We Are Divergent

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Tris?” I heard from a distance.

I looked around, confused where the voice was coming from. I couldn’t make out who it was, but it sounded like a woman. I couldn’t see anybody near me in the dark, and an eerie fog was rising all around me.

“Tris?” I heard again.

“Mom?” I called, confused. “Is that you?”

Why is my mom here? And where am I? I walked through the expanding fog, squinting to see her, wanting to talk to her and to hug her again for the first time in so long. I tripped over something that I could not see, and fell flat on my face. When I opened my eyes I was in an alleyway. The alley seemed familiar; maybe I walked down it as a child. I turned around, and froze. Lying there on the floor was my mother’s corpse, just like I had remembered it the day she died. The bullet wound in her stomach looks to be seeping with fresh blood, as if she had just been shot. This is the exact place she died.

This time I didn’t cry by her side, begging for her to wake up and come along with me. That would be useless, because she cannot come back no matter how badly I want her to. I screamed, and turned to run away from her, but instead came face to face with something just as horrid, a pile of dead bodies. And not just any dead bodies, but all the bodies of loved ones, and people that I have murdered or witnessed be murdered. Even the ones I barely remembered. My scream doubled in sound, and eventually it just sounded like an aching ring in the back of my head that has always been there and won’t leave. Maybe it has been, who knows?

“TRIS!”

I opened my eyes, looking around. No more fog. No more dead bodies. Just Tobias.

“Tris, stop screaming!”

I clamped my hand over my mouth, not realizing that I had continued to scream, or that I had actually been screaming in the first place. What a horrible dream. He wrapped his arm around me, pulling me close to him.

“I thought those dreams were done,” He said quietly.

“Me too,”

I stared off into space, aware of the empty hole in my chest that I can only feel sometimes, like after I have dreams about my parents. Their absence makes me feel partially empty, and it upsets me knowing I don’t need them anymore. I should need them. It’s not right for me to be okay without them. They were there every moment for sixteen years, and now here I am, eighteen years old and fine, while they aren’t… I know I shouldn’t feel this way, and I have come to better terms with their deaths, and the reason for their sacrifice, but I know there’s a part of me that will never heal.

“Was it a really bad one?” He asked.

“They are all bad,”

“I know that, but you didn’t cry… You screamed.”

“Oh. Well it was scarier I guess. More scary than sad.” He nodded. “Did I wake you up?”