A/N: So many thank-yous to Eppoif1. Knowing that there's a human on the other end of the internet who is listening is something I treasure, and I've gone back and read your comment several times.
I did not originally intend to write more in the AU, but… having a fellow human makes a great deal of difference. Thank you for being that human, Eppoif1. I hope you come back and tell me what you think of this chapter.
Naruto and all characters belong to Kishimoto.
0
Konan sits at Kisame's bedside and wonders how many times she will attend dying friends. She watches his faint breath touch the oxygen mask and the rain tap against the window; she observes how his pale skin seems to bleed into the sheets and the way his hair seems to be falling out in hanks onto the crisp pillow.
A report sits in her hands. Having already read it, and spoken with the shinobi who brought him in, she understands the details and is unsatisfied with the results. The doctor's prognosis brought about a similar response; her mouth thinned as his opinion was delivered, and she didn't notice the man's relieved look as he was dismissed from the room. And even as the door closed behind him, Konan could feel the words, still hanging there in the air above Kisame:
Never again.
.5
"What do you think, Itachi?"
He doesn't look up as he checks the IV.
"I don't know, Lady. I am not a doctor, and thus not qualified to comment on Kisame's prognosis."
He feels her eyes boring into the back of his scrubs, and does not respond to her unspoken suggestion; he checks Kisame's temperature.
"I don't ask anything of you," she says at last.
"No, Lady."
"I honor your desires," she says.
He tucks Kisame's blankets a little more securely around him, and looks at her. "You do, Lady," he agrees. She glares at him.
"There is nothing to add."
He nods, watches her stride from the room, and breathes in the odor of hospital and reminds himself that this is not a dream.
1
Kisame is dead when he wakes up. He must be. And this must be his reward: Lungs that refuse to expand fully, arms which hang like anchors at his side, and an infuriating little man in a white coat telling him what happened. Kisame doesn't need him to explain what happened; he feels the events in his weak chest and his dull eardrums, and more than anything in the blank space beside his bed.
Hours of training, endless katas, the slippery meditation sessions in which he reached out for that presence with a ritual question and felt it reach back with a companionable Yes. Years of power and success and victory couldn't inoculate him against this one failure, one defeat.
Samehada was gone.
Taken.
Kisame hates himself as he corrects his train of thought for the hundredth time:
Samehada left.
1
When Kisame had first arrived at Hidden Rain, Konan had taken time to explain the events leading to her control of the city. He knew most of it, but listened anyway; and when it came to one particular detail, which had lived on in hearsay and ecstatic whispers, he couldn't have stopped himself from asking if he tried.
"The Angel. That was you, wasn't it?"
She nods, not really seeing his point.
"Forgive my saying, Lady, but you don't resemble the terrible gossip."
"These things become exaggerated."
"Not this one. The legend has stayed true through the years."
She raises her eyebrows, not displeased.
"You want to see it."
He bows his head in acknowledgement.
She brings him a wooden box, plainly carved, and opens it to expose a mask wrapped in a scrap of silk – just a white oval with two slits for eyes. The texture reveals that it is made from paper.
"Can you tell what it is?" she asks, not touching it.
"An illusion," he says, also not touching it. "It smells strong." He wrinkles his nose and turns his face away, his eyes watering.
"Dramatics," she remarks as she refolds the silk and closes the lid, "are a cheap trick, and suitable only when you have no better cards to play. You," she adds, referencing Samehada at his side, "are more familiar with artefacts of substance… and will."
2
Painkillers aren't on the table for him. Weakness of the body doesn't require obliteration, just time and patience, but Kisame finds himself wishing, over and over again, for unconsciousness, a break from the loneliness in his head and the aimlessness in his heart.
2
Itachi comes in to sit with him on his breaks.
Where there was once camaraderie between them, it had been eroded away by time and experience, and neither knows what to say to the other. The past gleams with pride which is now tarnished and broken. The present is uncomfortable and strange, filled with things that don't want to be said, and the future – well, as far as Kisame can bear to think, there is none.
Kisame lies there like a discarded puppet, masterless and unseeing, and Itachi sits by him, and their silence fills the room like bubbles of carbon monoxide.
6
"Never again." Itachi looks up from his hands, which are folded in his lap. Kisame stares at the ceiling, taking pains to avoid his eyes – dark eyes, damn eyes, knowing eyes.
"Never?" he asks at last.
"My system got used to the boost. The pathways are bloated. My body has to learn again, if it can." That little man in the white coat had said it couldn't; Kisame pretends to not remember.
"It looks as though you are dying," says Itachi.
"Your eyes always did see better than anyone else's," replies Kisame, as he turns his head away.
10
His physical therapist is a tall man with a furrow between his eyebrows, and his hands are warm as they guide his arms and legs through the exercises.
Konan shows up as the therapist leaves him to his break.
"Hard to pretend to be asleep when you're in the middle of exercising," she says as she sits down opposite him, settling the skirt of her robe around her.
"Hard to run a Hidden Village when you're visiting a useless shinobi," he retorts, feeling the sweat trickle down his body.
"How lucky it is that I am seeing a pupil today, then." She produces a small stack of brightly colored paper and offers it to him. He doesn't take it, avoids her eyes, her blank face.
Before either of them can stir from the invisible deadlock, the therapist reappears with a bottle of water, and Kisame hears the door close behind her.
12
"Itachi." Kisame asks, his head tipped back to stare at the dull light above his bed. "Why."
Itachi kneels in the shadows by his bed, leans his head against the mattress near Kisame's hand.
"I don't know."
It is midnight, and the bitterness and the forgiveness are indistinguishable.
Dunno what the canonical stance on Samehada is, but my headcanon is that it's a cursed sword.
Leave a review.