A year after Sasuke and his friends leave Konoha, Itachi stops taking his medications. It is not a decision that he makes abruptly, nor is it much of a decision at all. It comes to him slowly, as a revelation.
He is simply not going to get better.
The medical nin who see him following the Fifth Hokage's departure never tell him anything of substance. They talk about things like comfort and stability, accommodation and pain management, but they never offer anything concrete, anything practical.
Never anything he truly cares to hear.
The med-nin like to couch their analyses in euphemisms, as if trying to protect him from their true meaning, but he understands his prognosis without it needing to be spelled out for him: there is no defeating or overcoming his illness. There is only enduring it, just as he spent the last ten years of his life doing nothing but testing his endurance, of pushing his body's limits and accepting whatever consequences arose.
That endurance was simple, though. It was finite.
The complacency he's asked to entertain now is much more abstract, and much harder for him to reconcile.
.
.
.
The first dose that he misses is inadvertent. That much he maintains.
Almost a year passes in Konoha without so much as a word from Sasuke. Karin reports occasionally on his travels, filtered back to her from others in Konoha who have kept in contact with Sakura and Naruto. There is never any mention of a return to the village, and so Sasuke's mission continues indefinitely, ill-defined and interminable.
Seasons change, return, revert. Sasuke is gone, though life somehow continues on in his absence, a blur of meandering that is, strangely, not wholly unpleasant.
Itachi does not consider why that may be.
His and Karin's first winter in Konoha is short, but the spring that follows is sprawling, and with the spring comes an unending number of projects to be completed around the house: seals to repaint, door hinges to oil, floorboards to wax. Manual tasks, but ones that require very little, if any, serious consideration.
Most of these he sees to himself, rather than trouble Karin with their mundanity.
Still, even with no work assigned to her, Karin never strays far, her focus stuck to him like spider silk, flexible and enduring, but loath to tolerate much pull or slack. While he cleans the pollen from their back windows, she makes herself comfortable nearby, swinging her bare legs off of the edge of the porch as he sprays each window with water and vinegar.
Having no true work to preoccupy her, Karin lies on her back and reads out loud from one of her irredeemably lewd novels as he inches his washcloth down the glass slowly, moving from the top to bottom to avoid unsightly streaks.
"So I guess you're just that neurotic about everything you do, huh," Karin remarks when she grows bored, tilting her head back to watch him work upside down.
When he hums, noncommittal, she sighs and scuffs one foot in the grass below, before her comments trail off in favor of more pointed questions about their lunch arrangements.
Much of their time passes this way, light and hazy, as blinding and indiscriminate as that first winter's snow had been. The days go quickly, caught in the white blur that has become his life, with little more than an afterimage as it passes him by.
It is not quite April when the first hawk arrives. The winter chill has thawed completely, and Karin reports extensively to him about sundresses and the hanami parties she sees in the village as she comes and goes, her voice tempered by an unmistakable tinge of envy.
She is opining on one such party - (And they sat there for hours, just looking at the trees. Can you imagine doing some dumb shit like that for that long?) - when the hawk appears over the treeline in their backyard. Karin's sensing alerts him to it before his own eyes do, her spine snapping into place like a tripwire.
To his dim eyes, the bird initially appears as nothing more than a grey and brown smudge against the sky, its beating wings barely distinguishable from the rest of it as it descends.
The hawk makes a soft landing on the edge of the porch, its nails clicking lightly against the wood as it tucks in its wings. Its head swivels immediately towards him, its serious little eyes almost reminiscent of Sasuke's own, and it stares at him, unblinking, until Karin squawks and clambers onto her knees.
"Sasuke?!"
The hawk evades her open-armed lunge towards it with an annoyed kee, before hopping over to him, where it waits patiently by his feet until he bends down to get a better look at it. There's a small note tied to one of its legs, so small that he's not able to make out the actual writing on it until he's holding it inches from his face.
Sasuke's efficient handwriting is unmistakable, though, even to his deteriorated eyes: New lead.
"What the hell does that mean?" Karin asks, reading over his shoulder.
Many things, perhaps, but the main purpose of it seems clear: Don't expect me home any time soon.
There is nothing else written, even when Itachi turns the note over several times to be certain. He examines the paper itself regardless, in the hopes that it might reveal details Sasuke himself had omitted. It is crinkled irregularly along its folds, as if Sasuke had scrawled his note over some rough, uneven surface.
Stones, perhaps? A journey to Kumo, or Iwa?
"Well." He folds the note slowly, careful not to create any new creases, before cupping it gently in between his hands, the way a child might position their hands around a firefly. "I suppose they'll be away for a little while longer, then."
Karin wrinkles her nose. "Are we supposed to write him back, do you think?" she asks, crouching in front of the hawk, as if she were intending to ask for its input. There's a tinge of hopefulness in her voice that leaves him uneasy, for reasons he doesn't consider further. "He's gotta be wondering what we're getting up to."
As if responding, the hawk cocks its head at her before it turns and unfurls its wings.
"Hey, wait a sec!"
Before Karin can attempt another lunge at it, the hawk takes off, flying over the tops of the trees behind their house and quickly disappearing from sight.
His sight, at least.
"I guess that's our answer," Karin grumbles, as she watches the hawk fade into the distance. "So that's it?"
"It appears so." His hands are growing clammy around Sasuke's note, and internally he registers that he'll need to find a secure place to keep it, so that it won't degrade anymore than it already has.
It is Sasuke's only correspondence in the year he's been gone, after all, but perhaps it is meant to be a hint of more to come.
"Jackass didn't even give us a chance to reply," Karin mutters as she bends over to pick up her discarded novel. "Sakura must have bullied him into finally writing to us after all this time," she adds, somewhat wryly. "Forced him at fist-point, and that was probably the best she could wring out of him."
"Hm." He looks up at the trees, at the space where Sasuke's hawk had disappeared. Karin's intuition is likely correct—the hawk would not have left so abruptly if Sasuke had not ordered it to, of that he is sure. Without resting, without eating—an order like that could only have come from Sasuke. "Maybe so."
Karin stiffens out of the corner of his eye. "Uh." She inches closer, as if she were going to lunge at him the way she had with Sasuke's hawk. "But he probably just felt like it was time to write, you know?" she says matter-of-fact, one hand stuck to her hip. She pokes her glasses up her nose. "It's not like he's going to pour his heart out in a letter or something. Sasuke isn't like that; he's practical, nothing but the essentials."
"He is," he agrees. Once, perhaps, he might have been more than that, but no—Sasuke did not waste words, nor was he one for idle chatter.
And yet.
There was much Sasuke had asked of him that had occupied his attention prior to his leaving. For his first letter since then to be so brief, so detached… perhaps his interest has waned somewhat, leaving him with nothing more to say than New lead.
But then why write at all?
Karin continues to babble. "I mean, it's Sasuke. No one makes Sasuke do anything he doesn't want to do. There's nothing—"
"I'll be a moment, Karin," he says. "Please excuse me."
She stares after him as he walks back into the house, but she dutifully remains on the porch.
Karin is good like that, when she has a mind to be.
The door shuts behind him, closing with a soft click.
A year. Not a word in an entire year, but for this.
Was it intentional? Intentional silence on Sasuke's behalf, to see which of them might be stirred to act first? And now this, as a test of Itachi's mettle, to spur his interest. It was not his first impression, given how desperately Sasuke had sought his attention before, but perhaps time has made Sasuke clever enough for Itachi to underestimate him.
Perhaps time has made Itachi desperate enough to be less objective in his evaluations.
Belatedly, he finds himself replaying the hawk's entry in his own mind, and whether he might have unintentionally showed any eagerness to Sasuke's hawk in receiving the letter, some urgency that may now be reported back to him. What had Sasuke's hawk seen, that Sasuke now might be privy to?
Itachi raps his finger on the counter, contemplating it. Better to have shown no reaction at all, and to have left the hawk to Karin, rather than have Sasuke imagine for even a moment that Itachi might be mourning his absence.
No, better that Sasuke imagine him disinterested, preoccupied with the life he has built for himself here.
Better that Sasuke wish him dead, than to strain himself hoping for any sort of reconciliation between them.
Itachi grimaces. It is a reckless thought, one that ought to have no place in his blurry, blinding new life.
Sasuke wrote him a letter. He need not complicate the issue beyond that.
That assurance is enough to stand as a bulwark against his more tumultuous thoughts, which he is able to suppress entirely as he rummages through their cupboards, looking for a box or tin among their mismatched containers. A place to keep Sasuke's correspondence, regardless of whether or not there will be more of it to follow.
It was entirely understandable that Sasuke has only now just had an opportunity to write. Sasuke was away with friends, on a confidential mission that certainly requires such secrecy. There was no time to write or wait for long-winded correspondence, nor would such a thing be safe, regardless of how many letters Naruto and Sakura had apparently accustomed themselves to sending back to their friends and family in the village.
Was it a new form of revenge, perhaps? Intentional indifference, to punish Itachi for his own feigned lack of interest?
"Hey. Uh." Karin creeps up behind him, her footsteps unusually soft. "Whatcha doing?"
"Finding a container," he murmurs. His hand is stuck in the cabinet, unmoving. He feels around the wooden panels fruitlessly before closing that cabinet.
"Are you…"
"I am only looking for a container, Karin. I do not need assistance."
Before he can reach for the next cabinet, Karin takes another step closer and sets her cheek against his back. One hand snakes over his chest while she wraps the other around his waist, her fingers grasping at his shirt. Finding no resistance, Karin leans in closer, forcing him to support her weight.
"I'm gonna get lonely if you keep at this," she mumbles, though it's partly muffled into the back of his shirt.
"Hm?"
"Whatever you're up to in here by yourself…" It's more cloying this time, almost childish. She tugs at the front of his shirt. "Leaving me all alone outside…"
It's the type of immature behavior he would usually - begrudgingly - indulge, regardless of how off-putting it is, if only because the more ridiculous Karin's behavior is, the more pleased she is when he humors it.
"I'm busy, Karin," he tells her instead. He reaches for the next cabinet, which—hm. Glasses and bowls. Poor choice. "You will need to entertain yourself for a moment."
Karin growls and not so gently yanks him away from the cabinets and hoists herself on top of the countertop in front of him. It has the effect of making her slightly taller than he is, and he has to tilt his head somewhat to meet her eyes.
It also, conveniently, blocks him from reaching the remaining cabinets.
Before he can ask that she kindly move, Karin tugs him back in by the front of his shirt, then wraps her legs around his waist, pulling him in close enough that everything disappears save for the annoyed look on her face.
"Hey. Jackass." She knocks her forehead against his and rests it there, then guides one of his hands to her side, stroking herself with his hand once, as she often does, to show him how she'd like it done, so that he can imitate it with exacting precision. "You should know better than to leave me to myself. Who knows what I might get up to without you to keep an eye on me."
"I see." He follows her lead and runs his hand down her hips, the sides of her thighs. Erogenous zones, the kind that will reliably divert her attention. His other hand, still holding Sasuke's note, begins to itch. "My apologies for that."
Karin tightens her grip around his shoulders and murmurs into his hair, "I didn't mean anything by what I said, okay?"
He does know, likely better than she does.
And yet.
"If he wrote once, he can write again. We could just be ready for it next time. Write something in advance, just to give him a little update. Set him at ease."
And yet…
"Stop it." Karin tugs harshly at his hair, yanking his head backwards. She dips her head down, nosing lightly at his exposed neck. Her grip tightens, nails digging lightly into his scalp. "Stop thinking about him…"
With her other hand, she reaches towards the letter, sliding it from his grasp and pushing it down to the other end of the counter, beyond his sight or reach.
"Better," she says softly, as her lips find his thrumming pulse. "Just be here, with me…"
He waits for Karin to continue downwards, nibbling lightly at his skin until she's biting along the edge of his shirt collar, then running her tongue along his collarbone. The drag of her hands against his bare skin makes his skin crawl, for reasons beyond either of their control.
Karin is entitled to it, though, and he would never withhold it from her
When one hand slips under his shirt, nails scratching lightly up his sides, he stops her hand with his own and places a light kiss to her cheek.
"Okay, Karin," he tells her. He places one more kiss along her jaw before he pulls away and straightens his shirt collar, grabs Sasuke's letter, and returns to his prior errand. "Go wait for me outside, and I will be along shortly."
To assure her the matter won't need to be revisited, he is quick about finding a secure place to keep Sasuke's note, and he returns to the back porch shortly after, excusing Karin's frustrated mumbling about goddamn emotional brick walls. She appears content enough to have him returned to their shared space that it does not appear to be something that warrants further attention.
His pace is still slower than it'd been before, though, when he returns to his work, and his mind wanders. When Karin next picks up her novel, she's able to make it more than halfway through a gruesome lovemaking scene before he has the presence of mind to cringe and ask that she lower her voice.
That night he sleeps fitfully, spending more time tossing and turning than actually resting. The moonlight is preternaturally bright, cutting through their bedroom curtains like a knife and vivisecting the bedroom with one severe slash across his midsection.
Karin sleeps peacefully beside him for most of it, by then grown used to his fitful sleeping. Around midnight, however, she rolls over and hooks one arm around his waist, slotting her body close to his.
He almost expects her to complain about being woken, but she lingers there, her hand stroking his stomach, his chest. The night is a great equalizer between them, and in the dark, without her glasses, Karin's vision is just as poor as his own.
The darkness moderates her behavior much better than he does, forcing her to parse through his chakra as she tries to diagnose his mood.
"I do kinda wonder what took him so long to write," she says eventually. Her voice is softer than usual, tempered by the late hour. "Cause he sure waited long enough."
"I'm sure he's been preoccupied." He has long preferred this way of discussing Sasuke, where Karin argues their shared insecurities, allowing him to knock them down with his innate contrarianism. "It is unlikely that he could disclose much in unsecured correspondence regarding the objective of their mission."
Karin snorts. "As if. That whole mission is an excuse to blow out of town and have fun. They're probably partying their way across the continent. I'd be surprised if they still have any money left at this point."
He hums, more in acknowledgment of what she's said than in true agreement.
"You worried at all?" she asks, changing her approach. One finger hooks lazily into the chain around his neck, loosely, rolling over the links. "You've been kinda… you know, since this afternoon."
"I'm not sure that I know what you mean," he responds lightly.
Her arm tightens around him. "Come on. It's not like it's—"
"Karin." It is half admonishment, half warning. He sets his hand over hers and guides it back down from his neck, setting it securely against his chest and squeezing it softly. "Let's get some sleep."
He sleeps poorly through the rest of the night, watching as the moonlight is slowly retracted back into its sheath. It is not until the next morning when he is cleaning the remains of their dinner from the night before that he finds several of his pills lying on the table, overlooked by him in the fog of the previous day.
Overlooked by Karin as well, it seems, given that she hadn't remarked on it.
Curious, that.
With no further consideration, Itachi scrapes the forgotten pills into the trash with the rest of their uneaten leftovers and says nothing more.
He's rewarded for it with an unexpected sense of ease, one so palpable that even Karin seems to be touched by it. She bumps her shoulder flirtatiously against his own when she wakes and shuffles into the kitchen to get her own breakfast.
When she later takes him by the head and leads him back into their bedroom, her grin broad and white, he goes easy, the blur in his mind so bright that not one spot manages to cloud it.
His next dose is much easier to forgo, and the next, until several weeks pass without him once disturbing any of his numerous pill bottles. Medicine has multiplied around their house ever since his return to Konoha, springing up like ivy: pervasive, persistent, and decorative at best.
And at times, he supposes, needing to be pruned.
He says nothing of it to Karin, but because she is the only one of them who goes into the village, it is not something he can effectively hide from her. The next time they are preparing their grocery list, she can't help but take note of it.
"Hasn't it been a while since your last refill?" she asks, tapping her pen on the counter. "I can't remember the last time I stopped to pick one up."
He hums, as if it were curious to him. "I don't believe I'm due for another one quite yet."
Karin looks up from her writing and opens the cupboard next to her head. She fishes out one of his pill bottles and rattles it around before glancing back at him.
"It's only half-empty?" she says, half-statement, half-question. "That can't be right."
"Apparently it is." He turns back to his examination of their pantry. "If you are planning to be over by the Tower, we'll be needing more rice vinegar. I tend to prefer the vendor at the end of that street, if it is not too much trouble."
Karin turns the prescription bottle around in her hands to read the inscription, ignoring him entirely. Her glasses click as she pushes them up her nose. "This was written like three months ago. That's definitely not right."
"Hm."
"And this bottle is half-empty. That means you should be—"
"Karin," he says gently. "Please leave it alone."
They fight about it once.
Not immediately, though. Before then, there's a week of snide remarks and strained silence, the sharp sound of glass and porcelain hitting wood when he asks her to set the table. For that week, Karin is inconsolable. Her own uncertainties demand it of her, that she persist and dig and seek out those places where his brokenness and hers collide, irrespective of any possible utility such an inquiry could bring.
You really think you're just gonna get better on your own, huh? Shinobi like you don't need stupid shit like medicine, is that it? Think you're better than that?
He knows better than to respond to any of her taunts, and he knows Karin well enough to read underneath her frustrated, clipped remarks—don't you need me?
Don't you want me?
He doesn't fault her for being uncertain, though the tension between them quickly overwhelms all of their other affairs.
She glares at him each time he is unable to muffle a cough into the crook of his arm, and she refuses to listen when he tells her, kindly, to mind her own business.
That remark is received about as well as could be expected, where Karin is concerned.
After one day of exceedingly pointed snarking, Karin meets his silence by hurling a half-full pill bottle at his head, missing him only inches. The loose top pops off, and pills scatter to the floor around him, much too small for him to see.
Karin points down at the mess of pills and says, "I am fucking sick and tired of your bullshit."
He ignores her again, in lieu of bending down to clean up the mess she's made on their living room floor.
She stalks him into the kitchen, where he disposes of the bottle and its contents. When he turns around, she's standing directly in front of him, blocking his way out of the kitchen, her thin arms crossed severely over her chest.
Theirs is a modest house, after all, and there are few places one can hide within it.
Consequently, there is very little he can do to avoid Karin without becoming shamefully creative.
"Just explain it to me," she demands. "Just tell me what's so goddamn important that you think it's worth rotting away over after all the time we've wasted trying to keep you alive."
Her argument, of course, misses the issue entirely. His illness has nothing to do with her - or with any amorphous we. And so he is frank in telling her so—that it is not her fault, her responsibility, or her concern. "Nor would I like for it to be," he finishes.
"You don't think so?" She sets her hands on her hips. "You're really gonna stand there and tell me that what happens to you doesn't concern me at all?"
"It shouldn't." But even he is aware of the harsh implications of that. "Not in that way, it shouldn't," he amends. "It is a separate matter altogether."
Karin is quiet for a moment, the quick gears in her head churning rapidly, almost audibly. "But I bet it concerns Sasuke, doesn't it? Crazy how all this only happens after we hear from him for the first time in who knows how long." Her voice crawls up an octave, likely because she knows she's found a sensitive nerve to press. "I hope you know that once he hears about what you're trying to do here, you're gonna have to deal with someone a lot more annoying than I am."
"I'm afraid you've missed that opportunity, Karin," he says, with the slightest hint of scorn. "You'll have to be quicker next time that Sasuke's hawk returns."
"I could find a way if I wanted to." The flash in her eyes tells him she believes it. "Sakura writes back to her parents almost every week. I could have Sasuke in Konoha before the end of the month. He'd come, if he knew about this, and he won't fuck around about it so nicely."
His fingers begin to tingle, as if he were dehydrated. "I would think very carefully about trying that, Karin." A strange calm overtakes him, as if his very consciousness were being drained from his body, leaving it as empty and colorless as glass, with the brightness of the blur in his mind shining straight through it. "That is, unless you were intending to leave with Sasuke as well."
Karin has nothing to say to that.
That is, rather than saying anything, she seems unable to speak. Her lips move silently, almost as if she were unaware of it.
It takes a moment for what he's said to fully sink in, before Karin's face clouds over and any traces of vulnerability are erased.
Her back straightens, and she immediately turns on her heel, stomps out onto the back porch, and slams the door shut behind her. The windows shake, and the floorboards underneath rattle even as Karin stalks away without so much as a fuck you, though it is keenly felt.
Itachi's body comes back to him slowly once she's gone, like circulation being restored to a limb. Back to flesh, to blood. Fingers bend, knees ache. He drops down into a chair next to the table in their kitchen, feeling strangely out of breath.
By all means he has won the argument, but he cannot help but feel as though something greater has been lost.
He has become fond of the undisturbed waters between them, he supposes, the lines Karin has joined him in not crossing. At times it passes for peace between them, and he can almost forget that still waters are more often a mask for the more turbulent currents beneath.
He sits at the kitchen table and stews until the sun begins to set outside. Karin resolutely does not return, though he hears the occasional muffled curse from the back porch and knows she's at least remained there.
An hour passes in muggy silence, until Itachi finds himself standing at the back door of their house, knowing that Karin can sense his presence there, while he is only barely able to make out the outline of her back through the glass panes in the doorframe.
He wonders briefly whether he can bluff his way into a conversation by offering a blanket or food to her, under the guise of checking on her, but then decides that any lie to Karin would ultimately not be worth the indignity of it.
The back door clicks softly when he opens it. He is almost certain that she'd been aware of him waiting at the door behind her before then, with his chakra signature lingering only feet away, but she still turns her head to watch as he steps out onto the porch and settles into the spot next to her.
Her eyelashes are dark and shiny, almost purple in hue. She might have been quiet about it, but it's obvious she's been crying.
Despite that, he makes no attempt to revisit their argument; he has said all that needs said, and perhaps more still. Instead, he takes Karin's hand in his own and watches the sun as it sinks down, simmering, beyond the horizon. Much of the fire has gone out of her by then, nothing but smoke and smolders remaining.
They sit in silence, though it is not long before they are joined by an audience of several dozen or so crows from a flock that's taken up roost in their backyard, appearing to him as tiny black smudges in the trees around them.
That flock in particular has followed him faithfully for years as he's traveled outside of Konoha, though he imagines they're grateful to finally have settled down in a village where foraging is easy for them, and the seasons more mild than most.
Settling down is a good thing in general, he thinks, especially when it is accompanied by such easy stability.
Karin nods along dimly while he describes the crows' migration patterns to her, how they flock to Konoha in the early spring, arriving in the village in droves. How crows, compared to other birds, are relatively weak fliers, and are more prone to resting frequently as they travel south to the coast along the Land of Wind, making their migrations significantly longer than other species.
"There are trips that other birds make in several days only," he tells her, "but that for a crow will last several weeks."
"Yeah?" Karin seems to perk up at that. They share a long look, and he senses that she's keyed in on some additional, unintended meaning to something he's said. "Lots of fits and starts, you mean."
"They aren't particularly strong fliers," he repeats. "And they prefer to only travel in the daytime."
Karin nods her head in apparent understanding. "But then they get there eventually."
"They do."
She scoots closer. "So by that you mean…"
"Only what it is that I said." A tense moment passes, before he adds, "I am not a crow."
"I didn't—" She bares her teeth before turning her head sharply away from him and propping it up on her knees. "That's stupid. Of course I didn't think that."
Still, some part of her seems oddly pacified.
Or, at the very least, conciliatory enough.
She crosses her arms over her stomach as if she were sick, and looks away from him, talking into the night air. "So things are just gonna be like that now?"
"Yes."
"And there's nothing I can do about it?"
"Nothing," he assures her. "And it is nothing for you to worry about."
She squirms, kicking her shoes into the dirt as if trying to manually find a compromise. "But if something happened or you really get sick, or—"
"Then I will take care of it," he promises. "And I will make sure that you are taken care of."
He can tell that answer doesn't satisfy her completely, if at all, but she still allows him to set his hand back over hers afterwards, and she lets him keep it there as the evening cools, lets him move closer until they're touching again, body to body, his arm loosely wrapped around her waist.
The stars slowly blink awake only to find them together still, his lips resting gently against her pulse as the late night dew forms around them both. When the night air grows heavier, the coolness of it settling in his chest, he helps Karin to her feet and walks her back into the house, and she lets him guide her back to their bedroom without complaint, his hand pushing at the small of her back.
Karin continues to stay with him, though her reasons for doing so are not always entirely clear to him.
Irrational as it may be, he can't help but view the two of them as having become parts of a whole, as so many broken things are. The two of them fit together that way, like shards of glass: awkward, sharp, and irregular, but complementary all the same.
Settling, as the crows do, where things are the most stable.
Karin stays, and so he pays her the same courtesy she has paid him over the years—he lies close to her that night, holding her even as she grows smaller and smaller beside him, shrinking into herself until he's able to wrap his arms around the entirety of her curled up body.
They fight once, and then never again. He can see the defeat in her then and knows it will be true.
It weighs on Karin, though. The words that she withholds are leaden, and in the days following their argument, she says very little to him at all. He hovers around her the next morning to gauge her interest in a continuation, another outburst, a larger fight, but she only blinks up tiredly at him before turning over in bed and pulling the covers over her head.
She sleeps past noon and skips both breakfast and lunch. The plate he leaves on the dresser next to her goes untouched, and that night she only picks lightly at the dinner he prepares before she sets it aside.
The next night, Karin moves to the couch and sleeps there alone, something she hasn't done in seasons. Her shoulders are sloped, her steps growing heavier each day as she shuffles from the couch to the bathroom, from the bathroom back to their kitchen and couch.
She continues on in this way for nearly a week with no apparent signs of reverting back to her former disposition. The uneven scales between them demand that he do something, though, and so he does what he believes Karin would do for him.
That is, he refuses to leave her.
It has always been Karin's place to push boundaries between the two of them, and he does not feel wholly prepared to assume that duty, or any of her duties. Still, he takes to it delicately, gradually inserting himself between her and the couch, and eating up the space between them in small increments.
"Perhaps it is early enough in the season for you and I to plant a garden," he suggests one particularly warm day, though there is no response. At times he finds himself talking just to fill the time, in the hopes that something he says may catch her attention. "Along the back of the house, so we might see it from the porch."
The next day, while trying to tempt her with other potential home renovation projects, he finds himself describing the benefits of a garden. Again, he receives no response from Karin, but the idea begins to take hold of him.
"Do you think it is too late?" he asks her later that week. He is standing in the kitchen, staring out at their back porch, where poorly-defined green areas have begun to take shape in his mind. "Karin?"
"Huh?" she croaks from the couch. "For what?"
"In the planting season. Whether it is too late for us to consider starting a garden."
Karin only grunts, as if in disbelief.
"We should plant a garden," he suggests again that night, as he picks apart the remains of his dinner on one end of the touch, while eyeing the uneaten plate in front of Karin on the other end. He considers whether offering to feed her by hand might be more successful, if not for the very real possibility that she might bite him instead.
Instead, he inclines his head towards the back door. "You and I, out in the backyard, near the porch."
This time, she scowls and turns over on the couch, burying her face into the cushion. "Do whatever you want."
It is as positive a response as he can expect from her.
The next day, Karin waits for him to leave the bedroom before she slips in with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and locks the door behind her. He hears the telltale flop of Karin's clothes being thrown to the floor shortly after and the squeak of their shower faucet as she turns it on.
While she is occupied, he takes out a scroll and begins to roughly trace the garden he's been plotting. It coalesces as something equal parts aesthetic and practical: some produce - beans, radishes, tomatoes - to supplement their grocery shopping, but with flowers too, perhaps, something ornamental to blur his vision with different colors.
He thinks Karin might appreciate them, if nothing else.
The difficulty, of course, is that even a humble garden requires a good deal of supplies he doesn't have on hand, the least of which are, of course, actual plants.
Ordinarily, this would be a task he could delegate to Karin, for her occasional trips into the village. It's been more than a week since she's left their house, though, and the odds of Karin breaking out of her stupor right then seem low. Assigning more work to her - work which serves no purpose but to entertain him, which offers her no direct material benefit - does not seem like the best way to work himself back into her good graces.
It is that simple, then. His mind made up, Itachi tucks the scroll into one of his pockets and is gone out the door before Karin has even finished her shower.
It takes nearly an hour for him to make the short walk from his home to the village alone. It's been several months since he visited the village at all—not since his last, brief appointment with the med-nin. It's long enough that he can't decide whether that's significantly longer than it had taken before, when Karin would accompany him to his appointments.
While that hour should be more than enough time for Karin to notice his absence, she makes no attempt at pursuit. He makes it to the village gate undisturbed, where he is allowed in with something of a baffled No way those are real when he presents his identification papers to the chunin guards there.
There is at least one set of eyes at his back as he continues on into the village, but there are no further disruptions beyond that, and no one dares to approach him.
He isn't acknowledged by anyone, save by the occasional vendor who attempts to catch his eye once he finds his way to an open air market. It hasn't been long since he returned to the village - years now, but still less time than he'd spent outside of it.
It is different, anonymity.
Undoubtedly most if not all of the other market patrons would know him by reputation, but reputation is one thing and recognition is another. He has always had much of the former and very little of the latter.
He makes his purchases quickly - or rather, as quickly as he is able, though it does take him a moment to regain his bearings. While he's passed through Konoha's various neighborhoods more times than he can count, nearly all of those were in a former life, in a former village that bears only a familial resemblance to the one he's walked into.
The village comes together like a great tree: Konoha has changed slowly but surely over time, and several streets are displaced from where they sit in his memory, branching off in wholly new directions. His navigation is made all the more difficult by the lapses in his sight, and he manages to make a majority of his purchases through a combination of careful stepping and luck.
On his way out of the village, he pulls aside on the road to lighten his load and safely pack away what he's purchased. His storage scroll spills out across the ground, with more than enough room for him to seal away what he's bought.
The bigger question is whether he can muster the chakra to do so.
Quickly, and with an urgency he hasn't felt in a very long time, he's able to mark the necessary seals from one end of the scroll to the other using the tip of his finger and a bottle of ink from his pocket. He arranges his purchases carefully down the line, spacing them out neatly from end to end.
The mere act of completing the seal makes his arm flare with pain, but he is able to accomplish the job. A numbness sets in shortly after that doesn't ebb until he's returned back to the house, where Karin is waiting for him at the front door, arms crossed and twitchy.
His hips and shoulders both ache fiercely, and he's more tired than he would like to admit, but he still offers Karin a polite smile and nod as he shuffles past her up the stairs and into their house.
Karin follows him to the kitchen. "Where were you?"
"Well." Her sensing ought to have told her where he'd been , so he can only assume it's another type of question she's asking. "We needed some groceries," he starts, indicating to one of the scrolls he has, "and I thought you and I could start planting that garden today."
"What?"
"I bought seeds, and some equipment that would help us." He pauses, gauging her reaction. "If you would care to help me."
This time, when he turns to go out onto the back porch, Karin follows. She wraps her arms even tighter around herself, giving her a tense, hunch-backed look. "So what does that mean, then?"
"Pardon?"
"What's it mean," she repeats. "You gonna start doing the grocery shopping now?"
Wisely, he stops himself from reminding her that he wouldn't have had to go shopping if she'd only continued doing it herself. Instead, he shakes his head and begins setting up stone markers where he would like there to be a fence. "I have no desire to do your work."
It is more than that, though. Karin's work serves a purpose to her, that is greater than the purpose it serves for himself. He has no desire to take away Karin's usefulness from her, so long as it's something he can offer to her.
His home functions in a particular sort of way, after all, and Karin's presence is an essential part of it.
Wordlessly, Karin steps out onto the porch and watches him as he marks off the boundaries of his garden.
When the shape of it satisfies him - when the bed is close enough to the house that the trees will not occlude the sun, when the elevation is neither too low nor too high - he unrolls his scroll across the back porch.
He presses his hand against the first seal, but it takes almost a minute for enough chakra to matriculate to his hand so he can undo it. When it does, the seal breaks with a sharp sting that travels up the length of his forearm and leaves his fingers burning. The skin of one finger splits, and a small trickle of blood runs off the side.
Good, a voice inside of him whispers, soothingly. This is what you deserve.
And maybe it is.
With a sigh, he sucks the blood away then moves his hand to the next seal. Perhaps he will not be able to unseal each thing he's purchased today, but he can unseal enough to allow himself some progress, and he can see to the rest tomorrow. He closes his eyes, bracing himself as chakra gathers to his palm with a molasses-like slowness.
Before he can break the seal, though, something cool settles over his hand, disrupting his concentration. Karin threads her fingers around his, her grip unexpectedly gentle.
"Don't read too much into this," she mutters. With a tiny, effortless push, her chakra passes through his hand to break the seal, revealing a set of garden shears.
She doesn't meet his eyes, and for a moment, he thinks she's pitying him. Her hand falls away. "I don't know if that was ever gonna go back to the way it used to be."
"It likely wasn't," he concedes, having come to the same realization himself months ago. Oddly, that seems to be acceptable to Karin. She moves quickly along the rest of the scroll on her own, neatly breaking each seal and leaving behind a trail of seeds and seedlings, garden tools and stakes.
"You budget for this?" she asks as she nears the end. He thinks her brow furrows, though he isn't close enough to confirm.
"Well." Of course he hasn't; their finances have always been Karin's to manage. Even before her, he'd never really seen much sense in it. "We'll save a considerable amount in producing our own vegetables. It is an investment, in that sense."
"How considerable of an amount do you think it's gonna be?"
He hedges. "I assume you would be better situated to tell me that."
Karin wrinkles her nose. "Well, if you wanna know," she starts, jabbing her finger toward his seedlings, "you're probably on track to spend a couple hundred ryo for each head of cabbage you grow, when all's said and done. And I'm not even considering the cost of labor."
"None of those are cabbages," he responds, almost as an afterthought. It feels unimpressive for their first amicable conversation in several weeks. "Would you like cabbages?"
Karin grunts, which he interprets as a No, though already in the back of his mind, his garden is growing. He'll grow Karin cabbages.
"You can think on it," he says instead, as he feels among his equipment until he finds what he's looking for.
It's a garden bed he's wanting, after all. He chooses a hoe from his new tools and starts in the corner of his plot, striking a patch of the short grass that's cropped up around their house. It isn't bad soil - no such thing exists in Konoha - but it takes several good hits for him to get a feel for it.
For younger and more impatient shinobi, tilling a small, personal garden patch is the work of minutes. For them - and for him, once upon a time - it would not take much: a doton to clear the land, or a suiton to prepare the ground. Such a jutsu would not be wholly beyond him now on a good day, though today it seems he'll have to do the work manually.
Karin sits as he moves from one end of the garden to the other, watching him from the back porch with her hands crossed over her knees. At one point, she goes inside to get herself a glass of water, which she drinks as she watches him work, without once offering him so much as a sip.
He supposes she's more than justified in that.
It takes him nearly two hours to clear the majority of the area he'd marked off. He hadn't been particularly ambitious in it - perhaps a dozen feet going both ways - but his accomplishments come with a lot of fits and starts, and he's hardly made it through a quarter of the area before his shoulders begin to ache and his lungs begin to burn.
Good, that voice inside him says again. It's feminine, the voice—soft and conciliatory, unlike Karin's blunt and harsh tone. He imagines it as a soft hand against his face, a kiss in the center of his forehead, her long, dark hair tickling the sides of his face—Very good, Itachi-kun.
When his arms barely have the strength to lift the hoe again, and the last island of green has been cleared away, he gently sets the hoe aside in the grass.
While tilling is not work that requires precision, his eyesight makes it difficult for him to decide whether he's done. The dark brown of the soil is appealing enough, but he still finds himself kneeling in the soil to feel it for himself, forming clumps with his hands and feeling them crumble away.
Kneeling, it just so happens, is much easier on his knees and back than standing and crouching had been.
There are footsteps from behind him. "Not the worst position I've ever seen you in," Karin remarks. "You tryna get my attention?"
In a sense, perhaps, but likely not in the one she is imaging. "Have I succeeded?"
"Whaddya doing?" She crouches at the edge of his makeshift fence, her arms crossed over her knees. "You lookin' for worms? 'Cause I could probably find them a lot faster than you could like that."
"I'm feeling the soil," he tells her. "It's very good quality out here, once you've broken it up." After a moment, he adds, "I am not looking for worms," if only to assure her of it.
Karin scrunches her nose and pokes a hole in the dirt, as if testing it for herself. "Then what was the point of digging up all of this dirt?"
He sighs. "It loosens up the soil so I can plant. The worms are fine where they are."
"If you say so." Karin crosses her arms over her knees. Her hands clench around nothing, a sign that she's considering something intently. "What about you?"
"Pardon?"
She looks towards the woods, avoiding eye contact they wouldn't be having at that distance anyway. "Are you—uh." She grimaces. "Are you fine where you are?"
"Ah." Now they are back to metaphors. It comes as a courtesy, this time—a chance to speak frankly to her. "Are you?"
"Jackass." She falls back into the grass with an angry sigh. He can no longer see her face, but he gets the sense that her expression isn't a particularly pleased one. "I asked first."
"Okay."
It takes a moment, but then Karin's leg twitches and she's staring at him again, her legs crossed in front of her. "Let's hear it, then."
"I like it here, where we are," he offers. It is the truth, which he thinks Karin will appreciate. "I think this is as good of a place to be as any." He nods towards the front of their house, in the rough direction of the village. "It is quiet out here. We are a part of Konoha, and yet are not."
Certainly, Konoha would claim the territory where they live as its own, and yet what truly makes up Konoha—its people, its institutions, its traditions—has very little reach this far away from Konoha proper, secluded as they are.
He looks down at his hands, black with dirt and smarting with fresh calluses. Raw and aching, but alive. "At times, it is almost as if we lived in another world entirely, where nothing else exists."
It is so much more than that, but that is the core of it, what truly matters, and he trusts Karin to put together the pieces on her own.
He takes up a handful of soil as if to demonstrate. "The land here—it is a good place to be." It comes out awkwardly, and so he adds, "That is—the soil is nutrient rich, and always has been. There's not much that won't grow in Konoha, if only it is given time."
There's a tearing noise before Karin tosses a handful of uprooted grass into his freshly tilled garden. "So you like the dirt out here."
"Among other things."
"And you just wanna stay out here and look after your dirt and worms."
"Among other things," he says again, with a slight touch of humor.
A long moment passes, before Karin asks, "Forever?"
"For the meanwhile, so long as it may last."
Before he can approach the matter with more serious thought - or at the very least, ask that she answer the question herself - Karin is up again, looking over the supplies she unsealed from his scroll.
She peers over them, her hands placed on her hips. "So what's next, worm boy?"
"Ah." He looks around his plot, taking mental stock of the work yet to be done. "I have some fresh soil to mix in, after which I'll start with the actual planting." Both are tasks which require some amount of skill and familiarity with the process, neither of which Karin would seem to have. "In the meantime, you can start placing the actual fence around the garden. There seems to be an abundance of wildlife around us, so I imagine it will come in handy."
Karin snorts. "As far out in the woods as we are, exploding tags would be better protection than a little fence."
With that ominous remark, Karin tucks the pile of stakes under her arm before tossing them into an undignified heap next to his freshly tilled garden, save for one. She circles the garden slowly with it clenched in her hand, making note of the markers he's left.
When she completes her circle, she stabs her single stake down into the earth with a hearty grunt. "There."
"Ah. Karin?"
"I'm working, don't interrupt me."
She stomps the stake several inches deeper, at an angle that makes it tilt. Half blind as he is, he is fairly certain that it is either broken or crooked or - most likely - both.
"A little less violent, perhaps."
Karin grunts, which he interprets to mean that she will do it her way, or not at all.
He'll buy more stakes.
With Karin working her way around the perimeter of the garden, Itachi decides to organize his plants, matching them up with the ambitious chart he'd scrawled that morning. There is also the bag of fresh soil he'll need to carry into the garden at some point, then till again, until it's incorporated.
He's able to generate a list of tasks with ease, though the execution of it is not quite so neat. His head feels light when he rights himself, and he isn't entirely confident in his ability to stand.
In fact, he's quite convinced that any attempt to stand will just as soon have him back on the ground. When he's hit with a sweeping wave of nausea, he accepts that he's reached his limit, for now, and stretches out flat in the grass on his back, staring up at the sky while he waits for it to stop spinning around him.
"You dead?" Karin's head appears at the top of his vision. Even from that angle, Karin is little more than a red-and-black blur. A lovely blur, he thinks, half-delirious.
She really is lovely, in her own way. He's never truly stopped to consider it—to an extent, he believes beauty to be an objective thing. Aesthetics have always felt separate from attraction, more of a threshold matter to consider as opposed to anything of significant weight.
But still, Karin is lovely, in her own way.
He reaches up towards her unsteadily, his hand closing around empty air. "Closer," he murmurs.
She bears down on her knees and leans in further, until he's able to make out the concerned look on her face. "Are you okay?" she asks.
Close enough.
He snags his hand into the front of her shirt and uses that handhold to hoist himself up, crushing his mouth up into hers. Karin squeaks and starts to pull away, before his momentum overwhelms her and she topples onto her hands and knees over him with a muffled yelp.
It leaves them at an odd angle, her nose scraping his chin, her hands planted next to his ribs. He coaxes her closer, setting one hand on her hips and guiding her down onto her back in the grass beside him. Before she can pounce on him first, he rolls over top of her, steadying himself as the world spins around him.
The sudden movement is disorienting, but it feels harmless now, more akin to intoxication than disorientation.
And maybe he is intoxicated, or at least touched with it. He pushes Karin's hair away from her face, noting the streaks of black soil where he's touched her. For a delirious moment, he imagines Karin as another thing he would like to plant there as well, something he could keep there, rooted and secure.
As if Karin could grow in Konoha and flourish there, unimpeded by him.
He slides one hand up her side appreciatively before positioning her thin little wrists above her head with the other. "Stay like that," he tells her, as he reaches for the zipper on her shirt, and Karin whines, loudly.
Itachi takes his time in undressing her, as he always does, allowing his eyes to run over her body until she finally wriggles out of his hold and kisses him, pushing up against him until her shoulders strain with her effort to reach him. It is his nature to savor these moments—to kiss her softly, tenderly, slowly.
Conversely, it is Karin's nature to hook her legs around his hips, and attempt to rush through all of the things he finds most compelling. She slings her arm around his neck, hoisting herself just to get closer, to smack her teeth against his.
He relents and allows her to roll them over again, the earth spinning around him, until she's perched on top of his hips, both halves of her shirt hanging open. Her hands cover his body, more invasive than sunlight, tugging and grabbing and nudging, until she's twisted her body into his, her warm center pressed flush against him.
It feels like everything she's been holding back, let loose all at once in one vicious tide. She sets one hand against his shoulder, pressing him down as her other hand slides down the plane of his chest, his stomach—
"Not enough," she growls. It is punctuated with a frustrated tug on his waistband. Her teeth cut into his lips, her other hand making quick work of the buttons on his pants.
As things often do between them, they devolve quickly after that.
Karin's sullenness quickly dissipates after that, burned up like dew under the morning sun. It does not feel like true reconciliation, if such a thing is ever possible, because there is never any score settled between them. He concedes nothing of substance; Karin only relents and allows him to do as he pleases.
She isn't the type to give in to despair, though—if she had been, he can only assume she would've been dead long before their paths had ever crossed.
She returns to his bed that same night and, for a while, things between them resume in the way they had once.
Except they don't entirely, because things between them have changed.