Tris took an audible breath. “I will, if you want me to. Do you want me to?” His fingers carded through the hair on the side of Francis’s head, and his other hand was like an anchor on his far shoulder, impossible, and real, and comforting.
“No.”
“Okay, then.” It might have been his imagination, or maybe the drugs, but it felt like a kiss was pressed to the top of his head. “Okay.”
~*~
They kept him drugged to the gills for the first few days, whether he wanted it or not, and whenever he edged toward the next dosage, the lightning-crackles of pain in the remainder of his arm reminded him that being loopy and unconscious was better than being on fire.
Rose snuck him in chocolate pudding on more than one occasion, and sat in Tris’s empty chair, keeping watch, while he ate it. When Francis asked – casually, he hoped – where Tris had gone, she rolled her eyes and said, “I told him to take five. He’s been sleeping in this chair day and night. How he doesn’t have the world’s worst backache, I don’t know.”
That set his stomach to tumbling. “He – he stays here? All the time?”
“Even when you’re sleeping.”
He did not once wake alone. Tris only left the room when the nurses shooed him out so they could sponge him down. He stayed for the changing of bandages.
“Don’t look at it,” he encouraged Francis, roughly, a hand on his good shoulder like always, now.
But Francis looked. He wanted to see the stitches, and the pink, puffy, healing flesh. “I have to look sometime. It’s my arm now.”
Tris huffed a breath. “Stubborn.” His voice nearly sounded affectionate.
Francis slept, and sipped broth, and watched his catheter and IV bags get changed out, and glimpsed, every time he so much as turned his head, Tris there in the chair that had becomehis. He allowed himself the indulgence of enjoying large, warm, gentle hands on him, helping him to sit, bringing him water, fingers trailing through his hair and smoothing the collar of his gown. He knew this was only the product of guilt and regret and pity, and that it wouldn’t last, once he was more himself again, but he drank it in, now. He pretended. Pretended that, in the dim hours, when pain woke him and he tried to fumble for the morphine pump, that Tris sayingsweetheartmeant something.
Finally, the drugs were dialed back, and, stump throbbing in time to his pulse, but clear-headed, Francis got the okay from the doctor to get up on his own two feet and take a shower.
“Don’t get the water too hot or you’ll pass out and crack your head on the wall,” he warned, reassuringly no-nonsense. His bedside manner was terrible, but at least, that way, Francis knew he wasn’t being lied to when he was told that if he continued to heal as he was, he’d be ready for a prosthetic fitting soon. There were Knights who continued to serve after losing a limb, and he was determined to be one of them.
“Owen’ll help you.” The doctor gestured to an orderly built like a man who was used to carrying incapacitated Knights around.
But Tris said, “No, I’ll do it.”
The doctor regarded him, then gave a facial shrug. He turned back to Francis. “Call for real help if you end up needing it.”
Tris glared the doctor and Owen out of the room.
Francis, sitting with his feet dangling over the side of the bed, toes pressed to the cold tile, gripped the hem of his gown in his right hand, hard enough his knuckles went white. He was considering hitting the call button, nervous sweat prickling to life on his temples, and under his arms.
“You don’t get to choose who helps me,” he said through gritted teeth, angry, suddenly – furious. It was one thing to take comfort in Tris’s presence in his delirium, quite another to be fully himself, and have Tris act like a dictator in front of medical professionals.
Tris, standing with his arms folded, his clothes rumpled from having slept in them, cocked a brow and said, “You trust thatOwennot to let you fall?”
“I trust that he’s a professional, and that unlike you, he’s used to helping injured people get around, and, frankly, if you really want to know, he’s bigger than you. So. Yes. I trust him.” He could hear that he sounded petulant, but desperation was stirring in his belly, crawling up his throat, threatening to choke him. This charade couldn’t continue, or he would start to believe it, and that would be too cruel for words.
Tris stared at him, implacable. “Who do you think put you in the helo?”
Francis gulped, his stomach twisting up even tighter. He could only remember it in snatches, a grayed-out blur of pain, and shouting, and strong hands gripping him, too hot on his face and throat; tight on his waist, sure behind his knees. He remembered a throat, sweaty and dirt-streaked, smelling of fear, but a calm voice rumbling above him, telling him that he would be okay.
He forced his hand smooth against his thigh, gulped a breath, and said the thing that would finally shatter the morphine-induced illusion of the past week. “You can stop pretending now. I’m alive.” He lifted his left arm, and it felt so very wrong; swore he felt his hand open and close though it wasn’t there. “You don’t have to stick around anymore because you feel guilty or whatever. I’m fine.”
Tris’s face fell. “I’m not–”
“Guilty? Oh, but you are. There’s no other reason you’d be sitting beside my bed like this. Thanks, but, no thanks. I don’t – it doesn’t feel good, being pitied. I know I fucked up. I know I’m not – not as good as you. But don’t pity me.” He shook his head. “Don’t be – don’t be kind to me now, just because…” He clenched his teeth against the next words, against the tremor that threatened to accompany them.
Tris stared at him a moment, then nodded to himself and closed the distance to the bed. Situated himself so they were side by side, on Francis’s good side, and leaned down to loop an arm around his waist. “Come on, then,” he said, quietly.
Francis bit his lip hard, caught between the urge to laugh and the urge to scream. He caught Tris’s gaze, the warm dark brown of it, his expression infinitely patient in a way it had never been.
