From Here On Out

fifty seven

"I'll be standing here, Where I am today,"

Present Day

"She looks like you more and more everyday," Tris gushes softly, shaking her head gently. "It's crazy."

Sitting on Tobias's knee is Melody. Shauna and Zeke stopped by to visit and brought Melody to see her mom and dad for a few hours. Tobias keeps her on his lap, because she likes to grab at the cords and IV line.

"You think?" Tobias asks, pressing a kiss to their daughter's head. Her hair growing fast and full in curls of honey blond like her mother. Everything about her to Tobias screams her mother, but Tris can't help but see Tobias.

"She's a spitting image."

Sitting there with soreness and medicine pumped through her to help the pain, Tris can't help but smile at the scene in front of her. For a moment, it doesn't even matter that they're in a hospital room. That Tris was in an accident, or that it was a close call. All that matters in that single moment, is the way her daughter sits there giggling and grinning at her on her father's knee. The way Tobias sits there just the same.

It's a scene that leaves her silent with a smile, a warmness beating inside of her heart. To watch the two people she loves the most in this world together. It feels almost like a film playing, as though she's watching and not truly living it. For it's perfect, everything in that moment felt perfect.

When it comes down to it, Tobias would do anything for Tris and his daughter. Tris sees that in every thing he does. When he looks down at their daughter in his lap, she sees it. The way he would move heaven and earth for her, and that fills her with a feeling she can't quite pin point. One of happiness and pride for sure, but there's an emotion beneath both of those she can't describe.

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Present Day-- Later that day

Tobias had stepped out with Melody for a few minutes, leaving Tris in her hospital room to rest.

The room was small but it wasn't cramped. It smelled heavy of disinfectant, but she didn't feel sick like hospitals sometimes made her feel. Her friends had come by with flowers which brightened up the room, and the sun was out that afternoon so her nurse opened the shades for her. Allowing the sun to shine into her room, warming the air around her and lending fresh light that Tris liked. Tris can feel the sun on her skin as her eyes are shut, resting as best she can, until she hears a voice.

"That smile sure does look good on you." The voice is feminine, and one she hasn't heard in years. One that fills her with a sense of familiarity and love.

Opening her eyes, Tris turns her head to the right, looking to the chair Tobias was sitting in for hours at her bedside. This time, an older woman sits there. Her hair white and short on top of her head, her hands frail and her body clothed in a purple dress Tris remembers vividly.

"Grandma?" Tris asks, not believing that she's truly there.

The woman who sits in the chair beside Tris is as real as the doctors and nurses outside. So real Tris could reach out and touch her. But she can't be, she died years ago. She remembers that day, that day Tobias held her as she wept.

"Sweetheart." Her grandmother smiles, and it was a smile that always filled Tris with such warmth.

"What are you doing here?" Tris asks.

"Came to see you," Her grandmother replies, and Tris can smell the faint peppermint she always smelled of. "I figured everyone else has been, and it's my turn to come on by."

It was true. Her friends had visited all morning, and her brother and parents stayed by her side for hours.

"I miss you." Tris says, and feels tears in the corners of her eyes.

"I know dear, and I miss you too."

"Can I ask you something?" Tris asks, and watches the woman nod sweetly. She always went to her grandmother for advice, she did it so many times until she passed.

"When Tobias and Melody were sitting there this morning," Tris pauses thinking back to that moment. "I felt something. I felt something as I watched them and I couldn't figure out what it was. Do you have any idea what it could be?"

"What did it feel like?"

"Like... I was floating. Like everything was perfect. I felt lighter, I felt happy. But it was a different kind of happiness, one I've never felt before."

"Could it have been peace you were feeling?"

"Peace?"

Her grandmother nods. "Peace that everything with you and Tobias is well again. Peace that your daughter is safe, and knows nothing of the accident her mother was in. Peace to not worry any longer."

"I suppose so," Tris says. "But it was something about seeing Melody with Tobias that made it hit me so hard."

"Maybe you were feeling peace that if something would have happened to you, if the accident was worse than it was, that Melody wouldn't be alone. That she would be alright with her father. Maybe you were feeling peace at the thought of knowing Tobias would raise that girl up right and in a life filled with endless love if something happened to you yesterday. Peace that even if you didn't make it, they could live on without you."

A/N: Shorter chapter, kind of filler.