（ the moments where he looks genuinely unguarded are few and far between. this is the second such moment, and even then it's subtle. it's just a faint — wonderment, perhaps that looks out of place if only because in a life stretched on the torturous rack of millennia, there's little space left in him for it to fill.
but it's there. something quiet, something tired, something just a little sad. not for himself, because he rarely spares that manner of consideration for his own interiority — but just. sadness is, in many ways, hardcoded into his marrow, spelled out across the atoms of the assembled star-stuff that is his human form.
and then he blinks, and the moment is broken.
tellingly, he doesn't have an immediate answer. yes, he uses safewords. yes, he does everything proper and above board — that refrain of safe, sane, consensual a constant hammering metronome in the back of a ruined mind. but when it's happens, when he offers it up to a partner, it's because he's adhering to a structure that's been just a little thrown out with sasuke, and no one ever asks for those reasons the boy might suppose — he does seem like he has little need of one. confident and self-assured, open and mindful of his own traumas and those of others.
no subject
but it's there. something quiet, something tired, something just a little sad. not for himself, because he rarely spares that manner of consideration for his own interiority — but just. sadness is, in many ways, hardcoded into his marrow, spelled out across the atoms of the assembled star-stuff that is his human form.
and then he blinks, and the moment is broken.
tellingly, he doesn't have an immediate answer. yes, he uses safewords. yes, he does everything proper and above board — that refrain of safe, sane, consensual a constant hammering metronome in the back of a ruined mind. but when it's happens, when he offers it up to a partner, it's because he's adhering to a structure that's been just a little thrown out with sasuke, and no one ever asks for those reasons the boy might suppose — he does seem like he has little need of one. confident and self-assured, open and mindful of his own traumas and those of others.
the silence takes a thoughtful bent, and then: ）
Ares. Let's go with that.