Eric Coulter Imagines

Couldn't Ever Lose You

You don't like this any more than anyone else. Somewhere out there, Dauntless is still alive, merged with Erudite to make some alternate reality monster that's far deadlier than anything you ever knew of your old faction. There are people out there dressed in black who are you and yet aren't, who wear your colors while plotting your demise.

At one point in your life, merely being Dauntless would have been enough to save you. You were the best of the best back then, one of the kids who stuck it out during initiation long enough to swing into a halfway decent job. When you weren't proving your worth day after day, you were working to make a faction that would be even more bloodthirsty than the day before it.

If there was ever a world in which you were truly safe in Dauntless, though, it's long gone now. The rats have come out of the woodwork, and all who were traitors and turncoats have revealed themselves en masse. Jeanine Matthews is a cunning warmonger who's been able to turn a lot of the top Dauntless to her side, and now you are on the other side of a war from the very people you used to call friends.

Despite going throughout your day with the knowledge that you will never be able to get back that which you hold dear, you still don't regret the choices you made. Although you may not be Divergent yourself, some of your best friends are, and that means you'll fight on their side until the day you die.

Learning Four was Divergent came as a shock, not to mention Tris as well. You grew close to Four during your own initiation, and are proud to call him a good friend. You can't count the number of times Four called on you to help out on the latest round of training, and that's where you met Tris.

Now it's the three of you on the run, wondering how long you'll have until your luck falls through and you finally get to know what it's like to have a bullet through your head. Usually, you're the one pulling the trigger. At one point in the future, you won't, and that's when it will all be over.

For the moment, all you can do is struggle to stay alive, day after day until the feeble hope comes that you might actually make it through this endless war. Things may never be the same, but at least you'll be there to watch as everyone tries to put the pieces back together again.

If you're looking for a happy ending, or at least one that isn't terrible, there's still something holding you back. See, you're conveniently leaving out the one worst part of this whole war against the Divergent. That's the fact that you love somebody on the opposite side, and that person is Eric Coulter.

Eric would never switch sides, and neither would you. You're both terribly headstrong, so obstinate that you would throw yourself from a cliff rather than admit you're wrong. That's why the two of you get together so well, after all; you have never met anyone more like you than Eric. You both think and act the exact same way, barring one all important opinion.

It is this one difference that condemns you to a life without the man you love. You would stick by your friends until the day you die, and Eric will never stop fighting for the glory of the new Dauntless he's making with Jeanine Matthews until the end of time. You are both sprinting in opposite directions, never to turn around again. Perhaps you will never see him other than in brief snippets as he tries to capture you and your friends, or perhaps you'll be able to meet one day after this.

In all honesty, the odds of Eric even being able to love you are slim to none. Eric is all principle, all opinion. He believes what he believes to the utmost, and anyone who stands in his way will be pushed aside, no matter who they once were to him. It's exactly the spirit you taught him, but it is what will spell the end for the two of you.

If you're in a charitable mood, you'll allow yourself to think about what it had been like, back then before it occurred to either of you that you might be enemy captains in a fight strong enough to cleave this city in two. You two were unstoppable, you know. No one ever thought that a single thing could separate you, and look at what's happened now.