AN: this is another inktober fic, for the prompt "sick day."
to those close to me, this is the infamous "broken dick fic," but uh. its not all that lighthearted as that title might imply for everyone coming from moving in, moving on, uh. sorry, i guess.
this is intended to be a rough sequel to MIMO, since MIMO itself started as a prequel to a fic that would follow this one. i just got really into the idea and see no need to hold this back. there are some spoilers but not significant ones. youll know the disposition of things but not how or why they end up the way they do. that said, if you havent read MIMO, you don't really need to. some context might be clearer but i wrote this separately, so that it shouldnt be necessary for the two to be read together
title is from a birthday, by ws merwin
Despite all indications to the contrary, Karin takes very good care of him.
At least, Itachi thinks she does.
Certainly, his younger brother seemed to have his own reservations about their arrangement, though he expressed his concerns silently, with questioning looks. And Sasuke, more than Itachi, would have an understanding of what Karin was, and was not, capable of doing.
But Sasuke had left him in Karin's care once before, which demonstrated enough trust for Itachi to believe she would at least be competent, for as long as he would need to make use of her.
And really, when he had initially extended the offer, it had never been his intent that he would actually need to rely upon Karin for anything more than a few simple, menial tasks - nothing that required much competence at all.
While her past certainly piques his interest, he comes to see his lack of further inquiry as a courtesy. Privacy is a form of grace, Itachi believes, that they have extended to each other.
Without pushing his imagination too far into her past—because ultimately, it serves neither of them to dwell on it—Itachi can at least piece together a framework for why Karin would give off the impression of being a poor caregiver. Karin is a woman of many contradictions, after all, and most of them are not, on the surface, particularly flattering ones.
Even below the surface, there is no particular point of convergence where Karin appears to him wholly consistent. She's a secretive busybody, possessive and flighty, and her own vulnerabilities have never once made her sympathetic to those weaker than her.
Still, Karin takes very good care of him. She is attentive, if only to him. Steadfast, if only because he is unable to leave their tiny home on the outskirts of Konoha.
Tonight, Karin is helpful, if only because he has asked it of her, and quiet, because he has refused to ask her for anything else. Even that he does not mind—if there is any trait he and Karin share, it is the desire to be useful.
While he recognizes this in them both, Itachi rarely assigns her any work, largely because Karin does not take kindly to being ordered around, but also because he prefers to do the work himself when possible. When he does delegate to her, however, he prefers to give her the easiest tasks. This is especially true when it comes to preparing their meals, given that he is by far the more experienced cook between them.
Tonight, he does it as a peace offering of sorts, though not much peace has come from it.
He adds vegetables to the pot of broth he's cooking over the stove, while Karin rinses rice in the sink, a hand towel preemptively slung over her shoulder. It's a task that requires nothing but patience, a trait Karin is not particularly known for, but she manages just fine. She works quietly, if somewhat sharply, with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, leaning over the sink and scowling as she flips the spout on and off.
Their kitchen is quiet. Usually Karin is more talkative, especially when she has him for a captive audience, but she's said very little to him so far.
It is peaceful for them. Unusually productive.
Things are usually like that when Karin is angry with him.
Instead of their usual back and forth, her call and his response, there's the hiss of water from the sink and the thud of his knife against the cutting board, the click of the burners, and several distinct plops as he scrapes the remaining chopped herbs and vegetables off of his cutting board and into the boiling pot of broth on the stove.
His arm wavers as he lowers his cutting board back to the counter, and for a moment, his fingers go numb.
Even with his degraded eyesight, he sees Karin stiffen out of the corner of his eye. Her head jerks up, her eyes pointed out the kitchen window but unseeing. She sighs once, irritably, but says nothing.
She could be more subtle about her prying if she wished, but at times he thinks it is a warning to him, an opportunity for him to speak up first and diffuse the situation before she begins to press him.
He doesn't, of course, because there's no need to continue to have those conversations in the first place, aside from Karin's insistence that they should. She's allowed to be disappointed by her own unrealistic expectations.
Her hands are still buried in the bowl of rice at the bottom of the sink, the water continuing to run until he hears—but does not see—the bowl overflowing, rice and starch and excess water likely pouring down the drain.
After a second, Karin blinks, stares down at the rice, and then hastily shuts off the water. She curses under her breath and dries her hands on her pants, the material darkening under her palms.
After a few moments, her hands slow, and she seems to lose focus again.
Though he knows it is better if he does not ask, he does so anyway. "Do you need any help, Karin?"
She doesn't answer immediately, caught in a thoughtful silence, still staring down into the sink.
Karin is strategic, even in their relationship—as reckless as she is otherwise, Karin has a good sense of how to maneuver confrontations between them.
"I have some mild painkillers," she eventually says instead before turning back to her work. It's delivered with a hint of forced levity, a very intentional carefree tone that falls just short of the real thing.
"It's nothing crazy. Just acetaminophen," Karin adds. "For—you know, aches and whatever."
She looks over at him expectantly, but he doesn't reply. He finds it much easier to focus when Karin isn't forcing an active conversation between them.
And thankfully, she doesn't do anything more than that.
He's almost a little relieved that she doesn't. That she has stopped. The kitchen goes silent, and this makes it easier for him to focus when his vision blurs, and the knife under his hands begins to cut slant-ways as he slices strips of beef.
Karin doesn't comment on it, even when he sets one hand out against the counter to steady himself, and he is thankful for that.
Karin used to do more, after all.
That is, Karin used to push him to let her do more—to arrange hospital visits, to run to the village to renew his prescriptions.
To offer her own healing, and her own vitality, to compensate for what his own body could not do on its own.
She's been looking at him oddly since he first attempted to rise from bed that morning, only for black spots to immediately form in the periphery of his vision.
He was experienced enough in the matter to know that he would not be having what Karin would deem a good health day, but he said nothing of it. And neither did she, though he can see her patience is now wearing thin.
He's made his position on the matter clear, though, and enough rejections have gone far in discouraging her further. Even when she tries now, she pares down her suggestions by offering him mild painkillers and short breaks, qualifying them in the hope that her offered assistance will become insignificant enough to appeal to him.
"Fine," Karin eventually snaps. It's almost petulant, like a child throwing a tantrum. She turns the faucet back on with a violent jerk. "Fine," she repeats, this time under her breath.
He can see so little of her now, especially on these sorts of days, but what he can see has always been enough—enough that he can see the aggressive jerks in her movements, the irritated flicks of her fingers when individual grains stick to them.
The feeling in his own fingers has yet to return. If anything, the lack of feeling appears to be traveling upwards from his fingers to his wrists, to his forearms. From experience, he knows that he will likely be waiting much longer before it will improve.
He removes his hand from the knife he'd been holding with as much precision as he can manage, laying it down flat on the counter and pulling his hand away while he is still able to coordinate the movement. Even this requires his entire concentration, the half-butchered remains of their dinner abandoned.
The dark spots that have been floating like snow in his peripherals seem to grow, staining his field of vision like a blizzard. It makes him feel less confident in his balance, and he digs his nails into the wood of their countertop to center himself. The pot next to him begins to boil up to the rim, savory broth running down the sides and bubbling over onto the burner.
Unable to do much else, he lets it boil. The flame on the stove jumps greedily towards the runoff broth, singeing it as it pours down the sides of his pot. He still has the presence of mind to mourn what is undoubtedly a waste of a perfectly fine soup.
The faucet cuts off again. Karin is almost certainly staring now, even if he is unable to turn and confirm it for himself. Subtlety is something Karin struggles with, as is minding her own business.
He would prefer that she paid him no mind at all, which is a calculus Karin is unable to understand.
The rot inside of him is something that did not manifest until he had already left Konoha, which he refuses to assign to coincidence. It took years of breathing in whatever pollution he had surrounded himself with before it began to seep beneath the skin and kill him from the inside out.
The Fifth Hokage referred to it as a disorder, a blockage or misdirection of his chakra pathways that prevents his body from carrying on its proper functions. Having lived with it, though, he understands it much better than she could. The idea that it could all be condensed into such a simple diagnosis is laughable, though he knows better than to challenge her.
Instead, he rests quietly knowing that whatever is in him has all but become a part of him now, that the rot has made its home inside of him and grown from there. While Tsunade saw no issue in attempting to reverse whatever damage had been done, he questions whether it is right to remove something that has so obviously been placed where it is for a reason.
Karin lets out a frustrated sigh and slaps her towel on the counter. Her feet are bare on the wooden floors of their kitchen, but boards underfoot creak as she walks over towards him. He inches his head over to catch a glimpse of her, but her movements are blurred, even more than what he is used to.
She approaches him from behind, reaching her hands around him to turn off the stove and remove the pot from the burner.
He will need to thank her for that later, when he has the presence of mind to do so.
Karin can't seem to help herself, though—her task accomplished, she wraps her arms around him and presses herself up against his back.
She doesn't say anything.
Before, she might've. Karin has never tread lightly around anything, least of all matters of health, which have always been, he supposes, more of an abstraction for someone like her.
Now, though, she's quiet. She leans against him, her cheek nestled against the space between his shoulder blades.
That's his own fault, he thinks.
"Let's go sit down, yeah?" she eventually murmurs. She leaves one frustratingly gentle hand against his back and walks him to the couch, taking slow steps to accommodate his own uncertain ones.
He is sure to leave space for her next to him—he would never ask it of her, but she always insists on waiting with him there until his indisposition passes, and there is no reason why this time should be any different.
She turns off the lights next. The whole house is dusky save for the last bit of sunset that spills through their kitchen window, molten like gold. Fall is upon them, and winter will be soon to follow.
"We can eat later," Karin says, though their dinner preparations had started with her kicking open the back door of their house and shouting, When is dinner gonna be ready, old man!
She's grown much quieter since then.
Rather than attempt to relitigate any of the many arguments they've had in the past, Karin rests with him on the couch and with her head in his lap, allowing her presence to serve as a reminder that all of it - the headaches, the exhaustion, the cold that makes him grit his teeth until they too ache - all of it can be fixed if he'd only ask it of her.
He doesn't want that, though, and so he doesn't ask.
Instead, he closes his eyes while he waits for his body to come back to him. He lets his clumsy fingers tangle in her hair, his thumb stroking her forehead as his own begins to throb, heavy from his stuttering breaths. He traces nonsense patterns, Uzumaki whorls and the outlines of clouds to divert his attention elsewhere.
If there is anything he has left in the world that is a relief to him, though, it is that Karin takes very, very good care of him.
Karin closes her eyes and lets out a long, tired breath. She curls up over top of his lap, her hands stretched over the arm of the couch. She's never entirely at ease, and she won't be until he either returns to the kitchen or allows her to lead him back to their bedroom.
Still, her attempts to intervene will end there. If he does not want to feel better, it's his own prerogative; Karin will not interfere.
He has never wanted for anything with her. Karin simply understands his needs without him ever needing to voice them. Anything he has ever wanted - food or drink, privacy or company - Karin anticipates and provides.
He doesn't doubt that Karin could carve a niche out for herself wherever she went, that she could twist herself to fit into any role she wanted to fill. She's too cunning to ever allow herself to be trapped somewhere she did not want to be, and so he can only assume that she remains where she is - that is, with him - because she would like to.
As nebulous as it seems to him, he cannot find any other explanation for it.
Whatever her reasons may be, Karin stays, and she takes very good care of him.
.
.
.
In retrospect, it is a good thing that Karin does take such good care of him.
His return to the village had been marked by a series of staggering, successive losses. His degrading body was a long coming one. Sasuke became another. The death which had once been so certain has been indefinitely postponed, and the secrets he had protected and cultivated for years are no longer his to keep.
In the midst of that all, a relationship with Karin had not been a part of his original calculus. In truth, nothing involving Karin had been as he'd initially planned, save for the fact that she was nearby and convenient, and he happened to be in want of an assistant of sorts.
But even assistant is too ambitious a term for what he had imagined for her. All he needed was a placeholder. A page to run to the village and conduct his affairs. A doorman, to greet his visitors and send them on their way.
And a scarecrow, to keep Sasuke away.
He could not say he knew her particularly well when he extended his offer, though he believed he had known many others like her. Her deliberations were not moral ones, and they largely revolved around whatever would benefit herself the most.
Without becoming overly dependent on her, Itachi believed he had offered her, at the very least, enough to keep her around until Sasuke's interest in him was diverted.
Like so many of his plans, though, that one rapidly progressed beyond his control.
.
.
.
It is important that there is some measure of reciprocity in what he and Karin do. Not to Karin, because Karin's self-worth is based solely on the value she generates, and she would gladly allow herself to be used if only to confirm that she still is of use.
It matters to him, though. It matters a good deal—far more than it ought to, especially because Karin is frighteningly eager to accept the bare minimum on his behalf, and he is seldom able to rise above it. The impossible mental calculus that keeps him sane refuses to accept any scale tipped in his favor, any take where he has not first abundantly given.
The problem is that he has very little left to give. Physically, his body is many years past its prime, and he is all but reliant on Karin's assistance for any physically demanding labor.
In a technical sense, he supports them financially, but even that feels like a weak offering when the money is - or feels, at least - entirely unearned. Money has never meant much to him, and his present circumstances are no exception—he's always had more of it than he needs, and he's never cultivated much of an interest in acquiring more.
His income is more modest now than it's been in the past, but his lifestyle is equally modest, and the monthly pension checks the ANBU office issues in his name are more than enough to provide for both his needs and Karin's, which he suspects is the point.
What little else he has left to give is simple, and does not carry much value at all to him personally, but Karin is frustratingly content with it.
Enthusiastic about it, even.
Intimacy is a gradual exploration for them both, though much more gradual for himself—his prior lifestyle had never allowed him to consider romantic or sexual partnerships, and he'd never had much of an interest in either.
Karin is not particularly forthcoming about her own past, but her eagerness and unfortunate tendency to rush into things leads him to believe that she is similarly inexperienced.
He finds it difficult to say whether it matters, when both of them are tied so tightly to the other that it is nearly impossible for either to simply walk away. There is grace in it, he supposes, for the benefit of forgiving small grievances is so much greater when they are each other's only companions, and the cost so much more prohibitive.
Their first encounter is spontaneous and alcohol-fueled, and it ends with Karin sprawled red-faced and unconscious on the floor of their living room, the skin of her neck dark and swollen where she'd goaded him into biting her.
He is much more careful with her the next time. More gentle.
It is something he learns gradually. Karin is tactile; she likes to touch and be touched, even to her own detriment. She likes the press of his body on top of hers, the scrape of his teeth at the base of her throat. She likes attention, soft pats on the top of her head, gentle hands holding her hips.
She likes direction, and she responds well to guidance.
That is, she calls him a neurotic controlling bastard, and yet when he tells her to place her arms against the wall, she complies without protest, and when he tells her to spread her legs, she shivers under his hands.
He makes his way down her body slowly, starting with the zipper on her collar and finishing with the buttons on her shorts, his hand sliding down the flat plane of her stomach and under her waistband.
Karin dutifully holds her position until the rest of her clothes have been similarly removed. From there, her only demands are ones he gladly accepts - Higher. Not that high, you jackass!
Kiss me.
Physical contact has never appealed much to him, though he can appreciate certain facets of it. He likes the smoothness of the skin between Karin's thighs, and the indents of her scars rutting under his short nails. He likes the red marks on her nose when he removes her glasses, the sensitive spot under her jaw that makes her gasp his name and writhe in his arms.
He likes those things because they make Karin happy, but he could never hope to match Karin's intensity or hunger in desiring them. In this, he offers only what he knows for certain that Karin will take, and pushes no further than she would have him go.
It's mimicry, shadow play: Karin desires, and he answers.
Unwittingly, in doing this, he believes he has discovered the only thing capable of leaving Karin disappointed.
One morning their first winter they are fumbling in their shared bedroom, their clothes tossed into a heap on the floor, with several layers of blankets on top of them to trap the spare heat their bodies generate.
Most of their days begin or end this way: he will either wake to Karin's hands teasing along the waistband of his pants, or be lured into the bedroom by the sound of her high-pitched giggling.
As for the former, Karin is slow to wake herself, but always quick to wake him. That morning, she is hunched over him, straddling his hips before he is fully conscious, one hand fisted into the shoulder of his shirt, and the other working efficiently between her own thighs.
It is less often that Karin wakes first, and waits for him to join her. And in fact, it being Karin, she doesn't wait for him at all. Before he can even greet her good morning, Karin has her slick hand wrapped around him, attempting to stroke him to hardness for her to mount.
If he is slow to wake, he is even slower to that.
That winter is a dry one, with all of the cracked skin and foggy thoughts such a thing typically entails for him. By then, though, he is awake enough to realize what Karin is doing, and to offer her slight mercies in helping her along.
She works him for several minutes, her once-slick palm becoming dry and chafing, before he places his hand over hers and begins to stroke himself.
It is not any more effective than Karin's hand had been. For all of his familiarity with his own pleasures, it lacks the novelty and spontaneity of Karin's own movements, her human touch. The motions are correct, but the action in itself feels empty.
Nonetheless, he continues, if only because Karin would like him to continue.
It is a matter of pure physicality and, if he keeps at it steadily, it will not take overly long before he can give Karin what she'd like. Ten minutes, perhaps, if not fifteen.
When he tells her this, Karin's brows furrow.
Nevermind. Karin climbs off of him as if nothing had happened, as if a switch in her mind had been flipped. Your chakra went sour, she tells him as she shrugs her pants back on and leaves the bedroom.
And, regardless of the offers he makes to her, she doesn't come back.
She would never say so directly, as a demand, but he knows Karin wants more from him.
That is, Karin wants him to want more, with a desire commensurate with her own. Karin has never shied from making demands of him in other matters, but there are certain things she will not ask of him, calculations of her own that determine just how content she can be with receiving something from him solely because she has asked for it.
On her own, Karin thinks very little of touching him, and when she does it's often spontaneous, unannounced and unexpected.
His responses are rarely voluntary—his body tenses, he breaks out in cold sweats, and, in some moments he would much rather prefer not to dwell on, they lose whatever progress Karin has made with her hands and mouth and body.
Those other things - the things Karin would like him to like - do not come easily. Vulnerability has been bled out of him over the years, leaving him with a very low tolerance for other people, especially when he is not able to direct or predict their movements.
When one's body is made to be a weapon, it's hard to act surprised when it functions as one.
Still, because Karin gives so much and he gives so little, Itachi carves out spaces for her within his own personal sphere, and he continues to carve them out until Karin is satisfied. It is a slow endeavor, her head resting on his shoulder one day, her teeth scraping against his thigh the next, but he steels himself until her touches become seamless, until Karin can touch him at her own leisure and his body hardly registers it.
It is a slow endeavor, but he finds Karin is surprisingly eager to be patient so long as she is rewarded for it.
For a while, Itachi finds that he is able to take care of Karin almost as well as she has taken care of him.
.
.
.
Inevitably, though, the scale once again tips in his favor.
Their relationship is inherently unbalanced, he thinks. He and Karin have their own needs for each other, but Karin's are so much more abstract than his, so much more difficult for him to comprehend. He believes her needs can only be satisfied incidentally, when they are the byproduct of some other act of his.
At times he cannot tell what motivates her more to stay: her interest in him, or her disinterest in going anywhere else. Karin could make a home for herself anywhere, he believes, but there is no one else capable of managing his affairs the way Karin does.
At least, no one else who remained.
For the first time in his life, Itachi cannot be sure whether Sasuke will come back to him. There was a discomfort in his brother's voice when he talked about Konoha, a certain wanderlust in his eyes that had Itachi wanting him to promise he'd return, even if it would only be for a short visit.
He would not ask that of Sasuke, however, because it was not his place to ask anything of Sasuke. Instead, Itachi shook his hand gently and wished him good luck.
Afterwards, he and Karin returned to their prior arrangement. Which is to say, he and she occupied themselves in different rooms and continued their night as if nothing had happened.
Several months later, he has Karin under him for the first time, and he must decide for himself whether there is a second life to be had after the one he has lived, and whether there is any future or redemption for a man like himself.
He defers, putting off the question until a later date, because the decision has only ever been Sasuke's to make.