A/N: Thanks so much everyone for reading! Special thanks to all those following. I love hearing from you. I hope you enjoy this one. :)

I stalk up the path at the edge of the Pit, my thoughts on the girl standing by the chasm with her friends. Christina and Will's relationship seems to be shifting from friendship into flirtation and I suspect Tris won't enjoy feeling like a third wheel, but she needs her friends now more than ever. I'm still not sure she understands the dangers for her here, or that she can trust me. As I climb higher along the path, I think about the last time I talked to her, during Al's funeral.

I hate Dauntless funerals. None of them even knew Al and the guilt that drove him to the chasm. But that's not what I was thinking about as Eric made his bullshit speech. I was thinking about another funeral, about abandonment and grief and lies. Al's was the first Dauntless funeral I'd been to since I found out my mother is alive. Which means she abandoned me willingly. She just left me with ... with him. And now years after I make my escape from him, she thinks I'd welcome her into my life? She's delusional.

I feel out of place at Dauntless funerals, and they are not rare here. When you've grown up in the silent solemnity of Abnegation, seeing everyone drunk and rowdy at the end of a life is jarring. Of course I kept my eye on Tris, and followed her when she took off. She doesn't get that even that action can be dangerous, that as a divergent she is in constant danger here.

So when she took off as the crowd chanted Albert's name, there wasn't any hesitation. I went after her. Maybe she's thought about what I told her - about the Dauntless leaders, about helping her when she thought I was hurting her. I remember the warmth of her skin. I definitely broke her idea of me as an instructor. Around her I am compelled into honesty, into revealing myself, more than I should. And here I am, about to reveal everything. I'm nervous, what she will think when she knows the truth. Maybe - hopefully - tonight, assuming she follows me.

When I'm near the top, I look down into the Pit from the corner I my eye. Tris and her friends are gone. I can almost sense her behind me. Almost. I think again of the five factions, and of their symbols, tattooed across my skin, as I have so often recently. How many have I seen Tris embody in the little time I have known her? I do not count the time I knew her as Beatrice in Abnegation; we are both different people here.

Standing outside the fear landscape room, I hear her light footsteps behind me. I'm glad she's followed. I've become convinced that this is my opportunity to balance the scales. I won't see her actual fear landscape, but I've seen her simulations. She didn't have a say in that disclosure. If she's going to see me as anything but an instructor, I've got to do this. As she approaches I announce calmly, "since you're here, you might as well go in with me."

"Into your fear landscape?" she asks. She wasn't expecting this - or probably any kind of invitation. I suppose that's no surprise given how she keeps thinking the worst of me. Yet she came anyway. I agree and explain how the serum will connect her to the program, and that the program is set for me. Then she asks, "You would let me see that?"

She's taking it seriously. She knows what it means for me to bare myself this way. In an odd way it's a relief. I don't look at her. "Why else do you think I'm going in?" I answer rhetorically, and add, "There are some things I want to show you."

I raise the needle and she tilts her head so that I can inject her with the serum. Then I show her where to inject me, and once the serum is flowing through my blood, I take her hand in mine before we step through the door. I feel like I should say something, some final word before she has to face what's coming. I say the only thing that I can think of. "See if you can figure out why they call me Four."

The door clicks shut behind us, taking all the light with it. The hall is dark and cold, the only hint of warmth comes from Tris, from our locked hands and her body close to my side. There in the dark, she asks me my real name. There's no time to explain the truth. I tell her simply, "see if you can figure that out too." Then the darkness is obliterated by a scorching light and the simulation begins.

Once the fear landscape takes over, it's as if all my thoughts abandon me, leaking out of my head into the thin, cold air. This is what happens when you are faced with your worst fears. Even knowing what is coming, the emotion overwhelms me. Panic.

I am suspended on a roof high above the city. Heights are one of my worst fears. It doesn't matter that I know it's a logical fear, common even. I'm paralyzed, grasping desperately to the body beside me and struggling to breathe. Tris, who I'm clutching to against the wind, grabs my attention. She talks me through what we must do. I can't even answer, I just nod in response. And somehow with her hand in mine I follow her off the roof.

As soon as we are safe from the dizzying height, Tris asks, "What's next?" I press a hand to my chest. The relief is short-lived. I know the deep, dark confinement that comes. I know the crushing fear of being trapped. But I can't get the answer out before the walls close in, shoving Tris' body into mine, so hard it doesn't even register as another human being. Claustrophobic, that's the official term. Anxiety pulses through me as I feel the ceiling crash down, a hair's breadth from my head.

"Confinement," Tris answers her own question. I feel her breathe, feel trapped between her and the box, and squeeze my eyes shut as if it will help close out the fear. She pulls my arms around her, fitting us together so there is more space in the tiny box, and I cling to her. Tris' voice is comforting, calming, but it doesn't reach through the horrific distress of being trapped and unable to escape. Tris is talking, joking about being small. I don't think I've heard her joke before. She must be trying to distract me, but she soon moves on to reasoning out how we can overcome the fear landscape, that we need to make the space smaller. There is no fear in her. She pulls us both down, turning and squeezing more tightly together, and my anxiety spikes. I can barely think, barely speak. "This is worse. This is definitely…," I say but she shushes me and again returns to how to conquer the obstacle. She wants me to forget that we're here, and the simplicity of the suggestion sends a pang through me. "Yeah? That easy, huh?" I'm desperate to be out of this prison.

"You know, most boys would enjoy being trapped in close quarters with a girl."

Close quarters does not describe the crushing walls or the panic it induces. The more I try not to think about it, the worse it is. "Not claustrophobic people, Tris!"

"Okay, okay," she relents. She moves my hand to her chest and says, "Feel my heartbeat. Can you feel it?" I swallow, trying to focus.

Her chest thumps rapidly under my hand. "Yes." It's confusing, clashing with my fear.

"Feel how steady it is?" she asks.

"It's fast." Not as fast as mine, maybe, but fast.

"Yes, well, that has nothing to do with the box," she says. Nervous. "Every time you feel me breathe, you breathe. Focus on that." She's still in control, trying to help me overcome the fear.

"Okay." I feel her chest expand and contract and I mirror her slow, deep breaths. But the box presses in and my anxiety is still running rampant.

"Why don't you tell me where this fear comes from. Maybe talking about it will help us somehow." She sounds calm.

I agree, because I will agree to anything that will get me out of the box and I trust her reactions more than my own. "This one is from my fantastic childhood. Childhood punishments. The tiny closet upstairs." The memory of the closet paralyzes me. I feel like I can't breathe. I focus again on the rhythm of Tris' breaths, forcing my lungs into cooperation.

"My mother kept our winter coats in our closet," she answers.

Her Abnegation mother, in her Abnegation house, just like the Abnegation house I grew up in, the same closet. Now my mind is running with the compounded image of my old childhood imprisonment in a closet full of coats. It's too much. "I don't … I don't really want to talk about it anymore," I tell her.

"Okay," she answers. "Then … I can talk. Ask me something."

"Okay." I try to think. The confining walls press in. There is only one thing that rises above the flood of claustrophobia. Her heart still pounds in her chest, under my hand. I ask her, "Why is your heart racing, Tris?"

"Well, I … I barely know you." She stammers, pauses, and then continues,"I barely know you and I'm crammed up against you in a box, Four, what do you think?" Her voice is no longer calm.

The possibility is distracting. "If we were in your fear landscape, would I be in it?"

Her answer comes quickly this time, almost defiantly. "I'm not afraid of you."

"Of course you're not," I answer. She's one of the few initiates that is not afraid of me. "But that's not what I meant." And for the first time since the walls crashed down on us, I forget about them, distracted by her revealing slips. A laugh escapes me, and suddenly the walls crushing us together disintegrate and disappear.

We scramble to our feet, and between her obvious evasions and the relief of freedom from the suffocating box, I can't stop from staring at her, grinning. "Maybe you were cut out for Candor," I tease her, "because you're a terrible liar."

"I think my aptitude test ruled that one out pretty well," she says drily.

I shake my head. "The aptitude test tells you nothing."

"What are you trying to tell me? Your test isn't the reason you ended up Dauntless?"

Her questions are so sudden and vehement that I'm taken aback by them. "Not exactly, no." I am about to explain, but then the next obstacle appears, drawing my attention. There stands the woman pointing the gun at me. Then, the table appears, along with the gun, and the bullet. This one, too, is the same. I watch the woman with dread, knowing what I have to do.

"You have to kill her," Tris whispers, catching on.

"Every single time." It's a depressing thought, that every time I enter the fear landscape, I face this. This one I face every day in Dauntless, wondering if I will have to kill someone, and still it is among my worst fears.

Tris reasons with me, reminding me it's not real. This time, because there's no all-consuming panic preventing it, and because this one Tris cannot do for me, I reassure her. I still dread it. The raw truth of these actions, the finality of a bullet, grips me as I methodically load the gun and hold it out in front of me with both hands. I take aim, breathing slowly just as I taught the initiates in their knife-throwing practice, and fire. There's a gush of bright red blood as she crumples to the floor, and I drop the gun. Her body lays inert on the floor.

Tris' hand grasps my arm and she tugs me past the body, saying "Come on, let's go. Keep moving."

I follow her, and the body disappears as we move past it. We are in the center of a circle of light, surrounded by deep shadows.

I know who is coming before he appears. "Here we go," I whisper. My worst fear. My deepest shame. Slowly he creeps along the edge of the light, emerging from the dark in his familiar and dreadful manner, dressed in Abnegation gray, his hands folded behind his back so that the belt he carries is out of sight for the moment. Some small part of my brain wonders if Tris will recognize him. I assume she will.

Then I hear her whisper, "Marcus."

I fight for the composure to answer her. "Here's the part where you figure out my name."

And after a minute, edging around that circle of light with Tris at my side and my father moving nearer, I hear her. "Tobias." She knows.

My father shows us his hands, slowly unwinding the belt curled around his right hand. "This is for your own good," he says. It paralyzes me. I am eight years old again, powerless against his cruelty. I scarcely register his voice echoing as the shadows of Marcus appear all around us, each dragging his own belt, surrounding us and preventing any idea of escape.

I stare fearfully at my father. He pulls his arm back, the belt swinging over his shoulder, and instinctively I shrink back, hiding behind my arms, terrified of the coming lash. I hear the crack of the belt, I wince against the coming pain. It doesn't come. I wait, it doesn't come. I look out from under my arms and see Tris planted firmly between me and my father, the end of the belt looped around her wrist, held tight in her hand as she jerks it from him. Tris has the belt. Tris has the belt? She takes hold of the buckle and in a mirror image of my father's motion, swings it violently at my father. It hits his shoulder, and as my father lunges at her, reaching for her in anger, my fear of his punishment evaporates, replaced by fury. I don't think. My body moves as if of its own volition, jumping between them, pushing Tris behind me, enraged that he could attack her.

And in an instant, he disappears, along with all the shadows and belts and threats. The lights come on, revealing a long, narrow room with busted brick walls and a cement floor.

It's over.

I turn and look at Tris, who inspired the courage to face my father. She's looking around the room as if still wondering where the next obstacle will come from. She doesn't realize how amazing she is, how she has led me through my worst fears and sparked in me something new and unfamiliar.

"That's it? Those were your worst fears?" Tris asks. "Why do you only have four…" She trails off as she connects the dots. She turns toward me saying, "Oh. That's why they call you -" but she stops short as our eyes meet.

She amazes me. She was not just following me through my fear landscape. Though the obstacles were all the same, the experience of it was so different, because she had been there. And it was the first time that anger truly overrode fear of my father. The very idea of him threatening her was so abhorrent, so impossibly unjust, that it snapped me out of my own fear. And she had faced him down. Even if he wasn't her father, she faced down the leader of Abnegation and fought back against him with his own weapon. I am utterly in awe of her.

I reach for her, taking her by the elbow and pulling her to me. I press against her cheek, breathing deeply, and lower my face to her neck, my arms around her shoulders. After a second, her body relaxes against me and her arms loop around my back.

Her voice murmurs in my ear, "Hey, we got through it." I pull my head up to see her face, her concern, and I slide my hands into her hair and tuck it back behind her ear, fingering a section of it as I look into her eyes.

I think she has no idea what she has done for me here. I don't even know how to explain it to her. Eventually I answer, "you got me through it." And after everything she has just been through and witnessed, I know I cannot say goodbye now. I want to take her to a safer place.

"Well ... it's easy to be brave when they're not my fears," she answers, and she looks away and drops her arms.

After a moment I take her hand again, lacing my fingers between hers, and say, "Come on, I have something else to show you." I lead her back out of the room and toward the Pit. I am overwhelmed by the intensity of my feelings for her. We walk together, hand in hand, lost in thought after my fear landscape. I think of her, leading me through at every turn, learning who I am - I hear her voice in my mind, saying my name. I want her to say it again, now that the nightmare is over.

Eventually she breaks the silence between us. "So ... four fears."

I nod. "Four fears then; four fears now. They haven't changed, so I keep going in there, but…," I shake my head in frustration. "I still haven't made any progress."

"You can't be fearless, remember? Because you still care about things. About your life," she reasons correctly, repeating back things that she has heard from me during initiation.

"I know." I agree, thinking that what I care about most at this moment is her.

"You were going to tell me about your aptitude test results," she says as I lead her down the generally overlooked narrow path to the bottom of the chasm, to the secret place by the water.

"Ah. Does it matter?" It's not what I want to talk about.

"Yes. I want to know." Her answer is so forthright. It makes me smile. I should know to expect no less from her.

"How demanding you are."

We have reached the bottom of the chasm, so I lead Tris across the rocks, over the familiar disarray of rough, angled rocks and gaps revealing the dark water below. When we have settled onto the flat, sharp-edged rock by an eddy in the water, I answer her. "These are things I don't tell people, you know. Not even my friends," I begin, as a reminder to myself as much as to her. Then I tell her. "My result was as expected, Abnegation."

"Oh," she says, and I hear the disappointment. I am sure it's connected to her divergence. "But you chose Dauntless anyway?"

"Out of necessity," I answer flatly.

"Why did you have to leave?" she asks, her eyes searching me. I look away, still reeling a bit from the recent reminder of why. I try to think how I will say it, but before I get there she says it for me. "You had to get away from your dad. Is that why you don't want to be a Dauntless leader? Because if you were, you might have to see him again?"

I give her a half-shrug, but even if it's not a comfortable topic, I like that she remembers. "That, and I've always felt that I don't quite belong among the Dauntless. Not the way they are now, anyway."

"But you're…incredible. I mean, by Dauntless standards. Four fears is unheard of," she adds quickly. "How could you not belong here?" It's funny that she has just called me incredible when she is the one who is so incredible.

I shrug again, not wanting to think about my many inadequacies. It doesn't mean anything to her that my fears haven't changed, or that they are what drove me to seek refuge in Dauntless in the first place. It was fear that brought me here and fear that has kept me here. But I don't want to shut her out, so I tell her, "I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren't all that different. All your life you've been training to forget yourself, so when you're in danger, it becomes your first instinct. I could belong in Abnegation just as easily." And I think again of Tris stepping between me and my father. It's not the first time I've seen that selflessness in her.

"Yeah, well, I left Abnegation because I wasn't selfless enough, no matter how hard I tried to be."

I have to smile at that, because she's so wrong about herself. "That's not entirely true. That girl who let someone throw knives at her to spare a friend?" It's amazing that she can't see it. "Who hit my dad with a belt to protect me—that selfless girl, that's not you?"

She narrows her eyes a bit, the corners of her mouth turning down. "You've been paying close attention, haven't you?"

She's right, but I try to deflect it. "I like to observe people."

"Maybe you were cut out for Candor, Four, because you're a terrible liar."

Even though she's still using my Dauntless nickname, I like that she's throwing my words back in my face. Maybe we are done lying to each other and now I can admit it. I lean back, resting my hand next to hers on the rock surface, and her attention lingers there, down, avoiding my eyes. "Fine," I say. I admire her long, slender neck and thin face, her soft lips, her narrow nose, and long, straight hair. She knows the worst and she is here, and so I can admit the truth plainly to her, "I watched you because I like you." Looking into her cloudy blue eyes I add, "and don't call me 'Four,' okay? It's nice to hear my name again."

"But you're older than I am…Tobias." Her ridiculous objection aside, her voice saying my name is like a refuge, a secret held between us.

I can't help but smile. "Yes, that whopping two-year gap really is insurmountable, isn't it?"

"I'm not trying to be self-deprecating, I just don't get it," she says, sincerely bothered. "I'm younger. I'm not pretty. I—" I laugh, amazed that she is worried about why I would like her. At this sign of uncertainty from her I kiss the corner of her face behind her eye, because to me she is amazing.

"Don't pretend," she protests. "You know I'm not. I'm not ugly, but I am certainly not pretty."

"Fine," I relent. What does pretty mean, anyway? Who decides that? I like her for who she is, it's not about what she looks like. "You're not pretty. So?" I kiss her cheek. "I like how you look. You're deadly smart. You're brave." And then more seriously I say, "and even though you found out about Marcus … you aren't giving me that look. Like I'm a kicked puppy or something."

"Well, you're not," she answers. Like it's that simple. And looking at her, I see that it is that simple. I have seen other people kiss, but find myself uncertain. I reach out and touching her face with my hand, I brush my lips lightly against hers, tentatively. She wants this too. I grin and kiss her full-on, and her body tightens. As the water beneath us crashes against the rocks, I pull away so that I can raise my free hand to her face and holding her, I kiss her again, more confident, swept up in being with her. After a moment her hand slides across my neck and into my hair. It feels right, it feels like a dream to be kissing Tris in this safe and secret place.

...