While the Dark Earth Spins Part 2/3
Hi! Livejournal has such awful length restrictions. Here is part 2!
Title: While the Dark Earth Spins part 2/3
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
Itachi hears they are sending Shisui away and his throat is suddenly tight and sore; a relentless, aching constriction that cracks his usually smoothly unwavering voice in half, almost desperately, when he asks his father why Shisui’s talents are being so fucking wasted. Why were they sending him to the remote, dangerously political hidden village of Kirikagure, why were they separating him from where he could bring the Uchiha clan name fame and power, banishing him.
Banishing him from Itachi.
Uchiha Fugaku’s mouth is hard, as it has always been hard, and his jaw is rigid, as it has always been rigid, and there is nothing Itachi wants more in that moment than to break that tightrope, steel cable of a line.
But he does not.
Itachi holds himself in check, heart racing as he bows his back in a stiff apology. Fugaku is dismissive, businesslike. He never has been anything but businesslike, for Itachi’s entire life.
“The village needs a skilled diplomat to secure the tender balance Kiri’s political uprisings have shaken and an ANBU captain in one. Shisui fits the job perfectly.” His eyes glint in the shadows appraisingly at this son, because Uchiha Fugaku always appraises his son instead of really seeing him, ever since that first moment a toddler Itachi had been caught slicing his face open playing with the family shuriken.
“There is to be no disgrace brought to him by seeming displeased about an honorable assignment, Itachi. Shisui does his duty to the clan.”
Itachi wants to scream at his father, to dig his nails deep into his skin. He wants to lift his shirt and trace his fingers spasmodically over the patterns of scars painted across his ribs, down his stomach, over his chest.
Itachi wants to lock onto his fathers unforgiving gaze and demand retribution: “These scars are the places where I have bled, the places my living soul has splashed onto my skin and burned out of duty to the clan. You say you love me, you love your son. Show me yours. Show me. Show me...”
But he does not.
Insubordination is pointless.
Instead, he leaves to find Shisui; black-eyed, velvet-voiced Shisui, who is packing travel bags that are too big.
Shisui doesn’t turn from his activities when Itachi slides open his door with a thud, but his hand flicks a kunai towards Itachi’s head.
Itachi snatches it from the air before it makes contact with his forehead and examines the newly minted metal and elegant silk cord wrapping. The ring at the base is polished to a gleam. It is finely made, well-wrought metal, elaborate scrolling along the edges.
A gift.
He throws it to the ground, buries its tip in tatami paneled floor with a satisfying crack. Shisui straightens over his packing.
When he turns, there is a smile on his face, dancing like the sun over that river they always were sitting by, just sitting and sitting and sitting.
“I take it you spoke to Fugaku-san.”
Itachi doesn’t dignify that with a response.
Shisui runs a long-fingered hand distractedly through the riot of his curls that refused to stay Uchiha smooth. They are almost more unruly than Sasuke’s, and the thought makes Itachi’s lips twitch. “I have to take the mission ‘Tachi. You know that. It’s a fucking pain, but I’ve got to.”
Shisui knows he has to. He doesn’t argue with the truth. (Itachi knows now that there was a time when Shisui did argue, when he threw a veritable hellstorm with his argument, and when he would’ve stopped at nothing to change the facts, to get his own way with that touchingly spoiled charm of his, but it had only been once. It had only ever been once.)
Itachi knows a great many things.They rattle in his brain whenever he turns his head; they toss and fidget when he sleeps. He knows about duty, he knows about suffering. He knows there is injustice in this world, and death, and hands that tighten around throats. He knows that the situation in Kirigakure is going to be more than a fucking pain. Its going to be a shitstorm, a vipers nest, a war.
War, which shatters minds and tears men apart like wet paper. He is aware. He is thirteen, and he is excruciatingly, horribly aware.
Itachi doesn’t know how to respond. Shisui leaving is something that never once occurred to him. Shisui leaving is not an option Itachi even considered to be possible.
How is the world supposed to turn now? How are things supposed to be normal? How is Itachi supposed to sleep and breathe and live if Shisui is not with him, by his side, drifting through his dreams.
Without Shisui, things seem faded. There is less brilliance in the world, less sunburst. Life is already taking on muted colors, fabrics losing texture and voices becoming echoes, and Shisui is only packing his bags.
He stands out in the haze like a knife-bite contrast, the bright illumination that makes one cover their eyes when they come out of a dark room.
Itachi and Shisui are geniuses. They were prized babies, gifted children, and now somehow they’ve grown up too quickly and become part of an adult world, a world demanding they bleed with blank faces and forget the words to bedtime stories. (Adults are what they are; thirteen and fifteen and fucking veterans.)
Shisui has always breezed through life; a quick-witted boy, effortless and engaging. Itachi used to stand quietly in a corner, soaking in the brightness from that playful, wicked little child in the center of the room tentatively, as though drawn helplessly into to his orbit. What is Itachi supposed to be, now?
Itachi remains very still, his mouth a complicated jigsaw.
Shisui flickers suddenly in front of him. The travel bags are over his shoulder, his bone amour glints against his chest, and the mask is tied to his hip.
It is too late.
Itachi feels his fingers twitch, as though for chakra, racing to fill the emptiness that drains through him like a leaky pipe. Shisui is leaving and Itachi is late and they must say goodbye now, even though Itachi has never had to really say goodbye before, not to anyone important.
He gropes for himself.
Hands cup Itachi’s head, palms warm and smooth along the lines of Itachi’s face.Shisui meets his eyes squarely, and Itachi feels his world abruptly align itself back into smooth patterns of black lashes and deep pupils.
There is a reason he never has to say very much around Shisui.
Then Shisui smiles, mouth a lazy gash of shadow in the darkness of the room suddenly draped in heavy purple twilight, and the aristocratic angles of his eyes crinkle slowly. “Get some sleep, ‘Tachi.”
Itachi is thirteen, and he doesn’t understand the stab of unnamed emotion that guts his chest.
He nods.
Shisui strokes his thumb against Itachi’s sharp cheekbone once, and then he is gone without another word. The body flicker transportation jutsu is one of Shunshin no Shisui’s specialties, and the Uchiha have never been good at farewells.
All at once, there is only a sparse room and a lingering tingle on Itachi’s face.
Itachi feels sick; colorless and tasteless. His throat heaves for breath with dry rattling noises and his eyes itch fiercely. He never wants move his feet again.
But Itachi has a mission too, a duty to his clan and his village, and so he turns around and takes a deep breath and walks slowy out of the room he will return to sleep in every night for the next month.
(In the boxes of his orderly mind, Shisui is shut up tight, so tight Itachi thinks he can’t pry the lid off.)
He picks up the hand-crafted kunai from the floor before he leaves. Shisui hated to be wasteful.
X
Missions are quick, efficient, numerous. Itachi completes his objectives perfectly, returns directly to the village. Itachi wipes his blade and mask clean of blood with a damp and stained cloth, files his reports with a deft pen and a brisk slide of inky paper, and returns to his family in the clan compound with carefully even steps.
Itachi eats. He watches his little brother with quiet, evaluating eyes, and he makes small conversation with his mother when she inquires after his day with white hands and a white voice.
Tomorrow, he will do the same thing again.
He will do the same again many, many times.
If things are monochrome, dryly wasted and crumbling along the edges of his mind, perhaps he pretends not to notice.
Sometimes Itachi is even good at lying to himself.
The first few months, Itachi slept in Shisui’s room, and it was easy, as though Shisui was simply on a bit of a longer mission, due to come home any night and fall on top of Itachi in his bed, smelling of mud and sweaty exhaustion and sweetness. His sheets still smelled like grass and spice and watery green tea; his desk didn’t have dust.
On the first day of the third month, Itachi wakes up, calmly dresses and brushes his teeth, and closes the door before he reminds himself the room is not his own.
When Itachi remembered, he stopped sleeping there.
After that, it was a bit harder.
Sasuke is small and vaguely pink-faced, clinging to his sleeve and pant leg with admirable leechiness, selfishly happy to suddenly have Itachi-niisan to himself so much now. Sasuke has always been possessive, since that tender baby age when he first learned the word ‘mine’, and Itachi would be annoyed, but he has never been annoyed with Sasuke in his life, and doesn’t think it’s possible to start now.
Itachi flicks his brother’s forehead bruised, because he doesn’t know how to say “You are the most important thing in my life right now,” to a four year old.
He never knew how to say it to anyone.
X
OOO
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
... ... ...
"I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
OOO
X