A/N: This is a birthday present for my good friend and writing buddy, JM Darhower. You are truly an inspiration, endless fountain of support, and one of my best friends. I hope this year is filled with great things and fun times. Thank you for being the best book pusher there is and introducing me to both Four and Dimka.

This fic was written as a gift and is not beta'd so my apologies for any errors that you might find while reading. This story is in Tobias' point of view and it takes place in the Divergent world after Allegiant ends, so if you haven't read all of Allegiant and don't want spoilers don't read any further.

I have no ownership of the original works that these characters and locations are from. This story, however, is mine.

"Oh, Terrified of the dark, but not if you go with me
And I won't need a pill to make me numb
And I wrote the book on runnin',
But that chapter of my life will soon be done

I'm the king of the great escape
You're not gonna watch me checking out of this place
You're not gonna lose me
'Cause the passion and pain
Are gonna keep us alive someday."

(The Great Escape, P!nk)

Chapter One: Stiff

Stiff.

My muscles are stiff from intermittent exercise.

My lungs are stiff from cold, relentless air.

My clothes are stiff from too much starch.

Stiff. Rigor mortis.

Is existence considered life so long as the body is living? Most days I can ignore it. Most days I just keep moving, pushing through the aches and pains.

But some days I'm just stiff.

The world turns into a haze of whites and grays with winter months. White snow covers the ground. Gray clouds fill the sky. The night is still black and the sunrise blends reds and yellows into a golden orange promise that maybe today won't be a day that I feel stiff.

I kick a rock as I walk, too tired to fight the soreness in my muscles and run. Why bother? Where would I be running to?

Stop this, she says in my mind. You're stronger than this. You can't give up already.

She always had more faith in me than I did. She saw a different person underneath my skin. Maybe I was that guy. Maybe I still am that guy. But he's trapped under too many starched layers of skin now to break free.

"Tobias," a voice calls ahead of me.

My neck creaks as I raise it to see who is calling my name. Zeke. Damn.

I pull my lips into a friendly grin, even though my cheeks protest. "You're early."

"Hello to you too, Sunshine," Zeke says with an easy smile.

It's easy for Zeke. He's never been stiff. He's been hurt. He's known agony. But he's never been stiff.

"I thought you were going on vacation? Weren't you guys going on a trip to some place exotic or something?"

Zeke laughs. I envy the way his lungs fill with air so effortlessly. "Oh yeah, we drove to the paradise that is Milwaukee." He sighs with so much exaggerated flare that I roll my eyes. "It was tough to pry ourselves away from that little piece of Heaven on Earth, but we somehow found the strength—"

"Your sacrifice is commendable. I'm sure people are writing songs about you right now."

Another laugh, another smile. "Well even if I did only get to see the oversized garbage compactor that is Milwaukee I get the feeling my week was a thousand times more fun than yours."

His eyebrows rise as if to pull out a pen and write down the story of my life. My shoulders move up and down, reminding me that my lower back is little more than a tight bundle of nerves now. "My week was…normal."

"Boring."

"Satisfactory."

"Man, I nearly fell asleep just hearing you describe it."

I roll my eyes again and my head is already aching from the overdone movement. "We can't all live such a thrilling life as you do."

Zeke watches me then and my eyes search the immediate surroundings like wounded animals looking for a place to lay low and die. It's only then that I realize I've wandered a bit out of my way. I'm closer to his side of town. Closer to the place I once called home too.

How did I get here?

"Tell you what I'm going to do for you, Four," he says as he slaps a hand to my shoulder. Four. No one calls me that anymore. No one remembers that version of me anymore. He doesn't use it all the time, but every now and then he slips. "I'm going to take you out to dinner."

"You're not really my type."

He laughs, slinging an arm over my shoulders and forcing me to follow him to whatever plan he has concocted.

"Well dinner will be at a bar and we'll mostly be drinking more than eating." He waggles his brows. "How I'm looking now?"

I shove my hands in my pockets, begrudgingly admitting this plan didn't sound half bad. "I'll give you a test run but if you want a second date you'll have to really impress me tonight."

He takes me to a place that has little more than a guy with a long table and bottles of just about every alcohol ever invented. A few smaller tables are squished in the back. Only a handful of chairs are scattered through the room.

Zeke plops down on the first open barstool and greets the man behind the counter. He knows everyone, never forgets a face or a name. My brain is exhausted from the idea of storing so much knowledge. People are passing, fleeting parts of life. Only those who crawled into my head and wrote their names on my brain were kept in my memory.

Is that what I did? she asks.

No, I tell her. You cracked open my chest and planted yourself inside my heart.

The organ beats a little slower these days. Maybe a symptom of loneliness, more likely a result of lack of cardio.

"Harry, I need you to set us up with a couple of shots to start with and then a never-ending supply of beer until you feel confident enough that you can kick us out."

Harry finds Zeke's zeal amusing. I find it grating. I don't want to get that drunk. And yet part of me never wants to be sober again.

Two shots of something I don't bother asking the name of are placed in front of me. Zeke throws his two shots back in rapid fire, hollering like a man who's just been stabbed after each. I toss my first one back, hissing as my nostrils burn and my throat stings. The liquid hits my stomach like a hot rock in an ice bath. I'm downing my second shot before I can fully appreciate the first. Then I'm gulping down half of my first beer with the hopes it can cool the burn from the hard liquor.

The greatest gift alcohol gives me is relaxation. Sober I am stiff. Drunk I am loose. My shoulders slouch. My head dips. My lips slip up more. My lungs can breathe deeper. My vision blurs, but my eyes don't want to run away anymore. I can look Zeke in the eye. I can face the world.

I really don't do this enough.

I swallow the last few drops from the bottle in my hand and knock two others over as I put it down. How many have I had?

"That sounds like torture," I say, scratching the back of my neck. Zeke has been enlightening me on the joys of fatherhood.

A year before, he and his wife Shauna adopted a three year old girl from a relocation camp outside of the city. The camps house people with no homes, no families, and what the government believes will be no futures. Zeke met his daughter on one of his scouting trips to the camp and has been a hopelessly devoted daddy ever since.

"It is, man," Zeke says, holding his bottle inches from his lips as he shakes his head. "If I could step into the chamber today I know, without a doubt, that tea parties with stuffed animals and pedicures would be two of my worst fears."

I laugh. Me. Laugh. My lungs don't constrict and the sound is not forced.

"What the hell are you laughing at?"

I take a swig from my fresh beer and nearly choke as I laugh again. "I'm just imaging you wearing a bonnet. I'm pretty sure that would be my fifth fear."

"Not funny, Four. Not funny." His lips twitch, contradicting his words.

I marvel at the way the drink in my hand makes it okay for me to hear about fear landscapes, to hear my old name, and to not feel like my chest is about to explode. I even let my mind wander back to that time. Back to when this sort of thing, me and Zeke getting so shitfaced we can barely see straight, was called Saturday night.

You never had to get drunk with me.

I see her then. She's huddled at the back of the initiate group, folding in on herself from uncertainty. She's timid and shy, but there's something in her face, in her eyes. Something that tells me the second I get in that face, the minute I enrage the spark in those eyes, she'll lose that insecurity. She'll wake up.

The downside to alcohol is that it's a depressant. For those already living under a thin sheet of compressed emotional baggage it doesn't help to add another sheet on top. It's gasoline on an already blazing inferno.

I don't feel stiff. I do feel sad.

"Don't do that," Zeke says, pointing mouth of his bottle at me like a sixth finger.

"Don't do what?"

"And don't do that," he says with groan. "You are violating the code of bar night."

"There's a code to bar night?"

I honestly can't believe either of us is sober enough to follow this conversation at this point. From the look on Harry's face we might not be.

"Yes," Zeke says. "Bar night is about relaxing and forgetting the shit that…keeps you from relaxing." Yeah, we probably passed the ability to have an intellectual conversation a few beers ago. "And you are going all unrelaxy right now."

"I don't think that's a word."

"Whatever," he says, waving his arms in the air. "One or more of you has to agree with me that you should check the sads at the door."

"One or more of me?"

He closes one eye and then switches to close the other. "Yeah…when did you multiple into six people anyway?"

"I think we're good," I say to Harry and he nods.

"No…nope…we're not good. My boy is looking like he's about to jump into the chasm. We need something. More beer. Hot girls. Chocolate cake."

My stomach feels ready to vomit at the mention of more beer and women, but it growls at the thought of cake. I shake my head. "We're good. How much do we owe you?"

Harry waves me off. "He's got a tab, don't worry about it."

Zeke blows Harry a kiss and staggers off his stool. "Whoa," he says, catching himself on my shoulder to steady his legs. "I think they did something to gravity since we sat down."

I sigh, stabilizing myself on the end of the bar as I stand. "How long has it been since you got drunk?"

Zeke leans into me as we shuffle our way towards the door. "Um…when was the last time we got drunk together?"

I laugh. "I'm pretty sure we were both dressed in black and I was overseeing the simulations of initiates."

"Then…then," he says, emphasizing the word with a punch to the air.

I wish that was the last time I got drunk. Shame mingles with the sadness and I hope he doesn't ask if that was my last time too. I'm sure he would understand. Zeke always understands. It's what makes him Zeke.

"You remember that song that was playing that first time we got drunk?"

What was it about alcohol that deadened every brain cell but the deepest, darkest, most forgotten memories? Sadly, I did remember it.

Zeke doesn't wait for my reply. He starts belting out the chorus, off key and singing every other word wrong. By the time we reach the door I am convinced that singing along with him is a good idea. We stagger on to the sidewalk, breaking apart to dance to the music that only we can hear. I don't know how long we stand there, singing and dancing and making total jackasses of ourselves.

Zeke slaps my chest and nods to the side of the building. A couple is embraced, a man leaning against the wall while his girlfriend is sucking on his neck.

"Unbelievable," I say, feeling my face flush as I turn away.

Zeke snorts. "Stiff."

I'm too damn mellow to take offense to his jab, too far gone to even realize what he's called me. I shove his shoulder, angling him back toward the corner. He lives two blocks north of here. If we lean against each other and keep moving forward eventually we'll make it there.

I hope.