linking arms, sinking hearts (1/2)
(I'm finally giving up and posting this because it's been sitting around for MONTHS. More Western. Enjoy? xD;)
“I’m getting married.”
The words don’t hit Shisui for a minute. He’s not sure if that’s because he doesn’t want to hear them or because they’re so batfuck crazy his head just is flat out refusing to let them in.
Maybe it’s a little of both.
Either way, willfully ignorant can only work for so long, Shisui knows it better’n most, so finally he just says “The fuck?”
“Eloquent as always,” Itachi says, but it’s not the way he normally says it. Shisui’s gotten used to the sheriff’s digs at his vocabulary and whatnot, to the point where he realized it wasn’t actually Itachi making fun of him so much as Itachi being a dipshit and acting all-fond, okay? There isn’t really another word for it, because if there was Shisui’d definitely be using that instead, but there isn’t. It’s fondness. And it’s all the things they don’t say.
Anyway. This ain’t like that. This is short and sharp and mean, in a way Shisui’s never had reason to associate with Itachi before. It throws him off.
“What, you drop a bomb like that and think I’m gonna be eloquent?” he shoots back.
Itachi gives him an infuriating little shrug. “No, I suppose not.”
Which brings them back around to the original issue. “Married, Itachi? Married? What the fuck? When’d that happen?”
“Last week,” Itachi says. He’s made himself busy straightening up the papers strewn all over his desk, which makes Shisui want to sweep them all onto the floor, but he’s not a kid anymore so he doesn’t. If barely. “I received a letter from my father. He believes that, given my position here and Sasuke’s impending graduation, as well as his own…ambitions, now would be an opportune time to propose.”
“To who?” Shisui demands. It’s easier than laughing himself into hysterics because Fugaku Fucking Uchiha is the most Machiavellian manipulative shit he’s ever had the misfortune to know.
“Her name is Amane,” Itachi replies coolly. “Her father owns a bank in the city. We’ve met in the past and gotten along reasonably well. I am not certain whether we would return here to live after the wedding, although I believe we will.” Seeing Shisui’s slack-jawed disbelief and misinterpreting it (probably on purpose, the bastard), he adds, “Do not worry. My deputies will handle things admirably in my absence, I have no doubt.”
That wasn’t what I was thinking about and you know it, you fuck, Shisui thinks, but he doesn’t say it.
“I don’t give a shit who she is,” he says instead.
Itachi pauses in his shuffling. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”
“Hell is that supposed to mean?”
A sigh. “What do you want from me, Shisui?”
That wasn’t where this was supposed to go. Shisui stumbles. “I’m not allowed to be curious? You never said anything.”
“I didn’t think it was any of your business.”
“Wasn’t-”
Shisui bites himself off before he can let on how fucking pissed off that statement makes him. Casual. Like there was never any doubt. Like none of this has anything to do with him at all. “You didn’t think it’d be worth a mention? ‘Hey, I’m gonna fuck off for a couple weeks to go marry my girl-oh, yeah, I have a girl, did that ever come up? Well, see ya when I come back with my firstborn kid.’ Something like that.”
“I didn’t have a girl,” Itachi says, then stops, like he didn’t mean to say it. “I wasn’t…”
He looks Shisui in the eye, finally, but it’s hard and it’s tired. “I wouldn’t.”
And Shisui gets it.
Well, not so much gets it as gets Itachi. Gets that he’s always had that whole honor, fall-on-your-sword thing going on. It makes him a damned idealistic idiot, and also a surprisingly decent sheriff.
It also means that he’d never sleep with Shisui if he were with someone else. Bent or no.
And then the implications of that sink in. “So that’s it,” Shisui hears himself say. “We’re done.”
“We’re done,” Itachi echoes, nodding once. There’s a twitch around his mouth that might’ve turned into a smile in some other place. “It has been…illuminating.”
Wish I could say the same, Shisui thinks, because he feels more confused than he ever has.
Itachi’s eyes drop back down to those fucking papers. He gathers them all up and puts them in a worn-down leather case, neat as you please, like a train ride won’t knock them out of order in half a second flat, and the movement shakes Shisui out of stillness.
“You leaving?”
“First thing in the morning,” Itachi answers. He snaps the case shut.
Shisui wants to say something smart, something-he doesn’t even fucking know what. Something that’ll ground everything that feels like it’s coming unmoored right now. But because this is his life and he’s a complete fuckup he just ends up repeating himself.
“I don’t give a shit who she is. I don’t want you to marry her.”
Itachi looks up real sharp. His eyes narrow. Shisui figures too late that he was waiting for this, waiting for a fight, and Shisui just handed it to him.
“Why? Why do you care?” Itachi asks, cold like they don’t even know each other from Adam. “We are not friends, Shisui. You have made it abundantly clear that what we-that whatever we did, it was strictly casual. A release.” His mouth goes tight. “Why should you have any say whatsoever in what I decide to do with my life?”
And see, Shisui could say a lot of things here. He could make fun of the notion that Itachi’s the one choosing anything, because it sounds a helluva lot like Fugaku’s the one pulling all the strings, but that would just get him hit.
He could tell Itachi that he only ever backed off because he was fucking terrified of being sucked any deeper into his orbit, but he’s pretty sure Itachi wouldn’t believe him. Also, he’d rather cut his own chest open than admit it.
Or he could say that he didn’t want to see Itachi hurt. That he knew their situation had always been balanced on a knife’s edge and that there was no place for people like them in the world.
That Shisui had never thought he’d be stupid enough to hope, and that he’d ended up hoping anyway.
But he doesn’t say any of that. The words won’t come; his tongue and his throat and his head stop working in tandem because they’re all screaming different things, and buried somewhere underneath it all is another voice that he can barely hear-
“I just don’t,” is what he mumbles, weak and ineffective and not anywhere close to enough. Inadequate, to use Itachi’s fancy-ass words. And they both know it.
The disappointment in Itachi’s eyes is what does it. He picks up his case and turns to walk right out of Shisui’s life the way he walked into it, sudden and strange and tipping everything off-kilter, and just like that all the clamoring voices in Shisui’s head fall away. All that’s left is the one buried down deep where he could’ve pretended to ignore it, before. The one he tried so fucking hard not to hear.
I don’t want you to go.
He’s going to say it. Fuck feeling exposed or feeling like an idiot or knowing it’s gonna come back later and bite him in the ass, Shisui’s going to say it and not have any regrets either way. He’s going to say it. The words are in his mouth.
“Itachi-”
Itachi stops with his hand on the door handle.
He’s going to say it, and then he remembers Sasuke saying he deserves better. Not nasty or anything. Like it was just a fact.
Because it was.
The words are still in his mouth, but Shisui chokes on them.
He thinks he sees Itachi’s shoulders sink before he opens the door and leaves through it, but he’s not sure.
.
Shisui’s not anything close to a stranger at the bar, but once he’s downed three shots in as many minutes and is eyeing up the rest of the bottle even Anko is looking concerned.
“You okay, Shi?” she asks.
He snorts. “Fuckin’ peachy.”
“’Cause you look like shit. And like hell.” She considers. “Like you went to hell and it shit you right back out. That’s how bad you look.”
Shisui can’t even muster the energy to be offended. “Can always count on you for a cheerin’ up, Anko.”
Anko looks like she wants to say something else, but she doesn’t. Instead she fills his glass up again, adding, “This one’s on me.”
He raises the glass to her and knocks it back in one gulp. The burn is good. It edges all the way down his throat, settles in his stomach in a pool of heat.
And it does fuck-all to help him forget the shit he’s gone and quagmired himself in.
It’s probably not good that Shisui wants to kill some girl he’s never actually met. Actually, scratch that, it’s definitely not good. It’s pretty fucking bad, and not just because acting on the impulse would get him hung for sure no matter if it was Fugaku or Itachi or God Himself doing the judging.
It’s fucking bad because it says way more about Shisui’s-he doesn’t wanna say “feelings” because that sounds fucking bent even to him, but there’s nothing else for it, is there? He’s fucked. He’s fucked for Itachi and he knows it, he just wishes he didn't.
He doesn’t want him to go. He doesn’t want him to disappear and get married and go back to the city, he doesn’t want him to have some easy-living job (or worse, the same shit job and him always being in Shisui’s line of sight when Shisui can’t do a damn thing about it), doesn’t want him to have seven kids and a wife he says he loves, because Shisui’s selfish and he hates liars. But mostly he’s just selfish.
He’d take that, though. He’d take being selfish and a drain on everyone around him and every other thing people’ve ever said bad about him, words he’s knocked teeth out for in the past. He’d take all of it if it meant Itachi stayed here with him. And he knows that says it all. Spells out every reason why he’s fucked eight ways to Sunday and back.
The worst part, Shisui thinks morosely, is that she’s probably really nice. Gorgeous too; the Uchiha heir wouldn’t merit anything less than abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous, right? No shit.
And Itachi would love her.
Shisui feels like he knows that when he’s got no right to think he does, but he does. He knows Itachi would love her and keep her safe and have fucking stunning kids with her-because he felt duty bound to it if nothing else.
But even that’s easier than thinking he’d fall in love with her proper, like everything with Shisui had been a bit of rebellion. An indiscretion for the golden boy to get out of his system before he went back to the path everyone expected him to follow from the beginning.
Shisui stands up so fast he knocks the barstool backwards and sways on his feet for a second.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, putting the stool to rights.
“Shisui,” Anko starts, but he waves her off. He’s got other places to be.
Even piss-drunk Shisui could still find his way to the whorehouse blindfolded. It’s weird, though, he realizes when he’s waltzing through the front door-he hasn’t dragged himself over here for a fuck in months, not since-
Not since he got picked up by a couple of deputies who dumped him in a cell and left him thinking he’d have to deal with Fugaku, when it was actually Fugaku’s kid who showed up and flipped everything upside-down.
He shakes the thought off like he’s a dog with fleas and puts on his best smile for the landlady. He knows the whole song and dance by heart; it’s easy to get impatient with it, but Shisui normally doesn’t. He’s a patient kinda guy when he has to be.
Except now he’s more than a little drunk and maybe a little heartbroken and probably not drowning in subtlety so much as whiskey. Which he figures he’ll regret in the morning, but not now, not when there’s a dark-eyed guy on his arm leading him upstairs. Not now.
He can go back to hating his life later.
.
“I’m getting married.”
The words don’t hit Shisui for a minute. He’s not sure if that’s because he doesn’t want to hear them or because they’re so batfuck crazy his head just is flat out refusing to let them in.
Maybe it’s a little of both.
Either way, willfully ignorant can only work for so long, Shisui knows it better’n most, so finally he just says “The fuck?”
“Eloquent as always,” Itachi says, but it’s not the way he normally says it. Shisui’s gotten used to the sheriff’s digs at his vocabulary and whatnot, to the point where he realized it wasn’t actually Itachi making fun of him so much as Itachi being a dipshit and acting all-fond, okay? There isn’t really another word for it, because if there was Shisui’d definitely be using that instead, but there isn’t. It’s fondness. And it’s all the things they don’t say.
Anyway. This ain’t like that. This is short and sharp and mean, in a way Shisui’s never had reason to associate with Itachi before. It throws him off.
“What, you drop a bomb like that and think I’m gonna be eloquent?” he shoots back.
Itachi gives him an infuriating little shrug. “No, I suppose not.”
Which brings them back around to the original issue. “Married, Itachi? Married? What the fuck? When’d that happen?”
“Last week,” Itachi says. He’s made himself busy straightening up the papers strewn all over his desk, which makes Shisui want to sweep them all onto the floor, but he’s not a kid anymore so he doesn’t. If barely. “I received a letter from my father. He believes that, given my position here and Sasuke’s impending graduation, as well as his own…ambitions, now would be an opportune time to propose.”
“To who?” Shisui demands. It’s easier than laughing himself into hysterics because Fugaku Fucking Uchiha is the most Machiavellian manipulative shit he’s ever had the misfortune to know.
“Her name is Amane,” Itachi replies coolly. “Her father owns a bank in the city. We’ve met in the past and gotten along reasonably well. I am not certain whether we would return here to live after the wedding, although I believe we will.” Seeing Shisui’s slack-jawed disbelief and misinterpreting it (probably on purpose, the bastard), he adds, “Do not worry. My deputies will handle things admirably in my absence, I have no doubt.”
That wasn’t what I was thinking about and you know it, you fuck, Shisui thinks, but he doesn’t say it.
“I don’t give a shit who she is,” he says instead.
Itachi pauses in his shuffling. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”
“Hell is that supposed to mean?”
A sigh. “What do you want from me, Shisui?”
That wasn’t where this was supposed to go. Shisui stumbles. “I’m not allowed to be curious? You never said anything.”
“I didn’t think it was any of your business.”
“Wasn’t-”
Shisui bites himself off before he can let on how fucking pissed off that statement makes him. Casual. Like there was never any doubt. Like none of this has anything to do with him at all. “You didn’t think it’d be worth a mention? ‘Hey, I’m gonna fuck off for a couple weeks to go marry my girl-oh, yeah, I have a girl, did that ever come up? Well, see ya when I come back with my firstborn kid.’ Something like that.”
“I didn’t have a girl,” Itachi says, then stops, like he didn’t mean to say it. “I wasn’t…”
He looks Shisui in the eye, finally, but it’s hard and it’s tired. “I wouldn’t.”
And Shisui gets it.
Well, not so much gets it as gets Itachi. Gets that he’s always had that whole honor, fall-on-your-sword thing going on. It makes him a damned idealistic idiot, and also a surprisingly decent sheriff.
It also means that he’d never sleep with Shisui if he were with someone else. Bent or no.
And then the implications of that sink in. “So that’s it,” Shisui hears himself say. “We’re done.”
“We’re done,” Itachi echoes, nodding once. There’s a twitch around his mouth that might’ve turned into a smile in some other place. “It has been…illuminating.”
Wish I could say the same, Shisui thinks, because he feels more confused than he ever has.
Itachi’s eyes drop back down to those fucking papers. He gathers them all up and puts them in a worn-down leather case, neat as you please, like a train ride won’t knock them out of order in half a second flat, and the movement shakes Shisui out of stillness.
“You leaving?”
“First thing in the morning,” Itachi answers. He snaps the case shut.
Shisui wants to say something smart, something-he doesn’t even fucking know what. Something that’ll ground everything that feels like it’s coming unmoored right now. But because this is his life and he’s a complete fuckup he just ends up repeating himself.
“I don’t give a shit who she is. I don’t want you to marry her.”
Itachi looks up real sharp. His eyes narrow. Shisui figures too late that he was waiting for this, waiting for a fight, and Shisui just handed it to him.
“Why? Why do you care?” Itachi asks, cold like they don’t even know each other from Adam. “We are not friends, Shisui. You have made it abundantly clear that what we-that whatever we did, it was strictly casual. A release.” His mouth goes tight. “Why should you have any say whatsoever in what I decide to do with my life?”
And see, Shisui could say a lot of things here. He could make fun of the notion that Itachi’s the one choosing anything, because it sounds a helluva lot like Fugaku’s the one pulling all the strings, but that would just get him hit.
He could tell Itachi that he only ever backed off because he was fucking terrified of being sucked any deeper into his orbit, but he’s pretty sure Itachi wouldn’t believe him. Also, he’d rather cut his own chest open than admit it.
Or he could say that he didn’t want to see Itachi hurt. That he knew their situation had always been balanced on a knife’s edge and that there was no place for people like them in the world.
That Shisui had never thought he’d be stupid enough to hope, and that he’d ended up hoping anyway.
But he doesn’t say any of that. The words won’t come; his tongue and his throat and his head stop working in tandem because they’re all screaming different things, and buried somewhere underneath it all is another voice that he can barely hear-
“I just don’t,” is what he mumbles, weak and ineffective and not anywhere close to enough. Inadequate, to use Itachi’s fancy-ass words. And they both know it.
The disappointment in Itachi’s eyes is what does it. He picks up his case and turns to walk right out of Shisui’s life the way he walked into it, sudden and strange and tipping everything off-kilter, and just like that all the clamoring voices in Shisui’s head fall away. All that’s left is the one buried down deep where he could’ve pretended to ignore it, before. The one he tried so fucking hard not to hear.
I don’t want you to go.
He’s going to say it. Fuck feeling exposed or feeling like an idiot or knowing it’s gonna come back later and bite him in the ass, Shisui’s going to say it and not have any regrets either way. He’s going to say it. The words are in his mouth.
“Itachi-”
Itachi stops with his hand on the door handle.
He’s going to say it, and then he remembers Sasuke saying he deserves better. Not nasty or anything. Like it was just a fact.
Because it was.
The words are still in his mouth, but Shisui chokes on them.
He thinks he sees Itachi’s shoulders sink before he opens the door and leaves through it, but he’s not sure.
.
Shisui’s not anything close to a stranger at the bar, but once he’s downed three shots in as many minutes and is eyeing up the rest of the bottle even Anko is looking concerned.
“You okay, Shi?” she asks.
He snorts. “Fuckin’ peachy.”
“’Cause you look like shit. And like hell.” She considers. “Like you went to hell and it shit you right back out. That’s how bad you look.”
Shisui can’t even muster the energy to be offended. “Can always count on you for a cheerin’ up, Anko.”
Anko looks like she wants to say something else, but she doesn’t. Instead she fills his glass up again, adding, “This one’s on me.”
He raises the glass to her and knocks it back in one gulp. The burn is good. It edges all the way down his throat, settles in his stomach in a pool of heat.
And it does fuck-all to help him forget the shit he’s gone and quagmired himself in.
It’s probably not good that Shisui wants to kill some girl he’s never actually met. Actually, scratch that, it’s definitely not good. It’s pretty fucking bad, and not just because acting on the impulse would get him hung for sure no matter if it was Fugaku or Itachi or God Himself doing the judging.
It’s fucking bad because it says way more about Shisui’s-he doesn’t wanna say “feelings” because that sounds fucking bent even to him, but there’s nothing else for it, is there? He’s fucked. He’s fucked for Itachi and he knows it, he just wishes he didn't.
He doesn’t want him to go. He doesn’t want him to disappear and get married and go back to the city, he doesn’t want him to have some easy-living job (or worse, the same shit job and him always being in Shisui’s line of sight when Shisui can’t do a damn thing about it), doesn’t want him to have seven kids and a wife he says he loves, because Shisui’s selfish and he hates liars. But mostly he’s just selfish.
He’d take that, though. He’d take being selfish and a drain on everyone around him and every other thing people’ve ever said bad about him, words he’s knocked teeth out for in the past. He’d take all of it if it meant Itachi stayed here with him. And he knows that says it all. Spells out every reason why he’s fucked eight ways to Sunday and back.
The worst part, Shisui thinks morosely, is that she’s probably really nice. Gorgeous too; the Uchiha heir wouldn’t merit anything less than abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous, right? No shit.
And Itachi would love her.
Shisui feels like he knows that when he’s got no right to think he does, but he does. He knows Itachi would love her and keep her safe and have fucking stunning kids with her-because he felt duty bound to it if nothing else.
But even that’s easier than thinking he’d fall in love with her proper, like everything with Shisui had been a bit of rebellion. An indiscretion for the golden boy to get out of his system before he went back to the path everyone expected him to follow from the beginning.
Shisui stands up so fast he knocks the barstool backwards and sways on his feet for a second.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, putting the stool to rights.
“Shisui,” Anko starts, but he waves her off. He’s got other places to be.
Even piss-drunk Shisui could still find his way to the whorehouse blindfolded. It’s weird, though, he realizes when he’s waltzing through the front door-he hasn’t dragged himself over here for a fuck in months, not since-
Not since he got picked up by a couple of deputies who dumped him in a cell and left him thinking he’d have to deal with Fugaku, when it was actually Fugaku’s kid who showed up and flipped everything upside-down.
He shakes the thought off like he’s a dog with fleas and puts on his best smile for the landlady. He knows the whole song and dance by heart; it’s easy to get impatient with it, but Shisui normally doesn’t. He’s a patient kinda guy when he has to be.
Except now he’s more than a little drunk and maybe a little heartbroken and probably not drowning in subtlety so much as whiskey. Which he figures he’ll regret in the morning, but not now, not when there’s a dark-eyed guy on his arm leading him upstairs. Not now.
He can go back to hating his life later.
.