[sketchfic] 2 Kisame/Itachi AUs I Totally Did Not Write
Two sea-shanties of very distinct flavors, brought to you by the person who thought it was a good idea to stick Deidara and Naruto on a beach and make them have hot, questionably sane sex.
[1] So there is this ship called the S. S. Uchiha Belafonte, and her captain is a man on a mission: to wreak vengeance upon a maneating shark-like creature who killed his best friend/big brother figure/significant other. He is joined on his quest by a host of colorful characters: a self-proclaimed relative, a spunky pregnant British reporter, and his charming, half-gay rival. Only about three of you will get what the hell I'm talking about but all will be scarred for life.
Part of Your World
Itachi’s first thought upon waking to the sound of crashing waves, the sun a white supernova blaze and hot on his skin, was a clear and casual: I’m going to drop Kakashi into a whirlpool the first opportunity I get.
The expedition to the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago had been boring and rainy and infuriating for reasons he’d rather not go into while lying flat on his back on an unidentified beach -- if all that damp, tickling sand were any indication -- without any knowledge of how he’d actually got there. But if he had known that the first thing his rival would do after being rescued from bloodthirsty pirates was to accidentally knock Itachi overboard in a tropical storm while he was trying to save the filming equipment, he would have left the cheeky bastard to the proverbial sharks, half-gay or no.
Speaking of sharks, he thought dully, there was just no telling the extent to which this development for the worse -- and by worse he meant more stupid -- would set back their progress with the mission. It had been hard enough to convince the Board of Directors to greenlight the Belafonte’s latest expedition, and even he had to admit it had taken a veteran hardass to sell the idea of "an ultra-murderous colony of shark-people" to the bond company stooges. But: a) something had to have eaten Shisui, dammit, and b) Uchiha Itachi was nothing if not King Hardass.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, he supposed, if Sasuke had been able to keep up his bright-eyed helpful streak. There was still the thing where Itachi wasn’t sure the kid was really his brother -- he had left home at a young age, hadn’t thought his parents would have even wanted to spawn after having him -- but as it was Sasuke’s inheritance that had kept the whole project from sinking like a rock in water all this time, he didn’t particularly care.
Unfortunately, ever since that blond gum-popping reporter had come aboard, it had been nothing but one revolting display of incompetence after another. Hormonal idiots.
Worse still, Uzumaki hadn’t stopped at grossly distracting Itachi’s crew, but had even had the gall to come after Itachi with his various plebeian and poorly constructed questions for an article that was obviously never going to make it above the fold, despite Itachi constantly leveling him with many cold stares that conveyed exactly how little he cared.
Really, he wouldn’t have much qualm throwing all three of them into a whirlpool, but this wasn’t a feasible prospect given his present predicament. He didn’t like land, and it took every ounce of his self-control to keep the disorientation at bay -- the Belafonte was his home, her absence made him feel lost and naked.
Or, possibly, he was feeling lost and naked because on some intellectual level he’d realized that the waves had liberated him of his red knitcap. As if he needed another obstacle.
To add insult to injury, when Itachi finally managed to drag his sand-crusted eyelids open, he was greeted with the sight of white sands, blue waves, and an endless wall of green palms swaying in the breeze. Quietly, he felt a piece of his soul wither.
“And that,” he muttered aloud to himself, sliding his eyes shut, “is the reason I’m never, ever coming back to the Italian Riviera.” There was also the stuff about the government-issued ban, but he was fairly sure his hatred of the place ranked higher than the threat of lifetime imprisonment.
“Really?” asked an unfamiliar voice, low and gruff. “Because I heard it’s very nice this time of year.”
He blinked, decided it hadn’t been a heat-induced hallucination, and opened his eyes again, squinting against the bright light.
“It’s about time you came to,” said tall, broad-shouldered, and unfamiliar. “I was beginning to think I’d wasted all my effort.”
“You -- you saved my life?” Itachi croaked weakly, working the syllables around his parched throat.
“It’s the way of my people,” said the man without a trace of humor. “But don’t expect me to sing or anything.”
It was that exact moment that Itachi’s eyes finally adjusted to the light and the features of his rescuer came into full, high-definition view, and in an ultimately uncharacteristic move, his bottom jaw dropped like hot loads were going out of style.
“Oh god,” he heard someone say, sounding weirdly like himself. “You have -- you have gills?”
The man -- gills! gills! -- scowled, but when he spoke there was a slight edge of amusement in his voice, “Meanwhile, my name is Kisame. And don’t stare like that, you’re making me shy.”
This had to be hydrogen psychosis. Prolonged shortage of oxygen caused hallucinations; perhaps Itachi had simply gone deep sea diving and conveniently forgot about it. Then another thought occurred to him.
“The Academy would never believe this.”
The man - Kisame! Kisame! - cocked one thin eyebrow in mild confusion, which turned out to be a very good look for him. The camera would love him, Itachi thought feverishly with the kind of crazed schoolgirl glee that documentaries brought out in him. There was no way they would be able to deny him the award for oceanographer of the year now.
[2] Oh God, this one started out with me walking around asking various people, "Seriously, don't you think Kisame would make a really hot abusive boyfriend?" Also, I seem to have read too much Huckleberry literature and listened to too many Decemberists songs in my formative years or something, because when I saw this picture pimped by ayonoi, the first thought that came into my head was, "I totally called that! There is no originality anymore, the Japanese have thought of everything." Nonetheless, this progressed to the point where one of my hapless friends who doesn't even have a clue who these characters are caved and said in a clear attempt to placate my insanity, "Yeah, sure, that would probably work if his girlfriend was also, like, this incredible slut," and I said, "Oh my god, I can totally write that." Yeah, I don't know either.
The reason I have to tell you this is because I wrote something truly horrible and inappropriate and you have to know the true humiliating depths of my suffering in order to understand it; please forgive me or at least stone me really hard.
37
*
The small stairwell leading up to their hovel of a bedroom has thirty-seven steps. Kisame climbs them everyday, and today isn't the first time he finds Itachi lounging in bed long after his waking hour, his clothing a fetching disarray on the filthy floor and a challenging, particularly well-fucked look in his vacant eyes.
It’s truly a wretched state of affairs, Kisame reflects, and he wishes that if Itachi had to be difficult, he would have the decency to stage his act-out hissy fit later in the day, when it would be socially acceptable to drink.
“Smoking in bed again?” he says dully. “We can’t really afford another place if you burn this one down on our current budget.”
In response, Itachi just removes the black tip of the long cigarette holder from between his lips and dips it over the side of the bed, once, twice, letting a pinch of ash drop to the floor. It’s a marvel that it makes any difference to the general state of the room.
Kisame shuts the door behind him and rolls up the sleeves of his yukata as he walks, hoping to god that for once, just once, the idiot would take the hint.
“Who did you go with last night?” he asks tightly, canting his hips against the bedpost.
“Nobody,” Itachi says, surprisingly light. “A client.”
Kisame grits his teeth loud enough to be heard in the stale air, as Itachi slinks off the bed and pulls his night robe closer around his shoulders, padding across the room to stand in a puddle of sunshine pooling in near the window. He passes Kisame a glance but says nothing. Kisame is forced to admit in spite of his mood that in a dark satin robe and rumpled hair sans the high heels and make-up, Itachi looks unforeseeably sexy -- disheveled and unvarnished -- which he supposes is part of the problem.
He’d better get this out before he loses anymore brain cells to his dick. “A client?”
“Yes,” Itachi says smoothly. “He gave us work.”
Kisame blinks and in that same hairtrigger second -- it doesn’t matter how many times he tells himself that he can’t, he won’t - he’s crossed the room, shoving chairs out of the way and knocking them over, and clenched his fingers around one of Itachi’s wrists, twisting, hard enough to hurt, hurt a lot even, maybe enough to leave a ring of purple on that white, white skin.
He knows, somewhere in his head, that he’s punishing himself, too.
“You sure he didn’t give you anything else?”
The look on Itachi’s face is unreadable, not even a trace of pain. The loose robe slips off his shoulder, revealing another bruise on his collarbone, this one two weeks old, rimmed green and yellow and ugly. “What do you think?”
It’s stupid to think Itachi would try to lie to him, because he has no reason to. Kisame can feel the black rage burning agonizingly behind his eyes, twisting around his spine like a snake. His mouth has gone dry and any moment now he might…
“I don’t think anything.”
Itachi’s mouth curves into a cold smirk. “Then there is no reason we should be having this discussion, is there?”
Kisame spares a dull thought that they really might burn down the house this time when the cigarette holder clatters to the ground, showering the floor with embers. The blood on Itachi’s lips is red and profuse, but he hasn’t stopped smirking.
*
The first time they fucked, there were Itachi’s mouth and Kisame’s hands, rubbed slick and hot and skin to skin, kissing and fumbling and falling just over the edge of awkward, but there was also the thrill of crossing boundaries and distances.
When Kisame slid inside, slow and deep, Itachi didn’t wince but it was a near thing given the way his body stiffened, and Kisame tensed up in return and said, “You’re a virgin.”
Itachi’s smirk was small and hard. “Not anymore,” he said, curling his fingers into the hair at the back of Kisame’s neck and yanking him forward.
It gave Kisame enough guts to curl his own fingers around Itachi’s thin, rich boy wrists and bend his hands over the headboard of the bed, pushing Itachi’s knees into his chest and rocking them together, slow and languorous like the white boats bobbing in the blue of the bay that he knew so well, a sure, sea-steady rhythm that had traced the veins of his life, every single day of it leading up to that summer and the white-clapboard vacation house, the room on the east wing with the open window, facing the sea.
Itachi said that he was eighteen but was obviously lying. The first time they met on the wide and endless beach Kisame knew right off the bat the boy was too young for him, but that didn’t stop him from scaling up the goddamn rose trellises that night and nearly slicing his thumb open on a rogue nail hanging from Itachi’s window ledge, the only upside being that afterwards he got to fuck Itachi deep into the cool, white sheet of his bed while his family snored just down the hall from them and every sound they made was a stifled gasp, muffled into skin and collarbones.
In an ideal world, Kisame thought, Itachi would have been an orphan. He had the mindset of one and seemed deserving of the distance and distinction that orphans got, all except for the fact that he had parents. Two, even, and a little brother that followed him around and worshipped him like the sun in his sky and the moon in his night.
Itachi, however, was ready to be an orphan, to embark on a life as a person with no people. His family wouldn’t let him go, and so, when Itachi talked about disposing of them, methodical, matter-of-fact, in a voice so chilling and detached he probably used it to recite classical poetry at whatever highbrow boarding school he attended outside the realm of summer and ocean breeze, Kisame didn’t find it difficult to believe him at all.
After the third time he fucked Itachi, Kisame told him about sailing in industrial steamboats, about how much he loved it. He talked about the ocean off the coasts of the last ladyfingers of the Japanese archipelago, green and unbroken and graceful in its vastness, an infinity well within reach from the deck of a sleek white boat cutting its way through the water, the wind off the curling waves icy and sharp with brine. He talked about running your hand over the helm and feeling the vessel vibrate under your skin, the ocean rising up to meet you, and lifted his arm to show Itachi his anchor tattoo, small and a darker shade of blue against the pale skin of his inner wrist.
And at some point, drowsy and half-crazed, he started talking about sailing all the great oceans of the world, running the palm of his hand over the small of Itachi’s back as though charting the routes of future voyages into his skin, and in the middle of this accidental cartography, Itachi looked at him and asked, “You’re not falling in love with me, are you?”
Kisame jerked his hand away like he’d been burned, and scowled. “Yes, that’s exactly it,” he said, skittering with sarcasm, “I’m madly in love with you,” and turned to face the wall.
*
But the thing is…
The thing is, and this Kisame knows, he hasn’t seen the ocean in a very long time, and somewhere along the line they’ve picked up an enviable arsenal of sharp, lethal objects to complement the cleaving knives they used to butcher Itachi’s family, and after that they’ve managed to get pretty good at killing other people with them too.
Kisame has always been generous with his strength, which comes in handy when he’s struggling against malfunctioning fishing equipment or bashing open the skulls of people whose deaths would pay for their next meal, but neither of this is the same thing as fisting his hands into the front of Itachi’s night robe and slamming his lover so hard against the wall he can hear the wood paneling splintering beneath him.
That’ll leave a bruise too, he thinks distantly, maybe a welt the color of Itachi’s eyes, cutting a line of pain into his back that won’t fade for days and days. He thinks of running his fingers carefully over it, later, like drawing a map, but touching like that isn’t allowed -- not anymore.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, there is the knowledge that he has lost his temper with Itachi a sum total of thirty-seven times. Kisame knows this figure with exact certainty because every single time it happens there is also the hollow fear that he might go too far this time. Because what he also knows with perfect certainty is that Itachi keeps a knife in his garterbelt -- what he lacks in brute force he makes up for by being quick as a cat, and if Kisame doesn’t stop focusing on the wrong things all the time he’s going to end up with that blade driven through the base of his skull, one of these days.
But the truth is that Itachi made a choice, and Kisame is just now reacting to it, as well as he can.
He ends up shoving his face next to Itachi’s neck and hissing in his ear, “Don’t make me decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth. I won’t do this again.” He’d do it again in a heartbeat.
And the only answer he gets is, “Is that right?”
Suddenly he’s very sick of that smart fucking mouth -- made for sucking cocks, he’s always known -- and so he sticks two fingers into it before turning Itachi to face the wall.
At that moment, the territories he’s always thought clearly marked in his mind are suddenly blurry and indistinct. Kisame thinks of cartography and oceans, how he’s always been at home in the water, which rises up to meet him, lapping against the hard edges of his body in warm sympathy. The sea is cruel and treacherous but she loves him, wants him, and there’s not an ocean he hasn’t been able to sail, charted or no. But land is hard for him, and so is Itachi, whom Kisame used to think of as an undiscovered ocean, an elegant mystery that he wanted to map, to figure out, to go the length of. It figures he’d be wrong about that too.
In the midst of the jagged rhythm of their hips, he hears Itachi whisper, very softly, almost sad, “You act like you have a fight to pick with the entire world, Kisame. But you won’t win.”
There is nothing more to be said after that.
*
Kisame sits slumped against the wall long after Itachi has shrugged on his clothes and started applying his make-up in front of the chipped vanity mirror. The cold seeps into his skin through the fabric of his stained yukata, and he feels it to his fingertips. Once, what seems like a lifetime ago, he was lying in the sultry darkness of a summer night, waiting for dawn and the sound of ships coming into the harbor, signals that it was time to crawl back out the window and leave the way he came. He slides his eyes shut, reaching for the memory.
“We have work to do tonight,” Itachi is saying somewhere above him, voice even and cool as you please. “Do be professional.”
Kisame barely resists the urge to snort. He slouches against the wall and feels every inch of the woodwork against his back, the splinters biting into the palms of his hands. There is not a sound in the room, and he’s glad he can’t see Itachi’s face.
The cold, clinical click of heels on wood breaks the silence, and when Kisame slits his eyes open, he catches only the sight of Itachi’s retreating back, a slim silhouette supported on pencil-thin heels disappearing into the dishwater light beyond the door. The tail of his silk kimono drapes after him, a poison secret, but Kisame knows he’s just reaching for metaphors.
Be professional, he thinks with a bitter sneer. Once upon a time, he really believed that was all it took, and even now, with a little money set aside and barring any foreseeable disaster on the event horizon, there is still a part of him that denies the obvious, a part that likes to think it can still all work out, somehow…
But Kisame is a practical man. He knows something’s over long before it actually is. One day, the rest of it will catch up with them, maybe the laws or Itachi’s wealthy and well-connected relatives. Or maybe it won’t even come to that, and instead, one of these sunny mornings, those pencil-thin heels will walk out the door and down those thirty-seven steps and out of Kisame’s life forever, and he won’t be surprised because it’ll only be fitting that Itachi will leave the way he came, like a sullen submarine breaking the smooth green surface of the ocean. Maybe the in-between leagues are already more than they were ever supposed to have.
It's nothing big, just widening water.
He can’t hear the sound of ships coming into the harbor anymore. He throws himself onto the bed and stares at the ceiling, flecked with golden light. The room stinks of semen and smoke and cheap perfume. There’s a bottle of scotch on the bedside table, but he doesn’t have the strength to reach for it and take another shot. Instead, he puts a pillow over his face and laughs himself sick.
So there you have it. Angry, jaded sailorman. Runaway rich boy with a penchant for crossdressing and kinky business. Together, they fight crime! Or, you know, kill people. Basically, I wrote this entire story as an excuse to indulge my various kinks like anchor tattoos and rolled-up sleeves and wrist-grabbing, and also to use the phrase "unforseeably sexy". I was really tempted to go for "smack the ho" but I figured the stoning would be too intense even for me to bear. So. I'm a moron. And I'm sorry.
Also, please to download this incredibly inappropriate song that I used as soundtrack for the second fic: You Know I’m No Good by Ghostface Killah feat. Amy Winehouse.
Have a KisaIta Valentine's Day! Please someone have some respect left for me! ♥
[1] So there is this ship called the S. S. Uchiha Belafonte, and her captain is a man on a mission: to wreak vengeance upon a maneating shark-like creature who killed his best friend/big brother figure/significant other. He is joined on his quest by a host of colorful characters: a self-proclaimed relative, a spunky pregnant British reporter, and his charming, half-gay rival. Only about three of you will get what the hell I'm talking about but all will be scarred for life.
Part of Your World
Itachi’s first thought upon waking to the sound of crashing waves, the sun a white supernova blaze and hot on his skin, was a clear and casual: I’m going to drop Kakashi into a whirlpool the first opportunity I get.
The expedition to the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago had been boring and rainy and infuriating for reasons he’d rather not go into while lying flat on his back on an unidentified beach -- if all that damp, tickling sand were any indication -- without any knowledge of how he’d actually got there. But if he had known that the first thing his rival would do after being rescued from bloodthirsty pirates was to accidentally knock Itachi overboard in a tropical storm while he was trying to save the filming equipment, he would have left the cheeky bastard to the proverbial sharks, half-gay or no.
Speaking of sharks, he thought dully, there was just no telling the extent to which this development for the worse -- and by worse he meant more stupid -- would set back their progress with the mission. It had been hard enough to convince the Board of Directors to greenlight the Belafonte’s latest expedition, and even he had to admit it had taken a veteran hardass to sell the idea of "an ultra-murderous colony of shark-people" to the bond company stooges. But: a) something had to have eaten Shisui, dammit, and b) Uchiha Itachi was nothing if not King Hardass.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, he supposed, if Sasuke had been able to keep up his bright-eyed helpful streak. There was still the thing where Itachi wasn’t sure the kid was really his brother -- he had left home at a young age, hadn’t thought his parents would have even wanted to spawn after having him -- but as it was Sasuke’s inheritance that had kept the whole project from sinking like a rock in water all this time, he didn’t particularly care.
Unfortunately, ever since that blond gum-popping reporter had come aboard, it had been nothing but one revolting display of incompetence after another. Hormonal idiots.
Worse still, Uzumaki hadn’t stopped at grossly distracting Itachi’s crew, but had even had the gall to come after Itachi with his various plebeian and poorly constructed questions for an article that was obviously never going to make it above the fold, despite Itachi constantly leveling him with many cold stares that conveyed exactly how little he cared.
Really, he wouldn’t have much qualm throwing all three of them into a whirlpool, but this wasn’t a feasible prospect given his present predicament. He didn’t like land, and it took every ounce of his self-control to keep the disorientation at bay -- the Belafonte was his home, her absence made him feel lost and naked.
Or, possibly, he was feeling lost and naked because on some intellectual level he’d realized that the waves had liberated him of his red knitcap. As if he needed another obstacle.
To add insult to injury, when Itachi finally managed to drag his sand-crusted eyelids open, he was greeted with the sight of white sands, blue waves, and an endless wall of green palms swaying in the breeze. Quietly, he felt a piece of his soul wither.
“And that,” he muttered aloud to himself, sliding his eyes shut, “is the reason I’m never, ever coming back to the Italian Riviera.” There was also the stuff about the government-issued ban, but he was fairly sure his hatred of the place ranked higher than the threat of lifetime imprisonment.
“Really?” asked an unfamiliar voice, low and gruff. “Because I heard it’s very nice this time of year.”
He blinked, decided it hadn’t been a heat-induced hallucination, and opened his eyes again, squinting against the bright light.
“It’s about time you came to,” said tall, broad-shouldered, and unfamiliar. “I was beginning to think I’d wasted all my effort.”
“You -- you saved my life?” Itachi croaked weakly, working the syllables around his parched throat.
“It’s the way of my people,” said the man without a trace of humor. “But don’t expect me to sing or anything.”
It was that exact moment that Itachi’s eyes finally adjusted to the light and the features of his rescuer came into full, high-definition view, and in an ultimately uncharacteristic move, his bottom jaw dropped like hot loads were going out of style.
“Oh god,” he heard someone say, sounding weirdly like himself. “You have -- you have gills?”
The man -- gills! gills! -- scowled, but when he spoke there was a slight edge of amusement in his voice, “Meanwhile, my name is Kisame. And don’t stare like that, you’re making me shy.”
This had to be hydrogen psychosis. Prolonged shortage of oxygen caused hallucinations; perhaps Itachi had simply gone deep sea diving and conveniently forgot about it. Then another thought occurred to him.
“The Academy would never believe this.”
The man - Kisame! Kisame! - cocked one thin eyebrow in mild confusion, which turned out to be a very good look for him. The camera would love him, Itachi thought feverishly with the kind of crazed schoolgirl glee that documentaries brought out in him. There was no way they would be able to deny him the award for oceanographer of the year now.
[2] Oh God, this one started out with me walking around asking various people, "Seriously, don't you think Kisame would make a really hot abusive boyfriend?" Also, I seem to have read too much Huckleberry literature and listened to too many Decemberists songs in my formative years or something, because when I saw this picture pimped by ayonoi, the first thought that came into my head was, "I totally called that! There is no originality anymore, the Japanese have thought of everything." Nonetheless, this progressed to the point where one of my hapless friends who doesn't even have a clue who these characters are caved and said in a clear attempt to placate my insanity, "Yeah, sure, that would probably work if his girlfriend was also, like, this incredible slut," and I said, "Oh my god, I can totally write that." Yeah, I don't know either.
The reason I have to tell you this is because I wrote something truly horrible and inappropriate and you have to know the true humiliating depths of my suffering in order to understand it; please forgive me or at least stone me really hard.
37
*
The small stairwell leading up to their hovel of a bedroom has thirty-seven steps. Kisame climbs them everyday, and today isn't the first time he finds Itachi lounging in bed long after his waking hour, his clothing a fetching disarray on the filthy floor and a challenging, particularly well-fucked look in his vacant eyes.
It’s truly a wretched state of affairs, Kisame reflects, and he wishes that if Itachi had to be difficult, he would have the decency to stage his act-out hissy fit later in the day, when it would be socially acceptable to drink.
“Smoking in bed again?” he says dully. “We can’t really afford another place if you burn this one down on our current budget.”
In response, Itachi just removes the black tip of the long cigarette holder from between his lips and dips it over the side of the bed, once, twice, letting a pinch of ash drop to the floor. It’s a marvel that it makes any difference to the general state of the room.
Kisame shuts the door behind him and rolls up the sleeves of his yukata as he walks, hoping to god that for once, just once, the idiot would take the hint.
“Who did you go with last night?” he asks tightly, canting his hips against the bedpost.
“Nobody,” Itachi says, surprisingly light. “A client.”
Kisame grits his teeth loud enough to be heard in the stale air, as Itachi slinks off the bed and pulls his night robe closer around his shoulders, padding across the room to stand in a puddle of sunshine pooling in near the window. He passes Kisame a glance but says nothing. Kisame is forced to admit in spite of his mood that in a dark satin robe and rumpled hair sans the high heels and make-up, Itachi looks unforeseeably sexy -- disheveled and unvarnished -- which he supposes is part of the problem.
He’d better get this out before he loses anymore brain cells to his dick. “A client?”
“Yes,” Itachi says smoothly. “He gave us work.”
Kisame blinks and in that same hairtrigger second -- it doesn’t matter how many times he tells himself that he can’t, he won’t - he’s crossed the room, shoving chairs out of the way and knocking them over, and clenched his fingers around one of Itachi’s wrists, twisting, hard enough to hurt, hurt a lot even, maybe enough to leave a ring of purple on that white, white skin.
He knows, somewhere in his head, that he’s punishing himself, too.
“You sure he didn’t give you anything else?”
The look on Itachi’s face is unreadable, not even a trace of pain. The loose robe slips off his shoulder, revealing another bruise on his collarbone, this one two weeks old, rimmed green and yellow and ugly. “What do you think?”
It’s stupid to think Itachi would try to lie to him, because he has no reason to. Kisame can feel the black rage burning agonizingly behind his eyes, twisting around his spine like a snake. His mouth has gone dry and any moment now he might…
“I don’t think anything.”
Itachi’s mouth curves into a cold smirk. “Then there is no reason we should be having this discussion, is there?”
Kisame spares a dull thought that they really might burn down the house this time when the cigarette holder clatters to the ground, showering the floor with embers. The blood on Itachi’s lips is red and profuse, but he hasn’t stopped smirking.
*
The first time they fucked, there were Itachi’s mouth and Kisame’s hands, rubbed slick and hot and skin to skin, kissing and fumbling and falling just over the edge of awkward, but there was also the thrill of crossing boundaries and distances.
When Kisame slid inside, slow and deep, Itachi didn’t wince but it was a near thing given the way his body stiffened, and Kisame tensed up in return and said, “You’re a virgin.”
Itachi’s smirk was small and hard. “Not anymore,” he said, curling his fingers into the hair at the back of Kisame’s neck and yanking him forward.
It gave Kisame enough guts to curl his own fingers around Itachi’s thin, rich boy wrists and bend his hands over the headboard of the bed, pushing Itachi’s knees into his chest and rocking them together, slow and languorous like the white boats bobbing in the blue of the bay that he knew so well, a sure, sea-steady rhythm that had traced the veins of his life, every single day of it leading up to that summer and the white-clapboard vacation house, the room on the east wing with the open window, facing the sea.
Itachi said that he was eighteen but was obviously lying. The first time they met on the wide and endless beach Kisame knew right off the bat the boy was too young for him, but that didn’t stop him from scaling up the goddamn rose trellises that night and nearly slicing his thumb open on a rogue nail hanging from Itachi’s window ledge, the only upside being that afterwards he got to fuck Itachi deep into the cool, white sheet of his bed while his family snored just down the hall from them and every sound they made was a stifled gasp, muffled into skin and collarbones.
In an ideal world, Kisame thought, Itachi would have been an orphan. He had the mindset of one and seemed deserving of the distance and distinction that orphans got, all except for the fact that he had parents. Two, even, and a little brother that followed him around and worshipped him like the sun in his sky and the moon in his night.
Itachi, however, was ready to be an orphan, to embark on a life as a person with no people. His family wouldn’t let him go, and so, when Itachi talked about disposing of them, methodical, matter-of-fact, in a voice so chilling and detached he probably used it to recite classical poetry at whatever highbrow boarding school he attended outside the realm of summer and ocean breeze, Kisame didn’t find it difficult to believe him at all.
After the third time he fucked Itachi, Kisame told him about sailing in industrial steamboats, about how much he loved it. He talked about the ocean off the coasts of the last ladyfingers of the Japanese archipelago, green and unbroken and graceful in its vastness, an infinity well within reach from the deck of a sleek white boat cutting its way through the water, the wind off the curling waves icy and sharp with brine. He talked about running your hand over the helm and feeling the vessel vibrate under your skin, the ocean rising up to meet you, and lifted his arm to show Itachi his anchor tattoo, small and a darker shade of blue against the pale skin of his inner wrist.
And at some point, drowsy and half-crazed, he started talking about sailing all the great oceans of the world, running the palm of his hand over the small of Itachi’s back as though charting the routes of future voyages into his skin, and in the middle of this accidental cartography, Itachi looked at him and asked, “You’re not falling in love with me, are you?”
Kisame jerked his hand away like he’d been burned, and scowled. “Yes, that’s exactly it,” he said, skittering with sarcasm, “I’m madly in love with you,” and turned to face the wall.
*
But the thing is…
The thing is, and this Kisame knows, he hasn’t seen the ocean in a very long time, and somewhere along the line they’ve picked up an enviable arsenal of sharp, lethal objects to complement the cleaving knives they used to butcher Itachi’s family, and after that they’ve managed to get pretty good at killing other people with them too.
Kisame has always been generous with his strength, which comes in handy when he’s struggling against malfunctioning fishing equipment or bashing open the skulls of people whose deaths would pay for their next meal, but neither of this is the same thing as fisting his hands into the front of Itachi’s night robe and slamming his lover so hard against the wall he can hear the wood paneling splintering beneath him.
That’ll leave a bruise too, he thinks distantly, maybe a welt the color of Itachi’s eyes, cutting a line of pain into his back that won’t fade for days and days. He thinks of running his fingers carefully over it, later, like drawing a map, but touching like that isn’t allowed -- not anymore.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, there is the knowledge that he has lost his temper with Itachi a sum total of thirty-seven times. Kisame knows this figure with exact certainty because every single time it happens there is also the hollow fear that he might go too far this time. Because what he also knows with perfect certainty is that Itachi keeps a knife in his garterbelt -- what he lacks in brute force he makes up for by being quick as a cat, and if Kisame doesn’t stop focusing on the wrong things all the time he’s going to end up with that blade driven through the base of his skull, one of these days.
But the truth is that Itachi made a choice, and Kisame is just now reacting to it, as well as he can.
He ends up shoving his face next to Itachi’s neck and hissing in his ear, “Don’t make me decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth. I won’t do this again.” He’d do it again in a heartbeat.
And the only answer he gets is, “Is that right?”
Suddenly he’s very sick of that smart fucking mouth -- made for sucking cocks, he’s always known -- and so he sticks two fingers into it before turning Itachi to face the wall.
At that moment, the territories he’s always thought clearly marked in his mind are suddenly blurry and indistinct. Kisame thinks of cartography and oceans, how he’s always been at home in the water, which rises up to meet him, lapping against the hard edges of his body in warm sympathy. The sea is cruel and treacherous but she loves him, wants him, and there’s not an ocean he hasn’t been able to sail, charted or no. But land is hard for him, and so is Itachi, whom Kisame used to think of as an undiscovered ocean, an elegant mystery that he wanted to map, to figure out, to go the length of. It figures he’d be wrong about that too.
In the midst of the jagged rhythm of their hips, he hears Itachi whisper, very softly, almost sad, “You act like you have a fight to pick with the entire world, Kisame. But you won’t win.”
There is nothing more to be said after that.
*
Kisame sits slumped against the wall long after Itachi has shrugged on his clothes and started applying his make-up in front of the chipped vanity mirror. The cold seeps into his skin through the fabric of his stained yukata, and he feels it to his fingertips. Once, what seems like a lifetime ago, he was lying in the sultry darkness of a summer night, waiting for dawn and the sound of ships coming into the harbor, signals that it was time to crawl back out the window and leave the way he came. He slides his eyes shut, reaching for the memory.
“We have work to do tonight,” Itachi is saying somewhere above him, voice even and cool as you please. “Do be professional.”
Kisame barely resists the urge to snort. He slouches against the wall and feels every inch of the woodwork against his back, the splinters biting into the palms of his hands. There is not a sound in the room, and he’s glad he can’t see Itachi’s face.
The cold, clinical click of heels on wood breaks the silence, and when Kisame slits his eyes open, he catches only the sight of Itachi’s retreating back, a slim silhouette supported on pencil-thin heels disappearing into the dishwater light beyond the door. The tail of his silk kimono drapes after him, a poison secret, but Kisame knows he’s just reaching for metaphors.
Be professional, he thinks with a bitter sneer. Once upon a time, he really believed that was all it took, and even now, with a little money set aside and barring any foreseeable disaster on the event horizon, there is still a part of him that denies the obvious, a part that likes to think it can still all work out, somehow…
But Kisame is a practical man. He knows something’s over long before it actually is. One day, the rest of it will catch up with them, maybe the laws or Itachi’s wealthy and well-connected relatives. Or maybe it won’t even come to that, and instead, one of these sunny mornings, those pencil-thin heels will walk out the door and down those thirty-seven steps and out of Kisame’s life forever, and he won’t be surprised because it’ll only be fitting that Itachi will leave the way he came, like a sullen submarine breaking the smooth green surface of the ocean. Maybe the in-between leagues are already more than they were ever supposed to have.
It's nothing big, just widening water.
He can’t hear the sound of ships coming into the harbor anymore. He throws himself onto the bed and stares at the ceiling, flecked with golden light. The room stinks of semen and smoke and cheap perfume. There’s a bottle of scotch on the bedside table, but he doesn’t have the strength to reach for it and take another shot. Instead, he puts a pillow over his face and laughs himself sick.
So there you have it. Angry, jaded sailorman. Runaway rich boy with a penchant for crossdressing and kinky business. Together, they fight crime! Or, you know, kill people. Basically, I wrote this entire story as an excuse to indulge my various kinks like anchor tattoos and rolled-up sleeves and wrist-grabbing, and also to use the phrase "unforseeably sexy". I was really tempted to go for "smack the ho" but I figured the stoning would be too intense even for me to bear. So. I'm a moron. And I'm sorry.
Also, please to download this incredibly inappropriate song that I used as soundtrack for the second fic: You Know I’m No Good by Ghostface Killah feat. Amy Winehouse.
Have a KisaIta Valentine's Day! Please someone have some respect left for me! ♥