1. fear doesn’t shut you down, it wakes you up.
2. everything has changed.
3. blood is blood, but the convent threatens to outweigh the womb
you do not know how to comfort caleb, or how to explain the why, the lingering question that would keep you up for days. it was your everyday, you made that decision when you leaped from the rooftop, when sliced palm was held over sizzling rocks, a blur of grey disappointment with black welcome. you do it every day because you must, because there is no other way, and there is no one else willing to fight. erudite’s betrayal of abnegation, their hidden malice in using dauntless to round up citizens, children who did not know better it is for that you wake up every day, desperate to start anew. stagnation was death, it was thoughts overcrowding mind with the henious reminders of gunshots, friend turned foe leaping off bridge into the cold depths, or of bullet penetrating a friend, to lie to the lover until there is no other option than your truths boiling over. everything you had ever known dissolved in the acid of nothingness, but caleb had always been inherently good, how he did not need a second thought to go help someone with fruit scattered over the grass, he just did. you supposed your nature was expressed now in a different way, there was no second guessing in split second decisions. it had become do or die; to wash blood with blood and hope for a different result. it had only been months since you left, and yet he felt like a stranger. he no longer knew you, and you weren’t sure you knew him as well as you once thought. it’s funny, you think, how proximity can trick the mind into familiarity.
a memory like a knife, it never stops cutting. phases of childhood where he was the only bearable part, where you did not fear to see your reflection staring back at you but a boy made up of the same of you; lopsided smile fashioned in grey, same wandering eye that you had always assumed was you staring at yourself through his green irises. [you remind yourself that he; ever selfless, left too] chose to create a new family far from what you had known. you worry he looks at you like a blood-thirsty hound- you had licked your wounds and bit your tongue for years, climbed off of the family tree to run from the things you knew you couldn’t be, what they wanted you to be. “i’ve not been given a choice.” it’s quiet when you respond, own mind falters when you try to grasp at reasonings that made sense/in the moment, dauntless had made sense, the unknown when you had only known safety. family line twists, it’s roots all so tangled in each other that meant you could not let go. he was your brother, you do this to keep him safe, to keep everyone free and to not break another promise to a corpse. “i don’t think i know how to do anything else.”