fic: Itachi/Shisui: The mechanics of waking up.
well, it was bound to happen eventually. All the Naruto fic I've been reading banging around in my brain, and a Goddamn lot of Itachi/Shisui, too.
Spawned from ronsard’s comment that Itachi can only see Sasuke as a real person. I think Shisui should be in that category, too, and so this was born. :P
I also like how her Gleeful!Shisui, and all the water motifs with the Nakano in Itachi/Shisui fic have started filtering about fandom like the plague. A good plague. Success! Writing wins forever!
Featuring a lot of terrible run-on sentences and my love of italicizing everything.
Title: The Mechanics of Waking Up
Rating: PG. Introspection, fluff.
Pairing: Itachi/Shisui
Length: 811
Summary: Itachi has always been waiting for something to stir him into motion.
- The Mechanics of Waking Up -
Home is a variable concept, Itachi muses. He has always felt a sort of abstraction pulling at his heels, like the current of slow water, driving him away from family, from clan. It’s not something he plans, but it happens anyway, and he learns to live with it. He knows his calm unnerves people, he knows it distances him from them, but he can’t help it. You can’t fight currents forever, fish can’t swim upstream forever, and he can’t breathe out of the water, so this is where he stays, trying to make himself see people as people, when all he sees is gray. They might as well be mannequins in a shop.
He filters the world through shinobi behavior, through archetypes and known patterns that tend to create a dull monotony of background noise which he learns to tune out. People follow the formula, nothing stands out, and he is unsurprised. Itachi is waiting for something to move him, a rock that will snag him.
It happens twice: His cousin, and then his baby brother. Shisui cannot help but be bright and mostly insane, it’s the way he is, and Itachi finds it wakes him up as well; an answering echo. A force to push against everything Shisui is. He discovers something living inside himself for the first time. His heart is beating, and Itachi is only aware of it now because the spaces inside him felt like dust before.
Itachi sometimes wonders, with a touch of chagrin for his clan, How did someone so obnoxiously carefree and stable ever get born into the Uchiha clan? Don’t they throw out well-adjusted children early on, and keep the emotionally stunted overachievers these days?
He’s also aware, and this time with a touch of fear, that finally having something means you can suddenly be hurt, that now he has to step up. He has to live. Shisui has dragged him into the big bright burning world, now he has to do something with it. Besides excel at ninjutsu, anyway.
Maybe it paved the way for Sasuke. Maybe now that he can look back on memories of running through the forest during rainstorms, and falling back exhausted to the dense forest ground, sprawling there with Shisui, finally feeling that he’s not just waiting for some large unknown event to catapult him into action, but that everything around him is dizzy and sick with possibility, he knows how caring works. He wants to show Sasuke what Shisui has shown him, that there’s more than training and obedience and The Clan. He swears that his younger brother is going to be a fully-formed person, fleshed-out and whole, smiles not just perfunctory. He will be protected from those darker mechanisms Konoha can’t seem to help itself from engaging in from time to time, movements of a truly horrific scale. Sasuke is going to have actual friends! and adventures and Itachi will teach him everything he knows.
He’s also not surprised, therefore, to find that when he first recognizes the next step, it’s as an abstract concept, too.
I’m in love with Shisui, Itachi realizes one day. He didn’t understand till that quiet moment what it all meant, but now it makes a pattern: Shisui’s hand on the back of his neck, their sparring matches, the feeling of actually laughing- something Itachi does not often partake in!- the tingles on his arms when Shisui hugged him. He doesn’t connect it to how often he mused that Shisui is very good looking, why doesn’t he have a girlfriend yet? How he sometimes looks at his constant companion and feels something liquid and sharp coil down his spine, breaking things as it goes, turning them to heat. He could not identify these things, but with his characteristic pragmatism, he ruthlessly categorizes them:
Oh.
I’ve probably hit puberty. They talk about this in the textbooks, if I recall. It surely can’t affect my training schedule too much. Shisui would be mocking me right about now, calling me a mindless shinobi automaton.
I’m in love with my best friend. He’d laugh about this, then wack me on the shoulder-
He may, in all probability, be in love with me too. Itachi snags on that last thought, the one his brain had supplied before he had fully absorbed its meaning.
I should find out.
He heads to the training grounds where Shisui is, in all likelihood, frightening small wildlife and practicing his inefficient moves, as per his motto: wild improvisation is the mother of invention! And the basis for the best new jutsus! No, don’t give me that look, Itachi, that’s how the saying goes.
Itachi finds he is smirking to himself. For all that Shisui displays a frightening capacity to understand Itachi’s thoughts and motives, this is going to broadside him completely. It’s a comforting thought, that he is about to completely mess up Shisui’s day.
***
"but there's a scene missing, between marriage and death.....": i had originally aimed for something smuttier, but next time. next time there will be sexy times. :3
Spawned from ronsard’s comment that Itachi can only see Sasuke as a real person. I think Shisui should be in that category, too, and so this was born. :P
I also like how her Gleeful!Shisui, and all the water motifs with the Nakano in Itachi/Shisui fic have started filtering about fandom like the plague. A good plague. Success! Writing wins forever!
Featuring a lot of terrible run-on sentences and my love of italicizing everything.
Title: The Mechanics of Waking Up
Rating: PG. Introspection, fluff.
Pairing: Itachi/Shisui
Length: 811
Summary: Itachi has always been waiting for something to stir him into motion.
- The Mechanics of Waking Up -
Home is a variable concept, Itachi muses. He has always felt a sort of abstraction pulling at his heels, like the current of slow water, driving him away from family, from clan. It’s not something he plans, but it happens anyway, and he learns to live with it. He knows his calm unnerves people, he knows it distances him from them, but he can’t help it. You can’t fight currents forever, fish can’t swim upstream forever, and he can’t breathe out of the water, so this is where he stays, trying to make himself see people as people, when all he sees is gray. They might as well be mannequins in a shop.
He filters the world through shinobi behavior, through archetypes and known patterns that tend to create a dull monotony of background noise which he learns to tune out. People follow the formula, nothing stands out, and he is unsurprised. Itachi is waiting for something to move him, a rock that will snag him.
It happens twice: His cousin, and then his baby brother. Shisui cannot help but be bright and mostly insane, it’s the way he is, and Itachi finds it wakes him up as well; an answering echo. A force to push against everything Shisui is. He discovers something living inside himself for the first time. His heart is beating, and Itachi is only aware of it now because the spaces inside him felt like dust before.
Itachi sometimes wonders, with a touch of chagrin for his clan, How did someone so obnoxiously carefree and stable ever get born into the Uchiha clan? Don’t they throw out well-adjusted children early on, and keep the emotionally stunted overachievers these days?
He’s also aware, and this time with a touch of fear, that finally having something means you can suddenly be hurt, that now he has to step up. He has to live. Shisui has dragged him into the big bright burning world, now he has to do something with it. Besides excel at ninjutsu, anyway.
Maybe it paved the way for Sasuke. Maybe now that he can look back on memories of running through the forest during rainstorms, and falling back exhausted to the dense forest ground, sprawling there with Shisui, finally feeling that he’s not just waiting for some large unknown event to catapult him into action, but that everything around him is dizzy and sick with possibility, he knows how caring works. He wants to show Sasuke what Shisui has shown him, that there’s more than training and obedience and The Clan. He swears that his younger brother is going to be a fully-formed person, fleshed-out and whole, smiles not just perfunctory. He will be protected from those darker mechanisms Konoha can’t seem to help itself from engaging in from time to time, movements of a truly horrific scale. Sasuke is going to have actual friends! and adventures and Itachi will teach him everything he knows.
He’s also not surprised, therefore, to find that when he first recognizes the next step, it’s as an abstract concept, too.
I’m in love with Shisui, Itachi realizes one day. He didn’t understand till that quiet moment what it all meant, but now it makes a pattern: Shisui’s hand on the back of his neck, their sparring matches, the feeling of actually laughing- something Itachi does not often partake in!- the tingles on his arms when Shisui hugged him. He doesn’t connect it to how often he mused that Shisui is very good looking, why doesn’t he have a girlfriend yet? How he sometimes looks at his constant companion and feels something liquid and sharp coil down his spine, breaking things as it goes, turning them to heat. He could not identify these things, but with his characteristic pragmatism, he ruthlessly categorizes them:
Oh.
I’ve probably hit puberty. They talk about this in the textbooks, if I recall. It surely can’t affect my training schedule too much. Shisui would be mocking me right about now, calling me a mindless shinobi automaton.
I’m in love with my best friend. He’d laugh about this, then wack me on the shoulder-
He may, in all probability, be in love with me too. Itachi snags on that last thought, the one his brain had supplied before he had fully absorbed its meaning.
I should find out.
He heads to the training grounds where Shisui is, in all likelihood, frightening small wildlife and practicing his inefficient moves, as per his motto: wild improvisation is the mother of invention! And the basis for the best new jutsus! No, don’t give me that look, Itachi, that’s how the saying goes.
Itachi finds he is smirking to himself. For all that Shisui displays a frightening capacity to understand Itachi’s thoughts and motives, this is going to broadside him completely. It’s a comforting thought, that he is about to completely mess up Shisui’s day.
***
"but there's a scene missing, between marriage and death.....": i had originally aimed for something smuttier, but next time. next time there will be sexy times. :3