High Noon Chapter 2
Shisui drops off the face of the friggin’ earth just like he promised. Resolves to keep his head down and his nose clean for the week or so Itachi’s kid brother is supposed to be hanging around.
‘Course given the fact that this town’s about the size of a pea, Shisui might actually have to go underground to avoid both Itachi and his brother for the time the kid’s staying. He’s not sure what their sheriff is thinking.
Then again, maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s just scared shitless and this is the best solution he can come up with.
Not that Shisui cares much either way.
He figures he’ll retreat to the stable where he sleeps, over the horses everyone keeps tethered there. People ain’t exactly running over each other to hang around horse shit and hay, so there’s not much chance the mysterious brother’ll even know he’s there.
That decided, Shisui heads off to the saloon. One more huzzah before heading off to exile in his own fucking boomtown. Shit. The things he does for-
Sex. Obviously.
.
Anko doesn’t bother asking Shisui what he wants when he slumps down at the bar, already dreading the boring days to come. The barkeep just slides a shot glass his way and doesn’t ask questions. He’s always liked that about her.
(Then there’s the weirdly hot matter of Shisui’s pretty damn sure she could kill him during sex. Like, actually kill him, and he’s not saying it wouldn’t be worth it, but he’s not ready to leave this earth just yet, so he and Anko are just acquaintances for now. She’s got the distinction of being the only woman on God’s earth Shisui’d be willing to flip sides for, but she punched him in the mouth last time he brought it up so maybe that’s not as big of an honor as he’d thought.)
He tips the glass in her direction in thanks and downs it, knowing another’ll be on its way. The whiskey burns all the way down. It settles warm in his stomach.
Maybe he can just sleep under the bar for the next couple days, he thinks. It’d be less dull than staring at the cracks in the stable roof for hours on end.
“Hey, Anko,” he says. She grunts to show she’s paying attention. “What would you say if I asked to sleep under the bar for the next couple’a days?”
“I’d ask what the fuck you were on,” she answers. Shisui sighs and nods. Pretty much what he’d been expecting.
He’s glaring morosely at his third or fourth drink when someone plops down two seats down from him, easy as you please.
“Beer,” the intruder says shortly. “And keep them coming.”
Shisui doesn’t recognize the voice but it’s high enough to catch his attention, and sure enough when he turns around there’s a kid sitting there, can’t be older than eighteen or Shisui’ll swallow his shot glass along with the whiskey in it.
“Sure you’re old enough for that shit?” he asks, because running his mouth is easy enough even without the alcohol to speed it along.
The kid turns to look him in the face and Shisui almost chokes.
There’s not much of a resemblance, truth be told. This kid’s got darker hair than Itachi, dust making it stick up at the back so that he looks like a damn cactus; paler skin too, which Shisui didn’t think humanly possible this far from civilization and all its fun amenities like roofs without cracks in them. He looks pissed off, which is something Shisui’s only seen on Itachi’s face a handful of times, so that’s not familiar either.
The eyes, though. There’s something about those eyes, big and dark and crackling good as any fire, and Shisui knows.
“Oh shit,” he blurts.
“Can I help you?” Itachi’s brother asks, all ice.
Shisui raises his hands, trying not to cause any more damage. “Nothin’ doing. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t tryin’ to pull a fast one on Anko here.”
Anko snorts. “Please, I’ve been pouring whiskey down your throat since before you could spit.” Then, to the kid, “I don't give a flying fuck if you’re a suckling babe, long as you pay.”
“Thanks, Anko,” Shisui mutters. “You’re a real help.”
“I don’t make a habit of taking shit from deadbeats in bars,” the kid says lazily, leaning back a ways on his barstool. Shisui suddenly feels like reaching out and tipping it backwards.
“Really. ‘Cause from where I’m sitting, you don’t look like you could fight your way out of a wet blanket, kid.”
The kid scowls. Shisui wonders if he should just go around wearing a bandanna around his face like the outlaws do; maybe that’d stop any more stupid shit from leaving his mouth.
He kind of doubts it.
“Outside,” the kid snaps. “I don’t want to end up paying for any damages.”
“Only damage’ll be to your pretty face, you keep this up,” Shisui snaps back. He can’t help it; he’s been in this situation too many times-a little drunk and a little pissed and not caring what comes out of his mouth as much as he should-and now he’s just running on routine.
The kid stands up fast, walks calmly to the doors of the bar. He looks over his shoulder and shoots Shisui one of the dirtiest looks he’s ever seen.
“Coming?” he asks.
And, well. Now there’re folks taking an interest, and Shisui’s pride can stand a lot of hits, but he’s not sure it’d ever recover if he backed down from a fight with some pretty boy who could pass for twelve if he tried. Never mind whose brother he was.
He slaps a few bills down on the bar for Anko, who snatches them up quick as a cobra and then goes back to polishing a glass like nothing’s going on.
“Keep it outside,” she warns without looking up. “I don’t want any blood on my floors. That shit takes ages to clean out.”
“Got it,” Shisui calls over his shoulder. He gets outside, squints in the sun-
-and is sucker punched the second he tastes fresh air.
Shisui staggers backwards a step, putting a hand up to his (now throbbing) nose on instinct. His fingers come away bloody. Son of a bitch.
“Y’know,” Shisui says, conversational even with his sudden burning rage, “you’re lucky I’m one of the few ‘round here that doesn’t carry a gun everywhere they go.”
And he throws a punch of his own, knowing it’ll wipe that infuriating smirk off the kid’s face.
.
It’s not as bad as it could be, Shisui tells himself a while later, when he’s trussed up nice and pretty behind depressingly familiar iron bars. At least Itachi seems to’ve learned the fine art of delegation. Two of his deputies showed up to pull him and the kid off each other instead of the man himself, which is why Shisui figures it could’ve been worse-Itachi’s had such a goddamn stick up his ass lately, he probably would’ve just done what Fugaku’s wanted to do for years and shot Shisui on sight.
Yeah, it could’ve been worse. But Shisui’s still not looking forward to the second when Itachi walks through that door and realizes Shisui’s not only gotten into trouble again, but kind of smacked his baby brother around on top of it.
The baby brother in question is sitting in the corner, handcuffed to a radiator with a split lip and a seriously pissed off expression. This town is piss-poor enough not to afford two whole jail cells, and apparently the deputy in charge thought Shisui was the bigger flight risk or some shit, which he guesses he could probably take as a compliment if he were feeling so inclined.
“I hope you realize that I was kicking your ass back there,” the kid tells him.
Shisui looks up and glares at him. Arrogant little dick. “Stupid and delusional? Shit, you’re really not gonna last long around here.”
The kid snorts. “I’m not going to be sticking around long.”
“Then maybe there’s a God after all,” Shisui says, with feeling, and that’s when the door swings open.
Well, shit. Definitely back to atheism for him. Itachi shuts the door behind him with way too much calm.
“Sasuke,” he greets the hellspawn.
“Nice to see you, big brother.” Shisui’s surprised to hear a shred of real fondness under the sarcasm; that’s the first he’s heard from the kid that doesn’t have acid poured all over it.
Itachi turns to Shisui.
“I begin to see why my father was so intent on hanging you,” he says.
Shisui offers his best cheeky grin. “I’m the guy your daddy warned you about, huh? I’m flattered, Sheriff, really I am.”
“Wait, wait,” Sasuke interrupts, horror coloring his words. “You know him?”
Itachi is still eyeing Shisui in that weirdly relaxed way Shisui’s started calling his ‘figuring out how to hide the body’ look. “Unfortunately, yes. You have become acquainted with the bane of my current existence.”
Shisui can't let that go. “But at least I’m pretty, right?”
“The prostitutes seem to think so. I imagine it almost makes up for your completely abhorrent personality,” Itachi tells him dryly.
“Hey, I’m the best damn thing that’s happened to you since you showed up here,” Shisui protests, but he shuts up at Itachi’s warning look. Fine, maybe he needs to tamp down the flirting a little. At least while Kid Brother’s in the room.
Not that Sasuke seems to’ve picked up on all the sexual frustration hovering under his nose (Shisui likes ‘sexual frustration’ a whole lot better than ‘prelude to some serious prisoner mistreatment’).
“He can’t fight for shit,” he mutters, glaring daggers into the side of Shisui’s head.
Ignoring Shisui’s murderous look, Itachi puts his hand to his head in a long-suffering kind of way. “Your face would beg to differ, Sasuke.”
Shisui’s sporting some sore ribs and a pretty decent collection of bruises, himself, but the shiner he gave Sasuke’ll last longer than either. It’s a pretty cheerful thought.
“And do I want to know why you are picking fights within an hour of arriving here?” Itachi continues, and fuck, Shisui can actually see the disapproving big brother burrowing his way out of the sheriff suit Itachi likes to wear all the time. Sasuke sees it too because he practically shrinks. It makes him look a lot younger than he already did.
“This place is a shithole,” he says. “It was depressing. I decided to liven it up.”
“By almost getting yourself killed?”
Sasuke smirks. “Killed? By this idiot? You don’t give me any credit.”
“Anyone else-literally anyone else in this fucking town would’ve just shot your prissy ass,” Shisui cuts in, pissed all over again. “Don’t even fucking try to lord over me, kid, you don’t know shit about what you walked into.”
Christ. Itachi might’ve been the worst suited person on the face of the earth to run things out here, but at least he’d had the good sense to be terrified of the task. His kid brother just waltzes in and expects everybody to bow down? He’s not even gonna survive a week’s visit.
Not that Shisui cares all that much, because he doesn’t. Hell, he’d probably laugh if Sasuke did get shot somewhere not-that-important. Maybe it’d teach him to figure out where the hell he was before running his stupid mouth.
He doesn’t want to see Itachi’s brother dead, though. And it’s more than Shisui’s general dislike of seeing people dead, because dead people smell and are depressing as shit besides; this brat means a lot to Itachi, so apparently that means Shisui can’t throw him to the wolves. Fuck.
“Shisui is right,” Itachi is saying. His calm is eroding fast. “You could have been shot before I even knew you were here. I cannot protect you if you put yourself in needless danger.”
Sasuke’s face goes hard. “I don’t need you to protect me, Itachi.”
“Because you are doing such an excellent job of protecting yourself.”
“Fuck off,” Sasuke says with venom, then freezes. He and Itachi both look like they’ve been hit across the face.
Shisui just sits there and stews in the vast uncomfortable-ness of it all.
Then, after a minute, “Sorry.”
Sasuke’s voice is so quiet he just about misses it.
Itachi crosses the room in a few quick strides and kneels down next to his brother. Then, an honest-to-God smile pulling at his mouth (maybe the preacher’s right and Armageddon’s coming for them after all), he pokes Sasuke in the forehead. He’s not too gentle about it either, if the wince on the kid’s face says anything.
And then he’s up and heading back for the door, grabbing a stack of papers from the desk on his way out.
Shisui’s tongue thaws out. “Hey, hey, how long am I gonna be stuck with your prick of a brother?”
“How long am I going to be stuck in here with this imbecile?” Sasuke deadpans in response. “Because I might hang myself.”
“You’re both staying overnight,” Itachi informs them. “Perhaps this will encourage you not to make rash decisions when alcohol is involved. I can’t have people brawling over every little slight-this town would become very empty, very fast.”
He leaves before either of them can shout him down. Shisui sighs and starts working on finding a position that isn’t hell on his wrists. Might as well get comfortable. Truth be told, this little cell’s started to take on something of a homey feeling lately. His arms are gonna be sore as fuck in the morning, but he’ll probably manage a decent night’s sleep before then.
He goes right along thinking that until Sasuke breaks the quiet.
“So,” he says coolly. “How long have you been fucking my brother?”