Powerful

18. I'm Just A Dead Man Walking Tonight

"One thing I've been wondering," Jord mused.

Virgil glanced at her, their eyes meeting in the mirror, which Jord was using to braid her long, naturally blonde hair. They were both in Virg's apartment, but they had to leave in less than ten minutes for the final testing of all the initiates. Jord had spent considerable time during the past few days learning how to braid her own hair from Rory and Lia, and she was fairly pleased with the result, admiring the neat braid she'd created on the back of her head, extending down, and over her shoulder.

"How do girls do that?" Virg smiled at her pleased expression.

"If it looks hard, that's because it is," she laughed, turning to look at him. "I can teach you, if you want."

"I'll just take your word for it, I think," He said, poking his man bun with one finger. "Would look kinda silly on me. Anyway, what were you wondering?"

"Oh," said Jord, remembering she'd been about to ask a question. "I don't know, you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I was just wondering what your fears were?"

"Are," Virg corrected her. "Present tense. I don't think you ever lose them."

"How do you know?" She wondered. "Have you been into your fear landscape recently?"

"I used to go in there every so often," said Virg, shrugging. "I've always had four. You want to know what they are? You have to promise not to laugh."

Jord turned to face him with a frown, not understanding why he thought she would laugh.

"It's your worst fears, Virg, why would I laugh at that?"

"Okay," he shrugged. "Well, the first one is spiders."

"Oh," Jord was surprised. "That's... hell no. And I'm not laughing, by the way, so can I have my brownie points now?"

"Sure," Virg shook his head, with a smile. "It's not dissimilar to your own fear of beetles, they just crawl all over me."

"Huh," said Jord. "Quick and easy way to deal with us, just drop us in a hole with a load of beetles and spiders. Death."

"Ha, don't forget you can use as much fire as you like in real life, if it's the right situation," Virg reminded her.

"Does your emotions thing work on spiders?"

"Of course it works on spiders," he laughed. "The first time I went in there the spiders all ran away from me. So, I get how hard it is to avoid using your power. Anyway, can we move on from the spiders?"

"Okay, what's your second fear then?"

"Well... this one's kinda weird. It starts with me breaking my own limbs, sometimes it's both legs and an arm, sometimes it's just one of each, but it's really painful. But then, I obviously can't do anything for myself, so I have to sit there and watch my friends fighting this battle that's going on for some reason, normally it's Gini and Joe. Sometimes Trent is there, or Ox. And they're losing, and I can't do anything about it. It's... yeah. It's not great."

Jord was looking at him with sympathetic eyes.

"Fear of being helpless?"

"Yeah, or fear of injury, I think it's a combination of the two, because it always involves my being injured. Anyway, the third one. I think it's a fear of authority, but..."

"Fear of authority?" Asked Jord. "I don't think I get it."

"It's only bad authority," Virg tried to explain it, taking the end of Jord's braid in his hands, and twisting it around his fingers. "The sim has changed since I was an initiate. It used to entail the Dauntless leaders setting all these rules about how we had to kill off anyone who did a certain thing, say it was breaking a curfew, or something. But after I found out I was Divergent, the law was that we had to kill all the Divergents if we knew them. There was only two ways I could complete the sim - I had to either kill the leaders, which, well... obviously can't do that for your final test, or I had to kill the people that I was told to kill."