Page 16 of Mystic Wonderful

Things got better after that. Francis stopped actively trying to avoid Tris, and Tris started appearing more and more at mealtimes; their company usually ate together at one end of a table, and Tris joined them, contributing to conversations without ever addressing Francis directly – he didn’t scowl at him, though. And he would answer, if Francis asked him a question.

A few days after their uneventful mission to the foothills, Francis walked into the training room and found Tris taping his knuckles, stripped down to his tank top, dog tags tucked inside, clearly ready for a few rounds with the heavy bag hanging in the corner. Francis paused on the threshold, and when Tris turned a faintly inquiring look on him he said, “I can come back later if–”

“I was gonna hit the bag, but if you wanna spar…?”

Francis swallowed around a suddenly tight throat. “Yeah. Okay.” He felt like he was calling the man’s bluff, but Tris didn’t respond with displeasure. He tossed over the roll of tape and started stretching out his arms.

Francis shrugged off his jacket, tucked his own tags out of the way, and made fast work of the tape, severing the last bit from the roll with his teeth. His pulse throbbed as they squared off from one another.

He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Tris that he wouldn’t make another inappropriate move. He wouldn’t; he knew that no chance for anything beyond a working relationship lay between them. But that didn’t mean that Tris wasn’t still all gorgeous, rippling muscles, and peeking chest hair, and a tattoo that was most definitely a sword wreathed in flame and flowing script. He was still, physically, a fantasy.

Francis shoved all thoughts ruthlessly aside, and engaged.

It was different sparring now, after last time, and the three strange verbal exchanges they’d had since. Oddly, Francis was less nervous. He’d asked, and received an answer; there was no need to be careful anymore, and so he wasn’t, throwing himself into jabs, and blocks, and parries. Less cautious, surer-footed, he dodged a move that would have led him to him pinned again, landed a glancing blow to Tristan’s ribs, and danced out of range again.

Tris narrowed his gaze – and then a reluctant smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “You’re getting better.”

“It just takes me a while, sometimes,” Francis said, grinning back, wide and delighted.

Tris huffed a breath, rolled his eyes, but the smile, tiny though it was, stayed in place. “Come on, again.”

iv.

Tris had never claimed to be a genius. But he wasn’t an idiot.

Except for when he was.

His whole life had been soldiering; born an army brat before the First Rift, both his parents had already been in the military, had been part of the first scramble of armed forces who’d responded to the heavenly chaos that had ensued. His father had died in combat, then.

He’d joined up at eighteen, and proved alarmingly good at killing people for a living. The Rift Walkers had seemed a natural fit. His mother had cried at his graduation ceremony.

He’d been told he was made of stone, as an insult more often than a joke, but he was a man, same as any other, on the most basic levels. He got hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and horny. In the post-Rift world, the military stopped caring so much about certain regulations: about hair, and fraternization, and which direction a person’s attractions lay. It wasn’t hard to find someone with an equal itch; to steal a few minutes in a stairwell or behind a locked dorm door, standing, or crowded together on a narrow bunk. All of it perfunctory, no-strings, and effortless.

Tris had seen all manner of terrible things as a Walker. Had watched fellow Knights die again and again, until their names, and faces, and personalities all blended together. Until it was just a role within each company: there were leaders, and steadfast rocks, like himself, clowns like Gavin, and then there was the One Who Died. Always, always, the cannon fodder, the first to fall, the weak link.

He’d taken one look at Sir Francis Gallo and known him for what he was: the One Who Died. He hadn’t understood how someone with such soft hair and such a sweet face could have been made a Knight in the first place. Though smaller, the girl, Rose, had radiating a prickly aggression that would stand her in good stead in the company.

Gallo, though…Gallo wassoft.

Even more damning: Gallo made Trisfeelsoft.

If asked, he would have told anyone curious that he didn’t have finer feelings, an assertion that would have been taken for truth after one look at his cold, hard face. But the actual truth was that, like any other man, those finer feelings could exist, could be crippling, and so he’d packed all capacity for them away, locked them up tight, deep inside, because they had no place in a life such as his.

He took one look at that stupid, doomed to die, curly-headed boy Knight, though, and he wasn’t thinking about a quick tug in a closet. It wasn’t a faint itch on the back of his tongue that unsettled him – but a hunger. Instant, and deep, yawning painfully wide inside him, unearthing urges best left buried. He wanted to know the texture of his skin, and watch his eyes dilate up close, right before he tasted his mouth – and then every other part of him.

It was such an immediate, devastating rush of heat and not simply want, butdesire, that blasted through him that he rejected it violently. It couldn’t happen. It couldneverhappen. It would kill him.

He tried being distant with the boy, but that didn’t work because Gallo stared at him with naked wonder and worship. So then he tried helping him, thinking that, once he was seen as human, he would lose some of his mystique and Gallo would transfer his attention elsewhere, somewhere friendlier and safer.

Instead, Gallo proved himself to be quicker, and stronger, and more tenacious than expected. And cheerful – always so fucking cheerful. A bruise on his jaw, and sweat running down bare arms better muscled than Tris had anticipated, and grinning like an idiot (like a sweetheart), ready for another go.

Trislikedhim, damn it, beyond the ways he plagued his every fevered dream, the ones he woke from sweat-drenched, hard, and half-humping his mattress.

And then had comethat day.

Thesparring match. The one in which Tris had first been shown up, and then…been shown something entirely different.

Later, during his shower, when he played it back on loop, he realized that he’d been the one to fuck everything up. Because even though Gallohadpressed back into him, and admitted to it later, it would have been an easy thing for a man not currently fighting his own arousal to brush off. A polite decline, an apology, and nothing else.

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