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If there is anything that Kisame knows, it is violence.
He first raises a blade against a comrade when he is just six years old. Kirigakure does not show mercy to anyone, especially not Kisame, always tall for his age, always strong amongst his peers. And so from childhood he learns to rip and shred and decimate those around him. He is taught to fight enemies and allies in tandem, taught that no one is safe from the slaughter, groomed to be a weapon first and human second.
So it is—expected, in a word, for him to kill the entire cypher division just because he is told that he needs to. The protection of intel, and therefore Kiri, is the priority; human lives mean nothing in comparison. His strength is overwhelming, and he crushes the division like prey in a shark’s jaw, leaves the bodies broken and pathetic on the forest floor.
He ignores the guilt. He is drowning in it worse than if he held himself under the ocean itself, but he pretends he can breathe. He keeps pushing, moving, going, because it’s the only thing he knows how to do.
And so when he discovers that Fuguki was selling the information all along, when he realizes that all his slaughter was pointless—the ground is ripped out from under his feet. Nothing he did meant anything, none of those lives lost mattered. He is a killer of his own people—the worst of the worst, and he didn’t even have a good reason to do it in the end.
He is a monster, worth nothing, good for nothing, jagged and tumultuous as a rocky shoreline, as solitary and out of place and vicious as the sharks he commands.
His disillusionment with the world doesn’t dilute the guilt; it makes it stronger, maybe, because he can still remember the innocent faces of people who choked on their own blood under his blade, eyes asking why until the light dimmed. So he tells himself it’s thrill, excitement, that gnawing, roiling feeling he can’t escape. He tells himself that killing allies is fun, because he isn’t important enough to feel guilty.
He decides that the values he has wrapped in his brute fist, murky ideas of truth and loyalty, are the only constants worth clinging to.
And so he clings.
It makes him raw and vulnerable in all the easiest ways when the masked man finds him, lures him in with blood in the water. These elusive, shadowy promises of a world exposed—it is almost hand crafted to manipulate him, specifically.
He lingers with the swordsmen for the time being, but there’s an itch that he can’t scratch. He thinks that it’s because none of them are strong enough to present him with a true fight, that he could plow through them with his sword and his knuckles and sheer amount of chakra, and so they aren’t interesting or enticing enough to fulfill what an ally means to him.
He is enlivened when, years later, he finds out he is to be partnered with Itachi Uchiha.
Itachi was just a kid when he cut down his own family. Even someone like Kisame has to raise his brows at the story; slaughtering an entire clan, slaughtering your own clan, in a single night as a thirteen year old—Kisame is at the very least intrigued.
He expects to share a common ground with Itachi. He expects them to be able to relate to each other’s pasts, to share the same feelings of being ruthless and cutting, expects to be at each other’s throats. Killing comrades is fun, after all, right? Itachi is strong in a way that excites him.
He taunts Itachi, openly admits to being a monster, ruled by instinct and the command to kill, and tells him to watch his back. He’s wanting to work Itachi up and make him hostile, because he thinks that the tension is what he’s looking for.
Itachi takes a single look at him, and with that calm, guarded face, says, “You are human.”
It’s somehow the most jarring thing Kisame has ever heard.
It’s not until much later that he realizes he was never excited over Itachi because he thought that he would offer Kisame a good fight. He was never expecting rivalry or shared self-loathing because of their mutual experiences.
He was hoping to be known.
For the second time, everything Kisame thinks he knows about the world is turned on its head, and it’s all because of Itachi.
Itachi leads them with his quiet voice and analytical wisdom. Kisame falls into step easily beside him, the brute force behind Itachi’s intelligence, the movement to his stillness. He learns all the little bits about Itachi that he can, gathers them in his hands like scattered grains of rice, clutches them to his chest. Itachi likes sweets, cats, warm tea, the sound rain; he dislikes the smell of cooking meat, uncleanliness, being cold.
He fights on the defensive, evading attacks instead of fighting, and prefers to be covert and undetected. It’s the opposite of Kisame’s style, who bullies into battle and unleashes cataclysm because it’s fun.
Itachi doesn’t enjoy fighting, and he pulls them back before Kisame can get worked up. Before he realizes it, Kisame’s default is to step back from combat and wait for Itachi’s insight. He is so wrapped up in Itachi that he doesn’t even miss the fighting. Maybe it’s because the brutality was only ever a distraction at best and autopilot at worst, maybe it’s because working with Itachi feels even better than battling.
It turns out he’s more than just fighting and killing.
Itachi continues to draw him in like a siren’s song, wrecking all of Kisame’s beliefs against the rocks of his confusing little idiosyncrasies.
Kisame’s newfound attachment to him is the most harrowing development. He always thought that comrades were meant to be kept at arms’ length, guarded with a wary eye, and then cut down after betrayal.
But Itachi was not to be hurt. Itachi was to be—watched, admired. At some point, any and all of Kisame’s anticipatory bloodlust toward his partner had turned into yearning.
So he watches.
He watches the shine of the moonlight on Itachi’s black hair, the flicker of the fire on his face, the long shadows his eyelashes cast on his cheeks. He watches the way he spins his cups of tea on café tables and the way his eyes soften when he smells fresh-baked cakes. He watches the way he brushes his fingers on the top of his crows’ beaks, petting them with a loving familiarity that seems so out of place for everything Kisame knows about him. He watches him finger comb his long hair, cut the ends off with a sharp kunai at a whim, watches him pull his cloak tighter around his body when the wind picks up. He watches the way he touches things, always with a deliberate gentleness, the way his fingers alone move with utmost purpose, every step he takes and tilt of his head intentional.
He can’t look away anymore.
Kisame was steeped in violence from such a young age, familiar only with the smell of blood and steel, the sound of dying screams and wet wounds slopping onto the ground. He thought it was all he knew, all he wanted, all he needed.
But now there’s Itachi. Despite having an entire massacre under his belt, eyes that glow with the deaths of those he loved, there is not really anything violent about him. The way he moves and acts, the way he speaks, down to the words he chooses—the way he doesn’t ever seem to actually kill anybody. He is—gentle, in everything he does. Soft does not seem like a word that can be applied to the most notorious missing-nin to ever come out of Konoha, but when Kisame tries to describe Itachi all he can come up with is soft, gentle, quiet.
For the first time, Kisame realizes that he craves softness, too.
The first time Kisame holds him is on a rainy afternoon in the outskirts of Ishigakure. It’s cold, and Itachi is—exhausted. There is a kind of weariness about him that is rooted in his very soul, something that weighs on him like the earth is trying to pull him down and bury him alive.
The storm comes on so suddenly that Kisame barely has time to warn Itachi. By the time they find a cave to take shelter in, rain is already falling. It’s just a tiny outcropping in the rock that they find; Itachi ends up pressed right against Kisame’s side so that they both fit under the shelter.
Itachi curls in on himself to keep warm; sometimes, in moments like these, with Itachi small and shivering and exhausted, Kisame can’t see the infamous clan killer, with his bloody hands and bloody eyes. He just sees—Itachi. He isn’t yet sure exactly what or who that is, Itachi, but he knows that there’s some sort of distinction there, between this Itachi with his chin on his knees and his eyelashes on his cheeks, and the one who commands whatever battle field he steps on.
Kisame is lost in his thoughts, letting the light of fire smear the vision behind his eyes with white and yellow, when he feels something gently knock against his shoulder.
Itachi is asleep, dozed off to the sound of rain and crackling of the miserable little fire. He cheek is pressed against Kisame’s shoulder, smooshed up in a way that makes him look even younger, somehow. His black bangs spill around his face, slipping out of the low ponytail.
He just—watches Itachi, as he always does. Itachi looks like a different person when sleep has smoothed the furrow away from his brow, the sharpness out of his eyes. He realizes, with a little catch of his breath, that Itachi might be the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
Kisame hasn’t seen or noticed beauty in a very long time, and he was starting to think that maybe he just doesn't have the eyes to recognize it.
But here, pressed close in this tiny little cave, he knows now that he can see beauty. It exists in this world, after all, and to him it begins and ends in Itachi.
He raises his hand slowly, staying as still as he can, like he’s trying to pet a skittish animal, and touches Itachi’s hair. It’s smooth under his rough palm. He slides his hand down, gentle as he possibly can, to rest it over Itachi’s neck.
Kisame can’t remember the last time he touched someone that wasn’t to break their bones or rip them apart.
He just—feels. Feels the warmth of Itachi’s skin seeping into his hand, feels the thrum of his pulse, feels the texture of his hair where it spills down his face. He feels Itachi breathe against him, his shoulders rising and falling gently. He holds him there, tells himself that it’s just to keep Itachi’s head in place so that he can sleep peacefully, because Itachi is tired and cold, and Kisame—cares that he is safe and warm.
His fingers curl gently, curving around the top of Itachi’s jaw, finger tips pressing into the soft flesh under Itachi’s ear.
He doesn’t think he’s ever held something in his hand that felt this precious.
It turns out he likes being gentle sometimes, too.
It becomes a strange little habit for them, sharing warmth when Itachi gets too cold. Sometimes Itachi just sits quietly next to him, close enough to feel his body heat; sometimes Itachi presses right into him, buries his face into his skin, curls his freezing fingers around Kisame’s muscles. It’s just another one of Itachi’s eccentricities. He’s still distant, cold-hearted, disinterested in almost everything. Kisame, hard as he has wracked his brain, cannot figure out what Itachi is really doing, why he is in the Akatsuki, what goal he is striving towards.
Itachi is too calculated, too analytical to drift aimlessly, so he’s sure that there is something whirring behind those alluring eyes and long lashes. Every time Itachi offers Kisame another little piece of who he is, Kisame finds himself craving more like a starving man.
But Kisame doesn’t ask, and Itachi doesn’t tell, and that—works for them.
It’s enough for Kisame, to follow and yearn. Its enough for Itachi, at least it seems, to press against him for warmth when he needs it. The unspoken intimacy of their physical touch becomes Kisame’s only solace in life; Itachi’s warm, breathing body in Kisame’s arms is like a refuge from the feeling of people going limp and dead in his murderous hands.
He adds ‘touch starved’ to the list of revelations he never asked to have.
The last time Kisame holds him, he doesn’t even realize that it’s the last time.
It isn’t particularly cold, but Itachi is tired, even for him. He’s been getting tired more easily lately, retreating away from Kisame as the sun goes down and coming back with exhausted eyes and a rough voice. Kisame wants to help him, whatever is going on with him, but it's never the right time to ask him about it.
Itachi looks like he might collapse at any minute, so Kisame pulls him to the nearest motel. It’s shoddy and run down, the wooden boards rotted and splintering, paint chipping.
“I might just make the floor fall through,” Kisame jokes, holding the door open for Itachi.
Itachi’s most surprising skill is his banter; Kisame is used to getting dry witticisms in response to his corny jokes, but Itachi stays quiet this time.
The innkeeper blanches at Kisame, almost seven feet tall and wide as a barn door. “I’m—I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I only have one room available tonight.”
Kisame grips the hilt of Samehada, fingers tightening. “I’m sure we can find a way to make it two.”
He squeaks, pressing himself against the wall behind the counter. “I cannot—”
“One is fine,” Itachi interrupts. His voice is gravelly, and his hat hides his face.
Kisame glances at him from the corner of his eye; Itachi looks like he’s about to fall over.
“We’ll take the one, then,” he relents. “You can make it on the house for our troubles.”
All it takes is a grin that flashes all of Kisame’s sharp teeth for the innkeeper to throw him a key.
They’ve been walking all day, practically, so Kisame is grateful for the opportunity to stretch out on the bed and rest his feet. He tosses his cloak on a chair and sets Samehada against the wall before collapsing onto the single bed.
He closes his eyes and listens to the sound of water running in the bathroom, interrupted only by half-hearted coughing. Itachi stays there long enough for Kisame to grow sleepy, and when the rain finally starts up, patting gently on the ramshackle roof, he is lulled off into a state of amorphous unconsciousness.
Itachi rouses him when he comes out of the bathroom, the gentle tapping of his feet enough to draw him back into awareness.
“There is a leak in the bathroom,” he hums.
Kisame snorts, eyes still closed. “I’m surprised the roof hasn’t caved in yet.”
Itachi lays his cloak over Kisame’s and pads over to the bed.
Kisame opens his eyes in time to see Itachi tug the band out of his hair, letting it spill long and loose around his neck and shoulders.
His heart flutters.
There’s only a single bed, so of course they will have to share, but it still pleasantly thrills Kisame when Itachi chooses to climb directly on top of him.
He thinks that Itachi fits well against him. Maybe it’s just the size difference, sure, but there’s something about how easily Itachi’s head can tuck into his neck, how perfectly he melts across Kisame’s broad chest. They’re—synchronized, balanced, compatible.
He runs his hand down Itachi’s soft hair, securing one arm over Itachi’s shoulders as he feels Itachi press his icy toes into Kisame’s legs.
Kisame’s hand spans almost the entirety of Itachi’s waist. He splays his fingers across Itachi’s lower back, marvels at the way it fits under his palm.
“I could snap you in half with my bare hands,” he grunts.
Kisame feels Itachi’s frosty nose press into the skin under his jaw, and then Itachi’s contented sigh fans across his neck. “You won’t,” he murmurs. It’s completely confident, and in that moment Kisame realizes—he’s right.
He won’t hurt Itachi.
The revelation hits him with a soft sort of finality. He won’t hurt Itachi, not if the masked man Madara asks him to, not if Itachi sinks a kunai into the backs of every single Akatsuki member. For the first time in his life, Kisame has someone he won’t kill, not for anything. For the first time, Kisame has an ally that he wants to hold close.
So he holds him close.
Itachi’s quiet, gently labored breathing has become his favorite sound. He listens to him until his breaths become farther apart and he knows he has fallen asleep, and then he holds him even more tightly. He thinks that everything will be okay as long as he can keep having these little moments with Itachi.
Kisame doesn’t even have the word to identify his own heartbreak when Itachi dies.
It doesn’t feel like anything is breaking. He doesn’t cry, doesn’t fall to his knees and tear his clothes or—whatever grief is supposed to look like. He’s never grieved, never been told he was allowed to grieve, because everyone he has lost was supposed to die, right?
But Itachi was not supposed to die.
How could he have been? Itachi, who didn’t even mean to, taught Kisame what beauty was, what softness was, made Kisame realize that, while he’s rough as shark skin on the outside, there is still something alive within him.
He showed Kisame was love is—what if feels like to want it, what it feels like to want to give it, to need to give it.
Kisame is in love, and his Itachi is dead.
It turns out that heartbreak is an emptiness.
Itachi smoothed Kisame over with his chilly fingers, pressed against all the holes that life had punched through him, and now that he is gone it felt like Kisame was a deflating balloon. Itachi was a warm glow that nurtured something in him, and now he is cold again.
Things had started to make sense. Life had started to mean something different. He thinks that there was truth in the way he loved Itachi. It was the only thing he ever did that wasn’t influenced by anything else, by orders or enemies or preconceptions. Itachi made the inside of him was settle like sand to the sea floor after a storm.
He never doubted, he never fought.
He used to feel powerful for being alone, used to feel independent and strong as he traveled through life self-sustained. He just feels adrift, now. Being a rogue, he’s never had a place in the world, never thought he would fit anywhere. He fit at Itachi’s side, though. He had a place that mattered with Itachi, and now it’s gone.
It feels—karmic, maybe. That after everything he has taken from the word, all the blood he’s shed and lives he’s ripped into, bodies he’s shredded, that he would lose the only thing he ever really came to love.
He keeps going, because he thinks it’s what Itachi would want him to do.
The time eventually comes where he realizes that it’s the end for him, too. He accepts it so easily it almost surprises him, because he could probably fight a little bit longer, at the very least could probably escape with his life.
Maybe he’s chasing Itachi. He hasn’t wanted to confront how lost he has been since not being able to return to Itachi’s side. He hasn’t let himself admit that ever since losing Itachi he just hasn’t cared about anything, not Madara or the Akatsuki or this asinine Moon’s Eye plan. The truth is that Itachi’s death once again tore Kisame’s world in half, and three times is just too many, even for Kisame.
He’ll never know if Itachi really loved him. He’ll never know if Itachi would even be able to, Itachi with his pretty eyes and curved lips and sweeping hair, Itachi with his complexity of buried mysteries and twinkling philosophies.
Kisame is roguish, brutal—simple, he thinks. He fought, and he killed, and now he’s going to die.
There was something about him, though, that shifted and changed.
He thinks, as he’s bleeding out and grinning, that the word he is looking for is healing.
Itachi started to heal him, all his open wounds and broken teeth. His quiet, wry affirmations, buried in wise quips and dry humor, soothed the storm in Kisame’s soul.
He doesn’t know if Itachi really loved him, no, but he does remember the way Itachi sighed across his skin, the way Itachi rubbed his thumb against him sometimes when he was curled up against his chest, the way Itachi came back to him again and again for warmth and—maybe something else, too.
It makes the task of commanding his sharks to eat him just a bit less daunting.
He takes himself out the same way he committed his first great sin, the sin that haunted him with a cloak of guilt his entire life. He destroys himself to protect the integrity of the Akatsuki, because it’s his turn for his life to be less important than preserving information.
It feels like it’s enough to make his life worth something in the end. He knows now that there was good in him all along; he wishes he could have known it when Itachi was still alive, because maybe something would have been different if he had.
Maybe Itachi saw it in him all along. Maybe, when he finds Itachi, wherever they end up, Itachi will still have cold fingers, and Kisame can hold him again.
And so he follows Itachi, smiling.