+ + +
I return to my cot early that
morning, and Tobias is already awake. I do not say anything, and neither does
he. He turns and walks toward the elevators, and I follow him, because I know
that’s what he wants. We stand in the elevator, side by side, in silence. I
hear ringing in my ears and blame it on my lack of sleep, but I think it’s more
that everything is about to fall apart and I know it.
The elevator sinks to the second
floor, and I start to shake. It starts with my hands, but travels to my arms
and my chest, until little shudders go through my entire body and I have no way
to stop them. Outside the elevators, we stand right above another Candor
symbol, the uneven scales. That symbol is also drawn on the middle of his
spine.
He doesn’t look at me for a long
time. He stands with his arms crossed and his head down until I can’t stand it
anymore, until I feel like I might scream. I should say something, but I don’t
know what to say. I can’t apologize, because I only told the truth, and I can’t
change the truth into a lie. I can’t give excuses.
“So you killed Will.”
Hearing him say it makes me feel the
weight of it. Guilt is heavier than grief, almost heavier than I can bear.
“Yes,” I say.
“All those nightmares you were
having . . . were they about him?” His voice is quiet and under control. I know
better than to think that’s a good sign.
I nod, once. “Most of them.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Here I was thinking I wasn’t just
‘anyone’ to you,” he says. He laughs harshly. “Guess not.”
He isn’t yelling, but he is on the
verge of it, his voice quaking with the effort of keeping it under control. He
glares at me, and in his stare is an accusation, but I don’t know what he’s
accusing me of. Lying? Keeping things from him? Murdering one of my friends?
Not being in love with him?
I don’t know where the anger comes
from, because a few seconds ago, I was terrified of losing him. But my face is
boiling hot, and the creature that has been clawing at my chest since Will died
gnashes its teeth.
“I’m sorry, was I inconsiderate?” I
say. “How terrible of me, not to think of your
feelings when both my parents are dead and I can’t sleep without nightmares
about armies of mindless Dauntless and almost drowning in a glass box and
shooting my friend in the head!”
“Don’t even pretend that I am being petty,” he snaps. “You know as well as I do
that this is just the start of the things that you lie to me about.”
“I didn’t lie to you, I—”
“You didn’t lie to me? Every time
that I asked you what was wrong and you made up an excuse, every time that you
crawled into my bed and pretended you were just grieving for your parents,
those weren’t lies?”
“I’ve known you for weeks,” I say hotly, “not months. Not
years. Weeks. I don’t have to tell
you everything, Tobias!”
“You don’t have to, no,” he says.
All the anger goes out of his voice like air from a deflating balloon, and he
gives me a weary look. “The fact that you don’t want to, though—”
“I didn’t want to tell you one thing,” I say. “That’s hardly
indicative of a pattern!”
“You didn’t want to tell me about
the water tank,” he says. “You never wanted to tell me about your parents. We
haven’t had an honest conversation in weeks. Not since I had to pressure you to talk to me about your
fear landscape.”
I have nothing to say to that,
because I know that he’s right.
“I am grieving,” I say flatly. “I
don’t know how to do this. I’ve never had to before.”
“Aren’t you listening to me?” he
asks, scowling. “I’m telling you this has nothing to do with your parents’
deaths, or Will’s death, or the attack. I’m telling you that you have been like
this since I met you; you have always
been like this.”
My lips part to release a word, but
nothing comes.
“You are impenetrable,” he says. “And
I can’t do this anymore.”
Can’t
do this. I try to force the words into my mind so that I understand what
they mean, but they float around, detached from sense and logic. I hear the
sound of them, feel their shape in my head, but I can’t make sense of them.
And then I do.
“This isn’t about me,” I say. My
voice gets louder, straining to be heard even though we are in an empty room. “Don’t
make it seem like it is! This is about you,
and how you can’t take that I didn’t
profess my undying love for you after a few weeks of dating. This is about your unreasonable expectations—not about
me!”
“Maybe it is,” he says calmly. “Can
you blame me? I thought, when you almost died for me, that it was a sign. A
sign that you felt the same way about me that I did about you. So I told you. I
was honest with you.” He shakes his head. “And today I find out that you didn’t
hand over the gun because you cared about me. You did it because you believed
it was the right thing. You did it out of duty.”
“I saved your life,” I almost choke.
“Sacrifice with no feeling behind it
is empty,” he says. “Useless. Meaningless.”
“You’re unreasonable,” I say. “Unreasonable
to expect me to have strong feelings for you after such a short period of time,
and unreasonable to expect me to do the right things with the perfect
intentions.”
“You can’t even see yourself!” He presses a hand to his forehead. “You’re arguing
with me about the logic of what I’m saying. You’re angry because you don’t
think my reasons make sense. You aren’t upset.
You aren’t heartbroken. You’ll be just fine without me.”
I feel like my brain is stuck in one
place, on one word—impenetrable.
“I can’t be with someone who is the
same with me as she is without me,” he says.
“But I . . .” My throat feels tight,
and there are a thousand things I want to say. I want to tell him that I do
need him, that I wouldn’t have made it through the last few weeks without him.
I want to tell him that I think I will love him, when the haze of guilt and
grief lifts from my life. But I just stare at him, my heart pounding in my
ears, thinking that he called me impenetrable; he called my sacrifice
meaningless. He thinks I’m cold. Like Eric. Like Jeanine. Like an Erudite.
And I can’t tell him I need him. The
thought makes me feel sick, like the day I had to walk into the cafeteria with
my head down after Peter attacked me.
“That’s what I thought,” he says.
Pride is the flaw in every Dauntless
heart.
And it is in mine.
