Almost Was Good Enough
. . .
Part II
. . .
Shisui had meant to spend the remainder of the weekend mulling over his options. On Monday morning he still hadn't come to a decision, and resignedly slouched into work where four separate people scurried up to inform him that Mei was in a terrible mood, that she couldn't believe the stunt he had pulled the other night, that she couldn't believe he had had the audacity to defy her direct order, and did he know Ao had worn a tailcoat to the reception? Mei also didn't believe the horse crap he'd tried to feed her about having to man a friend's suicide watch, but the slightly guilty look on Akemi's face when she brought in his morning coffee told Shisui that the feebleness of his excuse was not all to blame.
In a moment of weakness he let slip the details of his latest drama, and despite the cut-throat sums he paid her to be helpful, she proved her uselessness by saying, "It's just a family visit, how bad can it be?"
"I don't see you going over the moon about going home whenever a holiday rolls around."
"That's because I grew up on a pig farm. I looked up your hometown and it's what, five miles outside of Nagoya?" she said, rolling her eyes. "It's no Tokyo, but it's not exactly the sticks. You always make it sound like you lived all the way out in the boondocks or something."
"I might as well have," Shisui said darkly. "Don't you know about the creepy insular shit that goes on in those 'traditional' communities? So you leave, hoping it'll be easy to just burn your bridges and never look back—and for awhile you get so wrapped up in dealing with your new bullshit that you delude yourself into thinking that it is easy, until something like this comes along and it all comes barreling like an acid flashback."
"Okay, you totally just lost me there," Akemi said. She planted her elbow on the reception counter and propped her chin on her hand, eyes glittering. "So, you need a date to the funeral, country boy? Because I hear Dr. Fujimiya down in IT is very, very interested."
"Does everybody here have to all up in everybody else's business all the time?"
"Well, now that you're dating again and all..."
"It's not the actual funeral," he admitted. "Just the reading of the will, and I'm not sure I'm going to go."
"Why not?" Akemi asked. "What's the big deal?"
"Were you not listening during the part about leaving and never looking back?"
"No," she said, and walked away, because they didn't raise you right on those pig farms.
This appalling mess couldn't have come at a worse time. Hydra was well into Q2 and had an influx of new clients on their hands on top of all their standing accounts, and usually this time of year Shisui didn't even have the luxury of sleeping, let alone taking extended vacations to deal with family ridiculousness. He stared sadly at his computer screen, the fucking gorgeous art proof slides he had drawn up, then made a decision and stomped back out into the open office.
"Sugimoto!"
His criminally inept project manager leapt up from his desk where he had been doing something that looked suspiciously like reading erotic fanfiction, looking at Shisui wildly.
"I have to be out of town for a couple of days, so I'm putting you in charge of the Comme des Garçons account, effective now."
"You're serious about this?" Sugimoto stuttered.
"This account is my precious baby," Shisui said bitterly. "Against my better judgment, I'm placing her into your clumsy hands which I strongly doubt you generally put to better use than waving your dick around. I will take you out to dinner, suck you off over dessert, and buy you a pretty, pretty pony when I get back, so do not—do not fuck this up."
"Really?" Sugimoto said hopefully, and Shisui threw up his hands and left in disgust.
-x-
He loitered outside Mei's office for a full ten minutes before hating himself enough to go inside. The thing was Mei didn't have an office so much as a traditional tea room somehow squeezed into a downtown Tokyo penthouse. She owned no desk or computer or anything vaguely businesslike, and most of the time could be found lounging at the edge of the miniature waterfall playing with one of the many, many orchid arrangements she had strewn about the room.
There were only three kinds of women who succeeded in the corporate world: the Workaholic, the Guy, and the Hostess. Terumi Mei was the third, and exemplified the trope. It was a trait Shisui grudgingly admired—he operated in much the same way, via the principle of working with what you had instead of whining about it. The two of them had a disturbing amount in common, including and not limited to the fact that Mei had started out in her previous firm at the position Shisui currently held. This was probably why she picked on him so much.
Mei lifted her eyes slowly when he came in. "You broke my heart the other night, you know?"
Shisui smirked. "I'm sure that with time and a tasteful musical montage you will get over it and be a strong, confident woman once more." She was a pathological flirt, increasingly so as her age inched ever closer to the Big Four-O. Generally Shisui wholeheartedly approved of this tendency, except for that one time they had both hooked up with the same print ad model in the same weekend and hadn't been able to meet each other's eyes in the office for days.
"I know this is going to sound crazy." Hopefully not so crazy she fired him on the spot on charges of being insanely unqualified for his job. "And this is possibly the worst time ever to ask, but I'm going to have to make use of some of my… vacation days."
"Are you sure?" Mei said, eyes huge. "You went to work with a 41C fever last spring. Akemi tells me sometimes you forget national holidays and call her asking why she isn't at work."
"It's family business," he said, and added, "Serious business. No, believe me, I'd get out of it if I could."
The bald desperation in his voice must have given her pause. She tented her fingers thoughtfully and said, "I don't know. I need someone around to wrangle the squeaky-voiced geeks down in IT, lest they start getting uppity."
"I hate the squeaky-voiced geeks down in IT," Shisui said. "Make Ao deal with them, he likes that whole putting people down shtick."
"But you're the only one they listen to," Mei said with a mean, mean smile. "They always get super duper excited whenever you descend into their fortress of solitude. I think they all want in your pants."
Shisui lifted his shoulders in resignation. "I do tend to attract those types," he said, and felt depressed that he was only half-joking.
His history with Mei was yet another tale straight out of a television drama. Seven years ago when he had arrived in Tokyo alone and empty-handed, hungry for a piece of the world bigger than what he'd known, Shisui had fallen in with an indie startup crew. It was just him and three other guys, equally insane but brilliant innovator-types, and really, were there any other kinds? Along with innovating stuff they also pioneered the ambitious field of ramen-based, couch-surfing subsistence living, and for one spectacularly awful winter month basically lived in their unheated barely furnished office. Through a combination of sheer tenacity and some truly impressive shystering they somehow managed to land an account with Japan Airlines. When their campaign began garnering national attention, Hoshiteru Inc. stepped in.
It had been Mei's idea to rebrand the merged firm, changed the name to Hydra. It sounded pure as spring water but actually meant a multi-headed venomous snake of antiquity, which Shisui conceded was a nice touch. His colleagues—the whores—were all chuffed to bits about being absorbed into the new agency and the chance to work a bigger market on a fatter paycheck, but Shisui resisted. He would not betray the independent visionary spirit. He would do something worthwhile with his life, starting by pocketing his cut and toddling off to Tokyo Motherfucking University to get a proper education.
Exactly forty-five minutes into his first economics lecture, he realized what a moronic hipster he was being. He pulled a million all-nighters and cut his lifespan short by several years just to bulldoze through the two and a half it took to complete his bullshit degree before crawling back to admit that he had been wrong, wrong, wrong. Thankfully Mei was in a merciful mood that day and only made him grovel for all of half a humiliating day before giving him a job.
Since then another three years had blown by, and even though Shisui knew he'd sold out big time it wasn't as if he'd ever wanted to take any of it back. There were years and miles aplenty separating the person he was now and the kid who'd stumbled into this city miserable and pissed-off, hell-bent on carving out a new life for himself. But even if you could take the boy out of the past, you couldn't take the past out of the boy.
"It was my grandmother's dying wish," he said in the end, with all the solemnity he could manage without making himself ill.
Mei tilted her head, her shiny fire engine hair sliding over one shoulder. "Well, if it's like that."
"Yeah, it's like that," Shisui said, though the very words pained him. "I'm going to need a few days off work."
His boss wiggled her perfectly manicured fingers in an abstract movement, said, "Take as many as you like." He had the distinct feeling this entire exercise was more about Mei reestablishing her pecking order and mantle of authority than anything to do with his traveling arrangements.
-x-
From Tokyo to Nagoya it was about two hours on the bullet train, but Shisui chose the six-hour drive instead, taking his car out for her maiden road trip. The heat wave from the previous week had finally let up, and as the day retreated into late afternoon, the summer sky melted into deep coral, a bruised purple line faint at the horizon. Familiar landmarks were beginning to emerge on both sides of the highway, something like nostalgia bobbing to the surface of his mind.
In the early 90's, bolstered with confidence inspired by the economic bubble, the Aichi branch of the National Tourism Organization had undertaken a number of ambitious construction projects in and around the city of Nagoya. In one especially egregious instance, they dumped tens of millions into erecting an "authentic" Dutch windmill on the bank of the Hori River. It was a direct rip-off of the De Liefde ground-sailer in Chiba, and lay just within the boundary of Konoha Village. This attraction never yielded the margin of profit the government had expected, and after the stock market crash, the mill was pretty much abandoned, in the following decade serving as nothing more than a picaresque reminder of fiscal incompetence.
To Shisui, however, the sight of its stationary wings stenciled against a honeyed sunset stirred only memories of lazy autumn days and a girl named Hyuuga Hinata.
-x-
Shisui, when asked, often told people that he'd first become gainfully employed at the age of thirteen. This was only partially true, as he had already spent a year before that hawking snacks and drinks at the village train station like the most destitute of street urchins. This story could be a hilarious icebreaker except whenever he began comparing himself to a young Thomas Edison someone would inevitably point out that Edison had been an asshole and then ruefully shake their head like this just explained so much.
It was good while it lasted, but right around the time several street vendors got into a bidding war over his services, his grandmother found out and put an end to his days as The Littlest Entrepreneur. She wouldn't give him a reason, but he assumed it was because it besmirched the family name to have one of their progenies, well, hawking snacks and drinks at the village train station like the most destitute of street urchins.
"Is it money that you want?" she randomly asked one day when he was scrubbing the walkway under her supervision and dreaming about spilling pine-scented floor cleaner on her kimono.
"And that's bad?" Shisui muttered. In five years she had never so much as offered him pocket change, but apparently resourcefulness was a human trait disallowed in Shizuka's relatives.
She appeared not to hear him. "Just as well. Maybe now you can focus your energy on the tasks you're given at home."
Shisui frowned. "I slave around for ya and yer ol' biddies all the time." One of her favorite hobbies was trying to break him of his Osaka dialect, so naturally he exaggerated it as much as humanly possible. "Didcha forget just 'cos we haven't had any smashed teacups lately?"
"Are you implying that compensation will improve the quality of your lackluster performance?
"Wha'? Ya gonna pay me to spend time with ya?"
"If that's what's needed to incentivize you, I suppose I don't have a choice."
"Nobody asked ya to do that," he retorted, wringing the damp washcloth in his hand.
Shizuka rose to her full height, towering over him. "I just don't want you to feel like you've been relying on someone's charity," she said. "That's what all this nonsense is about, isn't it?"
Shisui glared, but kept his mouth shut. After five years, he had learned to hate her in silence, hate with a straight face. He put up with the snide remarks, the Sisyphean chores she enjoyed setting, mainly because he perceived them as challenges, but on this he wouldn't budge.
At the time, Itachi was smack dab in the middle of another starstruck phase where he was plumbly and consistently wowed by his little brother. Sasuke was six years old, and even though Shisui had liked Itachi just fine at that age, no force on Earth could move him to feel the same about anyone else. When he'd tried to stage an intervention, however, Itachi had somehow arrived at the appalling conclusion that Shisui was jealous. "It's not a competition," he'd said tolerantly, and Shisui had snorted with laughter. Only someone who had never had to compete would ever make such a declaration.
Still, he listened to Shisui's grievances with the usual serenity, and then handed him a box of strawberry Pocky before tearing off a page from his English notebook and writing down the number for his former homeroom teacher. Kurenai-sensei listened to his tale with slightly more bafflement, but referred him anyway, which was when Shisui discovered that he was to be a tutor.
-x-
Hinata's father was very specific and adamant in his instructions. She needed help with her math, her grades were dismal, she was hopeless, hopeless, hopeless, and he should start with the basics but drive her as hard as possible because otherwise she just wouldn't learn. The fact that he said all this with his daughter in the same room made Shisui's nostrils flare in secondhand indignation. He reined it in, but it was very hard.
He did as he was told, but quickly made an odd discovery.
"Okay, either your pop's been lyin' to me or yer seriously hidin' somethin', missy. Fess up."
"W-what do you mean?" she asked, eyes trained on the hands folded in her lap.
"Yer not actually bad at math, are ya?" he said knowingly. She looked confused.
He had started out with basic problems, then slipped in a few harder ones when she breezed through those, and kept upping the difficulty without telling her until it became apparent that, as far as improving aptitude was concerned, he had no business being there.
"I'm not good at taking tests," she admitted, blushing hard enough to stall traffic. Maybe it was nerves, or something else equally nebulous, neither of which could be resolved by repeatedly hammering her brain into mincemeat for three hours a day.
So every day, at the hour-and-a-half mark, Shisui would snap the book shut and announce, "Let's go see the windmill."
The thing with Hinata officially began because he liked the way she sat in chairs. Tiny and birdlike, she folded herself up like a canary on the perch of its cage, knees up against her chest and arms hugging her legs like a precise fragile instrument just barely holding itself together. It made his heart lurch protectively, made him want to step in and take over the task for her. A risky impulse. She only sat like that when they were alone together. Whenever someone else entered the room, an abrupt change would come over her pale timid eyes and she would snap back into a ramrod position, like a Pavlovian reflex. Her father's presence in particular produced the most startling effect, and Shisui didn't need the one Psych course he would later take and hate in college to figure out the atmosphere in the Hyuuga household.
Part of it was because it was all so similar. There was apparently a new baby in the family, and on top of the regular chaos Shisui associated with memories of Sasuke's bean-sized days, it transpired that Hinata's mother was ailing in health, which explained why Shisui had never seen hide nor hair her in all his time tutoring Hinata: she was staying at a hospital in the city.
"Father is sad," Hinata told him on their first outing. They were on his bike, her face pressed softly to his body, and he could feel her breath warm on the small of his back where her mouth could just reach. "He doesn't smile like he used to, and sometimes he cries when he sees Hanabi."
Shisui murmured bland agreement, and quietly revised his opinion of Hyuuga Hiashi, but not by an awful lot. He wasn't old enough to be that charitable toward adults. He revised the rule about six-year-olds as well, this time much more generously.
Then there was the boy who stalked about the house. A cousin. He was hard-eyed and rawboned and always seemed to idle in doorways, standing crooked as if hung on a hook, lingering in those transitional spaces like someone intent on leading a liminal existence. Shisui knew nothing about Neji, only that Hinata sometimes stared after his squared retreating back, damp-eyed and wordless. There was deep water here, some kind of family tragedy, and he recognized the cousin's chosen response for what it was: anger. It was a very specific anger, not yet mellowed out and with nowhere to go. It was a dangerous situation, a gunpowder keg placed precariously close to a spitting hearth, one that would have consumed Shisui himself had it not been for a certain imp following him around stuffing food in his mouth to fill up the emptiness.
On the gentled slope of the Hori, they made windmill arms, or skipped rocks, or sometimes just sat and watched the defunct mill on the opposite bank, and Shisui told the stories of Shizuka's cartoonish evils. In small doses, the frustration popped open easily, then suctioned itself shut.
"Troubled home life, ya know? I'm the bad seed. Maybe someday I'll run away." He flicked her nose. "Will'cha let me take ya away?" Clapped his hands together to make her smile glimmer.
And sometimes Itachi would walk by on his way back from picking Sasuke up from cello lessons and the two of them would join him on the grass as twilight slowly wrapped the shadow around the bright day like a cool fist. Looking back he always felt certain he could have been happy living that way forever, but hindsight was 20/20. Life only made sense in retread.
-x-
The drive into the village proper felt like pins and needles. Shisui tried not to feel paranoid about every longhaired silhouette that crossed his vision, and nearly succumbed to four separate freak-outs before reaching the house, but all his pain and turmoil turned out to be for naught because when he arrived, Itachi wasn't home.
He was at Meidai, finishing his first year of a doctorate program in Environmental Engineering. Shisui faked cheeriness upon being assured that he still lived at home and would be returning shortly. As far as anyone alive was aware, they had been the best of buddies right up till the moment Shisui had made a break for it, so he wasn't surprised. Not for the first time in his life he found a dreaded meeting intercepted by a conversation with Fugaku.
Their relationship had been and was still defined by the complete lack thereof. It almost seemed as if his uncle had forgotten that he'd ever had a nephew named Shisui, let alone one that had lived in his house for almost a decade. After the civil interrogation, during which Shisui's not-inconsiderable achievements were placed under scrutiny, he was relegated to the benign role of just another successful snob in a tribe of many. This suited Shisui just fine.
He had only been home appreciably for about forty-five minutes when someone else came along to make him feel unwelcome.
Shisui fully admitted to possessing tunnel vision when it came to people. He hadn't spared Sasuke a single thought since leaving; his mental image of him was capped at ten years of age, and consequently he had to be reintroduced to the high school senior who slouched into the living room swinging a canvas messenger bag in artful nonchalance. Sasuke's hair was the same bird nest, but Shisui could objectively admit that he had grown up well: decently smart, athletic, hot in that showy, part-time-modeling way, with attitude to match. He possessed the general family assets—alabaster skin, crow-feather hair, luminous grey eyes—but few of the graceful fluencies that had made his brother fascinating to watch.
"Is that how you dress these days?" Sasuke said, after they had stared at each other in silence over the coffee table for a full minute.
Shisui glanced down at himself—his gunmetal button-down and slim dark slacks, a Hugo Boss ensemble so de rigueur it was positively chic, but evidently Sasuke had other ideas. He shrugged and said, "The day you can rock business casual is the day you earn your manhood, little cousin."
Sasuke looked at him loathingly. At that age, everyone hated being spoken down to.
"You work in advertising?" Another laconic, unenthusiastic overture.
"That's right. Who told you?"
"No one. I read about you in Seventeen Japan."
Shisui winced, but only inwardly. "Yeah, I led their rebranding project last year." He must have been drunk when he had agreed to that interview.
Sasuke crossed his long legs, one over the other, and said, "Done any interesting work lately?"
"Have you seen the new JAL campaign? That was me."
"So it was your idea to broadcast to the world that every pretty girl in Japan either wants to become an idol singer or flight attendant?"
Shisui raised one of his eyebrows. "Because that's an inaccurate image?"
Sasuke actually laughed. Not the sarcastic chuckle but a full-on ha-ha affair. His shoulders shook and his spiky hair jostled around, which Shisui kind of liked, watching the light catch Sasuke's silver earring at just the right angle. He was stunned by this development, and would have remained so had Mikoto not walked into the room looking distressed.
"Shisui-kun, we haven't talked about where you'll be staying for the night."
The house was bursting at the seams, obscure members of the extended family crawling out of the woodwork for the impending pie-division, the imminent bloody dismembering of the corpulent beast. Shisui wondered if even half this many people had shown up for the funeral, and okay, it was totally his fault he had decided to come at the last minute but that didn't change the fact that he was shit out of luck.
"It's not a problem, Mikoto-san. I'll just check into a hotel or something."
"Oh no, that won't be necessary," said Mikoto, her face lighting up. "There's still the carriage house."
He would have really preferred the hotel.
-x-
The story behind the carriage house went like this:
When he entered high school, Shisui finally gave in to the longing glances of his female classmates and went out with one. Miho had been in his class in junior high, made him an absolutely bitching banner for the intramural soccer tournament, and most importantly, brought him a handmade bento with fan-shaped soy sauce containers every other day. As Itachi could attest, Shisui's affection could totally be bought with food.
There were select details he loved about her and would always remember, the way she blushed so thoroughly it inflamed the part in her hair, her emphatically un-orphaned background full of wild, enthralling stories about nagging parents and embarrassing siblings that she was never shy to tell him about, always with a teasingly fed-up sigh. Her endearing lack of complications was unquestionably her most attractive trait.
But the problem was that the relationship just never went anywhere, and even for a high school romance it was quickly becoming clear that they just weren't right. At the start of summer vacation, they lost their virginities in a session of truly uninspired sex, and that just seemed to make everything worse. So it came to be that he went to her house one day when Miho was out, and instead was greeted by her older brother, home from university.
Hiroto told Shisui he was a practicing nihilist. He was asthmatic, studied fractals in Kyoto, and had a kind of chilling, unbalanced quality that Shisui would correctly place as edginess. But with edginess came the edge, over which you might stumble and plummet. At the time it made no difference. Limerence had him by the throat, and held fast. Never mind that Hiroto was twenty-three to his fifteen, an inestimable mathematical mind cannibalized by his second nervous breakdown in three years—or perhaps that was the attraction. There was something deeply alluring about his sad struggle: a lovely, hopeless pratfall.
He remembered ducking his head in laughter over a clever Nietzschean jibe one afternoon, and looking up into a kiss. They'd been drinking warm Suntory beer and smoking marijuana—sticky, sweet, like wasted youth. Like Shisui himself would say, years later and many more ill-advised fucks under his belt: liquor in the front, poker in the rear.
Joking aside, he probably wouldn't have preferred it so literally that first time, but after the long sloppy kisses and fumbling gropes it became apparent that Hiroto's experience in this regard was of the theoretical variety. But there was a manic gleam in his eyes that passed for confidence; it simultaneously turned Shisui on and made him feel naked, exposed, watching Hiroto trying to uncap a lube bottle with one hand and shoving a pillow under Shisui's hips with the other. Felt the smooth, uncalloused palms firm on the inside of his thighs, pressing them apart in the space of a few shuddering breaths, and then—fuck. Fucking hell, how was this going to work? A sharp, slippery twist and he felt something wide and hot and hard, stretching him open and just kept going on and on, and shit, was this guy going to go all in one thrust?
His eyes were watering and he almost went limp, but he dug his heels into Hiroto's back and urged him on anyway. Bit his lip and forced himself to relax and exhale, and—oh. Oh well, that wasn't—it wasn't good, but it was… better. Even more fascinating was the way Hiroto's eyes flared in surprise, his mouth dropping open in a gasp when he finally, finally glided home. He managed three more shallow thrusts before spasming in climax, going abruptly still. As Shisui lay there, sore and feverish, wondering when it would be appropriate to reach down and finish himself off, a devastated expression clouded Hiroto's face, the reality of their situation suddenly sinking in. "Don't tell," he sobbed, his face burned red buried in Shisui's neck. "Please don't tell." And Shisui, touched, but not in love, stroked his back encouragingly and agreed.
-x-
Of course he couldn't keep it from Itachi, his only confidant back in those days. In perfect confidence Shisui had requested discretion, which Itachi had apparently interpreted as, "Yes, please call up my girlfriend and tell her about my fling with her closeted cradle-robbing brother."
The results were predictably catastrophic. Shisui was lucky, he supposed, in that he at least had some insurance against social disaster. He was, in spite of everything, an honor student from a reputable family, not to mention the younger party by a good way, and even though he wished he had ended things with Miho before this so as to spare her the pain and humiliation, there wasn't very much he could do for her now except staying the hell out of her way. But he couldn't be relieved that he'd come out relatively unscathed because in the aftermath, Hiroto collapsed into horror and anguish. Undone and wretched, he took a bad turn with a pill bottle and spent the rest of the year in a Nagoya psych ward waiting for clarity. By the time he stepped out of the bin and back into the world, he wanted nothing more to do with Shisui, and who could blame him?
Shizuka to his great surprise had nothing to say on the subject. Nobody seemed to know what to say to him, actually, and he had the feeling eventually everything would just fall into a kind of limbo, and maybe that was alright. He wasn't turning back anyhow.
The one time Itachi tried to initiate a conversation, Shisui said, "Save it," and slammed the door in his face.
He was sleeping in the garret at this time, because it would be impossible to avoid talking when you were living in each other's back pockets. But he couldn't stay there forever, and he didn't want to inconvenience the family by moving into another room.
The sad part was: he wasn't even in shock.
One year ago, when Shisui was in his last year of junior high, two of his teachers were discovered having an adulterous affair. Both were married, happily so, and in fact their "illicit" relationship was a long standing open secret, somewhat astounding in its durability given their provincial home. They went on trips together as a couple, and everybody knew the truth, including the adult son of the man. Everybody that was, except for the spouses. It wasn't particularly dirty laundry, just old and worn from the tiring business of living.
One divorce, one trial separation, and several shattered lives later, the entire student body turned on the one who had told, and Shisui bore witness to this unthinking martyrdom with a remote, ossified kind of horror, like watching a car wreck in slow motion, in itself a great metaphor for the graceless mechanism of love.
"They had a right to know," Itachi told him simply, fishing another hate letter out of his shoe locker. He frowned, and said, "It was the right thing to do."
"Sure," Shisui said. "But it ain't no good thing to do."
He knew even as the words were coming out of his mouth that such a distinction would be lost on Itachi. There was nothing he could do to convey the truth of this simple good. That teachers were just as fallible and fucked-up as anyone else. That the woman's small children didn't need to see their daddy tearing up the wedding photos. That it was possible, if rare and painful, to make peace with having two kinds of love—the public love, and the deep, smoldering one that you kept to yourself. Neither reason nor platitude could sway Itachi. He was no narc, took no smug pleasure in moral superiority; it was simply that he liked to have the facts straight. With him, with this mind full of ideas and good will, you got away with exactly nothing.
Contrary to the assertion of his acquaintances, Shisui wasn't some kind of prodigy: he was merely exceptionally good at everything he did. Genius seemed to indicate some special innate quality, a magical stream of excellence that normal people couldn't tap into. That wasn't how he operated. He didn't pull rabbits out of hats—there was nothing about his accomplishments that was superhuman in any way. He didn't see the world in conceptual planes others couldn't but give him a concrete problem, a challenge to get from A to B, and he would figure out a way. The closest thing to a genius quality in him was his obsession with beating the system.
People insisted on attributing this distinction to him anyway because most of them had a poor understanding of what genius truly entailed. They believed geniuses were the pinnacles of human existence, when reality was much closer to the opposite. Shisui had rubbed shoulders with enough bona fide geniuses in his lifetime—his brainiac colleagues from the old agency, Mensa-caliber minds who worked for his clients and even in Hydra's tech division—to know that they were the least likely to flourish in society. These guys were not people-people. Insensitive to and annoyed by the subtle nuances of interpersonal interactions, most of them were unkempt and erratic and physically unattractive, by nature or lack of effort. Ugly, without the Great Personality to make up for it. Their vision was so immense everybody inevitably let them down.
And Itachi, he knew, was a member of that doomed clan. His only saving grace was his genetics, which had plastered up all the uncomely telltale signs, but on the inside he was exactly the same as all his smelly, abrasive cohorts. His mind could conjure up endless dimensions in every possible permutation, but the real world eluded him; he didn't understand what it wanted from him, or why what he gave was just never enough.
At this time, their driver had just gotten married and the suite of rooms above the garage was unoccupied. It was strictly utilitarian in structure, one bedroom and an attached water closet, and other than a bed frame had no furniture to speak of. Shisui and his friends spent an entire weekend moving his stuff in, sweeping and dusting and decorating with military-like zeal, and afterward he threw a party and had more fun than he'd ever known since moving into this house.
But now the guests were gone and he was lying awake in the early morning, listening to his uncle's car starting in the garage below. Watching the light bleeding blue and grey into the room, he just felt hollow and deflated. He had been betrayed and acted out of anger, but now the door to Itachi's room was no longer the door to his, and it didn't seem worth it at all.
. . .
TBC