Work Text:
In the three years they had spent assigned together, Kisame went from treating Itachi like a nuisance to following Itachi’s orders even when he disagreed with them.
At first Itachi didn’t know how to accept the implied amount of respect, and reacted with the same emotionlessness that he used to cover up nearly everything he felt. Kisame was acute enough not to mistake the poker face for indifference, and simply kept treating Itachi with his crude, off-putting yet disarming candour.
“There is something about a man who wears his own skin instead of a mask,” Itachi said as Kisame walked out of the bathroom. He was wearing his trousers, and the remark was not addressed to his lack of shirt; rather it referenced the way Itachi had caught Kisame staring earlier, when Itachi was the one coming out of the bath.
He had had an hour to contemplate that stare, and the many other indications that preceded it. He had also had a long time to decide if he wanted to do anything about it. And if he did – then what that something would be.
They were renting a room in a more luxurious ryoukan than the usual places where they stayed, and neither of them were as ascetic as to deny themselves the pleasure of a hot bath. Itachi was still relaxed from his, and perhaps that was why he allowed himself both the fanciful contemplation of his partner’s nature and the fanciful contemplation of his partner’s abdominal muscles. “It is a vulgar practice, but also appealing.”
“Vulgar?” Kisame repeated, chucking his towel in the direction of the bathroom. It flopped onto the tiles and soaked up the water Kisame left behind.
“He is parading naked in front of the entire world,” Itachi pointed out, loose and pleased with both his observations. “His audience may like what they see, but who would admit to it when aware that it invites the accusation of perversion? And-” Here he adopted a faintly mocking tone. “-would someone think of the children?”
Kisame was not amused. “How old are you again?”
Itachi stood up. He still had a growth spurt in him, and even fully grown he would not come up higher than to Kisame’s shoulder. But his partner towered over everyone anyway, and few of the Uchiha ever grew actually tall. His body – the physical conditioning of an elite shinobi, occasional starvation, repeated damage and the first signs of the incipient illness – did not truly look his age.
“I am a dead man,” he said. “What does a number matter to one such as I?”
“Cop out,” Kisame snapped. He narrowed his eyes and tried to make his own estimate. “C’mon, tell. I know you can’t be eighteen yet.”
Itachi raised an eyebrow. “Is eighteen such a crucial demarcation? I was a jounin and an ANBU Captain. Most bingo books rate me as an S-class nukenin. And none of this is a coincidence. What qualifications there are for adulthood, I have met them.”
“Cop out,” Kisame repeated. “I am not physically attracted to children.”
Itachi did not roll his eyes, because it was not the kind of gesture that came to him naturally. They would not be having this discussion if Kisame were not attracted to him, and by his own profession this attraction confirmed Itachi’s adult status. “Caught in your own trap, Kisame?”
Kisame froze for a moment. He retraced his own mental steps and followed down Itachi’s track. The realisation dawned on him, and on its heels followed the frustration of once again stepping wrong in a fight against Itachi, tricked into sabotaging himself.
He bared his teeth.
That was all he did. He controlled his anger much better than anyone might suspect; most people only saw him as gleefully violent – which he was. But he was also aware of his glee at violence, and thus very careful of when he let himself off the leash.
He could attack Itachi. They could spar; they could even fight for real, but he would be defeated again, and he knew it. If Itachi felt especially peeved, he might have even made the defeat humiliating. The only thing his violence would result in would be the increase of his frustration.
“How did this even become a topic of conversation?”
“My presence frustrates you,” Itachi pointed out. He had not initially been certain of the nature of that frustration, but it became more apparent as the frequency of Kisame’s visits of brothels increased. The women he picked tended toward certain similarities in physical appearance. It was almost disappointingly textbook. “You may have enough money to spend on companionship, but were it not more satisfying to get what you truly want instead of flawed replacements?”
“You’re not seriously offering yourself to me to save money?”
Itachi watched him impassively. Was this petty revenge? Was Kisame purposely misunderstanding him, or was he having an eclipse of the mind?
He did not acknowledge the facetious question, and eventually the silence grew oppressive enough that Kisame caught on.
The man huffed and crossed his arms. “You’re the most difficult person I’ve ever had to deal with.” He looked at Samehada to imply how he would prefer to solve his problems – were they both not well aware that no amount of trying would get him anywhere.
“Yourself excepting?” Itachi suggested. He felt the corner of his mouth lift.
Another baring of teeth, another frustrated snarl.
A very interesting idea occurred to Itachi – would he be able to bring Kisame to the very brink of self-control simply by alternately speaking to him and ignoring him? It seemed like a more delicate dance than he had ever attempted before, but the challenge of it! And the possible rewards!
It had been… such a long time since he had indulged. In anything at all.
Could he afford it? Could he take something for himself?
“You,” Kisame retorted, “are by far more frustrating than I could ever attempt to be!”
Itachi contemplated his strategy. He wanted to do this – quite viscerally – and it took him by surprise. Not allowing himself to want had served him well in the past, and he was quite worried that if he let through any desire at all, the rest of the suppressed impulses would come rushing out behind this one thing.
And what then? What then?
Then he would go back home, and do what he should have done years ago, what he would have done if he had been just a little bit braver, a little bit more independent.
Well… if there was anything you lost as a dead man it was fear, and if there was anything you gained it was independence.
“You’re not even here,” Kisame said, falling down onto his futon with a thud that shook the wooden walls and made the paper panels shiver. “Wherever you just went, it’s got nothing to do with me, just like nothing of this has anything to do with me. You are a great liar, Itachi. An amazing liar.”
If anyone else had said it, Itachi would have been flattered. Coming from Kisame, this was the furthest thing from a compliment – and it, surprisingly, stung a little.
Oh. Itachi was discovering all sorts of new things about himself today.
“You are quite wrong,” he replied.
“Another lie-”
“It has a lot to do with you,” Itachi cut him off. He was not addressing the lying – that would forever be a point of contention between them, but they both had their paths to walk and where Kisame could afford to hold truth as his highest priority, Itachi did not have the luxury. He still had someone to protect. “If not for you, I would never contemplate this course of action.”
“You were absolutely not thinking about me,” Kisame protested coldly. His wrists rested idly on his knees; he hung his head, eyes trained on his toes – big, blue, with grotesquely mangled nails.
“I was…” Itachi spoke, and then changed his mind mid-sentence about how he was going to continue, less of a tease and more of unvarnished, crude honesty that seemed to be his partner’s blind spot. “…thinking about where this would lead – if I allowed myself this much indulgence, what would be the next one? How many objectives would I compromise for personal gain?”
“You?!” Kisame almost laughed off the suggestion, except then he caught the sight of Itachi’s face and realised that there was nothing funny about it. That it only seemed so amusing for how absurd he had assumed it to be, and that he had only assumed it absurd because it was unthinkable.
If Itachi turned against the Akatsuki, how much damage could he deal them before they stopped him? Would they be able to stop him?
“What a dilemma,” Itachi agreed, harshly squashing down the welling self-satisfaction, lest he come across as smug. “Reject me and seed the resentment that might fester between us.” They would have to live together, day by day, in near-constant physical closeness to remind them both of what they denied themselves. “Or don’t reject me, and risk that I will like taking and choose to take more.”
Perhaps taking was not the right word there. Perhaps ensnaring would have been closer. Itachi already had Kisame half-ensnared – otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten to this point – but the reverse was also true, wasn’t it? Itachi rarely felt attracted to people, and never to anyone whom he did not know well enough to predict and manipulate and perhaps imitate if the fancy struck him. He used to assume it was some sort of genjutsu-related fetish or reverse narcissism, but it might have been less complicated.
Maybe he simply needed the closeness before he felt physical attraction.
Kisame laughed, low and hoarse, but finally raised his head to grin, toothily, at Itachi. “If anyone’s doing any taking, it’s going to be me.”
“How literal of you,” Itachi pointed out. He imagined that if they did it right, they both would be taking something from it. In a move that was more instinctual than calculated he reached back and released his hair from the ponytail.
Kisame’s audible hitch of breath caught him by surprise.
Oh.
Strands of hair slithered down his shoulders; Kisame’s eyes followed them. Itachi caught the cue and let his hand rise to the knot on his sash. He didn’t have to look down – too busy tracking Kisame’s expressions – his fingers palpated the knot, identified the thread to tug, dug in, pulled.
Itachi had known that Kisame wanted him, but he had known it intellectually. Now he was beginning to see the actual emotion involved. Because it was all emotion – there was no decision behind it. If there had been, Kisame would have certainly decided otherwise. This was impractical. Ill-advised.
But strong like a gale force.
Kisame’s jaw was clenched, and so were his fists, planted on his thighs. He was scowling, hunched over, but his eyes were trained upwards, bright and hungry.
Oh.
Itachi swallowed. There was a feeling like hunger in his guts, but not hunger. He wanted to press his hand between his legs, but he wasn’t sure if it was to quench that feeling, or simply to give himself the friction. He shuddered.
“Fuck,” Kisame hissed through his gritted teeth.
One of his hands opened. Strong fingers petaled out, revealing a softer palm. The palm was raised up, arm extended further from the body, slowly, maybe reluctantly, but it ended up stretched toward Itachi anyway. The offer.
Itachi let the sash go, let his yukata fall open. He was not quite self-conscious, but he also wasn’t putting on a show (except that he was, in not putting one on). Kisame’s eyes sought out the gap between the fabric, trailing skin and-
There was another harsh exhale as he noticed that Itachi was wearing nothing underneath.
Itachi took the three steps that separated them and put his hand in Kisame’s. In hindsight the gesture was almost regal, and of course Kisame would have little patience for such drama. He clasped Itachi’s hand and tugged him down to the futon, to kneel between his knees. He pushed the yukata off Itachi’s shoulders and let it pool over his calves. He brushed one of Itachi’s nipples with the pad of his thumb.
First Itachi’s eyes and then his hand found the distented front of Kisame’s trousers where his cock was pressing against them. Itachi had always imagined such contact as vaguely uncomfortable, but now it felt exciting, a little intimidating, and definitely something he wanted more of.
“I bet none of the others have to deal with this,” Kisame complained, but the way his hands mapped the most accessible parts of Itachi’s skin belied his statement.
Admittedly, of the Akatsuki members other than Pein and Konan, they were the ones closest in both age and amount of humanity retained, so he was most probably right. Certainly Itachi categorically refused to waste any brainpower in that direction of thought.
He was much more interested in the hand stroking up the back of his thigh to his backside, and then squeezing, almost hard enough to leave a bruise.
Itachi scowled at Kisame. He meant to say ‘if you attempt to damage me, I will take off a body part of my choice’, but there was no need to give voice to the threat. It was heard clearly even in the silence.
This, too, was unexpectedly not nearly as uncomfortable as he expected. His arousal surged, and he found himself craving more of the closeness, in physical aspects rather than just figurative. He shuffled on his knees, pressing his chest to Kisame’s and snaking an arm behind his neck.
Itachi wanted to kiss him. Was it okay to kiss him? Was kissing something they did-?
But, it occurred to him, what sort of ridiculous reasoning was that? He wanted to kiss, so kiss he would. And did.
Kisame balked at the first contact of Itachi’s mouth, as it that was actually something he did not do – as if he assumed himself too off-putting for anyone to want to kiss him rather than because he did not like it, assuming by his sudden enthusiasm. Perhaps Itachi was too tentative, both unpracticed and wary of the sharp teeth, but once Kisame took over it was like a wave crashing over Itachi, hard and heavy and sweeping him, dragging him along.
x
Kisame had burn scars put there by Itachi.
It was not a surprise – Itachi had been aware and perfectly in control when he had inflicted the wounds, and he had never regretted it. He still not regret it. In fact, he felt embarrassingly proprietary about both them and the man who wore them.
There was one, still somewhat shiny, than spanned from Kisame’s left buttock across the small of his back to the right side of his lower ribcage. It was shapeless and raised against the rest of his skin, and it felt a little as though Itachi had carved his name into Kisame’s skin.
He wanted to touch it.
But not at the risk of waking up the man. It was enough to watch. And – he briefly activated the Sharingan – to keep this memory forever fresh.
There was the familiar wet, hollow pressure behind the bridge of his nose, and Itachi focused on breathing until it went away. He had had sex. It had been… far more enjoyable than anything he had ever imagined. Far more emotionally engaging, too. He just… he just felt a little off-balance right now.
There were still things Itachi wanted. Not only Kisame again. Other things, too. And the only thing that kept him from achieving them was himself.
Those ideas were novel. Incongruous. Treasonous, perhaps. Itachi had always been loyal to Konoha.
Whose Konoha, though?
Sasuke’s Konoha, he answered himself – so far the reasoning was simple. Itachi had destroyed his parents’ – his Clan’s – Konoha when it stopped being a good Konoha for Sasuke.
And now Danzo’s Konoha stopped being good for Sasuke. The solution was simple. And who would stop Itachi? Who could stop him? Aside from, perhaps, Madara himself, but Madara would not find out until it was far too late.
The plan was fairly straightforward: secure Sasuke, leak Itachi’s S-class secret through other shinobi villages and, while the rumours travelled, come for the perpetrators. Why, if the timing was right, he might even come out of this as a hero.
“…something about a man who wears his own skin instead of a mask, huh,” Itachi whispered into the night.
Had he been anyone else, this amount of noise would have wakened Kisame. But Itachi might have spoken without lowering his voice and gotten no response whatsoever. Because Kisame trusted him.
The fool.
x
They left the hotel and the town behind, both yet more quiet than they usually were (which was already very quiet) and walking in parallel contemplations of the acts they had recently committed upon each other. There was a lot to contemplate, and much of it was pleasant.
They stopped on top of a small hill, overlooking the main road in both directions – to the North and to the South. Itachi’s eyes, however, were inexorably drawn to West. There were mountains just barely visible on the horizon.
“You’re going to betray Akatsuki,” Kisame said, looking into the distance over Itachi’s shoulder.
“No, I am not.” Itachi’s mouth moved in a watered-down approximation of a smile.
Kisame’s hand tightened on Samehada’s hilt. “Because you cannot betray something to which you were not loyal in the first place?”
“There are other things to betray. Trust, for instance.” Itachi was good at fostering it and betraying it, but he had never liked doing so. “Akatsuki does not trust me.”
Do you? he did not ask, but he did not-ask it distinctly enough to be understood. The question was rhetorical anyway – Itachi knew the answer. He felt the aftershocks of it, still, in the places where his body was healing.
“If I knew you would leave I would not have consented to sleep with you,” Kisame told him, bitter.
Itachi wanted to kiss him – in gratitude or reassurance, he wasn’t sure – but knew that Kisame would not accept the contact. “You were more right than either of us suspected.”
Surprised, the man finally looked Itachi in the face. “How so?”
“I was not a child, but there was something still missing from a complete adult. And-” he added quickly, seeing as Kisame was once again fixating on the obvious and missing the implied, “-that was the awareness of my own capacity. I knew I was powerful, but I did not know I could exercise the power how I decided to.” He had never done anything but obey orders.
Even the power to choose whose orders he obeyed had seemed beyond his reach at a time. Now here he was, tasting the smoke in the chilly air and beginning to understand what freedom meant.
“I see,” Kisame said.
It took Itachi a moment to catch what it was he had seen. Ah. The truth of the Uchiha Massacre. Well, if there had ever been anyone into whom Itachi might have wanted to confide, it was this man. Itachi trusted him; sadly, saying so out loud at this moment would make it sound like a pathetic attempt at emotional extortion.
He hoped they would meet again. They might fight and they might not – either would be fine with Itachi, if there were no mortal blows dealt in that fight. If he loosened the hold on his desires and let himself admit what he truly wished for, it would be this: to achieve his objective to protect his little brother, but also somehow survive, keep this freedom, and meet Kisame again on the other side of this upcoming war.
It was not very likely to happen, but so many other unlikely things had happened that he refused to dismiss it as impossible.
“Resent me,” Itachi muttered. “Keep the resentment in your heart, and come find me to take your revenge-”
Kisame laughed, cold and mirthless. “That’s what you’d like, wouldn’t you? Stringing me across the distance until I came back and tried to take some meaningless revenge?”
Oh. Itachi wasn’t sure what to do now. Last time he had tried this, it had worked well. Perhaps it was the lack of Tsukuyomi?
Or the lack of shock?
Sasuke had been quite out of it at that time, and maybe Itachi had overdone it a little bit. On the other hand, Itachi had been more than a little out of it at that time, and had absolutely no ability to judge how much was too much (everything had been too much).
Itachi bit on the inside of his lower lip. What to do now that this gambit failed? He had rather shown his cards there.
“Go before I change my mind,” Kisame demanded. “If we meet again, you’ll just talk me into whatever you want anyway.”
Itachi went. He did not look back, but he felt Kisame’s eyes on him for a long while after he had walked out of sight. The forest swallowed him. There was a long trek in front of him, and many perils, but now that he had formulated a viable plan, everything seemed so much less chaotic. He could complete his self-assigned mission and then worry about the man he had left behind.
Don’t die, Kisame, he thought.
Don’t die before we meet again. Because without you, my world will always be incomplete.