While the Dark Earth Spins: A fic for you! Part 1/3
Hi!
I'm Lute, and I've been a lurker here since God knows when, but finally I have something to post here and share and it's ACTUAL FIC. I thought I'd post it here, even though it's actually been complete and up on my Ao3 and fanfiction pages (under the name lutelyre) for a few months, because I was kicking around the Itachi/Shisui fandom this week and was like AHHH bitter nakano is so awesome I should share my fic there.
I haven't been here in a while, so I don't know how active this community is/how people will like this fic, but I thought I'd post anyway. :D
It's entirely not canon compliant by the way, I just kind of go my own way entirely. Itachi is older here than in canon, and Shisui is in ANBU too. Wow. I hope you all enjoy!
Title: While the Dark Earth Spins
Rating: M for slight slash and referneces to violence, bloodshed, murder etc.
Warnings: Angst level 1000, cliche-ness, Shisui goes to Kiri, references to genocide, murder, bloodshed, slashiness
“The world works in mysterious ways.”
Shisui’s voice brushes against Itachi’s skin, a vibration in his ears. He is casual, lackadaisical, humor trickling through his tone.
Shisui is being cliche again.
Catchphrases and taglines and epic war cries are frivolous and tacky. Itachi has no time for them. Frankly, Itachi thought Shisui would’ve known better than to try such a weak line with him.
He is not so gullible. Nothing frivolous has a place in Itachi’s scarlet-laced mindset, and he doesn’t understand why things that don’t belong seem to work their way in, worm themselves under the cracks.
Things like Shisui’s smile, for instance, as it stretches across his face, a gash of shadow sprinkled with sun. Lackadaisical.
They are lying on the bank of the Nakano river, green grass hot and pale under afternoon sun-glare and cushioning Itachi’s skin pleasantly as he lets himself sit for a moment that is blissful but not truly relaxing, because Itachi doesn't remember the last time he really breathed without feeling something hard and tight constrict in his chest.
The sun beats heat down on them in heavy drum beats. It is summer, fluid and mosaic and pulsating in the slight breeze that rolls over their clothes and flutters across closed eyelashes.
They’ve been lying out here for almost an hour, all of their self-designated lunch break, and Itachi’s sweat drips down his cheeks slides off his nose and collects at his temples in salty droplets.
“Ahh ‘Tachi, you just think I’m being silly, don’t you?”
Shisui is speaking again, and Itachi likes to listen to Shisui talk, so he breaks his quiet reverie on the sparking light refracting off the river to focus on Shisui’s face, whose hair is tumbled with bits of grass, eyes half-closed in drowsiness and lips quirked with a question he inevitably already knows the answer too.
Itachi forces the slack muscles in his tongue to work. (What happened to the tightness, the focus always coiled like a spring? When Shisui and he bake under the sun here between missions, he sometimes feels boneless.)
“The world’s patterns aren’t my concern, Shisui.”
Itachi has a voice that always stays culturally soft and smoothly neutral, but Shisui laughs at him anyway, and the sound breaks from between his lips like shiny soap bubbles.
Shisui loves to rile him up.
“Sure, sure.” He drawls, slippery and lilting.
Shisui is always comfortable with himself, with his voice and his hands and the way he lies splayed in the grass like a cat stretching languidly under the sun.
Itachi, who has never been clumsy but never been entirely graceful either, a slightly puzzled deer in the headlights whenever faced with a situation he’s unable to cleanly address with mission focus, is decidedly not amused.
He stays clipped and pruned and closed together during clan gatherings, social occasions, family dinners. He’s never quite known what to do with his hands when not fighting, and Shisui’s attempts to show him have had varied success.
“Keep telling yourself that Itachi. One of these days I’ll dazzle you with my wit and creative use of puns. You’ll think I’m a really deep and soulful motherfucker.”
Itachi doesn’t bother to stop himself from snorting with thin amusement, and Shisui rolls over onto his stomach at the sound, a hint of triumph dancing merrily in his eyes.
“Did I get a laugh? Score number five for Uchiha Shisui today, folks. It’s shaping up to be a pretty decent day, huh?”
Itachi knows that Shisui isn’t talking about earlier that morning, when they’d been given an assignment to assassinate the newborn son of a high-ranking official who had started to plot against fire country’s daimyou. He definitely wasn’t talking about that.
The scroll with the mission details is sitting in Itachi’s bento box, carefully rolled up and marked with the most auspicious details needed to complete the mission cleanly. Itachi likes to keep the mission clean, even if his hands aren’t.
“You’d think Tachi, that by now you’d be warming up to my charm. Especially since we became ANBU. Big scary bat-spooks with our very own brand of nerdiness. You know everyone in the division is a sucker for a good bit of classical learning.”
He could be being sarcastic, but it was Shisui, so you never know. For all Itachi knew, the conversation he’d walked in on the other day with Shisui and one of their fellow team members wherein both shinobi seemed suspiciously flushed in the face and blatantly avoiding eye contact with Itachi, could’ve been nothing more than a lively spat about the different literary complexities between literature and Jiraiya-sama’s newest book release, as they had claimed. Kakashi-senpai would surely have been on the side of the Sannin.
Somehow, Itachi doubted it had been a strictly verbal conversation.
Shisui is the only one Itachi was ever unsure about. Everyone else falls into neat individual boxes with a swirl of red, but Shisui tended to continually break out of his.
Itachi considers wondering about it all a useless pastime. He much prefers to operate on factual evidence.
He had decided not to respond to Shisui’s comment, to maintain his dignity and poise about the whole thing, but words somehow fall out of his mouth anyway.
“I didn’t know Kakashi-senpai had that much interest in the subject.”
Shisui also has this strange habit of pulling sentences out of Itachi he’d never planned on saying, not even if captured and threatened interrogation.
Shisui really laughs, throws back his head and everything, and Itachi glances at him sideways, curious despite himself. Shisui’s eyes are crinkled in a tease.
“Well, I could say Kakashi really knows how to read someone, if I wanted to be crass.” He apparently can’t keep the innuendo from his overconfident, idiotically endearing tone anymore. Itachi shifts awkwardly, stiffening.
He is massively uncomfortable hearing about the numerous budding sexual exploits of his cousin. Thinking about it makes his neck hot, makes his chest tighten for reasons, reasons he doesn’t really want to have to face right this very moment.
“Our lunch break has end--” He is cut off mid sentence as Shisui appears in front of him, all laugh lines and messy hair and breath that smells like sweet pork dumplings.
“Hey, ‘Tachi. I don’t think I’m really that interested in Kakashi’s material, okay?” There is a small smile on his face, on his face with it’s winged eyes and those sharp cheekbones. One of his hands--dirt under his fingernails but Itachi decides he really doesn’t mind that, if it’s Shisui’s hand--comes up and pushes Itachi’s hair behind his ear.
Shisui, for all he’s only two years older, always seems like he knows exactly what Itachi is thinking, every single dip and turn and twist of his thoughts.
“Hmm.”
“You have the softest hair, did you know that?”
Itachi wonders how Shisui can leap like that, from teetering on bitter to raucously sweet, and finds his mouth twisting up without really thinking about it. His lips feel slick in the humidity.
Their lunch break is ending. Itachi straightens up, emerging from the kiln of sun and grass, reaffirming his scowl as he remembers the mission that waits for them later.
“Shisui, your jokes are not that amusing.”
Shisui squawks in mock indignation, but doesn’t bother really being offended. He knows Itachi too well, by now. Instead, he hauls himself up from the dirt and dips his chopsticks in his bento box, offering up to Itachi his last dumpling. His eyes are casually averted, but a shadow smile still plays over his thin lips.
Itachi considers ignoring the dumpling, but Shisui’s fingers beckon earnestly.
Itachi has always had trouble denying Shisui anything, from boyhood toys to extra shuriken to his heart. He notices the crust of dirt and dried blood around Shisui’s pink-white nails again and sighs, snapping up the offering briskly.
He is still a little too peeved to show gratitude, but the special thing about Shisui is that he has no expectations of Itachi, not for laughter at his humor or thanks for his gifts. He stretches like a gangly, contented cat and vaults to his feet instead of waiting for any acknowledgement.
Sometimes, Itachi thinks Shisui doesn’t wait for anything.
“It’s way too hot for this. I’m going to wash off.”
Even though they should be going to report back to HQ and really there is no excuse for wasting time, according to Itachi’s vigorous regimen, Shisui slings off his vest and shirt and wades into the shallows of the river, splashing his face.
Water drips along the almond-milk of his skin, mixing with sweat, and the humidity cloaked on his back sizzles against the rebellious chill of the river. Shisui smiles like the honed blade of a knife and calls jokingly for Itachi to join him, hands flicking water bullets towards the bank with half-hearted velocity.
Itachi ignores the call. He bites the dumpling, tastes sweet pork explode on his loose tongue, and is distracted and momentarily confused by the shimmer and sparkle of the sun refracting off droplets condensing on the sleek line of Shisui’s shoulders.
From this angle the sun floats right above Shisui’s head, and Itachi is briefly struck by the possibility of the two merging together; the sun falling and Shisui rising until they form one glowing, shivering entity.
Then he focuses again and the image is gone. He swallows. Wiping sweat from his forehead with the edge of his sleeve where the Uchiha fan symbol sways somberly, Itachi rises to his feet and turns. His limbs move slowly despite himself, still drowsy in the soupy air of a summer riverbank that has long since drowned him.
He hears Shisui laugh again and faces away, waits by the tree’s edge for his cousin to catch up.
He thinks of locked and calculated boxes and monochromatic red, of duty, of bleeding.
There is no room for confusion. There is no time.
X
Itachi has never remembered a time where he didn’t know Shisui. He supposes at one point they logically probably hadn’t met, but has no recollection of such a milky, half-formed era. Shisui came into Itachi’s life and person fully formed, and even though he doesn’t remember how, Itachi remembers snippets of childhood when he was a quiet, unassuming age of ten-sharpening kunai and shoving them into throats before bedtime-- and Shisui was a precocious twelve-year old genius already gaining favor in the clan.
Itachi remembers nightmares. There were no bodies of the dead floating in his dreams, no faceless figures, and no bloodied blades. He is well familiar with those and how they came to be, and Itachi has never been weak or fearful of death.
No, Itachi dreamt of barren, howling landscapes gutted by black rivers, gaping and stagnant, clotted with blood. His dreams scattered him on wild plains with no end in sight, flung him high into a steel-gray sky and dragged him down plunge into icy water--breaking and dying. Itachi wakes in spasms; violent paroxysms that arch his rickety spine from the narrow bed and make his skin glisten in a cold sweat.
Somehow one night, one of so many that he doesn’t remember if it’s the first or the fiftieth, Shisui is there.
Shisui’s voice is mellow, still boyishly high, warm and sleep-sweet. He reaches out, holding Itachi’s face in both hands, palm to cheek and fingers slipping through Itachi’s hair.
“Silly ‘Tachi. It’s not that hard to get to sleep y’know. Don’t you know how?”
(It’s a question Itachi never thought to ask himself, but now it repeats in a constant mantra through his head; Don’tyoudon’tyoudon’tyou... He might know the answer, but it always slips away, elusive as the first dew on flower petals. Itachi hasn’t slept now for a very, very long time.)
Itachi feels rough calluses on the palms holding his face together and sees Shisui’s eyes; slanted sharply and yet softer than a dove’s wing. He could melt into those eyes, melded grey-black and glowing.
That night Shisui settled comfortably into Itachi’s sheets, lanky bodies just beginning to stretch into full-grown limbs wrapped around each other, arms and legs gripping and grasping and tangling until he was curled around Itachi like a second skin, and with his chin resting on the crown of Itachi’s head, lips practically in his hair.
Itachi shivered and shook for a long time within the cave of Shisui’s body, fingers holding tight along the edges of Shisui’s ribs, and listened to the steady drone of Shisui’s heartbeats thumping steadily in his ear. Shisui murmured to him with sleepy yet insistent whispers, calm and slow-rocking as a mother’s croon;
“Shh. Don’t be scared. Don’t worry. Shhh. Let’s get some sleep, okay? I’m here.”
Itachi listened to the steady stream of words and the slogging beats of a foolish little boy’s heart until he could no longer distinguish between the two, and fell into sleep that was slow, and even, and pillow-soft.
.
After that, Shisui was always with him. Itachi fell nto bed and Shisui would be there, as if he had melted from the wall, or the sky. He reached out and touched Itachi’s face with tender, slightly hesitant hands, and asked if Itachi would mind Shisui here tonight.
Itachi never said no.
He would bury his face into Shisui’s chest, with his cheek against Shisui’s heartbeat as though he could fall into Shisui’s ribcage and stay there always, counting pulses of blood until he’d heard enough to stay asleep forever. Shisui curled around him and held him fast onto the bed, anchored.
Itachi knew the nightmares could never spit him into the sky if Shisui was holding him so tightly, and for the first time since he could remember his father teaching him how to grip a kunai, Itachi didn’t dream at all.
During those nights, Itachi thought he knew how to sleep. This was how to sleep, with Shisui next to him, breathing innocent puffs of air against his jaw.
He doesn’t know anymore if he was right, but you can always trick yourself, and Itachi is good at that, always has been..
This was how Shisui came to be. Itachi knows that those first few nights of shaking shoulders and whispered words are the ones where he knew Shisui best. On those nights, his world had only two astonishingly simple colors: the black of Shisui’s eyes and hair and inky sky through the window, and the soft fleece-gray of his blankets..
Of course, he doesn’t know those colors anymore. Mellow words and sleep-shine breath have no place in Itachi’s world.
Itachi lives in a world of crimson haze and blood-choked throats; first, always, and last.
X
When Itachi is twelve and Shisui still appears every night like clockwork to cast sleep spells;
Another mission stained with blood, another objective completed, and Itachi sprawled in his room at the compound, lying on his floor and staring at the ceiling.
It had been his first ANBU mission.
ANBU is a hard thing when you’re twelve. (It is a hard thing always, but at twelve, first solo assassination wearing the bone and mask; Itachi knows anything that he had left of a soul is gone, really gone.)
He can still feel the fine neck of the girl underneath his palms, snapping just so. Her spine had been still new and growing and far too easily twisted. It had barely taken chakra. He remembers wide blue eyes he didn’t look at, a wide smiling mouth turning down in fear he didn’t notice, and a single ribbon of blood he hadn’t tenderly wiped away.
The village had commanded and Itachi, armor still shiny-bright, had obeyed. The village had to be kept safe, had to be safe. There must never be another war in Konohagakure, ever. Itachi knows that.
It’s his duty to do the things that keep the village safe, whatever those things might be, and Itachi does it because he must. There is no other option.
There is no option of enemy shinobi infiltrating Konoha, no option of Sasuke’s baby fists having to hold a kunai before he holds chopsticks.
There is no option for anything else, twelve year old Itachi realizes, with the phantom memory of a girl-child’s skin under his fingertips. There is no place for anything else.
He acknowledges this fact, understands and files away the information in one of the neatly organized boxes hanging in his mind, and then rolls over and throws up violently, heaves of breath wreaking through his body and bile in his throat and salty tears spilling from squeezed eyes.
Shisui finds him. Shisui knew, and he’d been looking. Shisui always finds him.
(Shisui is the only one who ever knows and looks.)
Shisui croons softly in Itachi’s ear, voice low and lilting. He brushes Itachi’s sweaty hair back from where it’s plastered by sweat over his forehead, all of the spitfire fight and cut-throat tongue which usually keeps Shisui sharp as a finely balanced blade vanishing the second he slides open the door to Itachi’s room. Shisui holds him, because he is the only one who understands right now, and gives him water to wash out his mouth. Shisui whispers bedtime stories, ninja proverbs.
Itachi listens hard, shaking despite himself.
Shisui murmurs in his ear, holding Itachi against his own unsullied amour, black and white and freshly polished porcelain, and Itachi closes his eyes as he feels Shisui trace schematic patterns along his unsnapped spine.
X
Itachi has done a hundred ANBU missions. He doesn’t vomit anymore. Shisui has done two hundred ANBU missions. He vomits sometimes.
Itachi holds his head and give him sips of water, and when Shisui has smiled-- thin and wicked--and joked about something stupidly-- “I know I’m really fucking hot right now, so no need to remind me”-- and walked away whistling after ruffling Itachi’s hair, Itachi doesn’t think about the old proverb, because there is no point to the bedtime stories anymore.
Still, sometimes Itachi sketches random, looping designs over Shisui’s back while the his cousin heaves his body dry.
If you asked him about it, he would say that you've been misinformed, but Itachi has always been a good liar.