Prompt#1 Cold hands
His hands are beautiful.
Maybe it's a strange thing to think, hell she knows it's a strange thing to think, but it doesn't make it any less true. It's with a sense of despair she compares them to her own, rough and calloused from years of weapons training. Her grandmother had warned her to wear gloves or risk ruining them but with the arrogance that being thirteen brings she'd neglected to.
Now of course she wears the gloves but she thinks it's a case of too little too late. Her hands are worn and calloused, tend to get chapped and rough in cold weather and go red until they bear such a startling resemblance to her grandmother's she thinks she might cry.
His hands are smooth and soft, possibly because his style of fighting is far less tai-jutsu based than 're also....graceful, strong and when he extends his arm in battle, hand languidly splayed out often she forgets they are supposed to be fighting, caught up in the simple elegance of his movements. The way his simplest gesture seems to hold both brute force and heart-breaking grace. It's a contradiction, like a poem that makes no sense but somehow manages to move you.
It gives her chills to watch him to the most basic of things, like pushing open a door.
She worries about her sanity a little.
'Your hands....'
He looks up at her, questioning, as she slides her hand into his. Holding hands is not something they do very often, not because they are an unaffectionate couple, but simply because of his tendancy to keep his in his pockets. She does not want to push for it, to make him uncomfortable but tonight she wants...needs.... to see her own calloused brown hand wrapped up with his slender pale one.
Shino's fingers are startlingly cold as she intertwine's them with her own and she can't help giving a little gasp.
'...are freezing.'
'Yes. As you are aware, body tempurature is a matter of choice for me.'
He turns to look at her when he says it, and there's a little bit of a smile curling the corners of his mouth up. For some reason she thinks he might have been gently teasing her, but before she can think of a retort his hand suddenly becomes warm in hers, the heat sending a comforting little thrill straight up her arm.
Sometimes she thinks she will never get used to Aburame Shino. That it would take a thousand years to learn and decipher all of his odd little habits and quirks.
And she wishes, so hard, that she had a thousand years to spend with him.
'Is that better?'
She likes the low lingering caress of his voice, the way his hand tightens slightly posessively on her's, the way he inclines his head towards her as if he's anxious for her response...
She likes alot of things about him. And she wonders if all that like is being compacted, pushed down until it's something else, something stronger and more lasting. So that it's not really 'like' anymore at all.
'Yes, thank you.' she says when she finally remembers to answer, and looks at their fingers all tangled up with each other. It makes her want to laugh, and cry and a thousand other things she most certainly never thought Aburame Shino, of all people, would be capable of making her feel.
'It does not bother you. The kikkai.' He says it without question, just a sort of quiet fascination in his voice and she feels an overwhelming surge of affection.
'No.'
It really doesn't. Perhaps it should, it seems to bother all her friends for her- the idea of touching someone who is a living hive, of kissing a mouth insects exit his body through... (not that she has kissed him yet but she lives in hope, god she lives in so much hope)...they are all politely repulsed by it.
If she had been the type of person who cared what people think, it might have put her off but she isn't and it doesn't. Of course sometimes she wishes other people could see what she does but she doesn't really mind. It makes her feel special, privileged that she is the only one who see's him....really see's him.
They walk along the darkened deserted streets of night-time Konoha, hand-in-hand in a comfortable warm silence. And she wishes it could stay like this forever.