Itachi exited the treeline with a polite rustle and carried with him the sweet stink of rot. Kisame pushed himself up from the rock he was idly perched on and swung Samehada back over his shoulder. They faced south and continued the trek to Tea Country.
Chasing rumors and jinchuuriki seemed to be all they did these days, although they rarely caught either. Kisame privately suspected it was a bid to keep Itachi and himself far away from Rain. It wouldn't do to let such powerful rogues to run loose all over your nice city.
"Say, Itachi-san," Kisame waited a half-second for the slight shift of attention, "what do you suppose are the odds we'll actually fight someone this time?"
"Poor." Itachi said it with a slight huff of air. If one was generous, and Kisame generally was with regards to Itachi's stifled emotions, it could be interpreted as amusement.
"Ah," Kisame chuffed, grinding his teeth together, "so they are. I believe Samehada is getting rather tired of all this walking and not fighting. Perhaps we'll run into the Kyuubi brat. That would be fun."
Itachi said nothing, and there was really no point in continuing a one sided conversation when Kisame already knew the answer to the rhetorical questions he was asking. They continued in silence.
The dense tangled forests of Fire Country slowly shifted into scrubland and structured plantations: Tea Country. The border between Tea and Fire was technically open, but there were scuffed tabi prints in the dusty road.
Itachi paused for a second and Kisame felt the sickly tingle of a genjutsu engulfing them.
"Ah, Itachi-san," Kisame sighed, "you're spoiling my fun."
Itachi said nothing, and they continued across the border. A pair of the Fire Damyio's soldiers lounged in the shade just off the path, absently smoking rolled cigarettes and calling pittance bets on dice.
Kisame watched the cup, pale eyes wide in his craggy face.
"It seems they're using weighted dice." He observed, drifting as close as he could without straying beyond the range of the genjutsu. Samehada bristled along his back. The guards had barely more chakra than a civilian, but it was enough for his sword, starved of anything interesting as the poor thing was, to react to their presence. Kisame pulled back before Samehada started siphoning Itachi's chakra from his genjutsu. Perhaps once Itachi's chakra might have been palatable, but now it tasted like bitter illness. Kisame supposed Itachi might have thought himself clever enough to hide his disease, and had he been a lesser shinobi, perhaps he was clever enough. But. Kisame was not that, and Itachi was very obviously dying.
Tragic, to lose such a fun fight to something so mundane as illness.
They continued in silence down the dusty road. Tea Country's long overdue rain was just that, and it was obvious how parched the land was. Every step was accompanied by a puff of that awful yellow dirt, and the sparse shrubs were wilted and brown.
"I suppose they're hoping for rain, eh, Itachi-san?" Kisame pulled a dead leaf off of a sickly looking branch. Dry weather was something he'd never conceptualize.
Itachi didn't respond, but Kisame was well-versed in carrying on a one-sided conversation.
"It doesn't smell much like rain, and I have a rather refined sense for that sort of thing. No, I don't think it's going to rain for some time now."
"Maybe it will."
Kisame nodded slowly, his teeth bared in his usual half grin. It was rather more comfortable to pull the fleshy bits of his mouth away from his teeth, and it had the added bonus of looking quite intimidating.
"How optimistic of you, Itachi-san."
"I have my moments." His stride faltered, almost imperceptibly. Yes, Itachi's taciturn tendencies were certainly partially inherent, but Kisame would bet Samehada that he didn't speak quite as much as he wanted to simply because he couldn't spare the oxygen.
Kisame had chatter to spare however, and he managed to fill the silence until the plantations faded away into sparse farmhouses, and tiny villages, and eventually into the capital city. Itachi's genjutsu kept them hidden as a haze of heat and dust the entire way. Now that they were simply another pair of oddly dressed travellers among the thousand that flocked to the capital, he canceled it, sucking away that disgusting chakra. Samehada reacted with a faintly disappointed rustle. Kisame felt something in him inclined to agree.
The capital of Tea Country was a city-like blend of neat shops and crumbling slums. Tattoed punks carrying knives sat next to young mothers and withered grannies waiting for the next rickshaw. The market street was full of open tents brimming with fresh fish and ripe vegetables, sweating in the heat. They bypassed the street, however, and continued to the warehouse district, where an older man huffing on a cigarette in-between loading crates directed them to Orin Shipping.
"This is it, yes, Itachi-san?" Kisame stared at the large warehouse. It took up most of the block, and stretched perhaps a half block back as well. It stank like old tea and tobacco and, beneath that, there was the copper salt stink of watery blood. Itachi slipped silently into the warehouse office in lieu of replying.
If a person who did not know who Kisame was and what he could do and had done saw him, they tended to assume he was a brawling meathead, barely leashed by Itachi's cool head and collected demeanor. It was an impression he cultivated with every goonish comment and fixation on dismemberment. That being, it terrified people when he, more so than Itachi, appeared silently in a room.
"Fuck!" Kemuri Ushitora jumped up from his desk and caught his legs on the underside of the cheap pine. He crashed backwards and landed on the floor, cradling his head.
"Surprised him, didn't we?" Kisame grinned.
"Kemuri Ushitora." Itachi said tonelessly. He didn't bother to walk closer to the man.
"You're," the man stumbled to his feet, trying to speak through spit and blood, "you're—that means. Is… is she dead?"
Itach reached into his cloak and retrieved a jeweled hairpin, the sort of thing a rich man would give his mistress. He tossed it onto the desk and Kemuri grabbed it, holding it up to the buzzing electric light.
"Shit." He whispered. "You got it. And, uh," the nerves came back into his voice, "she's dead, right?"
Itachi stared blankly at him.
"Ah, right. Good, good." He received a small satchel from inside his shirt. "Here's the rest of your payment."
He tossed the satchel to Itachi; his arm flickered out of his robe and he snatched out of the air so quickly it looked like it vanished. He didn't bother counting. Kemuri was a sniveling coward, but he wasn't stupid.
Itachi turned on his heel, and Kisame followed.
"Ah." Kemuri cleared his throat. "How, uh, how did she die?"
Itachi's face barely changed, but Kisame got the impression of exasperation from him.
"Rather slowly, I'm afraid." Kisame turned back, grinning. The bell on his hat jangled cheerfully. He touched his hand to Samehade's hilt. "My blade is inefficient at cutting throats, and Nui-san's neck was just so delicate." His grin widened. "So I cut off her legs instead. But don't worry, Kemuri. She passed out quickly. I'm sure she didn't feel it when I hit bone."
Kemuri's face went sheet white.
"Kisame."
"Of course."
They slipped out of the office and back into the busy street. The dry air was becoming stifled with dust as the hours dragged by and the market street finally began turning away customers rather than inviting them in. In another hour the streets would be clear, and an hour after that the illicit business would start to awaken.
They paid for a pair of rooms at a run down inn. For the sake of privacy, and to impede one of them from turning on the other in the middle of the night and crashing through the wall with a knife, they typically chose rooms on different floors, or at the opposite end of the same floor, but the inn tonight was full up and they were stuck in neighboring rooms.
Kisame closed the door to his room and flicked on the light. He made a cursory check of the room, then, finding it suitably clean and free from any nasty trap jutsu, unfolded his futon and made a neat bed in the center of the room.
Then he sat against the wall, cradling Samehada, and stared at the door.
The floorboards here were cheap and he could hear every step his neighbor took. His neighbor on the other side might as well have been a ghost, for all the noise Itachi made. But Samehada was Samehada, and when the wall against Kisame's back creaked, the sword bristled.
Itachi made it to midnight without coughing, but then the fits started in earnest. He heaved for breath in sick, muffled noises, gasping when he managed to hack up enough of whatever was killing him to suck down fresh air into the spoiled meat lodged in his chest. Kisame could feel the peculiar wet fever heat radiating through the wall, blazing up his back. Itachi never had sweats while he was awake, but he couldn't push himself to stay awake through the night anymore. His exhaustion pushed him into somnolence and his body panicked, spiking his temperature and dropping it just as quickly—a futile attempt to kill the disease, which did a better job of killing the host.
It never lasted long though, because the need to breathe was more pressing than the urge to doze, and Itachi staggered out of his fever and into another round of hacking.
Kisame settled back against the wall, shuffling until he found some measure of comfort against the thin wood. Then, to the soundtrack of Itachi's slow, rotting death, he fell asleep.
The sun rose oddly here.
Mist was a land of smoggy, shrouded fog. The sun struggled to cut through the stuff until it dissipated around noon. Sunrise in Mist was a slow affair, a dim, dawnless light that persisted in a room like smoke.
In a country like this, where the sea wasn't stifling, it was a kinder affair. Beautiful, even, if Kisame felt inclined to be poetic. The sun burst up from behind the horizon in a dazzling array of golden light and blushing clouds. The cicadas started buzzing in that low drone of theirs, and the streets bustled to life.
Kisame remained silent.
In the next room, there was a harsh cough, and Itachi spat. There was the dull shake of pills in a jar.
He pushed himself to his feet, and folded the futon neatly, storing it in the cupboard. He retrieved his straw hat and tied it around his chin. Samehada bristled when he touched it, so he sneered, and funneled a portion of chakra into it.
His sword was a balancing act. Starve it, and whatever curse kept the thing alive would fail, and Kisame would become the proud keeper of the unwieldy hunk of iron that used to be Samehada. Overfeed it, and it would start siphoning off enough chakra to kill him, and then the sword would become the proud killer of the shinobi that used to be Hoshigaki Kisame.
He shouldered Samehada and ducked out through the door. Itachi was waiting in the hall. His hat and cloak covered most of his body, but Kisame was versed enough in the arcane body language of the man to see that he was flagging with exhaustion.
"I think dango would be pleasant for breakfast." Kisame announced as they exited the inn. "But it isn't much of a breakfast food."
"There was a cafe two blocks east."
"Shall we go, then?"
They walked sedately. There was no rush, really. The streets were sparsely peopled this early in the morning. The only thing they really had to worry about were the drunks staggering home from the stand bars and the adulterers nervously creeping back from the brothels, wearing yesterday's crumpled clothes.
There was a young woman outside of the cafe, sweeping the stone entryway. She set up a little menu display and stepped back inside. The place smelled like sugar and bread, overwhelming the leafy stink of tea.
Kisame stepped inside, stooping under the doorframe. The young woman froze when she saw him.
"Hello, miss," Kisame spoke, grinning, "I don't suppose you're open yet?"
"We're open." She whispered. In a world of odd faces, his was odder than most.
"Good." His grin broadened. "Itachi-san, did you hear? They're open."
"How fortunate."
If Kisame's thin voice was lilting, then Itachi's was deep and flat. He spoken tonelessly, even when he could make walls buzz with a whisper.
The woman's face became stone.
"What would you like?"
She watched them like she expected them to say 'your blood' or perhaps, 'a child to sacrifice', but that was much more a co-workers thing. Kisame leaned over the glass case, considering the pastries.
"Ah, no dango here, Itachi-san, but you might like the castella. They're rather sweet."
"Fine."
Kisame ordered a slice of castella for Itachi and a steamed cake for himself. The young woman wrapped them in pretty waxed paper, Kisame just smiled when he paid and carried them over to a table in the far corner. Itachi was already sitting, perched in a peculiar hunched pose that kept too much of his lungs from running down his throat.
Kisame handed Itachi his cake, and then ate his own. He ate slowly, elbows off the table, back straight, and cutlery clutched loosely. Truth be told, sweets were foul on a mouth used to fresh fish and undercooked rice, but he had once resolved himself to expand his pallette.
"Not much of a breakfast, but I supposed we have no mother's to chide us for eating cake instead of rice."
Itachi paused midchew, and shuddered, almost imperceptibly. Then he stood, and walked outside of the shop, disappointed around the corner. The woman watched him go.
"Think nothing of it." Kisame advised blithely as he collected their food and tucked it into one of his pockets. "My friend has fickle tastes, you see."
He grinned at her again before following Itachi.
He was stooped, half hidden by some weeds in a messy alley out of the way of the main street. He spat, clearing the sick out of his mouth, then rose. Kisame's nose twitched.
"I rather liked her cooking, Itachi-san." Kisame's eyes glinted in the dull light of the alley. "But I suppose it wasn't the little cakes that made you ill? Was it your medicine?"
"Being forward is unlike you." Itachi muttered, stepping past Kisame back onto the street.
Kisame laughed. "I suppose it isn't, Itachi-san."
They exited the town and headed East, this time. Another one of Kakuzu's dead drops. Hopefully this time he had chosen their assignment based on the level of skill required, not the amount of money a trade heir was willing to pay to keep his bastards from sprouting up in half the brothels from here to the Fire Capital. Itachi didn't bother casting his genjutsu. Perhaps it was because he, too, noticed the crowded bustle of heartbeats and stinking steel spread along the road, or, more likely, if he cast something like that he would die.
"Kisame."
"Of course."
The cicadas screeched under the sun, and the hazy dust from the road coiled under their feet.
When the crowd of small time gangbangers came into view, Kisame huffed a laugh.
"You the fucks Ushitora hired?" The man who must have been their leader for all of his braggadocio stepped forwards and sneered. There were fifteen men all lined across the road.
Itachi remained silent.
"Ah, language, please." Kisame grinned and unshouldered Samehada. "You'll make me blush."
"Piece of shit can't even take care of his own bastards." The man gestured, and his little henchmen surrounded them. They looked like most people outside of the Hidden Villages looked—short and underfed. Itachi was taller than most of them.
If Kisame was the kind of man who cared, then the baited gossip might have been enough to postpone the fight. But he wasn't, and neither was it.
Kisame swept Samehada out like a club, catching one man by the skull and knocking him into another.
The remaining men rushed them. They carried dull katana, ramblers and gamblers, all of them. Kisame blocked one with Samehada while he grabbed another man's arm with his free hand and snapped it. He went down screaming, clutching his broken arm like he didn't really want to touch it. Kisame kicked the man he had blocked and drove the heel of his foot down into the first man's chest.
He tossed Samehada at another of them, then snapped through a series of signs: Tiger to Ram.
"Suiton: Suikōdan no Jutsu," he hissed, forming the shark from the dry air and hurtling it at three of the men.
Eight men in less than a minute. He was getting slow and sloppy in his old age, wasn't he?
Itachi looked up and locked eyes with the leader. His eyes shifted to Sharingan, but not to that odd distorted pattern that meant he was pulling them into a three-day nightmare. The man paused, staggered, then fell back, screaming. Itachi flicked a kunai at his throat.
Now that their leader was feeding whatever worms remained in the dry ground, the rest of them seemed to lose their steam. One of them bolted, sprinting back towards the town. Kisame flung Samehada after him, smashing through most of his left side. Couldn't have any of them escaping to blab about their techniques.
Kisame inhaled, then twisted his hand into snake before slamming his palms to the ground. Normally Doton: Dochū Senkō was for his own personal travel underground, but with a touch more chakra—and he had that in spades—it could be redirected outwards. The dry ground turned fluid, and the men were sucked under.
The road was quiet, unnaturally so after the screaming and the restructuring of the earth and such. Kisame leaned over and retrieved Samehada.
"Well," he began conversationally, "it was fight, Itachi-san, although not much of one."
Itachi propped his hand back in his cloak and took a step, then collapsed. Kisame blinked.
"Itachi-san?" He asked when it became apparent he wasn't getting up. Kisame held Samehada at the ready and walked over to the man, then flipped him onto his back with his foot.
"You look almost as blue as me," Kisame mused, resting Samehada on Itachi's chest. He gasped for air, but it was clear nothing was going down. Kisame squinted at him.
"Shall I kill you, Itachi-san?" He asked bluntly. "I can promise it will be quick."
Itachi's mouth moved. Kisame leaned closer.
"Mercy is good manners." Kisame's grinned widened. "You know I respect you greatly, Itachi-san."
He leant more of his weight to Samehada. The sword would siphon the chakra Itachi was using to supplement his coughing, and he would go quietly, without any of his painful coughing.
A droplet of rain smacked Kisame's nose. He looked up. A wave of grey clouds rolled over the clear blue sky, carrying the cool stink of humidity. Another raindrop fell, splashing in the dust next to Itachi's face.
"Rain."
Kisame pulled the sword away and pushed Itachi onto his side. He inhaled, hacking and gasping. He managed to push himself upright and coughed deeply. Kisame watched the clouds.
When Itachi finally brought up a mass of bloody phlegm, Kisame turned back to him.
"I suppose you were right about the weather."
"Was I?" Itachi rasped.
"Oh, yes." Kisame scuffed the newly muddied ground with his foot, then leaned over to pick up Itachi's hat. Itachi glared up at him with bloodshot eyes.
"Would you really have killed me?" Itachi took the hat and levered himself to his feet.
"Would you have preferred it if I did?"
"No."
"Well then," Kisame started walking, "when you want to die, please tell me. I'll make it quick for you."
"Hn."
Happy Shark Week! To celebrate, I wrote pretentious fanfic.
Some notes: All of the OC character names (and the warehouse), are plucked from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. The title is from Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence. "Mercy is good manners." is a paraphrased quote from Lawrence of Arabia, which I have clearly seen too many times because I quoted it by accident and then spent an hour wondering where I got it from.
Ostensibly this is kisaita; I wrote it with that intent in mind, however, Kisame is far too messed up to be able to have normal romantic attraction to someone—offering a mercy kill is about the best he can do.
My personal headcanon for Itachi's illness is TB, because one can have it for years (if the body manages to wall off the infection in the lungs), and then have some outside factor (immunosupression, other diseases, stress, etc) trigger an active case.
Please leave a comment if you liked it!