A/N: Thank you xii_itachi for your glorious fanart, which I shamelessly based this off of. This probably takes place sometime before Brother of the Bride.
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Exactly What It Looks Like
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Sasuke knocks on the door to his brother's apartment and waits.
While he waits, he congratulates himself on his foresight, because for once he can surprise Itachi on his birthday without having to deal with Shisui; his cousin's swim team kids have some kind of competition out of town and he won't be back until the weekend. While this doesn't exactly negate Sasuke's opinion of Shisui as a useless boyfriend (who the hell goes out of town on their significant other's birthday, honestly), it does have the far more pleasant side effect of keeping him out of Sasuke's way.
The door still hasn't opened. Sasuke knocks again, shifting his gift from one arm to the other.
(Said gift is a boxed set of every Game of Thrones book to date which, considering the series is apparently five million pages long, is extremely fucking heavy. Shisui had dragged Itachi into watching the show with him, getting him hooked against his will, and then of course Itachi'd gone and read the entire series in a week. Now he holds threats of spoilers over Shisui's head if the latter is really pissing him off, because they all know Shisui has the attention span of a gnat and won't get past the first chapter.)
Shisui has always been something Sasuke's just had to tolerate on Itachi's birthday, the way other people tolerate obnoxious coworkers or the flu. Whether he was mixing up sugar and salt in a woefully misguided attempt at baking a cake, or dragging Itachi off in the dead of night on his 21st to get him hopelessly drunk, it's always something. He's always been so very there. It's only gotten worse since they moved in together, for obvious reasons, so Sasuke figures this will be a blissfully uneventful exception to the rule.
Still no answer. Frowning and wondering if he's caught Itachi in the shower or something, Sasuke starts rooting around in his pocket for the spare key he'd been given him a few weeks back.
He feels vaguely like a creeper, fitting a key into the lock of someone else's place, but Itachi is his brother, and if said brother is bleeding out on the bathroom floor right now, Sasuke doesn't want to look back on this moment and realize he let Itachi die because he felt squeamish about using the damn key.
(Growing up in the Uchiha household has imbued him with a healthy sense of paranoia that he doesn't think is at all unreasonable, thank you very much. And anyway, things happen in bathrooms. Linoleum is slippery. Shisui likes to leave his glittery mascara bottles on the floor in the hopes that nobody will bother to look at them too closely, such is their cousin's deranged logic, and Sasuke's been able to blame them for at least two of his own near-death experiences.)
After a minute of wriggling the key around the door swings open. Sasuke nudges his way inside and heaves the biggest fucking books in America onto the nearest flat surface. He doesn't bother to announce himself, because hello, surprise. He'll just need to be careful about how he does the surprising; otherwise he'll end up pinned to the floor and/or with a knitting needle buried in his neck.
It's on that unfortunately realistic thought that Sasuke hears the noise.
It might be a—no, wait, that was definitely a moan coming from the direction of the bathroom.
Now. Sasuke likes to think of himself as an intelligent person. Not the genius his brother is, as everyone in their respective lives has been kind enough to point out, but certainly capable of holding his own intellectually. In short, he's not actually a fucking moron with no sense of how the world works.
But a miserably timed combination of aforementioned paranoia and personal enmity towards Shisui's mascara results in Sasuke's immediate thought being this:
So that was probably the moan of a person bleeding out onto unforgiving off-white tiles because his idiot boyfriend couldn't pick up after himself.
And not this:
There are two pairs of shoes at the door and the bathroom is connected to Itachi and Shisui's bedroom.
He's power-walking-not-running in the direction of the noise before he can really, really think about the situation he's found himself in. (In his defense, his thoughts have been pretty much entirely taken up with cursing Shisui's very birth, which doesn't leave a lot of room for deduction.)
As such, the light bulb doesn't flicker feebly to life until he's actually pushing open the door and—
"What the fuck?" Sasuke absolutely does not shriek.
Itachi, the cold-blooded bastard, looks supremely unbothered by the interruption. Which would be perfectly reasonable if what Sasuke hadn't just interrupted was oh Jesus fuck I'm not thinking about it.
Not thinking about it is difficult when a) his brother is naked, b) his cousin is on top of his brother and also naked, c) holy shitting fuck, his brother is naked, why has he not gone blind already.
Shisui is getting redder and redder the longer they're all frozen in this spectacularly awkward tableau (although he'd been red-faced to begin with, and also sweaty, and Sasuke wants to fucking die).
All he can do is thank God for a strategically placed sheet because there is not enough bleach in the world, in the fucking world.
"Sasuke," Shisui finally croaks. "Get out."
"Ffffglph," Sasuke replies in a very reasonable (albeit high-pitched) tone.
But shit if he needs to be told twice. He slams the door and whirls around, forgoing power walking this time in favor of bolting out of his brother's apartment.
(Fugaku would probably say he was disgracing his ancestors or some shit, because Uchihas aren't born to run from fights, but Sasuke is of the firm belief that there are situations where a tactical retreat is the only option that won't end in bloodshed or permanent mental trauma. There is no universe in which this isn't one of them.)
He runs out the door, he runs to the parking lot, he drives home like the hounds of hell are chasing him before he realizes he left his fucking shoes behind, and then he starts Googling variations on 'how to get a key melted down'.
And then he drowns his sorrows in chocolate and Netflix and attempts to forget this entire day ever happened.
Of course, forgetting becomes harder to do when Itachi texts him half an hour later.
Thank you for the books, the text says.
Then, two seconds later because Itachi is a freakishly fast typer, I'm sorry about today. Shisui managed to come home early. We were distracted.
Sasuke focuses very hard on not projectile vomiting all over the carpet.
Can I take you to dinner tonight? As an apology? the next one asks.
Sasuke squints and considers okaying the request as long as Shisui stays far, far away. It's so tempting.
But when he texts back it's after some serious consideration, during which he's come to the reluctant conclusion that he's not actually a complete bastard.
shut up braniac, it's ur birthday, i'm paying.
His phone buzzes one more time a minute later.
Thank you, Sasuke.
Sasuke shakes his head, but he's smiling as he types.
happy birthday Itachi.
And then, after a minute of thought, but tell ur idiot boyfriend he can pay for himself. Because he may not be a complete bastard, but he's not about to turn saint either.
Satisfied that he's acquired enough good karma for a lifetime, he leans back in his chair and contemplates how very, very drunk he's going to get this evening.
Fucking Shisui. Seriously.
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end
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A/N: Happy Birthday, Itachi. ;)