Stream of conscious, mentions of sex, confused definitions of love.
It's hard for me to say what exactly was broken in Itachi's head. Something was broken, and I knew it. I never knew what, though. And me—I'd been climbing around in people's head by the time I was ten like most kids my age were climbing around jungle gyms—ninja kids.
So I had pretty much always known, something inside Itachi's head was broken.
And it was beautiful.
Imagine a glass window. A perfect window that changes color as the light hits it. Then imagine smashing that window. The glass shatters, but none of it falls. It just all hangs in the air, not really window shaped but you can recognize it as window. All the little pieces reflect light differently, Each one has a different hue, shade, brightness, and they constantly change and flicker and quiver. The only problem is, they're sharp. When you bump them, you bleed, and they fragment just a little more.
I did try to fix Itachi. I think I made him a little worse, but maybe he got worse all on his own. I even tried to give him antipsychotics once. I figured crazy person plus anti-crazy drugs would mean negative craziness. It didn't. It meant sewing Itachi arms shut after the bathroom incident. Fixed is no better than broken, and when something takes your breath away, bask in it. Love it. Cherish it. Don't change it.
Before I get any farther into this, I should say, I've always loved Itachi. From the first time I saw him, I loved him. He could have been depraved and wicked as well as broken, and I still would have loved him with everything I had. There really was no choice in the matter. Thankfully, he wasn't. He was heart-breakingly human and compassionate when we met. Things changed, of course, but that little child was the true essence of what Itachi was for me through the years.
I met Itachi when I was six and he was two. Grandmother Chichi had gotten Itachi from Aunt Mikoto. I wondered, at times, if Mikoto had known there was something wrong with Itachi. She did seem surprised to find him alive when she came back. I was the one who kept him alive. Not that Itachi would have died without me there, but I was the one who took care of him, and I wouldn't have let anyone else take care of him. Never mind that there were lots of people way more capable of taking care of the child. I wanted to do it. I wanted to make something live in that den of death and decay that surrounded us in the war. Itachi pretty much attached himself to me too, so I was allowed to buoy my tremulous six year-old ego.
Those days…the war days…they all pretty much blur together. Everything runs into everything else, like watery paints trying to be a reasonable landscape but with too much red. I remember clear moments of this and that. I remember when someone actually blew something up in the compound, and we lived in shelters for what felt like months. I don't think Itachi and I were ever separated those months. We huddled in the cold ground and wished for sunshine. I sang Itachi nonsense song to drown out the other noises, and Itachi hummed them back to me, but was otherwise silent. His tiny hands gripped my arms, held my hands, and I brushed out his tangled hair every morning—or every three meals, at least. I can't say those were good times, but I look back, and those moments….Itachi's silence, the smell of him, the feel of him always near me, always connected… Those were good moments.
The humming-Itachi didn't speak for a long time. I don't know if that was the war, or if it was his head being broken. People tried for years to make him talk, something I couldn't imagine because Itachi was silence to me. He didn't speak. He was the calm center of the storm, silent and just waiting.
Of course, waiting means waiting for something. Itachi did start speaking. He first spoke when he was six, and it was a long monologue to Sasuke. I remember every word. I would have been jealous, but Itachi smiled at me. Oh, he smiled for other people, but he had this special little smile that was crooked and quirky that he'd turn only on me. It was MY smile.
Because I was Shisui. That's what he told me to explain so many things. Because I was Shisui, and he was Itachi, and that as all we needed to say.
Someone asked me once if I had ever kissed Itachi. I said of course, I kissed Itachi all the time. He was actually really affectionate as a kid, handing out wet little kisses all the time. before double digits turned his so aloof. He was a limpet too, always in my lap or clutched to me. I had to return kisses, or he'd give me a very heart broken look. Itachi spoke with his eyes like no one else. Maybe it was a precursor to his powerful Sharingan, or maybe I was just hopeless against him. Maybe I already knew denying Itachi anything was useless.
But, that wasn't the kind of kisses they meant. They meant mouth kisses. Love kisses. The answer's still yes. Three times. I kissed Uchiha Itachi three times.
Loving Itachi is complicated, and not just because he's broken, but how he is. I can't really explain it, not quite. I had three girls from twelve to seventeen I could count as girlfriends. None of them I loved as I loved Itachi. I had sex with two of them. Reiko was an Uchiha, but Kagome…she was a civilian. Sex with Reiko was almost like some duty that had to be preformed. Strictly business, minimal fondling, clumsy cold kisses, and a hot-cold fire that burned every thought up. Kagome. Sex with Kagome was…well, it was. She was full of life a desire and always had something new to try. It was always a wild breathless experiment all about us. All about what felt good and what made someone scream. That was sex to remember, but it helped me see something.
Uchiha do not touch. Perhaps it comes from being a war clan, but Uchiha to not touch. Any Uchiha touching comes from an obligation. It's okay to touch when you're young, because children need it. It's okay to touch to teach someone how to fight. Okay to touch in spars. Okay to touch in fights, but there is a lack of personal intimacy in touches. Itachi, who rocketed through the ranks, floundered at first. He was used to touch, used the clinging, and his sudden growth to ninja had placed him socially older than his physical age. Itachi learned, quickly as he always did, not to touch. To avoid touch. His parents praised him, saying how grown up he was. How very grown up.
But Itachi needed touch like a tree needed sun.
How to explain…how to know? What do you feel when your little cousin walks up to you, the little baby cousin you adore who's been so distant lately, walks up to you, and tells you he doesn't feel anything? That he looked at the little brother he loved and felt nothing? That people were only disgusting bags of flesh filled with hated emotions? How to you describe the horror, the fear, the sudden agony of your being as you try to hold on tight enough to mean something to your cousin who just doesn't feel anything anymore.
Itachi needed touch. He needed it to feel human and connected.
So he touched me.
I was an anchor for my cousin. I was the heavy rock that bound him to humanity. He wrapped his arms around me and listened as I spoke. He endured the soft touch on the back of his hand while we stood in line to file missions. His foot wedged up my pants leg under tables. He struggled to be human, and he spread my thin hand between his as he tried to remember the concepts of compassion and sympathy—that I could feel his touch and warmth as he could feel mine. He orbited me like an uncertain sun, crashing into me again and again as the sky around us thinned.
We were good Uchiha. We didn't touch where people could see. We acted like we were normal when we were the farthest thing from it. And, I wonder, if someone had ever seen Itachi grab my hand and smile, if anyone had ever heard him laugh, had known what he was beyond the precarious Uchiha façade, if things would have turned out differently—if someone would have questioned, if his name would be something other than a curse.
"Shisui."
I don't know when he started calling me by my name instead of calling me brother. He lisped a bit at first. Then his tone fell flat, and in the company of others, his greeting was dull and respectful. When no one was listening, when I had been gone for more than a week, Itachi would look up at me with his imperfect smile. His voice would rise and fall, pitched and singing.
"Shisui."
My heart didn't stop. My pulse didn't flutter, but I never more wanted to bury my face in Itachi than when he said my name. His voice said I was special. His smile said I was the only one he'd ever hold in that place. I was smitten. Totally, fully, devoted to Itachi with every fiber of my being, and so he was with me.
At some point, I, in my idiotic brilliance, decided that Itachi could be fixed. I never told anyone my cousin was crazy-broken in his head. I simply did some research, looked into things, and then pressed the small bottle of pills into Itachi's hand.
"There's something wrong with your head." I though self-delusion had no place in our life. I thought I was doing him a favor by shoving his problem into his face and screaming it at him.
"This will make you better." Itachi wrapped his hand around the cold bottle, and looked in my face. He didn't nod. He didn't smile. He just looked with wide, vacant eyes.
Never had I ever implied that my cousin was broken. Never had I implied, in any way, I found something wrong with him. Now, I offered him a way to be better. I said, with those words, that he wasn't good enough for me. That I wanted him to be different. That I didn't love him as much as I possibly ever could.
My stupidity lead to Itachi's blood all over my bathroom floor. My baby cousin staring at me. He'd tried. He'd tried for me to be different. To be better. He'd tried so hard, but it had never worked.
Imagine that window. Imagine its beauty. Now, cover it with oil—slick, flat black oil that corrodes anything it touches. Call it pretty. Call it better.
Call it fucking fixed.
"It didn't work." Itachi voice was choked. Dizzy frantic. "Shisui, it didn't….I tried." He'd tried for me, even though he'd known for what had to be weeks the drugs were making him worse. He'd kept taking them because I had said they would make him better.
There was blood all down Itachi's arm. Old scratches, the broken mirror, glass in his hair. He could never tell me what had happened, but something had happened. Something bad. Something in his head that had scared him badly.
I took his bloody elbows in my hands, and he tried to push me away. I told him it was okay, that I was sorry. That I was stupid. He struggled. Said he was sorry. Apologized for not being good enough, For failing me when I had failed him.
I kissed him there, in the broken bathroom. I kissed him, and his lips tasted like blood and vomit. His cracked lips quivered under the press of mine, uncertain and broken down. His lips firmed as his hands found my shirt front. He pressed himself—his lips, his body—against me for a moment, then his body gave an odd like jerk, his mouth opened for a soft little cry too much like a sob.
I flushed the drugs. I tore them apart and threw them away. I told everyone I had given Itachi the illness from Mist I'd had last week, and lived in the confines of my little apartment, convincing the center of my universe he was just that. I was stupid. I was selfish, and I had almost killed the sun with my brilliance.
It's not like we got along all the time. We fought, but we always made up. Ashes, we fought. We usually tried to kill eachother when fights got too serious. Live steel and fire hot enough to crack skin were pretty normal for us. Touch is touch, and sometimes the greatest confirmation of life was pain, crashing into someone and fighting for every breath.
I'm sure Itachi never meant to choke me into unconsciousness. Positive. It was only seconds, but the moments before, I felt the expert clamp of Itachi's fingers on my throat…
Do you believe in fate? I woke up with Itachi straddling my stomach. He was looking at his hands, staring at them as if they'd just grown on his arms. I, sick and dizzy, couldn't move more then to flop my head to the side. Itachi looked past his hands to me. He leaned down, pressing his hands into the angry red marks on my neck.
Then, and only then, I felt a flutter of fear. I saw my cousin for what he really was. A killer with only a firm grip on humanity and its compassions.
"Tachi."
Itachi rocked forward, giving me his full attention. His eyes were bright. His mouth half open in a red lined question. Excited. Inquisitive. What would happen if he did it again? For a few seconds longer?
"Tachi, stop." Please.
Itachi's lips closed.
"Tachi."
His hands peeled back. He rolled off of me. He stood. Walked away. I pushed myself up, touching the red swelling on my throat. It burned more than it ached. It wasn't anything bad.
"Does it hurt?" Itachi looked at the sky.
"No." I dropped my hand.
"Good." Itachi rocked back on his heels, hands laced behind him. He went from toe to heel. Toe to heel.
"It felt good." Itachi kept rocking. I paused in the act of standing.
"In a bad way." Itachi tipped his head up farther, and I could almost see the shudder run through him. I stood up and walked up behind Itachi. I placed a hand on Itachi's hands, breaking them apart. Itachi leaned back and looked up at me—wide eyes filled with something deep and murky.
"If I killed you, I could be the strongest." There was no excitement. No relish in the thought. Only dread.
I leaned my forehead against Itachi's forehead. My throat didn't bruise, but I carried the crescent shaped cuts and circle bruises of Itachi's fingers on my hands for weeks.
What about the massacre? Is that what you're asking me? Or maybe you want to know about the other two kisses? Maybe you want me to go back and started again, putting everything in order? There is no order here. Everything fades and grows together, crashing around. The conspiracy isn't important. It stopped. We stopped it. Itachi matters. He's still going.
He's going with his partner—that guys named Kisame. Sometimes I wonder if Itachi gets his medicine from Kisame. I wonder if the large man allows for the tiny touches, or if Itachi abstains. I wonder if he slowly goes mad for lack of me. The thought's a flush of…something. There's not a name for that tingly feeling of too much rushing blood. Oh, that I would wish my cousin mad…
Would you choose fidelity, the sorrow of constant loneness? The dangerous maw of insanity? Would you wish your other half on without you, propelling them into the unwise hands of another? Would you pray for kindness? Would you pray to never be overshadowed? Would you weep?
Yes. You would weep, because your other half is beyond your reach. Your soul has moved on, and you're just a hollow shell. You'll cry while you still can, and savor those last flavors of loved.
I loved you.
I love you.
Did you hear something?
Kisame glanced at Itachi. "Pardon?"
Itachi blinked his heavy eyes. He opened his mouth and tasted the cold, salty air. The spray of the sea ran down his face and stung his eyes. "Nothing." Itachi shrugged off the supporting hand curled against his skin.
"It was nothing.
Let's go."