While the Dark Earth Spins part 3/3
Title: While the Dark Earth Spins part 3/3
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
Hope you enjoy!
When Itachi sees Shisui again, it is two years but only five letters later, and Itachi is angry, so angry, because he knows the situation in Kirigakure is beyond fucked up, he really did. He’s heard about the mass murder, about the systematic ethnic cleansings. He’s heard about the horror and it’s made him sick, but he can’t manage to stop himself from burning up inside, burning burning burning.
Why the hell did Shisui leave him? How could he have left? How could Shisui leave him and not visit and hardly write, did he really believe Itachi was that fucking noble? That fucking self-sacrificing?
There is just as much horror and disaster and death right here in Konoha, right under their very noses, and Itachi has discovered it all by himself.
Itachi has sacrificed more in these past two years, sacrificed everything he is and was and will be for the clan and the family and village, but he would've never let go of Shisui, not until the end of the world, not for anything.
Only now he doesn’t need too, because of course Shisui didn’t bother to ask his permission before giving himself up. Shisui has never asked Itachi’s permission for anything.
Now, He stands there in front of Itachi on the dusty road into the the Uchiha compound, seventeen years old but really so much older than that, old like a hard-handed soldier, old like a weary warhorse, finally broken. His stance is rigid; spine an upright board and hands straightlaced by his sides. It’s not how Shisui has ever stood before.
His face is too hard and his eyes are too tight, and he looks at Itachi as though he isn’t seeing him anymore, not really. There is a new scar on Shisui’s face, deep and black over his hollow left cheekbone and down across those knife-thin lips that used to laugh so often, and it seals his mouth closed.
Itachi hates that scar.
Sasuke is hiding behind Itachi-niisan’s leg, because this strange shinobi in front of them wears his Uchiha emblem like its a mourning banner. This shinobi with the ragged scar and the lean limbs and the furiously hard eyes is scary, is brutal, is dangerous.
Sasuke peeks behind Itachi’s thigh and Shisui’s gaze flicks down at him for a flash of a second, a slight almost half-smile sneaking over his face for a quicksilver moment, as though he might want to say something.
His fingers twitch-- as though he is suddenly teetering on the edge of something; about to touch Itachi’s face with his old wanton playfulness, about to crack a witty joke about something silly and pointless and then everything will come pouring out, everything will be okay, everything will be right again, finally, in Itachi’s permanently wrong world.
--but then the millisecond of time is gone. Shisui is glossed over, a man in his place who has seen too much and become changed, become different, become broken. He salutes Itachi--like Itachi cared about fucking formalities now or Shisui ever had before--and then simply walks away with his shoulders still and his pace too steady, like it was easy
Itachi watches him go, something in his chest splintering into a hundred pieces with a quiet clatter.
X
Rage boils in Itachi’s stomach, deep and sad, and he wants to howl, to tear his hair out and sob until he’s nothing anymore, nothing but empty, for once. Itachi has never been empty before, too full of Shisui and loyalty and gut-wrenching love, and now he wants it more than anything, because it was just too fucking unfair.
This had been the thing he needed most in the world. He just needed to know he still had this one fucking thing.
But Shisui’s gone, underneath war-tempered steel and duty and Kirigakure genocide, and Itachi’s whole life has been unfair.
X
Fours months later, Shisui is underneath Itachi in the cold black water of the rushing Nakano river.
Shisui, who quit ANBU upon return to Konohagakure to join the Uchiha police force permanently, Shisui who was leading the clan coup with more fire and ruthlessness than a mad man, Shisui who had a cruel laugh now, when he laughed at all, a laugh like something in him had snapped.
Shisui who held his head in his hands at night, rocking back and forth. Shisui who is vicious and hard on the mouth of anyone who looks twice, Shisui who runs his fingers over the scar on his face like it was all he had left.
Shisui’s breath gurgles in his throat as Itachi pushes him under again, hands as gentle as they could be, tenderly clutching around Shisui’s throat. Shisui would be the first, because Itachi wouldn’t be able to bear having him be the last, it had been decided. He just wouldn’t fucking bear that.
Itachi is crying, because all his nightmares have come back and and because Shisui is clawing at his shoulders desperately. Itachi is crying because he knows Shisui would’ve wanted him too.
Konohagakure must be safe. Sasuke must be safe.
Shisui isn’t a high-ranking shinobi for nothing, and he gets his head above the depths again, gasping and cursing and looking so alive still, furiously and gloriously alive.
Shisui stares wildly up, his eyes blazing like he can see Itachi in front of him again, like suddenly it’s all he’s ever wanted to see.
There is something like a smile stretching over Shisui’s scarred mouth.
“‘Ta--chi...”
Itachi knows what he is doing-- He’s an ANBU level shinobi and a genius and it is not terribly difficult to drown someone, he knows. Somehow he has the upper hand now.
Itachi can hardly see through the tears falling hard and silent from his eyes when Shisui stops struggling quite suddenly, when all the fight is gone and he closes his eyes over his sharingan slowly under the water, river weeds obscuring his face. Itachi holds him under, a limp ragdoll, until he is completely sure his objective has been accomplished.
Then, he pulls Shisui up with him onto the bank of baby-fresh grass, and tries to get some sleep. He doesn’t get any for a long, long time.
X
The thing is.
The thing is: Itachi doesn’t like to remember Shisui when he became hard as flint and uncompromising like polished brass, when he forgot how to smile without pulling his mouth into a grimace.
That had been the ending, and when Itachi he catches himself thinking about it, he doesn’t like to remember the ending. It isn’t really true to think of Shisui like that, and he knows Shisui would scoff at him for not remembering correctly.
Itachi can sometimes picture him, all easy grin and lanky fifteen year old spark, balancing his ANBU mask on one careless fingertip and laughing sideways at Itachi across a flickering fire;
“‘Tachi, you’re getting me wrong. Cut a guy a break here, you know I love you.”
Itachi, on those rare occasions when he can think about it all without forgetting how to breathe, likes to remember Shisui like this:
Hands cupping his face, a mouth coaxing sweetness carefully from under his tongue, lips smiling mischievously against his own. There was a single summer, spent basking in the hot grass by the riverbank, a summer when Shisui was pithy and selfish and delightful, just learning how to move in some special way that made all of the girls in the village sigh.
He’d kissed Itachi, hot on his mouth with his hands trembling a little in Itachi’s hair, and Itachi--who was maybe too naive about it all but also maybe really fucking wanted it, because this was Shisui and Itachi has always wanted everything Shisui had to give--kissed back.
Itachi remembers that Shisui bragged a lot about all the exploits he managed to get up into, of course always quite by accident. He came back to Itachi with his stories, earnestly eager, and his fingers were warm when he would slip them up Itachi’s shirt or slide his palm tentatively down Itachi’s stomach.
His voice was always nervously breathless, excited by this intoxication of pure discovery and budding pleasure that was contagious. “If you--I mean--I learned how to try this--”
Itachi remembers them tumbling frantically together in the bushes along the river, laughing and awkward and sweaty, hands everywhere and lips dripping with wonder.
They didn’t get far-- they were too young, and too simple, and they killed people every day but later that night or when they ate lunch by the river Itachi remembers the way Shisui’s back would arch when Itachi kissed along his neck, lips clumsy with enthusiasm. He remembers the way it felt when they grinded their hips together so frantically that Itachi felt his veins quiver in half-formed ecstasy, Shisui’s pink mouth suddenly falling open above Itachi’s as though he could see something too beautiful to describe.
When they snuck into each others rooms and fell asleep tangled into one another, still boyish in the way Itachi liked to hog all their covers and Shisui had the softest, most soothing snores Itachi had ever heard, then or since, Itachi remembers feeling dreamless, weightless, safe.
This is the way Itachi likes to remember Shisui, because Shisui had been like the goddamn sun that summer, and Itachi was warmed in the glow.
Sometimes he remembers Shisui in other ways. There are fleeting memories of a ruthless police captain who ordered a public whipping Itachi hadn’t even realized was fucking legal in Konohagakure, or a tired little boy who rubbed his back and whispered stories to Itachi when he got back from an mission and couldn’t stand to face himself in the mirror.
Shisui had been so many things, and now it’s been long enough that all of Itachi’s versions of Shisui blur together sometimes, scarred mouth and sleep-sweet breath mingling until all Itachi can see is the soaked black curls of Shisui’s hair, clinging slick and wet to his forehead when Itachi dragged him haltingly from the river on their very last night.
Itachi remember him in that golden summer and is grateful for it, because he knows he doesn’t deserve to dream of those days.
X
When Sasuke’s blade is flying straight into his chest and Itachi is bleeding out onto the cold stone floor, red on his hands (He used to always long for pristine palms and clean fingernails, but would you just look at him now) and red down his cloak and streaming from underneath swollen eyelids, when he can see his little brother--not so pink and small now, but still just as possessive and Itachi will not pretend he is anything but impressed by that--who has eyes of crimson fire and holds lightning in his palms, Itachi sags down against the wall in something almost like relief because he is so tired. It was all finally ending, fucking finally.
Shisui’s quicksilver smile tears across Itachi’s blurring vision in a here-and-gone flash, a gash of mocking and wickedly triumphant shadow.
Itachi remembers, quite unexpectedly, that he never really told Shisui how when Itachi looked at him his heart swelled up painfully into his throat. How he would’ve followed Shisui to the end of their river and back, just to stay at his side.
Itachi has never told Sasuke either, but he hopes--when his fingers trail one last bloody path down Sasuke’s forehead and he sees his little brother’s eyes snap open in shock--
He hopes Sasuke knows.
X
Fin.
I have slept with you
all night long while
the dark earth spins
with the living and the dead,
and on waking suddenly
in the midst of the shadow
my arm encircled your waist.
-Pablo Neruda “Night on the Island”
FIN
All feedback is greatly appreciated.
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
Hope you enjoy!
When Itachi sees Shisui again, it is two years but only five letters later, and Itachi is angry, so angry, because he knows the situation in Kirigakure is beyond fucked up, he really did. He’s heard about the mass murder, about the systematic ethnic cleansings. He’s heard about the horror and it’s made him sick, but he can’t manage to stop himself from burning up inside, burning burning burning.
Why the hell did Shisui leave him? How could he have left? How could Shisui leave him and not visit and hardly write, did he really believe Itachi was that fucking noble? That fucking self-sacrificing?
There is just as much horror and disaster and death right here in Konoha, right under their very noses, and Itachi has discovered it all by himself.
Itachi has sacrificed more in these past two years, sacrificed everything he is and was and will be for the clan and the family and village, but he would've never let go of Shisui, not until the end of the world, not for anything.
Only now he doesn’t need too, because of course Shisui didn’t bother to ask his permission before giving himself up. Shisui has never asked Itachi’s permission for anything.
Now, He stands there in front of Itachi on the dusty road into the the Uchiha compound, seventeen years old but really so much older than that, old like a hard-handed soldier, old like a weary warhorse, finally broken. His stance is rigid; spine an upright board and hands straightlaced by his sides. It’s not how Shisui has ever stood before.
His face is too hard and his eyes are too tight, and he looks at Itachi as though he isn’t seeing him anymore, not really. There is a new scar on Shisui’s face, deep and black over his hollow left cheekbone and down across those knife-thin lips that used to laugh so often, and it seals his mouth closed.
Itachi hates that scar.
Sasuke is hiding behind Itachi-niisan’s leg, because this strange shinobi in front of them wears his Uchiha emblem like its a mourning banner. This shinobi with the ragged scar and the lean limbs and the furiously hard eyes is scary, is brutal, is dangerous.
Sasuke peeks behind Itachi’s thigh and Shisui’s gaze flicks down at him for a flash of a second, a slight almost half-smile sneaking over his face for a quicksilver moment, as though he might want to say something.
His fingers twitch-- as though he is suddenly teetering on the edge of something; about to touch Itachi’s face with his old wanton playfulness, about to crack a witty joke about something silly and pointless and then everything will come pouring out, everything will be okay, everything will be right again, finally, in Itachi’s permanently wrong world.
--but then the millisecond of time is gone. Shisui is glossed over, a man in his place who has seen too much and become changed, become different, become broken. He salutes Itachi--like Itachi cared about fucking formalities now or Shisui ever had before--and then simply walks away with his shoulders still and his pace too steady, like it was easy
Itachi watches him go, something in his chest splintering into a hundred pieces with a quiet clatter.
X
Rage boils in Itachi’s stomach, deep and sad, and he wants to howl, to tear his hair out and sob until he’s nothing anymore, nothing but empty, for once. Itachi has never been empty before, too full of Shisui and loyalty and gut-wrenching love, and now he wants it more than anything, because it was just too fucking unfair.
This had been the thing he needed most in the world. He just needed to know he still had this one fucking thing.
But Shisui’s gone, underneath war-tempered steel and duty and Kirigakure genocide, and Itachi’s whole life has been unfair.
X
Fours months later, Shisui is underneath Itachi in the cold black water of the rushing Nakano river.
Shisui, who quit ANBU upon return to Konohagakure to join the Uchiha police force permanently, Shisui who was leading the clan coup with more fire and ruthlessness than a mad man, Shisui who had a cruel laugh now, when he laughed at all, a laugh like something in him had snapped.
Shisui who held his head in his hands at night, rocking back and forth. Shisui who is vicious and hard on the mouth of anyone who looks twice, Shisui who runs his fingers over the scar on his face like it was all he had left.
Shisui’s breath gurgles in his throat as Itachi pushes him under again, hands as gentle as they could be, tenderly clutching around Shisui’s throat. Shisui would be the first, because Itachi wouldn’t be able to bear having him be the last, it had been decided. He just wouldn’t fucking bear that.
Itachi is crying, because all his nightmares have come back and and because Shisui is clawing at his shoulders desperately. Itachi is crying because he knows Shisui would’ve wanted him too.
Konohagakure must be safe. Sasuke must be safe.
Shisui isn’t a high-ranking shinobi for nothing, and he gets his head above the depths again, gasping and cursing and looking so alive still, furiously and gloriously alive.
Shisui stares wildly up, his eyes blazing like he can see Itachi in front of him again, like suddenly it’s all he’s ever wanted to see.
There is something like a smile stretching over Shisui’s scarred mouth.
“‘Ta--chi...”
Itachi knows what he is doing-- He’s an ANBU level shinobi and a genius and it is not terribly difficult to drown someone, he knows. Somehow he has the upper hand now.
Itachi can hardly see through the tears falling hard and silent from his eyes when Shisui stops struggling quite suddenly, when all the fight is gone and he closes his eyes over his sharingan slowly under the water, river weeds obscuring his face. Itachi holds him under, a limp ragdoll, until he is completely sure his objective has been accomplished.
Then, he pulls Shisui up with him onto the bank of baby-fresh grass, and tries to get some sleep. He doesn’t get any for a long, long time.
X
The thing is.
The thing is: Itachi doesn’t like to remember Shisui when he became hard as flint and uncompromising like polished brass, when he forgot how to smile without pulling his mouth into a grimace.
That had been the ending, and when Itachi he catches himself thinking about it, he doesn’t like to remember the ending. It isn’t really true to think of Shisui like that, and he knows Shisui would scoff at him for not remembering correctly.
Itachi can sometimes picture him, all easy grin and lanky fifteen year old spark, balancing his ANBU mask on one careless fingertip and laughing sideways at Itachi across a flickering fire;
“‘Tachi, you’re getting me wrong. Cut a guy a break here, you know I love you.”
Itachi, on those rare occasions when he can think about it all without forgetting how to breathe, likes to remember Shisui like this:
Hands cupping his face, a mouth coaxing sweetness carefully from under his tongue, lips smiling mischievously against his own. There was a single summer, spent basking in the hot grass by the riverbank, a summer when Shisui was pithy and selfish and delightful, just learning how to move in some special way that made all of the girls in the village sigh.
He’d kissed Itachi, hot on his mouth with his hands trembling a little in Itachi’s hair, and Itachi--who was maybe too naive about it all but also maybe really fucking wanted it, because this was Shisui and Itachi has always wanted everything Shisui had to give--kissed back.
Itachi remembers that Shisui bragged a lot about all the exploits he managed to get up into, of course always quite by accident. He came back to Itachi with his stories, earnestly eager, and his fingers were warm when he would slip them up Itachi’s shirt or slide his palm tentatively down Itachi’s stomach.
His voice was always nervously breathless, excited by this intoxication of pure discovery and budding pleasure that was contagious. “If you--I mean--I learned how to try this--”
Itachi remembers them tumbling frantically together in the bushes along the river, laughing and awkward and sweaty, hands everywhere and lips dripping with wonder.
They didn’t get far-- they were too young, and too simple, and they killed people every day but later that night or when they ate lunch by the river Itachi remembers the way Shisui’s back would arch when Itachi kissed along his neck, lips clumsy with enthusiasm. He remembers the way it felt when they grinded their hips together so frantically that Itachi felt his veins quiver in half-formed ecstasy, Shisui’s pink mouth suddenly falling open above Itachi’s as though he could see something too beautiful to describe.
When they snuck into each others rooms and fell asleep tangled into one another, still boyish in the way Itachi liked to hog all their covers and Shisui had the softest, most soothing snores Itachi had ever heard, then or since, Itachi remembers feeling dreamless, weightless, safe.
This is the way Itachi likes to remember Shisui, because Shisui had been like the goddamn sun that summer, and Itachi was warmed in the glow.
Sometimes he remembers Shisui in other ways. There are fleeting memories of a ruthless police captain who ordered a public whipping Itachi hadn’t even realized was fucking legal in Konohagakure, or a tired little boy who rubbed his back and whispered stories to Itachi when he got back from an mission and couldn’t stand to face himself in the mirror.
Shisui had been so many things, and now it’s been long enough that all of Itachi’s versions of Shisui blur together sometimes, scarred mouth and sleep-sweet breath mingling until all Itachi can see is the soaked black curls of Shisui’s hair, clinging slick and wet to his forehead when Itachi dragged him haltingly from the river on their very last night.
Itachi remember him in that golden summer and is grateful for it, because he knows he doesn’t deserve to dream of those days.
X
When Sasuke’s blade is flying straight into his chest and Itachi is bleeding out onto the cold stone floor, red on his hands (He used to always long for pristine palms and clean fingernails, but would you just look at him now) and red down his cloak and streaming from underneath swollen eyelids, when he can see his little brother--not so pink and small now, but still just as possessive and Itachi will not pretend he is anything but impressed by that--who has eyes of crimson fire and holds lightning in his palms, Itachi sags down against the wall in something almost like relief because he is so tired. It was all finally ending, fucking finally.
Shisui’s quicksilver smile tears across Itachi’s blurring vision in a here-and-gone flash, a gash of mocking and wickedly triumphant shadow.
Itachi remembers, quite unexpectedly, that he never really told Shisui how when Itachi looked at him his heart swelled up painfully into his throat. How he would’ve followed Shisui to the end of their river and back, just to stay at his side.
Itachi has never told Sasuke either, but he hopes--when his fingers trail one last bloody path down Sasuke’s forehead and he sees his little brother’s eyes snap open in shock--
He hopes Sasuke knows.
X
Fin.
I have slept with you
all night long while
the dark earth spins
with the living and the dead,
and on waking suddenly
in the midst of the shadow
my arm encircled your waist.
-Pablo Neruda “Night on the Island”
FIN
All feedback is greatly appreciated.