Another chapter, as promised. More domestic "bliss" and some vaguely adult references.
Disclaimer as in ch.1
Enjoy!
He can't recall if She moved into his tiny, cramped apartment immediately upon her return or some time later. It had been a foregone conclusion anyway; the entire village knew about their kiss in the rain before she had even reached the Sea Country. They had assumed to rest for themselves. Even her sister and her slightly twitchy husband had accepted the fact that their charge had taken up with one of the most dangerous ninjas ever to be produced by their village weeks before She got back. The rest of her family didn't even blink, but then again, any group that produces and nurtures a Zabuza probably had a severely skewed sense of danger anyway.
As it was those were halcyon days and passed in the timeless blur that such periods of life usually do. She could not cook, which was fine since he was a picky eater anyway. They were both neat freaks, unless they were working and then all bets were off. She was a morning person, he was decidedly not but she found ways to make it up to him. He tries not to let his mind linger too long on those mornings; they cause uncomfortable dilemmas when lodged in a narrow space.
Better yet another, war broke out in the between the River and Tea countries shortly after they had begun living together. Since neither nation had any shinobi of their own the vast majority of the fighting was done by hired swords, and nobody had better swords-for-hire than Kiri.
They were often apart as she had been quickly folded into one of the many new reconnaissance squads and he was immediately requested to lead a combat group. Even when they happened across one another she still held strictly to her policy of no-quickies-on-missions. He thinks he hardly cared. He got to spend two or three weeks hacking various malcontents to fish food and then come back to a nice warm woman who didn't mind his blue skin or gills and even enjoyed his macabre humor. Life had been ideal.
He's sure that it hadn't actually been that easy. There must have been weeks, and maybe even months, where they missed each other entirely; one coming home only hours after the other had gone, having nothing but their fading scent in the sheets to fall asleep with. There must have been fights or maybe a pall of general disapproval and disgust from some of the other ninjas and villagers but he doesn't remember.
His brain has erased all the awkward or unpleasant parts. It has glossed over the discomfort of momentary separations. Kisame has realized that his memories even lack linear time. Oh the rational part of his mind tells him that they had three years of the war between River and Tea and then another two of a quiet time. He knows it is during those two lazy years of peace that he began to chafe against the strictures of the village hierarchy but did little about it because was too content. His brain tells him all of this and yet he can't sort the vignettes of his life with Her into a coherent timeline.
His life with her exists outside the time and space of the rest of his universe. Their relationship might have happened in another dimension, in another life. There is never anything as mundane as the passage of days or months in his memories. He thinks this may be because they had so little time in the end. In fact he can only conjure up two fully formed recollections of what he has come to think of as their happy period.
He remembers how she fell into Samehada by accident one night. Actually he can't recall exactly how she fell, merely that she did. It had rent a long scrape down her left leg. She had leapt away and then fallen over again when her injured leg buckled. Enraged, she had attempted to level a blast of her wind at the sword but it had absorbed too much of her chakra. Her efforts produced no more than a pleasant breeze that fluttered playfully through the shredded wrappings.
He had laughed so hard he hadn't been able to stand. They probably had been drunk in retrospect since he was raised better than to laugh at a companion's pain. She had tackled him angrily, trying to regain some of her dignity by pounding his face in. He had restrained her hands easily, still chuckling. She had hissed and spit like a kettle left too long over a flame but they had eventually made love there on the floor. She had finally gotten her revenge by teasing him to the point of begging.
He remembered helping her babysit her nephew, Shigeru, for an afternoon. This must have been late in the little war, or maybe just after it ended. They were both around and idle and the kid was about three or four. Kisame had thought he was cute, all fat little limbs and wild black hair like his father's. He remembered musing that the kid might make a halfway decent ninja one day, despite his parentage, since he never quit climbing all over everything and poking around.
He had always liked kids for some bizarre reason not even he really understood and was happy to watch the tyke. He had loved the weirded out look She gave him when he cheerfully volunteered before her sister had even finished making the request. The sister had smiled at him and thanked him very graciously; he recalled thinking to himself that he had always known she was okay. Once she had satisfied herself that he was not going to eat or dismember her or her family for fun she had never so much as batted an eye either at his strange appearance or fearsome reputation.
He let Shigeru get away with way too much that day, giving him all sorts of garbage to eat and letting him play with some of the myriad sharp, shiny things they had laying around the flat. She had glared at him with half-hearted disapproval when she found them sitting on the couch with a small pile of kunai and shuriken between them. They had worn Her down without any effort and soon she was gently tossing blunted missiles at her nephew. He didn't catch a single one and only 'dodged' by accident; giggling uncontrollably and appearing to have the time of his short life. He would probably have gotten hurt had her aim not been so good; she managed to just miss him every time. Her sister had looked a little horrified when Shigeru told her what they had done that day but, seeing as he wasn't hurt, she let it slide.
They had stood watching Kenji carry the unconscious kid away. He had fallen asleep seemingly the second his dad had picked him up. Kisame had wrapped an arm around Her shoulders as he felt the oddest sensation of drifting up and out of his own body. He had felt like he could look down on the scene as though he were doing a recon job. The happy, normal family strolled home through the warm air; mother, father, son and another on the way while a pair of poseur freaks looked on. They were both too tall; she was as tall as most men and he's even bigger. They were too mismatched; he's too strange looking, she was plain. He's a bloodthirsty killer even by his villages' standards and she was trained to track down and kill people with no thought or mercy at a word.
He knows, knew, that the similar things could be said of every other ninja in every other ninja village but somehow, in that moment, everything is personal. He doesn't know if he felt the sense of crushing dread then or if it's his hindsight intruding on his memory but there's a sort of disgust rolling black and green in his belly at himself and at Her. They're pretending to be just like everyone else, it's pathetic and ridiculous. They have no idea they're doomed.
Other than those two flashes of memory it's all fragmentary. The way the water runs over her skin in the shower, or how she always gives away her next parry by cutting in the direction she wants to go with her eyes. He can still feel the weight of her body as she lays across his chest and the sticky-slick drag of their drying sweat as they settle into a comfortable position. He's not sure he can remember the way she smelled, it always seemed to change, but there are certain scents the recall her. Anything metal or damp usually triggers something, a moment of her training, a glimpse of her in full hunter-nin guard on a mission. She used a common soap in Kiri that's almost unknown here on the mainland so whenever he comes across a woman smelling like salt and that little white cone-flower he can bring up vivid images of her hair; between his fingers, across his belly, fanning out in the water, spinning behind her as she moved and a dozen more.
He hates the fact that he can't assemble his recollections of her, of them, abstractly. He suspects that the lack of clarity is a good thing. Itachi remembered everything in perfect detail and look where it got him. Sometimes he's almost relieved that the good parts, the parts that would become unbearably, maddeningly bitter in the face of the cold, hard reality he's living are so hazy. Better to remember the bad parts, the end; the things that fuel his spite and rage and force him to keep going. Because Kisame suspects that if he dwells too much on what he lost, really dredges everything up, he might crack and let himself get caught or killed. So he doesn't try to remember too much of his fleeting happy period and turns his mind to the permanent bad one.
Needless to say the next chapter or two (I haven't decided how much longer I want to drag this out) is/are going to be darker. Hopefully I'll get it/those done soon.
As always, let me know what you thought.
