Title: Fraternity

Summary: Shisui committed suicide and everyone believed it all too easily. Another look at ItaShi and the Shisui loyalists. Inabi POV. Oneshot.

Notes: Written for the bitter_nakano Advent Calendar on LJ. Assume they're all roughly the same age.

Before there were coups and before there were prodigies, there were boys with marbles in their hands, blue-gray ones and cat's-eyes, and chatter in their eyes, and dreams in their hands like lightning flashes about to be released skyward.

~0~

Their parents had been neighbors, and between the shuffling and bustling and take-my-kid-for-a-while-I'm-on-active-duty. Playmates out of necessity, Tekka and Inabi get used to each other like a habit, get used to sharing houses and mealtimes and issues and experiences. They've learned early on to be as self-serving as could be, to watch each other's back, and trust little else.

(Uchiha children are typically grown like this, left to their own devices, so there's nothing soft about them. They're sharp as bones, tough as nails, decidedly loyal.)

When they're old enough to think themselves marvellously cunning, they steal away to play pirates and shinobi in the swamp. It's best at night, when the dark cocoons them like an icy blanket, the insects roar to a cacophony, nightshade and moss cold and slimy on their bare feet, lantern-glow in their eyes. A secret playground of bobbing fire light and water and inky darkness.

One night, just past the crumbling shinto shrines where the river begins to trickle slow, another dark-eyed child steps into their path and deals them an ultimatum. Children born to be shinobi or not, there are bedtimes and limits, and this boy strings them up in the air like so many blockades to cordon off their adventure.

"I'll keep quiet if you let me join," the boy whispers finally, completely self-satisfied.

They let him.

Years on, they will still agree that Yashiro conned his way in.

~0~

Uchiha Shisui has gangly limbs and raucous curls meant to be laughed at. He entertains too many family elders to be entirely trustworthy, and had been star-kissed from the start. Clever, obedient and unforgettable, he grew up with "promising" above his head like a sage-green banner. They saw him fit under the role, and liked him well enough to relinquish playground space and canes of candy. Shisui could be counted on be cool.

What they didn't expect was him being their saving grace in the war.

~0~

War, they would recall later, once the numbness was gone, was hell and back and all those other sayings which cannot ever adequately summarize the madness. Inabi recalls sparrow eggs speckled and cracked and bleeding into the ground after the earth shuddered with Iwa assaults, shrill crackling propaganda, sulphuric lights and metallic scents, sirens blaring, a sky dark with ash. He remembers how he would beg on his knees, saying please let it stop like it was the only prayer he ever knew, and how hatred filtered slowly like venom into his blood, hot to touch, slow to heal, hard to stop.

Shisui had distracted them, strategizing thieving missions into the rice mills, leading them to the river (before poison started running in thin streams within it) to scour for fish, telling magnificently-morbid ghost stories. The hatred stilled and dissolved in the warmth of his arrogant, reassuring face, vanishing like pale prisms of light in his sunlike radiance.

~0~

And then it was over. They've cried together, laughed together as destruction went off around them, slept together in the very literal sense of the word, and became friends out of inertia.

In peacetime, the four of them slip into brotherhood easily, seamlessly, like the bolt of a door slid shut into its slot, boys cut from the same cloth, rooted in the same ground.

In peacetime, they're allowed good memories: camping out on top of Uchiha Madara's head on cold, clear nights with the sky dusted with stars, skipping stones on the polished silver surface of the river, weapons shops, festival foods.

There are still deaths and funerals and tragedies. The Kyuubi happens, and Konoha finds itself robbed of a good man, a leader as encompassing and brilliant as the blue sky. Borders are breached. Enemies lurk within shadows and walls and shrines. There is tension from within and without. Jealousy. Revenge. Plots. Homicide.

Dying still happens. (But not to them.)

~0~

The years pass and they with it, eight, eleven, fourteen. They grow tall, they grow out, they manifest the obligatory sharingan, they become patented awesome.

Their friendship grows into its own. Teamwork comes naturally. Words become easy, effortless, the shapes familiar on their tongue. There develop, unmistakably, modus operandi, rituals (he who rocks a mission the most foots the bill at whatever hole-in-the-wall they crash the daybreak in, civvie nights where they once may have or may have not enacted a boyband, Nakano saturdays) and rules (no hitting on each others' girls, no preaching, no fucking sentimentality).

Also: no ever mentioning the word brother, Uchiha men have a fatal history with the word and the notion.

~0~

One summer, during the rare pockets of inactivity, Shisui keeps popping berries into his mouth, staining his lips a bright, bloody red. They can see it as they uneasily tiptoe the matters of recent tragic events scattered like fine glass around him: despite his languid pose, Shisui's still bothered. (And he's clearly inebriated.)

It dawns on Inabi only then how, after the smattering of exams they took within the last decade, the leaps and bounds between Shisui and the rest simply grew. It was easy to forget, when Shisui enjoyed the same stretch of bright-lit, debauched nights as them, when he cracked the same jokes and showed the same temperament, the gap in responsibilities.

It makes commiseration difficult. They cannot, after all, claim to understand the burden Shisui undertakes. They try.

Tekka says, "My mother died to protect me. It was my fault."

Shisui looks at him oddly, a dry smirk starting to show. "Of course, it's always the dead parents. Honestly, you guys, forgettaboutit."

"Just don't kill yourself over it," Inabi reminds him.

"I wouldn't do that," Shisui snaps, his words clean, his mouth crimson. "I just – I won't."

~0~

It is, astonishingly, not Shisui who first breaches the topic of girlfriend. It's Yashiro who comes babbling like a brook about this civilian girl who wears sweetness like a white frock, and kindness like a crown, and who was as lovely as -

(At that point, Tekka plants a fist on his mouth. Oh geez, stop. Shut up.)

Shisui scoffs, letting it speak for him, until he catches sight of the moony expression. He sits up, his brows furrowing almost imperceptibly. "What the fuck?" he snarls eloquently, hilarity brightening his eyes. "Since when did you grow up?"

In time, Yashiro manages to convince them that he's serious (enough), that it wasn't the usual shit they spout to pass the time, and they awkwardly offer help – Serenades? Dinner reservations? Knock off other potential suitors? Stalk her straight into his protective, loving arms?

They're not very brave but Inabi knows other deceitful ways to be a friend. If Yashiro can play hero, he has no qualms being the villain, set off the ugly words, take the role that fits like a glove, take one for the team. (Theoretically, he's the better ninja for this.)

~0~

Shisui outs himself while on pain medication.

They stare. They would say he's delirious, but his eyes are frighteningly lucid in a face half-covered by bandages, his jaw is set, his pallor awful.

"Head injury?" Inabi ventures.

"Nope, for real," Shisui affirms with a light laugh that, time showed, often spiralled into self-deprecation. "Completely gay. A total fucking sugarplum fairy. A damn fruitcake."

They've made no secret of that fact that they delight in Shisui's few flaws, scratches to mar his perfection, a balm to the sting of their own inadequacy, but it rankled on Inabi's nerves to hear Shisui speaking so offensively of himself. Anyone else, they would have shredded, but Shisui wastheirs, he can be forgiven anything.

Tekka clears his throat uncomfortably. "Is that all? I thought you were dying, or something."

Yeah, Inabi thinks, because that's the only thing that mattered. Shisui's masculinity, or compromised version thereof, was insubstantial.

Shisui glowers at them through the layers of gauze. "Go on, make light of my life-changing announcement. I hate you."

But the familiar long-suffering smirk plays on his lips, and his spine straightens, a burden like a cold stone lifted.

~0~

They were a circle so tight it leaves no elbowroom for anything else, like others or outsiders or even hollow-boned heirs.

Or so they believed when Itachi first started to appear, close on Shisui's heels, as intimidating and aloof as they'd always known. So they believed when they didn't give him –- apparently Shisui's mission partner for the time being –- a second thought.

Or so they believed when Shisui tried to cultivate an acquaintance with him.

Or so they believed when Shisui began to invite him in, across the threshold, into his (their) affections.

~0~

"I don't think I've talked to you since you were in short pants," Tekka laughs, trying to build some sort of insincere rapport, but Itachi ignores him, possibly sees right through him. The younger boy remains impassive, his silence imperious, his bloodline clear in the unyieldingness of his stance.

Whether he means to be standoffish or not, whether he was looking down his perfectly-straight nose at them or merely stood that way, they cannot tell.

The silence stretches, ice-blue and constricting, the hush after a massacred note in a symphony. For all his precision, and they've certainly had enough of that, Itachi fits like that wrong note. Incongruent. Intrusive at some points, leaves too much empty space at others.

Fifteen is an age yet tactless and relentless and obnoxiously stubborn, even without a reason more sufficient than this, they want Itachi out. They resort to petty, ugly methods – make plans around him, dredge up memories he was not privy to, cut him off at every turn -it couldn't have been more obvious if they built a fence of hands, and snarledlike beasts with their territory breached.

Shisui didn't miss it; Itachi pretended to.

(His resolve is legendary; he would not scare easily.)

~0~

Tekka notices it first, Itachi's mythological heart. It's displayed on his sleeve. The subtle ways and soft words that flutter from Itachi's lips, the gestures that seem solely meant to capture Shisui's attention. He came on to Shisui much like the loneliness of those brutally silent nights during the war: lingering at their windows, knocking on the glass, looking to get in.

The moment they see it, realize what it meant, is the moment they knew for certain Itachi would never fall into their familiar, comfortable patterns. He'll bring in a different edge entirely to the pyramid of their friendship.

(Already, Shisui spends more time away than he'd ever used to, his absence a hole they keep walking around in daytime, keep falling into at night.)

The urgency to eradicate Itachi grows.

~0~

But he'd swept Shisui away like a whirlwind, titillated Shisui's genius with intelligent bullshit, impressed the inborn soldier with his strategic acumen and battle skills, drew in the teenage boy with his sinful good looks and dry wit. He met Shisui on equal ground, never straggled after him, something that probably took blew Shisui away at first sight.

Shisui even admits it one afternoon, head bent down, eyes downcast and wide with not so much wonder but astonishment. "I can't," he says, his tone low and wretched, entreating them to understand. "I can't be just friends with him. He's something else."

His tone is pliant, submissive, but his words lay down the law like a crack of a gavel: stop harassing Itachi, he's important, I won't stand for it anymore.

That night, Inabi walks home with lilac disappointment and, more surprisingly, disdain coating his throat. He remembers an old sheet of paper waiting at home, beneath the floorboards with other important documents, a speech in their messy scrawls. They saved it for Shisui's first girlfriend, diagrammed it in fat, black font and multitudes of X's, and it had been rehearsed with Mitarashi Anko in mind. They were supposed to be prepared.

~0~

There's always a niggling fear in the back of their minds that someday, Shisui will inevitably find them wanting. Itachi will merely be the catalyst, give Shisui something to compare them to (and, as always, they can't compare to Itachi), make him realize that there's a fast exciting ocean just waiting for him to take the leap from their small, familiar pond.

It's easy to see the path down: Shisui and Itachi. Shisui and Itachi, who can hold a conversation of only facial expressions, a language of their own. Shisui and Itachi, smiles infectious, hands intertwined. Shisui and Itachi, in a slow dance in quick steps, pristine-white and elegant and magical like the free-falling snow of winter. Shisui and Itachi, taking the world by storm, trodding on everyone else.

It's scary and -

Also, a word they personally never used to associate with Shisui: intimidating.

Itachi already had everything – looks, position, talent, adoration. He wasn't supposed to have Shisui as well.

~0~

There are afternoons when they catch a glimpse of Shisui, and he looks just that much happier in his perfect little sphere with Itachi, they can allow him this.

~0~

But.

~0~

They've always had their suspicions.

However completely unfounded it had been in the beginning, paranoia being a trait born and bred in them, it made eerie sense that Itachi be the one undermining the clan. He was in ANBU, the Hokage's dog, and by all means: an outsider. But Itachi was also the heir and always in the heart of hearts of all clan operations.

(Sometimes, Inabi sees Itachi in his dreams - burrowing his way under Shisui's skin like a worm, coiling around Shisui's veins in gray-green webs, his hands grasping the face of Shisui's soul like thick threads of fungi around a hollow tree, inextricable –- and thinks the image real.)

They see the knife in the back. Their Shisui would've seen it too, immediately. But this Shisui... love had pried open all his defenses, took his trust by the hand and raised it up far, far to where it can no longer feel the fear of being let go of.

They try to enlight Shisui and muck it up impressively. Gallant deeds had never been their forte and, sometime between I knew we couldn't trust the weasel and leave him, it'll be fine, things'll go back to the way they were, Shisui narrows his slanted eyes at them.

"Are you jealous?" Shisui finally balks, disbelief coloring his tone a dull rust, and for all the offhandedness of his words, his reaction stings like a bitch.

They know they're not good with words, having known neither tact nor diplomacy, but how can they explain that the one cold morning Shisui deigned to spend with them, Yashiro had seen Itachi, sheathed like a silver dagger in his ANBU breastplate, behind the balustrade of the nearest tower, his eyes sharp and calculating and fever-bright with jealousy? How can they explain, without sounding like a girl, how their chests pooled with the chill of dread at the mere memory of it, or the spectre of malevolence that permeated the thin air?

It's easier to be angry. It's easier to take offense than to try and fail and explain and fail again. They've had it with what they thought was a bone-deep-benevolent gesture, they've had it with prodigies. It's all too fucking complicated.

So they do something they already should've known was the worst course of action: they force Shisui's hand.

"He's using you."

Something in their tone must've gotten to him because, while his voice is low, the outrage elevates his words to a whipcrack. "What?"

"He's using you," Inabi says again, more spitefully. Trust us.

"I'll think about it," Shisui says, doubt lacing his words, but they knew they had already lost.

~0~

The confrontation that will never make the history books:

It's not them who instigate it.

"What do you want, Itachi?" The first name falls uncomfortably off his tongue. Itachi, and his mother's voice saying he'll be your leader someday, be good to each other. Itachi, who slithered between the threads of their family and weaved in his deceptions.

Itachi raises his chin almost defiantly. For the first time, Inabi notices the incisiveness of his serene gaze.

"You wouldn't understand," Itachi says, eyes trained to a point as far away as fantasy, expression unreadable.

What he says could mean a million different things but you wouldn't understand because you're not like us is what Inabi hears. You're weak. Shisui's too good for you. He'll always be too good for you.

(Inabi remembers a word in Shisui's voice cradled in the summer breeze: forgettaboutit.)

When Itachi leaves, Inabi peeks at what the younger boy had been looking at. A block of white stone, cut from the compound walls to facilate the expansion of their territory, triangular in shape, a plank of wood stretched across it. It looked almost like a fulcrum.

~0~

He may not have meant to, but Itachi makes him realize a few things.

They were the ones who crossed the line first. However lofty their reasons may have sounded at the time, it will always come down to (1) a dangerous, baseless accusation, (2) them trying to cage in the prodigy in Shisui.

They crossed the line, but it was Shisui who walked away ("let's pretend this conversation never happened"). Actually, he flickered, like a parting wink, and was gone. So much for unconditional loyalty.

~0~

Life goes on.

It is the worst year ever.

None of them get a girlfriend, even though it's past time and many would jump at the chance – it's too soon, it's too hard. Their precarious triangle is all that's left to cling to, and they guard it jealously like a house of cards in the swaying wind.

Beginnings never know their ends, and they certainly didn't expect this. They (and Shisui) had fallen into each other's lives snap-quick, had been a unit since their mothers sang them to sleep with slow lullabies about forgotten wars and victorious goddesses. But they grew up at different pace, and they fall apart in slow motion, like the graceful collapse of ocean cliff, disintegration in small increments.

They believed their friendship worth a supernova of a break-up, and it never happened. Without the explosion, they are a timeless ruin, and it never truly ends.

Shisui talks to them, quickly, let's-discuss-the-weather superficial, cool like peppermint, friendly enough to not be awkward. But he leaps forth quicker than time, gotten so far that his tracks are all they can glimpse, grown up so quickly while they straggled the thin line between juvenile pursuits and maturity. He's fast becoming a legend, with the shunshin, with the dreaded doryoku, and they're, well, them – good enough, but none of them deny who'd been important in their making.

Sometimes Inabi meanders to think that neither party wants to burn that bridge completely, not when they've threaded so much of themselves into it - him in the stone, Tekka and Yashiro in the trestles, Shisui in the archs –

(The lack of closure makes it harder, or easier.)

~0~

They are sitting at the waterhole near the compound, chilling after a mission with ginger ales, when Shisui passes by, his cousin in tow. Itachi in ANBU armor is grating, even vaguely sickening, to watch. Inabi can't imagine how Shisui allows the Uchiha heir to hang on his arm like that, so publicly.

He transfers his gaze upward to see a flock of birds fly across the bloodied sky to the west. Crows, Inabi thinks, idly noting Shisui's out-of-habit wave passing by the periphery of his vision. Unconsciously, he returns the gesture.

That afternoon they watched Shisui's back disappear into the crowd and didn't know it would be the last time they would see their brother-in-arms alive.

His death comes like a slap to the face.

~0~

The Nakano river, corded off and swarmed by their pale-faced clansmen, inspires the kind of dread that, Inabi imagines, civilians must feel after an ANBU assassination, when they've reached the familiar borders of their house and sees nothing disturbed, knowing that something is terribly wrong.

Dread turns to horror turns to sick when the Police Force produces the suicide note, ink stains and water drops and words that ride hard on his heart like a chariot on fire.

He had thought their friendship reduced to vague greetings and awkward silences and dust, and yet he knew now –- too late – it had still been there, however it had stung, strong and true as before, a golden chord that connected them deeper than ties of blood.

It's been snapped so abruptly that he can still feel the other end flapping loose in the distance. That's why it hurts. That's why he feels reeling, stunned and little-boy lost, like he can't ever quite find his feet or catch his breath again.

~0~

At Shisui's funeral, where there was no body to burn, he dares not meet Itachi's eyes. He didn't want to see either the ghastly red that was surely Shisui's lifeblood glowing in them, or the tears.

(The latter ones he only knows about because he bites his lips whenever Itachi furiously dabs at the stream at his cheekbones like they were unexpected and unwanted. That, and Itachi's bowed head, and his otherwise somber expression, belied his treachery.)

It was contemptible to watch.

He looks to the altar instead, and the smoke rising to new heights in the open, gray sky. He thinks he can see Shisui's unbearable face in the delicate swirls made by the burning incense. Tekka squeezes his shoulder, grip like a vise. Yashiro kicks distractedly at the ground, face pale, mouth drawn tight.

(Death happens, and now to them.)

If they were anyone else, Inabi thinks, they would have cried.

~0~

Shisui committed suicide and everyone believed it all too easily. They can't, because they've grown up with the boy, watched the making of the man, and he wouldn't.

Suicide is what cowards do when there's nothing left, no support systems, no safety nets. Shisui wasn't someone who bowed to fear, and he hadn't had nothing. Shisui knew that he could always go back to them, that there'll always be a space saved for him, that they would've forgiven him everything, and he wouldn't.

Inabi remembers Shisui at the worst moment of his life when the prodigy had singlehandedly sabotaged an Uchiha battalion and sent two cousins to their deaths, the burden heavy on the corners of Shisui's mouth and on his shoulders, a debt that ensured the most steadfast loyalty in years to come. Shisui had said it himself – I won't. – his word crystal clear through the haze of alcohol fumes, and now people were believing the exact opposite.

Itachi always had a way of making people see what he wanted them to see.

~0~

Shisui is irrevocably gone.

The fact is so breathtakingly painful that the only avenue, the only way to alleviate the hurt, is to lash out. For so long they had been inseparable, for ten years one sentient being, and now they were as a headless creature, lost in agony with nothing to sense by, snarling even at ghosts to relieve itself of its bloodlust.

(It's easier to be angry.)

They find Itachi in the main house and call him out to the empty, gray courtyard. Physical violence, the viciousness of solid contact, had always been what they were good at.

(Shisui had been the brains and the keystone of all their plans. He would've told them outright they wouldn't find the conclusion here.)

Itachi comes out into the brittle gray light and, for a moment, like a chessboard caught in suspension, all is still.

Inabi slams his fist hard on the pavement. It breaks the silence and the picture and then it's just the four of them, gaslit and explosive, ready to burst over the anguish of one death. It occurs to him, beneath all the cloudy rage, that this is their moment, when they finally get off the wayside and do a thing noteworthy, a thing Shisui would have laughed off as heroic, and it's perfectly ruined because they're doing it without a second thought to consequences, without an underlying sense of purpose. It's not a high road (but he can play the villain when it's necessary).

He is vaguely aware that the kid - the spare - is watching, concern and curiousity (and, revoltingly, a thin flutter of anticipation) lining his wide eyes. The better part of him wishes Itachi's little brother didn't have to see this, but the larger part wants to make Itachi feel even an iota of the same pain, suffer the loss of those surprisingly debilitating fraternal bonds.

He thinks of Shisui rotting somewhere beneath the earth and words spill from his mouth as though all the blistering hatred under his skin bubbled over through his throat. He doesn't even hear himself for the rushing in his ears like whitewater.

The loud crack of metal thrusting against rock is the last thing he registers before Itachi attacks. Like the hailstorm showers vollerys of ice on the unguarded earth, Itachi hits without pause, piercing and merciless and desperate like a fugitive.

You don't understand ANYTHING!, shouts his wild-eyed glare. His own rage, shimmering like starlight beneath his sparse restraint, would have been palpable had they not been so blinded.

They might not understand anything, but they understand this: payment in blood. He wants to rub in Itachi's face the backlash of his decisions, that he couldn't beguile and betray and destroy a member of a fraternity without suffering due revenge.

But the resolve to accuse, to make him answer for Shisui's death pulsates slower with every blow. They're not strong enough, can't believe they ever thought they would be, that grief would be fuel enough to face Itachi head-on.

(You're weak.)

What hurts the most is the truth: they are still too weak even to exact justice for him whom they had so loved.

~0~

When Itachi approaches, they expect it, they've been waiting for it.

It's their weekly drinking session and whatever good memory was attached to the ritual is ruined by the pervasive, taut silence that makes the sound of ice clinking against glass unnaturally loud and their laughter too echo-like. Three pairs of sharingan between them and no illusion is strong enough to pry their eyes from the reality that nothing will ever be the same (that empty seat will remain empty).

Itachi, like the thief that he is, comes in the night, masked and shadowy, youth and honor whittled from his face by circumstance.

The night churns unsteady, the years coalesce, and the ending begins. They don't flinch, and they are ready to raise up their arms until every last one falls.

This is their final stand.

(Inabi almost smiles. All in all, it's not the worst way to die.)

"If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get along with my friends." - Spice Girls XD

End.