Reparation:

A Fourtris Modern AU in which their marriage is need of repair

"Do we still…do we…?" she begins to ask but can't bring herself to finish in fear of the answer.

"Do we still what?" he snaps, losing his patience with every second. He has a class to prepare to teach, and she shows up in his classroom unannounced, tripping over her words. He is not pleased with the situation.

"Tris, I've got a class in ten minutes," he reiterates.

"You can't talk to me for ten minutes? Come on, Tobias, this is important."

"So is this!" he exclaims. "You can't just interrupt me at my job! You keep doing this, distracting me, and I'll get fired!"

"You say it like I'm here every day! I barely do this. I'm sorry for coming to your work, but we need to talk about this," she insists, stepping closer to him, her eyes softening. She doesn't want to be angry right now. Tobias is frustrated enough for the two of them.

"Well, then say what you have to say," he condescendingly requests. "Say what's so important that you'd cancel your shift at the diner and drop the kids off at Christina's doorstep!"

He's implicating she's irresponsible, and although it bothers her, and although it takes everything she has not to let her annoyance through, she chooses not to address it. So she swallows thickly and steadies her voice. She doesn't want Tobias to hear it waver.

"Do we still love each other?" she finally asks.

Now it's Tobias who can't quite articulate his thoughts. He wants to scold her for the ridiculousness of the question, for the inappropriate setting to ask it, for the following discussion that they do not have time for. He wants to say anything but his answer to the question.

"We love each other," he whispers unconvincingly.

It's not enough to appease Tris. "Even if that was true," Tris says. "I don't think we're in love anymore." Her own face falls as she chokes out. "Maybe we were never in love at all."

Tobias's eyes widen and his blood runs cold as soon as the words leave her mouth.

"I mean, we were very young when we were married," Tris offers as a small explanation for their current problems.

"You were," he corrects. "I wasn't."

"And we got married for the wrong reasons." He starts to protest, but she continues. "We did! We got married right before we found out I was pregnant, and we were tired of my family and what they had to say about our relationship. We got married to prove a point, and that's not exactly the proper foundation for a marriage."

"Zeke and Shauna were in the same situation not one year ago, and they're fine now!" he reasons.

"Shauna wasn't a senior in high school!" she shouts, her voice so raw that he has to take a step back to process her emotions.

"Besides," Tris adds, "That's Zeke and Shauna. We're Tris and Tobias. We got married a week after I turned eighteen, and you were already twenty-five. And now here we are, five years later, three kids later. Three kids, Tobias! In five years! And not one of them was planned!"

"Just can't keep you off of me," he jokes.

"God, can you talk to me about this? Are you capable of seriousness, Mr. Professor? Can you hear what I'm saying right now? Are you listening?" she demands.

"Yeah, I'm listening!"

"Then answer the question. Do we still love each other?"

"That's an unfair question," he says mildly.

"How is that an unfair question?"

"Well, if I say we don't love each other, nothing changes. Not yet, anyways. There's nothing we can do about it. We're not in a position to separate until we cool off, and we don't have the finances to divorce."

"You want to divorce?" she asks carefully. Neither one of them had ever mentioned divorce before. In fact, his casual implementation of the word in their conversation unsettles Tris.

"Do you?" he challenges. "Why are you here, bringing this up if you don't want some kind of break between us, Tris? What's your goal here?"

She wipes her eyes. "I just want to find out if our marriage is worth fixing because it definitely needs to be fixed right now. This isn't working. We're so distant and withdrawn, and there's nothing between us anymore. And if we don't love each other, then we can't move forward."

"And if we do love each other?"

"Then we can fix us."

"Well, even if I say we love each other, it's pointless because you wouldn't be here if you were sure we loved each other," he reminds her.

"That's not true. I honestly don't know. I'm here because I don't feel like we love each other, and I want to know if it's because we need to reconnect, or if it's because we really don't love each other. So which one is it?"

He stares blankly at her while he hesitates. His silence is too much for Tris, and as his first few students begin to trickle in, she can't stand to be in his company any longer. Her husband's silence is an answer in itself. She turns her back to him and walks away.

"Tris!" he calls after her.

"Whatever, Tobias! Forget I asked. I'll see if I can get that shift back at the diner since I need to start saving up for our impending divorce."

"Tris!" he shouts again, earning odd looks from his students.

"Just remember that Christina has night school, so you have to pick the boys up from her place before six. Text me if you don't know what to do with them afterwards."

She's gone before he has a chance to reply.

Tobias buys a pizza for dinner, a treat for their oldest son, Logan, because of his perfect reading score in language arts. No doubt Nathan enjoys the meal, too, but the ten-month-old Isaiah is too young to participate.

Honestly, Tobias purchases the meal because he is too distracted to cook anything. He can't focus with Tris's words cutting into him like daggers every time he relives the afternoon. A part of him is quick to brush off her comments – the same part that swears the two of them are content. But the other part of him, the honest one, knows that's not true.

But as he sits with his sons at their little kitchen table, as he sees how excited Logan is to recount his day in kindergarten, as he watches Nathan smear pizza sauce across his face, as Isaiah laughs for the entirety of the meal, he knows without a doubt that he wants to experience this elation with Tris, too. And she wouldn't have come to see him in his classroom, struggling to breathe through her tears, if she didn't want the same thing. At least, he hopes so.

She gets home at nine, after all the boys are tucked into bed. She doesn't immediately spot any major messes, so she figures Tobias must have successfully wrangled the boys. She kicks her shoes off and hangs her coat by the door. She tries to be quiet, in case Tobias wants to continue their previous discussion, but she obviously wasn't quiet enough since she can hear his heavy footsteps begin their trek down the stairs. She sighs and throws her purse onto the kitchen table. It clatters with the two pizza boxes.

"Saved you some pizza," he says softly, like he's afraid to startle her. "Figured you didn't get much of a meal at the diner."

"Thanks," she replies tightly, opening up the refrigerator.

"Why don't you heat it up on a plate and come upstairs, up to our room?" he suggests.

She wants to chastise him. She originally thinks that he's suggesting for the two of them to have sex to release their stress, as they have done in the past, but she's surprised when his face says otherwise. She nods in response, appreciating that he is giving her an olive branch, so to speak. If anything, he is making an effort, and that in itself is almost enough to make her forget about the pizza.

"Okay. I'll meet you upstairs," she agrees with a hint of a smile – one that he returns.

He leaves the door to their bedroom open for her, inviting her in, but she closes it behind her, sealing them off from everything else. She sees him sitting on their bed, every photo album they own sprawled out in front of him.

"What's all this?" she asks curiously.

Tobias pats the bed beside him, and she sits in the space, bringing her knees to her chest and propping her back against their headboard.

"I'm reminiscing," he tells her.

She blows on her slice of pizza before taking a bite. "I'm not sure if reminiscing is going to help us," she cautions. "I'm not the same person anymore."

"Of course you're not," he says. "Neither am I, and that' s okay. That's supposed to happen. We can't stay the same, even if we tried, but the problem is that we don't know the other's new self. We haven't been around each other enough to see these changes, and that's part of the fun of being married. So you and I need to start at the very beginning, and work our way forward. We have to remember where we started, right, to help us determine where we go?"

Her throat is tight as she nods.

"I know a lot of the albums we have of the boys are on our computer, but we're going way back," he says as he slips one of the photographs from its covers, smiling at it before handing it to her.

"Oh, my God," she says. The picture is of the two of them at a café by the beach. It was taken the summer they met. "That's the café that Zeke and Christina ditched us for, isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah, they did do that when we met," he says. "You know, I never would have gone over there to talk to you unless Zeke wanted to flirt with Christina."

"The funny thing is that we got together, and they didn't."

He smiles fondly. "I honestly thought that you were older than seventeen."

"You did not!" she insists. "I looked younger than seventeen! The only reason I don't look seventeen anymore is because I've had three kids."

"I thought you were nineteen at least."

She lightheartedly hits him with a pillow. "Liar," she says. "But I was completely smitten with you. I'd check my phone every couple minutes for a new message, or a missed call, or something. You didn't call me for a week."

"I lost your number," he admits.

"What?"

"Zeke accidentally threw away the piece of paper it was written on, and I was so mad at him because I really wanted to take you out for dinner or a movie or something. So I made Zeke call Christina to get your number, which was very entertaining to witness, since they had already been on that catastrophic date with each other."

She laughs. "I never knew that!"

"Christina didn't tell you?"

"No, I can't believe she didn't. She usually has trouble keeping those kinds of things to herself."

He hums absently as his mind absorbs the next picture. "This is my favorite one from when we were dating."

Instead of taking the picture from him, Tris scoots closer to him, leaning over his shoulder to get a look at the photograph. It is a picture of the two of them sitting under a tree at his university, the university he teaches at now. In the picture, Tobias has his arm slung across her shoulders, and they both are smiling brightly.

"I think Zeke took that one," he says just to say something. Tris has been staring at it silently too long for his comfort.

"You proposed to me under that tree," she remembers.

"Yeah, I did, but it was a pretty lame proposal. It wasn't even planned. I didn't have a ring or anything."

"I liked it."

"Well, it was the day before you turned eighteen. You were pretty young. You didn't really have any expectations. Sometimes I feel like I took advantage of that."

"You were a perfect gentleman," she assures him. "You wouldn't even sleep with me until I turned eighteen."

"And then we eloped a week later, once we were sure we were sexually compatible."

She throws her head back in laughter, and he does the same. It feels so good to laugh.

"I'm pretty sure we conceived Logan the first night we were together."

"I think you're right."

She looks down at the photograph again. "We should blow this up and get it framed, hang it in the living room. It's a good picture. We don't really have any pictures of the two of us around the house, just the boys."

"Well, I just figured out our six-year anniversary gift."

"And when is our anniversary, Tobias?"

"April 28th," he says without hesitation.

She smiles. "That's something I always appreciated about you – you're really good at remembering dates."

"Just the important ones," he says. "And even if I didn't, it's written on the back of this picture here."

"Aw, our courthouse wedding photo. Christina was my maid of honor, and Zeke was your best man, and they did not get along at our mini reception."

"Our mini reception? Do you mean the lemonade and sandwiches at Zeke's apartment?" he asks.

"Hey, that was a nice reception! Very intimate!"

"Whatever you say, Tris."

He picks up another picture from shortly after the two of them were married. "Here you are right after getting your first tattoo," he shows her. "The ravens."

She scrambles for the picture with one hand while placing her other hand across the ravens decorating her collarbone – three birds to represent the members of her immediate family.

"That was something I really loved about you, still do," he says honestly.

"What, the tattoo?"

"No, the meaning behind the tattoo. It was for your family, and you got it after they disowned you for running off and eloping. You said that the relationships you had with them were strained because of what happened, but you always wanted to keep them with you."

She nods. "And I never told them about it," she confesses. "I never told them about how much the wedge between us hurt, and that's part of the reason why I came to your class today. It's because I don't want there to be a wedge between us. I feel us growing further and further apart, and I don't want it to get to the point where we separate, and you're nothing more than a mark on my skin."

"That won't happen," he promises.

"When you mentioned divorce earlier, my heart stopped," she says. "And I realized that I don't want us to run away from this and make excuses for our behavior. I want us to deal with this and solve it, and I want us to raise our family together. I want us to be happy with each other. I want us to look forward to seeing each other. We didn't get much time together before we had Logan, and even beforehand, we didn't date for very long. There was never a lot of time to focus on the two of us, and that's really important. We have to make time for that now."

He nods and places his arm around her shoulders, drawing her to him, hugging her close. She lays her head against his chest, her body a dead weight, not that he minds. They're not exactly the most emotionally-open people, and this day has really taken its toll on them mentally.

"You're absolutely right," he says, his voice a whisper. "And I'm sorry I hesitated earlier today when you asked me if we still loved each other. I hesitated because I didn't know how to say what I had to say. But I do love you, Tris. I love you very much."

She takes a deep breath against his chest before meeting his eyes with hers. "I love you, too."

And as they fell asleep together, arms around each other, beloved pictures on their nightstands, they knew that any hole in their marriage was well on its way to reparation.

Thank you so much for reading! This is not the first fanfiction I've ever written, but this is my first for the Divergent fandom! I'll probably be writing a lot more of them soon!