Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s on the eve of his twenty-first birthday that Itachi Uchiha realises he's losing his sight.

Maybe ‘realises’ isn’t quite the right word. Sudden periods of high sensitivity to light and blurry vision have plagued him for almost a month now. It’s getting progressively harder to read his professors’ presentations from their projectors during lectures, and he can only bear to stare at his laptop screen for a couple of hours before he starts to feel the strain throb behind his eyes. It’s only during dusk on the day before he turns twenty-one, after having bused to the derelict fringes of the city with nothing but a lighter, a pack of cigarettes, and the thick textbook most relevant to his current research paper, that he can bring himself to acknowledge that he might find himself blind before the year is through.

He’s yet to tell anyone about it. Logically, he knows it’s something he should get checked out. It’s getting worse with time, the periods of distorted vision becoming longer and more frequent. Getting a professional diagnosis and a treatment plan to go with could mean the difference between keeping his ability to see, if not at least preserving it for as long as possible, and losing his sight entirely.

But there is a lot depending on him.

Eager for early retirement and the chance to solidify the influence of their family name for another generation, his father is certain he will finish his Masters in both Law and Criminal Justice by the end of the year and be ready to immediately begin the process of taking over his position as the head of their family law firm. The Uchiha name already holds power in high places, but with him—the diligent, eldest son of the family head—taking charge of things so young, his father is sure it will raise even more heads.

The path has been paved for him since his parents first found out they were having a son. But he’s not sure how much longer he can pretend he’s happy where he is. With every sign of increasing deterioration to his eyesight, his resolve to finish is waning.

A prodigy, they call him, but he doesn’t feel like one now. Three whole years ahead of most people his age, and the pressure to keep ahead is suffocating. Every night he keeps himself squirrelled away on the highest floor of the university library or in his single bedroom apartment, churning out quality assignments and edits to his dissertations. He’s running himself into the ground and calling it progress.

Sighing heavily in the shadow of the bridge, he drops his textbook onto the footpath that winds beneath it and crouches down beside it, opening it to a random page and holding the lighter to the worn corner until the treated paper catches. The flame takes a while to hold. As he’s standing there, hunched over a temporary embodiment of what has been his life for the last fifteen years to shelter it from the faint breeze, squinting through tired eyes as he tries to set it alight, he has to scoff at the symbolism of it. It’s stupidly simple but collapsing back into the wooden embrace of the lone bench behind him, his cigarette smouldering between his lips, he’s never felt more burnt out. He’s too young for all of this—too young to have graduated university at all, let alone be close to achieving his Masters, all the while bearing the burdensome brunt of his family’s future on his shoulders. Twenty-one is too young to be the best at anything.

Tilting his head back wearily and closing his eyes, he draws deeply on his smoke. Nicotine, burning ink and petrichor. It rained earlier, misty and miserable, but eased up enough for him to forgo wearing a jacket over top of his black V-neck. By what he can see of the sky peeking beneath the underbelly of the bridge, it will rain again.

He doesn’t mind. The gloomy grey is easier on his eyes than the sun.

“Damn, you always look like you've just ventured outta renaissance painting?”

Itachi opens his eyes, blinking slowly to try and clear the blur cobwebbing his vision, and turns his head in the direction of the voice. Though he doesn’t show his discomfort on his face, his stomach swoops. It’s unsettling not to have noticed someone approaching. Disconcerting, even. Like the flip of one’s stomach when you miss a step, and just barely catch yourself on the next one down. If his condition is this incapacitating in this state, despite years of rigorous training in martial arts, and even more of needing to carefully observe those around him, how useless will he be when he can no longer see at all?

“Only when the mood suits.” He shrugs, tapping ash off the end of his cigarette as he takes in the man who startled him.

He must be close to being several heads taller than Itachi, if how his neck protests with just how far he has to look up is any indication. Taller, and much broader. His shoulders look to be twice the width of his own, bulky with thick muscle beneath his severe and very well-tailored, deep blue suit. Tied back behind his crown, his hair is dyed a similar shade, and coiled in thick dreads, dark roots starting to make an appearance close to his scalp. His face is all sharp angles and silver piercings that stand out against the dark sepia of his skin. There are two above the harsh lines of his cheek bones, one peculiarly located between his eyes along the narrow bridge of his nose, another one through the arch of his right eyebrow, and a number of studs lining his ears. With his corded arms folded across his chest, his intense gunmetal grey gaze alight with morbid curiosity, he strikes an intimidating picture standing in dark overhang beneath the bridge, even when his silhouette is blurred at the edges.

Even laughing as he is. Full-chested, reverberating chuckles that stir interest low in Itachi’s stomach. He’s tempted to slip on a coy smile, but with the exhaustion clinging to him like a second skin he hasn’t been able to shed for several weeks, the effort is too great. He can barely angle his head up the way he is without feeling the strain in his neck, the sweeping haze of vertigo as it swipes his vision away for a moment, replacing it with a migraine that feels as though he’s put his brain through a blender. Still, he watches as the man eyes the burning book steadily crumbling into a pile of ash on the path.

“You into arson?” he asks, and the bench jolts violently as he swings himself gracelessly down beside him. Itachi can feel the wood groan beneath their shared weight, as aching and run down as he feels.

“Apparently.”

The man laughs again, loud and vivacious, like sunlight slicing through the depths of the ocean. There is so much life to the sound. Caught in his fatigue and the dismal fog of grey and gloom hanging low over his eyes like cling film, Itachi feels dwarfed by it. The flames chewing his textbook to ash at his feet don’t warm him nearly as much.

“You got another smoke on you?”

Wordlessly, Itachi offers up the pack of smokes in the palm of his hand, flicking the box open smoothly with his thumb nail. He’s glad to share. He won’t get through them all by himself, and there will be hell to pay if his father catches him with them in his possession. Uchiha’s don’t smoke, nor indulge in anything that might compromise their ability to live for their work. But his health is already compromised. His body is already failing him. What’s a little unhealthy indulgence on top of that?

The man takes one and leans forward over his lap to light it in dying flames at their feet. The fire has almost died out, the remains of his book little more than dust on the pavement, but the end of his cigarette still catches, flaring a seething orange between his fingers, painfully bright to Itachi’s failing eyes. He shields it with one large hand as he brings it up to his lips, setting it between his teeth. His exhale is one of great relief—almost a sigh in the way it sweeps through his whole body, his arms and strong thighs flaring open as he sinks back against the back of the bench.

“Cheers, sweetheart.”

Itachi nods once in acknowledgement but doesn’t say anything. It’s somewhat cathartic, seeing someone else so relaxed. With midterms right around the corner, there’s not a lot of calm to be seen anywhere on campus. For a moment, he forgets to be envious, too caught up in basking in the sight.

Somewhere, not too far from where they sit, sirens trill in the distance and the man grins wide, lips curled back with a feral edge over his starkly white teeth.

“And that’s my cue, darlin’,” he says, apparently deeply amused by the sound of approaching law enforcement, and gets to his feet. Standing, he is all crisp lines and predatory grace, even as he ducks low to put out his cigarette in the feathery remains of the burned book by their feet and has to adjust his suit slightly when he rises.

Itachi tilts his head in the rough direction of the sirens. His hearing has always been good. When he returns home between semesters, he never fails to know exactly when his little brother is slinking out of the downstairs bathroom window at night to see his loudmouthed blond who lives two blocks over. Sasuke is quiet, overly cautious from paranoia, but Itachi knows the second he’s crept downstairs, and the moment he’s returned in the early hours of the morning. Even the slightest creak gives him away. But now, he’s realising just how much he has lived his entire life dependent on his sight.

“Are you out early?"

He’s not wearing an orange jumpsuit, but Itachi knows it’s easy enough to have a disguise or change of clothes waiting for you on the other side if you have power or money. He doesn’t need perfect eyesight to see how this man carries himself with the security of someone who has both at his disposal.

"Hah, you could say that.” His gaze narrows, sweeping swifty over Itachi from head to toe, somehow appraising and appreciative all at once. “What, you a cop? You don't look like a cop."

"I'm not. I’m a law student."

"You don't look too happy about that."

Itachi looks away, drawing deeply on his cigarette. He takes his time on the exhale, watching absently as the smoke clouds his vision before being swept away entirely by the swift breeze. He’s not happy. Looking back, he can’t even pinpoint the last time he was. At some point, he lost it to the pressure to push himself, the need to meet the high-hopes everyone had for him and stay ahead of them. Now he’s terrified, stewing over the thought that maybe he’s losing the chance to be along with his eyesight.

"I've yet to decide on that,” he says instead, but it feels no less like an admission, a betrayal of sorts. He can already feel the distinctive pinch of regret tight in his chest, curling around itself beneath his sternum like a rattlesnake, shaking with the readiness to sink its fangs into something, and that something is him.

“Sounds to me like you need to.” The man shrugs, a wry smile curling the corners of his mouth. Itachi doesn’t like the look in his eyes at all. It’s too much like the gleam in the eyes of the sharks behind the glass in the city aquarium, dangerous and disconcertingly all-knowing. “I’ll see you around, sweetheart.”

Itachi watches him go. Watches the blue dreads hanging down past the strong slope of his shoulders sway like the tail of some brightly coloured parakeet and counts his long strides until they blur too much to do so. The grey light and the dead fire at his feet, the cigarette forgotten between his fingertips—all of it is too much. It all hurts. Too much, too much. The ground is too fast approaching, and he’s helplessly hurtling towards it.

Inhaling sharply, he buries his face in his hands and squeezes his eyes shut tight before he loses the man’s figure to the static closing in from all sides.

A month passes before the man finds him again.

Itachi is not at the bench by the bridge, but rather sprawled out in the shadow of a tree at the very edge of campus. His eyes ache from squinting at his dissertation, his vision rife with patches of static dark, and his eyelids sting from all of the times his fear has robbed him of the restraint required to keep from rubbing at them. He doesn’t think he could make it to the other bench—not without someone else guiding him. A little problematic when he still hasn’t told anyone.

He thinks Shisui is suspicious. Itachi has been gradually cutting down on their shared study sessions in favour of hiding alone in his apartment with the curtains pulled, and a pillow over his eyes. Sasuke, too, is aware something is wrong. When he came to visit a week ago, Itachi at first mistook him for their cousin from afar. He’s never once done that before. He knows his little brother by the sound of his footsteps—was adamant he would know him blind—but in a moment of distraction, he couldn’t tell.

“I looked you up, you know. You’re quite famous.”

Itachi doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing. That’s twice now, he’s failed to notice the other man approach. It’s deeply unnerving when he’s not used to others getting the upper hand on him. A sign of just how much control over his own life he’s about to lose.

“As are you, it would seem. Hoshigaki Kisame: once one of Kiri’s finest swordsmen, now an illusive arms dealer who drives the police mad by swimming circles around them, always lawyering up at the last second.” He shifts his head slightly to the left, just enough for the other man’s shadow to fall over his face, and arches a single dark brow. “You’ve been doing my father’s head in for years now.”

“Oh?” Kisame’s grin is a vicious thing. All teeth and split cheeks; a cut-throat warning of danger and of the unrepentant joy he finds in the long-standing game of cat and mouse he’s been playing with the cops, glowing white in his brown face. He collapses into the grass by Itachi’s side with a hearty bout of laughter, crinkling the dead leaves on the ground around them and jostling Itachi where he lies with a wayward knee. His bulk is furiously warm against his side, heat blazing over Itachi's ribcage with the man so close. “Consider me thrilled. It’s not every day one gets to be on Uchiha Fugaku’s radar.”

“Well, it’s not everyday somebody escapes his lawsuits. You’re one of very few.”

“Lucky me then,” Kisame says and laughs again, the rough edge to his voice light with amusement. He’s almost too bright. Itachi looks away, exhausted, turning his bleary gaze back to the foliage overhead.

There’s a moment of quiet wherein neither of them speaks. Itachi feels underwater, listening to the distant clamour of university life—the occasional aggressive honking of an altercation in the student car park, the abrasive cheering ringing out from the field where a track event of some sort is being held, the animated chatter of a gaggle of freshman as they pass by, too caught up in themselves to notice Itachi’s companion is a wanted criminal—as it’s drowned out by the pounding in his head. He took some Ibuprofen before lunchtime, but after a long day of staring at screens and pages and pages of words he can’t make sense of, it’s proving to have been a pointless endeavour.

“Tell me, Itachi. Does your family know that their precious little prodigy is going blind?”

Itachi doesn’t say anything. It’s easier to blink up at the spotty shadows of the leaves, fluttering and static, than admit how isolated he is in knowing he’s losing the life he knows. How carefully he’s planned and schemed to keep it that way until he can’t pretend anymore.

“Goddamn it, kid. Does anyone know?”

“Apparently, you do.”

Kisame snorts, but shakes his head, frowning. “That’s different, darlin’. You’ve met me twice in the span of one month, and not once before then. I meant your family. Your professors. A doctor. Someone who can help fix your eyes.”

“I don’t think this is something that can be fixed.”

“How can you know that? You a doctor and a lawyer now?”

Itachi ignores him. He knows the man is right, but he’s grasping at straws, seeking any excuse not to face this because once he does, it will be all too real. Seeing a doctor and getting a diagnosis? That will make it real—make it his life. And he doesn’t know what the hell he’ll do when it comes to that. His life right now—the whole exhilarating, exhausting weight of it right down to the future picked out for him—won’t fit him anymore.

“Anyway, the people around me, they see what they want to see and avoid looking for the things they don’t. This–” he waves a hand through the air over his head, the shape of it a formless blur sweeping across his vision–“is definitely something that falls under the latter. I have duties. No one is going to be thrilled to learn that I’m not up to doing them anymore.”

Another shadow closes over his face, slow but far too close for comfort, and Itachi’s fingers snatch the other man’s wrist away before he can make the attempt to rap his knuckles on his forehead.

“Don’t,” he murmurs low. “Please.”

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Kisame concedes, surprisingly genuine, but doesn’t allow Itachi to release his grip on his wrist. Instead, he twists his own hand around until Itachi’s pale, ink-stained and trembling fingers are encased between his own. “I know you don’t wanna hear it, yeah, but screw your duties or whatever you wanna call it, and do yourself a favour. Call a doctor, ‘Tachi. Not for them. Don’t give the fuckers the satisfaction. Do it for yourself. Because this is your life you’re letting go. Not theirs.”

And he’s right, again, but admittedly, Itachi’s only half listening. He’s still under water, too distant to decipher the other man’s words, let alone the strength of his conviction. The small fractured pieces of twig among the leaf litter underneath him are the only thing keeping him rooted to the Earth. And Kisame’s hand. There’s a bizarre sense of safety to be found in the warm, rough-skinned cradle of his touch. Itachi has to remind himself that this man is a stranger, a stranger and a criminal—one who has succeeded in making even his court-hardened father wary and grit his teeth at the mere mention of this man’s name.

But he is also the only one currently standing in Itachi’s corner as the room goes dark.

So tired, foolish man that he is, Itachi doesn’t force the man to let go of his hand.

Still, he doesn’t call a doctor. He doesn’t call anyone. As soon as Kisame has left, disappearing as swiftly as he arrived, Itachi inches back to his apartment with slow, wary steps, wound as tight as the recoil on a gun, and lies face down on his bed, waiting for the darkness smothering his vision to choke everything in his life with failure.

Chapter Text

There are problems that arise early on.

Small ones at first, like having to learn how to tell which is the shampoo and which is the conditioner by their consistency, and to count how many steps there are between the top of the staircase and the door to his apartment.

Then grocery day comes around.

Itachi can no longer make it to the grocery store on his own. Even with the GPS rattling off directions in his ear (and only in the one, because wearing headphones in both ears now feels too much like subjecting himself to a different kind of blindness), he doesn't know the way half-blind, and he doesn't trust himself around so much heavy traffic. Konoha is busy and bustling, and while he loves this city right down to the dingy back alleys and bloodied ground it was first built upon, he can’t deny that it is loud. There are so many sounds overlapping that he can’t even begin to separate them, and the thought of attempting to cross a pedestrian crossing on his own now is one that frightens him. It's safer to order the food right to his door, but the effort it takes to make sense of their website on his laptop screen is excruciating. He can only make out so many letters through the fog. And even if he does succeed in ordering some things, he can't see very well what they are afterwards when they're delivered to his door.

Then what about in a week's time? In two weeks or however long he has before he can’t see at all? What then?

It's a small mercy, he supposes, that he has the number for his local Chinese restaurant memorised. And that they do takeaway delivery.

He’s sitting on the floor in his small kitchen, squinting at the label on a carton of custard and trying for the life of him to work out what he’s supposed to do with that instead of milk, when his phone rings.

Much to his surprise, it’s Kisame.

He was expecting his father, maybe his mother, the pair of them calling just to make an admirable attempt at disguising their disappointment through the line as they make their concerns known. Even Shisui, calling ahead to ask if he is actually going to show up to their next scheduled study session, then chewing him out, masking his worry with irritation, when Itachi tells him he can’t make it. He is pleasantly surprised when he answers the unknown number, and is met with a familiar gruff, “Hey, darlin’.”

“Hoshigaki,” he says, keeping his tone neutral. How Kisame got a hold of his number, Itachi doesn’t know, but he’s sure it’s not an impossible feat. If he didn’t somehow snatch the information up from the gossip chain circling the law firms in the city, Itachi was an RA briefly two semesters ago, and he can name at least six students that might have traded his private information for a bit of much needed cash. Not everyone has had the same opportunities he has—this he knows down to his bones. It’s another reason he can’t bring himself to let go of all of his work here. It would be wasteful. He considers the thought until he chokes on it, knocking half emptied grocery bags out of the way as he draws his knees up close to his chest, curling in on himself.

Bitter and burning, he’s slinking towards total blindness like a wounded dog.

On the other end of the line, Kisame laughs. Great deep, hearty breaths of it, sharp like the glare of the sun on the sea. It’s the warmest thing Itachi has heard all week.

“None of that now, ‘Tachi. Call me Kisame.”

“If you insist.” Itachi drops the carton of custard on the floor and lies back against the tile, closing his eyes. The hundred-watt lights above are bright enough to stamp searing rings of cold, fluorescent white through his eyelids. It burns, but the relief that he can still see that much is dizzying. He can’t look away. “I hear you’re no longer an actively wanted criminal.”

“That’s right, darlin’. I’m a free man for the time being. They couldn’t hold me on the charges when I had all the right paperwork delivered, even if it was a little late. But better late than never, and I’m sure you already know how it works. It’s almost a shame I couldn’t have you representing me. I hear you’re a real tough cookie to crack in court.”

Itachi turns his head to the side, staring at the skirting beneath the cabinetry. The paint job is uneven enough for him to see, several rough strokes of Spanish white tarnishing the polished black finish. How has he never noticed that before? More so, how is he noticing it now?

“I don’t think I’ll be allowed to set foot in a court as a professional. Not anymore, at least. Not after this.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Blind or not, you’ll still be the renowned Uchiha’s child prodigy. That name carries a lot of power. And for all I’d like to see someone else try and tell ‘em no for once, there aren’t many out there with enough guts to challenge your father.”

The reminder of his father sinks low in Itachi’s gut like a stone. Fugaku Uchiha is a very particular man, and a very intelligent one, too. So much so that it came as very little surprise when it was discovered that Itachi was a genius of sorts. He has always been his father’s son more than his own person. Losing his eyesight will change that—has already changed their dynamic because even now, when he still retains some of his vision, he is unable to fulfil his father’s expectations. He can’t see enough to meet them, to be the filial son he has been all his life, and it’s exhausting him to pretend otherwise. He was stretched thin and struggling to keep up even before his sight started deteriorating, and now he has no energy left to hold the illusion he is fine in place.

He doesn’t know for sure how his father will react when he finds out, but he can take an educated guess. There will be an immediate line up of appointments with specialists all bribed to the teeth to keep his little hiccup out of the public eye. Maybe a follow up surgery. A cornea transplant or something similar if there is even the slightest possibility it will fix the problem. All of it would be very hush-hush, kept as tightly under wraps as his father can manage. And then there would be an angry, disappointed lashing of questions as to why Itachi dared keep it hidden for so long. Why he did nothing to prevent it from getting worse. Does he expect his father to be able to fix his every embarrassment? Telling his father that he couldn’t find the energy to do so—that he’s been having second thoughts about his career path and losing his sight was just the right kind of sick excuse to justify them because it’s a factor out of his control, because it feels inevitable now, inescapable—is not going to cut it.

“It’s my father that I’m worried about,” he says at last. It’s almost funny how fatal a few words strung together can feel. How final.

“If he says no, too, well then fuck ‘em. You don’t need ‘em, ‘Tachi. If it’s somethin’ you really want, you’re smart enough to work to make it happen, with or without their support.”

“Thank you.”

It’s sweet of him. Itachi wishes he could believe it was that simple. But it’s one thing to say that he can do it, another thing entirely for Itachi to take his life in his hands and make it his own.

“Nothin’ to it, sweetheart. You don’t need me to tell you that. I’m pretty sure your mind could run laps ‘round mine. You’ll make a killing doin’ whatever you decide on, even if that ain’t got nothing to do with what Ol’ Fugaku wants.”

“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit.”

“Maybe. There’s always a chance I’m just fishin’ for a compliment from you.” His tone is coy, light with a teasing lilt. Wherever he is, he is surely grinning on the other end of the line. Itachi can picture him, his white teeth luminous where they split his cheeks, his expression mirroring the one he wore when he first approached Itachi at the bench by the bridge.

“Anyway, the reason I called is that I’ve got some errands I need to run shortly, and I thought you might wanna get out for a bit. I can pick you up after your lecture at six, if you’d like?”

He doesn’t say he knows Itachi hasn’t been out recently, but Itachi hears it anyway. He wonders if Kisame keeps tabs on him, watching from afar. If he has gone searching for him on the fringes of campus and is calling now because he came up empty handed.

Because Itachi hasn’t left his apartment in two days.

He keeps telling himself that he has had no reason to. His record of perfect attendance might suffer, but as long as he has his laptop up and running, most of his work can be done from home. There is a stack of books relevant to his dissertation propped up against the wall next to the head of his bed, never mind that they’re currently acting as a bedside table because try as he may, he can’t read any of them. He has resorted to highlighting passages of his essays and listening to them be read aloud by his laptop’s robotic voice, then using the voice-typing function to edit what he can. But the reality is that while it’s getting harder to find the motivation needed to put any effort into his course work at all, it’s also getting harder to hide his condition.

“I’m not going to the lecture,” Itachi admits. He shares that particular class with Shisui, and that is not a confrontation he wishes to have anytime soon.

“In that case, I’ll be there at five. You can keep me company while I sort out a few things.”

“That all sounds very incriminating.”

“And yet, you’ll come along anyway. Won’t you?”

“I need help. I can’t–” he starts and trails off. He feels wrong-footed, feeling so helpless in the solitude he has made his own. Admitting so leaves him with the urge to hang up the phone and retreat, tangling himself up so deep within his thoughts he’ll lose another day without even realising. But glancing at the carton of custard abandoned on the floor, he knows he can’t afford to do that anymore.

“I need groceries. And to do laundry.”

Kisame doesn’t even seem to think twice about it. “Sure, sweetheart. We can do that. Whatever you need. You just get yourself ready to go, and I’ll be there in an hour.”

Itachi waits for Kisame on the sidewalk outside of his tenement, his bag of laundry zipped up neatly at his feet and a pair of sunglasses shielding his eyes. Sunsets in Konoha are always violent, and they linger, soaking the city streets in shades of sangria and gold paint as if she can’t bear to let the light go. Tonight, the sky is monarch orange and ashen, dusty as a butterfly's wings. His hands shake with how desperately he wants to take it all in, to reach out and touch and watch the dusk come away on his fingertips. But the pain is too great. His stomach revolts, tearing up to his throat with the threat of bile, if he looks too long. Even through the tinted lenses of his glasses, the light burns. So, he keeps his gaze cast low and seethes at the thought of looking every bit like the caricatured blind man he feels is fast approaching.

People step around him as they pass. Some shoot odd looks in his direction, while others merely avoid his silhouette in the corner of their eyes as they walk by with their phones in hand. He can feel their eyes like needles beneath his skin. He wonders if they can tell just by looking at him.

A black sedan pulls alongside the curb in front of him, darting out of the line of traffic quick enough to startle him. He retreats a short step back from the street, squinting at the vehicle through his glasses, and purses his lips. It’s a subtle enough choice that it doesn’t look out of place parked up outside of his building, but even Itachi can see that the windows are tinted darker than what is surely the legal limit. The flagrant disregard for the law where it suits has Kisame’s name tagged all over it.

Sure enough, the other man steps out of the driver's side door with the engine still running. Kisame’s hair is the first thing Itachi sees. His dreads are coiled high on his crown like a snake, deftly twisted and pinned back, still the same striking shade of blue as they were the last time he saw him. He is dressed very similar to how he was then, too. Tucked neatly in a pair of dressy black trousers, his button up shirt is the exact same cutting shade of dark blue.

Itachi can’t help the flicker of a smile that tugs at the corner of his mouth. For all he actually knows very little about this man, he can at least be sure that he knows what his favourite colour is.

“Evenin’, darlin’,” Kisame greets, joining Itachi on the sidewalk. He looks down as he does so, contemplating Itachi’s laundry bag with raised brows. “I’m surprised your buildin’ doesn’t have somewhere for you to do your laundry. It sure seems fancy enough.”

“It does, usually. Someone flooded the room this morning, and it looks like it’s going to be closed for a while until they’ve fixed everything.”

Itachi suspects he knows who was responsible for the damage, but as Deidara doesn’t actually live in the building, he’s likely to get away with it.

“Well, I can’t say I’m mad about that.” Kisame grins sharply, his piercings flashing in the dark where they catch the headlights of a passing car. Based on his appearance alone, he cuts a rather intimidating figure. But with his unnerving grin, he looks every bit like a shark that has just tasted blood in the water. It’s really no wonder he gets on Itachi’s father’s nerves in and out of the courtroom. “You just let me know if you need a lift anywhere, yeah? Or a helping hand. Chances are, I’ll be around.”

“We’ll see.”

Itachi watches as the other man slings his bag of laundry over his shoulder before loading it into the boot of the car. Standing to the side with empty hands, the same sinking feeling of helplessness as earlier strikes him soundly. He bites back the urge to tell Kisame that he can do it himself, his tongue twisting like a serpent behind his gritted teeth.

He can’t, not really. Or rather, he doesn’t feel safe stepping out into the street so close to the evermoving current of vehicles speeding by. But he’s been doing things on his own now for so long, it’s more than just a habit, it’s instinctual. A comfort, even. When he was younger, he was so far ahead of the curriculum that his teachers sat his parents down and encouraged them to get him screened for any psychological disorders. He could see how they found him fascinating, yet deeply resented him in the same breath. He could hear it in the way they first introduced him to his classes, announcing his much younger age to audiences of teenage vultures as if it were a piece of meat to be tossed around. He was a short and skinny eight-year-old, dressed neatly in a brand new uniform that had had to be hand-tailored to fit, braving the halls of highschool on his own. Genius has always come with a price, and that is to be suspended above, forever on the outside of the majority. Not necessarily put on a pedestal, but always held at a distance. And while he made it clear very early on that he was more than capable of defending himself, it was always easier to do things alone.

“No driver?” he asks instead, bracing his forearms across his chest like they might hold him together. If he takes hold of that thread, lets himself linger on the past or dwell on the precarious future he can’t see coming, he’ll unravel right where he stands.

“Not today. People tend to notice when you’ve got someone cartin’ you round. I figured you wouldn’t wanna draw too much attention. Didn’t want that spoilin’ our night out,” Kisame answers, closing the boot with a soft snick and striding back around the car to open up the passenger side door, gesturing for Itachi to step inside. “That said, there’s bound to be some bastard around hangin’ out to get his hour of fame with a damning photo. Always is. And now you’re a juicy scoop just waitin’ to happen on your own, sweetheart, but gettin’ caught out and about with me? The Press will have a field day.”

“It doesn’t matter if they do. As you so eloquently put it, I’m likely to be headlining in a few weeks anyway. I won’t be able to hide this forever.”

Even if his father does his best to hide it. Unless he locks Itachi away somewhere out of sight for good, someone will notice. Chances are, someone already has. They’d only have to speak to one of his professors, ask the right questions and maybe poke around at his sudden absences from class, to figure out that something is wrong.

“Besides, I doubt there will be anybody from the Press where we’re going.”

“And where is that, sweetheart? Do you wanna go there first?”

Itachi ducks into the passenger seat and shakes his head up at the other man.

“I’ll let you know once you’ve sorted out your errands. Mine may take a while.”

Inside the car, Itachi finds himself surrounded by the bodied scent of sandalwood and kretek cigarettes. Inhaling deeply, the metallic tang of gunpowder settles alongside that of burning wood and clove on the back of his tongue.

He knows the scent fairly well. He’s even been to a shooting range twice before. His cousin Obito is an avid enough pursuer of the sport that he’s on a team and competes in tournaments around the country, much to Itachi’s father’s vocal disapproval as the family head. An heir to the Uchiha law firm, no matter how far down they are on the list of names that might someday inherit the company they are, playing around with the same weapons his family convicts people for using? It sounds too much like a bad joke, his father can’t stand it.

But this—the strength of the smell is almost alarming. Even more so is the fact that it’s not only the interior of the car carrying the sharp smell, but also Kisame himself.

“You smell like gunpowder,” Itachi says, and he can’t quite keep the sharp note of accusation out of his tone of voice.

Kisame raises his brows, but doesn’t look away from the road except to shoot Itachi a short, cursory glance. “You can smell that?”

Itachi stares at his side profile, unyielding. “Did you…?”

“Shoot someone?” Kisame snorts, unrepentant. “Not recently. But I am an arms dealer, ‘Tachi. Shootin’ guns and selling them to other people who shoot them is my job. I was at one of my warehouses earlier, testing out a new shipment of products. All legal, I promise—there’s paperwork to prove it. And there’s a private firing range there specifically for that purpose. I’ve got to swing by there tonight, actually. I could show you, if you like. Teach you how to shoot.”

Itachi blinks at him. There’s a lie to be found somewhere there. He’s been almost callously insistent about the legality of his paperwork, some of it has surely been forged. It would somewhat explain his numerous narrow escapes from serving jail time. He also has his doubts about what Kisame considers recent. But he doesn’t make a show of dissecting the other man’s explanation. For all Kisame has been seeking him out on his own terms, there is no denying just who Itachi is. Kisame was right earlier when he said that the Uchiha name holds a lot of power. He may not like or agree with them, and go out of his way to piss them off, but he is wary of them. And he is right to be. He is a criminal walking free despite being blacklisted by Fugaku Uchiha. He’s not about to admit to anything incriminating when there’s a risk it might get back to Itachi’s father.

Even in this, his own secrets, Itachi can’t escape his father’s legacy.

Never mind that he has no intention of telling his father about Kisame at all until the truth finds him some other way. Itachi could walk away from Kisame tonight, not see or speak to him for the next twenty years, and there would still be a fight if his father were to ever find out about this.

But he can’t help but think his father might be right about Kisame in at least one regard. After all, what kind of man offers to teach someone visually impaired to shoot?

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I wouldn’t let you hurt yourself. Or anyone else, if that’s what you’re worried about. Hard to do that at a decent shooting range unless you start shooting others on purpose. Even if you can’t see the target very well.”

“That’s not the issue.” Itachi debates on whether it’s smart to inform Kisame that he already knows how to fire a gun, but at the sight of the serious consideration taking shape in the other man’s expression, he decides against it. “The earmuffs. I won’t wear them. I don’t like not being able to hear. Not now.”

Kisame shrugs, unbothered by his resistance.

“In that case, there’s a mat set up for sparring there as well. Sometimes, the guys get a little keyed up—somethin’ which I can’t have happenin’ when they’re handling dangerous weaponry. It’s bad for business, you see. But I’m not about to bat an eye if someone gets their ass handed to ‘em on the mat,” he offers instead, and Itachi watches his strong hands shift position on the steering wheel as they turn round a tight corner. “I remember readin’ somewhere that you’re trained in martial arts. That true?”

Itachi hums, turning his face away and gazing out the side window. The city lights smear like wet ink as they speed by, bleeding through the dark spots in his vision with a fierce glow.

Generations ago, Uchiha was not merely an influential family name, but also a clan of powerful warriors. Their history books tell of great martial prowess and talented martial artists with flocks of disciples, their descendants each more renowned than the last. His great, great grandfather Madara was one of the last of them. To this day, it remains a religiously adhered to tradition that every child born unto the Uchiha name will train in some kind of martial arts. His father preaches that it’s a way of teaching them discipline and to respect those that came before them, but Itachi thinks it’s distasteful. A lot of their revered ancestors were known for sending child soldiers to fight their wars for them or were executed for their crimes against the state. Madara himself went mad and attempted to wipe the Konoha of his time off the map. He thinks tradition is just an excuse. His father and most of his elders are just clinging to the illusion of power that died out years ago. The Uchiha name may be widely respected in the present, but it is no longer feared the way he believes his father often wishes it was.

“You could say it’s something of an Uchiha family tradition.”

Kisame barks a laugh at the audible scorn in his reply.

“In that case, I look forward to seeing what you can do.”

They arrive at their destination several minutes later. Kisame pulls the car up outside a large industrial warehouse, flanked on all sides by a heavy duty chain link fence, and brakes just long enough for several personnel in vivid orange high-vis jackets to open the gate and let them through. Having abandoned his sunglasses on the dash, the bodies darting about outside look eerily like the city lights to Itachi’s struggling eyes. He winces, ducking his head to blink slivers of fluorescent silver and amber from his vision, burned into his retinas by the glaringly bright reflection of Kisame’s headlights catching on their brightly coloured clothing.

“Not long now,” Kisame murmurs, and Itachi can just barely see the concerned glance he slips his way from the corner of his eye.

The car rolls to a careful stop and Itachi lifts his head, uncurling his hands from where they had been gripping his thighs just moments ago. There’s a steel door in the wall to their left, a large sign that reads, ‘authorised personnel only’, screwed in directly above it.

“I wouldn’t exactly call myself authorised to be here,” he says quietly as Kisame pulls the key from the ignition.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re with me,” the other man states, as if it really is as simple as that. Maybe it is. Itachi wouldn’t know. But when they enter the building, there are only two others already inside.

A brunet man in black slacks and a brown wife beater slouches against a workbench while he converses with a much younger person of indiscernible gender dressed neatly in a leaf green kimono. The older man has brown skin quite a few shades lighter than Kisame and looks to be about half a decade or so older, the harsh lines of his scowling face revealed by the bandana holding the spiky strands of his hair back from his temples. The pair of them look up when Kisame leads him inside, their conversation coming to a stop with the jangle of keys dropping into Kisame’s pocket.

“‘Bout time you showed up,” the older man grouses, crossing his strong arms over his chest. “That shipment you had due to come in tomorrow got here twenty-minutes ago. The courier’s out back gettin’ shitty. Says he needs the boss’ signature. None of us are good enough apparently.”

“Yeah, well, I got waylaid,” Kisame drawls, placing a hand against the small of Itachi’s back to guide him gently over to the pair of strangers.

Itachi flinches slightly at the contact. Unable to see it coming, the heat of Kisame’s palm sinks through his layers of clothing like a blade. The strangers in the room don’t appear to notice, but his reaction must have been felt by Kisame because the other man removes his hand, keeping it just close enough that he can feel the heat of it hovering over his sweater, but so that it’s no longer touching.

The older man sets his hooded eyes on Itachi and scoffs. “I can see that.”

“Don’t be an ass, Momochi. ‘Tachi’s just visiting,” Kisame retorts, his hand leaving the space behind Itachi’s back to mime a punch towards the other man’s arm. “You got a pen? I’ll go sort this shit out.”

“Nah, but the postie’s got two in his pocket. I reckon he might let you borrow one if you ask nicely.”

“Alright.” Kisame claps him hard on the shoulder before turning to face Itachi, barely wobbling at all when the other man retaliates by shoving at him good-naturedly. “‘Tachi, this here is Zabuza Momochi and his charge, Haku. They’ll keep you company for a bit while I go get this bastard off of my back door.”

It doesn’t escape Itachi’s notice that he doesn’t properly introduce him to the others. Whatever Kisame’s reasons are, he’s grateful. He can’t imagine anyone in the other man’s circles would take too kindly to him inviting an Uchiha into the heart of their operation, much less if it gets out that he’s Fugaku’s son and prodigy. He doesn’t even want to think about what consequences will arise if his being here, sharing company with the likes of Kisame, somehow gets back to his father.

Instead, he counts Kisame’s strides across the concrete floor as he goes until he can’t see them anymore and forces himself to stand a little straighter, preparing to be interrogated in his absence.

“I couldn’t help but notice you’re moving as if a little hesitant,” the younger one—Haku—asks quietly. “Are you injured?”

Itachi shakes his head, taking them in on an angle. He has to tilt his head slightly to the left so that he may see their face through the sporadic haze obscuring his vision. They look to be younger than him, maybe even younger than Sasuke, but there is something in the way they hold themselves that speaks of strife and a wisdom his little brother certainly hasn’t yet learned to possess. He wonders how they found themselves here, spending their evenings in an echoing warehouse home to guns and violence, and in the care of the brutish man boring bullet holes into Itachi’s aching skull.

“Not as such. It’s my eyes. I’m losing my vision.”

“Oh,” they murmur, taken aback and abashed for being so. At the same time the older man—Momochi—shifts too quickly for Itachi to follow, his shadow suddenly looming over Haku’s right shoulder as he exclaims without any sense of tact, “You’re kidding?”

Itachi stares at him flatly, unimpressed. “Afraid not.”

Momochi doesn’t appear to be phased by it at all.

“You’re not Hoshigaki’s usual flavour of the month, I’ll give you that,” he says, considering and completely unapologetic. “What’s someone like you doin’ hangin’ around someone like that bastard?”

“Would you believe me if I said he’s my ride to the grocery store after this?”

“Seriously?”

“Deadly.” Itachi shrugs. “I can’t exactly drive myself there. And the odds of surviving walking the three blocks to get to the nearest one on my own aren’t exactly in my favour.”

“And Hoshigaki was your first pick to keep you company? He blackmailin’ you or something’?”

“No, nothing like that. He just sort of showed up a couple of months ago, and I haven’t been able to get rid of him since.”

Momochi snorts. “That sounds like him, all right.”

A loud clang echoes through the building, shaking the wall Kisame disappeared behind. The man in question marches back into view, grinning absurdly and holding a hand over his heart.

“That hurts, ‘Tachi. And here I thought we were somethin' special!”

Itachi wrinkles his nose in his direction. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“You wound me, sweetheart,” he croons in jest and shapes his features into a mournful pout. The parodied expression slips away in seconds, his signature savage grin returning to spit the seams of his face. “Now if you’re feeling up to it, I believe you owe me a sparring match.”

“Hoshigaki-san—” Haku makes a small noise of protest that is abruptly cut off by Momochi vocalising his disbelief.

“You’re seriously challenging a blind man to a fist fight? Have you gone mad, Hoshigaki?” Momochi mutters, glancing between the two of them as if measuring all of the differences between them. “Even setting aside the fact that he can’t fuckin’ see you, he’s gotta be at least half your weight. You can’t be serious!”

“Oh, I’m serious!” Kisame proclaims, stalking over towards the other side of the warehouse. As he described earlier, there’s a large mat set up on the floor, sidelined by a pair of green lawn chairs and a worn coffee table that looks to have seen far better days.

“You’re such an asshole,” Momochi says to Kisame’s back, resigned, and then he turns to Itachi. “You’re sure he’s not blackmailin’ you?”

Itachi shakes his head and starts to follow Kisame over to the mat.

“He’s not. I wouldn’t be here if he was, and neither would he. Besides–” Itachi shrugs, removing his coat as he walks– “I’m not all blind yet. Might as well have some fun while I still can.”

He enjoys sparring with Kisame. Relishes it even. It’s not often now that he’s capable of besting the people around him. Academically, he can no longer keep up. His grades are slipping, and he’s been skipping lectures by the dozen. He hasn’t touched his dissertation in days. He hasn’t been able to read it, and hasn’t been able to bring himself to reach out for help just yet. But with martial arts, the other senses are deeply involved, and he has been trained in them almost as long as he has been expected to take up his father’s legacy as his own. He’s good, even taking his failing sight into account.

And Kisame isn’t expecting it.

“You’re good,” the other man remarks, fending off a fiendish kick with his forearm, parrying an attempt on the acupuncture point in his neck with the flat of his palm. He’s grinning something wicked, his white teeth dazzling where they catch the shafts of light piercing through the roof of the warehouse.

“Better than you?”

He’s not. Just quicker. He is fast where Kisame is strong, his lean muscle mass and slight figure ideal for dancing in and out of the other man’s sphere. He can land a hit and then duck out of the way before the retaliated blow can touch him.

“Don’t get too cocky, darlin’. We’re not finished yet.”

Kisame has him on the ground ten minutes later with a simple tripping manoeuvre he didn’t see coming. There’s something apocalyptic about the way his knees hit the mat. He’s still good, but also still not good enough. He capsizes onto his back, grasping at all the details he can see on the warehouse ceiling as all the air inside his lungs escapes him with a hiss like steam from the spout of a tea-kettle.

How long? How long before he can’t see any of this? Can’t see anything at all?

“You okay, sweetheart?” Kisame rumbles, leaning over him with one large hand extended.

No. Not really. Time is slipping away from me and I don’t know how to stop it, how to get it back, how to hold it still and lock it in a cage where it can’t escape me. What am I doing with myself? I need to move, to do something instead of sinking further into this stifling passivity. But I’m stuck. I’m stuck in this stillness—a fish inside a birdcage—and I can’t make myself move.

“I’m fine,” he says instead, taking the offered hand and allowing himself to be gently hauled to his feet. The world spins before his eyes, encased in cobwebs, sheets of dust and sleet. This is what it must look like on the inside of a tornado, he thinks. A moment in time where everything is distorted, displaced by swirling winds to the point where it’s impossible to make out what is level and what is unbalanced. If he stumbles, Kisame doesn’t comment on it, just patiently guides Itachi gently off the mat with his callused hands.

“He almost had you there! You gettin’ soft, Hoshigaki?” Momochi bulldozes Itachi’s sombre mood aside, brazenly taunting Kisame from the sidelines.

“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you, Momochi? Why don't you come on over here and let me show you otherwise?” Kisame challenges without missing a beat. The fierce promise of violence belying his words is deeply at odds with how carefully he leads Itachi over to the pair of lawn chairs where Haku has been looking on with mild interest, a book in hand.

“Those places you’ve gotta get to,” he says once Itachi is sitting down, sly and eager, shifting on his feet like Sasuke used to when asking their parents for permission. “Are they gonna close anytime soon? Or do I have time to teach that punk a lesson?”

“They’re open twenty-four hours.”

Kisame grins, squeezing Itachi’s shoulder gently. “Brilliant! Give me two seconds and then we can get out of here.”

When they start to leave twenty minutes later, Kisame is sporting a darkening bruise the shape of Momochi’s knuckles beneath his right cheekbone and smirking at the sound of Momochi cursing in bitter defeat behind them.

Itachi is tired, but it’s a kinder exhaustion than the one that usually swamps him. His ribs ache with it, the tenderness from a fight well-fought blooming in his muscles and joints. Maybe it’s silly to think so, but this fatigue feels hard-earned. Justified, like he’s done something to deserve it. Even if he did wind up losing in the end. His dread has eased since he first sunk to his knees on the mat, caught off-guard by Kisame’s swinging foot. Or rather, everything feels inconsequential in this moment, where his stomach is warm, his eyes are heavy, and he’s yawning into his hands. Any concerns he knows he should have slide off of him like summer rain on an oilskin coat. Scooching his sore limbs into the front seat of Kisame’s car, he feels distant, but also more like himself than he has in months.

“You gonna tell me where we’re headin’ now, sweetheart?”

“Start by turning left at the last intersection we went through.”

The laundromat Itachi directs them to is not the one he usually goes to. It’s several blocks further east than he usually travels. But it is quiet. This late, the carpark is almost empty with the exception of two staff vehicles for the convenience store next door, and a beige van parked up in one corner with moth-eaten curtains drawn over its small oval windows. There’s no one around to watch as he steps gingerly out of the car, massaging a sore muscle in his arm with his fingers, with Kisame in tow.

The other man trails after him, carrying his laundry bag into the building and warning Itachi of potholes when he steps too close to them. He patiently waits for Itachi when he pauses in the doorway, his eyes stinging as they struggle to adjust to the fluorescent lighting inside. Then he reads aloud the instructions on the machines so that Itachi doesn’t have to, and can focus on loading them up.

“Do you usually wait around for it to finish?” Kisame asks as Itachi scoops out half the small handful of loose change from inside his wallet and deposits the coins into the other man’s open hand.

“Not usually. Too many things to do. We can go find a grocery store while we wait.”

“Pretty sure I saw one not too far back on the way here. You got a grocery list?”

Gathering his now empty laundry bag up and tucking it beneath his elbow, Itachi pulls his list from his coat pocket and unfolds it before handing it to Kisame.

“Is it readable?”

“‘Course, it is. You have very pretty cursive.” There’s a short pause as Kisame scans over his list. Itachi watches as the other man frowns down at the small piece of paper, squinting through the spots of static dark in an attempt to read the sudden furrow in his brow. “There’s not a lot on here, ‘Tachi. You sure this is all you need?”

“I don’t need a lot.”

Kisame looks sceptical, but doesn’t try to refute him.

“Alright then. You ready to go?”

The grocery store Kisame drives them to is not one Itachi is familiar with either, but it, too, is quiet, the car park mostly empty. They only pass one other person entering the building: a young woman shuffling behind a small trolley in Spiderman slippers, her long brown hair held precariously in a bun by a single chopstick. Itachi doesn’t need perfect vision to see how her eyes widen at the sight of them approaching, zeroing in instantly on Kisame with an edge of primitive fear.

So alert to the alarm suddenly gnawing at her entire body—the way it seems to dredge tension up to the surface, right beneath her skin, and tighten the slight hunch of her shoulders—he fails to catch sight of the slight incline of the pavement. He lurches forwards, scrambling to catch himself on something, anything, before he hits the ground.

“Shit, you alright, sweetheart?”

Kisame is there immediately, grabbing hold of his elbow with a firm hand, catching him before he can topple all the way over and steadying him where he stands.

“Sorry, that’s on me,” he apologises, releasing his sturdy grip on Itachi’s arm. “I shoulda’ seen that one there.”

Cheeks warm with embarrassment, Itachi ducks his head. The woman had stopped as well, waiting on the sidelines lest further help was needed. He catches sight of her slippers inclined in their direction and spares a glance up at her face. She no longer seems so afraid, her expression suddenly more contemplative—relieved—than anything else.

“I’m okay,” he says, and gestures for them to continue walking to the entrance. Inside him, helplessness rears its ugly head, and he feels sick. Is this how everything will be from this moment on? Will he always need to have someone to guide him? To rely on others for the rest of his life?

“It doesn’t bother you? How people look at you,” he asks instead, curious how Kisame can handle the stares when has no trouble seeing them at all.

“Darlin’, I grew up in Kiri. There ain’t many who look like me here and people notice. Momochi is the first person I’ve met who’s even been there, but even he isn’t from there—born there. If I got worried ‘bout every sideways glance and dirty look, I wouldn’t have the energy to focus on anythin’ else.” Kisame shrugs, reaching behind Itachi for two plastic shopping baskets, then he holds one out for him to take. “‘Sides that, I’m a big man, ‘Tachi. I take up space. I look like I could hurt someone, and they wouldn’t be wrong. I don’t blame them for being wary, and especially not women. I’d rather they be wary, if it means they’ll be safe from other assholes. God knows there’s no shortage of ‘em out there.”

Itachi stares at him through the haze in his eyes, watching as the other man scans over his scrawled list and begins to fill a mesh bag with clementines, carefully feeling out the ones soft with bruising and the ones that are not yet ripe. He doesn’t need to be here, losing an evening to helping Itachi complete the mundane tasks he can no longer carry out easily on his own. He certainly doesn’t need to do so with so much care. Kisame may not be a good man, but as far as Itachi’s concerned, he is at least a kind one.

Kind enough to let Itachi pay for his own groceries at his own insistence, then shoulder the lot of them across the car park on his own. And later, once Itachi’s laundry has finished its wash and a short cycle in a dryer, he carries the bags up to Itachi’s apartment, allowing Itachi with his empty hands to unlock his door and let them both inside.

“Where’d you want ‘em, sweetheart?” he says, glancing around at the minimal interior of Itachi’s apartment. He seems to almost drink it in, taking in every little thing from the absence of a T.V. to the wool throw piled messily on one end of the sofa where he last tried working on his dissertation a few days earlier.

“On the counter is fine,” Itachi murmurs in response, and heads straight for the kettle sitting on his stove top. Today has been exhausting. His fatigue hangs heavily from under his eyes like sodden clothes dripping from a washing line, and there’s an ache beneath his temples threatening to crack open a fissure in his skull. He already knows he won’t be going to his lecture scheduled for eight o’clock tomorrow morning. He probably won’t go to any of his classes tomorrow, citing illness to anyone who asks why he’s absent. Standing over the sink with the kettle hovering under the tap, he offers to make Kisame a cup as well. “Would you like some tea?”

“That would be great, thanks, darlin’.”

As he sets the kettle down on the stove and reaches into the cupboard over the sink for two clean mugs, Kisame begins to rummage through the bags on the counter, humming some cheerful tune under his breath as he goes to put certain items in the fridge.

“Have you got a place for everythin’ or is any cupboard good?” he asks, setting two packets of ramen noodles down on the bench and looking to Itachi for answers.

“Noodles and rice go in that one over there, eggs just go on the bench, and the rest of the stuff can just go in the one above the fridge.” Itachi gestures towards the different cupboards as he explains what goes where, watching as Kisame starts to follow his directions without question.

It feels strange, sharing such a domestic moment with someone else. Itachi is not used to this—to other people just existing in his space. Even when he returns home during his breaks and goes back, albeit briefly, to living under the same roof as his brother and their parents, it’s not quite the same as this. There is tension at the table when they all sit down for a meal, and he would not be allowed to do as he pleases in the kitchen for that is as much his mother’s domain as her beloved garden.

Sasuke is at that age where he fights against everything and is determined to keep everything he does a secret. Itachi doesn’t think his brother looks up to him much anymore, and for that, he is grateful. He doesn’t think he’s done anything worth aspiring to for himself, only for other people—fulfilling other people’s expectations—and that’s not the kind of life he wants Sasuke to make for himself. Before he was certain that if he failed to be the heir their father expected him to be, then he would turn to heap that responsibility upon Sasuke’s shoulders. But now, he doubts his little brother will go through with anything he doesn’t want to do. Their father knows it, too, he’s sure. It would explain his disapproving stares from the head of the dining table and Sasuke’s venomous glares of retaliation that wore him very thin during his last visit.

He loves his family, but they are not easy people to be around. Itachi is exhausted almost every time he comes back to his apartment, and then he has no time to recuperate. The new semester picks up before he can really take a breath, and then he has no choice but to throw himself headfirst into his education once again.

This moment of quiet with Kisame is different. Almost peaceful. Once the kettle starts to huff steam like a young dragon, but isn’t quite boiling, he fills both of their cups to the brim and carries them over to the coffee table along with the bag of clementines.

Sipping his tea, he closes his eyes and inhales deeply the mellow scent of sencha rising with the steam.

He loves his family, but sometimes, he thinks he loves them too much. He thinks they’re at least part of the reason why it hurts when other people venture too close. Why he aches like a bruised bone or cracked rib when he has company like this. Tenderness has always felt a little too much like a length of rope wound tightly around him, squeezing him empty of breath. He loves his little brother more than anything else in the world—more than the words he can no longer read, and more than the sunsets falling over his city he knows he will miss like an amputated limb. And yet if Sasuke were to turn and look at him with that kind of love, that kind of intensity, in return, he would flinch back as if burned. He was raised with responsibility, with respect—given more trust than he probably should have been, even now—but not a whole lot of affection. And what little was doled out, was not often free. Caring, he thinks, is not something that comes to his family naturally. Certainly not between him and his father, but even between his parents. Maybe it's the price of being born an Uchiha, but he’s been held at a distance for so long, he wouldn't know what to do with real love if it was poured into his own two hands.

It’s why he feels breathless, watching Kisame sit down at his side on the sofa and start to peel him a clementine. The other man’s shirt sleeves have been rolled up, his elbows propped up on his strong thighs as he leans forward over the coffee table, careful not to drip any juice on the carpet as he removes the skin with single-minded focus. There is pith stacked up beneath his fingernails, but he holds the fruit out without a glance, reaching for another from the mesh bag before Itachi has even taken it from him.

There is no talk of favours or making it up to him later. Just the simple act of giving without being asked or asking for anything in return.

“You alright, ‘Tachi?” Kisame asks, after a moment passes and Itachi still hasn’t taken the fruit on offer from his waiting hand. His piercing eyes are soft for the moment, and fixed on Itachi, searching for an answer to his question before Itachi deigns to speak. “I’ll eat it, if you don’t want it.”

Itachi hums his reply. His father certainly won’t approve of this, but maybe that’s for the better. If his life continues to veer off track the way it has been since he first noticed his vision was deteriorating, at least this way he might have something of his own to cushion his fall.

“I’m fine,” he says, and dares to wriggle his cold toes into the gap between Kisame’s thigh and the couch. “Thank you.”

He takes the clementine.

Chapter Text

Itachi knows the moment he wakes that today is going to be a bad one.

They sneak up on him sometimes. He’ll go to bed one night fine—content even, his stomach still warm from the beer Shisui brought round to celebrate the end of another week, and the inside of his mouth frosted clean with the taste of mint toothpaste—then wake up feeling as though someone has come along while he was asleep and hollowed him out with a rusty shovel. His body will be gripped with the need to move, to pull back the sheets and reach for the curtains, but his mind is seized in stillness. The effort to get out of bed is enormous.

He does it. He has to. Depression is not a term used in his father’s vocabulary, let alone a valid excuse to miss his classes. In his family, mental health issues are something that happens to other people. So he drags himself about his apartment on leadened feet, skipping breakfast on account of having no will to make it, and sits stonily through all his lectures, mechanically typing up exactly what his professors say so that he can revisit the material later, when he has the head for it.

Then he goes to feed the crows.

There are two murders on the east side of the city that he knows of. Many of them flock towards the park one street over from the fine arts building on the northernmost sector of campus, unnerving a lot of the locals by roosting in the oak trees lining the sidewalks and bickering loudly over some kind of avian turf war. Itachi has been feeding them since his freshman year. Fresh berries and ground beef—even occasionally the unwanted grubs and insects his mother plucks from her garden and he collects when he goes home to visit. They’ve come to recognise him now, the bravest and most curious of the lot sometimes even daring to eat out of his hand and follow him home when he begins to walk away.

He adores them. They remind him of Sasuke, when his brother was younger and would sneak out from under their mother’s watchful eyes to follow him on the short walk to school. His own small shadow, never too far from being underfoot. The memory is a balm that eases his trembling, seismic brain on days like this one.

Things were easier back then. Simpler. He was young enough to get away with feeling small. With feeling like a child. Despite his genius that became apparent at such an early age, people would still occasionally look at him then and worry about what kind of weight that might put on a boy so young.

No one looks at him like that now.

It’s a comfort he feels in need of at this moment, but not one that is coming anytime soon. When did he cross that line, he wonders. At what point did those around him decide that he was capable enough to handle all of this—his postgraduate degree, the matchbox apartment he lives in all on his lonesome, the reputable Uchiha law firm, its legacy and the hurdle of expectations that come with it, all of it—on his own? Why can’t he seem to wrap his head around it?

Itachi tilts his head to the side, staring vacantly at the hem of the curtains shifting in the draft of the open window instead of the ceiling. He can’t trace the stitching to ground himself anymore. He can’t even see the thread, it being too fine to pick out of the smudge of charcoal fabric. Twisting onto his other side, he fumbles for his phone from on top of the stack of books by his bedside, blinking bleary-eyed at the screen as it sears his corneas through the thickening swathe of spotted dark.

It’s five thirteen a.m. Surely, too early to call anyone—even Kisame.

It’s been another week since they last spoke. Itachi hadn’t noticed until now. There’s something very dismal about September. Time almost seems to pass differently. He can go days without hearing from anyone and not think anything of it. Still, Kisame strikes him as someone who also gets so caught up in other things, he doesn’t always notice just how much time has escaped him.

The silence spread thick throughout Itachi’s apartment is deafening. Another kind of blindness threatening to overwhelm him. Exhausted as he is, with dry eyes and leadened bones, his brain has tripped an invisible string that’s left him wired. He couldn’t go back to sleep if he tried.

Scrolling through his call log until he spots what might be the sequence of digits that make up the other man’s number, he calls Kisame anyway.

Somehow, he gets it right on the first try; Kisame picks up on the fifth ring.

“Mornin’, sweetheart,” he drawls, voice gravelly with sleep. In the background, there’s the soft susurration of skin sliding through sheets. The quiet click of a light switch being flicked on and the whispered movement of maybe a blind being pulled back from the edge of a window. Itachi can picture him sitting up in bed, propping himself up with his strong arms before letting the headboard take his weight, glancing at the darkness inside the room and out, swamping the streets out of a window he may or may not have, before turning on the lights. “What’s got you up so early?”

“Kisame,” he says after a moment, staring into the mottled abyss his apartment has become before dawn in the last month. Only three syllables, the other man’s name sits in his mouth like a stone. It takes effort to dredge his voice up from where it hides, hibernating, inside him, resistant to surface. More effort than he can bear, really. He struggles to find the strength to speak. Words seem to have exhausted all attempts of escape, stuck fast in his throat like mice in drying cement. “Do you have a moment?”

There is a short huff of breath down the line. Not a sigh, but something sweeter, almost fond, followed by the sound of bed springs straining under shifting weight.

“For you, darlin’, even at this hour. What’s happenin’?”

“Could you–” Itachi starts, only to stop mid-sentence. What right does he have to ask Kisame to come to him? For all he knows, he might live miles away—on the other side of the city or even outside of it, away from the persistent, ever-present hum of civilization. He could be working. Could be crashing at the warehouse they visited the other day or at another like it, working the smell of gunpowder into his skin when he rubs tension from his temple or the sharp line of his jaw. Itachi wouldn’t know. He doesn’t—

“Hey, hey, don’t go clammin’ up on me now, love,” Kisame urges, the discernible tenderness in his words at odds with the gruff edge to his voice. “Whatever it is, you can always ask. I may not always be available to do it or even get to you, but that don’t mean you can’t ask, yeah?”

It’s not normal, this bizarre stroke of warmth between them. He doesn’t think it quite ventures into the disastrous realms of codependency, but at least for him, it comes frighteningly close. It really hasn’t been all that long since the other man first approached him under the bridge where he burned one of his textbooks to dust. But he relies on Kisame. Trusts him with more than he should. More than he wants to. There’s not another soul among his contacts that he would call for something like this. That he would trust to keep his secret, just because Itachi wants him to.

Itachi sucks in a long, jarring inhale, pretending he doesn’t feel the sudden urge for a cigarette itching the inside of his lungs, and curls up tighter in on himself beneath his covers.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“Would you mind bringing the car around?” he asks, faintly, twisting the hem of his pillowcase between his fingers.

He needn’t have been worried. Kisame sounds inordinately pleased when he replies.

“Not at all. I’ll be right there, sweetheart.”

Kisame doesn’t comment when he pulls up beside the curb outside of Itachi’s tenement and finds Itachi still in the same rumpled, loose sweater and soft, black cotton pants he slept in. He gets out of the car without a word and crosses around the front of it to open the passenger side door for him to clamber inside.

Itachi knows he must look a wreck. His hair is mussed, staticky at the back from his pillowcase, and his mouth is sour, his teeth unbrushed and thick with a layer of fur under his tongue like the mould he found on the cheese in the fridge yesterday. He thinks his sweater might even be inside out. But it took everything he had just to step out of his apartment and into the elevator, to push the button for the ground floor and then exit the foyer. He wasn’t about to comb his hair. He’s even wearing his slippers outside.

“Where to, sweetheart?” Kisame asks once he gets back into the car, calmly reaching over Itachi for his seatbelt when he notices Itachi hasn’t gone to clip it in himself.

Itachi lets him, giving him the address for the little convenience store on the corner of the nearest intersection, before casting his tired gaze out the window. It’s an injustice, really, that it is both easier and harder to see at night. In the dark, the strain on his eyes is less, but if not for the street lamps draping buttery light across the asphalt, he doubts he would be able to see anything at all.

Nothing more is said during the short drive there. Kisame hands him a thermos of what smells like very strong coffee before turning the radio on, changing the station several times before landing on one not currently playing advertisements. He doesn’t usually drink coffee outside of finals week, but he sips tentatively at it now, relishing the absence of any need for conversation between them as he attempts to catch the spots of light flickering by with his eyes and hold them like fireflies in a jar.

Itachi’s grateful. It’s not often he finds himself in quiet company, much less comfortably the way he is. It’s always plagued nowadays by the need to linger as little as possible. To mask all of the little changes brought on by his condition that he knows are visible if anyone pauses to look at him for too long. For all Kisame is still largely an unknown variable in Itachi’s life, there’s something very easy about being in his presence. He feels somewhat alleviated—free of all the crushing expectations he’s expected to uphold with excellence and with pride in his day-to-day life. Curled up in Kisame’s passenger seat, he doesn’t feel like an Uchiha. Not his father’s prodigy or the heir to anything. He’s just Itachi. Bone-weary and burnt-out Itachi, cloaked in the feathery darkness of early morning in the city.

He hopes that when the truth about his failing eyesight comes to light, he won’t have to be anything else. That he will be enough, just being himself.

They pull up alongside the curb outside the convenience store a few minutes later. There is no one else around, save for a pair of drunk teenagers giggling over their phones as they wait for the next bus and a man with hair such a peculiar light shade of blond, it appears almost white beneath the overhanging streetlights. The latter has his head buried in a book, but he glances over at them from the corner of his eyes as they pass by, taking in Kisame first and then Itachi, and tracks their movements warily until they disappear behind the door.

He looks familiar, but unable to see his face very well in this light, Itachi can’t for the life of him place where he might have seen him before. Up until very recently, his days were usually a flurry of faces. Those of other students, his professors; work colleagues, interns and clients; strangers passing him by on the short walk home from campus, the other residents in his building and the seemingly endless array of those belonging to members of his family. Now he’s having to adjust to profiling people by singular features. A hooked nose, a prominent chin, or the asymmetrical line of someone’s mouth. Piercings in unusual places or the rough touch of cystic acne marking a temple.

He can’t pull enough of the stranger’s face from the static haze mottling his vision to identify him, but this morning, he doesn’t particularly care to. He dragged Kisame out here this early for a reason.

To feed the crows.

Kisame raises his eyebrows when Itachi beelines straight to the freezer units at the very back of the shop, shifting the piercing that he has there with the movement, but he doesn’t say anything until Itachi stops before them, squinting at the labels in an attempt to read them in the weak lighting without having to lean in.

“Whatcha looking for?”

“Mince. Ground beef, preferably, but any minced meat will do.”

The other man moves up the row of freezers, sliding the top hatch to one of them open and pulling out a small tray of mince. By the colour, it's beef. Not that it matters all that much. He has seen them attempt to eat everything from roadkill to soda cans and, on one memorable occasion, an entire empty pizza box.

“Will this do?”

“Perfectly.”

After also tracking down a travel-sized pack of wet wipes, Itachi gives Kisame the cash to pay for it while he hangs back from the counter, rubbing at his sore eyes like it might relieve the headache building behind them. He can no longer recognise the different notes anyway. Better to leave it to someone who can see well enough to count out the right amount.

When Kisame returns, a small plastic bag in hand, he catches Itachi’s wrists between his fingers and gently draws them away from his face.

“C’mon, love,” he says, softly, pressing the loose change into Itachi’s palm before leading them towards the exit. “You’ll only hurt yourself doin’ that. I’ve got aspirin in the car, if you need it.”

Outside, a cool breeze has arrived, vehemently blowing stray leaves and candy wrappers up the street, but there is still no sign of the sun. The bus must have come while they were inside for the two drunken teenagers are no longer babbling out in front of the shop. Nor is the man with the white hair still there. Itachi follows Kisame’s towering silhouette back to the car, murmuring the address for the park where his crows tend to congregate as he goes.

Driving away, he still can’t place a name to the man’s face.

If Kisame is concerned at all when they pull into the empty parking lot for the park, he hides it well. The other man doesn’t say anything as they leave the car and Itachi directs him to follow the stone path parallel to the street they just drove down. He carries the plastic bag with the meat and wipes inside without complaint, and doesn’t ask where they’re going once.

The park does look somewhat hostile in the dark, with its sheer lack of other vehicles and the lamp by the toilet block that is always flickering at night. Itachi has only ever felt comfortable coming here this early on his own before now because he had the means to protect himself in any situation. He can’t say he feels as capable now, but with Kisame tracing his steps, he isn’t worried in the slightest.

It’s a relief of sorts to know that, for a little while at least, his life resides in another’s hands to rest, rather than be directed. How odd it feels being told where it is safe for him to step instead of where he should. He doesn’t know if he could ever get used to it—to nothing being asked of him, expected from him.

He mostly lets his memory guide him to where he usually feeds the crows, adjusting his direction only to avoid any puddles and uneven ground Kisame warns him about. The looming row of oak and sycamore trees where they tend to linger is hard to miss, even with his failing eyesight.

There was a petition a year or so ago to have them all removed and the influx of corvids along with them. Parents were worried about the birds being so near to where their children played, and some people were concerned about having trees so tall so close to the road. What if they were to fall in a storm and damage the buildings across the street? Crush cars and cause a barrage of traffic build up? His parents had agreed, frowning at the local newspaper over breakfast and muttering their grievances behind cups of black coffee. Their opinion on the matter wasn’t surprising in the slightest, but he couldn’t understand how they could be so okay with it. The need to tear himself free from their table, from his quiet deference and the strings puppeteering his every move, that morning and make his disagreement heard with the slam of the front door was volatile. Itachi has never felt more apart from them than in that moment. Nor more grateful that government officials refused to have the trees cut down on account of Konoha being named after the sprawling forest that once hid it so well from enemy villages.

He stops the second he hears them. Listening fondly to their muffled chattering, the impatient ruffling of their feathers and gruff bickering as they argue over which branch to take their rest up above them, he casts his gaze skywards, squinting in an attempt to spot any signs of movement in the dark.

“They’re just here,” he says, gesturing for Kisame to stop alongside him.

“Who is–”

Almost at once, a swathe of feathered shadows descends from the treetops. Some land on the grass, while others perch loftily on the park benches and lamp posts nearby, cawing raucously and jostling each other like rowdy children as they catch sight of Itachi standing on the path. Their keen eyes are nearly invisible in the dark. He can just barely pick them out from their shifting black masses by their slight luminous shine, vaguely eerie where they catch the light stretching across the domain from the neighbouring buildings.

He smiles at the sight of them edging closer and rummages through the shopping bag in Kisame’s grasp for the tray of mince. Splitting the plastic wrapping open with his nails, he pinches small chunks between his fingertips and tosses them towards the hungry creatures growing restless as they wait on the lawn.

Beside him, Kisame is struck by a bout of riotous laughter. It bubbles out of him without restraint, loud and effervescent, like waves crashing into shore, shattering the surrounding peace. It makes the manicured expanse of lawn, paths and modernised pagodas feel lived in, somehow. A space that is only theirs for the moment, and no one else's. Even as it startles two of the crows that have dared to venture close to where he stands a short distance to Itachi’s left, sending them into a manic fit of hissing and flaring their wings as they dance a few short steps away.

They don’t stay shy for long. Itachi throws them another chunk of meat and they bounce right back, falling upon it with squawking mayhem.

“Oh,” Kisame says, surprised, still chuckling to himself. “I don’t know what I was expectin’ but it sure as hell wasn’t this.”

“What did you think the meat was for?”

He shrugs animatedly. “I hadn’t a damn clue, darlin’. I figured you had a plan for it, but that was about as far as I got. This is certainly unexpected.”

“You could have asked.”

“And have spoiled the surprise?” He laughs again, reaching for the tray of mince to toss a piece to the bristling birds himself. “Nah, this is much better.”

Itachi feels the moment his gaze settles on him, warming his cheeks and the inside of his chest against the faint chill creeping in on the wind. He doesn’t dare look at Kisame. He doesn’t want to see whatever expression is brewing on the other man’s face lest he finds a different kind of want there and can’t think of a way to escape it.

“I was right, you know. You really do look like somethin’ out of a painting,” Kisame says after a moment, not desperate or possessive, but almost reverent. Itachi half expects him to reach out, to feel fingertips heavy at his jaw, reassuring the other man that he is really standing at his side, scruffy and underdressed in the dark. “Even more so here than you did smokin’ under that bridge where I first saw you.”

“A good thing, I hope,” Itachi murmurs. The tray is empty of mince now, and a scuffle has broken out among the crows daring to fight over the last few morsels left hidden in the grass. He attempts to keep one eye on them as he shuffles over to the rubbish bin beneath the nearest lamp post, shoving the plastic tray gracelessly inside, but he can’t see anything more than the occasional furious blur of black feathers tumbling over another. Returning to Kisame’s side, he plucks the wet wipes from the plastic bag and sets about wiping his fingers clean, steadfastly avoiding the other man’s gaze.

“‘Course, it is,” Kisame says, grinning even as he takes a wipe of his own before carrying the rest of their rubbish over to the bin and loading it in. “You feed these guys often?”

Itachi looks on mournfully at the crows still scouring the grass. They’re not all fighting now, three of them having hopped close enough for Itachi to lean down and touch.

“I try to. I used to come out here and do it every few weeks, but people grew wary of me. One of my professors told me to put a stop to it. She said it wasn’t a good look for me to be skulking around with the corvids at the park if I was decided on being a prosecutor. It was too villainous or something along those lines. I didn’t want her to tell my father, so I stopped coming out when others were around to see. It’s not as often as I would like, but they never go hungry for long. They’re too clever.”

He squints across the lawn, tilting his head to watch those of them still rooting around in the grass for the very last few morsels of meat he tossed out. He can see them a little better now the sky is growing lighter, the threat of sunrise burdening the morning with an amber glow that promises to burn brighter than his eyes can handle in another hour or less. They’ll have to leave soon. Retreat to the controlled darkness of his apartment until the sun is high enough in the sky not to hurt him.

“They’re very misunderstood creatures. I like them.”

Kisame huffs a laugh. “I can tell. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say so much at once.”

There’s a shift of weight beside him, the heavy-footed shuffling of soles over concrete, then the hulking warmth of Kisame’s body is pressed up against his back. He does so tentatively, like he’s ready to draw back should Itachi show any signs of discomfort and offer something else—maybe his coat—to shelter him from the crisp autumn chill permeating the air.

“You’re shiverin’, love,” he murmurs, and strong hands set to rubbing warmth into Itachi’s arms and the sharp curve of his ribcage shadowed beneath them. “This okay?”

Itachi leans back, burrowing the narrow breadth of his shoulders into Kisame’s chest. Maybe he should resist. The urge is there, a frightened prickle against the underside of his skin, a knife’s edge skating over the back of his neck with the other man’s even breaths. A warning to put an end to this and move away before this careful intimacy warps into a precursor for more than Itachi is comfortable giving. How often has an indulgence of physical touch like this been taken as a go ahead for everything along the same lines? How can he know Kisame won’t take it as such?

But he is so very tired, and Kisame is so much taller than him, broader in the torso and stronger, but also so gentle. His fierce heat engulfs him head to toe and holds him like a wild animal held still between the jaws of some other dangerous creature, carefully and without the intent to hurt. He wraps his arms around himself, wedging his cold hands beneath his armpits, and allows the top of his head to be tucked beneath the proud jut of Kisame’s chin. When he sinks back into the furious heat leaching into his weary bones, watching the crows eat away to the steady thrum of Kisame’s heart keeping them both warm, it doesn’t feel like a surrender or a promise of anything more. Just another moment between them, no different to when Kisame peeled him a clementine on his sofa the week before.

“Forget them, 'Tachi,” Kisame asserts, disturbing the loose strands of hair tickling Itachi’s forehead with his exhale. “Just lemme know when you wanna come out here next, and I’ll bring you. If you wanna see ‘em, who are they to stop you? I can think of a few worse things to be caught doin’ than feedin’ the crows at the park. They ain’t got no right to dictate your life like that.”

Itachi smiles a little at his support. He says it with such certainty, as if it really is some despicable act for his superiors to keep Itachi from doing the little things he loves, no matter how bizarre or not in line with the front he presents when attempting to meet the expectations of those who look at him and see only his father’s son. For a moment, he almost wishes he could pit Kisame against his father, just to see what Fugaku might say when faced with someone who wants to know Itachi as he is, rather than as he tries to be seen.

“Thank you.”

“No need, darlin’. I mean it. You’re already pushin’ yourself too hard on their behalf. Ain’t no one got the right to ask any more of you than that.” The other man's hands move to wrap around him, daring to hold him a little closer. “Now that you’ve shown me your little family of crows, you’ve gotta let me take you to the aquarium three blocks south of here. You know the one with Ichiraku’s Ramen stand set up out front? They’ve got sharks like you wouldn’t believe. Reminds me of home.”

Kiri, he remembers, is situated right along the coast and is known for its long stretches of stony beaches, rugged inlets and isolated coves. There is no shortage of stories about its rough seas responsible for hundreds of shipwrecks throughout history, as well as sea mist so thick it sets in sometimes for days at a time. The stories suit Kisame. Itachi is not at all surprised that that hardy, savage place churned out the strong man standing at his back. He is dangerous, of that Itachi has no doubt, but he also seems to have a deeply ingrained healthy level of respect for all things with the potential to be just as deadly. He believes Kisame’s homeland to be somewhat responsible for that.

“You grew up by the sea,” he says simply—a statement, not a question.

“‘Course. I don’t think there’s a soul alive in Kiri who didn’t.”

“Do you miss it?”

Konoha is many things, but close to the ocean it is not. Itachi is suddenly deeply ashamed by the fact that he has never seen the sea himself, only in pictures and on television.

“All the damn time,” Kisame admits without any hesitation. “Ma was a fisherwoman. One of the best around. There hardly was a day we weren’t out at sea. We used to swim with the sharks, too. They got pretty used to us after a while. I can’t tell you how fuckin’ strange it was when I first came here and couldn’t smell the sea at all.”

“Why not go back?”

“No work there now, love. Not as a fisherman or a swordsman, lest you don’t care about doin’ other people’s dirty work. The government's gone to complete shit, and there ain’t no leg for the common people to stand on. You either adapt to their systems without question or leave before gettin’ rooted out like a weed. It’s just how it is. Kiri’s always been brutal like that.” He sighs, and Itachi can feel his weary affection for the place resound through his entire body. “Don’t think I’d be very welcome back there now. I’m a threat. Been gone so long now, I’m too far out of their control. A damn shame, all things considerin’. There’s a lot of money to be made sellin’ weapons to power-hungry people, and Kiri’s rife with ‘em.”

He sounds dismayed, but distantly so, as though he has already thought about this at length. Already grieved for the home that threatens to rebuke any attempt he might make to return.

Itachi knows a little of what it’s like to be separated from something so intrinsically part of himself. But to be chased out of his home and barred from returning? Admittedly, it’s a worry of his. What good is he to his family if he can no longer be of use to them? The need to preserve the family reputation might save him from being cast aside entirely, but he can’t fathom the thought of having to look his father in the eyes over breakfast and only see wretched disappointment where there used to be pride.

Releasing a shaky breath he hadn’t realised he was holding, he raises a hand against the burnished light of dawn, shielding his eyes from the white-hot glare of the sun captured by every high-rise window in the vicinity. Kisame notices and reorients their bodies in the opposite direction. In the distance, behind the university sign beholden of many arrows all pointing in different directions to the various faculties on campus, the moon dips, pale and pearlescent, in its descent from the sky.

“You ready to go then, darlin’?” Kisame asks, drawing back enough for his breath to ruffle the tangled tufts of hair sticking up near Itachi’s crown.

He doesn’t want to go home. Doesn’t want to face the stony quiet of his apartment where his dissertation waits impatiently on an open tab on his laptop, the deadline to have it complete only a few short months away. But his mind aches and his stomach churns at the thought of going anywhere where there are people around.

“We should go someday soon. To the aquarium,” he murmurs. He’d go today, but the pensive exhaustion clinging to him would spoil the experience. He wants to enjoy that, listening to Kisame reminisce and do his best to describe to him the different vibrantly coloured fish and other peculiar sea creatures behind the glass. Better to save the trip for a day when he feels a little lighter, no longer beholden to the same malignant fatigue and despondency weighing him down now.

Kisame grins and drops a tender kiss down on the top of his head. “I’d like that, darlin’. I’d like that very much.”

Kisame, as it turns out, is a very tactile person. Once Itachi has given him the go ahead to touch him, leaning into his large hands as he guides him back to the car and then, later, through the lobby of his apartment building towards the elevator, he hovers closer. Suddenly, a supportive bolster in the form of an arm around his waist or careful nudge in a specific direction is never far away.

He remembers the alarm that pounced on the woman in the grocery store car park last week. How quickly it swooped in and gripped her at the sight of him just walking by. He wonders if there is anyone else who welcomes Kisame’s touch in this way. Or if he, too, gets as much out of Itachi accepting his hand on his arm as Itachi does in knowing, at least for the moment, there is no hidden motive, nothing more expected of him, in Kisame’s anchoring hold.

“Would you like to come up?”

Kisame turns his head away from the controls where he’s jabbing at the arrows available to select the right floor number with the knuckle of his index finger and looks at him dubiously.

“You’re not just being courteous, are you? ‘Cause I won’t hang ‘round if you want some time to yourself. I know you’re exhausted, darlin’. Don’t spread yourself thin on my account. I can always come back another day when you’re feelin’ a little lighter.”

Itachi nods, tilting his head back to let the LED lights around the top of the elevator burn an imprint of their shape into his vision. Beneath his feet, the floor quakes and his stomach drops as they begin to ascend. He should probably eat something when they reach his apartment. Drink some water, too.

“I won’t be doing anything exciting, but–” he drops his gaze to the side, blinking away circlets of neon pink and orange light to meet the other man’s patient stare. “I would like for you to come up.”

“Alright then, love,” he says softly. “I’ll come up. You won’t mind if I work on a few things while I’m here?”

Itachi shakes his head as he lets them in, fumbling for the light switch in his entrance way. There are still papers scattered all over the kitchen bench and the compact desk he keeps in the corner near the end of his bed from the day before, each one with the visible text printed in a slightly larger font than the last. Pages from his dissertation enlarged in one last desperate attempt to try and complete it in the state he’s in. He could make out some of it, noting down any new edits on his phone where they can be read out loud easily enough, but after three desperate hours, he gave up on account of the migraine tearing his mind apart. He gathers them together as he walks past and dumps the lot in a disorganised heap on his desktop. He'll deal with them at a later date. Or perhaps, not at all.

“Go ahead,” he murmurs, moving on from the mess on his desk to his bed—still unmade from this morning, the sheets strewn about in the sunken shape of his body. Shifting to block the state of it from Kisame’s view, he hastily pulls the covers back into place, smoothing the wrinkles from his pillowcase. They’ll need to be changed tomorrow, but in the meantime, he needs to shower, to change his clothes and brush his teeth—maybe even comb his hair—while he has enough nervous energy coursing through his body to do so. “Make yourself comfortable, and help yourself to food, tea and coffee. I’m going to shower. I won’t be long.”

“Take all the time you need.”

The heat of Kisame’s palm skims over the top of his head before the other man strides over towards the couch, collapsing into the cushions with a gruff oof. One of his hands disappears behind the lapels of his coat, and he procures a small Moleskine notebook and a sleek silver pen from a hidden pocket there.

Itachi touches the base of his skull, surprised. He hadn’t realised Kisame was still so close.

Shaking his head to himself in an attempt to regain his senses, he leaves him to it. He rummages through his drawers for a small stack of clean clothes—loose black sweats, a cotton V-neck and a black woolen cardigan he only ever wears around home because the sleeves are too long—before retreating into his tiny ensuite.

Kisame is still settled on the couch when he shuffles back into the main room. He looks up when Itachi returns, taking him in with an affectionate gaze.

“Feelin' better, 'Tachi?” he asks.

Bleary-eyed from the steam, Itachi almost doesn’t catch the movement of Kisame’s hand patting the spot beside him on the couch. Or see the steaming cup of sencha waiting for him on the coffee table.

“Somewhat.”

He drops down beside the other man, closer than he needs to be, and gropes the top of the coffee table until his hand lands on the remote to the heat pump on the wall overhead. The on button is easy enough to recognise, but he can’t read the temperature it’s set to. Sighing, he holds it out towards Kisame.

“Is it set at twenty degrees?”

The other man glances at it without question, before taking it out of his hands.

“It’s at eighteen. You want me to change it?”

“Please,” he says, and sinks further into the divot of Kisame’s side, disturbed only when the other man leans forward slightly to set the remote back down.

Itachi loses himself in a daze as the room slowly heats up, nearly dozing between idly sipping his tea and watching Kisame work. Something has changed between them, and Kisame must have recognised it, too, if he’s content to work through potentially confidential information so close to him. Either that or he believes Itachi’s eyesight has deteriorated so badly, he no longer needs to worry about the risk of disclosure. He can’t very well reveal all of the other man’s secrets if he can’t even see well enough to read them. Yawning into his shoulder, he decides it doesn’t matter. Because either way, Kisame is right. He can’t read a word of what he has written, but he doesn’t care to. He isn’t about to tell anyone if it means losing this.

Stifling another yawn, he tucks the long strands of hair that have fallen into face behind his ears. They’re still damp, the ends still dripping like wet ink over his shoulders and down the back of his cardigan, despite having been wrung out over the bathroom sink. The spots they leave on his clothing cool quickly against his skin, but Kisame’s bulk burns like a furnace beside him. He burrows closer, hoping to keep the threat of a chill at bay.

His phone goes off barely an hour later.

Itachi lets it ring, staring blankly at where it buzzes on the coffee table with vengeance. He doesn’t want to answer it. It could be anyone from Shisui asking if he’s going to bother showing up to his classes this morning to his father, spitting with rage after somehow discovering how his eyes are failing him or his new-found closeness with Kisame. He barely has the energy to deal with conflict on a good day. Today, he hasn’t enough to even attempt to respond.

The call times out, only for another from the same number to come through immediately. The vibrations of his phone are suddenly three times more ominous than before.

“Go on, darlin’. Answer it. It might be important,” Kisame urges gently from his side. His Moleskine notebook is open on the coffee table in front of him, its pages lined with rough scrawl and a complex array of numbers. He’s alternating between scrolling on his phone, sending the occasional message and making notes. Every so often his eyes will narrow at his screen and he’ll make an adjustment, crossing something out with his pen and correcting it with a short sentence or two that Itachi can’t read.

If his father knew that figures and details pertaining to Kisame’s operation were so close within his reach and he did nothing but drink tea and let the other man play with the damp ends of his hair in moments of distraction, he might actually have the aneurysm his mother keeps warning him about.

He blinks down at his flashing phone screen. Then again, his father might already know. The number flashing on the screen is not one with a name from his contacts, but that isn’t to say it’s not a work phone. Or someone else's, borrowed specifically for the purpose of catching him unaware if he answers.

“What if someone knows?”

He’s been careful. Mostly. But maybe he hasn’t been careful enough.

Kisame sets his phone and pen down on the coffee table, twisting in his seat to better face Itachi, and meets his nervous gaze head on.

“Then we’ll deal with it if it comes to that.”

He doesn’t want to. Not today. Not now. But it could be someone else entirely. It could be his mother, maybe Sasuke. It could be Sasuke.

Itachi answers the phone.

“Hey, cous’,” Obito’s cheerful voice surges energetically down the line. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Obito?” he says, uncertainly, half hoping that his confusion masks the alarm buried beneath it. He’s relieved it’s not his father or his brother, but he hasn’t heard from his cousin since the start of the year when he popped up on campus one morning without warning to visit Shisui. As soon as he finished his undergraduate degree, he moved across the city as far from the Uchiha name and the block of houses their family has somehow congregated in as he could get short of changing his identity entirely. Last Itachi heard, he was no longer couch surfing his way through the homes of old college acquaintances, but rather renting an apartment together with his shooting team. But even that information came secondhand through Shisui. Obito makes an avid effort to avoid contacting any of them too much. It’s what has Itachi’s stomach sinking, even as he remains in his seat. Why else would he bother calling him so suddenly unless he knows? “What a surprise.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, brightly. “I’m sorry for callin’ so out of the blue—and so early at that! I know you’re crazy busy and all, but hey, look, I just got off the phone with Kakashi, and he reckons he saw you out and about before dawn with Hoshigaki Kisame! You know, the arms dealer punk that’s always givin’ your dad a hard time? I told him it couldn’t possibly have been you. I said you–”

Itachi goes still.

Kakashi. Kakashi Hatake. The man with the mask who was reading at the bus stop beside the convenience store earlier. The man with the bizarrely white hair. Itachi knew he looked familiar—he knew he’d seen him somewhere before. Kakashi is one of Obito’s teammates—one of his roommates. He was at the shooting range both times Itachi was invited. He remembers thinking he was rude, barely even glancing his way after their initial introduction and, not to mention, reading porn in public without so much as batting an eye.

“–wouldn’t be caught dead hangin’ out with a man like that, not when you’re so close to opposin’ people like him in court yourself,” his cousin barrels on, none the wiser to the dread washing over him, tightening around him like a snare—all icy wire and tension cutting into his flesh.

Itachi is suddenly very, very much awake.

“But he was adamant! I figured I’d call just to check in with you—make sure you’ve still got possession of all your mental facilities, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m fine,” he says at last, straightening as if Obito can somehow see him and read the lies from the nervous hunch of his shoulders through the phone. “I’ve not left the apartment yet. My first lecture is not until nine today. Did he really say that? I haven’t even come across Hoshigaki in court yet.”

The lies come easily, one after the other. Kisame stares at him, his near perfect composure unravelling with a short spasm of his mouth, as if he’s torn between being concerned with the situation or bursting out loud with riotous laughter at hearing Itachi lie so blatantly about him when he is sat right there, in Itachi’s home and on his couch, with Itachi tucked firmly against his side.

Itachi raises an eyebrow, and Kisame mimes zipping his lips closed. He is sceptical over whether the other man can hold his silence for the duration of the call. He looks like any minute he’s going to be overrun with amusement so loud, Itachi couldn’t escape it if he somehow managed to leave the building on his own.

“Eh, I’ll tell him he must have been seein’ things. I didn’t think you’d be up so early unless you had to be, much less conferring with a criminal!” Obito laughs brightly. “Not to mention with midterms having just been and gone. Did you do alright?”

Itachi goes to answer, but Obito cuts him off briskly with a loud snort.

“Who am I kidding? ‘Course you did fine. I betcha’ did so well Uncle Fugaku’s gonna be absolutely insufferable during the next big family dinner. We’ll never hear the end of your greatness!”

He says it all in jest, far too genuine to be taken at his word. He doesn’t think his cousin is capable of being serious, much less cruel. But his ribbing hits right where it hurts, prodding at the uncomfortable pressure crushing him with all the weight of Atlas’ boulder. Come the next grand Uchiha gathering, where everyone from direct descendants to collateral relatives and hangers on just there for the latest gossip attend, Itachi’s father certainly won’t be breathing his praises to anyone. He might not even be invited to attend.

“I’m sorry you’ll have to sit through that,” he says instead. “If there was a way to rein him in, I would have found it already.”

“I know you would have. Not your fault that you're his little pride and joy.”

There’s a short pause followed by the clatter of dishes in an empty sink and a muffled call of someone shouting out his cousin’s name in the background. Itachi takes the brief respite to grip a handful of Kisame’s shirt in his fist, overwhelmed by a landslide of panic and relief.

“Sorry, I’ve gotta head. I just figured I’d check on you, you know? You might have a lookalike running around Konoha! Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Ha,” Obito laughs, and Itachi can’t tell if the sudden lack of suspicion in his voice means he believes his lies or not. “I wish I had a double. Imagine how much more we could drive the family mad! Anyway, good talk, ‘Tachi. I’ll see you round!”

He hangs up without any further drama, leaving Itachi to stare at the blank screen without seeing it.

“Darlin’?”

Kisame’s tone is not nervous so much as wary. Itachi doubts Kisame knows anxiety as intimately as he does. He lifts his gaze as the other man’s shadow dances closer, falling over him as he leans further into Itachi’s space.

Sighing, he drops his head against Kisame’s chest.

“He doesn’t know. Not about my eyes,” he breathes, squeezing his eyes shut. Relief swoops violently in his stomach, rolling through him like a sickness. He can barely breathe through it. With all the tension and fear gone for the time being, exhaustion greets him like an old friend, embracing him hard enough he crumbles like wet tissue paper beneath its weight. “We were seen this morning. By a friend of my cousin.”

Kisame grimaces, stroking a heavy hand over the back of Itachi’s head.

“That bad, huh?”

“I don’t know. I think he believed me, but–” he sighs again, still gripping Kisame’s shirt tight. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anyhow.”

“No?”

“No. I’d rather you not go anywhere now, regardless.”

Kisame laughs, his chest rumbling violently beneath Itachi’s cheek, and smooths his thumb over the low curve of Itachi's ribcage.

“You’re gonna give Ol’ Fugaku a heart attack. And about two dozen of the men I got workin’ for me. Ain’t nobody gonna even remotely see this coming! I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to something more,” he says, not unkindly, but with a fervent amusement that Itachi knows means that someone is going to get hurt in the fallout and so long as it’s not them, Kisame is going to enjoy it immensely.

A criminal, he reminds himself. Kisame isn’t anything more or less just because he’s shared a few details about his past or spent a few hours being all cosy and domestic with him inside the walls of his apartment. But it doesn’t concern him. Not really. Not anymore. He’s running out of reasons to cling to the illusion that he cares.

“You’re despicable,” he hums, but the words hold no heat. When he lifts his head to look Kisame in the eyes, he can’t resist smiling a little.

Kisame grins right back.

“Don’t you know it, darlin’.”

Chapter Text

The thing about gradual blindness is that you’re never quite sure when you’ll see things for the last time.

The last time he saw Sasuke was months ago. His brother had come to visit not long after Itachi’s twenty-first birthday and stood scowling, hesitating, in the entrance way as he was leaving. Too old to embrace Itachi now, even after so many years of clinging to him, chasing his shadow, but writhing uncomfortably in his skin with the urge to do so anyway. Itachi had ruffled his hair in the end so he didn’t have to make the choice, snickering fondly when his hand was batted harshly away only after making contact, and Sasuke stormed out of his apartment with a fierce slam of the front door. It didn't occur to him then that it might be the last time he would actually be able to see his brother's face.

He thinks about it now. Pours over it like a fanatic, because it very well could be. He thinks that it will be, and how can he live with that answer? He should call and ask Sasuke to bring something from his mostly empty childhood bedroom that he doesn’t need, just to have him here. To see his glowering face, annoyed at having been woken and made to drive here in the early hours, while he still can engrave every line, scar and lonely freckle into his memory afresh.

But he can no longer see his phone screen well enough to make the call.

He has no choice but to settle with asking himself every night he stumbles through his evening routine, will this be the night? Will this be when he finds himself unable to see anything at all?

When it finally catches up to him, it happens on a harmless Thursday night.

He wakes in the night, reaching for the glass of water on his makeshift nightstand of books, only to realise he can’t see a thing. Not the light billowing softly in from under his curtains. Not the neon numbers flashing on the clock of his microwave in the kitchen or the glare of his phone screen when his fingers scramble to grab it in his rising panic.

Nothing.

With his next inhale hitching in his throat, he swipes frantically at the bottom of his phone screen, right over the emergency call option he knows is available there. It vibrates in his hands, the dial tone ringing out in the dark. Strung out as he is, it sounds desperate to his ears, somehow. Like it’s picking up on his distress and broadcasting it for all to hear.

Kisame picks up on the third ring.

“It’s a bit late for you to be callin’, love. Is everythin’ okay?” he croons down the line, the lilt of his voice toeing the line between worry, bemusement and curiosity. There’s a faint echo through the receiver—the sound of his voice and others, mocking huffs of laughter and the tell-tale scuffing of rubber soles on a concrete floor, rebounding off of solid tin walls. The warehouse, maybe? Has he interrupted a sparring session with Momochi? A weapons deal? He doesn’t even know what time it is. He can’t see his phone screen. He can’t see anything.

There’s a thud against one of the walls of his apartment. Instinctively, Itachi looks up, glancing around to pinpoint which direction it came from, only to realise belatedly that he can’t tell. Almost an entire three years in this room, and he can’t even tell where the front door is. His blindness has finally come to a head—sooner than expected, but as expected nonetheless—and now he’s helpless. Was the noise in the hall? Next door where his artist neighbour Sasori lives and Deidara, their noisy blond boyfriend with a proclivity for blowing things up, bunkers down during exam season? He can’t tell. He can’t see.

It’s all it takes for him to decide he doesn’t care what he’s interrupting.

“My eyes,” he whispers, clutching his phone to his face. The screen is cool against his cheek, the sensation unsettling when he can’t see it—can’t see anything. Everything is dark, his world eclipsed by mutant shades of endless black. He’s lucky he thought to set Kisame’s number as his emergency contact before he couldn’t see to do it, otherwise he’d be stuck, utterly alone in this solid dark he’s kept secret from everyone else he knows. Panic sits like a peach pit in his throat, too thick to swallow around, its sharp edges cutting tremors into his voice when he tries to speak. “I—I can’t see.”

“You stay right where you are, darlin’.” Kisame’s response is immediate and firm. Itachi latches onto the security it brings him, the reassurance that despite his efforts to keep his failing eyesight to himself, he’s not on his own trying to navigate this newfound darkness. The clamour in the background dies with the change of his tone of voice. “I’ll be right there.”

Itachi’s apartment is locked, but he’s not naive enough to believe that will stop Kisame from getting in. This man has successfully evaded the law for years without capture or ceasing his underground operation; there are no doubts that he could easily work his way into a locked room. Lesser criminals could get in without a hitch without him there.

Sure enough, the lock clicks loose sometime later. His head twists to look instinctively at who is at the door, but there is nothing. A shift of light, perhaps. A darker shadow darting through the mellow blackness blotting out the happenings of the world. He is blind to anything more. He can’t name the last time he felt so stripped bare, so vulnerable.

Distantly, he’s aware of the small, broken noise that escapes him. But it is quiet, lost beneath his futile attempt to track the heavy footfalls in his apartment as they cross the floor towards him.

“‘Tachi?” Kisame murmurs, gruff as the winds that chafe the underside of the bridge where they met in winter and suddenly, there are big hands cradling his face, thick fingers stretching over his ears and into the tangle of his unbrushed hair. Thick-skinned and calloused, they’re rough against his jaw—a warrior’s hands, heavy with the lingering sharp scent of gunpowder, bloodied knuckles and clove cigarettes—but they hold him with an unfathomable gentleness. He can’t bear it. The fear thrumming rabbit-quick in his throat spills wetly over his lashes.

“I—I can’t—I don’t—”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. It’s okay,” Kisame says, stroking his thumbs heavily over his cheek bones. His added weight sinks the mattress beneath them, shaping them a cocoon out of his covers, the touch grounding him in the moment. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”

“It’s okay,” he repeats when Itachi’s agitated gasps for air don’t ease up. “Just focus on breathin’ for now. Your apartment hasn’t changed one bit, okay? Everythin’ is right where you left it. You not being able to see it doesn’t change that.”

Itachi nods weakly, releasing a shuddering breath that rattles the whole way up his trachea. Logically, he knows that within the walls of his apartment, with only the two of them present, his blindness changes nothing. The world outside will keep moving until he’s ready to show his face and deal with the fallout that’s bound to occur. But from here on out, he is changed permanently. He chose to conceal his condition, to hide it from everyone he knows, and now he can’t ever go back to the way things were before. Even if there is forgiveness (however reluctantly given), he doubts his family will ever trust him again.

Kisame must take his response as a sign that he’s calming down, for his hands slip down over Itachi’s shoulders, tucking him close to his chest like a wounded bird.

“You’re not any less yourself because of it. Tell me you know that, ‘Tachi.”

“I know.”

“You don’t sound all that convinced.”

Itachi doesn’t answer. What could he say to explain it—the situation this puts him in or how much it’s going to change life as he knows it. How he doesn’t really know who he is outside of who he’s been told to be, and this isn’t how he hoped to have to find that out.

“What time is it?” he asks instead, feebly changing the subject. “I couldn’t—I can’t see what it is.”

Graciously, Kisame lets him get away with it.

“It’s about one-thirty in the mornin’.”

“And you were up?”

He doesn’t mean to pry into Kisame’s business. Honestly, the less he knows about what Kisame gets up to when he’s not at his side, the better. If he knows none of the incriminating details about his operation, he can’t begin to build a valid case against him. He won’t begin to feel obligated to do so. Nor does he want to be an accomplice in any of the other man’s schemes. But he needs the distraction. And now, he doesn’t even need to worry about pulling any wool over his eyes. He can’t see the evidence of any of Kisame’s wrong doings anyhow.

Kisame huffs a rough laugh into his hair. “Clearly. I’m here, aren’t I? Some stubborn assholes were tryna’ negotiate terms below the belt, and as temptin’ as it was to just let him have free reign, someone had to keep Momochi from shootin’ the lot of ‘em.”

“Haku wouldn’t stop him?”

“Nah, not at all. They might not look it, but they’re cut from the same cloth, those two. If Momochi decides to cut our losses with a few stray bullets, you can bet your ass that Haku will be right there at his side doin’ the same damn thing.”

“Double trouble,” he murmurs without thinking, and Kisame snorts.

“That’s certainly one way of puttin’ it.”

A yawn pushes up from the well of exhaustion swelling beneath his skin, cracking his jaw open against Kisame’s shirt. He doesn’t know what more to say. What to think.

“I don’t know what to do.”

It’s the first time he’s admitted it aloud. The first time he’s revealed the terrifying uncertainty that’s been clawing inside his chest for the past year or so. He doesn’t even remember when it started—what triggered his change of heart. Sometimes, it seems like someone else built the foundations of his life and he’s just been wandering the halls of it since he was a child, growing more and more lost every year. Other times, it’s like he just woke up one morning and couldn’t name who he was beyond the favoured son and Uchiha heir everyone has come to expect him to be.

“Well tonight, we’re going to sleep. Then tomorrow, we’re gonna to call a doctor. You don’t have to tell your parents or worry about your college work for now, okay? One thing at a time, darlin’.” He strokes a soothing hand along the curve of Itachi’s spine. “Startin’ with, do you want me to take the couch?”

It’s easier to manage this darkness with a body he can map beside him, but he’s cautious. The last thing he needs right now is to unintentionally offer up a space in his bed and have what that means to him lost in translation when Kisame jumps to the conclusion that it involves more. He counts the robust beats of Kisame’s heart before he answers, trying in vain to slow the rapid fire in his own chest to match.

“You would?”

“‘Course, I would.” Kisame’s tone is absolute, not searching for any unspoken invitation that isn’t there. “I want you to be comfortable.”

Hollowed out by his panic, now turned to exhaustion, it’s enough for Itachi to make his decision.

“Not tonight. You can stay.”

There is a knock at the door when they’re drinking coffee on the couch the next morning. After the tumultuous night, Itachi is feeling haggard. Enough to warrant a strong dose of caffeine, and maybe even another cup before the hour is up.

His legs are draped over Kisame’s lap, his forehead pressed up against the other man’s bicep. He can feel the wispy hairs he missed when tying his hair back tickling the nape of his neck, curling ignorantly around the curves of his ears, but he has no energy to try tuck them back into his hair tie.

“You expectin’ someone?” Kisame asks, his curious drawl followed by the rough clink of his mug being set down on the coffee table. Much like the rest of him, Kisame’s thighs are strong, powerful against the soft underside of his knees. They flex as he moves now, straining against the wrinkled fabric of his pants. He’s wearing the shirt and trousers he showed up in the night before, having draped them over the chair behind Itachi’s desk to avoid rumpling them with more creases than the ones ironed there by Itachi’s weight. He’s glad that one of them thought of it. There’s not a single item of clothing he owns that will fit Kisame.

“No,” he murmurs and follows suit, feeling for the edge of the table with one hand before placing his cup down safely a short distance beyond it. It doesn’t topple when he hauls himself to his feet so he counts that as a success for the morning. “It’s probably Shisui.”

Neither of his parents have the time to make it across town this early on a weekday. Not with the firm to run, people to prosecute, interns to train, and Sasuke to drop off at the first-rate private school they insisted he go to receive his secondary education. And despite his impromptu phone call not quite two weeks ago, he doesn’t think Obito cares enough about the family reputation to fact check his lies with an unannounced visit.

“Your cousin, right?”

Itachi nods in the direction of the other man's voice.

“Yes. He is also doing a double Masters at the university. Although, at this rate, he’ll probably finish his long before I can complete mine.”

The rasp of clothing grazing over the couch cushions sounds out as Kisame stands alongside him, laying a careful hand flat against the small of his back to guide him towards the door.

“You reckon you’ll still try to stick with it, if you can?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. It feels like such a waste to quit this far into it.”

“That don’t mean you have to keep at it if you don’t want to. Don’t go out of your way to dedicate your life to somethin’ you don’t want to do. ‘Specially if you have to struggle to do it. You’re only twenty-one, ‘Tachi. You could do almost anything you want. And if anyone asks why you didn’t complete it,” he quips and taps Itachi’s temple, not even attempting to dodge when Itachi swats his hand away, too exhausted to be annoyed, “just tell them the truth. They’re not gonna refute you after that.”

“I know that, but–” he shrugs. “Somehow, that feels like an excuse. I don’t want it to be an excuse.”

“You’ve lost your sight, ‘Tachi. Ain’t nobody gonna say you’re makin’ excuses.”

Itachi doesn’t answer. Instead, he reaches a hand out in front of him and feels for the handle to the front door. Drawing in a steadying breath, he pulls it open.

“Morning, ‘Tachi!” Shisui exclaims, far too upbeat for this time of day. Itachi hears him falter when he opens the door all the way, sucking a shocked breath in through his nose. Likely at the sight Kisame standing at Itachi’s side, still barefoot and with his clothes rumpled, looking every bit like he spent the night in Itachi’s bed. “Oh, uh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you had company.”

He startles a little himself, taking an urgent short step backwards. Unable to see him, he didn’t register just how close Shisui must be standing until he heard him speak.

“‘Tachi?” Shisui murmurs, uncertainty curled thickly around the syllables of his name. “What’s going on? What’s wrong with you?”

One of Kisame’s big hands settles on Itachi’s hip, the other coming to rest on his left shoulder. Together, they gently manoeuvre him a little to the right, adjusting where he stands in the doorway. Likely shifting him, he guesses, so that Shisui is in what would be his direct line of sight if he could still see anything more than the rare flicker of light, the odd movement of shadow.

“There’s nothing wrong with him.” Kisame’s voice is firm, if slightly reprimanding. “He’s sick. We’re going to call a specialist about it today.”

“Call a specialist—Itachi, what? You’re sick? Sick with what? Who is this?”

“It’s–”

Kisame cuts himself off the second Itachi’s hand settles clumsily on what he hopes is the other man’s arm. For all he is forceful, loud in ways that don’t require him to speak at all, he’s adamant about leaving room for Itachi to speak his mind without question. There is something more there—the silhouette of someone else, someone bigger, who once used their size to subdue and bring silence to others; a pair of shoes Kisame tries so hard not to fill in his company. A father, perhaps? Itachi isn’t about to ask.

He knows all about domineering fathers.

“It’s alright, Shisui,” he says softly, bracing himself against the door frame as he braves another careful step back, trusting Kisame not to allow him to stumble into the small side table he keeps by the door for his abundance of keys and small collection of weather gear. “Come inside. It will be easier to explain whilst sitting down.”

“Would you like some coffee?” he asks Shisui as Kisame closes the door behind them. There’s a short silence and he is struck by the notion that his cousin has just nodded at him. So used to the easy, wordless methods of communication they revert to so often during their study sessions and Uchiha family gatherings, he’s sure Shisui does it without thinking. Instinctually. Thoroughly out of his depth between Kisame, who has been Itachi’s eyes for the better half of the last month, and Itachi, who has had to learn to let himself be guided and to see in other ways.

“Oh, ah, only if it’s no trouble, ‘Tachi,” he stammers when Itachi doesn’t answer, rushing to correct himself. Itachi doesn’t need his vision to know his face is flushed with embarrassment. Despite not knowing the details, he is sure Shisui has, at the very least, made a guess now at what is wrong with him. Knowing him, he’s probably right.

“It’s fine,” he murmurs, turning his head away from Shisui to where Kisame’s body is a burning line by his side. “Is there more coffee in the pot?”

“There is.”

Itachi reaches out across the kitchen bench until his fingers find the plunger, the glass warm like candlelight beneath his palms. He doesn’t try to pour it, just holds it in his hands, considering. Warmth ghosts over his wrists as Kisame’s hands envelope his own.

“Want to pour it?”

“Will you tell me when to stop?”

“Go on then.”

A clean mug is pressed into his left hand and Kisame lifts the plunger with him using his right, directing where he needs to hold it in order to avoid pouring the lot all over the bench.

“You’re safe to start. Keep goin’, keep goin’—Woah! Just there is good, darlin’!”

He huffs, setting the plunger back down, and reaches behind him to shove at Kisame’s shoulder. “You’re so dramatic.”

“And you really do wound me, sweetheart.” There’s the scuff of porcelain over the bench top as Kisame slides what he assumes is the cup of coffee towards Shisui. “There you go.”

Shisui sounds positively baffled when he offers his thanks but doesn’t say anything more as Kisame patiently guides Itachi back over to the couch to sit down.

“Want me to leave you two for a bit? I can go get us some breakfast,” Kisame offers once Itachi is seated and has safely collected his own cup of coffee back from the coffee table.

“Would you mind?”

“If you’re in safe hands, darlin’, not at all.”

“We’ll be fine.” Short of calling his father and telling him everything, there’s not a whole lot Shisui can do to escalate the situation. And he trusts him to at least not want to see Itachi hurt like that.

“Anythin’ you want in particular?” At the slight shake of his head, Itachi hears Kisame shift at his side, turning to where Shisui must be standing in the room. “How ‘bout you? You eatin’ with us, too?”

“I’ve already eaten. But thank you, nonetheless.”

“Alright,” he notes, before ducking down and pressing a parting kiss to Itachi’s temple. “My phone’s on me if you need anythin’. Otherwise, I’ll be back in a bit.”

Shisui is on him as soon as Kisame is out the door.

“Is that Hoshigaki Kisame? The arms dealer?” he exclaims in abject disbelief, collapsing with flourish onto the couch beside Itachi. “I didn’t recognise him so dressed down. ‘Tachi, what the hell is he doing in your apartment at this hour? And getting you breakfast of all things!”

“He was the first to find out. I ran into him several months ago, not long after I figured out this–” Itachi gestures helplessly at his face where his eyes are open, searching unseeingly for Shisui’s face in the dark–“was getting worse. He’s hung around, helping me when I need a lift somewhere or a working pair of eyes, ever since then.”

“He called you darling. Sweetheart."

Itachi shrugs and takes a long drink of his cooling coffee. “He does that. Has been since we first met. It was friendly, I think. Or, at least to begin with.”

“But now it’s not. It’s more than that, isn’t it?”

“Now it’s not,” he confirms, helpless to say otherwise. Anything else would be a lie, and that’s something he wants to avoid doing any more of during this conversation.

“He’s a criminal, Itachi. And worse than that, he is actively your father’s opposition! Of all the people–” Shisui splutters, tripping over his own words with incredulity. “You can’t be serious!”

“I am serious.”

“And this is you talking? He hasn’t manipulated you in any way at all?”

Itachi scowls, hoping the effect isn’t lost when he fails to meet Shisui’s gaze head on. “Do you really think I’d fail to recognise it if he had?”

There is a tense pause wherein Itachi is sure Shisui is trying to find some way to make him a victim in all of this—to heap all the responsibility and the blame on Kisame’s shoulders, and absolve him of the situation entirely—before he sighs, clearly coming up short.

"No. I guess not.”

“It’s unexpected, I know. Not even I saw it coming.” Itachi sighs, too, allowing himself to sink back into his seat. There’s a joke to be found there; Kisame would have laughed himself hoarse at the sound of it leaving his lips, he’s sure of it. Shisui does not, instead releasing a small noise of protest that plants guilt to grow in his gut like a weed. “But he’s been here. I didn’t ask him to be, but he has been. I didn’t even tell him what was wrong. Why would I? At first, he was a stranger, and then afterwards, a repeat offender who shows up to court in jest just to piss off my father. He found out on his own, and when he did, he made the effort to be there. That means something to me, Shisui. I wasn’t about to act like it didn’t.”

He quickly drains the last of his coffee, preparing himself for the next rocky route of conversation. “And after a while, I wasn’t really in a position to tell him otherwise anyway. I needed the help.”

“Are you going to tell me what is wrong?” Shisui asks, after a moment.

“Surely, you’ve reached some conclusion of your own.”

“Yes, but I want to hear the truth from you, ‘Tachi.”

He ducks in head in lieu of answering right away. He’s almost grateful that he can’t see the expression darkening his cousin’s face. His head is a mess, and he is growing more and more exhausted the longer this confrontation drags out. There is no organising his thoughts on this, no way to condense them into something explainable—something palatable.

Although it’s now empty, he keeps a hold of his mug, pointlessly swirling the dregs around the bottom of it. If he lets go of it now, he’ll start to fidget, twisting his fingers together in his lap—something he thought his father scolded out of him years ago.

“I’ve lost my sight,” he begins at last, cutting right to the heart of the matter. “Have been losing it since the start of June this year. It started small, with periods of tunnel vision and sensitivity to light, and then it progressively got worse. Part of the reason I skipped class and studying with you so often was because I could no longer see well enough to read or stare at my laptop for very long without it being painful. My guess is that it’s some type of glaucoma, but I’ll get an official diagnosis once I visit a doctor. Kisame told you the plan is to call a specialist today.”

There is a moment of tense silence before Shisui exclaims hoarsely, worried, offended and deeply upset all in the same breath, “And you didn’t think to say anything? To tell me?”

If he’s being honest, Itachi did consider it, but ultimately, he decided against it. His family is a very complex thing. A delicate web of intricate connections. You have to know where to tread, how much pressure you can place on which threads, which people, who to trust and how much you can trust them. He was taught very early on how to dance over them, to balance information like a body on a tripwire, and he learned quickly to do the same to the people who taught him. His father, his mother, even his brother, are knots in the web. He is, too. He complies to the image expected of him, but he holds the pieces of him that don’t fit in that life very close to his chest. He loves his brother, his mother—loves Shisui even—but loving them and trusting them is not the same thing. Sharing personal details can be damning, incriminating all who know, and he wasn’t about to subject any of them to the fallout when his father does eventually find out.

“I’m sorry,” he says, finally. And he means it. Of all the members of his family he could have trusted with his condition, Shisui is one of very few he knows who would at least try to keep his secrets from getting back to his father. He should have given him the benefit of the doubt.

“I never–” Shisui cuts himself off. While Itachi can’t see him, he knows his cousin well enough to picture the frustrated scowl on his face. How his hands will ball into fists in his lap, fingernails biting into the skin of his palms, betrayal at Itachi’s silence and sinister guilt for not noticing himself warring violently within him. “I thought, maybe, you were finally acting out against your father. Going through the rebellious phase you skipped over when we were teenagers, and deciding how you wanted to live for a change. I didn’t want to say anything because god knows you deserve that, ‘Tachi, and I didn’t want to be the one to take that from you, even accidentally. The less I knew, the better.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. He’s grateful for the thought, but a thank you wouldn’t be appropriate, and with guilt steadfastly eating him up from the inside, he doesn’t know what else to say to that.

Shisui ignores him. Or rather more likely, doesn’t register that he spoke at all, too caught up in the translation of his thoughts into dialogue the way he often becomes during his rants about the material he’s studying for the few classes he doesn’t care for.

“Does Sasuke know?”

Itachi’s stomach sinches at the sound of his little brother’s name.

“No. None of them do.”

“You should tell him at least.”

Itachi sighs again and tilts his head back to stare into the black abyss concealing his ceiling from sight. As terrible as it is, he’s almost more worried about Sasuke’s reaction than his father’s. He can handle his father’s anger—has done so for years, even if the majority of it so far has not been directed at him. But Sasuke? He has no idea how his brother will react to his condition, Kisame or his silence, only that it’s sure to be taken as a betrayal of some sort, and that terrifies him.

“I know. Give me some time, and I will. I just need to figure out how best to break it to him.”

Shisui lays a hand on his shoulder, and Itachi gets the distinct feeling that he’s shaking his head in reply.

“There’s no easy way to break this to anyone, ‘Tachi, much less your brother. Whatever you do, just don’t leave it too long. Not if you want his forgiveness.”

Shisui stays until Kisame returns. He directs the conversation to topics of little consequence and when Kisame saunters back in through the door, with what sounds like a paper bag crinkling in his grip, he politely makes his excuses before fleeing the apartment. All things considered, Itachi doesn’t blame him. He just hopes that he hasn’t damaged their relationship beyond all repair.

“Did I scare him off?” Kisame asks, joining him on the couch with a full-bodied thunk.

He shakes his head regretfully. “Not entirely. I think it was mostly my handiwork.”

“His loss then. Hold out your hand,” he says emphatically, and Itachi does so without question, listening to the rustling of the bag as it’s dumped on the coffee table and its contents pillaged. “I got bagels. Would you rather cinnamon and raisin, or salmon and cream cheese?”

“Cinnamon and raisin, please.”

Something round and wrapped in wax paper is pressed gently into his hand.

“Just mind the paper when you take a bite.” The bag rustles once more before he speaks again. “I called a clinic while I was out. They said they can fit us in at one this afternoon with a Dr. Konan. Sound good to you?”

Itachi blinks in his direction, mid-bite into his bagel. “That was quicker than I expected.”

Beside him, Kisame shrugs, jostling him with the movement.

“I did her husband a favour not that long ago—one that is yet to be repaid. Never thought it would come in particularly handy, but hey, what do ya know. She seemed pretty concerned about you anyway. They probably would have had you come in today, favour notwithstanding.”

His stomach sinks, his bite of half-chewed bagel suddenly ash in his mouth.

“Oh,” he utters, surprised, though he knows he shouldn’t be. Of course, a doctor would be worried about his eyes and want to assess his condition as soon as possible. Most people would have done so themselves as soon as the symptoms started persisting. If he were anyone else, he probably would have done so too. “Does that time work for you? My schedule’s on standby, but I know you have other things to worry about, Kisame.”

“Don’t sweat it, sweetheart. There’s not much that Zabuza can’t do on my behalf, and anything he can’t, he knows to call me, and I’ll do my best to sort it out that way. Worst comes to worst, we might have to make a detour afterwards, but anything can at least wait until then.” Kisame asserts and shifts in his seat, knocking his knees against Itachi’s as he twists around. He doesn’t receive any warning before there is a hand cradling his cheek, the pad of Kisame’s thumb brushing a stray crumb from the corner of his mouth. “You’re not an inconvenience to me, Itachi. I’m doin’ this ‘cause I want to—Because I’m not about to let you sit through that alone. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says gingerly, and if Kisame can hear how flayed his declaration leaves him, he’s kind enough not to mention it.

The clinic they arrive at smells strongly of citrus and antiseptic. Even as they wait in front of the reception desk, the scent burns his nose and churns his stomach. He’s already feeling uneasy, unable to assess his surroundings beyond what little abstract details Kisame whispers to him after they enter. His grip on Kisame’s forearm is tighter than it probably should be, but the other man doesn’t say anything so he doesn’t let go.

Not even when Dr. Konan comes to collect them, introducing herself in a clear voice, and leads them into the examination room. Only when he is asked to sit while she runs some tests, does he let go, seeking comfort from Kisame’s warmth by hooking his foot around his ankle instead as he lets the doctor poke and prod at him as much as she deems necessary.

She asks questions throughout the process. Everything from, Can you look to the left and then to the right for me?, to, Have you been experiencing any pain behind your eyes during the last few weeks? He answers in mostly monosyllables, unnerved by how very real it all feels when she’s examining his eyes and he can see none of it. He’s terrified that if he opens up about it now, every ounce of fear and dread that has plagued him since his vision started failing will erupt from underneath his control and exhaustion, and he won’t be able to put an end to it.

There will be no hiding from it anymore after that.

“Mr Uchiha–” Dr. Konan starts once they have all taken a seat in her office, but in a bout of uncharacteristic rudeness, he cuts her off.

“Call me Itachi, please,” he asks gently, far too close to pleading for him to maintain any of his dignity for the rest of the appointment. But he can’t find it within himself to care. He can hear her folding her hands neatly in her lap in a way that promises a verdict he’s not going to like, and he doesn’t want to have to think about his father when she delivers it. Not when even noticeably absent and profoundly uninvited, the man is still here somehow, scowling furiously at Itachi’s side as one of the elephants in the room. “Mr Uchiha is my father.”

“Itachi, then,” she corrects without any further deliberation. “I’m afraid you have what is known as closed-angle glaucoma. This type of glaucoma is rare, but not impossible in people your age. It also typically impacts the affected individual very acutely, with symptoms persisting in a short period of time.”

He knew it was coming. The diagnosis was hard to miss when actively tightening over his eyes like a blindfold. He let it get this far—let it progress to the point of no return. But knowing is a hell of a lot different to hearing it aloud, spoken by a professional. Closed-angle glaucoma. It almost sounds like one of the long-winded legal terms in his textbooks. Or a sentence of sorts.

“Now,” Dr. Konan continues, “you told me you were experiencing these symptoms, but you did not specify the severity of them. Closed-angle glaucoma can be extremely painful, particularly at this stage of progression. Can I ask why you did not seek out immediate medical attention?”

She speaks slowly, carefully, as though speaking to a frightened animal backed up in a corner. Perhaps, she can sense his building panic the way he can taste it, a tinge of acid burning at the back of his throat. He doesn’t know how to answer her question in any way that will make sense. It’s not enough to say he was too tired or too busy because most people would be concerned enough to put everything on hold for a health scare of this magnitude. He can’t even lie and say he couldn’t afford it because his family name is too well known and if there is one thing Uchihas certainly are besides being unshakably tenacious, it’s wealthy. But the truth behind it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. He can’t very well tell her the real reason he let his condition get to this point without seeking help is because it’s a visible, physical justification of his crippling uncertainty—of all the missed lectures and the unfinished assignments gathering metaphorical dust on his laptop. A reason he, Itachi Uchiha, son of Fugaku Uchiha, can suddenly drop everything he’s spent his life working towards and allow himself to dither, to be idle and unsure of who he is and what he really wants to do with his life. Without being told he’s making a mistake. Without being scoffed at and scolded, told that he’s ruining his life, wasting his family’s precious time, money and resources.

He hasn’t beaten the pressure or the needling obligation to succeed in his father’s name, and he can’t even absolve himself of the wrong he’s committed against his own person. But as Kisame said, who is going to tell him he’s ruining his life now?

But he can’t tell her that. He won’t even try, because it’s too much. It sounds insane. Completely ball-to-the-wall insane, even to him. He doubts she will understand.

“You are aware of my family, yes? I was in a fairly precarious position,” he says at last, hoping that it’s close enough to the truth to satisfy her without unveiling all of the hurt and self-sabotage underneath.

“I know that you are the heir to the Uchiha family. And that some individuals might encourage you to delay seeking appropriate healthcare in favour of keeping things quiet. But surely it is not important enough to risk your health to this degree?”

He doesn’t answer. She’s got it all wrong, but if she thinks he did this for his family, all the better.

She sighs, but doesn’t seem all that surprised by his silence.

“Unfortunately, while there are a number of treatments available for this type of glaucoma that can slow down further vision loss, there are none yet capable of restoring lost vision. Full corneal transplant surgery is an option as well as several other types of minimally invasive glaucoma surgery, but all do come with certain risks and are not always successful. Regarding your case in particular, it is likely already too late for most preventative measures. The most we can do is focus on minimising your symptoms such as the eye pain and headaches.”

“You’re saying I will never see again.”

It’s not a question. He doesn’t see any point to asking questions he already knows the answers to.

“I’m sorry to say so, Itachi, but I’m afraid that is most likely the case.”

Staring into the dark, her words leave him paralysed.

“Of course, any medical decision is not to be taken lightly, and I would rather you leave this room today aware of all possible outcomes. In the meantime, however, I’m going to prescribe you some eye drops. What they are going to do is decrease the overabundance of fluids in your eyes and increase drainage to improve eye pressure.”

He barely hears her continue her spiel, picking up right where she left off, her words carefully coated with an impenetrable layer of professional concern. It makes him sick—slighted even, knowing she will tell him this, cementing change so deeply within his life, even by simply confirming what he already knows, and then go on to later repeat the same thing to someone else. How can she reveal something so earth-shattering to him, then brush it off, move on from it like it’s just words in her mouth and not the end of everything he knows?

And yet, it’s his own fault.

He could have prevented it getting this far. But he didn’t. He did this to himself.

A heavy hand lands on his thigh, squeezing gently just above his knee. He flinches at the touch, before the realisation that it’s Kisame sinks into his clouded mind. I’m not goin’ anywhere, he hears, though the words aren’t spoken aloud, and he moves to clutch the other man’s hand between his own like a lifeline.

Kisame holds onto him just as tightly.

“If you have someone to assist you until you feel confident in administering the treatment on yourself, that is recommended, particularly for the first week or so. But you will need to learn to do so yourself, as you will be required to apply them every day, if not multiple times per day, for what will likely be the rest of your life.”

“Is there anythin’ I should be aware of if I’m gonna be helpin’ him with this?” Kisame asks, inserting himself into Itachi’s immediate future just like that. Without hesitation, like there is no question of where he will be, even if everything falls apart, because he’s decided he’s going to stick by Itachi’s side for as long as there is a place for him.

“If you have steady hands and Itachi is willing, you can be the one to administer the eye drops or assist him in doing so himself. Keep note of when you administer them and try to do it at the same time every day. Set an alarm if you need to. Or, write it in a calendar. Also, always check the expiry date as most only retain their effectiveness for around twenty-eight days. Besides that, I recommend you avoid heavy traffic areas, Itachi, unless you have someone with you, and take care around dangerous objects such as knives in the kitchen. The risk regarding those things is usually greater than the reward.”

Her office chair squeaks, followed by the sound of rubber soles gripping linoleum. He lifts his gaze, hoping to follow her movements as she stands, maybe catch a whisper of shadow snaking across a weak tendril of light, but there is nothing. Nothing at all.

“I’ll print a prescription for you now, and if you hand it to Karin at reception on your way back through, she will sort you out. I’d also like to see you again within a month or so, just to see if anything is progressing and if the eye drops are working as they should. Then after that, we usually advise a checkup every six months or so. Glaucoma is a life-long condition after all. It is not to be taken lightly.”

Outside, Kisame doesn’t even bother asking if he’s okay. He stops them before they reach the car and gathers Itachi up in his arms, hauling him in close enough that the box of prescription eye drops in his hand crunches against his ribcage in protest. The touch has his eyes burning up. There is a raw nerve thrumming inside his chest, and shrouded in darkness, the press of Kisame’s body against his own rakes over top of it like a fingernail. But it stalls his whirring brain, making room for the sounds and unceasing motion of the city—the roar of traffic, speeding by with the odd furious honk and inciting fervent barking from lonely dogs in yards all across town—to roll around inside his head, painting a picture of what he can longer see himself.

“You know, we never went to the aquarium. I won’t be able to see your sharks anymore,” he murmurs after a while, his voice distorted by Kisame’s shirt.

It’s not at all something he’s worried about. Not when it pales in comparison to the thought of telling his family—his father—and having to decide what on earth he wants to do with his two, almost four, degrees and the four years of potentially wasted education under his belt. But he is sad that won’t ever get to see them the way Kisame does.

Kisame chuckles and shakes his head fondly. “I wouldn’t worry ‘bout that, love. I’m still plannin’ on takin’ you there. You can bully me into tryna’ describe what I see. I’d like to take you to Kiri one day, too. If it ever settles down, of course. I think you’d like it. I’d like for you to see it.”

“I didn’t tell you, but I’ve never seen the ocean before,” he admits.

“Even more reason for us to go then. You don’t need to see the sea for it to have an effect on you, darlin’. She ain’t called a sailor’s muse for nothin’,” he says, before huffing a long breath through his nose and embracing Itachi even tighter. “Look, I know things are gonna be a lot different for you now, but not all of ‘em have to end. They might be hard, but we’ll manage, yeah? We’ll make things work. Consider it my promise to you.”

“A promise?”

“Yeah,” he laughs, a little sombre, and lays his bristled cheek against Itachi’s temple. “And I don’t make ‘em all that often. That’s how you know I’m gonna do my best to keep it.”

Shisui texts him later that night. He gets Kisame to read the messages out to him as they’re brushing their teeth, the two of them squeezed side-by-side into his tiny ensuite bathroom, having made a quick detour on the way back to Kisame’s apartment so he could grab a few things, toothbrush and a change of clothes included.

You’re an asshole.

Sorry for bailing. Hope the appointment went well.

Slumping into Kisame’s side, he smiles faintly around his toothbrush, gutted by relief, and lets himself hope. Perhaps forgiveness at least, won’t be so far removed after all.

Chapter Text

Kisame doesn’t quite move in after Itachi’s diagnosis is given, but it’s a near thing.

Little bits and pieces of his start to appear. At first, it’s not a lot. A silk shirt draped over his desk chair and more food in the fridge. A bottle of sandalwood cologne on his dresser and an odd number of piercings in the chipped saucer of hair ties and bobby pins on his bedside stack of books. Then, all of a sudden, there are clothes far too big for him hanging in his closet and leaking out of the draws of his dresser, and hair products for dreadlocks he almost mistakes as his own stacked on the bathroom vanity. Itachi is surprised by how much he likes it. How Kisame is always here with him, even when he’s not physically present. He quietly revels in the way his mostly barren apartment is filling up with evidence of their time together—the way their lives are slowly converging, and doing so with such ease.

If this is going to be long term, it’s something they should talk about some time soon. But for now, he doesn’t want to disturb the pleasant peace they’ve attained. He can’t say he ever really expected to have this with anyone. What he asks for isn’t much, but it’s not traditional, and that’s always been enough to make him wary of letting others too far into his space. It requires a lot of trust to allow his body to be in the hands of another, even more so when he can’t see to protect himself.

But Kisame’s hands don’t wander. They’re safe, steady and sure on his shoulders, his waist, in a way he didn’t think he could have without sex as a prerequisite.

Still, he is wary. This man has spent the last two weeks sleeping in his bed, hunkering down night after night beside him in a firm, incongruent line of heat along his back, seemingly content to settle like that, snoring loudly and open-mouthed into Itachi’s hair. Maybe he’d noticed the way Itachi flinches sometimes when he touches him and took a wild guess. Assumed that for all Itachi, with his lithe thinness and slight figure, was capable of giving him a run for his money in a fight, he was at some point touched, hurt in some way he didn’t want. And shamefully, Itachi has said nothing, done nothing to counteract that idea. He doesn’t know how to admit to this man that nothing happened to make him this way. It’s simply the way he is. The way he has been since reaching the age of eight and realising that the picture-perfect family—a wife and two kids, a son to take on his legacy and a daughter to help widen the gene pool—he’d been taught to envision didn’t fit him any more than he fit in wherever he went. The way, maybe, he’s always been.

The morning he finds it in himself to mention it, they’re crammed into the tiny ensuite of his apartment. While he is a small man, Kisame is not, and the room is far too small for the pair of them to fit comfortably. Elbows knock pottles of moisturiser and eye cream into the sink, and Kisame swears profusely when he clocks the corner of the towel rail with his hipbone, guiding him through the room that was familiar barely a month ago, but he can no longer traverse alone.

Itachi is sat down behind the vanity, his hands clasped neatly in his lap, reminiscent of the days when he was still young enough to get away with his mother brushing his hair out before the mirror. Only today, it’s Kisame who stands at his back, cradling his head tenderly between his heavy hands, carefully drawing the brush through his hair, ever mindful of snagging the bristles on any tangles. His fingertips are calloused, but gentle where they sweep back the stray stands that tickle the skin of his forehead and the nape of his neck. Itachi closes his eyes, exchanging one darkness for another, and sinks into the sensation of feeling like something precious.

“You’re lookin’ like you might fall back asleep before we go anywhere,” Kisame jests, and Itachi’s breath catches in the back of his throat when the pad of a thumb dips unexpectedly beneath his right eye.

“I’m tempted,” he says, trying in vain to sound unaffected. To will his shoulders to relax once more, his hands to uncoil from the fists sitting tense over the tops of his thighs. To drain the embarrassed flush warming his cheeks. He’s not ashamed of his lack of want. Maybe once, sometimes still, but those trying days come and go, and today is not one of them. He just doesn’t want it to be the reason he loses this: the soft press of fingertips at his temples, trailing sweetly over the notches of his spine, a warm tether guiding him home through the dark.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Kisame apologises earnestly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Don’t be. It’s not you.”

“Okay.”

He should leave it at that, he knows. Let the conversation lie before it has the chance to sour. But he is plagued by the urge to tell Kisame the truth. To really get it across that it’s not Kisame—not anything the other man has done. He hasn’t abandoned Itachi to his blindness yet, why should this be any different? He hopes it will be no different.

“I wasn’t–” he bites, but the words don’t come. His tongue has been welded to the roof of his mouth—been weighed down with lead bricks and tossed like a body, a loose end, into the sea. “Nothing happened to make me like this. It wasn’t—I wasn’t hurt. Nobody did this to me. I just don’t care for it. For sex. I don’t want it.”

There are people in the hall. A clamour of footsteps racing by on the other side of the wall, proletarians on their way to work and other students, milling about their mornings as best they can when all of their routines have been shot to hell by exam season. Their whirlwind of voices and movement is loud, but not loud enough to smother the sound of his rabbit heart in his chest, his short panicked breaths, sharp as acid in his mouth before they shoot out into the air around him. He hates that he can’t see Kisame’s face. Can’t read anything of what he might be thinking from the lines creasing his heavy brown or the twist of his wide mouth. All he has to go by is that the other man’s hands remain heavy on his shoulders, not gripping, but resting, like none of this has phased him at all.

Itachi reaches over his shoulder to cover one of those strong hands with one of his own. His pale fingers are surely dwarfed by those beneath them, but he clutches at them regardless.

“This is enough for me. It’s everything to me. But I can’t give you more than this. Do you understand? Even if you want it, I can’t–” he says, barely an inch away from begging that he be allowed to keep this one piece of familiarity at his side in the dark. That he be allowed to have more mornings like this one, where he can slip back into sleep before the mirror and his reflection he can’t see, his lover’s gentle hands in his hair, ensuring he still looks like himself enough to feel like it. He almost says it, spits out the words, if you’re going to leave, do it now, before I get used to this—before I come to expect it, but he doesn’t want to open that door, lest Kisame hasn’t thought of it yet.

“Is that what this is about?”

There is the clatter of cheap plastic on porcelain—the hair brush in the sink maybe—and Itachi holds his breath, waiting for the ball to drop.

“Don’t fret, darlin’. I’m not plannin’ on goin’ anywhere,” Kisame says simply, and Itachi barely manages to refrain from spinning around on his chair to frantically tug at his shirt like a child and ask, really? Really? Can you promise me that? Honestly?

“Won’t you want more?” he asks instead, tense in his seat.

“Maybe, but not if it’s a card you don’t care to place on the table. I don’t need that from you. If it’s not something you want, we don’t need to. You’re somethin’ special, ‘Tachi. And men like me? We don't tend to get this. We don’t tend to deserve it. I know I don’t, and yet you’re lettin’ me be here with you anyway. That’s enough—more than enough—for me. You don’t need to give up any part of yourself to keep me here. I’m not expectin’ you to, okay? I’m right where I wanna be.”

Itachi draws in a deep breath, and does his best to ignore the way it quivers the entire way into his lungs. His relief is so great, the rush of it leaves him feeling a little light-headed.

“You’re certain?”

“Never been more sure of anythin’ in my life, love,” Kisame swears, and when Itachi sighs shakily, his head rolling to rest where their hands sit together on his shoulder, there is the sweet brush of lips over his crown. “Now, would you mind passin’ me a hair tie? They’re just in front of you, to the right of the tap.”

They leave his apartment an hour or so later, his hand curled snugly around the crook of Kisame’s elbow.

It’s grocery day once again, and with their laundry spinning away in the building’s newly repaired facilities, they’re free to head straight to the store. Once again, he thinks he could get used to this. Their laundry. His long-sleeves and Kisame’s dress shirts all piled in one basket, together. They’ll come back afterwards—come home—and fold every item of clothing neatly over the back of the couch before putting them away in his chest of drawers. Their lives once again mingling in such a simple way.

He rarely even has to use his apartment key now because Kisame has recently got one of his own cut. The reaction Sasori had when he caught him picking the lock a few nights ago was alarming enough, he went out to get a key for himself the next day. Having gone to attend to some mishap relating to shipment details at one of his warehouses, Kisame didn’t return until well after Itachi was in bed asleep, and he didn’t want to wake him. But the redhead’s threats to call security were loud. Stumbling bleary eyed and foggy minded out of bed, completely unable to see where he was going, he barely made it out the front door in time to placate his neighbour and stop him from calling the police.

It didn’t occur to him until now how stippled with permanence the whole thing was. Though it felt necessary then, and they’d both agreed it best, giving someone a key to your apartment is typically considered a huge deal. And now Kisame has a key to his. Just like that.

It’s what prompts him to consider what he’s going to do in the course of the next few months. As easy as it is now to just let every passing day wash over him, approaching and receding like the tide, it’s not sustainable. He’s told Shisui. He’s been to see a doctor and has so far followed his treatment plan to the letter. Besides talking to his brother—to his father—and maybe some of his professors, he hasn’t all that left to do to distract himself from letting his life get under way once more. He should make a start, contemplate some of the daunting decisions he has to make at some point, while he at least has some energy to do so.

“I think I’m going to take a gap year,” he says to Kisame in the grocery store, halfway down the third aisle they’ve turned into. While waiting for an answer, he plucks what feels like a kilo bag of rice from the shelf the other man is surveying and offers it to him to either put back or add to their grocery haul.

“Oh?” Kisame prompts as he takes the bag of rice from his hands and drops it haphazardly into their trolley.

“I think I need to step back from everything. At least until I’m a little more used to this.”

Dr. Konan also messaged Kisame the details for a specialised Braille class held near her clinic the night before, and he’d like to go. He knows he's not going to be content sitting in the dark, letting others do everything for him, forever. Not even if that person is Kisame. If it doesn’t wear his mild temper thin first, he’ll get bored, dismally so, and fast, even burnt out as he is. Learning how to read and write in what is essentially another language ought to keep his starving mind occupied for at least a little while.

“As you should, sweetheart. I’m guessin’ there will be someone in particular you need to contact to do that?”

He nods, compiling a rough list of names in his head for later. “Mmh. Several. Could you help me type out some emails later?”

“‘Course,” Kisame replies, and sets one hand between Itachi’s shoulder blades, encouraging him to carry on moving down the aisle with a gentle push. “What flavour dumplings do you want for tea?”

“None with beef.”

“Not a fan?”

Itachi wrinkles his nose. “No, not really.”

Kisame laughs sharply, the sound jarringly at odds with how his thumb sweeps over the notches of Itachi’s spine in a sweet caress. Itachi leans into it, feeling Kisame’s amusement reverberate through his palm and burrow into his skin, echoing soundlessly in the cavern of his ribcage. He wants to go to Kiri now more than ever, even if only to confirm whether or not Kisame’s laughter really does mimic the clap of thunder over the sea.

“Alright, no beef. That’s easy enough. How ‘bout shrimp?”

He nods. “Shrimp is fine–”

“Itachi?”

He falls still.

Sasuke.

He whirls around, searching for an imprint, the fringe of a silhouette—anything his failing eyes can see of his brother through the shroud of black over his vision. If he squints up a little towards the pale sliver that must be the store’s fluorescent overhead lights, he can just make out a darker edge that might be the wayward tufts of his brother’s hair. But that’s it. He can’t even begin to read his brother’s expression—can’t search for what he’s thinking at the sight of Kisame hovering close, or see the sinking realisation that for all he’s trying, Itachi can’t really see him at all.

It’s not enough.

He should have made the call. Should have risked his father’s wrath and gone to visit when he still could look Sasuke in the eye when telling him the truth. He should have–

“Shit, is this your brother, ‘Tachi?” Kisame exclaims vibrantly, his elbow grazing over Itachi’s waist as he shifts to look at his brother. “It’s gotta be, right? The resemblance is uncanny.”

“Eh, Itachi? Sasuke, that’s your brother?” another voice trills brightly from Sasuke’s direction. Itachi’s eyes widen as surprise grips him tightly. There’s no mistaking that raucous inflection for anyone else. Sasuke is out shopping midday in the public eye with Naruto, the boy he sneaks out of the bathroom window at their parent’s house to see every other night.

“Mmh,” his brother hums his reply. Like him, Sasuke is also a man of few words when he doesn’t need to be otherwise. But even in his wordless acknowledgement, there’s a clear note of suspicion underlying his agreement. Nervousness and betrayal, too, and his chest aches at the sound of it marring his brother’s tone. He wonders if either Naruto or Kisame pick up on it, or if he has just become so attuned to his brother’s way of communicating over the years, he knows just how to listen for it.

“Sasuke, it’s fine,” he tries to soothe, rallying himself together. This is not how he’d hoped to meet his brother’s secret beau, and it’s certainly not how he ever wanted Sasuke to learn about his new-found blindness. He wishes he could see his brother’s face. So much of how he communicates—how they’re used to communicating with each other—is with slight changes in his expressions. And now with his eyes as they are, he won’t be privy to that any longer. “Naruto, it’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Oh, ah, yeah! You too, Itachi,” the boy in question stammers sheepishly. He, too, is nervous. He’s practically vibrating with it, but he’s genuine. And just as shrill as Itachi remembers. Even shuffling awkwardly on his feet, the soles of his shoes audibly scuffing the shiny supermarket floor.

Though it was from a distance then, he can picture how he was the last time he saw him—olive skinned and blond like the sun low in the summer sky, and loud in every sense of the word, exaggerating everything he said with wide gestures and always so desperate to be heard. Maybe he’s grown up a little since then, Itachi doesn’t know, but he still oozes the same zealous warmth. He reminds him a little of a sticky-handed child that touches everything, leaving traces of their presence all around, then looks back at you with the biggest grin you’ve ever seen, completely unaware of what they’re doing. Everything and everyone he comes into contact with seems to wind up suffused by his enthusiasm.

Including his brother.

“You knew?” Sasuke hedges after a moment, sounding cagier than usual.

“I did.”

“Does father know?”

He wonders when they both began to unanimously refer to Fugaku as their father and not their dad as they did when they were children. Do other people hear the strain behind the word when they speak it? Surely it falls too heavy from their tongues to still be their own kept secret.

“Of course not,” Itachi confirms at once, only to hesitate. It’s been a while since he last spoke with their father. Even longer since he’s lived in the same house as them for longer than two weeks, snagging secrets as he heard them and holding them close to his chest, hoping to at least prevent some of them from ever seeing the light of day when it wasn’t wanted. He hasn’t a clue what their father knows and doesn’t know. But he suspects, much to his own mounting trepidation, that his own unusual behaviour in the last few months is driving Fugaku to distraction enough, he won’t have even thought to look too closely at his brother.

“Or at least, not to my knowledge. He makes you happy, Sasuke. That much was abundantly clear. I would never do anything so as to see that taken from you.”

He must know that. He must know just how little there is in the world that Itachi wouldn’t do for him.

“I know,” Sasuke says sincerely, and there is so much depth to those two words that if Itachi wasn’t so sure his attempt would be rebuffed, he’d reach out and embrace him.

“Hey, kid,” Kisame starts, drawing his attention from his brother. He’s not speaking to Itachi—that much is abundantly clear as he reaches for Itachi’s hand and places it gently on the handle of the trolley, smoothing his calloused thumb over his knuckles. Itachi then feels him move away, displacing the air between them as he makes a gesture he can’t see. “Walk with me to the frozen section. Let ‘em talk things out between themselves, yeah? I reckon there’s a fair bit to discuss.”

There’s a short pause before Naruto speaks up.

“Yeah, okay,” he concedes somewhat reluctantly.

Itachi tilts his head a little to the side, following the sound of their retreating footsteps.

“Kid?” He hears Naruto challenge, his tone indignant. “I’m sixteen.”

Kisame laughs brashly, as loud as ever. “And I’ve got more than ten years on you, kid. That makes you a kid as far as I’m concerned.”

“Eh? You’re old.”

Kisame scoffs, merely pretending to be offended. “Watch your mouth, punk.”

“Punk? You have piercings!”

Itachi shakes his head fondly at their bickering. Of course, the pair of them would get along. He’s glad of it. Chances are, they’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the near future.

“Naruto seems nice,” he prompts when he can no longer hear them, shifting his gaze in what he hopes is his brother’s direction.

Sasuke snorts. “He’s an idiot.”

“You must like him a great deal then to keep him around.”

“You could say that,” he allows begrudgingly, and Itachi can’t help the small wry smile that tugs at the corner of his mouth. If his brother was really that reluctant to be in Naruto’s company, he wouldn’t bother making the effort to see him at all, much less visiting the grocery store with him. Not when the risk if they’re caught is so high. “The man with you, is he Hoshigaki Kisame?”

“He is,” he confirms, and waits for it. Waits for his brother to hiss his disapproval as Shusui did and ask him why? Why risk so much for a criminal? For someone who has earned several lifetimes worth of their father’s vehement scorn?

But Sasuke just says, matter-of-factly, “Father hates him.”

“I know. That’s why he doesn’t know about it just yet.” Or, so he hopes.

“It?” Sasuke muses. “A relationship? I thought you didn’t like people like that.”

“Not in some ways, no. But this–” He shrugs. “This isn’t like that. It’s different. I’m hoping he’ll stick around for a long time yet. Besides, he’s been helping me while I adjust to living with my eyes like this.”

The brisk tap of heels approaches as someone passes by them, a plastic basket rattling on their arm. He hears Sasuke move into his space before he feels him, the rustle of hands leaving pockets and the crinkling of plastic as he steps out of the stranger’s way and brushes up against the shelved bags of rice behind him. When he speaks again, he’s not even an arms length away. It’s closer than he’s been in months.

“Your eyes,” he murmurs, catching on right away. “I thought something might have been wrong when I visited back in June. You mistook me for Shisui. You’ve never done that before. Not once.”

Itachi nods. He’s glad to know that that has as much of an effect on Sasuke as it did him.

“The symptoms started around then. It’s closed-angle glaucoma. I can no longer see more than small traces of light and odd shadows.”

“Is it permanent?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Even with treatment?”

“Even with treatment,” he says solemnly, holding his tongue so as not to spill too much of the truth. He doesn’t mention that preventative care was possible, he just left things too late for any of it to work. Despite not wanting to lie to Sasuke about any of this at all, he’d rather keep Sasuke from ever learning that he could have kept his condition from progressing if only he’d told someone as soon as it started.

Still, he wonders if there is any part of Sasuke that’s actually a little glad to hear about this. To hear how far removed he now is from being their father’s perfect heir. Maybe it’s a sick thought, but his brother has been in his shadow for as long as he’s been alive. He’s been compared to Itachi in every classroom and courthouse, in endless conversations at family gatherings—even in their own home, at their own dining table—and has been dismissed just as often. For all he’s endeavoured to never leave Sasuke behind, his mind worked so fast at one point he couldn’t help the skipped grades, the advances in their family firm, or all the congratulations that followed. He couldn’t slow himself down if he tried. Not until now, now that he's burnt himself out so thoroughly, the thought of advanced study—of even working a job as demanding as one in law—causes his brain to white-out. It’s been almost three weeks since he worked on anything related to the firm or his Masters, yet some days he still barely has the energy to get out of bed. He wishes he could scour his brother’s face for any signs that his situation consoles him in any way. If his new-found blindness is a relief, because if Itachi can no longer be the son Fugaku has convinced himself he deserves, what does it matter if he can’t be either?

He hopes that’s not the case. What kind of older sibling does that make him if his younger brother is relieved to see his pedestal kicked over and him brought down so low?

“Does father know about that?” Sasuke asks, almost hesitantly.

“No. I don’t think he knows about that yet either.”

“You’d know if he did.”

Itachi huffs a laugh through his nose. His brother is right. Their father is not exactly inconspicuous. If he knew anything about his blindness, or even about Kisame and Naruto, they’d know it.

“Could you keep it that way? I don’t think having him hear it from me is going to make the situation any easier, but at least that way I get to choose when and where he explodes.”

Sasuke hisses a long breath through his teeth, his weariness regarding their father reminiscent of his own.

“Damage control.”

Itachi nods gravely. “Exactly.”

“You know,” his brother says, shrewd in his disbelief. “If our father ever finds out about you and Hoshigaki, he's not going to care about me and Naruto. He might even be glad. Can you imagine?”

Itachi snorts, and tries to ignore the flicker of dread that surges within him at the thought. He doubts it will be that simple. Both of them are in relationships with men. Worse than that, they’re with men their father disapproves of—Kisame far more so than Naruto. And to think that he, his father’s prodigy, now seeks company and comfort with Kisame of all people? Even on top of his condition and all the secrets he’s kept surrounding it, their father’s not likely to let any part of it go. Not even Sasuke’s relationship with Naruto, no matter how unrelated it may be.

“I somehow doubt that. But I hope for your sake that you’re right.”

If Sasuke has anything more to add, he’s stalled by Kisame and Naruto returning. Laughing wildly, their bickering joined by the crunching of icy bags of what he assumes are frozen dumplings and maybe vegetables, they approach without care. Sasuke moves away from him as they draw near, making room for Kisame to sidle up against his side.

“That went alright?” Kisame murmurs, miming a kiss to the shell of Itachi’s ear to speak without the others hearing. Strands of his hair catch on the man’s stubble, tugging slightly at his scalp when he draws back, but Kisame smooths them down before Itachi has a chance to do so himself.

“Mhm,” he answers and smiles softly, quietly rejoicing in the disgusted sniff Sasuke makes to his right.

Because it did. There was no yelling or swearing or even scowling, as far as he could tell. Not even a, why didn’t you tell me this before? or a, how could you not tell me—tell anyone—about this right away? He hoped for things to go so smoothly, but he certainly never expected them to. But they did. And now he gets to laugh under his breath at his brother’s reaction to Kisame’s affection and wonder how Sasuke stands at Naruto’s side. If Naruto has his arm draped loosely over Sasuke’s shoulders and is slouching up against him? Or if they stand close to each other, but not touching? If they’re wary of passing eyes after already being caught out together today, no matter how unintentional their meeting was and how unbothered he is by his little brother’s relationship? He gets to stand with them and smile as he listens to Kisame invite them around for dinner.

“You two should come round for dinner at some point,” he suggests brightly. “How’s Wednesday night sound?”

“Wednesday’s a school night.”

Itachi huffs and shakes his head. Like that’s ever stopped the pair of them. There was never any schedule behind Sasuke’s sneaky ventures out of their parent’s house, only that they commenced very late in the night and that Naruto never tried to sneak into their place. He guesses that has more to do with how loud Naruto is more than anything else. He doubts the blond boy would get quite the same violent dressing down if Sasuke were caught in his bedroom one night, than if Naruto was found in Sasuke’s.

“Friday then. We’ll make something nice.”

“You should make ramen!” Naruto pipes up eagerly, but is immediately shot down by Sasuke.

“Not a chance. You can’t just demand them to cook you ramen,” he chastises, only to then try the exact same thing on Itachi, vetting heavily for his childhood favourite. “What about onigiri?”

Beside him, Kisame chuckles deeply enough his shoulders shake. “I’m sure we can manage both, eh? What do you think ‘Tachi?”

Relieved beyond words, he grins up at them and prays they can’t see the few tears stinging his eyes.

“Both are good. We’ll see you on Friday.”

Chapter Text

By the time Friday rolls around, all of his professors know about his condition.

Over the course of the week, he finds himself sitting down in their various offices across campus, talking with them much the same way he would as a spooked freshman, unable to look them in the eyes. Only now, it’s more a matter of can’t, rather than won’t, and now, he has either Kisame or Shisui at his side.

Still, at first, he was apprehensive about what they might have to say about his sudden lapse in work ethic, so vastly different from his usual effort to exceed expectations. But despite his excess buildup of unexplained absences and incomplete work, they’re all very sympathetic, even contrite, urging him not to worry about his recent backslide and apologising for not noticing anything was wrong. He doesn’t tell them that at least for a start, he engineered it that way. That he didn’t want any of them knowing a thing if he could help it. And as with Sasuke, he doesn’t tell them just how long he let it progress without seeking appropriate medical attention or that he could have prevented it from happening so quickly. Most don’t attempt to ask, and the few that do flounder when he pointedly reminds them that the finer details of his health are none of their concern.

After so many hard conversations, he is exhausted. It doesn’t get any easier, talking about his blindness after putting so much effort into keeping it a secret. His chest still swoops with nervousness with every new person to find out. Worse, it’s all so repetitive. The same questions asked and the same answers given. Why didn’t you say something sooner? Will you return to your study? I was unaware of what was wrong. I haven’t yet decided. Perhaps. Their pity, too, is prominent, oil-slick over every acquiescence. It makes him uncomfortable enough to fidget in his seat, twisting the hem of his sweater between his fingers. His life isn’t ruined because he can no longer see, it’s just changed. The way he wades through his routine has been altered significantly, but he’s slowly growing used to moving through each day by touch rather than sight. He’s not useless or even all that less capable than before, he just needs to find a new approach—a new way of understanding without first seeing.

Kisame snaps at Professor Danzo when he remarks on what a shame the whole ordeal is.

And to think that out of all my students, it had to happen to one of my favourites.

He hopes his shudder at being thought of as such isn’t too obvious. He has never liked Danzo all that much. The older man has always paid a peculiar and unnerving amount of attention to both him and Shisui. Never enough to be overly concerned about, but enough to make them both uncomfortable under his gaze.

Kisame notices right away and retaliates, letting the ageing professor know very clearly that both his attention and patronisation are not welcome.

“God, what a dick,” he spits, disgusted, barely a second out the door and certainly before they’re out of hearing distance. Picturing his fierce scowl, the way tension is surely etching deep lines into his brow and lighting the gritty, flint-and-steel spark in his grey eyes, Itachi mimes a gentle swat to his arm before hiding his smile against the other man’s shoulder, letting his appreciation be known.

Huffing an amused breath through his nose, Kisame waits until they’re in the elevator, traversing back to the ground floor, before commenting on it.

“You think so too, eh?”

“Mhm.” He adjusts the angle his head rests on Kisame’s shoulder but doesn’t remove himself from the other man’s space. “I can’t say I enjoy having his eyes on me any more now than I did when I could see him looking.”

“Pig,” Kisame bites out, rubbing his palm over Itachi’s knuckles where his hands are joined over Kisame’s left forearm. “Thankfully, you won’t have to see him for the next year, if not longer.”

“I do hope that’s the case.”

There’s a mechanical whir as the doors to the elevator open and a flurry of people storm in. A group of students in the midst of an avid discussion of something psychology-related. Crammed inside, they trail off almost at once. He imagines their faces as they take in Kisame’s shock of blue hair and huge form wedged between them in the small space, all wide-eyed and open-mouthed, startled like sheep having walked into a pen not expecting a wolf to already be there. He wonders what they think of him, with his smaller stature and dark, unfocused eyes, draped as comfortably against Kisame’s side as his shadow. They must paint quite a bizarre picture, so jarringly different yet standing so close together. Once the doors have closed behind them, they’re more than likely to be the new topic of conversation.

“Excuse us,” he says politely, and there is a hasty shuffling of bodies as the newcomers hurry to rearrange themselves to make room for Kisame to lead them out of the elevator.

Outside, the weather is mild—unusually so for this late in the year. Sunlight curls over his shoulders like a silk shawl, thin but warm, stray beams dancing sweetly over his collarbones and the nape of his neck. He’s not useless now that he can’t see, no, but he does miss being able to look at the sky and actually see it. To take in the changing colours and the shapes of the clouds as they shift across the horizon. He doesn’t even remember which sunset was the last he will ever see.

“Can you tell me what the sun looks like today?” he asks, not quite hesitant but wavering. It’s an odd thing to ask someone, after all. But Kisame can see it in all the ways he wishes he still could.

“The sun?” Kisame repeats, but if he’s surprised by the request, he doesn’t linger on it. “It’s lookin’ pretty anaemic at the minute. Pale like an oyster pearl. The sky’s grey, too. Remember what it was like the day we met under that bridge? It looks a bit like that today. Might even rain before the day is done.”

Closing his eyes, Itachi dwells on the thought. Envisions the sun, wan in a dreary slate sky, like it might satiate his desire to ever see another.

“Actually,” Kisame drawls, considering, only a few short steps later. “We’re not all that far from the bridge now. You wanna walk there?”

“Do you think we’ll beat the rain?”

“I reckon. What d’you say?”

He straightens up against Kisame’s side in anticipation. “Let’s go.”

Kisame doesn’t say very much as they walk, gladly leaving the bustling campus centre for the quiet pathways that wind their way across the university grounds. Once again, Itachi finds himself feeling profoundly grateful that they can have this together—these small moments of unhurried tranquillity that flow easily during the lulls in their conversations. He doesn’t need to hold Kisame’s attention with interesting tidbits of information or witty remarks. It’s enough to just exist in each other’s company.

It means his thoughts are free to wander to his eventful last few days. There is a list at the forefront of his mind. One with the names of all those he has told about his lost eyesight and those he has yet to tell.

His parents are now the last two on that list that matter.

It strikes him as odd that his professors have learned about it before his father—before even his mother. He feels wrong-footed—unfilial, more so than he’s ever dared to be before. But he doesn’t regret his decision to leave his father until last. At least with his professors, he can control most of the fallout, and the damage they can do to him is minimal. If they’re caught sharing a student’s private information without permission, he can do worse to them in court.

It doesn’t make him feel any better.

Paying a morbid amount of attention to the crunch of their uneven steps mulching the fallen leaves on the pavement underfoot, he listens for the river to distract himself. Flush with the last week of intermittent rain, he hears it before anything else. Can smell it, too. Taste it. The scent of wet earth and river silt is so thick in the air it’s almost tangible. Murky in comparison to the charged freshness of the rain to come lingering on the back of his tongue.

“We’re here, darlin’. You can sit down. The bench is dry,” Kisame says after a while. The pitiful creak of old wood joins the rush of flowing water as he pats the rickety bench firmly, only growing louder when Kisame drops himself down ungracefully onto the seat.

“Thank you,” he murmurs and settles down beside him. He presses close, slotting their thighs together from their hips downwards, and tucks his hands close enough to feel the grooves of the other man’s rib cage through his coat. Kisame endeavours to pull him even closer, wrapping a strong arm around his shoulders and tucking him further into his side.

They’ve only been sitting for a couple of minutes or so when Kisame’s phone trills from the confines of his jacket pocket.

“Damn, it’s Momochi,” Kisame sighs, disgruntled. Removing his arm from around Itachi’s shoulders, the bench underneath them groans again as he gets to his feet. “Sorry, love, but I better take this.”

Itachi waves the apology away. “It’s fine. I’ve been keeping you from your work for the last week. Don’t let me keep you from it any longer.”

“Can’t say I’m complainin’ about that. I do so love havin’ you around to distract me.”

Itachi laughs. Kisame’s eagerness to just simply be with him, in his company, stokes fires of joy within him that he’s never known the warmth of before. He feels buoyant even, knowing the other man can untangle the complicated knot of distress in his chest with just a few genuine words. He reaches out, shoving gently at Kisame’s stomach.

“Don’t let Momochi hear you say that. Go, see what he wants. It could be important.”

He tunes out Kisame’s call. If it concerns him in any way, the other man is sure to tell him. Instead, he tips his head back and closes his eyes against the meek heat of the late morning sun dappling the skin of his face.

A cyclist moseys by with a rattle of chains and suspension, calling out to someone further up the path. And there is birdsong, sweet and pitched high above in the maple and sycamore trees overhanging the pathway. Nothing like the harsh and demanding cries of his crows, but charming all the same. Distantly, he hears Kisame curse and grumble his goodbyes. But he doesn’t open his eyes. Not until the scarred skin of a knuckle slips beneath his chin, gently caressing the line of his jaw.

“Hey there, darlin’,” Kisame murmurs, and his thumb skates, feather-light, along the underside of Itachi’s cheekbone. “As much as I love watchin’ you enjoy the sun, do you mind if I drop you home for a bit? You were right—it was important. There’s been a disagreement of sorts. I’ve gotta go deal with the fallout before there’s a shootout.”

Itachi frowns. “That doesn’t sound very good.” Or safe, he doesn’t add.

“It sure as hell ain’t, but it happens in this line of work. Better I’m there to stop Momochi from pissin’ ‘em off further. He ain’t happy, and well,” he sighs, and drops his hand away. “You’ve met him. He ain’t exactly the most likeable asshole of the bunch, even when he’s not feelin’ very trigger happy.”

“Ah,” he acknowledges with a slight tilt of his head. He can certainly understand that much.

Kisame laughs under his breath. “Exactly.”

“That’s fine.” Lifting a hand up from his lap, he allows Kisame to grasp it in one of his own and tug him back to his feet. “Let’s head back then.”

When Kisame drops him off in the entrance way of his apartment, he touches his hand to the sharp angles of Kisame’s cheek, keeping his head lifted, his eyes looking up. He doesn’t expect Kisame to step back from his work for him, regardless of how dangerous it can surely be. Not ever. It’s not his place to ask, and so long as Kisame is being careful with his life, he doesn’t really care what he does with his time. But he worries. Even if he’s failing to meet the other man’s gaze, he hopes his concern is written plain as day across his face.

“Please be safe,” he murmurs. I want you to come back to me, preferably in one piece.

“I’ll do my best, darlin’. Always do.” Kisame’s cheek twitches beneath his fingertips as he speaks and a large hand comes up to engulf his own. Drawing Itachi’s hand away, Kisame brushes a parting kiss over his knuckles before lowering it back down to his side.

“I shouldn’t be gone too long. How ‘bout we go and get the things we need for tonight when I get back? I can pick you up from the lobby, if you like? We’ve still got the afternoon before your brother and his friend will be comin’ round.”

He nods. “I’ll be waiting.”

“And I’ll be lookin’ forward to coming home to you.”

The sun doesn’t stay.

By the time Kisame has called to tell him he’s on his way back and he’s made it down to the lobby without missing more than two steps on the stairs, it’s raining hard. Autumn in Konoha is always an erratic few months. Tomorrow, the sun could be out again, or the wind could be brisk, chasing fallen leaves from the gutters, and as cold as a razor's edge against the panes of his face.

He’s used to it now, having lived his whole life in the one place. Tucking his nose into the loose folds of his scarf, he traces his way along the wall of the lobby with his fingertips, listening to the rain batter the windows. He stops when the toe of his sneaker nudges the potted rubber plant to the left of the main entrance to the building and settles in to wait for Kisame to show.

He has no way of seeing the hand snapping through the air. He doesn't know it's there until it strikes his face.

The impact stuns him. It sends him staggering to the side, crashing into the pot plant. Ceramic shatters over the floor, and he lands painfully on his knees, sprawling amongst the scattering of shards, his palms and forearms pulsing where they slam onto the porcelain tiles in his desperate attempt to protect his head from hitting the ground.

Distantly, he thinks he hears the clerks from behind the desk yelp. But his ears are ringing, his pulse shuddering against the walls of his skull, and his hands are burning with an astringent sharpness where his skin must have been sliced to ribbons. He can’t see the damage, but he can assess that it’s not very pretty based on how fiercely it stings.

"What–” he starts, gasping and blinking pinpricks of static out of the darkness blanketing his eyes. After holding his own when sparring against Kisame last month, he thought he might still be capable of defending himself. Not the way he used to be, not even close. But enough to avoid situations like this.

Clearly, he was wrong. Between the rain beating down furiously on the pavement outside, the rattling chime of the elevator descending behind him and the hushed gossiping of the lobbyists behind their counter, he didn't even hear footsteps approaching.

His assailant grips him by the underside of his chin, strong fingers digging painfully into his jawbone. Panic tightens around his throat, and he grabs at their wrists, scrabbling in an attempt to remove their violent hands from being so close to the soft tissue of his neck.

Kisame isn’t here yet. He’s still probably at least ten minutes away. Dread sinks, cold as liquid nitrogen in his gut. Wherever he is, he’s certainly not close enough to see this—to stop it.

"You despicable child!"

His heart stutters weakly in his chest, hands falling away. All attempts to escape leave him at the sound of his father’s furious voice in his ears.

“You dare hide this from me?” his father hisses, squeezing his face hard enough to force his mouth ajar.

“Father–” He tries to speak around his shock. His father has never hit him before. Not for something more than a short and sharp physical reprimand when he was a child, anyway. Certainly, not like this. He tries to keep his eyes fixed on where he thinks his father’s face is in the all encompassing darkness lest this isn’t what this is about, but he can only guess where to look. Trying to look him in the eyes, he’s more likely to be staring beseechingly at his father’s proud nose or the light stubble shading his jaw and top lip.

His father cuts him off vehemently.

“How could you be so ungrateful? After all I’ve done for you—all the opportunities I’ve given you. And you chose to squander them by swanning about in public with that heathen!"

Oh.

Oh.

His father doesn’t know about his blindness yet. He knows about Kisame.

“Father, I–” he tries again, a myriad of lies and false scenarios coming to mind in order to attempt an explanation that might justify why he’s been seen with Kisame in the last couple of months. But he can’t bring himself to say any of them. They congeal on his tongue, clotting like blood in cold temperatures. After all Kisame has done for him, he doesn’t want to lie about the other man’s place in his life. He wants him to stick around, preferably for a long time, and that means his father either needs to accept that fact or cut them both loose in one foul swoop.

“Let me explain, please. I know it’s not what you want to hear but–”

“You’re right. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything you have to say for yourself. We’re going home where you are going to stay put and release a statement claiming you were consulting Hoshigaki on a case and he manipulated you into a closeness you weren’t comfortable with. You’re going to say you felt compelled to do as he said for the sake of your safety, and regret any harm and confusion your actions may have caused.”

The clerks behind the front desk are still whispering frantically, their voices tight with hysteria and brawling to be heard over one another. He can hear the second they decide it's a domestic dispute and therefore a matter not worth risking their jobs for, and his heart sinks. If they’re adamant that this is something to be dealt with by the families involved, no matter how distressing the sight of it happening in their lobby is, not one of them can be relied on to call anyone for help. Even if they did, he thinks dismally, there are few men working outside of law enforcement with as many connections to the police force as his father. Chances are, no one would come to his rescue anyway.

“No. No, I’m not going to lie about him. Nor am I going to hide from any of this. Please, let me go! Father–” He jerks his neck back and shoves at the body bearing down on him, trying in vain to tear himself free from his father’s hold. But his father only grips him tighter, incensed further by his rebuttal and blatant disobedience.

“He is a criminal, Itachi.”

“I don’t care!”

Silence trickles into the room, as pungent and choking as coal smoke. He can hear one of the clerks gasp in horror at his confession—can smell a hint of soy sauce on his father’s laboured breaths and the dried ink on his fingers where they clutch his chin between them. At once, he knows that everything he’s ever known is about to blow up in his face.

Then his father tenses against him, and the sound of a pistol being cocked echoes throughout the lobby.

“Let him go, gramps. I ain’t got no qualms ‘bout shootin’ you. After all these years, I’d say it’s about time I got the chance, don’t you think?” Kisame jeers, but the words beneath the ridicule in his voice leave no room for speculation. They are an order—he is holding his father at gunpoint and ordering Fugaku to release him.

Not something he can escape so easily in court.

“Kisame–” he tries to warn, but he is cut off once more.

“You, Hoshigaki,” his father snarls. “You've defiled my son! Ruined him!"

“There is nothin’ wrong with your son except for how badly you’ve hurt him. Let him go, Fugaku, and this won’t have to escalate.”

“How I’ve hurt him?” Fugaku spits the accusation out like a foul taste in his mouth, indignant and reeling, apparently unable to pinpoint exactly what he has done to deserve such insinuations. Itachi can’t even say he’s surprised. His father has always been one for persecuting the actions of others more than his own. “What have I done—”

“You’re fuckin’ hurting him now!” Kisame thunders and suddenly, Itachi is being shoved away violently. Stumbling with the force of it, he expects to meet the floor brutally once again and throws his arms out in a panicked attempt to catch himself.

He doesn’t hit the floor.

Kisame’s arm snakes around his ribcage and lifts, supporting his weight as he draws him close to his side. He smells of gunpowder and solvent, and Itachi can’t help but wonder if he did have to mitigate a shootout while he was out. Regardless, he grips him back just as hard, latching onto where the other man’s shirt sleeves are rolled up past his elbows, creasing the linen in the gaps between his trembling fingers. He must be staining it. His sliced hands burn where the cuts press up against the fabric, even against the dusting of dark hairs along Kisame’s forearms. But Kisame doesn’t let him go, even when his feet are steady underneath him once more.

“You alright, darlin?” he gauges cautiously. Itachi can hear the distraction in his voice, all too aware that the sight of Itachi’s father, furious and seething with betrayal, beyond the barrel of his gun is driving him to split his attention between them.

He pries his mouth open to answer, but no sound gets out past his gritted teeth.

He’s not alright. Not in the slightest. His hands ache, and there will be bruises dotting his jaw and around his throat tomorrow. Even in his worst moments, weighed down to his bed by dread and guilt, this is not how he thought this would go. He doesn’t want to fight his father, not like this, because despite all of his discordance with him, no matter how little his father has been aware of it, he loves his father. He loves him, even arrogant, controlling and argumentative as he is.

But he doesn’t listen. He chooses not to hear anything he doesn’t care to. His word is law, and anything and anyone who goes against what he deems is right, is wrong. Sometimes, if not most times, he is right. He wouldn’t be a very good lawyer if he was otherwise. But most times is not all times. In his eyes, Itachi has betrayed him and as far as he is concerned, he has no role in why. He won’t wait to listen to Itachi’s reasoning. Even if he did, he’s incapable of taking any sort of accountability because he refuses to believe himself to be responsible for any part of this, no matter how small.

And that is why Itachi is resigned to letting him go.

Because Kisame does make that effort. Kisame listens to him, lets him speak his mind and trusts him to speak for himself. He has known him for all of five months and not once has he seemed to expect anything from Itachi that he wouldn’t hesitate to give.

“I will be,” he settles on eventually, his voice hoarse. Then tilting his head slightly, he blinks out across from them, listening for where his father stands a short distance away. “Kisame has not hurt me once.”

The, which is more than I can say about you, goes unspoken.

“What is–” His father speaks up—falters, suddenly sounding very uncertain. A far cry from his earlier scorn. “Itachi, what is wrong with your eyes?”

“Listen here, gramps, ‘cause I’m only gonna say this once more. There is nothing wrong with your son,” Kisame repeats, and Itachi is struck by the barely veiled menace in his tone. If his laughter sounds like the sun on the sea, his anger is the churning black waters of the ocean in a storm, dangerous in the way threats go unseen until it’s already too late. His voice trembles with the kind of quiet violence he’s certain is what inspires the fear and respect of those who work for him. There’s real power there—a real threat, even controlled as it is. Itachi’s never been more glad to have it wielded on his behalf and not against him.

“And he doesn’t owe you anythin’, much less an explanation that you think you deserve. Anythin’ he has to say is his give and his to hold on to.”

Itachi’s next inhale hitches in his throat.

Kisame’s not a good man, no. But he is kind. And now that Itachi has his kindness, his support, he is never letting it go. Not if he can help it.

Clasping the other man’s forearm tighter in his hands, he gears himself up to admit the truth that’s been eating at him since this downward spiral began.

“I have a type of fast-acting glaucoma,” he says, quietly but clearly, into the tension between them. “I can no longer see anything at all.”

Just like that, the truth is out there, now its own creature among them. It doesn’t bring a flood of relief or free him from any of his lingering guilt, but he’s made his stand. He feels stronger for it somehow. More his own person than he’s ever been.

“How long? How long have you been hiding something of such great importance?” The ire is back in his father’s tone, but it’s brittle. He sounds defeated, like he knows he’s lost this fight already. In the end, it’s one he could only lose. The moment Itachi chose to keep quiet, he chose himself over his father, over the person—the son—Fugaku has always hoped for and for a long, long time, believed he already had. And now it’s too late for anything to be done about it. Itachi’s not that person anymore. He can’t be. His father is outraged, but his anger isn’t about to bring Itachi’s sight back. Not even he is capable of such a feat.

“Since June,” he admits, unable to help the guilt that grips him. There’s no forgiving this. No situation where everything is solved by putting their differences aside. But even after this mess, the ache in his hands and wrapped around his throat like a brand, he doesn’t relish hearing the pain in his father’s voice one bit.

“Are you really surprised?” Kisame bristles on his behalf. “If he knew you would react like this, why the hell would he want to tell you?”

His anger only rallies Fugaku once more.

“How I talk to my son is none of your business,” his father dictates stonily, all jagged edged like he’s hurling chunks of gravel at them with every word spoken. Then in the next breath, he turns the barbed conversation back to Itachi. “If you continue to associate with this poor excuse of a man, you’ll no longer be welcome in my family. Is that really what you want, Itachi? Your whole life will be over.”

Beside him, he hears Kisame shake his head in disappointment, his dreads audibly dragging over the back of his shirt with the movement. Whatever else he has to say is only going to add more fuel to the fire, reminding Fugaku once more that the first time they are all in a room together, Itachi is standing by Kisame’s side and not his. Tugging slightly at the other man’s rolled sleeves, he urges him to bite back his words, even if it’s just long enough for Itachi to get them out of this conversation.

Kisame stays quiet. Whether he is merely agreeing to Itachi’s whims or trusts him to take care of this, of himself, on his own, remains to be seen.

He hopes it’s the latter. If he’s going to make this choice, he needs it to be.

“Not over, just changed,” he says softly. All the fight in him has drained away. He is tired now, and there is thrumming pain building below his right temple. He barely refrains from raising a hand in an attempt to rub at it. Historically, that’s never worked for him before. Why would now, when it would be seen as a sign of weakness, be any different. “And it’s not my life I’m leaving behind, father. It’s yours.”

“Watch how you speak to me, Itachi,” his father warns. If he is surprised by Itachi’s words, he doesn’t let any trace of it burden his voice. “You forget, your apartment in this building is under my name—it’s funded by my work and my money. As is your education. Your car. Your whole life has been bought and paid for by me.”

“Certainly, I have made up for at least some of that with all of the time dedicated to doing as you asked? I have done nothing else—been anyone else—besides be your heir my entire life. I can leave the apartment, and I have taken a step back from my degree for now already. As for the car, well–” he shrugs, turning his body to leave. “You can definitely keep that. I can’t drive now anyway.”

“Itachi,” his father tries once more, as close to pleading as Itachi has ever heard him be. He doesn't glance back to watch his face fall, but he's sure it happens. He can hear it in his voice. In his desperation to return the situation to his control. None of this is going as he had planned, Itachi is sure of it. “Leave this man and come home.”

He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, father. Even if I did, it wouldn't be home anymore."

“Damn it!”

Kisame’s palm slams into the steering wheel. Itachi doesn’t flinch, but rather turns his head away from the display. He’s had enough anger for one day. He wants nothing more than to curl up in the comfort of his bed and let the tension knotted in his shoulders be swept away by a good sleep. But that’s no longer an option for him. His home no longer belongs to him.

“Fuck, ‘Tachi,” Kisame swears again, only this time his rage is pained. Distraught. The sound of his weight twisting around on the leather driver’s seat is all the warning he has before there are careful fingers seizing one of Itachi’s wrists from across the centre console. “I’m sorry, love. I know this ain’t what you need right now. It’s just—I wasn’t there. I should have–”

“No.” He cuts the other man off determinedly. He doesn’t need Kisame trying so hard to make amends for wrongs he didn’t commit. “It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault, Kisame. I’m relieved you got here before things got worse, but I don’t expect you to be at my side all the time. You have your own life, too. Your own commitments. I don’t expect you to neglect any of them for me. I don’t want you to.”

I don’t want there to be impossible expectations between us.

Kisame exhales softly. “You’re a commitment of mine now too, you know. I want to make time for you.”

Itachi nods his weary head in ascent, offering a small, tender smile. “I know.”

“Good,” Kisame urges gently. “Now lemme try and fix this up for you, darlin.”

The sound of a zipper being pulled undone tears through the quiet between them. The ripping of plastic and the liquid glug of a bottle of something bitter smelling being turned up on its end follows. An antiseptic of some sort. It’s not a surprise that Kisame carries a first aid kit around in his car. He wonders if he’s ever had to use it before now. What the circumstances might have been.

Kisame gently turns his wrist over, his hand coming to tentatively cradle the back of his own as he starts to dab at the cuts shredding the skin of his palms with a cotton pad. The substance stings fiercely and smells piercingly of tea tree. Itachi winces, dropping his head back against the headrest with an exhausted sigh.

“Thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me for this, love. Ever. That asshole ain’t got no right to hurt you like that. No right at all.”

“I know.”

With his sore hands neatly bandaged, he gathers Kisame’s hand up in his own and draws it up close to his face, holding it to his cheek. Kisame’s knuckles are rigid, the skin raised and thick with scar tissue, and the scent of gunpowder is sharp where it lingers still from earlier. He brushes his lips over them, closing his eyes on his darkness in favour of listening to the frayed tides of Kisame’s breathing.

“Oh, darlin’,” Kisame utters softly and suddenly, warmth blazes over the skin of his brow—the press of the other man’s forehead against his own. A searing exhale ghosts over his chin, catching on the dampness there—on the tears drying on his cheeks.

He hadn’t even realised he was crying.

“Let’s go home, yeah? My home is yours for as long as you might want it.” Kisame draws back, grazing his tears away with the rough pad of his thumb, and starts the car. “You can borrow some of my clothes for tonight. They'll be a bit big, but we can grab the rest of your things tomorrow. I have room. We’ll make room.”

Kisame welcomes him into his apartment handfirst.

Before his eyes, it’s a blank canvas. A sheet of black distorted only by a few shafts of grey light, smeared across his vision like fingerprints on a camera lens. Light, he supposes, from a window he can’t see, only guess the direction it’s in. But closing the door behind them, Kisame’s palm falls over the back of his left hand, engulfing the fine bones there and leading, guiding his fingers over the furniture in the room.

Starting with the kitchen.

“Just watch yourself near the bench top, yeah?” he warns, skating Itachi’s bandaged palm over the straight-lined edge of the kitchen counter. A commercialised marble of sorts with sharp corners that gives way to smooth stainless steel around the sink.

Moving with Kisame as he steps away from the bench, his hand slips through empty air for a moment before it lands on a solid wooden door frame. This is an older building than his tenement, he guesses. Homey, rather than industrial. Not blanched with polite and unobtrusive minimalism, but mellowed by large windows and touches of timber. It’s certainly not what he thought Kisame’s apartment would be like, but he likes how it already feels somewhat like a home.

“The bathroom’s through the first door and–” Kisame guides his fingertips across the bottom edge of a photo frame before letting their clasped hands pause on the brass handle of another door–“the bedroom’s through the second one. I’ll show ‘em to you a bit later.”

They do a circuit of the rest of the main room, tracing the outline of the couch and Kisame’s desk. He closes his eyes and just listens, feels, as Kisame paints the outline of the room against the black of his eyelids. The coffee table’s about six steps to your right. Just be wary of the wall behind the couch ‘cause I have a couple of swords hangin’ up there. When they reach the front door once more, Kisame returns him to the couch, encouraging him to sit down while he gets them something to drink.

“Make yourself at home, love,” he murmurs, drawing back with an affirming touch of his lips against Itachi’s temple.

Itachi can hear him moving around in the kitchen, running the tap, igniting the gas stove, opening draws then knocking them closed. Making them tea as if he hasn’t just shaken him to the core. Hollowed out a space in his home for Itachi with so few words and made it accessible—visible in a way. Who else in his life has gone to such lengths to ensure he felt comfortable? At home? He doesn’t know if anyone else would make the effort. Surely, not like this.

No. Not like this.

“You want anythin’ to eat, darlin’?”

“I’m alright, thank you,” he murmurs, and it’s a miracle his voice doesn’t tremble with the force of his appreciation. It’s early days yet—surely too soon for an I love you to be pushing up against the roof of his mouth. But it’s there, petal-soft and airy, molten on his tongue like the candy floss he would buy for Sasuke at the spring fairs with his pocket money when they were younger. He makes it so easy to love him. Itachi’s not sure he could have spent this much time with Kisame, even under different circumstances, and not found himself at least little enamoured.

“We should call Sasuke,” he says instead. Maybe Kisame can hear it, his confession in his voice, but for now, he’d like to keep it to himself. To save it for another day. One untainted by his father’s dissent and the uncertain future sprawled out before them.

“You think Ol’ Fugaku’s gonna give him any trouble after tonight?” Kisame asks, taking a seat down beside him.

Itachi shakes his head. “He shouldn’t. Not if Sasuke doesn’t admit to knowing anything. Let them assume that I planned to tell him over dinner tonight. I’m more worried about our father catching him with Naruto in such a state. If they’re in the area—”

He trails off.

Kisame hums and carefully touches Itachi’s fingertips to the handle of the mug sitting on the coffee table for him.

“Gotcha’. We’ll tell ‘em to high tail it out of there then. What’s his number?”

Itachi tells him, grasping his tea gratefully in his hands. Taking a moment to inhale the precious threads of steam rising up from his cup, he closes his eyes and listens to the shuffling of loose clothing as Kisame roots around in his pockets for his phone.

“Here,” Kisame says, and the weight of his phone, audibly dialing, is set down gently in Itachi’s lap. “You better talk to him. He’ll wanna hear that you’re alright from you.”

Setting his tea carefully back down, he lifts the phone up to his ear just in time for Sasuke to answer the call, his tone bone-dry with suspicion.

“Who is this?”

“Just me, Sasuke. Sorry, I don’t have my phone with me at the minute.”

“‘Tachi?” Sasuke queries, murmuring his name uncertainly into the receiver. “We’re just about to leave Naruto’s place. Is everything okay?”

Itachi sighs. “Unfortunately, we’re not at my apartment. Father found out.”

It’s almost funny how densely packed with subtext those last three words are. How incriminating. He’s certain they’ll hold their weight for as long as he can remember the events that inspired them.

“Oh,” his brother answers with a sharp inhale. “Are you okay? Was Hoshigaki there?”

“Kisame was there—is here now, too. We’re at his apartment. Do you mind if we postpone dinner for another time?”

“No, of course that’s fine. But Itachi,” Sasuke hedges, hesitant and even a little incredulous. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m okay, Sasuke,” he tries his best to assure. “Really. I just won’t be back home for a while. Maybe ever. It’s been made clear that I’m no longer welcome there.”

He’s given up on being many things in the past few months, even more so in just the last two hours. But in no way is he ready to forsake being Sasuke’s older brother. Even if that means downplaying all the hurt, hate and exhaustion festering inside of him. Pretending that this whole shitty situation is something he can simply dust off his shoulders and move on from right away. Diminishing his own pain to adhere to the illusion that he is capable of being the infallible and unproblematic role model he knows his brother sometimes needs. He never wants Sasuke to think that he can’t go to him with a problem because he is too overrun with his own.

“Will you still–” Sasuke cuts himself off, but Itachi knows him too well. Has grown well-practised in hearing his brother’s insecurities sprout in their conversations like weeds, growing more vigorously as they got older and as Itachi continued to move further and further ahead. He knows exactly what he’s trying to say.

Will you still come back for me?

“Of course,” he says sincerely. “You’re still my brother, Sasuke. Nothing father says or does will change that. Besides, there’s nothing he can do to stop me from visiting you away from home. Just name a time and place, and I’ll do my best to be there. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. Now, we’ve a few things to sort out on our end, but I’ll get Kisame to text you when things have calmed down enough for us to plan a dinner sometime.”

A door slams shut somewhere on the other end of the line before Sasuke can answer, and his brother makes an irritated tch sound into the receiver. Naruto’s voice chimes in with a sheepish apology before the blond launches into a muffled tangent, assaulting Sasuke with a barrage of questions—starting with, what’s the hold up?

Itachi laughs. “Say hi to Naruto from me.”

He hangs up just in time to hear Sasuke hiss, “Idiot”, at the blond. It’s a testament to how much Sasuke really cares for him that the insult is hurled with no real heat at all. And if he’s being honest, it makes a ridiculous amount of sense for his brother to be using insults as terms of endearment.

“You know,” Kisame prompts as he drops the phone into his lap, squeezing Itachi’s thigh gently just above his right knee. “I like your brother. I don’t know how the hell the pair of you came to be so different from your father, but fuck, am I glad that you did.”

“I’d like to think I had more of a hand in raising Sasuke than our father. Maybe not all the time, but enough to matter.” He shrugs. “I don’t know about me.”

“Oh, I think you’re just somethin’ special all on your own, sweetheart.”

Itachi shifts in his seat, drawing his knees up onto the sofa and bracing himself upright with them as he twists around to face Kisame head-on.

“As are you.”

“‘Tachi–”

“You must know that already, Kisame. Tell me you know how much you mean to me,” he implores, and takes Kisame’s weathered face in his hands. Adjusting the angle of his head so that he comes as close to looking the other man in the eyes as much as he can, he traces Kisame’s portrait much the same way as they did Kisame’s apartment. He maps out his unique array of features in his mind until he can call up the image of his face—sharp cheekbones, wide lips, the stern brow with an old scar long since disappeared into his hairline, and the variety of studs and piercings—as if doing so is second nature.

“I know,” Kisame murmurs with a deeply fond ardency that warms him all over. His hands come up to snag Itachi’s wrists, and his lips brush over Itachi’s left palm, light as the trembling touch of a butterfly’s wings, before drawing them away from his face.

“I want you to know that whatever happens now, you can stay here for as long as you like. Make it your home and fill it with books or trinkets—do whatever you like. It's yours now, just as much as it is mine,” he declares in earnest, squeezing Itachi’s wrists gently between his strong fingers. “Now, I'm guessin’ your father ain't too happy with either of us right now, but with me especially. If he decides to take what I've done today to court, I doubt I can get out of this one as easily as I did the other times, yeah? So if I go away for a little while, I’ll leave this place to you. And if you need help with anythin’, Momochi and Haku can be around for you, if you need them. Okay?”

Itachi shakes his head firmly, determined in his refusal.

“No. He committed a crime, too, Kisame. He won’t be able to get himself out of this very easily either. I will likely have bruises visible tomorrow. We can take photos for evidence, and my apartment building will have a security camera in the lobby. He may have contacts, but I have a few of my own, even if my disappearing act in the last few months has tested some of them. We can only try. I’m not letting you get put away for defending me.”

Kisame huffs a short, embittered laugh. “It would be the one worthy thing your father’s ever tried to have me serve time for.”

Wriggling his wrists free from Kisame’s loose grasp, Itachi reaches to hold his hands instead.

“But not one I’m willing to lose you over,” he states, resolutely. Not even he is without his family’s unwavering tenacity. For this—the right cause—he’ll willingly remind people of that fact. “I’ll defend you, in all the ways I can. My father won’t know what’s about to hit him.”

Chapter Text

Itachi is too hot when he wakes.

His skin is clammy, the collar of his loose T-shirt—one of Kisame's that he has long since commandeered as his own—sticking to the nape of his neck. His mouth is dry, his tongue starchy where it drags over his teeth. Beneath his cheek, Kisame's shirt is damp from his breathing throughout the night. A year ago, he would have been mortified but having woken up with his hair in Kisame's mouth more times than he can count, he's no longer bothered by it.

Despite the heat, he burrows closer, huffing a slow breath through his nose, and presses his forehead between the other man's shoulder blades. Kisame runs hot, always burning beneath the covers, a solid mass of muscle and fire against his front. Across the room, the AC whirs from where it's anchored to the wall. They have to have it running overnight throughout the summer or else they overheat. And if they leave the windows open, their apartment will be overrun with moths and other irritating insects by the morning.

"Mornin', love," Kisame murmurs softly, his stomach flexing beneath Itachi's palm.

"Mhmph," he manages to protest, curling up like a shrimp against Kisame's broad back. They have somewhere to be shortly. A long two day drive out to a small town just outside of the border to Kiri, then a short trip into the Land of Water itself and to the stretch of rugged coastline where Kisame grew up. But sleep evaded him much of the night before, leaving him to listen to Kisame’s light snores rumbling in the dark, and he is tired. Too tired to brave the day ahead just yet.

Kisame laughs gruffly under his breath before sliding out from under Itachi's hold, heaving himself out of bed.

Itachi doesn't follow. It's all too easy to roll into the warm spot Kisame leaves behind, tugging the covers up to his ears in a lazy attempt to keep the heat from escaping. The door to their bedroom scuffs across the carpet and after a moment or two, the sound of the shower starts up in the bathroom next door. Sighing tiredly into Kisame’s pillow, he buries his head beneath the covers.

For almost two years, he’s been lucky enough to have this. To hold onto it and make it routine. On slow mornings like this one, when Kisame doesn’t have to be anywhere else, the other man slips out of bed first for a shower and a shave, before returning with two cups of tea in hand. They’ll drink together, quietly discussing their plans for the day or else making the most of the early morning ease in comfortable silence before the day’s impending chaos intrudes upon their time together. He always finishes his tea before Kisame, moving on to pull some clothes from his dresser and disappear into the shower himself. Kisame will tackle any urgent emails or arrangements he needs to make for work in his absence, then when he’s clean and dry, Kisame will run a brush through his hair for him.

He thinks Kisame took it to heart when he told him before the bathroom mirror in his old apartment that this kind of contact means everything to him. It’s become a ritual they barely go a day without. A ceremony of habit Kisame is always careful to make time for. Even on the days when he has to leave for work early to wait for a shipment to arrive at one of his warehouses or stay out late to attend some kind of glitzy party hosted by a wealthy client in order to seal a deal, he always makes time to comb the tangles from Itachi’s hair.

Sure enough, when he wakes next, Kisame is sitting on the edge of the bed, trailing his fingers over Itachi’s arm from above the blankets with one hand, holding a cup of tea in his other.

“Here,” he says as Itachi sits up, already reaching for the promising aroma of warm sencha in the air.

Taking the proffered mug in hand, he raises it to his mouth, breathing in the steam like it might fully revitalise him.

“Thank you.”

“No worries, darlin’,” Kisame assures. “How are you feelin’ today?”

Itachi sighs into his cup. He’s tired. Fatigue a familiar tightness pinching at the skin around his eyes; a weighted tension bearing down on him in the junctions between his shoulders and neck. A part of him thinks he might always be a little tired. A little worn down and fraying a little at the edges. Like he used up half a life's worth of energy in his first twenty years and has no way of regaining it. It’s been almost two years since their confrontation with his father in the lobby of his old apartment building. He’s been dodging questions about when he’ll return to law ever since. He’s not even sure if he will return to academia at all. After all the years of trying so hard to assuage other people and their expectations, the thought of trying to tackle it at his own pace is unbearably daunting. Where would he even start? What else can he see himself dedicating so much time and energy to? So much of himself to?

For now, it’s enough to assist Kisame with his work in any way that he can. Reading through legal agreements and weeding new contracts of suspicious loopholes. Sometimes, when he feels up to it, he even tags along to events as Kisame’s plus one, batting away the barbed curiosity of strangers and associates alike like flies from where he hangs comfortably from Kisame’s arm. Kisame always gets more of a kick out of it than he does, spending the whole car ride back to their apartment chortling over the dumbfounded expressions worn by his wealthy clients and competitors during their attempts to politely pry him for information.

He’s content with that. Maybe not for the next five years or the rest of his life, but for now. And while he may not be able to read the confused interest warping the faces of the people they meet, he never fails to hear the little tight gasp of shock that they let out when he tells them who he is.

Because if anyone dares to ask, he gives them Kisame’s family name.

It’s entertaining to listen to people trip over themselves at the revelation, stammering as they try to gently prod at him for more answers and determine when exactly did he and Kisame form such a connection. Kisame’s name remains a bad omen broadcast from the mouths of so many. He suspects that after a delicately issued threat from him prevented his father from even attempting to take Kisame to court for protecting Itachi, his father has instead made every effort to rake the Hoshigaki name through the mud in other ways. But even so, Itachi hasn’t used the Uchiha name since their confrontation. He hasn’t considered himself an Uchiha for a long time now.

Kisame jumps at the chance to introduce Itachi as a Hoshigaki every opportunity he has. Since the first time he heard Itachi do it he’s been eager—determined—to do so himself. Sometimes, he thinks he does it as an apology. Something along the lines of, I’m sorry your family cut you out of their lives for being with me. Be a part of mine instead. He’s grateful for his efforts—grateful beyond words. While it’s true, he won't ever truly escape being an Uchiha. It’s written into his every seam, the shape of his face, his dark eyes, and his every expression. Even laced with the lead lining his bones. But he’s been more of a Hoshigaki as of late. There’s no legacy there, tucked between the syllables, that he’s expected to carry, or a bloody history that he’s indebted to. Just a connection and a future to build with his own two hands.

“The usual,” he admits, scrubbing at his temple with the heel of his hand. “Just tired.”

Warmth flares over the top of his thigh as Kisame lays a large hand down just above his knee, stroking his thumb absently over his bare skin. “Couldn’t sleep last night?”

“Not until late.”

“We can put off goin’ anywhere for another day, if you’d like? Just spend today at home?”

He shakes his head, lowering his mug into his lap. “No, we should go today. I’m alright, Kisame. We’ve held off going for long enough. I want to see your homeland. To know Kiri as you do.”

“Alright then,” Kisame yields instantly, his voice laden with fond affection. He’s been wanting to visit Kiri far longer than Itachi has. If not for the endless barrage of work he’d had lined up throughout the past year, Itachi’s certain he would have had the car packed up and ready to go months ago. But Kisame prides himself on his strong work ethic. He is a dedicated businessman and having built his career up from the ground up, he isn’t about to abandon his empire before he’s ready to.

The mattress dips slightly beneath where his legs are crossed in front of him, sinking as Kisame ducks close to press a chaste kiss to Itachi’s temple.

“We’ll go when you’re ready.”

Kiri is a very haunted place.

Itachi listens intently as Kisame describes their surroundings, letting him paint a picture of the shores he used to call home. The thick grey mist wreathed around the battered ruins on the outskirts of town. The abandoned fishermen's huts dotted along the shore in various states of disrepair, crumbling before splintered wharfs, rotting into the sands over time. The weather-beaten boats rolling in the shallows, paint flaking from their hulls and torn netting spilling over their decks like entrails.

He glosses over the details of the inner city. They avoided it on the way here, relying on Kisame’s local knowledge of the quiet back roads in order to give the main part of town a wide berth. A little under a year ago, there was an uprising. Violent riots broke out across the city, civilians fighting back against the corrupt regime for the first time in decades, and several corrupt government officials were very publicly removed. It’s no longer as rife with turmoil as then, but as with any state undergoing extreme political changes, there is still enough unrest to make Kisame wary about passing through the middle of it. He was pleased with the new leader, however, and rightfully so. Terumi Mei has so far proved to be just as ruthless, but it’s the common people she fights for, and that has made a world of difference already.

He’s never asked if Kisame had a hand in supplying the revolting groups with the gun power to fight back, but he suspects he did. Although the other man doesn’t often reminisce about the time he lived here, it’s clear he loves the place, penniless and cut-throat as it is, more than he lets on, and ultimately, the citizens of Kiri are his people. They’re the ones who know what it means to grow up with one leg on land and the other in the ocean. The ones who know what it means to start with nothing and to fight tooth and nail to make something of themselves in a world actively conspiring against them.

Kisame would tell him if he asked. They make an effort not to keep secrets. It’s something he asked for very early on in their relationship. His lack of vision blinds him enough already, he doesn’t want to fail to see what’s right under his nose because someone, much less his partner, decided to capitalise on that. But he won’t ask about this. Illegal as it was, he doesn’t think he could ever incriminate Kisame for doing what he could the best way he knew how.

His father would say otherwise. Perhaps, Shisui also. But what difference is there really between Kisame’s actions and the past his family is so proud of?

“We’re here, sweetheart,” Kisame announces brightly, drawing them to stop with a light tug of his hand.

He doesn’t know how long they’ve been walking. Can’t recall how many steps he’s taken since they left the car to make the steep trek down to the beach. Standing on the stony sands outside of what used to be Kisame’s family home, he is overwhelmed by the ocean, raging and spitting in the bay before them.

It’s loud. So much louder than what he thought it would be, particularly on a calm day like today. And there is such a variety of sounds coming from it. The crass hiss of waves crashing fiercely against the reef some distance out. The subdued susurration of the surf churning the sand along the shoreline. Even the birds, seagulls squawking obnoxiously from broken masts and the frightened trills of those nesting in the piles of debris washed ashore, disturbed by their presence and making sure they know they’re not welcome. Painted by all he can hear and aided by Kisame’s vivid descriptions, the scenery around them is clear. He finds he doesn’t need his eyes to see it in his mind.

“It takes your breath away, don’t it?” Kisame prompts from a short distance to his right. He, too, sounds humbled by the sea, but his tone is fond.

He forgets sometimes that Kisame grew up with this right outside of his front doorstep. Was lulled to sleep every night by the sound of the tides changing, beckoning from outside his bedroom window.

“It really does,” he murmurs, in awe of the atmosphere around them—the way he can feel it so distinctly without having to see it. Closing his eyes, he tilts his head up to the sky and breathes in deeply, tasting the salt in the moisture in the air. The mist is thicker than when they first arrived, damp in his mouth and where it sweeps over the panes of his face, as if any minute now it will morph into a heavy rain. “I can understand why you miss it.”

“She’s my first love, the sea. Makes sense that I’d introduce you to her one day, eh?”

Itachi smiles, tilting his head towards the other man. Even with the eye drops he was prescribed, his vision has continued to deteriorate. What little abstract notions of light he could still make out a year ago, are now few and far between. The shadowed curves of raindrops rolling down a window pane in the dark. But he’s become so attuned to Kisame’s voice, his laughter and the burly warmth that so often encompasses his presence, he’s learned exactly where to find him in his persistent darkness.

“I’m glad you did.”

Somewhere behind them, there is a gentle rattle of iron as the mist in the air suddenly coalesces into a light rain. Jewelled droplets of moisture perspire on his skin and start to run in rivulets down his throat, soaking into his shirt, strung over his collar bones like a thread of cool glass beads and dripping from the hinge of his jaw like stubborn tears.

“Damn,” Kisame swears, but he’s laughing. Great and boisterous belts of it that rise up in waves above the drumming beat of rain on rusted tin and the swollen bellowing of the ocean. A warm hand snatches up one of Itachi’s and tugs him into a fumbling jog, the closest thing to running he can manage when he can’t see the ground under him.

“Kisame!” he splutters, tripping over his own two feet in the sand. His arms flail, pulling awkwardly on Kisame’s hand, as he struggles to keep himself upright.

“Sorry, darlin’,” Kisame chuckles, and Itachi can hear his grin. Can picture the graphic slice of it, all fierce, cheek-splitting joy and white, white teeth, bright in the cinereal wasteland all around them. “‘C’mere. I’ve got a better idea.”

The hand clutched in his shakes off his grip, only to grasp his waist firmly instead. He knows immediately what Kisame plans to do, but he barely manages an undignified squawk before he is hoisted up into the air, his feet dangling uselessly away from the stability, and is draped over Kisame’s shoulder like a sack of flour.

“Kisame!” he protests, but his objection is botched by his own laughter. It bubbles out of him in breathy huffs, broken up into short wheezes of it every time Kisame’s wide steps leave him winded, the broad press of the other man’s shoulder jarring against his ribcage and the softness of his stomach as they move. “You—”

“Sorry, love,” Kisame teases. “I’ll put you down in a minute.”

Itachi smacks his low back, his stomach swooping as they bounce up what feels like a couple of stairs. The sluice of rain bearing down on them disappears when the ground becomes level again, but the sound of it echoes far louder in his ears. Somewhere above them, there’s now a rooftop over their heads. As he’s lowered back onto his feet, a warm weight settles over his shoulders. Kisame’s coat, the collar slightly damp and perfumed with the lingering spice of kretek cigarettes. Grabbing at the lapels with his cold hands, he draws it tight around himself and scooches back against Kisame’s chest.

Kisame grazes his hands down his arms, intently rubbing the chill from his skin.

“I’d let you feel what this place looks like, but the walls are pretty grotty. Better not touch ‘em. I don’t reckon anyone’s been in here since I left.”

“This is your childhood home?” he asks, peering around to see if he can catch any semblance of light. He can’t. Not even a momentary flicker.

“Sure is, though she’s quite a bit more rundown since I saw her last. Can’t say I’m surprised. It’s been more than a few years since then.”

“When did you leave?”

“I was nineteen. My Ma had just passed away. It was an altercation at the market in town, would you believe? All those years out on the ocean, taming the high seas and swimmin’ with sharks, and she died gettin’ knifed on a busy street by some desperate bastard stealin’ food she would have given ‘em for free. It still makes me mad just thinkin’ about it.”

Itachi drops his head back to rest against Kisame’s shoulder. “I would have liked to meet her.”

Kisame grins into Itachi’s hair. “She woulda’ loved you, darlin’. Probably woulda’ thought you too good for me, too. I’ll take you out to see her someday. We buried her out at sea so we’ll need a boat and some decent weather, but it ain’t a long trip. It’s about time I went out to pay my respects myself.”

“You truly haven’t been back in so long?”

“Not once. It probably makes me sound like a terrible son, but–” he shrugs, jostling the back of Itachi’s skull slightly with the movement. “You know, at one point I thought I could make somethin’ of what my Pops taught me here. Be a creator—a maker of weapons, rather than just a dirty ol’ dealer. But in the real world, men don't want swords or pretty blades. They want guns. Cleaner hands that way—or at least, the illusion of ‘em.”

He scoffs. “So, I had to leave and learn a new trade. If the old man ever learned that I went into dealin’ arms, he’d probably be disappointed. Hell, maybe he did. I wouldn’t know. I ain’t heard from him in years.”

“He’s alive?”

With the way Kisame has always spoken about his parents, he’d thought them both dead, not estranged. It would seem that disappointed fathers no longer present in their lives are something they have in common.

“He was the last time I was here. Who can say what’s happened since then. We fell out of touch a long time ago, and I admit, I ain’t in no hurry to bridge that gap.”

“We can both bear the mantle of having disappointed our fathers then.”

Kisame laughs, hunching his spine to knock his forehead gently against Itachi’s crown. “That’s true. I remember what my Ma taught me, though. Fuck, she’d have my head if I ever forgot—even twelve years in the grave. With the way Kiri was goin’ back then, there was no future in it. But now? Who’s to say? Things are changin’ for the better, and people always need to eat. So close to the ocean, the fishing industry’s bound to pick back up eventually.”

“Would you go back to it if you could?”

“If I can make a clean break from dealin’ arms, I wouldn’t mind it. Been a long time since I’ve been out on a boat. Too long.” He tilts his head slightly against Itachi’s own. “What do you say, sweetheart? You, me and a little house by the sea in say twenty or thirty odd years from now? Call it a retirement plan.”

Itachi’s breath catches in his throat. In the ribbed confines of his chest, his heart flutters, swiftly exhausting itself like a moth caught in a glass jar. For the vast majority of his life, the expectations placed upon him have hung over him like a guillotine. They have sliced away anything that didn’t fit into the mould made for him. Cut loose anything he dared admit that he wanted if it didn’t match up with what his father did—what was best for the firm and the people around him. There have been too many occasions where he denied himself because he didn’t feel like he was allowed to want anything. To want at all. Even now, with his blindness and Kisame’s influence freeing him from so many obligations, he still doesn’t really know what he wants. Not from his education. His family. Not even from himself.

But this, this he wants. He wants it all. The house with walls that shudder in strong swells like window panes in a hurricane, and the carpet that’s gritty with sand and peels back from the skirting boards every few months because of the salt in the air. The fervent mist that greets him every time he ventures outside with all the wet-mouthed enthusiasm of an over-eager auntie kissing his cheeks at a family gathering. The roar of the ocean always right there on his doorstep, blanketing him with solid noise throughout his ink-dark days and nights, constantly reminding him where he is with every violent surrender against the shore. And Kisame, maybe no longer carrying the explosive scent of hot gunpowder, the cutting sharpness of treated metal, but saturated with that of the sun and the sea instead. Kisame, with new callouses burned onto his hands by thick coils of rope and rigging, and fish scales flecking his palms like harvest moons. Kisame, sprawled out on the sand, an ice-cold beer in one hand, the other threading sweetly through Itachi’s long hair. Just Kisame, Kisame, Kisame, and this crescent of warmth they have carved out entirely for themselves.

He rakes through the darkness encasing him with his empty eyes, unearthing the shadows for an answer that won’t taint this ease between them the way an oil spill culls the brisk blue of ocean water. Won’t weigh heavily in his mouth, cutting into his tongue with the quiet violence of a glass shard slipped into a drink left unattended at a bar. An innocuous threat of ruin.

“That sounds an awful lot like a proposal,” he hedges, and his voice is too thick for it to masquerade as a joke. The press of his spine against Kisame’s front is too tense for him to pretend he is anything less than desperate—that he doesn’t want this more than he knows what to do with. He is a beetle on his back, waiting for the severing snap of a beak, the crush of the boot.

Only Kisame chuckles, the sound coarse and hitched with an edge of nervousness he’s never once heard mar the other man’s tone. His huge hands shift agitatedly down Itachi’s arms once again, the friction at once rubbing warmth into and soothing his cold, anxious bones, and he scuffs the sharp edge of his jaw restlessly over Itachi’s scalp.

“I suppose it is a proposal of sorts. I’m sorry it ain’t very flashy or even very planned, but I’d be happy to spend the rest of our lives like this. Just you and me, walks up the beach, sittin’ by the ocean, trips out on a boat. I know we’ve both got our hands full with other things at the moment—probably will for a long while yet—and I wouldn’t exactly call Kiri safe as houses just yet, but eventually, I’d like to settle here. Maybe fix up this old house. It probably ain’t the future you ever dreamed of havin’, but I reckon it’d be pretty damn peaceful, and I’d like to share it with you, ‘Tachi, if you’d like that?”

Itachi steps out of Kisame’s embrace just long enough to twist around. He crowds close to Kisame’s front and reaches upwards, tentatively feeling for Kisame’s face in the dark. His fingertips graze the stubbled edge of his jaw, rough like shark skin against his own, and once certain that he’s not at risk of poking the other man in the eye, he takes Kisame’s face in his hands and rises up to stand on his toes to kiss him soundly.

“I’d love that,” he murmurs, enraptured, relishing the way Kisame lingers close even as he pulls away, lowering his feet to the ground. The other man’s lips chase after him, dancing over his cheek, the crinkled corner of his left eye and the sensitive shell of his left ear, as if he can’t bear to let him go too far from him at this moment. Itachi didn’t think a person could ever be so full of delight. So overwrought by happiness. This overwhelming sense of belonging is what he has been starving for. It makes the meagre scraps of acceptance filched from stilted meals at his family home and dished out with his father’s uniform praises seem so miniscule, even unrewarding.

Kisame is his family now, too. Kisame is his home.

“You would? Truly?”

Kisame sounds surprised. Itachi can’t fathom how he thought he would say anything else. The only foundations for a life of his own he’s ever laid out reside in Kisame’s hands. In the earnestness of his expression when he first told Itachi to take his life in his own two hands—Do it for yourself. Because this is your life you’re letting go. Not theirs—then stood at his side while he tried his best to do just that. As if he could want for anything other than this.

“Of course, I would, Kisame. I’ve only been using your family name for the past year. As you once told me, I’m right where I want to be.”

Rapt laughter echoes off the walls around them, relieved and overjoyed—the sun on the sea—and suddenly, Itachi is being swept off his feet once again. Kisame embraces him tightly, stirring up dust moats as he whirls him around, his strong hands pressed firmly just below his shoulder blades, holding him close and foot or so off the ground. With their bodies tucked so close together, his face is smushed a little awkwardly over the other man’s chest, but he clutches Kisame against him just as tightly.

Even damp and dusty as they are, there is no place he’d rather be.

“Let’s make you a Hoshigaki for real then.”