#qasmavia

     @mita-rashi

     Tenzo rolls his eyes so hard they nearly pop out of his skull. Seriously, he thinks he sprained something-- his whole body tipped back, and he opens his mouth to spit something back to her before he pauses. The scornful look on his face turns to one of consideration, and he looks her up and down for a moment. 

     Anko is twenty four years old. He knows this because last year he’d crashed the little celebration the T&I division had thrown for her, and ended up eating the frosting off the bottom of the candles when he’d gotten drunk and didn’t want to talk. It had been vanilla flavored, and after sucking the bottom of twenty four little birthday candles-- talk about a fire hazard-- his stomach had hurt something fierce. She’d made fun of him for getting a tummy ache like a little baby. 

     Tenzo thinks he’s twenty one or so. Sometimes it’s hard to recall the date of birth that Kakashi had laughingly helped him pick, but his age in actual years is easy enough to guess. He’ll be turning twenty two in a month or so, he thinks. So he blinks at her owlishly, and then folds his arms and makes a quiet ‘huh’ noise. A smile creeps onto his face.

text meme | @qasmavia​

text meme | @qasmavia

 It wasn’t what he expected. Not after their father’s feigned ignorance the first time he had cautiously invited Lee over for a Friday movie night, or Kankuro’s awkward but well-meaning thump on the shoulder once they had settled into a routine of it (”About time, huh?”). He sifted through the books with a guarded sort of interest, as though he half expected someone to pop out from behind his bedroom door with a camera phone and new fodder for a thousand views on Youtube and the swift end to whatever meager social life Gaara hoped to obtain.

Nobody did. The books felt alive, as if they pulsed with a heartbeat of their own, so unlike the dreary sixteenth-century poetry assigned in his English classes or the monotonous textbooks he would “lose” a few weeks into each semester. These were mostly young-adult fiction, a few paperbacks that could have been science fiction or fantasy, and a handful of slim graphic novels, all which centered, judging by the cover art or the blurbs on the back, on romances… like his. Boy romances. Gay romances.

 He wasn’t quite comfortable with the term, not yet. Not sure if it fit him just right. But for now, holding in his hands hundreds of pages of stories about boys like him (boys who like boys they exist I exist it’s okay it’s allowed it’s not wrong), with his sister’s tentative first step to clear the fog between them, he felt a safety he had never known he needed.

accent challenge

@qasmavia

Apparently, it’s that time of the evening when all the children pick their favorite pillow to sleep in. And he is one such pillow. Surprisingly. Given Temari’s initial... distrust of him. Hah.

“Good evening, Temari. I’ve---”

“How do you know my name?”

A beat. “I can read minds.”

“You’re not going to like it,” Ryozen said, shaking his head when she reached for his glass. Again.

“If you close your eyes and count to 100 slowly--- in your head, in your head. You shouldn’t say it out loud. Your mom will bring out the hot chocolate for you, okay?”

@qasmavia

          one solid grey eye rolls to peer at her, his face otherwise unmoving where his chin is resting in his palm. he’s a study in stillness, looks like he’s carved from marble, scarcely breathing. he looks like he’s been slumped here so long that he’s become part of the scenery, just another archaic decoration hidden away in this tower. 

     he’s a little dramatic today, sue him. 

          a slow blink is the only answer she gets for a moment, and then his head shifts, and he looks down at the paper he’s been pressing his pen to for the past hour and a half, staring off into the middle distance like some kind of traumatized war veteran, and then he looks back to her, full-faced this time.