Ten -
Suikoden, Gremio
=====
 

Gremio was, of course, too polite to mention it, and Tir seemed pleased enough, but... Tir didn't look like that, fierce and angry, with the muscles in his arms corded and his weapon forever held to ready behind him. Gremio was in it, too, but he didn't look like that either, and for some reason the Gremio in the mural was wielding daggers.

Gremio was, of course, still too polite to mention it. 

Just as he was too polite to mention those fierce brown eyes that Ivanov had given Tir.  He supposed that Ivanov was taking some license to make the mural look better, but... best not to say anything about it. Instead, he simply studied the mural and smiled and nodded and said all the polite things in the polite voice, and occasionally glanced at Tir, quiet and calm beside him. 

Always beside him, these days, and watching him closely when he thought Gremio wasn't watching. He still didn't quite understand what had happened, why Tir stuck so close to him these days, how Tir could have changed from the boy he was to this withdrawn young man seemingly overnight, but he remembered enough. He had been dead. Now he was not.

And Tir had changed.

A year, it had been, he was told. Tir still looked seventeen (and would apparently continue to look seventeen for years to come) but there was something about the new stillness of his body and the flat, dead stare of his eyes that made him look a thousand years old. A thousand years old and somehow beautiful, as if everything extraneous had been rubbed away to leave him polished and hard.

His eyes hadn't held that look, before. Maybe Ivanov's version of Tir's eyes was also right, in the right situation. Gremio found that he didn't know, and it unsettled him, not knowing things about this young man beside him, so different from the chubby five-year-old he remembered, the ten-year-old yelling and laughing in the yard, the fifteen-year-old eating him out of house and home.

He turned to study the fierce and resolute eyes on the mural in front of him, and then turned to study Tir beside him, and late that night when he curled in on himself in his bed, silently pushing his loose pants down to ruck up about his thighs, taking himself in hand, it was those hawk's eyes that he saw in his mind, watching him, seeming to demand something from him that he had never before thought of providing.

He came under their imagined scrutiny, harder than usual, and shocks were still ripping along his spine when he forced his eyes open, staring at the blank stone wall. He didn't fall asleep again that night.