Author's note: I know I said I would upload sometime today, and this is not at all what I planned (and I will explain the reason at the end of this chapter), but hey, it's a new day, I'm on fanfiction, so I might as well, right?
"Excuse me." A man said, lightly rapping his knuckles on the steel garage door frame.
Kisame looked up from the collection of wrenches he was putting back in their proper places. This was Suikazan's last job and since Kisame hadn't seen the man all morning, he decided to busy himself with some much needed clean-up until the client returned to pick up his truck.
"I'm here to pick up my truck, a 2010 Ford F150," He said, pointing to the red truck sitting in the middle of the shop. "That one, right there." He said.
Kisame nodded and led the man to Suikazan's office to get his keys and go over the job. "Everything appears to be working well." Kisame said when they got in. He plucked the lone set of keys from the cork board where Suikazan kept the keys for every job he was currently working on and tossed them to their rightful owner who caught them with a single hand. "I wasn't here when Suikazan did the job, but I double-checked his work. Your tires have been rotated, your oil has been filtered, your gauges are working correctly – everything seems to be in working order." He smiled and offered his hand for a hand shake.
The man smiled back and shook the proffered hand. "Thanks man. So the shop's closing down pretty soon, I suppose? I didn't see very many cars out when I got here." He said, gesturing outside.
He nodded with a sigh and said, "Yeah man, your car was our last job. That's it after today."
"That's a shame, because I really like the work you guys do. You really put a lot of time into everything you do and it shows, it really does."
"Thanks."
"You're not taking over the business, are you?" The man asked him.
Kisame shook his head. "Nah. I don't know the first thing about running a business." He lied.
He shrugged. "You seem to know your way around the shop; I think you could do it if you wanted to." The man smiled and turned to leave, but just before he opened the door, he turned to Kisame and asked "Say, where is old man Suikazan, anyways? I wanna thank him for all the years he's worked on my car."
This took Kisame by surprise. He knew that his customers appreciated their work, but he never thought that they appreciated it this much. "Um…" Kisame stalled. "He's not here at the moment." He said, stating the obvious.
"Where is he? Should I come back another time, or…what?" He asked.
It was a good question. A question that Kisame honestly didn't know the answer to. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed Suikazan's number. "Gimme a sec." Kisame said to the man who nodded in understanding and waited for the call to go through.
Suikazan was always present in the garage, from sun up to sun down, it seemed. He was always there whenever Kisame came down for work in the morning, he was there when he came back from job-hunting, and most nights, he was there working on something when Kisame called it a day.
After ringing a few times, the call went to Suikazan's awkward voice mail recording, something it never did.
"Kisame, answer my phone for me, will ya?" Suikazan would ask if he was underneath a car or elbows deep in an engine.
"Can't you just call them back?" Kisame would ask in response.
"I can't let them hear my voicemail!" He'd yell, maneuvering his hands from out of the engine, or shimmying out from under the car.
"Then do it over!" Kisame'd yell, picking up the phone.
"God, Kisame, I could've injured myself trying to pick that darn thing up before it went to voicemail." Suikazan would mutter, rubbing his back.
Having returned to his own work, Kisame would be shaking his head "If you hate it that much, then do it over. It's not that difficult."
"Do you know how long it took me to get it right the first time? And it's still bad!"
Kisame never understood why Suikazan gave his customer's his cell phone number if he hated his voicemail box recording as much as he did. When his cell didn't work, Kisame tried dialing his house phone.
"Man, it's alright, I'll just come back another day or somethin'. If he ain't answerin', he ain't answerin'." The man said, halfway out the door.
Kisame was about to protest when the phone, after ringing eight times, went to voicemail as well. "Where is he?" Kisame muttered under his breath, quickly walking past the man standing at the doorway.
He'd last seen Suikazan the day before when he was running late and asked Suikazan if he could borrow his car to get there as quickly as possible. He was late, regardless as he received a lecture about time-management and responsibility, and did what he was told to do – cater to other people's demands and make sandwiches. By the time he got back, the lights in the garage were off, and Suikazan's house lights were on, signifying that he'd called it a night due to very little business.
And now it was déjà vu all over again, Kisame thought, as he briskly walked the short distance from the auto-shop to Suikazan's home, which was set closer to the road than the shop was.
When he got to the front door, he knocked and waited for five minutes. Suikazan was seventy-three, almost seventy-four. Although he could repair cars, trucks, motorcycles, you name it in under seventy-two hours, you had to give the man some time to move from one place to another.
With five minutes gone, Kisame knocked again and waited for his answer. Out of the corner of his eye, the man who owned the red truck had pulled up and rolled his window down. "Don't worry about it, man, I'll be back again later or something." He called and rolled his window back up as he turned onto the road.
Kisame watched as the red truck disappeared down the road and focused on the door. No noises were coming from the house like he'd expected. If Suikazan had run in to fetch something, Kisame would've been able to hear him from the inside, telling him "I'm coming, I'm coming, quiet down! Geez. If it's you Kisame, you better believe that Imma whup your butt for looking for me when I've only been gone for five minutes! You hear me?"
But he didn't hear anything. Nothing at all.
He pulled his phone from his pocket. No missed calls and no text messages, not that Suikazan texted, but hey, it was a new day, anything could happen.
He considered dialing 911. Suikazan wasn't young anymore. He was old. Kisame never told him that to his face, but they both knew that he was getting older and wasn't the strapping young man he thought himself to be when he was younger.
Kisame's mind drifted to those commercials he'd seen on TV that advertised devices that the elderly pressed when they'd fallen and couldn't get up. He'd mentioned it to Suikazan once and received "what a load of bologna" as his answer.
Besides, if he did call 911, the paramedics would have to find a way into his house, which would probably lead to them breaking in. If they broke in and Suikazan was alright, Suikazan would kick Kisame to the curb without a hint of remorse and make him pay for any damages done to the house.
With that in mind, Kisame jogged back to the garage and fished around the top drawer for his spare key. When he didn't find it, he realized that Suikazan must have taken it to let himself back into his house as Kisame had taken his car keys (which contained the house key he usually used) to work with him that day.
Car keys in hand, Kisame jogged back to the house and promptly let himself inside. In all the years Kisame had worked for Suikazan, he could count the number of times he'd seen the inside of the man's house on his left hand. He never had reason to be inside Suikazan's house since Suikazan himself didn't appear to spend much time inside his own house.
"Suikazan?" Kisame called out. The stairwell divided the first floor into two sides, the living room and the dining room with the kitchen nestled behind it. He could see into both the living room and dining room without having to set foot in either, and knew that his voice had carried enough for Suikazan to hear him in the kitchen if he was even in the kitchen.
To make sure, he walked through the dining room and peered into the kitchen with no luck. From there, he walked behind the stairs where he found two doors, one closed, and the other ajar. He pushed the second door open and flicked the light switch on, discovering it to be a bathroom. A bathroom without Suikazan in it. Then he tried the other door which led to staircase that descended down into the basement.
Walking halfway down the stairs, Kisame called "Suikazan?" But it was no use. If Suikazan were in the basement, a light would've been turned on, not off.
Once back on the first floor, Kisame closed the door behind him and sighed. "Guess the only place to go is up." He told himself and retraced his steps back through the kitchen and dining room until he found himself at the foot of the stairs.
Upon reaching the top, he found three doors, two closed, and one left slightly ajar. He looked over his shoulder to make sure Suikazan wasn't making his way up the steps, thinking that Kisame was a burglar or something, but he wasn't.
His heartbeat quickened as he walked towards the open room. He hadn't seen Suikazan since yesterday morning, which was odd in and of itself since he was supposed to meet with his final customer today – something Kisame was sure he wouldn't miss. That aside, Suikazan was always in the shop. Always. All of his cars were present, Kisame knew. He'd looked for them before making his way over to Suikazan's house.
And for him to be inside Suikazan's house, uninvited, meant something wasn't right.
"Suikazan?" He asked quietly, stepping inside the bedroom. He didn't have to ask twice, as he fumbled for his phone to dial 911.
He didn't want to be here. Instead, he'd wanted to be standing at the bridge, or better yet, lying six feet underground. It was fitting, really. When he saw Suikazan's lifeless body, his brain had turned off for a second and his heart skipped a beat before he moved to call 911. Now, here he was, sitting on Suikazan's front porch as the paramedics wheeled Suikazan's corpse into the back of the ambulance and switched the lights off.
He didn't remember being spoken to by any of the paramedics. If they talked to him, he didn't remember what he said to them in response. It was seventy-seven degrees outside, and yet, despite that, his mind and his body felt numb.
When the ambulance pulled out of the driveway, Kisame stood up and began walking with a familiar destination in mind.
His job was no more. His residence, after a while, would be as well. And the only person he considered family, his only friend, was gone too.
His lips twisted into a smile as he thought of Itachi who was probably at work. There was no doubt that he had his share of hardships, but at least he had one living family member and a place to call home. Kisame, on the other hand, had nothing else to lose.
Author's note: So...I realized that I made a mistake of mentioning that Suikazan was dead in the last chapter (don't bother going back and looking now, because I already fixed it - hopefully) so after fixing it, I was like "ah, what the heck? I'll just post the next chapter while I'm on). And so here it is.
Poor Kisame...
Until next time!
~Sasori33-001
PS The next chapter, which has yet to be written but has been carefully planned, will be a Kisame chapter and it will probably be a week or two before I get around to typing it up.