Disclaimer: I haven't owned Naruto for the past however many years it's been out, so I don't know why you'd suddenly expect me to own it now.
Warning: There's a line of dialogue in here referencing a scene that I think hasn't been shown in the anime yet.
I Had Such Friends
At first, Kisame had been highly skeptical when Pain told him that his new partner was only thirteen years old. Thirteen-year-olds, as a rule, were not cut out for S-ranked missions. Or for A-ranked, B-ranked, or C-ranked missions, for that matter. They were impulsive, inexperienced, headstrong, and a whole host of other qualities that were likely to get them killed. During periods of war, when there wasn't time to acclimate young genin by giving them D-rank assignments, fewer than forty percent survived past their fifth mission. Given the difficulty of assignments the Akatsuki took on, Kisame fully expected his new comrade to be dead within a month.
Needless to say, Uchiha Itachi was not what he expected.
Kisame had mixed feelings about being back in the Water Country. It was his home, but he'd left it behind for a reason.
Because Kisame was known there, and not exactly inconspicuous, they were sticking to little backwater villages until they reached the vicinity of their target. It was the middle of monsoon season, so many of the places they stopped were flooded or recovering from flooding. For two S-ranked shinobi, such things were just an annoyance, but it was clear that the ordinary civilians were hurting.
Running through the trees alongside a river that had overflowed its banks, they saw a group of people standing at the edge near a series of rapids. A boy dressed in a formal kimono slowly approached the water, looking frightened but determined.
"What are they doing?" Itachi asked.
Kisame shrugged. "This country gets a lot of storms and floods, and people used to believe those were caused by the gods of rivers and oceans becoming angry. It used to be common practice to try and placate these angry gods by sacrificing someone to them. It's still done in some of the more remote areas, like out here."
A girl ran up to the boy and tugged on his arm. From this far away, they couldn't hear over the sounds of the river, but they could read the words on her lips.
Please, don't do this!
I haven't got a choice! A lot of our crops have already been washed away, and if this keeps up, the whole village might starve!
The boy ran a hand through his curly, dark hair, squared his shoulders, and stepped forward into the water.
Itachi dropped down from his tree branch onto a rock that hung over the river. So quickly that Kisame couldn't follow them, he formed a series of seals and reached out to touch the river. The water began to swirl into a vortex that drilled down through the riverbed. There's got to be aquifers under here. Is he using Suigadan to drill into the water table? Why?
The answer became clear as the water level began to fall, the swollen river draining into underground chambers. The boy standing in the river stared down in confusion as he suddenly found himself in water that only came up to his knees.
Kisame opened his mouth to ask Itachi what the hell he was doing, but his partner silently returned to the trees and continued on.
Kisame shook his head in puzzlement and followed.
While its isolationism made the Rain Country a decent place for Akatsuki to hide, Kisame had to admit that it was pretty depressing. Many of the civilians were poor, nearly a quarter of the population were orphans, and puppet limbs were so commonplace that a person wearing one didn't even merit a double-take. As for the shinobi, ninja as young as eleven or twelve handled weapons like they'd been born with them in their hands.
One warm afternoon, Kisame found Itachi standing on a balcony, looking out over a square where a skirmish between squads of Hanzou's and Pain's men had just taken place. Two teenage shinobi wearing the crossed-out emblem of Pain's faction were trying to save their teammate with medical ninjutsu. The opposing squad were all dead, and some kind of fire technique had blasted out the windows on a nearby building.
"Did you ever think," Itachi said quietly, "that any of the shinobi villages could have ended up like this?"
Kisame watched silently for a few moments before replying. "Mine did, for a while."
"Mine did not, although..." He trailed off, and Kisame waited for him to continue. "I think it is good for them that they were spared this."
Once again, Kisame thought carefully before he answered. "I dunno. The civil war in my country happened because some of the more powerful shinobi began to suspect the Mizukage was under foreign influence. Others didn't believe it, and defended him. Would it have been better to keep those tensions simmering under the surface? I think an honest war is better than living a lie."
Later, Kisame wondered what he had said wrong to make Itachi grip the balcony railing so hard that the metal started to warp.
On a mission to the Earth Country, Kisame walked into the room he and Itachi shared at the local inn just in time to see Itachi press his thumb softly against the tip of a kunai. As a drop of blood welled up, he ran through a flurry of seals and placed his hand flat on the floor. There was a puff of smoke, and a small crow appeared. It tilted its head inquisitively towards Itachi and said in a gravelly voice, "Dude, your partner looks like a shark."
Ignoring the mouthy (beaky?) bird, he grinned at Itachi. "You made a summoning contract! That's great."
Itachi didn't seem to share Kisame's enthusiasm. "Not really."
"What do you mean?"
Itachi unsummoned the crow and stood up with his back to Kisame. "Crows are carrion-eaters, and they will only form a contract with someone who has proven himself capable of providing for them."
Kisame had never figured Itachi for a particularly religious man, so he was surprised when the Uchiha detoured off the main road in the direction of the local temple. He found the sonorous chanting of the monks and the sweet smell of the incense soothing, so he was content to sit and wait while Itachi wrote something on a folded piece of paper and placed it at the feet of Amida Buddha's statue.
Itachi bowed towards the altar and turned to Kisame. "We can go now," he said, without offering any explanation for his behavior.
As Kisame stood to accompany his partner out of the temple, his Akatsuki cloak swirled around him and knocked the paper off the shelf before the statue. Bending to pick it up, Kisame couldn't help seeing some of the names written on the paper in neat, precise katakana.
Uchiha Fugaku
Uchiha Mikoto
Uchiha Shisui
Uchiha Fujiko
Uchiha Tekka
Uchiha Inabi
Uchiha Yashiro
The list went on and on, covering the entire paper despite the tiny size of the letters.
As far as anyone knew, Itachi had regarded his clan as nothing more than a nuisance, to be disposed of when they became inconvenient. But why, then, would he offer their names to Buddha in hopes that their souls would find their way into Paradise?
Kisame replaced the paper, bowed an apology to the monks, and followed Itachi out of the temple.
Kisame looked like a monster, and he knew it. His skin was blue and he had gills. He was even known as "the Monster of the Hidden Mist". But oddly enough, when he and Itachi were fighting someone, he wasn't the one who got called a monster. Criminal, maybe. Freak, maybe. But that particular word, which combined the implied evilness of "criminal" with the implied grotesqueness of "freak," was reserved for his partner.
He didn't bother to feel offended on Itachi's behalf. If Itachi was offended, he was more than capable of making that clear himself. Besides, he found it useful to have a partner who was so universally feared. Opponents who were scared shitless were more likely to make a mistake he could exploit. Anyway, he thought at these enemies, monster or not, he's still beating your sorry ass.
Itachi, for his part, bore the insults with stoic silence. Of course, this is what an intelligent shinobi should do. Emotions are a distraction, and a true warrior doesn't allow himself to be swayed by childish taunts. But Kisame thought there may be more to it than that. Sometimes he caught a flicker of something on Itachi's face, as if the invective heaped on him by their enemies was only confirming what he already believed about himself.
It hadn't escaped Kisame's notice that the kunoichi of Amegakure thought Itachi was the best thing since sliced bread, and that Itachi inevitably failed to respond to their advances. He didn't even engage in the common teenage ninja behavior of sneaking into brothels under the influence of a Henge that made him look older. The other Akatsuki members found this apparent dedication to chastity a strange trait in an attractive young man, especially one who wasn't considered to be overly concerned with morality.
Kisame, on the other hand, experienced no confusion whatsoever. He knew exactly why Itachi always refused the advances of the Rain-nin, and refrained from purchasing carnal services in any of the towns they stopped at on their travels.
Itachi talked in his sleep.
While awake, Itachi kept his emotions in a grip of iron, not betraying the slightest hint of what he might be thinking or feeling. But even a prodigy couldn't exercise conscious control over his behavior while unconscious. If the clues he'd picked up during their waking hours hadn't been enough to tell Kisame that there was something more to Itachi than met the eye, the things he said while asleep definitely would have.
"Kaa-san..."
In a building in the wilderness of the Lightning Country that really didn't deserve its name of "inn," Kisame lay awake, staring up at the ceiling. Could that be the reason why Itachi acted so strangely for a man his age with regard to sexual encounters? Did he know that anyone who spent the night with him would hear the secrets he whispered in those lightless hours, when he couldn't stop himself? And was this perhaps for the hypothetical partner's own good? Would he feel compelled to kill anyone who knew the things he said in his sleep?
"Tou-san..."
Of course, if this hypothesis was correct, it meant that Itachi knew he talked in his sleep.
"Otouto..."
Which meant he knew that Kisame had heard him.
"Sasuke...forgive me, Sasuke, please..."
So why hasn't he killed me?
The jinchuuriki of the Four-Tails trained at a temple deep in the mountains of the Earth Country. The temple sat at the mouth of a valley, and with the aid of Itachi's genjutsu, it was easy enough to bypass the monks who guarded it.
At the other end of the valley, the Four-Tails stood on the surface of a river, practicing taijutsu. His face hardened at the sight of their red-and-black cloaks, and the waters of the river rose up around him as he formed a hand-seal.
"The Kyuubi's your job, so I'll take this one, eh, Itachi-san?" Kisame grinned as he unsheathed Samehada. Itachi said nothing, but took a step backward, which Kisame interpreted as agreement.
The battle was fast and brutal. The Four-Tails jinchuuriki had decades of combat experience, and had an Advanced Bloodline in addition to the demon sealed inside him. But the man's massive chakra had awakened Samehada's hunger, and Kisame's own bloodlust rose as the fight progressed. The jinchuuriki's expression of triumph turned to one of horror as Samehada drained his own chakra and used it to heal the wounds he'd inflicted on the Akatsuki member. After that, it wasn't long before the jinchuuriki fell.
They followed the river deeper into the lush forest that filled most of the valley, intending to rest. Pain was pleased to hear of the successful capture, but Kisame thought he detected something in Itachi's eyes when Deidara expressed his intention to fight Sasuke.
Kisame remembered what he'd heard (forgive me, Sasuke, please) and asked, "Are you okay with that, Itachi-san?" There was a long pause, and Kisame got the distinct impression that Itachi was almost relieved when the silence was interrupted by the arrival of the monks of the Four-Tails's temple. Without even standing up, Itachi formed hand-seals, and a flock of crows surrounded the monks. When it dispersed, they were unconscious on the ground.
Kisame approached one of the prone bodies with a kunai (there was no point in risking being followed), but Itachi pushed himself to his feet and said, "Kisame, let us go."
At the other end of the valley, the ground began to slope steeply upwards. As they started to climb, they came to a fairly anonymous-looking boulder wedged tightly into a cave near the spring that formed the mouth of the river.
"This is what those monks are really guarding, isn't it?"
Itachi nodded. "Yes. It's said that this is the entrance to Yomi, the underworld."
I wonder how many people the two of us together have sent through here, Kisame thought. Then he shook his head. The entrance to the underworld? In some random forest in Earth Country? As if that would be true. "This is just some old cave, Itachi-san."
Itachi raised an eyebrow. "Can you move the stone?"
Kisame looked at the boulder blocking the cave entrance. No civilian could move it unaided, but he should be able to push it aside easily, even without being lent chakra by Samehada. He strode over, placed his hands against the boulder, and pushed.
The rock didn't budge.
Kisame shoved harder. Still nothing. With a grunt of exasperation, Kisame directed a thought to the sword strapped across his back. Lend me some of the chakra you've got stored up, would you? Power flowed thorugh his limbs, and the stone moved an inch or two.
"Strange," he muttered. "It's heavier than it looks. Ninjutsu?"
"Supposedly," Itachi informed him, "only those who are close to death can move the stone."
Kisame rolled his eyes, marveling at the silly superstitions people will indulge in. "Let's get going, so we can at least get over the border before this guy wakes up." He started walking away, but turned around when he heard a grinding sound behind him.
With only one hand, Itachi had pushed the stone back nearly a foot, exposing a crescent of pure blackness behind it.
"...So then sensei looks up, and sees Tsunozaki clinging to the ceiling like a spider!" Kisame chuckled at the memory, and turned to his partner.
Itachi was staring off into space, giving no indication that he'd even heard Kisame's story.
To fill the awkward silence, Kisame said, "Tsunozaki was my best friend in the Academy. Great sense of humor. Pretty good with taijutsu for his age too."
There was another long pause, and just as Kisame was searching for something else to say, Itachi said, "What happened to him?"
Now it was Kisame's turn to be silent for a few moments. Eventually he answered, "I killed him."
"The graduation exam?"
Kisame nodded.
"Why are you so eager to speak of him?"
Kisame shrugged. "It just feels like telling stories about him is a way to honor his memory, you know?"
Itachi continued staring into space.
Once again, Kisame took it upon himself to break the silence, though his voice was oddly soft. "You must have some stories about your best friend too, right?"
There was no answer for a long time. When Itachi finally did speak, his voice was so quiet that Kisame almost didn't hear him. "His name was Shisui. And there was one incident I recall involving him and the Hokage's hat..."
"You waited for me." There was a little surprise in Kisame's voice, but not much.
Itachi was sitting on the grass with his back against the stone. He face was turned away, looking at the burbling spring, but he turned back to Kisame as the other man spoke.
"Well, I guess you were right," Kisame said. In response to Itachi's inquisitive look, he continued, "You remember, when we first met? You said those who turn their hands against their comrades are fated to die a terrible death. For the record, getting eaten alive by sharks kinda sucks."
Itachi made a soft sound that might have been an attempt at a laugh and pushed himself to his feet. He took a slow, deep breath, noting the clean scent of the spring water and the heady perfume of the small white flowers that grew throughout the clearing. "I haven't been able to breathe like that in months."
"Kind of ironic, isn't it? I mean, all things considered?" Kisame joined Itachi by the blocked cave entrance and reached out to touch the stone. He'd barely laid a finger against it when it slid back, without any apparent friction.
The two men looked at each other for a moment, then advanced side-by-side and walked into the darkness together.
A/N: The title is from William Butler Yeats: "Remember where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends."
Someone who's better at writing humor than I am totally needs to write the story of Shisui And The Hokage's Hat...