Divergent: Unleashed | ✓

Chapter 18

A/N: The song on the right fits this pretty well, and so does the one in the external link.

"Tobias, can I talk to you?"

Tobias smiles at Tris and nods. She takes his hand and leads him away from the others. He notices that she keeps her eyes down. She leads him into one of the Abnegation houses- it was obviously her family's- and leads him upstairs into a room. This was obviously her room.

"So," She sighs. "I've been thinking about some things." He nods, encouraging her to continue. "When we were in Dauntless and I said about us seeing other people...it's the best thing. For both of us."

He opens his mouth to speak, but she holds up a hand. "You deserve someone that's your age, someone that isn't just going to be dead weight. I just-" she stops herself. "I just don't think that we're meant to be together."

"Tris, what's this about?"

She looks at the ground, away from him. She shakes her head a little. "Something just...came up. And it made me realize that maybe we shouldn't be together."

He clenches his hands into fists, taking a step closer to her. "After everything we've been through, you just want to give up?"

She tips her chin up to look at him. "It's not giving up. It's letting you go. And maybe one day you'll thank me."

He gives a harsh laugh. "And why do you think that I would thank you for this?"

"Because. You'll fall in love, get married, have kids, and wonder what you ever saw in me. The Stiff." she whirls around and starts to leave. She pauses in to doorway, her back still to him. Then she turns around and walks over to him. She takes his face in her hands and kisses him, the goodbye obvious. Why is she doing this to him? "Goodbye, Tobias." she says it quietly, and then she's gone.

Tobias drops onto the bed, defeated. He holds his head in his hands and tries to hold back the tears that are threatening to fall. Tris left him. She left. He hopes that she'll come back and say that this was a joke, that she still loves him and that they'll figure out how to make this work. But he knows that she won't. Tris had made herself quite clear- they're done.

Pain that he'd never felt before shoots through him. He had felt hundreds of different types of pain in his eighteen- almost nineteen- years, and none of them compared to this. How is this a broken heart? he thinks. His heart isn't the only thing aching.

It is an hour later when Bryn and Ashlyn find him. He smiles at them, pretending to be okay. They lead him out of the house, out of the whole place. He takes a last look at the place that has been his world for the last eighteen years, watching as the gates close with a clang.

"So where's Tris?" Bryn asks. "I saw her leave an hour or so ago."

Tobias shrugs, hoping that they can't tell what he's thinking. "I don't know. She just wanted to leave." The hollow feeling in him refuses to go away, even when they get off the plane in the Philadelphia airport a few hours later. He recalls the time when he told Tris that he'd be her family, and the sadness tries deperately to pull him under again.

Everything else is alright, but they aren't.