Hey, I've got a fun game for you. Try and spot the random tense changes!
Okay, okay, kidding. But seriously if I switch tenses by accident, drop me a review and I'll fix it. Thanks.
Anyway... um, warnings for angst, possibly a couple of slashy hints (only if you're really looking for them though), a teeny tiny bit of blood, character death and maybe one or two swearwords. Oh yeah, and AU from Itachi's death onwards.
Title is a line from the poem 'Invictus' by William Ernest Henry. It is an awesome poem and you should read it.
Do not own.
Kisame is awoken by the sound of someone coughing. It's a wet, hacking sound, almost painful to hear.
He keeps his eyes shut, feigning sleep, but this action is counterintuitive- in his mind's eye he can see far more clearly than he ever could in dreary reality; and on the canvas of his imagination the blood that dribbles from his partner's mouth is horribly vivid.
He doesn't open his eyes, though. This is Itachi's moment of weakness, and it is private.
"Kisame," Itachi rasps, "I know you're awake."
"Yes, Itachi," he admits. There's little point in lying.
"I-" but he is forced to stop as another coughing fit wracks his thin frame. This time, Kisame does open his eyes, watching as Itachi leans against a tree and coughs. The fit only gets worse as Itachi desperately attempts to stop it, and finally, Kisame decides Itachi's dignity is not worth his life. He gets up and helps Itachi over to the bed, rubbing his back gently.
"It's okay, Itachi," he says soothingly. "You need to calm down. Calm."
"Tea," Itachi gasps out. "Medicinal. My bag."
Kisame nods. He is glad that they aren't in hiding tonight, and that the fire they'd made earlier is still burning cheerfully. He puts a pan of water on to boil and rummages through Itachi's bag for the tin of leaves.
The process of making tea is a calming one, and he finds that he can almost ignore the choked gasps coming from behind him. At least the coughing's stopped.
Itachi's 'tea' is not true tea at all, only a selection of herbs that provide relief for his symptoms. When brewed, they make a dingy green liquid that smells foul and presumably tastes little better, judging by the twist of Itachi's lips as he sips it. It does seem to work, though, as gradually, his breathing calms.
Itachi wipes the speckled blood off his hands and chin and nods at Kisame. "Thank you."
Kisame nods back and returns to bed. It feels odd to have seen his partner so vulnerable: it is a word that is rarely applied to the likes of Uchiha Itachi.
In the morning, when he wakes, Itachi is already up and packed and waiting to go. They do not speak of what happened in the night. They never do.
Itachi's moments of weakness are private.
Kisame has tried to convince Itachi to see a medic-nin, but whenever he brings the subject up Itachi gives him nothing more than a cold glare and a shake of the head.
"I am well," he says.
Sometimes Kisame tries to push the matter, but he always gives up in the end. If Itachi doesn't want to see a medic, he won't, and Kisame is not foolish enough to believe he could force him.
Itachi hides his illness well, but Kisame sees the toll it takes on him. Itachi speaks less now than he did before, and sleeps more: his sharingan constantly spinning to compensate for his physical weaknesses. He is pale and drawn and when he removes his cloak, Kisame could count his ribs.
"I could snap you in half," he'd joked, once. Itachi had turned to face him, expressionless, black patterns whirring lazily in red irises.
"You could try," he had replied. There was no threat in his words, but Kisame knew he was being warned.
Sometimes ninja life gets too much, and when it does, there are two ways a ninja can go.
Some ninja draw into themselves and go quietly insane. These are the ones who babble softly to themselves, the ones who don't know who they are anymore. They sob to themselves and keep their eyes shut against the world, lest they see something that makes them remember.
Then there's the other type.
You learn to recognise them, after a while: there's a look in their eyes that you learn to back away from fast. This isn't the quiet, sad, safe type of insanity: these are the ones who scream and lash out, the ones who don't care whether they live or die as long as they take you with them. They'd kill you just to feel death run through their fingers.
(He knew a few ninja who'd cracked that way. Deidara, for example. He'd probably been a good kid, once, and he wonders what Iwa had done to him to twist him like that.)
Sometimes Kisame lay awake at night, wondering what kind of crazy Itachi would be, and how long it would take him to go.
Other times, he thought that maybe, just maybe, Itachi was already gone.
Itachi's little brother, he's decided, is the second kind of crazy. Only instead of exploding outwards, at everyone and everything, he compacted it all into a single focus: all that rage and a single target. Sasuke's insanity is a hurricane and Itachi is the eye.
Eyes. It all comes down to eyes, doesn't it?
He never mentions any of this to Itachi. Talking about Itachi's family is not a wise move. He made that mistake once, early on, and he had been very careful never to make it again.
Itachi's illness progresses at an alarming rate. The coughing fits are longer now and more frequent; the effects more visible on his body. He is hollow-cheeked, with wrists that look like they could just snap. His cloak hangs off him. He looks… brittle.
(He's nearly blind now, without his Bloodline limit. He thinks Kisame doesn't know.)
Most disturbing of all though is his sharingan: when he first met Itachi, it had been rich and bloody; amaranthine and bright. The black patterns that whirled within were sharp.
But the sharingan has faded- black bleeds into red, and now it is dark. Dull.
Dead.
Itachi's brother is following them.
(Little bastard probably thinks they don't know.)
What puzzles him, though, is Itachi: he is aware, there's no doubt about it, but he does nothing.
Kisame waits, and waits.
Finally, he decides to broach the subject himself.
"Itachi, your brother's on our tail."
"Hn."
Kisame stares at him in disbelief.
Itachi is dying now. He has been all along, of course, but it draws ever closer and Kisame wonders if it's effecting his mind: because even in this state Sasuke would be no match for him. But Itachi refuses to deal with Sasuke, and Kisame drops it. It's not his problem. It's none of his business.
He wonders what prompted Itachi to kill his clan.
Itachi is not one for mindless slaughter. He is no sadist. Instead, Itachi is brutally efficient: he kills as little as possible, leaving as little in his wake as possible. He kills cleanly, using his sharingan more as a distraction than to inflict pain. He does nothing that is superfluous, makes no movement that is unnecessary. There is nothing spare about Itachi.
(If you didn't know better, you might say it was mercy.)
So what, then, had prompted him to take down his entire clan in a single night?
The massacre had been a bloodbath. Adults and children were slaughtered alike, ninja and civilians. It was violent, it was messy, it was everything Itachi was not.
Why?
It's easy to say that there was no reason, but that doesn't seem right. Kisame can't shake the thought that there had been something- something truly terrible-
Abuse? He wonders about that for a while. For someone so powerful it's strangely easy to see Itachi as victim rather than villain. He's so young: it isn't hard to imagine bruises on pale skin, fear in cold eyes…
Perhaps he simply snapped. He became a ninja at a remarkably young age, after all, and he became an ANBU only a few months before he killed them- perhaps it was too much for him, and he lashed out at anyone, at everyone-
Or maybe there's another reason. Who knew? Only Itachi, and Kisame has never dared ask.
After all, he killed his family. Is it such a stretch that he might kill his partner, too?
(Kisame has never admitted it to anyone, but he is afraid of Itachi.)
Itachi disappears one day, and Kisame doesn't find out until much later that he's dead.
Sasuke has won.
He wonders if he's overestimated Itachi; no-one is invincible. But that feels like the wrong answer. Every answer feels like the wrong answer.
Had his illness struck, at that most inopportune of moments?
No.
The thought whispers in Kisame's mind, and though he ignores it he also suspects it is true: Itachi had given up.
Suicide had never occurred to him as something Itachi might do, but he must've been wrong about that.
He's always been wrong about Itachi.
He wonders if Itachi is still sick, wherever he might be now. It's a cruel thought, that the ailments of life might continue after death. He wonders if Itachi is still sad.
He realises now that Itachi had indeed snapped, but not in the way he'd always suspected: Itachi had broken quietly and folded in on himself, and nobody ever noticed.
Kisame never left the Akatsuki. He was captured by konoha nin a year after Itachi's death and committed suicide to avoid interrogation.
Three years after that, Itachi posthumously finished what he started when Sasuke Uchiha died fighting Naruto Uzumaki, who used a power given to him by Itachi a few days before his death.
Naruto went on to defeat the Akatsuki and returned to konoha a hero, beloved by the village. When Tsunade retired, he took over as Hokage, fulfilling his lifelong dream.
The truth behind the Uchiha massacre was never officially made public, but rumours flew and ten long years after his death, Itachi's name was added to the konoha memorial stone for those who gave their lives for the village.