Four/Tobias Eaton Imagines

Smoke and Fire

There's a spark on the table in front of you, one bright bit of red in the midst of all this darkened gray and gloomy charcoal. Your mind races ahead of your body, wondering if you should put it out before a fire starts. Anyone else would, you think, the possibility of further damage too great for any temporary satisfaction of inaction.

Instead, you cross your legs and watch it until it burns out on your desk. Over your time in Dauntless, you've learned how to gauge risks, how to tell what's going to blossom into something deadly and what is just that, a spark, something that will flare for a second and then die out into nothing. There are far more sparks than people care to think, just embers in ashes that will choke out soon enough. Hardly any risks are worth the revolutions that people like to imagine.

In the end, maybe that's the lesson you learned from Dauntless, that everyday acts of bravery are only valued because they have no real meaning. Anyone can tell themselves that they're changing the world when they pick up a blade and choose not to send it spiraling into someone's head, or when they stand up to a playground bully for using their fists one too many times.

Talk all you like of integrity, of courage, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Nothing does matter around here, that's precisely how Dauntless works. You send a bunch of diehard adrenaline junkies into a building, whip them up on lies and promises to never be afraid again, and see what happens. They'll cloak their bodies in black shadow and save you the trouble of trying to convince them to hide themselves away.

Dauntless sticks to Dauntless out of misguided pride. Thus, the other factions don't have to waste a single breath in convincing the brave to stay away from their pure homes when your fearless faction already keeps to themselves more than even the Abnegation.

But you guess that's what you signed up for back when you chose Dauntless in the first place. The cigarette you've been smoking sends up a flurry of ash at the moment, as if even the smoke can't bear to think of the memories even more than you could. Doesn't mean you can hide from it any more, though, and you take a drag just to wash down the foul memories with a blast of acid down your throat.

It comes as quite a surprise to anyone who's ever known you to hear that you weren't a Dauntless-born. You've seen your share of shocked reactions, how their eyes widen to a comical size before they start proclaiming that this couldn't be, that you're the most Dauntless person they've ever met. Of course you are, you've butchered parts of yourself in your hurries to cut away all that wouldn't fit in here. You are what they made you, and in the end, that is Dauntless through and through.

Once upon a time, though, you weren't. The image appears in a wave of bluish gray mist, and when you close your eyes, it burns with all the fervor of the sparks still clinging to the lit end of your smoke.

You hadn't just been a transfer, you know, you had been worse. An Amity, the worst kind of person to ever end up here. There's no one the Dauntless hate more than the Amity. At least the Abnegation had the common sense to try and claw for power over the city, even if they're misusing their position to waste resources on those who can't better the place.

The Amity, though? They're such a lost cause that it's laughable. Who in their right minds would ever cast away the chance for success and ambition to run forever out in the never ending fields surrounding the city limits, pulling crops and wiping sweaty brows until you die? Their smiles are all fake, everybody knows that. It's a front for something malevolent, like the fact that not everybody is so thirsty for blood that despite all odds the yellow clothed faction might actually be kind.

That scares the Dauntless more than anything, so you spit at this totally foreign enemy and cast them aside. There's a reason Dauntless soldiers gunning for a new place on the wall have to be forcibly conscripted into serving time in Amity. They swear off ever stepping foot in that faction, even though it's statistically impossible that the city wall could have guard towers all around without having somebody there to watch over Amity.