a/n Hello lovelies! I'm so sorry for going a long time without updating. How is everyone? I love high school. The program I'm in is one of the best things that's ever happened to me, and in high school there are attractive bearded seniors, which there aren't in middle school. So, really, what's not to love? Anyway, this chapter is mostly just me dipping my feet back into the water. I'll try to write some more soon, but you guys will have to nag me about it. I promise, the whole story is going to get much happier, and I'm going to finish initiation really soon. And thoughts on the Insurgent trailer? (I personally didn't like it. What the hell is that box? Like...what? And she has a back piercing, which annoys me way more than it should) Enjoy!

Tris's POV

There are seven days after that. There are seven nights, twenty eight simulations, and four broken transfers. There is sawdust pounded into the shape of food, masks painted on each morning, eyes with shutters pulled closed. And then at night, there are Tobias's whispers and hands to crack my fearless mask, to try to mend the broken pieces in my mind.

"I don't know how you did this initiation thing twice," I whisper. "It's sort of terrible." I'm leaning back against Tobias's chest, and his fingers absentmindedly run through my hair.

"The first time wasn't hard like this. And the second time I had you."

He reaches his arm around my waist and gently pulls my hand off my stomach, flipping it wrist up so that he can see the delicate ferris wheel tattoo. I can feel his smile against my cheek as he pulls it to his lips.

"And the initiates? What do they have?"

"Hope, of course." He kisses my fingers.

"Hope?" I scoff. "Hope is stupid. Hope is just disappointment hiding under a facade of spun sugar and fluffy clouds." I lean away from Tobias, wrapping my arms around my bare knees. They knock together as I shiver.

Tobias is silent. He leans forward so that his fingers can trace the bumps of my spine, and then I feel hyper aware of the way my spine shoves through my shirt when I sit like this, like some strange mechanical monster writhing around underneath my paper skin.

"What makes you feel that way… like hope isn't real?" he asks quietly, more seriously. Then I feel stupid for saying anything at all.

I'm silent, thinking of hope, of feeling like you're sitting on the edge of something wonderful, like all you have to do is reach out and touch it. And then I think of disappointment, ribs cracking under the weight of knowing that what you wanted was never there at all.

"Tris?" he asks tentatively when I don't say anything.

"I mean...hope just sets people up for disappointment. Those initiates are out there hoping hoping hoping that they did the right thing, that they'll make it into Dauntless. And they're doing that under the impression that Dauntless will make them happy…" I trail off.

"You don't think that they'll be happy here?" Tobias's finger stills on my back.

"I don't know if they'll be happy, but I know that Dauntless is not the world they imagine it to be. And because they've undoubtedly built it up in their minds, no matter what Dauntless is actually like, they're going to be disappointed."

Tobias is silent, but his silence feels pressing. "And you feel that way? Like your hope betrayed you?"

"When I cut my hand over the Dauntless bowl, I knew it wouldn't be easy. I wasn't stupid. But I honestly thought it would be better than it is, better than Abnegation," I say, shrugging. "So, yeah. I do feel like hope let me down. Like hope is at fault."

"You're disappointed in your life here?" Tobias sounds wounded, and I'm confused.

"Let down. I'm let down."

"I don't understand." Tobias's voice is colder than I expected it to be.

"Are you mad at me?" I twist around to look at him, and his jaw is clenched tight, so that his face is all sharp lines and dark angles.

Tobias shoves off the bed and stalks to the doorway. He leans against it with his arms crossed tensely. I feel like I've been slapped.

"I don't understand what I said to make you act like this."

"Tris, you say that you're 'let down,' and you can't even hear how that sounds to me. For me, you are Dauntless. You're the only reason I'm here, and so you are this faction. And I thought you felt the same way, so when you say that you're disappointed in Dauntless, it hurts."

"I didn't mean it like that." I shove off the bed too.

"You know that I don't love this faction either! But I would suffer through any faction and be happy about it if it meant that I still got you," he pauses and takes a deep, controlled breath. "You said that Dauntless isn't better than Abnegation, and that's what I don't understand. In Abnegation we didn't have each other. How could anything," he raises his voice as he gestures between us, "be better than us being together."

He twists around, walking off into the living room. I chase after him. He stands, leaning against the kitchen countertop, his shoulder muscles all taut.

I reach my arms up around his shoulders, and he twists out of my embrace. "I'm sorry," I plea. "I didn't mean it like that. I just mean that I thought things would be simpler than they are. Tobias, in the past year my mother has tried to put me in danger just because of some arbitrary test results, I've thought I would be discovered far more times than desired, and I've watched someone I could have saved die. That's what I was talking about." Tobias watches me with guarded eyes. "Not you. You never disappoint me- never. When I say I thought things would be better somewhere else, I mean with you there. I thought that was agiven." I try again to hold him, and this time he begrudgingly wraps his arms around me. "I'm sorry."

"Tris, you know that I would live through ten lives in Dauntless if one of those lives could have you in it?" he says, but his voice still isn't the warm, rumbling kind it was before. His words usually fall from his lips just to wrap around me, and now they sort of float around us tentatively. Like they could still crash to the floor.

"I know. And I would follow you to any faction, any of them. I would follow you beyond that, too. Outside the fence. Wherever." I hold him tighter. I don't want him slipping away. "And I would probably be angry at the world, but all that anger would be worth it. Because I'd be home wherever I was. As long as you're there."

"As long as I'm there," he repeats.

"Yes."

"I'm sorry. For getting mad," he whispers.

"No. Don't be, please."

The more I think about what I said, the more it hurts. How could I have been so blind? I don't think that any one person can give you happiness, and I think that it would be unfair of anyone to expect that, but I also know that without Tobias the world of Dauntless would have crushed me long before. He's saved me time and time again; he's the one holding me together.

I'm kissing him, then. I haven't kissed him like this in a long time, and I've forgotten that I am wind and he is the canyon that gives me life. I've forgotten that my body is an ocean, and he is the moon that rules me, that my existence is based solely on him.

Usually our kisses are hungry and fiery. It's not that this kiss isn't passionate, but simply different. It's more patient, more understanding and slow. Our hands are still, his on my waist and mine around his neck. Even so, this is my favorite kind of kiss, because tucked between each movement is a word.

His lips barely touch the top of my ear, his top lip dragging down slowly. I shiver. "Tris," he says in the soft spot where my jaw meets my neck. "Love," he says into my shoulder. Darling at my collarbone, Six in the valley between my breasts, Eaton at my bellybutton. There are other words, too, but they are lost beneath the sound of my heart trying to break free from it's ribcage.

My heart beats like music that's forgotten it's meant to be beautiful.

There is a moment in between each word, and each kiss, where the world is pure anticipation. I want to live in that moment, to fall into its depths and never return. I want to live in moments wrapped in Tobias, in words kissed against my hips, in falling back into bed sheets when my bare skin actually can feel the cotton beneath me. I want to live in heat above me and coolness beneath me, in my back arched against the bed because I can't get enough in the slight lifespan I'm allotted.

I want to reside at the edge of sanity, where clarity goes when it wants to disappear.

a/n Em...let me know what you thought!