"Just because you offered me a place to stay doesn't mean I forgive any of the shit you did," Karin tells former ANBU, renowned terrorist, and redeemed genocidal maniac Uchiha Itachi.
With the kitchen counter firmly between them, she announces, "I haven't forgotten what you did to Sasuke, and I haven't forgiven you for wasting almost a year of my life."
It's a gauntlet she's throwing down, she thinks. A line of demarcation—Karin is circumnavigating their relationship, circumscribing its edges. All she needs to to get there first, to draw her boundaries before he draws his. Even if he pushes back, tries to get her to budge on anything, she sets the tone by doing it before he does.
This is not quite what happens.
Itachi nods once distantly, without even looking at her, and says, "Okay."
As if that were all he needed to say, Itachi pulls back tape from one of the many boxes scattered across the kitchen counter and begins to remove stacks of dishes and silverware from it as Karin watches on, hands on her hips as she waits for a response.
Any kind of response, really. Just not that one. An okay from Itachi is less of a concession and more of a rebuff—he isn't so much accepting or rejecting her terms as he is refusing to consider them at all.
She tries again. "So, that's where I stand! I'm not gonna be your buddy or your pal or anything. I'm gonna do my job, like a professional, and that's it! You got that?"
"Of course," he mutters, though his attention is clearly elsewhere—he holds one drinking glass up to the light, squinting at a hairline crack in its edge. He runs one nail along the crack and frowns when it catches on the gap. "That's unfortunate."
He pays her no further attention than that; instead, he continues to unpack bowls and plates, removing the newspaper wrapped protectively around them, and placing them all in a neat line along the counter. They're all mismatched hand-me-downs Sakura collected from her friends: lightly-painted ceramics and bright, glazed earthenware, plastics and tin cups and thick mugs with chips at their edges.
They're things that don't naturally fit together but, through odd misfortune and charity, are about to get packed into the same cupboards anyway.
After a moment, Itachi shoots her a brief glance, one fine eyebrow raised. "Did you perhaps intend to say more?"
"Ah—of course I did!" She has a lot to say - volumes, in fact! - but he gets in the way of it; she can't find her footing without him trying to swipe her feet from beneath her. "If I'm going to be sharing a house with you, there needs to be ground rules! An understanding of what's going on!"
"Hm." He's already back to Sakura's boxes, peeling back more tape on one marked Pots and Pans. "So then why don't you get on with it, then?"
She seethes, but settles for a calmer, if slightly tense, "Well, aren't we going to talk about anything that's happened so far? Any of it? Just to—you know, get it out of the way. Get it over with."
"Oh?" He has to be doing it on purpose—acting disinterested so she'll leave him alone.
"I'm not asking you to be my best friend," Karin tries, because she's never been the type to pray for miracles. "Or to be anything other than just around, which I don't even care about. But at the very least we should maybe just… Find some common ground here. Or something." Stable ground, she thinks. A line so she knows just how far she can go before she crosses it.
"I was technically granted legal title to the house," Itachi says instead, "But you are welcome to treat it as your own."
"That's not what I was—"
"I don't particularly care to discuss anything else," he says. "If you recall, you specifically agreed that you would not waste my time or yours attempting to relitigate what's past. That ought to be it." It's as blunt as any dismissal she's ever received from Sasuke or Orochimaru, but somehow it's a lot harder to choke down.
Maybe because it's been a while since she's been given an order, and maybe she's not as eager to receive one as she'd once been. Maybe she doesn't give a damn about orders from someone who, just a month ago, was her prisoner.
Maybe because she needs to be palatable and soft to win over Naruto and Sakura, but she only needs to coexist with Itachi.
"We don't have to get into the dirty details of everything, I just think—"
"I find it very difficult to believe you have nothing else you could be doing at this moment. It seems to me as though someone who intends to stay here would have already started to unpack their belongings."
"Now you wait just a minute! I'm trying to—"
Itachi lets out a long sigh, and finally looks up at her, and lets his eyes linger. There's only the kitchen counter between them—they're close enough that he's almost right on the mark. Regardless of whether he can actually see her clearly, he's at least able to look her in the eye. "Karin," he says, "stop talking to me."
She does.
Itachi lifts a stack of dishes and carries them over the other side of the kitchen, turning his back to her. Aside from the occasional ceramic shift of dishes, the house is silent again.
Karin does not go to unpack her things. It isn't, after all, as if she has much to unpack to begin with—when she left the Southern Hideout, she took only what she could carry. She's always traveled light, been flexible, ready to do what her mother could never do and run when things started to look bad.
She hasn't ever actually run, regardless of how bad things have looked, but she's always prepared for the eventuality, and that (she thinks) is what makes the difference.
Unpacking, she thinks, would only make that more obvious.
Karin leaves Itachi to the room-that-will-one-day-become-a-kitchen and stakes a claim to the couch, laying back and propping her feet up on the arm. It seems like the type of thing that would piss him off, but even if it does he doesn't bother commenting on it. She stares up at the ceiling and Itachi's chakra is doing absolutely nothing—the hum of chakra in the floorboards is louder than his is.
Fine then.
Karin finds better things to do with her time: she thumbs through one of several books Sakura left for her, propping it up against her bent knees in case she needs something to hide behind. It's a medical text, marked through with tabs and highlights, enthusiastic rows of exclamation points. There are scores of her comments scribbled in the margins, things like this was proven false, or Itachi responded well to this once—definitely something here.
She's well-intentioned—so much so that it's almost painful to read. It's not the kind of healing Karin is used to; Sakura's is precarious, intentional work, where Karin has never had to concern herself with the finer aspects of it. She just does it. Or, more accurately, it just happens—regardless whether she's trying to make it happen or not.
Because of that, Sakura is capable of holding entire conversations with notes on the page, but it all seems so pointless that Karin barely makes it ten pages before she's sneaking glances at Itachi again.
He's just… boring. It's almost like he's content to be shuffling around the kitchen putting away dishes. She knows, far better than most, that he's more than capable of high dramatics—usually deeply serious ones, but dramatics all the same.
Occasionally he'll rub his forehead absentmindedly or cradle one of his wrists, feeling for the places where his chakra suppressant seals had been placed. Now it's just plain skin, though his chakra is still returning in slow increments, trickling back honey-slow. Instead of trying to activate his Sharingan, Itachi feels his way around the cupboards and cabinets by touch, hands passing lightly over surfaces as if he were at risk of being burned.
It's another thing Sakura said she's still looking into—restoring his sight.
His body only holds up for a little bit longer. Over the top of her book she watches him stumble, steps uncertain, toward the table and drop down into a chair, closing his eyes and sinking his head into his hands. He's too low for her to see, but she can still hear his slow, complicated breaths. His voice has gotten deeper since she first met him—as much damage as his lungs have taken, she's almost surprised he can still talk at all.
And yet, not once does he look back at her. Not once does he ask for help.
That's his long-term plan, she supposes: he doesn't need her specifically, just someone who can pick up his groceries and run his errands. A line stretched as thin as possible from him to the village, leaving him in his quiet corner in the woods. She's just the poor son of a bitch actually stuck maintaining it.
There's too much and too little between them, she thinks; too much time, too little that's actually happened.
And yet, at the same time, that isn't entirely true either—a lot has happened, but not enough to have filled six months. She can hardly account for any change from the first time they met: there's a greater ease, perhaps, in how they speak, but six months is still six months—six months of three meals a day, six months of bathroom and shower breaks, occasional medical exams. Six months of laundry and scavenging for food, daydreaming and wakeful nights. Lying flat on her back in the middle of the day listening to water pump through the hideout's old pipes, waiting for the numbness in her arms to dissipate.
It's hard to view six months as empty, regardless of how little happened.
Six months was what, half a year? It's hard to put an exact number on it, to quantify the weeks of seeing no one but Itachi, of having no one to talk to but Itachi, but never actually talking to Itachi either. Digging into whatever wounds, emotional or otherwise, that she could find, twisting the knife when he wouldn't budge.
Never getting a response.
She can let those memories linger for the moment but they can't sit stagnant forever—they need to be unpacked eventually, she thinks, even if it's just taking them out of the box once in a while to look them over. Left alone, they gather dust, gather mold; that's a lesson she only needs to learn once.
No matter how few things she's carried with her, no matter how prepared she's ever been to run away, there are always moments when the world is too slow to feel dangerous. Moments where, alone in one hideout or another, there were no experiments or prisoners to feed her mind.
In moments like those, there's only so much that remains—in the quiet, in the night, the only things left for her are the things at the bottom of her mind. The things she doesn't unpack.
In the kitchen, Itachi finally gets up from the table and returns to his work, lining up mismatched cups and bowls in the cabinets, breaking down boxes as he goes.
.
.
.
For several hours, it's just the two of them. Karin leaves Itachi to his work in the kitchen and eventually goes out to sit on the back porch. The back door inexplicably has a deadbolt on it, which only makes Naruto's front door more incomprehensible.
She isn't out there long, however, before she senses an incoming chakra signature and scurries back through the back door.
"You can come in," she shouts, seconds before Sasuke can knock. "It doesn't have a lock on it."
"It—what?" Itachi is still in the kitchen, sorting through dish towels. "It doesn't…?"
"Sasuke!" She recalls, distantly, that she was maybe a little mad at him before, but sees no use in worrying about that now. Why stay mad at Sasuke when she could be happy to see him? When the only alternative she has is Itachi?
Itachi's greeting is much less warm. He nods once, politely. "Sasuke."
"Itachi."
And Karin, who can only introduce herself. "How was lunch? Are—is anyone else coming?" Just as she'd predicted, Itachi had no interest in joining Sasuke and his friends, though they'd almost definitely had a better afternoon than she'd had.
Sasuke shrugs, but doesn't look away from Itachi. "Sakura went to work. Naruto's still cleaning out his apartment."
"You should stay in the village. Those are the terms of your probation, are they not?"
"It's close enough to the gate that no one will say anything." Unsaid is that no one who isn't Naruto or the Hokage would dare to say anything to him. "I came to talk to you, Itachi."
"I see." Itachi takes a quick glance back at the kitchen. "Is it an urgent matter? Karin and I are still in the process of putting the house together."
Sasuke blinks. "It's—about the clan. I want to talk about the clan."
"Ah."
Karin takes a cautionary step back. If there's a fight, after all, she probably won't be able to avoid it, but she can at least get out of the line of fire.
(Still, though—if there's a fight, and she won't be able to avoid it, she's already picked sides. If Sasuke were around this time, if he could see all she'd do for him—maybe he'd think differently about ignoring her.)
"I want to talk," Sasuke repeats. "An actual conversation."
"And it's urgent?" When Sasuke doesn't waver, Itachi gestures to the kitchen table. "Then we might as well."
Their conversation has effectively become an Uchiha-only affair, which is fine.
Well. It's not fine exactly, but it's not far off enough from what Karin expected that she can say she's surprised. They have some shit to work and Karin is more than willing to let them figure it out on their own.
Like a good little person who intends to stay in Itachi's house, Karin leaves them alone in the soon-to-be kitchen.
Even if she can't personally be a part of their conversation, there's nothing to stop her from listening in, after all. It isn't like she's eavesdropping, since the house is so small she couldn't walk away from them if she wanted to. At least, not without leaving, she can't.
They know she's there—they just don't care enough to actually deal with her.
Sakura was kind enough to wash the few clothes she'd had before they left, so Karin goes into the single bedroom with her stack of fresh laundry and waits for the two brothers to get their shit together.
Sasuke, naturally, dominates the conversation, flying through more emotions in a single sentence than she'd felt from him in three years: anger, indignation, frustration, disbelief. Itachi had been, in some ways, lucky while they were in the ANBU cells because there was always something to get in the way of these conversations—meals or visitors or Karin, wedged between them. The reasons are practically uncountable—the twelve hours he would spend every night pretending to be asleep, the constant presence of guards.
"I deserve to know," Sasuke insists now, his voice echoing through the walls of the bedroom. "If I missed something, if there were things Danzo and Tobi didn't tell me—"
Itachi doesn't reply, his words bound up indefatigable stubbornness.
Well, there's nothing she can do about that. If there were anything she could do about Itachi—well, it would have been done a long while.
Turning to the task at hand, she gives the bedroom another once-over and finds herself unable to think of it as her bedroom and Itachi's bedroom, as their bedroom. More importantly—the single bed placed in the middle of room, which neither of them have claimed yet.
He said she was welcome to treat the house like her own, but maybe there's more to it than that.
In theory it could be, in reality it probably isn't, and in her mind there's nothing to actually make it hers, let alone make it theirs. She hears Itachi sigh all the way from the kitchen and wonders if he's even thought that far ahead, or if he's been too preoccupied with the dozens of other things that come with making up a house and terrorizing Sasuke that he hasn't realized there's only one bed.
To be fair, there's been enough happening that she can't exactly fault him for one oversight.
Itachi only seems to become more uncooperative and less talkative as the evening wears on, only sometimes offering one-word responses and shrugs at the end of whole monologues from Sasuke. More often than not, Itachi offers no response at all but only sits there, probably staring off at something Karin can't see. The empty space on his wrists where his chakra seals had been, maybe—he drifts back to them a lot.
More likely, nothing at all.
It'd been like that when Sasuke had finally returned for him at the hideout—she'd warned Itachi that he was coming, expecting to see him finally crack or beg her or something. As he'd done then, now he only sits in silence, waiting for Sasuke.
Then again, at the time she'd also been expecting Sasuke to immediately finish off Itachi. Instead he'd sat down across from his brother and declared, I know everything. Danzo told me everything. He'd been unshakeable in that belief at the time, but apparently enough time has passed that Sasuke's faith has waned somewhat.
Karin still doesn't exactly know who Danzo is or was or what he knew, but she knows Itachi didn't so much as flinch back then, didn't waver a single inch despite the very real possibility that Sasuke was about to end his life. He would've told you that I was a willing participant in all of it. I don't see what difference it makes.
You don't see—what do you mean you don't see a difference? Itachi—I… I almost killed you. Don't you see how that's different?
Have you come to end this or not? Itachi had snapped, his voice finally taking on an edge to it—more than Karin had seen in six months. Rather than take that bait, Sasuke had shaken his head.
"I just want to talk," he says now, though she can't hear a response.
She can trace the outline of their struggles: betrayal, regret, and misunderstandings color all of their interactions. The fine details, though, are beyond her. Above her pay grade, she thinks wryly.
Sasuke's questions broaden her understanding of it in the same way an explosive tag broadens a forest—leaving only more emptiness in its wake. Was—what was Mother's role? What did Izumi know? Shisui—you were lying about Shisui, I know you had to be lying—
What did Father think would happen to me, Itachi?
If it weren't so goddamn depressing, it'd almost feel validating—Itachi doesn't give him the same dismissal he'd given her, but Sasuke doesn't get anymore of a response than she'd received.
For a while, they don't speak at all—Sasuke's chakra is flaring, though, flickering with determination.
She leaves them to it.
Karin sighs and finally walks over to the dresser, pulling out an empty drawer and sitting and folding her several pairs of shorts in her lap.
Touring the house, it had seemed stupidly small. It felt like far too cramped a place for two people as different as her and Itachi to live, but she's not exactly planning to stick around all day to keep him company, either.
Karin fits every other article of clothing she owns into a single drawer and is barely able to fill it. She peeks into the other three drawers and finds only two have anything in them, realizes there aren't enough clothes between her and Itachi to even fill a dresser. To fill anything in the house.
Except, of course, when it comes to the bed.
Karin eyes it suspiciously and decides, no. She values her life too much to even ask to share a bed with Sasuke's brother, even innocently. Not while Sasuke was still within sensing range. Within chidori range.
Except, would he really care?
Itachi, she's pretty sure, would just ignore her.
She gets up from the floor and, after thinking it over for a solid second, flops down face first on the bed, the spring creaking under her. She thinks that she should ask Itachi what his plan is so she can find somewhere else to sleep, but she'd much rather claim ignorance later just so she can see how he handles it.
She rolls over, and looks the room over again.
In its rawest form, it's plain—obnoxiously so. There are exactly four pieces of furniture: a bed, a bedside table, a dresser, and a tiny bookshelf that's depressingly empty. Maybe five pieces, if Karin counts a hanging mirror on the wall, but given Itachi's near-blindness she's certain the mirror is only there for her to use.
It's from Sakura, she assumes, because Naruto is so scatter-brained that he forgot to put a lock on the front door, and she hasn't seen enough of anyone else to think they'd care. So many of her and Itachi's shared belongings have come from Sakura—before she and Itachi had headed back to the house, Sakura had pressed two thick sealing scrolls into his hand and cheerfully said, This should keep you two afloat for now!
Neither of them have added any of their own personal effects yet, though she also doubts either of them have much to contribute.
She wasn't exactly expecting anything beyond a place to sleep and shower and maybe eat, but at the same time the house doesn't feel like anything more than a weird mosaic of chakra.
Her mother's house—that was the closest she's thinks she's ever come to what a home ought to feel like. It was hers to keep, after all, paid for in blood and tears and chakra, filled with no one's belongings but hers, maintained by no hands except for her own. It wasn't in particularly great shape when she'd left it, especially not compared to the rest of the houses in Kusa, but it'd been her house, and that had counted for something.
She supposes that in a sense she's also paying Itachi now, but occasional grocery shopping seems a pretty nominal cost compared to what she's paid in the past. No sense complaining about it when it works in her favor, though.
"Putting up with him, though, that's actually going to take effort," she mutters.
Having nothing else to do, she rifles through the rest of the bedroom and finds several folded blankets in the bedroom closet and steals a pillow from the bed, reasoning that she's entitled to at least these things, that she'd be using them even if she wasn't sleeping in a different room.
Neither of Uchiha so much as acknowledges her when she steps out of the bedroom, even though they've been at it for at least an hour. Probably longer. Karin drops her blankets on the couch and picks Sakura's book back off the coffee table, and Itachi's silence continues uninterrupted.
Surprisingly, Itachi is the first to break: when the sun begins to set and the room darkens, his eyes drift to the windows and he sighs. "There is nothing here for you, Sasuke. You'd do best to return to the village before it gets any later."
"Don't think this is over." Sasuke doesn't budge until Itachi finally stands, slowly and deliberately. "I'm coming back tomorrow, and the day after if I have to."
Itachi walks Sasuke to the door. Once their backs are turned, Karin tosses Sakura's book, and pulls the blankets off the side of the couch and begins to shake them out.
Their relationship is weird. It's so fucked up that weird is about the only thing she can say about it. Almost a year ago Sasuke was willing to drag Karin and the rest of Hebi around the continent to kill Itachi, and now he's standing on the crooked concrete steps of their house with his hands in his pockets, deliberating several moments before he mumbles, have a good night, I guess, and heads off toward the village without once acknowledging her.
Itachi closes the door when Sasuke leaves and she finally sees his shoulders relax, hears him let out a slow, calming breath, as if Sasuke were a burden he's relieved to finally have off of his back.
He runs his hand through his hair but stops halfway, his body straightening. She senses his attention swing back towards her for a brief second, but when she turns to look he's facing the kitchen, avoiding her.
Well. She supposes there's a chance he isn't intentionally avoiding her, but the outcome is the same.
Karin turns away and finally drops her blankets on the couch, spreading them out into something that at least resembles a sleepable surface. She isn't planning to make a fuss about sleeping on the couch. There isn't really room for another bed, and she isn't going to push her luck more than she already has that day by bugging Itachi about sleeping arrangements.
(Later, when she's moving on ground that's a little more stable, she will absolutely bug him about it.
She… just isn't there yet.)
Itachi's footsteps fade into the would-be kitchen and now she knows he's watching her, can feel the uncomfortable prickling sensation on the back of her neck but she pointedly avoids looking back at him. She cracks her knuckles then fluffs the pillow she commandeered, smoothes out the creases in her blankets even though they're already straight, only wants something to do with her hands. Wants an excuse to keep avoiding him.
Besides, it's not like Itachi can see well enough to call her out on it.
At least, he can't call her out for that specifically.
Instead, he walks around the kitchen counter and back into the living room, leaning against the counter's edge to keep watching her. "Karin." It's a brief acknowledgement—a verbal nod in her direction. "What are you doing?"
"Are we talking now? I didn't think that was a thing we did."
He's firmer the second time. "Karin."
She pivots. "I was about to go to bed." As if to make her point, she turns around to sit on the couch. She adds, "if you were planning to stay up, it won't bother me," to try to end the conversation as fast as she can.
At this point, it's a survival tactic—if he wants someone to beat up after getting verbally beat up by Sasuke for however long, she's the only person left.
"You're sleeping on the couch." Like most of the things he says, it comes out without inflection, without a hint of emotion to taint it. Nothing to give her any goddamn idea of what he's actually trying to say.
She sighs inwardly but nods her head slowly. It's important, she thinks, because it keeps the conversation calm, keeps it light, but it also helps since he can barely see her. "Um. Yeah."
"There is a bed in the bedroom."
"Yeah. A bed. Like, one. A single bed. For one person." Itachi doesn't respond but furrows his eyebrows, doing his best to maintain eye contact with her. Not for the first time it occurs to her that he might not have thought this far ahead, that when he decided to invite her to stay with him, it meant he'd have to deal with the unbearable ordeal of having her physically present.
He's barely a few feet away but even at that distance she knows he can't make out all the details of her face. He can see, roughly, where her eyes are, but he's just slightly off, looking to the corners of her eyes or just over them instead of dead on.
Itachi opens his mouth and then pauses, like the single working gear in his brain has somehow started to malfunction. There's something here he can't quite process, but something deeply rooted in his psyche that insists he press on. "You are my guest."
"And what, you won't talk to me, but you'll let me have the bed?"
"It is my house, and you are my guest." Maybe it's meant to be an offer of hospitality, but it sounds a lot more like a threat. "Furthermore, you're a woman," he adds, as if that were something that mattered.
"But it's your house," she counters. "And it's not like you don't need the bed more than I do. You can't even stand up for an hour without getting lightheaded." If it's a pissing contest he wants, she'll piss twice as far as he does—she'll piss everywhere except the bed and the couch. "What, were you actually planning to crash on the couch? You're like half a foot taller than me; I'd like to see you try."
"I've slept under more difficult conditions." It feels like a challenge to her, as if he's daring her to contradict him.
Karin meets the challenge head on. "Well, so have I. Worse places than you, I bet."
She spent years working under Orochimaru and, as strange as he is, Itachi isn't enough of a pain in the ass to make an honest-to-goodness couch with cushions and blankets worse than rocky floors and straw mattresses.
"We could… share the bed." His mouth is at a slant, as if he can't even fully commit to the suggestion. "If it is necessary. We have shared other things."
Maybe he's thinking of the hideout, of sharing the same general living space. Still, Karin's hand instinctively slides around her arm, protecting the crook of her elbow where she has dozens of rings of scar tissue matching the exact patterns of Itachi's teeth, irregular, stuttering lines where she'd forced them into her skin. Most of the scars he left are nearly indistinguishable from the others by now, but she knows where they are, knows the feel of each individual scar.
Even the newest ones have faded away to waxy pink skin by now, her healing slowed by the continual drain on her chakra, and the fact that he had to be so fucking difficult about it.
Itachi watches her, his gaze analytical even if it isn't entirely on point. He doesn't comment.
His chakra should tell her more but it doesn't. It rarely tells her anything and it's absolutely infuriating: Itachi has an iron-clad control of his chakra—he can't hide his lies or his jutsu or shield her from his most intense emotions, but in a moment like this his chakra is blank. Impossible to read.
Maybe he wants her to be embarrassed, that he somehow thinks he can shame her for what she's done to him, as if she's another person so Konoha-soft that she'd really fold under that kind of pressure. It's almost a flattering thought—that she's close enough that he's willing to lump her in with the rest of them.
He ought to know better than that, though. Not even a month ago she was making him sleep on the floor of one of Orochimaru's abandoned hideouts for no reason other than spite.
If you think this is bad, she'd told him once, watching him writhe in the midst of another coughing fit, not even bothering to roll him over onto his back to let him breathe, just wait until Sasuke comes back to end you for good.
"For someone who was so insistent on having a conversation, you're being unusually thoughtful."
Karin flushes. "Well you can't just drop that on someone out of the blue! Maybe you can just throw out a suggestion like that, but some of us would actually think through that kind of thing first!"
At the very least, if he isn't trying to fuck with her, he should know damn well the difference between her holding him prisoner and the two of them sharing a bed.
It's not even a large bed. It wouldn't give either of them the space they'd need to avoid the other, and Karin can't think of something either of them would want more than a good foot or two between them.
For as blind as he is, she really doesn't think the difference is all that hard to spot.
"What happened at the hideout was different," she finally says, and it's a weak response. Something she's only saying to fill the silence, to turn the conversation back on him. "We were never… we were never that close before. Not enough to warrant—to warrant doing something like that now!"
Itachi's face slips, cracks, and then hardens into something that almost looks frustrated. Annoyed. "It was my intention to suggest we share on an alternating basis, Karin."
"Huh?"
He stares at her as if she were actually an idiot. "I was not suggesting that you and I sleep in the bed at the same time."
"Oh." Karin clears her throat. A second passes, and she slips one leg over onto the couch, leaning back on her arms. She tosses her hair back over her shoulder and pulls off the most casual-looking shrug of her lifetime. "I knew that."
Itachi doesn't look convinced. "I do not mind this living arrangement," he starts, "so long as there is no significant intrusion into my personal space. A host ought to be accommodating to his guests."
Karin snorts. "Yeah well, I'm fine with the couch."
"So be it," he says. He finally turns back into the kitchen, rummaging through boxes until he pulls out several candles in glass containers. "It may be a day or two until there is electricity."
Realistically, she should probably let their conversation die with that. Still, she's curious and apparently stupid enough that she can't help but ask, "Why are you making this harder for him?"
"Pardon?"
"Sasuke. You're making this harder for him, and it's pissing him off." At least, it should be pissing him off—Itachi clearly has answers Sasuke wants, and he clearly has no desire to share any of them. "He already said that he wasn't gonna try to kill you again. Seems like you're better off trying to get along with him unless you want him to change his mind. All he wants is information."
"Sasuke has decided, for the moment, not to complete his revenge. That's fully within his discretion."
"And so what, are you gonna tell me that if he changes his mind you're cool with that?" It's either so obviously wrong that he doesn't bother to deny it, or, somehow, she's right. "Just answer his damn questions and he'll leave you alone." Except—it's never that simple, is it? For all the things she doesn't know about Itachi, she knows he's at least as calculating as she is, and that there's almost certainly more than what she's seeing.
"Unless that's what you want, huh? If you don't tell him anything, Sasuke will just keep coming back—as long you know things he doesn't, you're valuable to him." His lifeplan has obviously had some drastic overhauls lately, so why wouldn't his strategies change too? "You've actually got a chance of outliving whatever the fuck is wrong with you now, and you're making sure he can't kill you."
That's how she'd play it, after all—when your life was in another person's hands, you needed to ensure it was worth more than whatever satisfaction your death would bring. That's just basic strategy.
She doesn't immediately get a reply. Itachi looks down again, rearranging the candles on the counter. He turns one over, feeling the rim of the glass. It's really starting to get dark now, but he doesn't light it. It wouldn't take much—for something as simple as a candle, any level of katon would suffice.
She wonders if he's still capable of even that.
He takes long enough to respond that she ultimately expects him to shut her down again and tell her to fuck off, but he inexplicably decides to entertain the thought. "Do you truly believe that?"
"What?"
Itachi shakes his head and places the candle back on the counter. "Do you truly believe that Sasuke would leave if I were to answer his questions? Almost certainly, the opposite would happen—having the answers he wants, Sasuke would only want more. Making him aware of how little he knows will only encourage him to return here, whether or not I have the answers he wants. Sasuke's imagination will only convince him there is still more for him to uncover."
There's a second-long pause, and then he adds, "Sasuke was only useful to me when he was pursuing revenge. If he no longer wishes to do so, then I have no further use for him, and he is better off remaining in the village."
Something finally sparks in Itachi's chakra and it's gorgeous, the most beautiful thing she's felt in days. "You're lying," she says. It's almost too good—that she's caught him lying to her. "You're lying about that!"
He cocks his head back at her. "Am I?" Without waiting for an answer, he shrugs. "So then what is the truth?"
"Ah—" Dammit. He'd said a lot—far too much for her to parse out a single lie. Finding a lie was one matter, the truth is something else entirely. "Something in there—there was a lie."
Itachi places the lid on the candle he'd been holding, and walks off toward the bedroom. "Perhaps. Have a good night, Karin," he says, though she doesn't feel particularly warmed by it.
.
.
.
Itachi sleeps with his door shut, and Karin lies awake for almost an hour waiting for him to finally fall asleep. To see if he will ever fall asleep. Just for the heck of it she'd like to feel it—she was nice enough to let him keep the bed, after all. It'd be damned nice if he actually used it.
With no electricity, and no matches Karin can find fumbling in the dark, there's not much else she can do once the sun finally goes down. She watches shadows play across the walls when the wind blows, and wonders what their plan is gonna be if someone comes in through their unlocked door. Tomorrow, she thinks, or whenever Naruto shows up next—someone will have to fix it, after all, and it might as well be him.
She wonders again if Itachi's actually going to sleep for a change, but dozes off before she can find out.
A/N:
Every night i go to bed full of regret that i dropped "anything you can say in the sunlight" on my first itakarin fic. I love that fic, dont get me wrong, but damn… that title was so good. That's all I wanna do with these characters, you know? Open them up and get all of the nastiness out in the open and then figure out where to go from there. Itachi was just... a lot this chapter! Karin felt, oddly enough, in a better place to me in this chapter compared to the last one, but i feel like letting her have an argument with someone always puts her in a livelier mood.
A tiny, not super important note—I sometimes refer to them being together for six or seven months—this flip-flops, mainly because I don't see it as a neat amount of time. It's somewhere in between; on the whole, the exact amount of time isn't significant, so long as I'm not confusing you guys too much! Occasionally Karin will refer to a year—in that sense, she's taking into account the extras—the time spent traveling, the time in prison. Lemme know if things aren't clear, though!
Also I deadass cannot explain the missing lock on that door or why i keep writing about it. It was gonna be a throwaway kind of thing but then i was like... well we can't just forget that? there's a missing lock on their front door?
As always, thank to everyone who is reading and commenting! And following and favoriting! I'm not the fastest but I'll do my best to be the lovingest person on here!