Oh my God guys! This chapter is so fucking juicy! AHHHHHH (and no, The Secret Sal, there will be no kissing, no gay sex, no marriage proposals, and no ninja strippers or homosexuality for that matter! #sorrynotsorry!)

Anyways, without further ado, I hope you all enjoy! ;)

"Why would you do that for me? You barely know me."

"You're right. I don't know you very well. But in the small amount of time that I have known you, you've proven to me that you are somebody who can be trusted. You strike me as a man who's led a very hard life who deserves a break for once and I'm willing to give you one."

"But why, Itachi? Why would you do that for somebody like me? I tri—" I tried to kill myself in your kitchen yesterday afternoon, he caught himself from saying. "I don't deserve such kindness."

"I insist."

Kisame clenched his fists in his lap. "But why me?"

"Because I trust you."

For the past two days, Kisame couldn't stop thinking about those four words "because I trust you." Was Itachi even in his right mindset when he said those words? How was Kisame supposed to know if he wasn't hopped up on some crazy cancer drug or something? Because the man Kisame had been living with for the past month and a half didn't come off as trusting easily. Hell, the man Kisame knew didn't warm up to people easily. Sure, Kisame didn't know Itachi very well much less who he talked to outside of the apartment if he talked to anyone outside of his apartment. He probably didn't. But anyways, what was so special about Kisame to convince this man to put his trust in him? Kisame wasn't even sure that he could bring himself to trust somebody who had nearly tried to kill themselves a few days prior when their roommate was getting treated for cancer.

And that was another thing. Itachi was being treated for cancer. There was a legitimate chance that this man could succumb to a disease that claimed thousands across the country each year and he wasn't giving up on life just yet. How could he? He had a stable, well-paying job, a fancy apartment that was close to everything, and a younger brother that was just starting out in the world to watch over. And what about Kisame? Three days ago, Kisame thought that he had run out of options. That he'd be better off underground like Suikazan. He thought he'd be living on the streets just like he did for those few months way back when.

And it was all thanks to Itachi's goodwill.

It had to be drug-induced, Kisame decided. There was no other logical explanation for this man's sudden kindness. Once he got better, he'd come to his senses; realize that Kisame wasn't doing nearly enough to pull his weight and that he was nothing more than a burden on him and toss him out onto the streets. "Why did I ever give this good for nothing lazy bum another chance?" Itachi would say. "And what was I thinking? Offering him to live with me rent-free? What's the purpose in that?"

And like so many times before, Kisame would have the rug ripped right out from under him.

A sudden knocking at the door immediately drew him out of his thoughts. Although he had picked up a few extra shifts here and there to avoid another run-in with Itachi's younger brother, he couldn't work for twenty-four hours on end without sleep and thus needed to return back to the apartment every so often. To Kisame's knowledge, Sasuke worked a few jobs as well and occasionally visited his older brother in the hospital which limited the amount of interaction he had with Kisame, but it didn't eliminate it entirely. It only limited it.

His first reaction was to stay quiet. Play dead. If he didn't make a sound, then Sasuke would assume that he was asleep or something. That was logical, right?

"Do you have a minute? I want to talk to you about something." Sasuke asked.

If he stayed quiet long enough, Sasuke would give up and walk away.

"Hey." He said a little more loudly, rapping on the door once more. "I know you're in there; I can hear the TV."

Dammit. That didn't mean that Kisame hadn't fallen asleep while watching TV. Or better yet, jumped out the window.

"Itachi wants to know how you're doing." He said.

Again, if Kisame didn't answer, Sasuke could assume that he was in a deep sleep. Or dead. In that case, what was stopping him from calling Itachi to alert him of such a suspicion? Or worse, the police? "I'm doing fine." He replied loudly enough so that Sasuke could hear him.

"I don't know that."

"Take my word for it." Kisame insisted.

"Maybe I would if you hadn't lied to me the other day about why there were so many pills in your hand."

Dammit!

"You've got three minutes to show yourself." Sasuke's voice echoed through the closed door.

"And if I don't?"

"Then I'm calling the police."

With a sigh of defeat, Kisame pushed himself off the bed and slowly opened the door, making certain to keep his face behind it in case Sasuke decided to punch him in an act of vengeance. "See? You can tell Itachi that I'm alive and conscious enough to respond to all of your questions."

Sasuke raised a skeptical brow. "Or you could have recently downed some over-the-counter medications without my knowledge and the side effects haven't made themselves present yet." He said and tilted his head towards the living room. "Care to chat over a cold drink?" He asked.

Slowly, Kisame opened the door and stepped into the fluorescent lighting of the main room. "What choice do I have? If I don't, you'll call the cops on me, won't you?" He muttered and resigned to his fate.

-8-8-8-

"Care for a beer?" Sasuke asked once they were comfortably seated in front of an episode of CSI Miami.

Kisame shook his head. "No thank you."

"It's okay. They're not Itachi's if that's what you're thinking so you're not going to get in trouble." Sasuke said. "I bought them on my way home from work today."

"Why are you being so nice to me?" Kisame asked. "Nice" wasn't quite the right word to describe the younger brother's actions at the moment but Kisame couldn't think of anything better to say.

Sasuke sat down on the couch next to Kisame with a sigh. "Well, it looks like I'm going to be moving back in since Itachi's in the hospital so I might as well get to know my new roommate."

"You're moving back in?" Kisame couldn't help but ask. So much for wearing only his boxers anymore…

Sasuke nodded. "I'd rather be close to Itachi while he's getting treated. It's not worth my time and gas money to drive back and forth to my jobs and the hospital. Itachi's apartment is central to both whereas mine is going out of my way." He explained. "Plus, I've been spending a lot of my time back here anyways, so I figured, why not move back in?"

Kisame nodded in agreement but didn't like the idea any more. "What do you do for a living?" He'd always wanted to know the answer to that question. If he was willing to call the police, he couldn't have been one himself. But for a twenty-something year old, he was awfully perceptive. Then again, so was Itachi. Kisame was willing to bet that this kid was a detective or something along the lines of that.

"I'm a certified criminal defense lawyer, but I'm working at an athletic store and pub part-time until I can find a hiring law firm." He answered and took a drink of his beer.

A lawyer. No wonder Kisame didn't fully trust this kid. In his book, lawyers were just as shady as police officers. They teach you in school that they're there to help, but Kisame had heard stories of those who have abused their power or used underhanded methods to achieve their desired outcome. "I would've never guessed." In a sense, lawyer wasn't one of the professions that crossed Kisame's mind when he thought about Itachi's kid brother. But it fit. "Why'd you choose that career path?"

Sasuke sighed and crossed his ankle at the knee. "For the longest time, I wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and become a police lieutenant."

Equally shady.

"But after our mother died, I changed my mind." He continued.

"My mother was forty-two when she died in a car accident almost ten years ago, and my father died of a heart attack at the age of fifty, six years ago." Kisame remembered Itachi saying to him almost a week ago. "Why? What happened?"

Sasuke kept his gaze in line with the car chase currently on the TV and said "I was fifteen years old when our mom died in a car accident. There was a freak snow storm and she couldn't see. And apparently, neither could the truck driver that blew through the intersection where she was driving through." He said and cast his gaze downwards at the beer in his hand. "After she died, her side of the family flew in from Japan and started a legal battle with our father to fight for a share of her inheritance even though she cut ties with them when she married our father." Sasuke said. "Her family never really approved of our dad because he wasn't the Japanese businessman that they envisioned for their daughter so I guess you could say that they cut ties with her. But anyways, they started a legal battle with our dad for a share of her inheritance." He sighed. "And it wasn't pretty. For one, half of her family didn't speak proper English and our dad only spoke a little Japanese so Itachi had act as the pipeline between us."

"How old was he?" Kisame asked.

"He was twenty at the time. He had to skip two of his final exams to sort things out between our dad and mom's relatives."

"Couldn't you have hired a translator or something to communicate for you?"

Sasuke shook his head. "We would've had to hire one twenty-four seven because they would make phone calls to our house at all hours of the day. They didn't care. Sometimes it would be an English speaking relative or a Japanese speaking relative. At first, our father would answer the phone and if it was an English speaking relative, they would sometimes switch back and forth from English to Japanese just to throw him off. Eventually, Itachi began answering all of their calls and that's when they took it to court. They realized that they couldn't get behind Itachi who spoke fluent Japanese so they couldn't pull any dirty tricks so they decided to start a court battle over it."

"What happened then?"

"We won of course, because mom was smart enough to write a will in case something happened to her. If you have a legal will dividing your assets after you die, there isn't much anyone can do about it. Our mom's relatives tried to fight it of course, saying that she wasn't in the right mind set because she was with an American but their arguments fell upon deaf ears." Sasuke explained and clutched the neck of his beer with such force that his knuckles turned white. "And that's when I decided to learn Japanese and become a lawyer; so that I call people out on their bullshit." He spoke, his words like acid.

"Why didn't Itachi become a lawyer? I'd think that an experience like that would—"

"He never wanted to deal with anything like that ever again. You probably don't know this about him, but Itachi hates conflict. He'll do anything he can to resolve things peacefully and with as little difficulty as possible. And it's all because of what happened with our mom's relatives after she died. That, and Itachi never wanted to become a lawyer in the first place. He always thought that arguing was a waste of time." Sasuke said and muttered "Even though he was captain of the speech and debate team during high school and all they did was argue about pointless topics like animal rights and shit."

Suddenly, Kisame felt as though he understood the Uchiha siblings. He understood why Itachi gave him a second chance to prove that he was capable of contributing to the monthly rent instead of turning him away upon their first meeting. And he felt as though he was starting to understand the differences between the two brothers – why one could be so calm and collected whereas the other was more volatile and argumentative. When their mother died, Itachi was a mature adult (though Kisame like to think that Itachi was a mature adult from the time he entered this world), and capable of seeing things from other's point of view whereas Sasuke was young and naïve and probably had no idea what was going on at the time (that, and he couldn't speak Japanese, Kisame assumed).

Although it was nice to know that these seemingly emotionless robots known as Uchihas were ordinary human beings, something that Sasuke mentioned caught Kisame's interest. "What were you saying about wills earlier?"

Sasuke blinked, seemingly caught off guard by the question. "What do you mean?"

"Sorry to change the subject," Kisame apologized, "but you said something about how if a person has a will, they've already said who gets what, right?"

Sasuke shrugged. "That's one way to describe it, but yes. If the deceased has collaborated with a lawyer and drawn up a formal will dividing their assets after they die, then their wishes are final with the exceptions of child custody and a few other things. Why do you ask?"

Kisame bit the inside of his cheek. Did he really want to take a chance and make a fool out of himself? Then again, he had already punched Sasuke while wearing only his boxers, so he didn't have much else to loose. "What happens to somebody's house when they die?"

Sasuke took a moment to consider this. "If they've left their estate to a specific person, then their estate will go to that person."

"And if they don't?"

"Then the estate will become property of the government. Why?"

"Well I was wondering…" Kisame started and reached over to where Sasuke had set a bottle of beer on the coffee table in case Kisame changed his mind. And in order to tell this story, Kisame knew he'd need it.

Kisame and Sasuke are getting along! Albeit forcibly! And possibly with some ulterior motives!

Fun Fact: I wasn't planning to include this backstory (which I've had planned for quite some time, in this chapter, but it just felt right so I did it~

For those of you who are keeping track, this chapter takes place on Saturday, July 21st so it's not Sasuke's birthday yet :( Though I think I have decided that Itachi is going to get him an expensive fountain pen for the big 2-5~

****To the Guest who reviewed on November 13th: Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you THANK YOU for the review (yes, I am usually this peppy with users who review) my one request is that you leave a name (real or fake, I don't care) next time so that I can differentiate you from any guests who review in the future!

****To The Secret Sal: Although the shower is a good place to find inspiration for fics, I found the inspiration to write this chapter while putting cloths away (no particular reason why) ;)

Until next time~

Sasori33-001

PS: I think the next chapter will be an Itachi chapter, I haven't decided yet...