Eric Coulter Imagines

Capture and Release

It's quiet in the Amity compound, far too quiet for your liking. You're sitting with your back against the wooden walls, and every moment that you spend waiting is one that you swear you'll end up regretting. You've been on the run with Tris, Four, Peter, Caleb, and the other Abnegation for a while now, but every time you close your eyes, you see the Dauntless compound, the one place you've ever truly considered home.

You hear movement, and look over to see Tris sitting down next to you. She raises an eyebrow at you. "I came over to hear reassurances that everything is going to be alright, but I'm starting to think that I may have asked the wrong person." You laugh quietly. "No worries, Tris. I'm just thinking about Dauntless." Tris nods. "Who doesn't?"

You sigh. "I just wish you got a better introduction to it. There's a lot more that initiation, and you should have been able to find that out for yourself." You're a few years older than Tris, and you've spent those few years falling deeper and deeper in love with your chosen faction. You graduated in the top of your initiation class, and took that opportunity to grab a position as a junior leader of Dauntless. You still drop in every now and then to help with leading combat classes or initiation, which is how you truly connected with Eric Coulter.

Eric. Even thinking about him feels wrong somehow, like by allowing yourself to remember how good it was back in Dauntless with him, you're betraying your friends by not fully committing to the cause. It's still hard to believe that he was one of the top guns of Jeanine's mad scheme to control the Dauntless into massacring the Abnegation to take over the entire city, but yet the truth is plain before you, even without the Candor to say it.

You knew that Eric was cold and calculating, he always has been. He's always been the first person in the room to rise for a gun, to never trust kindness but instead see what he could get from it. All the same, knowing that he was responsible for such cold-blooded killings hurts your chest like a stab wound. In the back of your head, some part of you whispers that it might not have been your Eric who did it, but it was. You can acknowledge that much, even if you don't want to.

Who is your Eric, anyway? You'd first met him back in initiation, when he'd only been leading the training for a year at most. He'd noticed you then, you were sure of that, but the two of you had kept any contact to tips in practice and whispered words across meals. Once you'd graduated from initiation, you had finally let yourself fall for him, and you started dating soon after that.

It had been good then, hadn't it? You came home from your respective jobs to a shared apartment. You wore his jackets when it got cold and he pretended he didn't stare whenever you did. You traded knives and guns and weapons like love notes, and you reveled in every moment you were with him, because he made you feel powerful. That, in a place like Dauntless, was everything.

Then the fighting came, and you realized that he was behind all the bloodshed. It turned your stomach, especially to know that he would have killed you just like the other Divergent had you not withheld that one key truth from him. Had you not been just slightly disillusioned enough with the fantasy you lived with Eric, you wouldn't have known that despite the fact that Eric would throw himself in front of a gun for you, he would be the one behind the trigger in a heartbeat had he known that you were Divergent. It hurts, to be sure, but it's true.

Tris sighs, as if she can tell what you're thinking. "I'm sure Eric is safe. I didn't see him dead when we were leaving." You lean your head against the wooden panel behind you. "I'm not worried about him dying. I'm worried about what I'm supposed to do when I see him again. There's no way Jeanine and her Dauntless forces would let us go easily. They'll be after us soon enough, and he'll be there."

Tris puts an arm around your shoulders, and you fight the urge to lean away. Even after all this time, you're not good at trusting people you don't know. As it turns out, you're even worse at trusting the people you do know. "Hey, just take it easy. You've done a great job of getting us here, and I don't want to lose you to doubt."