A/N: I hope you're all having a very Merry Christmas!
.
Fall In Love With Me (This Christmas)
.
Shisui fell in love because of a big, ugly Christmas sweater.
Okay, maybe blaming the sweater for all of the romantic drama that followed (for Shisui) was oversimplifying things a bit, but it had definitely been the straw that broke the boy genius' back. So to speak.
It wasn't like he'd been looking for the love of his life or anything. He'd innocently gone over to his aunt and uncle's house to help with the last minute Christmas baking, like he always did, little knowing that it would be his undoing.
Itachi had answered the door. Shisui's cheerful greeting had dried up in his throat.
His cousin/best friend/occasional scapegoat was wearing a Christmas sweater. A garishly knitted thing covered in small Santas and misshapen snowflakes and a blob that might generously be called a reindeer, complete with a big red bell sewn into its nose. (Or its tail. It was kind of hard to tell.) The thing was also massively oversized; Itachi was practically drowning in it, the sleeves hanging several inches over his slim wrists. It was, in short, an eyesore.
And just like that, Shisui was in love.
Holy shit, he thought in a daze, watching Itachi shove his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, he was in love with his best friend. (He could worry about the cousin part later.)
Suddenly a lot of things made a lot more sense. The whole wanting to be around Itachi all the time thing, even though Shisui was pretty sure a Venn diagram of their respective interests would involve two circles as far away from each other as possible; the unnaturally pervasive interest in his cousin's love life, paired with the bizarre twinges that came with actually imagining Itachi's hypothetical significant other; the fact that his heart started going double time whenever Itachi smiled at him…or smiled in general…or…
It was quite possible, in keeping with what certain family members had been telling him since kindergarten, that Shisui was an idiot.
"Shisui," Itachi said. "You are staring."
It was also quite possible that he was staring. It was also also possible that his mouth was hanging open slightly. He closed it in what he liked to think was a surreptitious manner.
"Hey, 'tachi," he greeted at last, and congratulated himself on how normal he sounded. Not at all like he'd just had a life-altering revelation or anything. "What's with the, uh…?" He gestured vaguely to the monstrosity Itachi was wearing.
"Mother has acquired a new hobby," Itachi said tonelessly. "You should see Sasuke's."
Shisui tried to imagine his younger (and far bitchier) cousin wearing one of those sweaters without first needing to be drugged and tied down, and failed.
As if reading his mind Itachi added, "Not that you will. I have a sneaking suspicion that he has already burnt it in the backyard."
"Sounds reasonable enough," Shisui mused, squinting at—oh, okay, that was 'Ho Ho Ho' embroidered across the chest, not indecipherable hieroglyphs from a long forgotten civilization. Kind of disappointing.
"Well, come in," Itachi said, moving aside for Shisui to do so. "We are attempting to construct a gingerbread house."
"First thing? Feeling confident this year, are we?"
Itachi shot him a reproachful look as Shisui shed his coat and hat. "I might remind you that we would have had no problems last year, if a certain person had not insisted on eating half of the icing."
"Hey, I didn't have lunch that day."
"And the year before that, when you started a 'snowball fight' using frosting to make the snowballs?"
"I got bored! Also, your brother's duck butt hairstyle was asking for it."
Itachi narrowed his eyes. "And the year before that, when you held me down and smeared frosting all over my face and hair?"
Because it had been hilarious, obviously. But Itachi had been taking judo lessons since he was four years old and Shisui didn't particularly feel like being tossed over someone's shoulder that day, so he forewent an actual answer in favor of a shrug.
Itachi sighed, but there was fondness in it. "Shall we see if we can get through one gingerbread house without any chaos?" he asked. He didn't sound too hopeful about the possibility.
"Lead the way," Shisui replied with a gallant little bow. Itachi shook his head and went on ahead anyway.
Leaving Shisui to muse over how very, very screwed he was.
Because he was very, very in love with his best friend. Fuck.
.
There was nothing else for it but to seduce him. Obviously.
Shisui decided to start with snow angels.
"Hey, nerd," he said brightly when Itachi picked up the phone. "We're gonna make snow angels. Get dressed."
Itachi's reply was immediate. "No."
Shisui frowned. "What else've you got to do? And if you say you're getting ahead on coursework or something I'm probably gonna hang myself with a holly garland."
That time there was a pause. Shisui closed his eyes and tried to digest this latest horror.
"You're actually getting ahead on coursework, aren't you."
"There's no reason to slack off simply because it's the holidays," Itachi muttered, but Shisui thought (hoped, prayed) that there was some embarrassment in his voice.
He recovered quickly. Shisui was the sort of person who bounced back from little things like the object of his latent affections being the nerdiest nerd ever to nerd. "Okay, now we're definitely making some snow angels. If you're not out here in five minutes I'm coming up there and dumping hot chocolate on all your textbooks, I don't care how much they cost."
"Must all of your threats be Christmas-themed this time of year?" Itachi asked with a sigh. Then, "Wait—Shisui, are you here?"
"Sure am," Shisui chirped. There was a flurry of movement from the upstairs window underneath which he'd been standing for the past five minutes, Itachi's disbelieving head making an appearance from behind the curtains. Shisui waved.
"You are insane," Itachi informed him. Shisui knew that tone. That was a tone of pure and utter surrender.
"As long as you're going to come down here and be insane with me," he said, but Itachi had already hung up.
Probably for the best. Couldn't lay it on too thick right at the outset, after all.
.
The idea had been a good one, if a little vague on the details. He and Itachi would lie on their backs and make snow angels as fluffy white flakes drifted merrily down from the ice blue sky. Snowflakes would catch in Itachi's girlishly thick eyelashes, white against black. At some point Shisui would say something terribly clever, as he was wont to do, and they'd both be laughing and their eyes would meet across a scant foot of cold space. A heavy silence would ensue, filled with promise. And then—
Well, Shisui hadn't quite thought that far ahead.
Not that it mattered, because what actually happened was Itachi appeared in the backyard, wrapped in a giant parka and looking like he hated the world and everything in it. And really, what was Shisui supposed to do but laugh his ass off? Between the parka and the hat and the abysmally long scarf, which Shisui could only assume was another product of Mikoto's determination to figure out the whole knitting thing because it was so long Itachi had to wrap it around his head five times before it stopped dragging on the ground, all he could see was a sliver of Itachi's face. And even that was iffy because his glasses were getting foggier every time he exhaled.
By the time Shisui got himself under control, Itachi was looking at him like he'd quite like to set his favorite cousin on fire.
"Are you finished?" he asked, acidic.
"Think so, yeah," Shisui wheezed. "Unless you have another Christmas sweater under all that."
"Truly you are a comic genius. There is no end to your wit." Itachi's deadpan was perfectly opaque, and with it his true feelings on the subject of the sweater.
"Yeah, well, that's what they say. So are we gonna make some awesome snow art or what?"
"I think—" Itachi's eyes flickered upward and widened with alarm. "Shisui—"
That was all he managed to get out before an icy waterfall descended from on high, soaking Shisui right through his layers and biting at his skin. He was pretty sure he made a yowling noise like a wounded cat; distantly he wondered if this was the hand of God telling him He disapproved of gay, vaguely incestuous seduction attempts.
Above the numbing pain (oxymoronic as that sounded) spreading throughout his body, Shisui registered Itachi saying something in a disapproving tone.
"That wasn't funny, Sasuke."
And behind that, the cackling sound of teenage laughter.
You little shit, Shisui thought murderously. He wanted to say it too, but his teeth were chattering too hard. Holy fuck, that water had been cold.
"It was too good an opportunity," Sasuke was protesting from the upstairs window. Shisui turned to glare in his general direction, saw the phone in his hand, and promptly tried to combust it with the sheer power of his fury. It didn't work.
"If this ends up on Vine," he said loudly, "I will kick your ass so hard, kid, you don't even know."
Sasuke snorted. Shisui suppressed the urge to climb up the siding like a maniacal monkey and strangle the brat where he stood, if only because Itachi loved his little brother and Shisui loved Itachi, and that meant no killing of cousins.
Dammit. This true love shit was hard work.
.
As had been established, Shisui wasn't the kind of person to let a little thing like heinously obnoxious future brothers-in-law stop him. He was more resilient than that. He bounced back, dammit.
His immune system, on the other hand, was a weak little fucker.
He woke up the next morning by sneezing six times in a row, which was gross but at least put off the realization that his throat felt like someone had shoved it through a paper shredder with extreme prejudice. He could feel himself sweating but it was cold as balls and oh shit, screw self-control and being the bigger person, he was gonna murder Sasuke.
Miserably, he padded into the bathroom and dug out the tissues. At least it was winter break; there was no way he'd've been able to handle Statistics in his current state.
The phone rang not ten minutes later and Shisui actually whimpered, wondering if he'd forgotten a shift at work or something else that would make him want to commit hara-kiri.
He picked up anyway.
"Hello?" he croaked, trying to sound as pathetic as possible. It wasn't hard.
"You sound like shit," Itachi informed him.
Shisui rolled his eyes. "Nah, really? Blame your duck-haired ass-pain of a baby brother. I'm pretty sure he's killed me."
"Or just given you a cold. But please, don't let logic detract from your melodrama."
And Shisui had a great retort lined up for that, thanks very much, but it was derailed by another round of rapid-fire sneezes. By the time he could breathe again his eyes were watering and he'd completely lost the thread of the conversation.
"Are you all right?" Itachi asked, sounding concerned now.
"Peachy," Shisui rasped, but he must not have sounded too convincing because the next words out of Itachi's mouth were "Get back in bed, I'm coming over."
He'd hung up before Shisui could say anything in protest. Typical.
But Itachi had made up his mind, which meant resistance was futile. Shisui sighed and dragged his pitiful ass back into bed.
.
Itachi was pushing open the door to Shisui's apartment in fifteen minutes flat. Which was a bit odd, considering his place and Shisui's were half an hour away with light traffic.
Shisui entertained the possibility of Itachi having created a complex algorithm explaining the most efficient driving routes at any given time of day, and found it too possible to laugh at.
"How'd you get in?" he croaked. The sound was muffled by his injured throat and no less than five blankets, inside of which he was curled up like a particularly fat shrimp, but Itachi still heard him.
"You hid the spare key inside the bell on that eyesore of a wreath you put on the door, because you like to think you are clever," Itachi said, shrugging off his coat and shoes.
"Yeah, well, it's worked every other year," Shisui grumbled.
Itachi hummed noncommittally and walked into the bedroom, laying a businesslike hand on Shisui's forehead.
His fingers felt gloriously cool against Shisui's overheated skin. He resisted the impulse to nuzzle into the touch like a contented cat.
"You have a fever," Itachi murmured. "Have you eaten anything?"
"I don't even have the energy to roll over," Shisui retorted in a rasp. Itachi shook his head.
"I thought as much. Sit up, I brought soup."
Shisui sat up, eyeing the bowl in Itachi's hands with deep suspicion. "Not one of your culinary creations, is it? You wouldn't try to finish me off by force-feeding me your cooking, would you?"
It was a fact well known throughout the family Uchiha that Itachi, in direct contrast to his freakishly high IQ and stellar scores on every aptitude test known to man, could burn water if left alone in a kitchen for too long.
Itachi shot him a withering look, but apparently Shisui looked pitiful enough to be spared any of his verbal barbs. "Mother made it. Eat."
He held up a spoonful of tomato soup. Shisui's brain short-circuited.
"'m'not too weak to hold a spoon, dork," he said. Oddly, Itachi's face took on a bit of a pink tinge at that.
"Obviously," he replied, and handed both bowl and spoon to Shisui.
The soup was amazing, the heat soothing on his throat, settling warm in his stomach. He still felt like shit, but at least he wasn't shivering as much.
At length, Itachi spoke up again. "If it makes you feel any better, Sasuke informs me that the video he posted is doing very well on Vine," he offered.
Shisui groaned. "I'm gonna kill that punk. Sorry, 'tachi, but you were an only child once. You'll get used to being one again."
"He also sends his apologies for getting you sick," Itachi continued, and Shisui snorted. Like hell.
Snorting was evidently beyond the meager capabilities of his esophagus because Shisui immediately began coughing, great hacking things that made him worry that he was going to spill the last dregs of soup, and by the time he finished he was shivering violently again.
"Fuck fuck fuck," he managed to get out. Itachi took the bowl and put it on the floor, looking alarmed.
"Shisui?"
He attempted a smile as he burrowed back down into his blanket nest. "F-f-fine, just a little f-f-fucking f-f-freezing, 's'all."
A crease appeared between Itachi's eyebrows. Shisui kind of wanted to smooth it away, but the way his hands were shaking he'd probably just end up poking Itachi in the eye. That seemed to be the way his day was going.
Itachi stood abruptly and clambered onto the bed, leaving Shisui to wonder if he'd fallen asleep at some point and wandered into a deeply inappropriate dream. While he wondered, Itachi wormed his way under the covers behind him, providing a pool of warmth that made Shisui want to pull him close and—
"Better?" Itachi asked, breath a soft puff at Shisui's ear.
"Yeah," he croaked. At least the sore throat gave him an excuse for how rough his voice sounded.
The inevitable awkward silence ensued. Shisui contemplated the fact that he and his best friend were basically spooning. He imagined Itachi was contemplating along similar lines.
Or else he was contemplating an answer to Einstein's Theorem or some shit. You never knew with Itachi.
Shisui's eyelids felt like lead curtains getting ready to drop. He tried to keep them open, to think of something funny and clever he could say to break the ice instead of just conking out like an asshat, but the cold was making his brain sluggish on top of everything else and eventually he just gave up, letting himself drift off to sleep.
As he did, he thought he felt a warm arm reach across his shoulders and tug him a little bit closer to something warm.
He never wanted to move.
.
By the time Shisui stopped sneezing and/or coughing every time he tried to speak, he had been forced to rethink his romancing strategy. The roundabout method hadn't worked. It wouldn't have worked even if Sasuke hadn't interrupted; frankly Shisui wasn't sure how he'd ever thought it would. Itachi was smart, terrifyingly so, but he had a tendency to miss social cues. Things like this—Shisui swallowed hard at the thought—things like this needed to be spelled out, otherwise he was likely to miss them entirely.
So, a proper date it was.
Itachi continued to visit his deathly ill (well, Shisui might've been exaggerating a tad) cousin every day until he started to visibly improve. It took about a week. During that time Shisui managed to glean that the local skating rink was going to be hosting live reindeer on loan from the zoo.
He wasn't going to get a better chance than this.
"Hey, 'tachi," Shisui said, in what he hoped was a cool and casual voice.
Itachi hummed to show he was listening, eyes fixed on the textbook Shisui had ripped bodily from his hands and chucked across the room an hour earlier; apparently the masochistic bastard had retrieved it while his friend was sleeping.
(For the record, there hadn't been a repeat of Itachi's…erm…effective method of pooling body heat. Shisui told himself he'd always slept just fine without anyone else in the room and that his sudden inability to fall asleep for hours was due to his illness and not anything else.)
"We should totally go see the reindeer," Shisui continued.
Itachi paused. Shisui wondered if, had his friend been holding a glass of water, he would have comically dropped it.
"What."
"Reindeer." Shisui made appropriate hand gestures. "Antlers. Cute little faces. Occasionally have luminous red noses. Any of this ringing a bell?"
"Shisui, I know what reindeer are. I have no idea what you're talking about."
"The ice skating rink? The reindeer?" Shisui prompted, watching Itachi's eyebrows knit together in confusion.
"I—wait. They're hosting that event for children, Shisui."
He said it patiently, like an adult trying to explain something to a small child. Shisui tried not to pout like one.
"Aw, c'mon, it's not like they're gonna card us at the door. Just try to take off your cloak of cynicism for five minutes and we should be fine."
Itachi raised an eyebrow. Shisui elaborated.
"It's like an Invisibility Cloak but less fun."
Itachi sighed. "Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, Shisui. I have things to do that do not involve catching a cold while waiting to look at reindeer I could just as easily see at the zoo—and I would think you would want to fully recover from your last illness before contracting another."
"Hey, I'm just trying to be efficient." Foreseeing another mature and too-sensible protest coming his way, Shisui pulled out the last stop. "Look, 'tachi, I might look better than death warmed over right now, but who knows? Maybe I have some rare form of slow-acting pneumonia that'll come back at any minute and kill me stone dead. This might be my last wish."
He threw in some puppy-dog eyes for good measure.
Itachi looked at him like he was an idiot.
.
Itachi was still looking at him like Shisui was an idiot the next day, when they were standing in line at the skating rink and freezing their respective asses off in a crowd of people doing the same.
Shisui was having difficulty reminding himself that he was not, in fact, an idiot. He was a smart person who occasionally made spectacularly bad choices.
This was shaping up to be one of them.
"So," he said uncomfortably. "This is fun."
Itachi gave him the driest look Shisui had ever seen on another human being. A fresh wail broke out from the kid a few places down in line; she'd been shrieking off and on since they'd arrived twenty minutes prior, and had Shisui mentioned that the line hadn't moved a single inch during that time?
Bad choice, Shisui scolded himself, trying not to bash his head repeatedly into the nearest hard surface. Spectacularly bad choice.
"I am skeptical about this," Itachi said under his breath. "Reindeer are not indigenous to this area. They may have constructed animatronic animals for the children and marketed them as being real."
Shisui's heart sank even deeper into his shoes. He hadn't thought about that.
They lapsed into a quiet that was awkward as hell and Shisui hated it—not that he was a huge fan of awkward silences on principle, mind, but this one was especially heinous because it was Itachi. He'd known Itachi since he was born, for god's sake; it had never been like this between them. It had never been strained. It'd just been…easy.
Easy.
Oh hell.
Maybe Shisui had been thinking about this all wrong. Everything was easy with Itachi, everything seemed simple when they were hanging out together or talking or whatever. Maybe he'd overthought fondness for his best friend. Maybe he'd deluded himself into thinking he was falling in love because it was just that—easy and simple and hardly worth a second look. Maybe—
Fuck.
Finally, finally, thank you God and Baby Jesus and everything else, the line moved. The ticket lady gave them a weird look, which Shisui allowed because they were the only people under thirty who weren't dragging kids along, but they got their little wreath hand stamps and were waved in.
Shisui snagged a map from her booth and squinted in the dim evening light. "Looks like the reindeer are just ahead," he declared, making a beeline for the promised animals. Itachi still looked dubious, but he followed.
In retrospect, Shisui probably hadn't needed the map. All he had to do was locate the teeming mass of humanity gathering around one tiny pen. Countless kids screaming in chorus, accompanied by a smell that even to Shisui's untrained nose definitely demanded a diaper change.
He was so losing Romance Points for this.
"We can't even see the damn things," he complained, but Itachi was already nudging past him. It took a second for Shisui to realize that his friend was actually going to delve into the shrieking, smelly horde. He reached out and caught Itachi's elbow before he was lost to it.
Itachi turned, annoyed. "What?"
"The hell are you doing?"
The annoyance faded into confusion. "You wanted to see the reindeer, did you not? It might take time, but we can make our way to the front." He paused. "Eventually."
It wasn't a deep moment. Itachi's statement didn't contain multitudes or hidden meanings; it wasn't snowing, Shisui wasn't being suave, and there were no snowflakes caught in Itachi's eyelashes.
But it still knocked something loose in him, leaving Shisui to decide once and for all that yeah, okay, he was kind of an idiot. He was an idiot for thinking this was friendship alone, or fondness, or whatever platonic bullshit he thought he might've mistaken it for.
Because this? This was not platonic. Itachi was bound and determined to see those damn reindeer if it meant something to Shisui, which kind of made him want to kiss the stubbornness out of his cousin's mouth.
He was in love. Plain and simple.
Itachi was starting to look confused again. It occurred to Shisui that he was staring. Again.
"Yeah," he said, way, way too late for it to sound anything but weird. "Yeah, no—I'll follow you."
And on some fit of impulse he reached out and took Itachi's hand.
A startled expression crossed Itachi's face, but it was there and gone before Shisui could interpret it.
"Once more unto the breach, then," Itachi intoned, a smile threatening at the corners of his mouth.
Shit, Shisui thought morosely, I really do wanna kiss this dork.
All he said was, "After you."
And together they dove into the fray.
.
Shisui totally made Itachi take a selfie with him and the reindeer (whose name was actually Comet, in case anyone was wondering). Itachi dragged his feet and muttered things about dignity but he gave in eventually, smiling at Shisui's phone in a way that looked surprisingly genuine.
They considered making use of the skating rink for about two-point-five seconds after freeing themselves from the reindeer mosh pit. Then they realized that everyone else had reached that exact same conclusion and chose to bolt rather than risk suffocating in another crowd. They got milkshakes at McDonald's instead.
It was a pretty good date, all things considered. The fact that Itachi probably didn't realize it had been a date didn't deter Shisui in the slightest.
.
Except Shisui now had a problem.
That being, it was six in the morning on Christmas Day and he hadn't gotten Itachi anything. And apparently his subconscious had registered this while his conscience had not. Hence waking up at six in the morning with a nagging feeling of guilt.
And then there was the other thing.
That being, Christmas would be over after tomorrow. Then it would be time to go back to the normal patterns of their lives—Shisui and Itachi would both return to their separate schools and their lives and Shisui would still drop in on them sometimes, like he always did, but he would no longer have the built-in excuse of wanting to spend some quality holiday time with his surviving family.
Besides, there was just something about Christmas. Something that made it a lot easier to be brave.
Maybe he just needed to be brave.
Shisui sat bolt upright and started feeling around in the dark for his pants. There had to be someplace open this early.
.
"Merry Christmas, dipshit," Sasuke greeted him at the door.
"Merry Christmas, squirt," Shisui replied with equal cheer.
It was only eight in the morning by that point, Uchiha family breakfasts being absurdly early at any time of the year, so neither of them had much energy for anything more than that.
The breakfast itself was more an opportunity to actually wake up than anything else. Even Itachi seemed preoccupied, picking at his pancakes with less than what Shisui thought of as appropriate vigor (he may not've gotten along fantastically with his uncle, but even he had to admit Fugaku made spectacular pancakes).
"Well," Mikoto began, after a long silence that suggested more than one person at the table had taken the opportunity to go back to sleep. "Why don't we open gifts now?"
Shisui kind of half-slept through that too (hey, six AM was way before his normal wakeup time), coming back to the world occasionally to make appropriate gestures and noises of thanks.
('Appropriate gestures' included flipping Sasuke off behind Mikoto's back, as the former had informed Shisui that his gift was the enduring Internet fame bought by that apparently still-popular Vine.)
The last box he opened was from Mikoto, and Shisui had a sneaking suspicion of what it might contain before he opened it. Sure enough: A hideously ugly Christmas sweater, both sleeves several inches longer than what a regular human being could comfortably wear, the whole front emblazoned with a gigantic grimacing snowman. And there were bells. Tiny little bells sewn into the lining and turning the slightest movement into an off-kilter rendition of Jingle Bells.
"Thanks, Aunt Miko," Shisui said with as much warmth as he could muster. She beamed at him.
"I'm glad you like it, Shisui."
Sasuke gave a cough that sounded suspiciously like a snicker. What the hell ever; Shisui knew for a fact that his brat of a cousin had an equally ugly sweater stashed away somewhere, that he hadn't actually burnt it in the backyard, and that he would definitely be wearing it for dinner to avoid hurting his mother's feelings.
If Itachi noticed that none of his gifts had Shisui's name on the tag, he said nothing. Shisui squirmed uncomfortably anyway.
Finally once the Christmas carnage was complete, shredded wrapping paper and discarded bags flung everywhere to make crossing the room a health hazard, the family started to disperse. Shisui nudged his best friend in the arm.
"C'mon," was all he said.
Itachi followed.
Shisui tugged him into an upstairs hallway that was, for the moment at least, abandoned.
"I did get you something, y'know," he said, at the same moment Itachi blurted "I made you something."
They both blinked at each other.
"Huh," Shisui said at last, scratching the back of his neck sheepishly. He'd been so tired and jittery earlier he hadn't even noticed being skipped. "Wait, 'made'? You did something creative?" he asked gleefully.
Even in the dim light of the hallway he could tell Itachi was going steadily pink. But surprisingly, he didn't offer any kind of retort. Instead he pulled a skinny, immaculately wrapped box out of nowhere (Time Lord technology in his pockets, it had to be) and offered it to Shisui.
"Merry Christmas," he said.
Intrigued, Shisui ripped into the package. He felt a little guilty for ruining Itachi's pristine wrapping job, but then Itachi's wrapping jobs were always pristine and what was Christmas without some harmless destruction?
He pulled the lid from the box to find…a lump of material. Yarn, to be exact. A pile of red and gold yarn.
Probably noticing the perplexed look on Shisui's face, Itachi added helpfully, "It's a scarf."
Shisui lifted one end experimentally. Indeed it was a scarf. And—"Wait, are these Gryffindor colors?"
Itachi was getting pinker. "Yes."
"How'd you know which House I was?" Shisui asked, astonished, pulling more of the scarf from its box.
"You crowed about it for a week after you discovered Pottermore, Shisui."
"Oh. Yeah."
He'd finally managed to free the whole thing, which was saying something, because Shisui didn't have a tape measure on hand but he'd be willing to bet the scarf was close to ten feet long.
"Mother explained the process to me," Itachi muttered. "But I couldn't seem to figure out how to stop, and she's been busy these past few days, so—"
"You knitted me a Gryffindor scarf," Shisui interrupted. Even he could hear the awe in it; good god, he was such a sap.
"If you don't like it," Itachi began, awkward, at which point Shisui lost what was left of his mind and kissed him.
Itachi didn't move.
After a few seconds of excruciating stillness Shisui backed off, feeling like he'd been shocked.
"Shit," he stammered. "Fuck, um. I didn't—did I totally misread that? I totally misread that, didn't I. Um. I'm just gonna go…drown myself, maybe. Just a little. And then I can come back and we can pretend I'm not the biggest idiot in the history of the word, okay?" Then, with a slight edge of desperation, "Itachi? I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry."
"Are you?" Itachi asked calmly.
"…Huh?"
"Are you sorry?"
Shisui opened his mouth intending to say yeah, yes, that was a huge mistake brought on by lack of sleep and a serious lack of impulse control and it'll never happen again, so please just keep being my best friend and I'll try to forget I ever wanted to climb you like a tree.
What came out instead was, "Not really, no."
Itachi nodded, almost to himself. "Ah. That's good."
It is? Shisui wanted to ask, but then Itachi was pulling him in for a kiss proper and his higher mental functions abruptly took a hike.
Because holy shit, everything was so much better with actual reciprocation.
.
"Y'know," Shisui said after a time, "you basically made my present for you redundant. Kinda rude."
"I apologize," Itachi replied gravely. His glasses were smudged up beyond all repair and it made Shisui want to cackle.
"You should. I got you mistletoe."
Itachi raised an eyebrow. Shisui continued.
"And by 'got' I mean 'borrowed off the wreath on your neighbor's door because literally nowhere was open on Christmas'."
The other eyebrow went up to join the first. "Should I be flattered that I am apparently worth performing a criminal act?"
Shisui grinned and kissed his hair, just because he could. "You should be so flattered. I wouldn't risk getting my ass shot off by your crazy neighbors for just anybody."
"Hmm. You could have just asked me, you know."
"Yeah. Sure. I was trying to be subtle, 'tachi."
"Shisui, you are about as subtle as a brick to the head."
"Ouch!" Shisui laughed, winding his new scarf around his neck. Five times. "I am pained and hurt."
Itachi didn't answer; he was too busy eyeing his handiwork. "To be honest, I think I need more practice in the art of knitting," he admitted. "You do not need to wear it."
Shisui clutched at the scarf protectively. "Are you kidding? I'm gonna wear this ridiculous thing everywhere. It'll make for a good story later on."
"Really." Itachi sounded skeptical, which Shisui magnanimously ignored in the spirit of the day.
"Kinda appropriate, when you think about it," he said thoughtfully. "I mean, I did realize I was in love with you because of a god-awful Christmas sweater."
Itachi made a choked sound beside him, causing Shisui to wonder if it might be possible to swallow his own tongue. He cringed.
"Sorry. Too soon? I—yeah. Sorry."
"Please stop apologizing," Itachi murmured. "You aren't—you aren't the only one who has been thinking about this."
Shisui turned to look at him, surprised. "No kidding?"
That got a smirk. Sometimes Shisui was reminded that Itachi and Sasuke were actually brothers. "We can't all be as transparent as you, unfortunately."
"Hey, you wish you were as transparent as me. Maybe we could've gotten past this awhile ago."
Itachi shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. Does it matter?"
Shisui considered that. He didn't have to consider very long. "No. Guess not."
Fact was, even if he'd had his big incestuous epiphany earlier, Shisui didn't think he'd have been any less terrified by just how many feelings he had for Itachi.
"I thought as much." Itachi stretched and started to stand. "We should go back downstairs before Sasuke is sent up to get us."
Shisui reached out and snagged his sleeve. "Yeah, sure, but first thing's first."
He pulled a (slightly crumpled) sprig of mistletoe out of his pants pocket and grinned up at Itachi. "It's rude not to use a Christmas present."
"Of course," Itachi deadpanned. But he leaned down, smiling, and Shisui stretched up on his knees, threading his fingers through Itachi's hair.
They met in the middle.