Author's Notes: NejiTen. Just a moment in time.
Calligraphy
She sits at a low table, her bare legs crossed, unhampered by the fact that she wears only one of his shirts. She's never really been conscious of how she looks, not even around him, and since he sleeps, she feels its alright to be oblivious. Anyone watching her might think she was preparing to mediate. She smiles to herself and picks up an ink brush.
The smell is of aged paper, wood, and the melting wax of the candles on the table. Thin streamers of smoke rise like offerings, filling the air with hazy wishes. She barely notices, long used to feeling time stop, to dodging discarded weapons on the floor. Her eyes flicker to the bed briefly but she doesn't speak. For that moment, her room contains everything she holds dear and she would like to hold it there a little longer.
She lifts an arm made firm and slender by years of weapons training, holding the brush with the grace of a sleeping ballerina, a dancer about to take her first step. Then she descends, painting the black trails of sounds and names, the forms of words on the long scroll spread across half the room. She likes calligraphy. She's good at it. She has good reflexes and her wrists are flexible, moving with the ink in patterns others might have ruined. She breathes life into cracked symbols, thinking of nothing and of everything. Her world has contracted to the sound of her brush against the parchment, her ink bottles, the bed, and him.
He's asleep for the first time in days. She knows because she never sleeps unless he does. The last mission took something out of him, he had had to kill someone. That, too, she had known by reading his eyes as well as he read hers. His painted mask lay forgotten in the corner, thrown there in his desire to lose himself in her.
She thinks he does not look young when he sleeps, nor innocent. Instead, he seems content, as if his dreams are pleasant and that's all she's ever wanted for him. Happiness. She tries to give it to him but it is a fleeting thing, fluttering off on rainbow wings just when she thinks its there to stay.
Or maybe, he doesn't dream at all.
She likes it like this though. Quiet and still, with the feel of his body still imprinted on hers, the windy smell of his hair lingering in her mind. When its like this, even the blue, cross-shaped seal on his forehead doesn't bother her. When its likes this, they can overcome anything.
Adding a little more ink, she writes his name because that too will give her a weapon.
"Tenten."
She looks up as he slips out of her bed, padding silently around until he sits behind her, pulling her back against him. He lifts a muscled arm and places it over hers, their fingers aligned as she grips her brush. She smiles softly and begins to write again, bringing him with her as they form the characters together.
The smell is of aged paper, wood, and the melting wax of the candles on the table. And her world has contracted to the sound of her brush against the parchment, her ink bottles, the bed, and him.
The End.