All for You.

Chapter 38 - Goodnight Beatrice

Chapter 38 - Goodnight Beatrice

— Tris

Feeling the familiar feeling of a cold, hard surface as I wake, I wonder if I have started over.

I woke up like this once before. I recall. I was on the floor of a bunker after a group ganged up on me in a spar.

I hadn't remembered much after that moment, until again, I had woken up on a different cold hard floor, to find my mother in a cell next to mine.

I inhale, feeling my face as I exhale sharply, pain radiating in my body.

Struggling, I try to sit, my hands finding tiles on the walls.

My old cell didn't have tiles.

I sit, halfway upright, my head slumped on the tile wall. I focus on my breathing, by head barely keeping up with reality.

Each exhale I take could be understood as a groan, my leg feels as if it's on fire, and I feel my whole abdomen bruised.

My vision is fuzzed, but I see bars that keep me in.

The bars have a familiar feel.
The last time I looked at these bars, I was so skinny I was almost positive that if I could stand I could slip through them easily.

However, unlike last time, I am not bleeding out.

The bars are the only opening to the cell, compared to the latter where my mothers cell directly attached with open bars.

I miss my mother.

I sit leaning against the wall for what could be days, swaying in and out of consciousness. There is an IV going into my left arm with a clear liquid dripping into my arm.

I consider ripping it out, but I decide against it.

Hope that it's something helping you, Tris.

Helping you or killing you. The dark side of my mind remarks.

I still decide against ripping it out of my arm.

As I sit, vivid colors flash through my mind.

I remember so much.
Yet, nothing makes sense.

I remember learning to spar vividly: the cool metal in my fingers and the loud clanking of metal against metal in a duel.

I was good at it.
Real good.

The memory continues, spar after spar, success after success.

Then a memory begins of fighting an older man, probably in his late thirties.

I just know that he was an instructor, but I do not know a name.
Maybe I never knew his name. Maybe there is no name to remember..?

I'm good at sparing, but so is he.
Each attack he throws I block, and each attack I give he blocks.

Then suddenly I remember who he is.
He was in charge of the New York program.
I did not know his name, but he was brought in specifically to duel me; to see my strength and coordination in person.

The duel raged on for hours. I remember someone calling out that it had been three hours and another asking if they should stop us.

Both of us had a trait that no one else in this program had.

It was a trait that Dauntless initiation taught me.

How not to give up.

I purposely let down my guard, throwing an act I had began to plan in my head when someone called out five hours.