Requisite Disclaimer: I am not affliiated with Masashi Kishimoto, Shueisha Publishing, Viz Media or any other offical holders to the rights of Naruto. I own none of the characters and will make no money off of this story.
On a side note I am editing this myself so if you see any grammatical or naming errors please feel free to point them out politlely and I will be happy to fix them.
Enjoy.
These days Kisame often finds himself with little to do but think. Unsurprisingly, existing inside a giant sword leaves one with some considerable free time and very little to fill it with. This does not make the shark-nin happy. He's made a point of occupying the spare moments of his life since his defection with ceaseless work or training.
Two of the best things about his relationship with Itachi, the Uchiha genius never asked him a single question about his life before joining Akatsuki and had an equally frenetic work-ethic. Sometimes Kisame wondered what unnamed demons drove Itachi as well but refused to ask. After all, that would have made his own fair conversational game, or gotten him transported to a literal world of pain.
Itachi was going to have plenty of time with his secrets now. Kisame will not even allow himself to consider how bad Sasuke's got to have it on the tormented memories front, what with the combination of his own and his brothers.
But that's not true.
Kisame finds himself thinking of Sasuke fairly often. He uses the kid as a yard stick of sorts whenever he's feeling particularly down. He tells himself that his damage isn't half that bad.
Some days he even believes it.
This is the first time in more than nine years that he's actually let the disjointed flashes of a remembered scent or color that managed to slip through his iron clad defenses form into coherent images.
She had ashy brown hair, cut short for necessity's sake but with an endearing tendency of falling over her left eye, or maybe it was the right one; the details were blurred by the passage of too much time. He could no longer recall the color of her eyes. They changed depending on his mood from pleasant blue to soothing grey to a passionate amber-brown. The one thing he could reconstruct with absolute clarity was the color and texture of her skin.
It had been a creamy, opaque ivory that warmed to gold easily on the rare occasions she got some sun. It had also been the softest thing he had ever touched. Oh sure, it sounded cliché, every lover in every bad romance ever written described his beloved's skin like that; but Kisame suspected it was at least something like true.
It was, he thought, a symptom of being in love.
In all likelihood her skin had not been all that soft when compared to say, a fine lady's who hardly ever did anything so rough as garden, let alone train until she dropped in a heap of sweat and blood. Nevertheless, to Kisame, his woman's skin had been unbelievably, terrifyingly soft. Especially in comparison to his rough hide. He always wondered how something so delicate feeling stood up to such punishment. He was certain that if he rubbed it too hard it would split and bleed, though it never did.
He also remembered her voice, or at least he thought he did. He certainly remembered the effect it had on him. She had been talking to another student, a girl as he had been passing on the street the first time he heard it. He had checked his long stride behind the pair. If he had ever known what the conversation had been about he had long, long since forgotten but her voice stayed with him. Both girls' voices did actually. Her pretty, raven haired companion had had a high, fluting way of speaking that he had heard many other women adopt in an attempt to sound 'cute.' He found it grating. Her voice though had been soft with a hint of a whispery huskiness even then when she couldn't have been more than eight or nine. It undercut her friend's shrill responses and wrapped around something inside of him.
He had followed them in silence all the way to the academy. The black haired one had started violently and hissed something venomous about not sneaking up on people but She had looked up at him with an expression both bemused and conspiratorial. She had been aware of his presence the entire time her look said; she had just decided not to say anything to her friend. Such subterfuge was a good sign in a tyro ninja he remembered thinking. He had been surprised to find himself hoping that she made it through her graduation.
She had, a year after he did. He had watched her viciously dispatch her pretty, vivacious friend and step over the other girl's severed head with its blood-matted black hair and shocked eyes without a second's hesitation. She had been ten. The next year her younger, second cousin had murdered the class behind hers.
It had taken over a year for the Mizukage to act in the face of Zabuza's frankly predictable brutality. The decision had come down in the spring, just weeks before the class that should have been Zabuza's would have graduated. There would be no more murderous battles between students. The entire class was passed. Kisame felt like he had been betrayed and was certain the village was doomed. He had stalked off to find a deserted inlet somewhere to vent his rage on rocks. It seemed that a fair few other recent graduates had had similar thoughts because he had been forced to walk much farther from the village than was his habit before he found a free bit of sand.
At least he had thought it free. He couldn't recall how long he had spent reducing boulders to fine gravel. He did remember being brought up short by a voice. He had reacted exactly as ninja should, viciously and without thinking, before he realized that it was that same whispery voice that had begun to haunt his subconscious. He had felt a sort of clenching in his gut as he turned to watch his water sharks tear her apart. She had dispelled them elegantly; dropping below one while blocking the other with an armored forearm and then pirouetting neatly to tear the other apart with a blast of chakra directed air. He was impressed and told her as much as she straightened and turned toward him.
She had smiled that half smile she used whenever she was trying to hide her emotions. He would come to know that smile well over the years, but this was the first time he had seen it. It tightened around the same place her voice did. Their first conversation was burned permanently into his brain.
" Hello, hello and to what do I owe the honor of a visit from the great monster of our humble village?"
"I wasn't aware I was visiting anyone."
"Ah well, as you are now what say you fuck off hmm?"
"For someone so pretty you have atrocious manners. Why should I go? You own this beach now?"
She gave a rude, unladylike snort in response. He found himself weirdly charmed. She continued, her voice having something like the crackle of approaching lightning in it.
"No I do not but, seeing as how I was here first, it would only seem polite for you to move on elsewhere."
"I only succumb to my manners if the party reminding me of them has some of their own."
"Please."
He laughed.
"That was the most insincere 'please' I've ever heard."
She snarled. He had never actually heard a human snarl before and then charged him. He deflected her first flurry of attacks easily; ducking and twisting and forcing her flip over his own badly timed kick. He wasn't really trying, expecting her to quickly vent whatever fury was driving her and accede the field to her better. She didn't, choosing instead to increase the speed and intensity of her blows, strengthening them with precise chakra. He had to work harder to stop her this time and she even managed to land a smarting kick or two. His patience was fading fast. He decided to end the fight before she really pissed him off and forced him to do something stupid to her.
He called up his third nastiest water summon. Wrapping someone in a bubble of rapidly shrinking air surrounded by water for a few minutes convinced the vast majority of people to do what he wanted. She barreled into him before he was finished shaping his chakra. He staggered but managed to keep his feet under him, barely. He was knocked squarely on his ass by a blast of arctic air a split second later. Without thinking, he let loose the half formed water sphere. Out of control it slammed her into the sheltering wall of the tiny cove. Even through the muffling curtain of water he heard her shriek in pain, inhaling and swallowing water as she did. She thrashed violently for a moment and then, her mouth opening again, she went limp.
Swearing, he climbed to his feet and dispersed the jutsu. He limped over to her still body. He hoped she was only unconscious. He really did not want to have to explain why she was dead to the rest of the village. He prodded her angrily with a foot. She didn't move. He had never been more annoyed with another creature than he was at that moment. He was drawing his foot back to give her corpse a nasty kick for being such an idiot and forcing him to kill her when she coughed. She did it again, painfully, and tried to roll from her back into a fetal position; groaning and flopping quickly back down after a second's effort.
Her left shoulder was four inches lower than her right one he noticed. She cracked her eyes and watched him silently for a moment. He did the same; following the blood trails from her broken nose over her lips and down her chin with his eyes. She broke the strange silence first.
"Are you going to kill me?"
It was just a question. There was no fear in her voice. He shook his head and sighed.
"If I spent all of my time killing fools I'd have no time to sleep."
She did not respond but sat up with great effort, flinching visibly when she accidently tried to support herself with her dislocated arm. He frowned. He was mildly pleased she wasn't as breakable as he had initially feared but he didn't want to have to explain why she was banged up either.
"Come here."
He hadn't meant to sound that angry. She didn't move. He grimaced and tried again.
"You can't reset the shoulder on your own and I don't think you want me to tell the medics how stupid you were."
She glared but, as he had hoped, she was a pragmatic girl. She accepted his left hand with her right and let him haul her to her feet. She only stiffened slightly when he wrapped his arm around her upper back and slid the other along the front of her clavicle.
"Alright, count of three."
She nodded, her skin going grey.
"One…Tw—"
He snapped the shoulder back into place. She didn't yell, to her credit. The second the procedure was finished, however, she wrenched herself away and swore at him under her breath, fingering her wobbly nose. He smirked.
"I can help you with that too if you like."
"Thank you so much but I think you've done more than enough for today."
He shrugged to say that she wouldn't be in such bad shape if she'd just backed off like a sensible thing. She got the message and frowned sourly.
The sun was just above the western horizon. He needed to get back, wandering around in the dark in Kiri was semi-suicidal. He began to walk up the beach to the steep entrance of the cove when he realized she wasn't following him.
"Get your ass over here or I will carry you back."
She sounded abstracted.
"Whatever happened to mister manners?"
"He's been replaced by mister getting very annoyed."
He spun and took several menacing steps towards her before stopping. She was standing where he's left her staring into the middle distance. He was close enough to catch an odd refraction of the fading light off her eyes. He thought she might be crying for a split second and then she dropped her chin and stalked over to him. They made their way back to the village in silence, him walking a step behind her.
It had taken him five more years to actually ask her what exactly she had been doing so far away from Kiri. She had smiled enigmatically and responded with two words.
"Thinking, waiting."
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