Chapter Text
Chapter I
Beatrice Witherheights was not supposed to know how to hold a blade. She was supposed to know how to hold a teacup. There was, according to her mother, a very significant difference between the two. A blade made the wrist stiff. A teacup made it delicate. A blade required the fingers to close with purpose; a teacup required them to hover, pretty and useless, like a white bird deciding whether or not to land. You get the point.
But very often, in restless daydreams during boring history lessons or while riding her horse out into an endlessly open field, she lets her mind wander in dangerous territory. In her daydreams, she zips across giant forest trees and kills the titans that wander outside the walls. In her daydreams, she's a scout.
“Not like that, Beatrice,” Lady Witherheights said, for what had to be the seventh time that morning.
Beatrice, who had been holding the porcelain cup apathetically, loosened her grip.
Beatrice sat straight-backed in the east parlor, dressed in a pale blue morning gown with pearl buttons down the front and lace at the cuffs. Her hair had been pinned so tightly to her head that she was certain one wrong facial expression would rip her scalp clean off. Across from her, her mother watched like a general surveying a battlefield. Beatrice stifled a laugh as she imagined her mother as the Survey Corps commander, yelling at the scouts to fix their postures and march onto battlefield with grace and elegance.
“Again,” Lady Witherheights said.
Tris lifted the cup. She had been trained in all of it. How to sit and stand. How to speak and how to laugh without showing too much of her teeth. How to walk down a staircase without tripping like an idiot. How to accept compliments from men twice her age without looking as disgusted as she felt. How to play the pianoforte until every guest in the room sighed and said, "What a bright little thing she is."
A bright little thing. That was what they called her. The bright Witherheights girl. The pretty one amongst her friends. The musical one.
According to everyone, she had perfect breeding and good manners, and ugh, she thought in disgust, good hips for childbearing. That comment had come from Lord Elmont when she was sixteen, and Tris had spent the rest of the evening imagining herself stabbing him in the thigh with a dessert fork.
“There,” her mother said at last. “Better.” Tris set the cup down with an obedient little clink. Lady Witherheights finally smiled. "You are eighteen in two weeks,” she said. “You must stop behaving like you are still a child.”
Tris looked out the window, sighing internally, squirming in her seat waiting for the moment that her mother would finally leave her be.
Beyond the glass, Wall Sina rose in the far distance, pale and enormous beneath the morning sun. Its stone surface was so familiar that most people in the interior barely noticed it anymore. Inside Wall Sina, everything was expensive and perfumed and rotten, but it was safe and it was home. Outside it, people died.
That was what Tris had been told as a child, anyway. Wall Sina was safety, and Wall Sina was civilization. Families like the Witherheights belonged here. Wall Rose was for merchants, farmers, craftsmen, or soldiers’ families. Finally, and most unfortunately, Wall Maria was for people who had the misfortune of being born too close to the edge of the world. And beyond Wall Maria—
“Beatrice,” her mother said.
Tris turned back, tearing up a napkin beneath the breakfast table and internally rolling her eyes.
“Yes, Mother?”
Lady Witherheights narrowed her eyes. That was the trouble with having a mother like Lavinia Witherheights. The woman could detect rebellion in the way a person blinked. “Your father expects you in the dining hall this evening.”
Tris frowned. “Why?”
“Well, if you must know, we are hosting guests tonight. For your eighteenth birthday.”
“We are always hosting guests. Can't we do it some other unfortunate that isn't my birthday?”
“These guests matter, they are very important,” she claimed dryly, then tapped Tris's hands in a warning manner, "And I expect you to be absolutely perfect, no rebellious behaviour from you at all today. I expect your father will also remind you of that when you see him."
Her mother left. Tris waited until the door closed. Then she picked up the teacup with her whole fist and drank the rest in one swallow. It was bitter and cold.
“Disgusting,” she muttered, as she rested her elbows onto the breakfast table in frustration and let out a small scream.
From behind the curtain, someone snorted. Tris did not jump. She did not even turn her head.
“You are aware,” she said, setting the cup down, “that if Mother finds you hiding there, she’ll have you skinned and made into a decorative footstool.”
A boy slipped out from behind it, tall and golden-haired and grinning.
Hayden Paterniere bowed dramatically.
“If Lady Witherheights makes me into a footstool, I expect you to place me somewhere with a good view.”
Tris stared at him.
“You were there the whole time?”
“Unfortunately.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do. Passionately.” Tris replied, crossing her arms in fake anger and looking around the dining table for something edible.
Hayden’s grin widened, as he waved his arms around in elegant pretense. “Passionately is promising.”
Tris threw a cushion at his head.
He caught it easily. Hayden had always had the infuriating habit of being easily graceful. He was nineteen, nearly twenty, with loose blonde hair that never sat correctly no matter how much his valet attacked it with oil, and warm eyes that always seemed to be laughing at something. His coat was forest green today, finely cut but already wrinkled at the cuffs because Hayden could ruin tailoring merely by existing inside it.
He looked like every noble mother’s dream until he opened his mouth. Then he became a problem. The amount of failed engagements this man had was laughable. His ability to turn serious situations into a circus was his secret hidden talent. His prank last year at the Gardener's Estate is still the talk of the town. Being a man however, gave him the option to act a fool is a privilege that Tris would never be able to embody.
“You look awful. Come on, cheer up. It's your birthday!” he said cheerfully.
Tris gasped. “What a gentleman. Sarah spent hours on my makeup and hair today, I should assume I look presentable enough for a clown like yourself. ”
She touched the back of her head and winced. “Besides the obvious headache its been giving me.”
Hayden crossed the room and, without asking, began pulling pins from her hair.
“Hayden.”
“Hold still.”
“My mother will murder you.”
“Your mother has wanted to murder me since I was eleven.”
“That is because when you were eleven, you released frogs into her solarium.”
“The frogs deserve a nice view as well. I don't discriminate against animals, you know that. ”
Despite herself, Tris laughed. “You were so bored.”
Hayden’s fingers slowed. A lock of her hair fell against her cheek, and Tris looked up at him. He was standing too close. Hayden stood close like it was his right and her right too. His position, standing beside her, came as easy as the sun rose and set.
They had grown up together. That was the problem. They had stolen pastries together from the kitchens. Many-a-time, they ruined expensive shoes in the rain, or made up cruel nicknames for boring aristocrats, and once, when Tris was thirteen, Hayden had taken the blame after she shattered her father’s imported decanter trying to see if she could throw a knife like her brother.
Hayden removed the last pin, and her hair came loose down her back in heavy waves.
“There,” he said, softer now. “You look like yourself again.”
She hated when he did that. Pulling her away from her perfect socialite self. Knowing her too well that even a slight look of hidden discomfort was enough for him to understand what she needed. Hayden had always been able to look at her and find the thing everyone else was trying to bury.
“You look quiet constipated there, milady. What are you thinking about?”
Tris kicked his shin.
“Ow.” He leaned down, rubbing at his leg. “Vicious little heiress.”
“Careful," she sang, "I know where Mother keeps the letter openers.”
“Ooh, I’m shaking. You're incredibly scary.” He snorted, folding himself into a chair and stealing a pastry she had her eye on since her mother left the room.
“You should be.”
For a moment, they were children again. Until Hayden’s expression changed, morphing into discomfort.
“Do you know what tonight is?” he asked.
Tris frowned.
“The dinner?”
“The dinner, dun dun dunnn.” he repeated.
She studied him. Something in his voice had gone awry.
“What about it?”
“I heard my father speaking with yours.”
Tris’s stomach gave a small, unpleasant twist.
“About what?”
He did not answer immediately.
That was answer enough.
“Hayden,” she said.
His eyes came back to hers.
“I think,” he said slowly, “tonight may be more than dinner.”
The room seemed to grow quieter.
From somewhere down the hall came the clatter of dishes, a maid’s hushed apology, the low voice of a footman.
“What did they say?”
Hayden shoved his hands into his pockets, then removed them, then crossed his arms, then apparently hated that too and let them fall at his sides.
“They were discussing the future.”
“I despise the future.”
“I know.”
“What future?”
His mouth twisted. Then he gently exhaled as he let his eyes roam around her face, carefully tucking away any emotion that might let on his thoughts.
“Ours, I think.”
Tris stared at him.
There it was.
A wordless thing settling between them like dust.
Ours.
Theirs.
Not hers. Not his.
Theirs, as decided by men in private rooms.
A hot, choking humiliation that rose up her throat so quickly she nearly laughed from the shock of it. Because of course. Of course she had been stupid enough to think there would be a conversation. That her life would arrive politely, knock on the door, and ask whether she wished to receive it.
Hayden stood up from his chair so quickly and clumsily he almost knocked it down, and stepped closer.
“Tris—”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t agree to anything.”
“But you knew.”
“I suspected.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
She stood too fast, the chair scraping behind her.
“No. You’re hinting now. You’re standing there while telling me my father may be planning to hand me over like property at dinner.”
His face flashed with hurt. His eyes pulled downwards tragically, and its in this moment that she sees how truly young he is.
“I would never think of you as property.”
“No, you’d only quietly benefit from the arrangement.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I don’t feel fair.”
“Clearly.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do not make a joke.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You sounded like it.”
“Because if I don’t sound like it, I might say something worse.”
“Worse than what?”
His composure cracked.
“Worse than I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do either, Tris!”
The silence after that was enormous.
Hayden looked away, breathing hard through his nose. His fingers flexed at his sides once, twice, like he wanted to reach for her and knew better.
Tris’s anger stumbled.
That was the terrible thing about Hayden. She could hate him properly if he would only be cruel. If he would shrug and say, "Yes, naturally we’ll marry, that’s what our families want." If he would become one of them.
But he stood there looking as trapped as she felt.
And she hated that more.
Because if he was trapped too, then who was she supposed to blame?
Her father, yes. His father, certainly. The whole glistening machinery of Wall Sina society, absolutely. But not Hayden. Never entirely Hayden.
It made the anger useless.
She sat back down, suddenly exhausted. Hayden lowered himself onto the chair opposite her. For a while neither spoke.
Then he said, very quietly, “Would it be so terrible?”
He sounded so incredibly torn, so innocent.
Tris’s heart gave one hard, painful thud.
She looked up. He was not smiling now. No teasing. No performance. No courtly little bow, no boyish deflection. Just plain old Hayden.
Tris opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Would it be so terrible?
That was the cruelest part.
No.
It would not be terrible.
If she had to marry someone from that world, Hayden was the only one whose hand she could imagine taking without wanting to bite clean through her own tongue. He would not bore her. He would not belittle her. He would not lock her in a nursery and visit between business meetings. He would laugh at her worst jokes. He would let her read in bed. He would argue with her. He would probably teach their children to climb statues and lie badly about it.
And because of that, because it would not be terrible, it was almost worse.
A gilded cage was still a cage even if someone kind stood inside it with you.
“Yes,” Tris whispered.
Hayden’s face fell before she could soften it.
She looked down at her hands.
“Not because of you.”
He laughed once, humorlessly.
“Somehow, that is not as comforting as you might imagine.”
“I mean it.”
“I know what you mean.”
“No, you don’t.”
He leaned back. “Then explain it to me.”
Tris lifted her head.
“If I marry you because they tell me to, then I lose you too.”
Hayden’s expression changed.
She hated herself immediately.
There it was. Too honest. Too bare. The sort of sentence that should have been locked in a diary and buried under a floorboard.
His voice softened.
“Tris.”
She stood again.
“I need to dress for dinner.”
“Beatrice.”
“Don’t call me that.”
He stood too.
“Then don’t run away from me.”
She almost laughed.
Almost.
Instead, she looked at him with all the fury and fear and affection she had no language for.
“I don’t know how to do anything else.”
Then she left him standing in the east parlor with her hairpins scattered across the table like tiny silver bones.
Killing Titans seemed almost a mercy compared to the jitters that shook her bones that night.
Dinner was theater. By seven, the Witherheights estate had transformed into something monstrous and beautiful. Every chandelier had been lit. Every mirror polished. Musicians played from the upper gallery, their strings trembling through the marble halls. Guests arrived in waves: lords, ladies, merchants rich enough to pretend they were nobility, officers in polished boots, women with throats bright with jewels, men with bellies full of wine.
Tris stood near the staircase while a maid adjusted the back of her gown.
It was ivory silk, known to be a debutante’s color. It was also the color of a sacrificial lamb. The bodice hugged her waist too tightly. The sleeves sat off her shoulders. Pearls had been woven through her hair. Her mother had looked at her when she entered the dressing room and actually paused. For one foolish second, Tris thought she might say something tender, something that might put her at ease as she get's thrown into the lion's den.
Instead, Lady Witherheights said, “Good. Your father will be pleased.” And that was that.
Now Tris stood at the top of the grand staircase watching below, where her father laughed with Lord Paterniere.
Cornelius Witherheights had the sort of wealth that made other wealthy men nervous. He was not noble by old blood, not truly, though he had bought enough marriages and favors and land to make everyone politely forget. His fortune came from trade: grain, timber, luxury fabrics, metalwork, shipping contracts, military supply routes, and any other industry that could be made profitable by hunger, fear, or vanity. He was a large man, broad through the chest, silver at the temples, and quiet handsome.
When he saw Tris, he smiled. She hated how proud he looked.
“My daughter,” he announced to no one and everyone.
Several heads turned as the music continued. Tris descended the stairs, focusing on each step as it came and went.
“You look exquisite,” he said.
“Thank you, Father.”
“Do not be difficult tonight.”
A smile remained on her face, twitching only slightly.
“When am I ever difficult?”
He patted her hand.
Hayden approached then, dressed in black and gold, his hair combed properly for once, though one lock had already fallen over his forehead in rebellion. Tris noticed it immediately and wanted, absurdly, to fix it.
His eyes found hers.
For a moment, the whole room blurred around him.
Then he bowed.
“Miss Witherheights.”
She curtsied.
“Mr. Paterniere.”
His mouth twitched.
“Miss?”
“Mr.?”
His eyes flicked to her gown.
“You look…” his face looked innocent, but Tris knew he was going to make an inappropriate joke.
“Careful.” She waved him away.
“I was going to say armed.”
That startled a laugh out of her.
His gaze softened.
“There you are,” he murmured.
She looked away too quickly. Hayden’s expression dimmed.
“Tris—”
A spoon chimed against crystal, and the room quieted. Tris held her breath and felt herself unable to breathe. Her father stood at the head of the hall, wine glass lifted, Lord Paterniere at his side. Lady Witherheights watched from nearby, serene as carved ivory.
No.
Tris felt it before he said a word.
No, no, no.
“My friends,” Cornelius Witherheights began, voice warm and commanding. “Tonight, we gather not only in celebration of old bonds, but of new ones. The Witherheights and Paterniere families have long stood together in friendship, enterprise, and mutual respect.”
Beside her, Hayden went very still.
Tris could hear her own heartbeat.
It was embarrassing, really, how loud a breaking life could be while everyone else stood politely holding champagne.
Her father continued.
“It is therefore my great joy to announce that, upon my daughter Beatrice’s eighteenth birthday, she shall be formally betrothed to Mr. Hayden Paterniere.”
For one second, no one moved.
Then the room erupted.
Applause. Gasps. Smiles. Hands covering mouths. Women turning to one another in delight.
Tris did not move.
Her father turned toward her, beaming.
“Beatrice,” he said, and held out his hand.
Everyone looked upon her as she stepped forward and arranged her face into a blank stare, the most she could push herself to doing. Better that than screaming uncontrollably and causing a scene. Cornelius drew her to the center of the room, where Hayden was guided forward by Lord Paterniere. Hayden’s face was pale beneath the candlelight. For once in his life, he had no joke. No clever line. No way out.
Tris looked at him and felt something inside her fold in on itself.
Her father placed her hand into Hayden’s.
The room sighed.
Hayden’s fingers closed around hers carefully.
“My dear,” Cornelius said softly, for the room to witness, “smile.”
Tris smiled.
And everyone applauded harder.
Later, she vomited into a rosebush. It was not elegant. It was, in fact, the least elegant thing she had ever done, which was almost satisfying.
She had fled to the west gardens under the pretense of needing air, though no one with a functioning brain would have believed it. Her stays dug into her ribs. Her pearls felt like a collar. Music spilled from the ballroom behind her, too bright and too cruel. She gripped the stone edge of a fountain and breathed through her nose.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
No use.
She bent over the rosebush and retched again.
“Oh, Bea...” someone said behind her.
Tris wiped her mouth with the back of her glove and turned. Hayden stood a few feet away, horrified.
“Oh, lovely,” she said weakly. “You’ve come to admire your bride.”
He winced.
“Don’t.”
“Why not? It has such a beautiful ring to it.” Tris's eyes were wide as saucers, as she swung her arms carelessly into the air.
“Tris.”
She stepped up to him and shook his hand forcefully, “Mrs. Beatrice Paterniere. Lady of nausea and shrubbery.”
"It's not my fault, Bea!"
"Yeah... I know"
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because... I can't believe this is my life.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
The moonlight caught on his face, and Tris laughed suddenly.
It sounded awful.
“Do you think I want this?” he asked.
“I think you want me," her mouth quivered, wrapping her arms around her body. The words hung between them, reckless and awful. Hayden’s eyes dropped for half a second to her mouth, then returned to her eyes with visible effort. He backed away for a second, but barely being able to hold himself away from her, he rushed forward, his entire body screaming, yearning for her.
“Yes,” he breathed.
Tris stopped breathing.
He looked furious now, but not at her. At himself, maybe. At the whole world. At the fact that honesty had arrived at the least useful possible moment.
“Yes, I want you,” Hayden said, voice low. “Is that what you want me to say? Fine. I want you. I have wanted you since I was too young to know what wanting meant. I want you when you’re insulting me, and when you’re playing piano and making up funny songs, and when you look at those damned walls like you’d tear them down with your teeth if someone handed you a hammer.”
Tris stared at him.
Her thoughts were not thoughts anymore.They were birds.A thousand startled birds beating themselves bloody against the inside of her skull.
Hayden dragged a hand through his hair, ruining it completely.
“God, don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve just shot you.”
“Have you not?”
He let out a sharp, broken laugh.
“I don’t want them to hand you to me. I don’t want to be another room they lock you inside. I don’t want you if having me means losing yourself.”
Tris blinked hard. Do not cry, she ordered herself. Do not you dare cry in an ivory gown beside a vomited-on rosebush while Hayden Paterniere says beautiful things like an absolute bastard.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
His mouth trembled into the saddest almost-smile she had ever seen.
“No, you don’t.”
“No,” she whispered, and the first tear slipped down her cheek. “I don’t.”
Hayden reached for face, stopped, then reached again more slowly.
This time she did not move away.
His thumb brushed beneath her eye, wiping the tear before it could reach her jaw. His touch was warm. Careful. Familiar and not familiar at all.
For one terrible second, she wanted to fall into him.To let him hold her. To let the whole thing happen. To marry the boy who knew her and loved her and would probably try, in his imperfect Hayden way, to make the cage comfortable.
Then she saw it, a life.
A house. Children. Music rooms. Dinner parties. Hayden making her laugh across polished tables while her father aged into satisfaction and her mother corrected their daughter’s posture. And Tris growing softer around the edges. Tris forgetting the angry thing inside her that looked at the walls and wanted out.
No.
She stepped back and Hayden’s hand fell.
“Tris?”
“I can’t.”
His face changed.
“I know,” he said, but his voice cracked on it.
“No, you don’t understand.”
“I think I do.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Hayden, I can’t stay.”
He went still.
The garden seemed to inhale.
“What does that mean?”
She looked toward the house.
The ballroom windows glowed gold. A perfect world, dancing.
“My brother wrote to me,” she said.
Hayden’s brows drew together.
“Adrian?”
Tris nodded.
Her older brother’s name still hurt.
Adrian Witherheights had been the first scandal of the family. The heir who had run away at seventeen to join the military, leaving behind inheritance, title, and the full force of their father’s wrath. Cornelius had nearly erased him from the house. Portraits removed. Letters burned. His name spoken only by Tris, and only when no one important could hear.
But Adrian had still written. Short letters sent through servants, hidden in books, tucked beneath loose stones in the garden wall.
He wrote of training fields and mud. Of soldiers who swore like devils and laughed like free men. Of hunger. Of exhaustion. Of the Survey Corps. Of commanders who looked death in the face. He wrote of a freedom that Tris wanted to claw her way towards.
Once, he had written:
"You would hate it here, little bird."
Then, beneath it:
"You would breathe for the first time."
Hayden’s face lost color.
“No.”
“I’m going to find him.”
“No.”
“I’m going to join.”
“Absolutely not.”
The sharpness of his voice startled them both.
There he was. The nobleman. The man trained to command.
Tris’s spine straightened.
“Do not speak to me like that.”
Hayden closed his eyes, jaw clenched.
When he opened them, fear had stripped him bare.
“You’ll die there, Tris. Nobody survives the Survey Corps. You won't even survive the training camp. They'll put you through hell.”
“Everyone dies at some point," Tris claimed dryly, tears dried on her face as she stomped her shoes into the grass.
“Don’t give me that philosophical horseshit. You know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean. You think that just because I'm this so-called heiress character that everyone wants to whip me into then I'm gonna immediately die. So yeah, Hayden, I do know what you mean.”
“No, you don’t. You think this is some romantic escape from your father. Tris, people get eaten out there.”
“I am aware of the Titans, Hayden.”
“Are you?” His voice rose. “Are you really? Because you grew up behind servants and stone walls and imported curtains. You’ve never even been hungry.”
Regret flashed across his face.
“Tris—”
But she had gone cold.There were some insults that revealed what a person thought when love was no longer fast enough to stop them.
“You’re right,” she said.
He swallowed.
“I didn’t mean—”
“No. You did.”
“I meant you’re sheltered, not weak.”
“And what is the difference to you?”
“A great deal.”
“Convenient.”
“Damn it, Tris, I am trying to keep you alive!”
“No,” she snapped. “You are trying to keep me here.”
Hayden looked like he might say a hundred things. That he loved her. That she was being foolish. That he would help her. That he would stop her. That he would wait. That he would not.
Instead, he said, “When?”
Tris’s throat tightened.
“Tonight.”
His eyes closed.
For a moment, he looked as if someone had physically struck him.
Then he laughed. Once. Empty.
“Of course.”
“Hayden—”
“No, it’s perfect. Very you. Get publicly engaged, vomit in the garden, ruin my life, then flee before midnight.”
“I need your help,” she said.
He felt dizzy as he put his head into his hands. “You cannot be serious.”
“I need civilian clothes, money that cannot be traced to me, and a horse from the west stable. Father’s men watch the front gate, but the old hunting road still leads toward Rose if you know where it breaks from the main path.”
Hayden stared at her.
“You’ve planned this.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
Tris hesitated.
His face hardened.
“How long, Beatrice?”
“Since Adrian’s last letter.”
“That was seven months ago.”
“Yes.”
The hurt in his eyes was almost unbearable.
“All this time,” he said quietly, “you were leaving.”
“All this time,” she replied, just as quietly, “I was trying to become brave enough.”
She looked up at him earnestly, roving her eyes up and down his body in desperation.
Hayden turned away, pressing both hands to the back of his neck.
“I am about to assist my fiancée in committing social suicide and possibly actual suicide.”
“You’ll help me?”
“No.”
Her heart dropped.
Then he said, “Yes.”
The heart rose again, stupid thing.
Hayden looked furious about it, but he loved her.
At five in the morning, Beatrice Witherheights stopped existing.
She cut her hair first.
Her maid, Sarah, stood behind her with both hands pressed over her mouth.
“My lady,” she whispered, horrified.
“Don’t call me that.”
“I cannot let you—”
“You can.”
“They’ll dismiss me.”
“No.” Tris turned. “They won’t know you helped.”
“I am visibly watching you destroy your hair.”
Tris sighed.
Sarah's eyes filled with tears.
That was worse than fear. Fear she could argue with. Tears made her feel cruel.
“I have to go,” Tris said softly.
Sarah shook her head. “The military is not for girls like you.”
“Then I will be the first girl like me to survive it.”
“You don’t know how.”
Sarah looked at her for a long moment.
Then, with a long-suffering sound that was half sob and half surrender, she snatched the scissors from Tris’s hand.
“At least let me fix it before you disgrace us all.”
Tris sat down as she watched Sarah cut her hair, her body tightly wound and unable to relax.
Hayden waited by the west stable as he looked upon the sunrise, the wind riffling though his golden locks and his hands shaking impossibly . When he saw her hair, his face changed. For one ridiculous moment, Tris thought he might laugh. Instead, he looked like he might cry.
“You cut it.”
“It will grow.”
“Yes,” he said. “That is generally what hair does.”
She smiled despite herself.
He helped her onto the horse, his hands lingering at her waist for half a second too long.
A small leather pouch was tied to the saddle. Money. Papers. A knife. A map. Food. Hayden had thought of everything, the bastard.
Tris looked down at him and imagined them training at the camp together, becoming captains, eating canned food by the fire and flying through the air together, free and beautiful. Moonlight silvered his face.
“Come with me,” she said.
The two of them riding until Wall Sina was behind them. Hayden swearing at bad roads. Tris laughing in the rain. No fathers. No announcements. No ballrooms. No future but the next mile.
“I can’t.”
Hayden had a mother who needed him, a younger sister, estates, obligations, a father who would turn cruel if abandoned. He had his own cage. It only looked larger than hers.
Tris nodded.
“Right.”
“I would,” he said fiercely.
“I know.”
“I would if I could.”
“I know.”
His hand tightened on the reins. She looked at him, the boy she had loved before she understood love did not always arrive with trumpets. Sometimes it arrived as irritation. As shared secrets. Love where someone pulls pins from your hair or helping you escape him.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I do.”
Hayden reached up and his hand slid behind her neck, warm against the shorn edge of her hair, and he pulled her down until their foreheads touched.
“Write to me, update me on every failure, on every accomplishment. Say the word, and I'll be there in the blink of an eye,” he said.
He wiped her tears away with his thumb, just as he had in the garden.
“Don’t die,” he said.
Tris tried to smile.
“What an inspiring farewell.”
“No, Tris.” His voice broke. “I mean it. Be selfish. Be cruel. Be ugly. Fight dirty. Run if you have to. I don’t care what heroic nonsense your brother wrote in his letters. You come back alive.”
She swallowed hard.
“Yes, sir.”
He laughed then, painfully.
“God help the military.”
Then he stepped back and slapped the horse’s flank.
The animal surged forward.
Tris nearly fell, caught herself, and rode through the west gate. She looked back once.
Hayden stood beneath the archway, a dark figure in the moonlight, one hand raised and motionless.
Behind him, the Witherheights estate blazed gold against the night.
Ahead, the road disappeared into black trees.
Tris faced forward.
And rode.
Three weeks later, she learned that freedom smelled like sweat.
Also mud. Blood. Leather. Smoke. Boiled cabbage. Unwashed men. Wet wool. Horse shit. Fear.
Mostly fear.
The training camp near Wall Rose had barracks that creaked in the wind and straw mattresses that felt stuffed with broken sticks. Her instructors screamed directly into one’s soul before breakfast, and there was certainly no time for lingering about in her nightgown in the morning or brushing her hair for hours, shaping it into perfection. She was allowed to learn the truth about life, she was allowed to grow up. Politics, unfairness, hunger, classism.
On her first day, a man with a shaved head and the neck of an angry bull looked her up and down.
“Name?”
She stood straight.
“Tris.”
“Tris what?”
“Witherheights.”
The instructor’s eyebrows rose.
“Witherheights?”
“Yes, sir.”
“As in Cornelius Witherheights?”
“Yes, sir.”
He leaned closer.
“You lost, princess?”
A few boys snickered.
Tris looked him in the eye.
“No, sir.”
“You sure? Because the ballroom is that way.” He pointed vaguely toward Wall Sina. “This here is where people piss blood and cry for their mothers.”
“Then I look forward to broadening my education, sir.”
“Well,” he said. “At least you’re funny.”
“I wasn’t joking, sir.”
“That’s why it was funny.”
By sundown, Tris had fallen off the ODM balance rig five times, vomited once, torn both palms open, and discovered that one could, in fact, be so exhausted that one can't even shove food down their throat at the end of the day.
She met a girl from Karanes named Mara, who became her good friend and training companion. Mara watched her collapse onto her bunk.
“You dead?”
Tris stared at the ceiling.
“Socially or physically?”
Mara snorted.
“Both, probably.”
“Then yes.”
Across the barracks, someone laughed, “Princess won’t last a week.”
Tris closed her eyes. Her body hurt in places she had not known had places. She thought of her mother’s parlor. The announcement. Hayden’s hand at the back of her neck.
Adrian’s letter.
"You would breathe for the first time."
Tris inhaled.
The barracks smelled like feet.
She exhaled.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
Mara laughed so hard she nearly fell off her bunk.
She did last a week.
Then a month.
Then a year.
The military tried very hard to break her, and to its credit, it came close several times. The first winter nearly killed her. Her fingers split open from cold. Her shoulders bruised purple from ODM harnesses. She learned to sleep through shouting, to eat quickly, to wrap bandages with her teeth, to swear creatively. She was not the strongest, and that irritated her, pushed her to her max. The ODM gear wanted her dead everytime she used it, but she didn't care. For months, she hated it with the focused passion of a woman wronged.
“You are so bad with the cables,” Adrian told her one evening, approaching her with a wide carefree grin.
He appeared at the edge of the training field with a Scout cloak thrown over his shoulders, older and thinner but unmistakably her brother. Tris had stared at him for exactly two seconds before punching him in the chest.
He had staggered back, wheezing.
“That,” he said, “was fair.”
Then she had hugged him so hard he cursed into her hair. He had their mother’s eyes and their father’s stubborn jaw, though softened by years of weather and war. In uniform, he looked less like an heir and more like a man who had chosen himself and paid for it. He helped train her, and brother and sister were reunited at last.
Spring passed and now she launches into the air without screaming her head off and terrifying her friends. By summer, her nape cuts surpassed those of her classemates.
By autumn, she had finally embraced her destiny...
as a soldier.
The day Tris met Levi Ackerman, she was bleeding from the eyebrow and in a terrible mood. The terrible mood had become something of a signature of Captain Witherheights. Yes indeed, she was finally Captain. She had been assigned to assist with intake after Commander Erwin returned from an expedition with three recruits from the Underground, though “recruits” was a generous word, They arrived in chains and one of them, in particular, looked ready to kill every person in the courtyard.
Isabel Magnolia.
Furlan Church.
Levi. No surname, apparently.
The courtyard buzzed with attention as the soldiers stared openly. Tris, who had been holding a cloth to her eyebrow, saw Levi’s eyes flick towards her in disdain and interest all at once. Then he looked at the blood on her face.
“Your head’s leaking,” he said.
Behind him, Isabel made a choking noise that might have been laughter.
Tris lowered the cloth, and sighed tiredly as she crossed her arms in inpatience.
“So it is.”
“You planning to fix that, or is this some surface tradition I don’t know about?”
Several soldiers stiffened. No one spoke to a captain like that.
Granted, Tris was newly promoted and still young enough that some men thought they could test the title if they smiled while doing it. But she was a captain nonetheless.
She stepped closer. Up close, his eyes were even more unsettling.
“You must be Levi,” she said.
His eyes narrowed.
Erwin approached then, tall and composed. He looked from Levi to Tris, and something unreadable passed over his face.
“Captain Witherheights,” he said.
Levi’s eyes shifted. He recognized the name. Seems that even underground criminals knew her name. Her name, always arriving to give off the wrong impression before she can open her mouth and prove herself.
His gaze flicked over her uniform, her cropped hair, her split eyebrow, the worn leather of her gloves.
“Thought rich people were supposed to be cleaner.”
“And I thought criminals were supposed to be taller.”
Then Isabel burst out laughing and furlan covered his mouth.
Levi stared at her, and very slowly, he looked her up and down.
Then he said, “Tch.”
And that was the beginning.