#tenzo.reply

‘i don’t want any more regrets.’ - for yamato

"Oh, is that all it takes?" Yamato asks drily, not pausing his pour of tea into Sasuke's cup. "Saying it makes it so?"

He pours himself a cup next, and then sets the kettle over on the stove. His kitchen is cramped, but at least as more and more buildings are set up, he doesn't have to share his space with other jounin anymore. He wasn't sure if Sasuke was willing to accept his invitation for tea when he'd offered it-- wasn't even sure if he'd wanted Sasuke to accept or not when he'd offered it.

But here he is.

"It's an admirable goal, Sasuke," he settles into the chair across from him, running his finger around the rim of his cup. "What are you doing to reach it?"

they've been staring at the ceiling fan for fifteen minutes now. "tenzo," they say, but it sounds like they're underwater, and they blink heavily against the... heaviness in their face. "tenzo, i think i'm starting to feel it. should i be concerned?"

Above them, the ceiling fan turns, turns, turns, and turns. Tenzo has watched the ceiling fan make forty seven lazy, useless loops in the last seven minutes. The motor is going out, but his landlord won't fix it until it goes out for real. That just means it's hotter than a furnace in his apartment, but Yasu doesn't seem to mind, curled up against his side with their leg thrown over his thighs and their limp, loose limbs otherwise arranged akimbo. Tenzo doesn't really mind, either. The heat makes his muscles feel loose, like he can grow from it, and the edible they'd split an hour ago makes him feel a little bit like he's been put through a taffy stretcher.

Yasu's slack expression, when he turns his face to look at them, makes him snicker. "Concerned? Nah," he replies, clumsily reaching over to arrange their hair away from the nape of their neck, sticky with humidity-sweat. Privately, he thinks it's likely that Yasu has been feeling it for a while, and has only just now started to realize it. "I would never let it hurt you, and if you start feeling too weird we can just go to sleep, huh? You wanna watch 'how it's made'?"

❛ I'll lose myself in him. ❜ [your pick baby]

Tenzo doesn't lift his chin from his knees, but he does turn his gaze from the street below to watch Gai, uncharacteristically serious, his arms crossed in front of him. He turns back toward the street, and watches as Kakashi, harried, chases after a familar dark-haired genin.

"Huh," is all he says for a moment, hands curled around his own ankles, his legs pulled up tight to his chest. Tenzo tries not to get involved in Kakashi's idiotic personal affairs, mostly because the other man's self-denial is enough to make even Tenzo feel just a little bit crazier than normal. And then, of course, there's the Gai of it all.

"Do you think that's what he would want you to do?" He asks finally, thoughtfully, like each word is being pulled out of him on a long chain he's using to tether the pair of them to the roof, to reality, to something hopelessly constructive. At Gai's frown, he just shrugs one shoulder. "I don't think he'd want you to lose yourself at all, is the thing. Let alone in him. So where does your vision for what you want from him square with his?"

Tenzo isn't known for being particularly emotionally open, but he's known Kakashi since he became a person himself. He thinks Gai would be good for him, if Kakashi could get over himself-- and if Gai could get over himself a little bit too.

Kakashi has caught the familiar dark-haired genin by the collar, and is hauling him back into the tea house while the kid struggles half-heartedly. It's his birthday. Kakashi had asked if he wanted to come see him turn thirteen, and he'd said sure, no problem. It's kind of a fucking problem. He remembers watching him duck under Itachi's cloak, six years old and still clinging to his baby fat and smiling-- now the scowl seems permanent on his face.

He thinks, miserably, that he wants a cigarette.

Tenzo unfolds his legs to let them hang over the edge of the roof, and leans back on his hands with a sigh, glancing at Gai once more. "He's afraid of you because he doesn't want you to turn yourself into something you're not for him. He doesn't want to take everything you're offering. It's not at all that he doesn't, um... Care about you, you know?" He fidgets with his fingers, watches the sun creep closer to the horizon, and then disappear behind a cloud. The fact that he's had to think so much about Kakashi's deep inner feelings so much in the past two minutes pisses him off. He sighs. "You should ask, you know. Just, like. Ask."

“YAMATO! FIST MY BUMP!” 👊

He's well used to Gai's antics by now, and won't pretend otherwise.

Yamato has spent much of his life as Kakashi's murderous little shadow-- until he was his big shadow, after that final growth spurt where he'd finally outstripped him in height. Now, Yamato is hardly a shadow at all. He's a jounin with a vest, with friends, with.... a little team, still orbiting Kakashi, but branching out with a life of his own for the first time.

He's not very good at it. Hence, his friendly association with Gai.

"Fist your-- Sure, man," Despite his private confusion, he cracks his knuckles with Gai easily, and then tucking his hands back into his pockets. "I'll fist your bump anytime. What're we celebrating?"

‘worried about me? how sweet.’ [yamato]

"Don't embarrass me," Yamato mutters without heat. He adjusts his grip on Gai's belt with his left hand, trying to keep him from sliding down. He's got Gai's arm slung around his shoulder, but he can't hang on to the man's wrist-- most of the bones in his right hand are shattered. He thinks Gai probably dislocated his knee, tore a couple ligaments, maybe even cracked some of the bones in his leg-- no way in hell he's walking on it. Sakura is going to cuss the pair of them out when they return. "Genma will rip my fucking head off if I leave you out here to crawl back on your own," he continues, tilting his head to wipe some of the drying blood out of his eyes on Gai's sleeve, since it's right there.

"Kakashi-senpai too, I guess," he continues thoughtfully. "Though, he wouldn't make it fast like Genma would. He'd play with me, because he's evil. You don't want me to get tortured by your evil, um..." Yamato falters for a half-second. He's never known what to call them. Kakashi always rolled his eyes at him whenever he'd asked, like he was stupid. Maybe he was. Gai is nice, but he's... a lot. "Your evil rival, do you? That's why I can't leave you out here. So stop telling me to."

He's been accused of nervous babbling before, but in his defense he's pretty sure they're both concussed. Maybe they won't even remember it. He doesn't even know why he's acting tough; Genma and Kakashi would kill him if he left Gai out here, sure, but beyond that... he doesn't want to leave him out here. He's got two legs. Gai has two hands. They can figure it out, right?

"I was going to make you a walking cast out of wood, but uh. I can't make hand signs," he confesses, lifting his arm carefully at the elbow to display the bloody shirt he has wrapped around it. "Oh-- or, we can. I saw Senpai do this once. We can each make half the sign, and I can make you a pretty sturdy splint.."

"That was a very stupid thing to do! What were you trying to prove?" // for tenzo :)

"Ow, Genma, can you-- OW!" Tenzo hisses, trying to shake her off. She continues plucking at the senbon sticking out of the left side of his neck and upper arm, undeterred by his whining and wiggling.

"Shut the hell up, sticks-for-brains," she slaps down his half-hearted elbow jab, and he yelps as her palm makes direct contact with one of the holes freshly poked in him. "If you don't sit still, I'm going to leave you here and let Hayate and Kakashi deal with y--" She pauses. The three of them look around the room. Kakashi has disappeared, and Hayate has gone back to staring at Tenzo with a displeased little slant to his mouth.

Tenzo freezes. Genma snickers, plucks three more senbon from his neck in rapid succession, and then stands from her crouch while Tenzo writhes on the floor like a big clumsy worm. By the time he's done cursing her and her ancestors and descendants, she's left the room, and it's just him laying sprawled on the floor and Hayate curled up on one of Kakashi's stupidly comfortable chairs, knees pressed to his chest, dark eyes huge and soulful.

There's a little pinch between his brows. Tenzo is in trouble.

"That was a very stupid thing to do," Hayate steeples his fingers in front of his mouth, not breaking his stare. "What were you trying to prove?"

Tenzo blinks. "...Prove?" They stare at each other for a moment. Tenzo gets the sense he fucked up, somehow. He laboriously sits up, and when his legs don't want to behave and allow him to stand (one of Genma's senbon had completely numbed his lower half, she said he was lucky he hadn't pissed his pants), he drags himself the three and a half feet between them with one arm, and rests his cheek on Hayate's knee with wide eyes, his best approximation of innocent.

He has a smear of blood on his cheek, and crusted in his right nostril. It does not look innocent, it looks deranged.

"I-- I wasn't trying to prove anything, Hayate, come on," he insists. "It was just training, I knew she wasn't gonna hurt you, but you weren't even looking."

Kakashi had already bawled him out for a variety of reasons when he'd carried him here from the training grounds. Hayate was an adult and a capable ninja, he knows, but that one smarts because he's seen that idiot take blows for someone that a genin could have dodged, so shut up. Genma was aiming for non-vital points on Hayate, but she could have seriously hurt you on accident, which, yeah okay. He's been hurt before, so shut up.

Tenzo almost insists he would have done it for anybody. But he's not Kakashi. He's not even Genma. He did it for Hayate, on instinct.

"I know, I know that instinct is the enemy of talent," Tenzo slumps against Hayate's leg, cheek pressed to the inside of his knee, and then lets his forehead fall forward onto the edge of the chair. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you. It's not that I think you couldn't have dodged, I just..." He panicked, which isn't like him. Especially not during a little spar. "I thought that panel would grow a bit faster." As it was, his wood jutsu kept most of the senbon from lodging into his spinal cord, or anything more damaging than his right asscheek and the back of his neck and shoulder. Slightly muffled: "Don't be mad at me, Hayate. C'mon."