((This story takes place in an AU universe where Tris passed initiation and Erudite was taken down, but Will did not die and instead they went on to live in their faction as normal. ~Faction Before Blood~))
The medical floor of the Dauntless HQ was a place that Tris frequented, and today was no different. The troubles of the people within the compound always hurting themselves due to "bravery acts" - a lot of the time, Tris thought grimly, weren't that brave at all - were all part of what the medical floor faced, and she was intrigued by the medicines they came up with. When not helping with around the compound she always lingered on the upper levels helping with the injured and she often found herself spending hours pouring over the reports and theses and all sorts of documents so that they could develop new pain relief. She would run her hands along the filing cabinets that housed documents from the old world dealing with old medicines and how to develop new ones, and Tris being Tris, she was fast to learn. She wanted badly to make sure that she knew as much as possible in relation to the sciences and the knowledge she was eager to inject into herself. Being Divergent meant that Erudite ran through her naturally, and so a thirst for knowledge was always there with the thrill of being part of the Dauntless, and sometimes she preferred it. Rather she go and talk to the head pharmacist, a burly man with a tattoo of a syringe on his right bicep about what he was doing than spend a Saturday morning doing drills. She liked him; he was a smart man who always had time to have a cup of warm milk with her and speak about the work he was doing and she liked how he spoke to her like a friend and not the child that she looked like.
It was during one of these visits when she nudged the door to his lab open with a hip as her hands were full with two cups of water that she noticed he had a huge smile on his face, 7 bottles lined up neatly in front of his magnifier.
"I did it!" he exclaimed as he hopped towards her, twirling as he scooped the cup from her hands and took a long gulp despite how hot the liquid was. Tris raised an eyebrow inquisitively as she looked over to the bottles. "I spent months perfecting the chemical formula for this so that the makeup was just right and I've done it." He slid the file over to her and she picked it up, feigning disinterest as the sick feeling of remembrance settled in her throat and she sighed as she waved him off. She remembered a time before, back when she was in Abnegation. They hadn't been allowed any pain killers whatsoever; how selfish of them to relieve their own pain when others had it much worse. She remembered a sickening crack in her wrist when she fell on the mundane pavement on the way home from school, her father refusing her painkillers at the hospital. She'd cried herself to sleep that night.
"I'm going to look through this, is that okay?" He beamed at her interest in the topic and offered her a grateful bow.
"Of course, Tris," he gushed. "I need to go and get some more of this to make more and totally perfect it but please feel free to keep reading..." He had ran out of the room in a hurry and Tris grinned, slipping onto the bench and giving the bottles an uneasy glance. Yellow for the opiates. She remembered reading about it somewhere, but she didn't think too much about them and instead sipped her water fiercely and began reading through the file.
A week later and Tris was standing at the back of the small hall with the head of the medical committee from Abnegation breathing down her neck as he edged past her and took his seat. The chemist gave her a nervous grin as he began his presentation with a flourish.
"Codeine," he announced as the presentation started. He swallowed the lump in his throat as he pointed to the screen behind him. " Codeine, or 3-methylmorphine, is an opiate used for its analgesic, antitussive, antidiarrheal, antihypertensive, anxiolytic, antidepressant, sedative and hypnotic properties. It is also used to suppress premature labor contractions, myocardial infarction, and has many other potential and indicated uses. Codeine is the second-most predominant alkaloid in
