Four/Tobias Eaton Imagines

Four and Five

At one point, it was the two of you and no one else.

Abnegation, try as it might, is not a place for great community. It is better to suffer in silence than waste breath that could have been used to save those in need on something as mundane as parlor conversation. The members of your gray-robed faction have people whose presence they enjoy and people whose presence they pride themselves on withstanding, but friends are rare. They are an excess, and here, that is not tolerated.

That is not to say that Abnegation is made of enemies, only, much like the rest of it, a collection of neutral stances. It would be unkind to like any one person more than the other if they were not your family or your lover. That is the way it has always been, and likely the way it will always be. Abnegation is not well suited for change.

It should be a sign, then, that the two people who chafed the most against this rule would end up leaving. Abnegation was not meant for you, nor the boy who was once known as Tobias Eaton. If the two of you ever found each other at all, it is only because you were each so vastly different from everyone else around you that it would be impossible for your paths not to cross.

You contemplated running from an early age. It is heartbreaking to think about how easy it would be. You could grab a few things like clothes and food and just take off in any direction. Maybe you wouldn't bring anything at all. You could just go, push yourself faster and faster until your old life was nothing but dust. The idea is as tempting as it is impossible.

After all, this life was not meant to be easy. Without the factions, you have nothing. Although the open streets called your name a thousand times, you could not answer, not until the Choosing Ceremony.

That's why you met Tobias for the first time, actually. You were both looking for something to distract you from the way that life was. Instead of an escape, you found each other, though in all honesty your meeting was just as good. Without Tobias, you wouldn't have made it through your early days in Abnegation. That much you can say with certainty.

You didn't know that you were ever the same after meeting him. Running into Tobias was an accident, pure and simple, but it was the best accident of your life. Poets have been writing centuries' worth of sonnets over the thrill of finding your one true love, but you think they've got it wrong. Finding the person who will become your best friend is a thousand times better than that.

Once you had Tobias on your side, you could do anything. Both of you had houses you'd rather avoid: mothers gone, fathers twisted. Your home was with Tobias, it would be from the moment you met him. When things got bad, the two of you could meet up somewhere out of the watchful eye of the faction and be safe. Sometimes you would talk or fix up each other's wounds or just sit there in silence, content in the knowledge that at one point it would be better.

You didn't know what faction you would choose at first. That you would transfer was unquestionable– neither of you were meant for this life, not in the slightest. The patronizing self sacrifices gnawed at you like rats to a bone. Nothing fit, nothing made sense. Neither of you understood why until you took your aptitude tests and both came back with results best kept buried.

Both of you were Divergent. Both. It was fitting somehow, like of course the two Divergents in all of Abnegation would manage to find each other some way or another, but it also meant that the danger increased twofold. You weren't just keeping your secret anymore, you were keeping Tobias' secret as well.

It meant that you were going to have to transfer, and transfer well. You and Tobias spent many long days working methodically through each option in front of you. Remaining in Abnegation was unthinkable, you had to escape your fathers in some way, and damning yourself to stay here forever would kill you just as surely as discovery.