Dedication: To friends, new & old!
Disclaimer: I do not profit nor claim to own Naruto.
Notes: Okay, so here's where the plot kicks in. It is rather short, but it gets to the point where I'd wanted to end it. Chapter three should come by the middle of next week. :)

Enjoy!

It was quiet around Itachi and Shisui's coffee table except for the occasional sips and clinking of china meeting saucers.

Their living room had a broad glass window that look out onto the street beyond. Light flooded the room on mornings, but now, they relied on the lamps scattered on different tables as well as a hint of sunlight through the door window from the kitchen, which was in one of the corners of the apartment building.

Out of the four of them, Shisui was the only one dressed in his pajamas. As it had been a furlough day, he hadn't gone into work, so he had, apparently, elected to stay in his slippers and a pair of blue sweatpants that Itachi had seen him in when he'd left that morning. Whenever he shifted in his chair, they would hang lower and lower on his hips until Sakura discreetly kicked him in the shins. Each time, he grinned at her.

"Like what you see, Sakura-chan?"

Each time, she kicked him again with a scowl and a hint of a blush.

The fifth time that happened, Itachi leveled him with a look and his cousin pouted.

"What's got your knickers in a twist, 'Tachi-chan?"

Sakura snorted.

"You're making Sakura-san uncomfortable; even if she is of age, she isn't here to be the victim of your obscene maneuvers, Shisui. Please keep your pants on or you will find something in a twist."

"'Tachi-chan! You shouldn't threaten your roommate, especially when they've known you since childhood…" He trailed off with a wicked gleam in his eyes.

"Oh, I wasn't threatening you…"

"It sounded like it to me. What say you, Sasu-chan?"

He shrugged and kept drinking his tea.

"… I was making a promise." Itachi looked at Shisui calmly before continuing to drink his tea.

Shisui raised both eyebrows. "Oh, well… in that case…"

His hands went for the top of his pants.

Taking a sip of tea, Itachi casually reached behind Sasuke and slapped Shisui upside the head.

"Shisui, stop being a pervert."

"It's called flirting."

"Until your pants start to come off," Sakura interjected, half-heartedly glaring at him. "Then it is, without any doubt, perverted and potentially liable for sexual assault. If we were outside, it would be indecent exposure."

As his cousin and his brother's friend argued over his intentions, mostly as to whether they were innocent or not, Itachi peered at them over the rim of his teacup.

There was something going on that they weren't telling him.

All three of them had the stiffest set of shoulders he had seen in a long outside of a courtroom. Sasuke, while usually not very talkative was currently looking into his teacup as if it held the secrets to the entire universe, and Shisui was never so flirty as to come close to removing his pants in front of other people.

Sakura's eyes just flickered over to look at him every so often before looking back at Shisui.

In the middle of Shisui insisting that he was not being lewd at all, Itachi asked, "What happened?"

Instantly, the tension ratcheted up a few notches.

"What do you mean?" Shisui and Sakura asked at the same time. Sakura looked at Shisui, a slightly worried look on her face, but he didn't seem to be panicking at all.

Facing him, Shisui had the calmest look on his face. "Where do you get that idea from?"

"Shisui, you hate tea," Itachi deadpanned, "yet you had the really nice tea set your mother gave you two years ago all set up by the time we all got back even though I normally don't get here for another two hours at least. I'm surprised there isn't more dust on these."

"It's never late to try new things," Shisui said, slouching even further into his chair.

"That still doesn't explain how you knew that Sasuke and Sakura were coming – you set out teacups for four people."

"Really lucky guess."

Itachi would've snorted if he'd known how to do so derisively, so he settled for raising an eyebrow at his cousin and roommate.

"Why don't you just-."

Seemingly annoyed with the purposeless chattering, Sasuke placed his cup with a queer sort of finality, and announced, "Father's dying."

Crack.

Everyone watched as, suddenly detached from its handle, Itachi's teacup fell to the ground and shattered into many little pieces.

Shisui slumped back and remarked, rubbing his forehead with his eyes closed, "Well, that went as well as we could have hoped, right?"