December

December: It's sad quiet in our apartment, because Itachi doesn't talk much. He laughs even less. I don't laugh much either, because there's nothing to laugh about anymore. Especially in December.

Category: Chapter fic
Status: Work in Progress
Rating: R for language, drug and sexual references, mature subject matter.
Pairings: KisaIta, KakaIru, a bit of GenRai
Beta: Plot Affcianado

Notes: Broke a narration pattern here. Sasuke starts, but he doesn’t finish. There will be less of him in the next two chapters and more KakaIru and KisaIta moments. He’ll be back in Chapter Eight.

And what’s this? Chapter Six is shorter than Chapter Five? Yes, I think so.

October
III. Jack and Jill went up the hill, waiting for disaster.



The tree in Kakashi’s front yard is dying.

The rain from Saturday only increased Sunday, lightning coming down to crack the earth. Newspapers on Monday ran stories about the bolt that hit a telephone pole right outside of Arden and knocked out power in our half of the town.

It just came back this morning. We spent Monday night in the pitch black with a soggy carpet.

Wind did in Kakashi’s elm tree. It already looked like wind had carved spirals and channels through the bark for rainwater to travel down, and now almost every one of its leaves are either on the ground or somewhere down the street. The storm was harsh on Sunday, harsh enough to break the second largest limb of the elm. Now it just dangles from the trunk like a decapitated arm, something out of a horror movie Dad let me stay up late once to watch. I remember having nightmares about that for weeks. Itachi had to let me sleep in his bed.

“Is there a reason you haven’t done something about that tree yet?” Iruka asks as he turns the page of the newspaper, pencil hovering over a notebook. “It’s kind of an eyesore.”

Kakashi’s hand is also hovering, his over the chess board, waiting for his mind to tell his hand which chess piece to pick up and kill me with. He hums absently in his throat, and scratches a spot just under the cascade of his bangs. He’s disinclined to answer while trying to concentrate. Not that he really needs to concentrate overly hard against me, but as per the running trend, Kakashi will do just about anything to avoid answering most of Iruka’s questions.

Iruka taps his pointer finger against the pencil and looks to Itachi for help. Itachi is settled comfortably in chair near me, feet tucked under his thighs for warmth. The cup of tea he made twenty minutes ago is still perched on the table, untouched and no longer steaming. Itachi doesn’t like his drinks hot.

“Shade?” Itachi offers lamely.

Kakashi rolls his eyes and takes one of my rooks into captivity.

Iruka’s right. It’s not a pretty tree. Between the innumerable wrinkles in the bark, and the odd angles at which the branches protrude, and the bumps where the tree buckles from pressure, the tree could be a veteran of war. But the tree belongs to the house, and Kakashi doesn’t change what belongs to the house. The woman who lived here beforehand, he told me not too long ago, was Charlotte. Her husband’s name was Hank.

Right now, if I really pretend, we could all live here: Kakashi, Itachi, and me. Kakashi belongs to the house and I can’t leave Itachi behind. Iruka will have to go.

Iruka closes the newspaper in front of him and reaches for the one with today’s date on it. The other one was from yesterday.

“Any luck?” Itachi asks as he tests the temperature of his tea with his finger. Cool enough for his liking, he takes a tiny sip. This is the third day in a row we’ve stayed here after work, almost an hour on Sunday and forty-five minutes yesterday. It’s not like Itachi to take an interest in a near stranger’s problems, but he has. Or at least he looks like he has a few moments at a time. Sometimes, he stops after one question and drops away completely, leaving me wondering why he asked at all. Such an odd scattering of involvement. Odd enough that he involves himself at all, but this is touch and go.

Shaking his head, Iruka viciously turns the pages of the newspaper until he finds the real estate section. “Everything is too big, too expensive, or too far away.”

“The apartment in Garret was nice,” Kakashi says with a nonchalance he doesn’t mean. Every time they discuss housing, Iruka ends up leaving the room and Kakashi gets quieter.

“The apartment in Garret falls into the ‘too far away’ category.”

The chess board in front of me isn’t making any sense. I’m too absorbed in the conversation at hand, but pretending not to be, and at the same time trying to see the web of traps Kakashi’s laid out for me. Kakashi doesn’t mind if I listen, but Iruka’s taken to giving me looks behind his back. I’m not sure what they say yet. I have to figure out what I’ve done before I can puzzle out these candid glances.

“Forty-five minutes,” Kakashi says, as if it cures all. Iruka doesn’t see it that way. They’ve had this conversation.

“Forty-five minutes constitutes as too far of a drive to work.” He puts a large X through a few blurbs on this house and that apartment. “I don’t want to commute.”

Everything else about the apartment, Iruka had said when he found it last week, was perfect. One bathroom, one bedroom, combined living room and kitchen, no dining room. Reasonable price for a bachelor. It’s just not close enough to the school.

“Think about it. With all that money I’d have to spend on gas just getting to work, I’d be better off switching schools. And it’s my first year teaching on my own instead of being a teaching assistant. I’d rather not do that when the year has barely started.”

There’s fire in Iruka’s voice, and Kakashi is the fuel. It’s not exactly fair that Iruka has to keep explaining himself when Kakashi feels no obligation whatsoever, but those are the rules of the house. I understand that. Itachi understands that. Really, I think Iruka understands, too, but the difference is that he lets the rules bother him too much. Sometimes, he argues too hard for Kakashi to let go. Ever since Iruka showed up, I’ve discovered that Kakashi can turn his voice to ice, just like Itachi. And when Kakashi goes to ice, Iruka goes to fire that doesn’t seem to burn. I understand the irony of it all – the way they work and, most of the time, don’t work. They don’t just argue in loud whispers.

“You’re being too picky. It’s just a house, Iruka.” Kakashi scratches the same spot under his bangs. “It’s your move, pretty bird.”

“I’m thinking,” I retort, not taking my eyes off the chess board and finally focusing in on the soldiers. My pieces are white, his black, and black is dominating the board. “Patience is a virtue.”

His thin eyebrow arches, disappearing into the curtain of his bangs. I’ve amused him again. But if I was offended even a week ago, I can’t bring myself to be now. Saturday changed so much between us. I’ve been trying to understand him for so long with no more than baby steps of progress and middles without beginning, like starting a book in the center and reading every other page. But now I know the beginning. Kakashi doesn’t have many pictures, and certainly none that look like they could be his parents. Kakashi doesn’t keep pictures of dead people.

I wonder what Obito looked like. Did he have black hair, blonde hair, red hair? Green eyes, brown eyes, black eyes? Short, tall, somewhere in the middle? Did he look a like Iruka?

“Are you quoting me, pretty bird?”

I place a finger on the crown of my queen, seeing the danger she’s in and knowing that, once again, I can’t do a thing about it. She’s going to die.

Kakashi chuckles and Iruka’s pen makes a thick, scratchy sound against the newspaper, then against the notepad. Sounds like more X’s. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

Itachi switches the tea cup to his other hand, the injured one. He took the gauze off on Monday, saying that he needed to let it breathe. “Try not to get stitches,” he’d said as he clipped straight through the wrappings with a pair of scissors. “They itch really badly.”

“Garret really is a long drive from here,” he says, leaning his head back against the wicker chair. Kakashi’s had the chair stuffed in the corner from the first day I walked in here, and neither of us ever sits in it. The thing looks like something out of the Better Homes and Gardens magazine Mom had in the bathroom – floral and pastel and altogether too pretty for the sleek, black, cherry wood chair I’m sitting in. “We used to have relatives in Garret.”

I frown as I make my move. Tonight will be like last night, then. “We did? Grandmom lived here, not in Garret.”

“You wouldn’t remember. You were four the last time we saw them, and you fidgeted the entire ride.”

“Did not,” I argue, even though, like he said, I don’t actually remember. Because I don’t fidget. I’m good at sitting still.

“Yes, you did,” he says with that odd almost smile. “You always did on long car rides.”

Even his almost smile is slightly sad. I can’t remember the last time he talked about anything even remotely related to the days before we moved into the apartment, and now he’s doing it for the second night in a row. I’m trying to decide if I like his sad version of the almost smile. Is that better than nothing? I remember thinking so.

“Garret is nice,” Iruka agrees without looking at any of us, as if Itachi was contesting him instead of siding with him. Though I don’t think he meant to commiserate. The intensity that is my brother is offset by his wandering mind. I’m used to seeing his eyes lose focus and go cloudy, but he’s always been fixated on one thought. Now, he’s bouncing between a bunch of them and his mouth is playing along. “I just don’t want to be that far away from the school. I’m still new and just getting used to the system.

“Besides,” he smiles hopefully at his newspaper and circles something. “I’m pretty sure the kids like me.”

And just like that, the torch falls to me. Kakashi isn’t inclined to say anything, Iruka holds that smile that can’t be at a price and Itachi blows on tea that isn’t hot. This is another way they argue, not in loud whispers, but in their silence and my carefully selected words. I have no choice but to continue the conversation, carry them on. They won’t do it, and if I don’t it’ll never end.

“You’re a good teacher, Iruka,” I say after a moment’s deliberation. They both relax, somewhat the smile on Iruka’s face morphing into an actual smile. Kakashi moves a bishop one step closer to my queen’s capture. Exercises in patience and humility, that’s just how I see these games now. I’m still going to win one day, but I figure that’ll come after I completely accept defeat.

Maybe Iruka should take a leaf out of my book. It’s somewhat funny that they both think they’ve won. That’s why they never do.

“Do you still want me to give you a ride to the café tomorrow?” Kakashi asks as I realize that he’s in perfect position to take my queen. Nowhere on his face does the slightest bit of excitement, or even acknowledgement, gleam. It’s like he doesn’t know what he’s done.

I look at my brother. Yesterday, when we were all quiet, he abruptly asked Kakashi to drop him off at the café early. No reason given. I’m probably the only one who cared.

Itachi “hmms” to something, he doesn’t know what, the almost smile hanging around. I know that a short while ago I would have killed to see him do that so often, but really, this smile isn’t the same one that Kakashi induces every once in a blue moon. This one is a freeze-frame, like we caught him doing something wrong. It lingers too long on the periphery of his lips, still waiting for someone to call him on it.

“Yes,” I answer for him, taking the torch to the end. “He does.”

The smile vacates premises after a few seconds. A delayed reaction, he could claim. “By five.”

Kakashi hums agreement and I sit back and wait for his final blow.



*^*^*

Sex is equally underrated and overrated.

On the one hand, yes, it can be relaxing after the fact. While it’s happening, with good sex anyway, your senses go first into overdrive before they frazzle out completely. It’s exactly what I imagine being struck by lightning would feel like, were I stupid enough to stand out in the middle of a storm. There’s something altogether exhilarating and terrifying about the simultaneous empowerment and defeat. Sex is an oxymoron, perfect on nights when you feel up to sorting through the incredulity of it in the morning.

It’s harder and harder every time.

All I see in my post-orgasmic hazy sleep are the discouraging sides of sex. My sheets are rumpled, smelly, and sticking uncomfortably to the small of my back and my thighs. My ass and lower back sport a dull ache. I’m torn between wanting a big mug of coffee and a tall glass of ice water, whichever one will wash away the taste of Iruka’s skin from my mouth quicker. My mind, slow but articulate, plods through a bunch of things I need to do today that I forgot to do last night when I should have done them. Change the sheets. Pick up my clothes. Wipe myself down with a washcloth.

Say no to Iruka.

No, you can’t stay here anymore, no, this isn’t going to work much longer, no, you can’t fuck me into the mattress. No, Ruka, I’m not going to pour out my soul, so just forget it.

I remember a time, one, two years ago, when sticky legs weren’t all that big of a deal, when I felt less of the terrors and more of the exhilarations that come with sex. The in-the-moment feeling used to outweigh the consequences, the overwhelming sense of regret I’m experiencing now as I lie on my side, watching the curtains blowing in and up from the window I told Iruka not to open. Reminding me that I put myself in a hole more than a little too deep.

The scent of him is everywhere. On me, the sheets, the pillows. It’s strong enough to slip past the dried cum and all the sweat, just hanging around to tease me. Telling me I knew better. Normal sex is bad enough, but angry sex? Angry sex is even worse. Twice the regret in the morning.

Iruka is in the shower, washing away his half of last night. I used to join him in the morning when he stayed at my apartment overnight, soaped him up and took him from behind, trying not to fall over. There are a lot things we used to do, things I miss. Back before we were complicated.

If he’d just move to Garret, everything would be fine for a while longer. We can go on pretending that we can last forever, even though we’ve never mentioned the words love or boyfriend or future together. We’ve gotten so good at it.

No, I rethink. That’s not quite true. We did mention the word boyfriend once, early on, in his dorm room with hanging paper lanterns and pictures of half-naked girls. He invited me over, bluntly and with the no nonsense tone I’d quickly come to like about him, “to fuck me.” Third time, more than a one-night stand but not enough to constitute a fling. We had no idea what we were doing other than having sex. Good sex.

I still wonder if I was too abrupt. I could have waited. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend,” I told him breathlessly, his cock buried in my ass, just almost brushing the spot that makes the sweat, the stick, the potential regrets worth it.

He didn’t falter so much as pause, and only for a few seconds in which he processed years of sex and what it was worth to him. Our timetables had better alignment at the time. “Who says I am?” he asked, just as breathlessly, but cocky too, as if questioning how I could have thought otherwise.

That’s all it was in the beginning. And now look at the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. We’re fighting over living arrangements.

I should have said no that first night he called after graduation, I decide for the hundredth time since that night. But by then I’d invited him drinking with me and Genma, had him over for the hockey games and ate burnt popcorn with him. We made it safely to friends.

The water isn’t running anymore. I can hear light morning noises through the open window, mostly squirrels going about their business of collecting nuts, and birds going about their branch-to-telephone wire route, gathering bugs and berries in-between. He left the door open wide enough to let all the steam out. I can see the bathtub, the white and green spider-webbed shower curtain drawing back to reveal a naked, drenched Iruka, hair plastered down his neck and cheeks. He looks good naked. He looks good with a towel around his waist, too, but he looks better naked.

He cooked naked in his kitchen for me once. Pancakes with gummy bears. Some textures shouldn’t be mixed.

“You’re awake,” Iruka says as he slips back into the bedroom. Not good morning. I didn’t expect his anger to evaporate during the night. Really, I ought to give up, let him stay as long as he needs. Be a good friend. I can’t though. I feel walls closing in on us. He has to leave soon, before we’re both forced to admit that time doesn’t stand still.

“I’m awake.” Awake and not at all ready to get out of bed and apologize for something I’m not sorry for saying. I want him to leave, sooner rather than later. It’s not even a lie. He gets ticked when I lie, and when I tell the truth. When I don’t say anything at all.

The truly funny thing about all of this is that he’s never asked about my rituals or habits since I told him I couldn’t talk about them.

He might never even ask what’s wrong with me. I ought to see that as less of a threat than Sasuke. Sasuke asked, for months on end at the cemetery. “Why do you talk to him?” he would ask, his nose scrunched up in confusion. “He can’t hear you.”

Such a naïve, simple question. Such a childlike question. And that’s it really. Right there. Sasuke is a child. He’s not an adult who has the foresight to see that I’m starting to lose it, who will insist that I do something about it. I can see how that’ll turn out now. I need therapy. I need a psychiatrist. I need to let go of the past and move on. Easy enough for him to say. He never killed anyone he loved.

That’s part of the reason I agreed to look after Sasuke in the first place. I commiserated with his brother.

No, he doesn’t ask anymore. But it’s there, in the sighs, the looks, the open window. He’s tired of me. And I don’t blame him. I’m hard to deal with and, as patient as Iruka is with me, I have a feeling he’ll crack if he stays here much longer. He’s seeing things that I didn’t let him see before, in addition to what I did. It’s going to be too much at some point. He doesn’t seem to realize that not knowing is infinitely better than knowing. I can’t even imagine how that would play out. “Iruka,” I would say softly, eyes averted. I wouldn’t be able to look at him. “I have conversations with my dead boyfriend. He died eight years ago. I can’t let him go. Oh, and I can’t throw anything in this house away because it reminds me of people I’ve never even met. You understand, don’t you?”

I must have laughed, because Iruka is looking at me quizzically. He’s in his boxers and a button-down left unbuttoned, looking at me carefully. See, he already thinks I’m a ticking time bomb. And he’s right. I’m going to blow us both sky-high.

Time is never on my fucking side. Or more likely, it just never agrees with what I need. Sasuke needed almost no time at all to accept me. Iruka’s still working on it. That’s why he can’t know about the cemetery. It sounds presumptuous and it sounds like I’m making excuses, but I know Iruka. I’ve known him for four years. He’s not the type of person who can work without an explanation. Iruka likes planners, directions, plot summaries, maps. I didn’t use a map on my road trip to Santa Fe. I took roads that felt westerly, roads that felt southerly. Iruka thought we were nuts. Considering we ended up in South Dakota some point along the way, he was right. But we made it.

“Would you look at that,” Asuma said as he lit a cigarette, the exit for Santa Fe a few hundred feet away. “The nuts made it to Santa Fe.” He took a deep inhale of the smoke that I used to smell like all the time. “You wanna be the acorn or the chestnut?”

I want him to understand and take me as I am, just as much as he’d like to know. But he’s not going to like what I have to say. What I do say makes no sense. He already told me once that I should have talked to a therapist after Asuma died, and he didn’t know about Obito then anymore then than he does now. Just one death. I can’t imagine for a one second that he would be okay coming with me every week, watching me, holding his tongue while I descend deeper into psychosis. Beneath all the muck of emotional and neurotic encyclopedia entries that explain why I’m such a commitment-phoebe, that’s what I dread the most: someone, anyone, suggesting that I should stop.

What if I fall for Iruka? What comes next? All secrets bared and an obligation to let him save me from myself? Therapy. Grief counseling. The whole spiel. And I’m just supposed to take it in stride because he loves me and wants only the best for me.

Stopping isn’t in my plan. Not until I tell him what I keep meaning to tell him. And for some reason, which Father Time might delineate to me when he feels good and ready, I think I need Sasuke to do that. I need what he gives me. Sasuke’s eyes, when he looks at me, are curious, often bewildered, and sometimes stunned, but that I can take. Iruka looks at me with concern, with worry, with caution, and, most distressingly, with disappointment.

Dig even further into my brain for an extra kick to the stomach. The people I fall in love with have a nasty habit of dying. So even if I’m wrong and Iruka does understand my neurosis, I’d live in the perpetual fear that he’d die, so I’d never be able to enjoy his company. I would rather Iruka stay alive and hate me for being a closed-off ass than stay with me and die. I’d rather not live with that hanging over our heads. I’d rather not lose the one chance I have to make amends.

So this is what I do, now that I’ve gotten myself deeper with him than I meant to, so far that I lost track of what we are. I take a deep breath as he leans over to get his watch from the table, smelling the wrong scent on him. He smells like my shampoo. He smells like me. He smells like me and I smell like him. It’s been like this for days. I touch his hair, the shell of his ear, meet those brown eyes full of worry and caution.

Exhale.

“I told you not to open the window,” I say just loudly enough to hear. I’m telling you everything, in my own way, Iruka. I’m telling you that whether or not you protest, we are going to end. I’m not going to give him up. You’ll be gone when you figure that out, even if I do let you in on my secret. See, baby, the violence is up to you.

Iruka bites his lips, looking over his shoulder at the window. There’s disappointment in his eyes. No smiles. “It’s stuffy in here,” he says as he picks up the watch and fastens it around his wrist. “You can close it if you want.”

He doesn’t see it because his back is turned, but I smile for both of us. I keep letting him down enough and he’ll catch on. I wish there was another way to break this cycle, but I’m not up to falling in love. There’s a hell of a lot to lose if I do.


*****

I’m sure it’s considered, by all accounts, childish to glare at inanimate objects. Like cursing at an armchair after you’ve stubbed your pinky toe. You are clearly at fault for the pain, whether by angle miscalculation or pure inattention. The chair didn’t do anything but sit there, waiting for the next patient to fill out its contours.

But, the way I figure it, coffee is made from a plant that was, at some point on a plantation in South America, alive. Therefore, my glare at the mug of Folgers on my desk is not entirely unjustified.

Psychologists call this phenomenon scapegoating, and ninety percent of the patients that pass in and out of my door are guilty of it. Including Itachi, who hasn’t occupied that chair for more than three weeks.

By all rational standards, I ought to drop him from my list of clientele. He’s shown no signs of progress. I’m not an impatient person, all things considered, and I don’t think I was all that rash during our last meeting. We just aren’t getting anywhere together. Short of blackmail, I don’t think there’s any way to get through to him. And it’s a shame. For both of us, it’s a shame.

At least I know that he doesn’t hate me, I think bitterly. That has to count for something.

It wouldn’t take more than a second to scribble the note for my receptionist. She’d tap a few keys at the computer, sending the court official notice, Itachi would transfer, and I’d have a free hour to myself tomorrow. I could go home early, have some leftover pasta, and watch the Thursday night game.

Every time I pick up the pen, though, I put it down again; allergic, suddenly, to ink.

Against my better judgment, I’m still hoping that the kid will show up and take his sullen place in the brown leather chair.

Curiously, even in my imagination he doesn’t talk about his problems. Something is different, nonetheless. I think he might be smiling. Which is crazy, because I’ve never seen him smile before.

I put down the pen for the sixth time.

Was I too hasty with him? Certainly, I don’t approve of how I saw him treat his brother, but a differentiation in morals is no reason to drop a client. Neither is my frustration or his unwillingness to cooperate. That’s my fucking job. I coax, lull into security. I don’t make an enemy of myself and, in return, I earn a bit of trust that he sorely needs.

He doesn’t. When I look into his eyes, examine his body stance, there’s no trust to be found. Still thinks I’m out to get him. I suppose, when it boils down, Itachi and I have drastically different ideas of what help entails. My version of help is to be nothing more than a confidant. I don’t have to say a word. I’ve had patients specifically request that I dole out no snippets of advice and just listen.

My pen taunts me. For being unable to admit to the basest of human emotions, and even more for infringing on one of the cardinal rules of psychiatric treatment: Don’t get emotionally involved with your patient. Feel for them, empathize with them, but don’t invest yourself in their lives outside of the office. Coffee may have taken me there, but Itachi should have kept me away. Psychiatrists are not meant to be friends, or even acquaintances, with their patients. Because here’s what happens: You run into one that doesn’t want to listen to you or be listened to, and all that messy stuff that friends have to shift through – the loyalty and backstabbing, the truth and the lies, the investment and drainage – all of it’s up around your neck.

I want to help him. He doesn’t want me to help. That hurts.

You don’t have to be a genius to see that I’ve gotten too close to him. The beauty of psychiatry is supposed to be the anonymity. It’s easier to spill your troubles to a random stranger than your father. Your father looks at you as if you should have known better. The stranger shakes your hand and says, ‘Nice talking to you and good luck with that. Hope it all works out.’

I want things to work out for him. I want someone to be the one to get a good reaction out of him, the right kind of anger at the right person. His father. Not me, and not himself. And the selfish, unprofessional part of me hopes that he can do it with me. Because I care about what happens to him. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it had to have happened beyond these walls. I’ve had stubborn patients in the past who didn’t get along with me and I had no trouble dropping them to let them move on, to find someone else who feels safe.

Itachi, in all his intractability, is not the problem. He’s just a patient. Granted, he’s the most difficult of the patients I’ve had in my two years of practice, and likely the most distrustful, but he’s allowed to be and, in the office, that’s precisely what he is to me.

Outside the office, it’s different. Outside the office, it’s harder to see him as just a patient. Things got personal when I saw him in a red apron, slamming biscotti down in front of me, hunkered down in my car, hand bleeding into my shirt. In a pizzeria with his little brother.

Our meeting was so random, too. How was I to know where he worked and how was I to know he’d react quite that badly? Maybe I should have known better, I don’t know, but I do know that I, accidentally and misguidedly, gave us a history. It’s not a good history, it’s not a bad history, but it’s there. It’s hard not to care about someone you have a history with. People bond through contact, after all. We’ve had more contact than is necessary for a doctor and a patient.

The dinner. That dinner was the best and worst of it. I should never have taken him out to dinner, let alone his little brother. Because it’s not his little brother either, and it’s not the way he acts around his little brother or what he expects from him. It was seeing it at all that’s turned out to be the problem.

I pick up the pen again, amazed, in spite of my education, at how complex and nonsensical human emotions can be. How is it that I can feel like such a prick and so self-righteous at the same time? I overacted but I’m glad I did?

“That’s not why I did it.” Those words of his keep floating around in my skull, the push and pull of my cynicism and optimism whacking them around like ping-pong balls. If for no other reason than Itachi is about as revealing as an Eskimo in the dead of winter, I’m convinced that there really is more to that story. There has to be more to the story. He’d tell me if there weren’t.

After all, I was right from the beginning. He never hated me. He just really, really wanted to. Now he’ll go on hating himself for not hating me, and I’ll hate him for being such an incredibly repressed, emotional, cynical mess, and then I’ll hate myself because I’m not supposed to be close enough to him to hate him for being a mess.

Mess. Big, fucking mess. All of it.

I hear a light clacking sound and realize that I’ve thrown my pen across the room. It hit the wall right under the signed poster of Ella Fitzgerald, some gem my dad found before I was born that became my birthday present the year I turned seven.

My office is filled to the brim with my personal effects. I know that a psychiatrist’s office, ideally, should host a distinctive lack of stimulation to maximize client relaxation. Soft colors, blank walls, dim lighting. Things that make you mellow. What I find, however, is that most of my patients didn’t mind the posters and the framed photographs. Those mean that I have a passion in life, an investment in something that doesn’t involve dissecting their brain. Some have roved the office from corner to corner, peering at the album covers of my childhood idols and those of my father in cheap jazz hovels in Boston. They’re intrigued by the sunglasses in the dark and the romanticism of novelty film students. Everything’s beautiful in black and white photography. A blonde told me so when I took her back to my apartment. She picked up the photo of my father at his piano, at the piano she thought was mine, and said, “I bet you play beautifully.”

That was about the time I moved my dad’s old things to the office. If I’d have known that would put people at ease in those few months after her kind words sent me into a tumult, I would have done it intentionally. Still, I’ve found these items fortuitous in putting my patients at ease; they ought to give someone the warm fuzzies, after all.

I guess I’ve become too accustomed to happy accidents to remember that there are such things as bad repercussions. His hand, last Thursday, ill will, they’re all bad for us.

Just as I’ve lifted myself out of my seat to retrieve my pen, because for some reason I never have pens that actually work in my office and I’m going to need it if I ever pluck up the courage to write down his name, there’s a soft beeping sound and the rapid blinking from the first red light on my answering machine. During office hours, I switch the phone from ring to beep in case a patient is in the room. The tone is set on low so as to not disturb their train of thought or startle them. I tend to forget to switch it back to ring on my breaks, thus all my calls end up going straight to voicemail when I could have been answering them.

Leaving the pen for a moment, I pick up the receiver and press the button for line one. My system is only rigged for two lines, one of which is the desk downstairs and one of which is my private line. I only give out my private line to patients in case of emergency. The light for the desk is the one blinking, so I patch myself directly to Izzy.

“That was fast,” she says as soon as she picks up. Her phone, which has more blinking lights than mine because she mans the fort for the other psychiatrist in the building as well, knows when I call the same way I know she’s called me. “Normally takes you a few minutes.”

“I was right at the desk,” I retort indignantly. “Didn’t listen to the message though, so I’m going to have to make you repeat yourself.”

She laughs. Izzy thinks everything I say is funny. “I have something for you. One of your patients dropped it off just a few minutes ago.”

I twirl the phone cord around my pinky finger, fondly recalling a night Dad actually called when he said he would. “Which patient?”

“He didn’t leave a name.”

The cord snaps back as I release and bounces loosely. I look at my watch. Five minutes left of my break. I have plenty of time to dash downstairs and pick up this mystery drop-off. It’s not like I have to deal with an elevator or mad rushes of people coming up and down the narrow stairwell of the converted Victorian. We’re very low key. “I’ll be right down.”

The wallpaper covering the room from floor to crown molding is a soft, pale pink, pinstriped with white. It’s feminine enough to remind me that there was a family living here eighty years ago, when all cars were Fords and candy cost a penny. Family portraits hung somewhere on these walls.

Every once in a while it strikes me that this is the perfect place to let go of ghosts and vendettas. They would simply join the ones the wars left behind.

Izzy smiles widely when she see me. She’s a small girl with brown hair and lots of freckles who looker younger than me but actually tops me by three years. No doubt she still gets carded at bars. I suspect she might be a victim of unrequited love for me, if those smiles are indicative at all. She doesn’t smile at Dr. Yamoto quite as broadly.

I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of paper, because I looked right over the cup Izzy motioned toward as she picked up the public line. I have to give the desk a second sweep before my brain readjusts to the correctional information. A cup. A cardboard cup with a familiar logo and an even more familiar aroma.

Hazelnut vanilla.

Tucked into the cardboard that protects my hands from burning is a piece of paper that looks like an order slip. I nearly smile, more interested in the note than the coffee. The paper is overly warm in my palm, feeling ready to burst into flames from heat exposure.

Itachi has neat handwriting. That’s the first thing I’m able to put together as I scan perfectly formed, even lettering. It takes a few seconds getting over the admiration of his penmanship before they make any sense. And even after they form real words, I’m not completely sure they make sense. This seems to be his version of an apology and I’m not quite sure I buy it. But it’s very intriguing.

Doctor,

Not this Thursday. And not in the office.

The Wok Grill, next Thursday.

Seven.

Itachi

I sigh before I can catch anymore professionally sticky implications. Will he ever call me by the actual name? Even Dr. Hoshigaki would do it. Doctor, remembering our first meeting, still sounds incredibly condescending coming from him. ‘You can’t help me, Doctor,’ he said. He was so sure nothing would come of me. Then I had to go and show up on his doorstep, and now I have his idea of amendment in the palm of my hand. Somewhere in between that and this, history recorded.

I pocket the note and thank Izzy for the message, blowing at my Red Lantern coffee through the slit on the rim. The hollow, reedy echo is this whole mess of ours reaching crescendo.

November
I. That whisper down the lane isn’t exactly a secret anymore.

I’m often surprised by the amount of restaurants Arden houses within its confined limits. But then, I’m equally often surprised by just how much of a tourist attraction this town really is. To me, Arden doesn’t exactly seem like a hot-spot for activity. The town, small, but big enough to have an impressive downtown district, has never felt to me as if it were a part of the world at large. I rode my bike down these streets, went to the elementary school, and stopped Sasuke from chasing dogs in the park, even though we both knew he’d never catch them on tiny five-year-old legs. I buried my mother and father in the cemetery.

Looking at their graves, at all the graves spread out around me in neat rows and columns, that was the moment I realized how very big Arden is and how very small my world had become. Me and Sasuke. And money. How much we don’t have, but need, to stay alive.

Sasuke doesn’t know this, but I was terrified. Most days, I’m still terrified. Of more things than I can really name, but mostly that I’ll let him down more than I’ve already managed. I killed his parents and now I foist him off every single day on man I only superficially knew when we struck the arrangement. To this day, I can’t figure out why Kakashi looks after Sasuke for no charge. After what happened to me, my hands were shaking the first time I let Sasuke go home with him from the Den, hoping and praying to a god I swore not to believe in anymore that there were still good men left in the world.

Someone answered, if not God. Kakashi curses and teases him and gives him coffee with way too much sugar, but he’s a good man. Sasuke likes him more than I ever imagined. We got lucky.

And I might have found another one.

If he shows up.

The Wok Grill is a place I haven’t been to in quite a while. A money constraint is the same thing as a time restraint, because I utilize the majority of my time to make money. I’m at work from nine in the morning to eight at night. I’m exhausted and full of Raido’s scraps, so by the time I pick up Sasuke and walk home, sleep is at the top of my list. Restaurants are a luxury on all fronts.

So, naturally, my stomach began howling at me as soon as I stepped through the door, the light but intoxicating aromas of soy and sautéing vegetable a welcome assault on my senses. It smells a lot like the old house. The only thing it is missing is the cigar smoke. Before, in the years when he didn’t touch me everywhere you aren’t supposed to touch children and I still missed him when he came home late from work, I’d sit in his arm chair and breathe in the sharp-sweet fragrance of the cigars he smoked and wait until he came home, afraid he’d be shot on the job. When I stopped, after, in the years when he did, Sasuke took up the occupation.

I close my eyes for a minute and lean back against the wall, willing the memory away when I feel the unmistakable pinpoints of heat prickling in my neck. I’ve been thinking too much ever since I last talked to Dr. Hoshigaki in the park, random reminiscences cropping up every now and again listening to other people talk. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all Dr. Hoshigaki’s fault, but I also can’t shake the feeling that it’s mine, too. For being too stand-offish, for letting the tension of our stand-offs build up to that breaking point. I think a leak sprung in my resolve. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have spent so many days after meeting him in the park back in memory land trying to figure out what I can do to fix my mistakes. I’ve made one too many mistakes to let this slide.

Most of the memories in memory land are pretty bad. I judged him on nothing but assumptions. That was unfair of me. Dr. Hoshigaki is probably a wonderful guy if I’m willing to give him half a chance. I’m the one who’s been going about this wrong. After all, I’d been afraid that Kakashi would be like my father.

I’m just not ready to talk about what happened yet. He has to understand that. He can’t push me to talk about it. Most of the memories I’ve been recalling aren’t so bad. Mostly, they’re good ones that I’ve forgotten. I’d rather them stay that way and I don’t know if I can do that around him. I don’t know if I can trust him entirely, but I did trust in his stalwart attachment to me. I trusted that he wouldn’t go anywhere.

I figure that’s why I’ve been thinking about home and Mom and Dad and my little brother so much. I feel guilty. More so than usual, which is a pretty spectacular feat considering my track record with crimes against the people I supposedly care about. Dr. Hoshigaki wasn’t trying to use Sasuke to get to me, anymore than I was using Sasuke to get to him. I was using him though, to justify my behavior. The guy just wanted to buy me dinner. Us dinner. That makes me the culprit in this blame game, and the one who needs to apologize for making this a battle royal.

It’s not his fault it’s too painful to even think about, much less talk about. It’s not his fault that when I have managed to fall asleep in the past two years I wake up in night sweats, or feel heat choking me when something suddenly reminds me of him and I’m tricked into thinking about him.

I’m sure he thinks he can help, but I still don’t. Not the way he wants to help me. The nameplate on his desk, the notebooks they carry and the pencil jots they make on your file remind me of the court psyche evaluation they gave me at a metal desk, handcuffs safely on in case I was really a nut case and decided to take them all out with my bare hands. They chaffed, I remember that, itched while I recalled anything and everything I’d ever read about temporary insanity, knowing that if they deemed me sane I’d lose him. They’d take him away from me and I’d go to jail until he forgot he’d ever liked me and that’s how I’d die, really, really alone.

I hadn’t needed to fake it, really. Afterwards, I’d almost known I’d gone crazy as I stood there, unable to feel remorse when I knew I should until I heard him start to cry behind me in heavy, racking sobs. And then all I could do was stare straight ahead, unable to comprehend what I’d just done, knowing that it would never, ever be alright again.

I didn’t mean to kill her. Something happened in the struggle, so quick I don’t even know what it was anymore. It’s not like I really knew how to handle a gun when I picked it up off the floor as he pushed his hands further into my boxers, drunk and full of hormones he couldn’t have taken out on some gritty slut in the bar. Has to take it out on me and Mom just one more time when I was sick and tired, sick to my stomach, tired of his fingers in me, and Mom is pounding on his back with a bleeding lip. I’ve never hated you more than in that moment – when the pain in my lower back is threatening to split me right in half, and the gun is so close – it was so easy to get him off of me once and for all.

Sounds like fireworks, those deafening kamikaze bangs. There’s smoke and the hissing of the gun cooling off in my hand. Can’t let go. I think Mom screamed. Blood. Soaking into our carpet the way rainwater from the leaky ceiling does now. Sasuke walks barefoot in that water, the moisture squelching between his toes.

The prickling heat in my neck creeps down my spine and moves through my nervous system. Should have known it was coming, too vivid of a memory to just pass over. There’s still smoke around my head, a throb in my lower back that feels like a million red-hot needles stabbing all at once, like Friday nights. As always, it winds through my extremities first, the burning sensation following the panic like rats following the Pied Piper. They’re crawling, some on my skin, some under, itching so badly that I could crawl right out of my skin to get the hell away from it. The temperature has climbed ten degrees in the room. I bring my hand to the collar of my shirt while the pinpoints reach their destination in my chest, wrapping around my lungs and all of a sudden I’m choking, I can’t breathe. Something’s wrong, something’s wrong with my lungs and my heart, beating faster than it should. I pull at my collar, because with my lungs on fire and the rats crawling on my skin and the threat of asphyxiation (god, isn’t that a pleasant word to describe dying) I’m grasping at straws.

Pinpoint are reforming, taking on solidity. Hands, around my waist and on my chest where the smoldering is concentrating. Or maybe the hands are made of fire, I don’t know, it’s all the same now.

No air. There’s no air to take in.

Colors heighten, distorting everything. Faces are peering at me with exaggerated expressions of concern, blurs of movement as they close in. Someone mentions 9-1-1. They fade in and out like bad radio reception. (1)

I let my knees go, sliding down the wall to the decorative tile floor. It’s the only thing in the room that’s remotely cool.

I close my eyes again, the too-bright colors leaving imprints on my retinas, waiting for it to pass. It always passes, even if it takes a while. The hands on my neck aren’t real, I know that. He’s dead, for god’s sake. I shot him almost three years ago. Nothing about this is real. Even the pain in my back is phantom.

But the hands on my shoulders, those might be real. They’re too heavy to be hallucinatory, and surprisingly cool through the fabric of my shirt. And I think I hear my name being said, repeatedly, like a chant. Since when do strangers know my name? I didn’t tell anyone my name, I remember that. The voice is male, I think. A deep voice. I know that voice.

Blue, that’s all I see when I open my eyes. Lots and lots of blue. So close to me, touching me so softly he almost isn’t until he hooks his arms under mine and I’m back on my feet, the world spinning again. He’s someone I know, though I couldn’t have put a name to all the colors. He’s saying something as he leads me away, but I can’t make out any concrete words.

All of a sudden the temperature drops down twenty degrees. As soon as the cold night air hits my skin, my vision starts returning to normal, although breathing is still an issue.

“Calm down,” the deep voice that I know from somewhere says. “You aren’t breathing right.”

“I know,” I say through ragged gasps, only just realizing the extent to which my breathing is erratic. Now that the murmurings of concern and restaurant sounds are gone, I can hear it rushing through my eardrums. “‘Dizzy.”

Both of his hands leave after guiding me to the column holding up the pseudo-pagoda and leaning me against it. “Itachi, listen to me,” he says, and now that there aren’t so many people I can focus on his face. I look, see blue again and finally recognize Dr. Hoshigaki, looking concerned but exceptionally calm. “You have to concentrate on regulating your breathing. Just breathe.”

Until I have another one, I correct idly, but nod nonetheless. I want this to end, this horrible, uncomfortable itch. He’s saying something again, a quiet authority that I follow without question, because it’s nice to have one of us know what we’re doing. In and out, in and out. I take to watching his chest fall up and down, up and down. I’ve never been especially skilled in mimicry, so I just keep my eyes on the rise and fall. Watching, trying my best to breathe, and not die as time passes.

It’s slow, time in passing. But it heals. One follows the other, just like in the attack. My breathing calms, dizziness goes down, the crawling under my skin fades. The chilled air on my skin seems to replace the prickly heat, also helping me breathe easy as Dr. Hoshigaki continues talking rhythmically. I wonder though, as I feel the prickles fade into something that feels like a healing sunburn – tight, a bit itchy, but no longer painful – how he knew that cold air would catalyze the process.

“Better?” he asks, after what feels like five minutes have passed. I crane my neck to look at his face, feeling small as I notice again how tall he is, especially in such close quarters. We aren’t touching, but he’s standing directly in front of me, hands braced a foot above my shoulder on the pillar. Protecting me, I garner, from the glare and somewhat frightening-from-this-angle smile he’s giving a man in a tweed jacket, an inquisitive onlooker.

It’s so undeservedly sweet of him. It’s sweet and it’s funny. I laugh. I laugh like I haven’t laughed in years. It feels good. Except that it makes me even dizzier and bounces around the hollow of my chest. Is this why I don’t laugh anymore? This horrible, tipsy world must be the reason I don’t laugh anymore.

In and out, up and down. Dizzy, dizzy, please not again.

I blink a few times to focus, sucking in a ragged breath through my concave chest cavity. Must still be out of it?

He quirks an eyebrow as he redirects his gaze at me. His eyes aren’t as blue as they looked a few minutes ago. That’s a good sign. “Did you hear what I just said?”

Of course, everything else on him is more than blue enough to compensate. His shirt, button down as usual, is a light blue left unbuttoned to show off a darker blue T-shirt. Or maybe long-sleeve shirt. I can’t tell. Not that it matters. But still, that’s a lot of blue. Too much blue.

“Do you ever wear anything else?” I muse aloud, counting the buttons on his shirt to distract myself from thoughts of having another one. I’ll go under if I think of that. Dad won’t have anything to do with it. One, two, three, four, five, six buttons. Also blue. “Every time I see you, you are wearing some variation of the color blue. You’re very monochromatic.”

That eyebrow of his goes up a little higher. He reminds me of Kakashi. And Sasuke. Sasuke’s starting to do it now, too. “I was going to say that you look better, but now I think you might be a bit on the delirious side.” He peers at me with an infuriating smile on his face. “Still dizzy?”

I appraise the thought, desperately reeling in my focus, looking outside the circle of his body to see if the rest of the world is making any sense. It’s mostly alright. I do feel light-headed, though. My brain is still playing catch-up from oxygen depletion and it seems to be making me say things. “Kind of. Kind of not.”

“Think you’re okay?”

Normally, I would object to the imposition. Heavily. We’re in close quarters. It might be my slightly foggy brain, but this time it’s not so bad. Especially because he’s acting as a barricade for me.

Yes, definitely a nice guy. And he looks nice in blue.

Breathing. Very important, breathing. “Getting there.”

“Good,” he says, pulling back. “I thought maybe you’d passed out in there.” He chuckles softly, rubbing his hands before sticking them in his pocket. He must find it cold. “To think, I came for the pork-fried rice.”

“Funny man.” I take the opportunity to glare at (an inquiring mind myself???? What does that mean? I think I know, but that reference is too distant and confusing.) “Do you always play the hero?”

“When I need to, yes,” he replies quietly, unwilling to take my previous statement as either a joke or and insult. I’m not even sure what I meant it as. I don’t think it was nice. I’m not a nice person. “It’s funny, your file didn’t mention anything about panic attacks. Probably would have been helpful, you know, in passing. I can prescribe medication for panic attacks.”

I sigh, closing my eyes one more time and leaning back against the pillar. My protective instincts tell me not to divulge too much information, but that’s not why I came here. I’m trying to fix the mistakes I’ve made with him. We don’t need anymore confrontations. I don’t need to feel like any more of an ass. And I don’t need the crawling sensation flaring up again. “I can’t afford it. Neither of my jobs have the insurance coverage.”

Dr. Hoshigaki nods dolefully. “Sorry, didn’t think of that.” He jerks his head toward the restaurant door. “Do you want to go inside, sit down? It’s kind of chilly out here.”

My head jerks at that, reworking something. He didn’t know that the cold helps relieve my panic attacks. He just took me outside to get me away from people. Equally insightful of him, because I felt claustrophobic, but he has no idea how much the cold air helped bring me down from the anxious high. It’s not the first time he’s helped someone through a panic attack. He probably does it for plenty of his clients. “Not yet.” I take a breath, steeling myself for unprecedented honesty, but passing it off as supplying my brain with more red cells with which to work. “I want to say that I’m sorry. For being a jerk.”

“Yeah?” he whispers. “I was hoping you might be. But I was wrong, too.” He pointedly makes eye contact with me, and, like always, they pull me in and keep me there. I really do think he practices that in the mirror. No one is born with that kind of gift. “Coming to see you at work and all. I shouldn’t have once I realized it bothered you.”

No you, shouldn’t have. That was wrong of you. But I was wrong, too.

He twiddles with the topmost button of his shirt. Fidgeting. Nervous, I guess, about this meeting. This has the potential, much like everything we attempt, to be disastrous. I don’t want to be on bad terms with him, whether or not we finally part here or make amends and try something new, something like friends. We have to really clear the air this time. I need to clear the air. I’m the one who made it smoky and hard to see through, who distorted everything. He made his intentions clear right from the beginning.

“Did you like the coffee,” I ask quietly, cringing as the words leave my mouth. Okay, I’m not great at the whole honesty bit. I’m just hoping he gives me credit for trying. Just like I hope Sasuke gives me credit for trying.

I have so many amendments to make.

“Well,” he pretends to muse as he begins walking backwards to the bench just outside the imitation pagoda, “I did come into the Red Lantern for the coffee. Told you that, didn’t I? About a month ago? Or maybe two.” He sits down, sprawled in the bench the way he seems to prefer to sit. His long limbs need room to flop naturally. “Was the coffee supposed to be an apology?”

I follow him, in smaller strides, to the bench. We always end up coming back to benches. “The dinner was actually supposed to be the apology,” I admit, sinking gratefully down beside him. My legs aren’t as steady as they could be. “To make up for the one I ruined.”

“Ahh.” His thumb twitches on the back of the bench seat, close to my shoulder. Twitches again. “That was pretty bad.”

“I really do have a reason,” I cut in quickly, before he can think on it too much and before I lose the bit of nerve I have. “It’s not a good one, but it’s a reason.”

A gust of wind rips through the courtyard, upending my bangs and a few strands of hair that must have come out when I slid against the wall. Dr. Hoshigaki’s curls do the same, though the general impression isn’t of disarray like mine. His hair is always slightly messy. It strikes me as unfair that destruction looks good on him and so bad on me.

I push the loose ones behind my ears, knowing that I look like shit. I can feel the lack of blood in my cheeks. “I’ve been a jerk to you. I didn’t want him to like you because, I thought . . . .” I thought a lot of things. Neither here nor there. Simply everywhere. “If he didn’t like you, then I wouldn’t.”

“You’re right,” he says succinctly. “That’s not a good reason.” He gives me a long once over, during which my heart beats like a wild thing. I fear another attack if he keeps looking at me like that. “Believable, though.” He slouches further down into the curve of the bench, putting his head just at my shoulder level. I blink once or twice, unable to believe that for all my fretting, this is all, that easily. “You were rather articulate for someone in the middle of a panic attack, you know.”

And there it is. I suppose he thinks this gives him the right to tease me. Like I’m indebted to him for enduring my cold, aloof, asinine behavior and still liking me enough to shield me from prying eyes during a panic attack.

Hell, maybe it does. Even if he is partially responsible for all of this. “Oh?” I humor him. “How’s that?”

He throws a mischievous smirk my way. “You called me ‘monochromatic.’”

“Well,” I deadpan in exchange for his mischievous smirk, reacquainting myself with the practice of fair-trade, “care to contradict?”

Dr. Hoshigaki looks down at his outfit, as if assessing the clothes he threw on that morning for the first time. Blue jeans, blue tee, blue oxford. He frowns for the briefest of moments, then smiles. “No,” he finally says. “Not tonight.”

I smile too. Minutely. I’m pretty sure he didn’t notice, still looking down at his blue oxford. “Can you promise me something?”

He stops counting the buttons on his shirt and looks up at me, noticeably wary. The only things I’ve ever asked of him were to give up and to leave me alone, to get the hell away. I understand where he’s coming from and what this’ll sound like. But it’s not the same. Things aren’t the same as they were when I first walked into his tiny, cluttered second floor office. And I blame it all on him.

Whether he knows all that or not, he nods. I continue in the hope that he won’t jump to the wrong conclusion. Like I did. “If you want to help me, you have to promise not to ask me about what happened. With my parents.”

He bites his lip immediately, which I hope isn’t as bad of a sign as I think it is. “Itachi, we tried this tactic, didn’t we? All I got from you was the accusation that I wasn’t doing my job.”

I remember that. I remember being frustrated that he could play my game so easily. Giving me exactly what I wanted so that I had no logical complaint. To frustrate the fight out of me. It had worked so well until I wanted a rematch. “It’s going to be different this time. You promise not to ask about. . . . that, and I’ll promise to answer all the other ones.” As long as they don’t connect too much to the still taboo topics. It might not be a lot, but it will be a step in a different direction.

Dr. Hoshigaki tilts his head back to look at the sky. It’s littered with stars. Daylights savings is a week past and seven o’clock is well past evening. “You promise, huh?”

He doesn’t know if this is right. I don’t know if this is right. Neither of us knows, this early on, if this has a chance in hell of working or if we’re both just kidding ourselves. But, nevertheless and because of it, I’m relieved when he nods. Apparently, he’s willing to hang around and find out. “Then I promise, too. To try it your way.” He glances at the restaurant longingly, hunched up inside his shirts. He must be cold. “Can we go inside now? It’s chilly and I’m hungry.”

In wake of my panic attack, eating is the last thing on my mind. But I suppose I could order something for Sasuke while he eats his pork fried rice. I can take it home in a bag for him like I used to do with desserts from the restaurant.

It’s been a while since I brought home a pie.

“That’s fine,” I agree as I stand up, thankful that the world doesn’t seem to be rotating too quickly on its axis anymore. My legs are steady. “You did come for the rice, didn’t you?”

Dr. Hoshigaki smiles widely, wider than I’ve ever seen before, showcasing all of his teeth. “You just made a joke, kid,” he says as he stands and stretches before taking a few of his long strides back towards the pagoda. He doesn’t have to walk fast for me to feel like I’m losing him. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

I open my mouth to say something in retaliation and close it abruptly. I probably made a snapping sound in my jaw. He always does this to me. He has the uncanny knack of saying exactly the right thing. I’m not one prone to making jokes. I didn’t even realize I was making one. So, I’m not putting my foot in my mouth. Not tonight. Tonight, there was no grand explosion, no forever parting as veterans of a civil war. No broken negotiations. We have called a truce; tentative, undefined, and liable not to withstand excess strain though it may be, there is peace.

I’d like to keep it that way.

***

The house smells completely wrong when Sasuke and I walk through the front door. I should have been clued in by the closed, unlocked door. Sasuke certainly was. He cocked his head at the door as if it had said something foreign, and then curled his lips into a frown.

If someone’s home, I leave the door open. If no one’s home, I lock it. Simple as that.

“Is Iruka home?” Sasuke asks as I prop open the door with the potted cactus I use as a doorstop.

I don’t answer at first, gazing around for evidence of his whereabouts. Nothing looks out of place on my end. The mint-colored blanket is draping from the back of the couch, the assorted magazines scattered on the coffee table, the dictionary on bookshelf next to an old snow-globe of Vermont in winter. His shoes, however, aren’t by the door where he normally keeps them, and I don’t see his car keys on the table by the door. The lights are on though, every one of them, from the floor lamp to the upstairs hall light.

Iruka likes the lights on.

“He’s home,” I affirm, nudging Sasuke towards the couch. “Sit tight. I’m going to put the coffee on.”

As Sasuke nods and toes his shoes off, I head into the kitchen to check for more signs of Iruka. The kitchen is in as much order as the living room – sugar bowl in place, cabinets closed, blinds drawn. The only thing off is the state of the papers on the table. Iruka left the newspaper, notebook, and pen he’s been using for his apartment hunting quest right where he’d been sitting that morning, instead of stowing them in the drawer where I keep the bills and other manners of paperwork.

The unusual scent is stronger in here than in the living room. It’s unusual different, not unusual bad, doubly so because it’s rather familiar. I know this scent. Some time ago, another time ago. It’s a subtle, understated scent, stronger than vanilla and cranberries but lighter at the same time. Vanilla is earth. This is air.

I scoop coffee grinds into the paper filter, three scoops because I dilute Sasuke’s with milk anyway, loosing the airy fragrance to the rich, heady scent of roasted beans. Coffee is an earth smell, keeps you on the ground.

Makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing drinking it.

Without Iruka lording over the process, I’m free to take a gander at the notes he’s been making on the houses in the real estate section. I’m not at all surprised to see that he has an orderly little system for picking out a new place. The entire notebook is dedicated to it. Each number on the page has a circle around it, like questions on a math test, and quick jots on the good and bad aspects of each house. The page I’m looking at has numbers thirty through thirty-four and directly corresponds to the circled houses in the newspaper, also labeled thirty through thirty-four.

The first four are apartments. He meticulously copied all of the details directly from the newspaper – real estate agents, locations, prices, living room dimensions – and then just as meticulously picked each one apart. For a small one bedroom in Sharon, which is only twenty minutes by train, negative points were subtracted once again for the commute. He also took off points for the size of the kitchen and the extra half-bath.

I sigh as I read through the apartments, berating myself for believing him when he said he’d only be here a few weeks. That was in September. It’s November, and Iruka is no closer to finding an apartment than I am to quitting coffee.

The fifth apartment on the list, however, isn’t an apartment at all. It’s a house that looks, I realize as I crosscheck with the picture, about the same size as mine. I blink a few times, attempting to dispel this illusion as the house takes on my front porch, my front bay window. Iruka wouldn’t be looking for a house. A house is too big for him. Two-bedroom apartments are too big for him. I don’t understand how this fits in with the pattern we’ve established, this house that looks like mine.

If I put the papers down now, I can chalk this up to a trick of my mind. It’s easy enough to say that I’m imagining things, considering my history with the dead. I can just say the psychosis is expanding.

But when I shake my head, the little house is still there, and the notes Iruka made in his notebook don’t help matters. They’re twice as detailed as the ones for the apartments. There’s something in these notes, affection in the strokes that’s disquieting, too personal, really. Hardwood floors, he wrote under all of the basic details. Bathroom has peeling paint and the kitchen needs new wallpaper. Bedroom window is cracked. Great afternoon sun in the kitchen. Airy. Too detailed for someone just perusing, these notes, set the blood boiling under my skin. For all his talk about how far away Garret is and how small a bachelor pad needs to be, he has a soft spot, went out and toured a house with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and an airy kitchen with a dining area. None of the other apartments, I see as I flip through page after page of notes Iruka wouldn’t let me see, have notes about peeling paint and the wonderful afternoon sun. He didn’t walk through any of the apartments he could afford, the ones that were plausible.

Seems like I’m not the only one who’s been keeping secrets.

The floor above me creaks. My bedroom straddles the kitchen and the living room, and the joints of that floor have probably been creaky years before I moved in. This house is old and it wants everyone to know it.

Seconds later, the creaking increases but moves away, in the direction of the stairs. Iruka is coming down. If I had any sense of decency, of respect, I would have put the book down. The last thing I felt like doing, however, was respecting his privacy after he’s spent the past month closing doors and opening windows. Let him see. Let him call me a hypocrite. It won’t change a thing.

“Kakashi,” Sasuke calls from the living room. The footsteps stop a few feet from the stairway, coming towards me. “Iruka’s here.”

If ever there wasn’t a time for stating the obvious, this is it. Iruka says a hurried hello to Sasuke and continues on his way to me, walking a bit faster than the footsteps upstairs.

When we look up, make that first moment of eye contact, something bad sparks. I feel it in the way his gaze slips, so damn quickly, from my face down to my hands and to the newspaper he left on the table. There are so many things that he could be contemplating as we stand apart, the distance between us as wide as ever and so much more real than a metaphor. It might be his carelessness, his dismay, fear, anger over my disrespect. It might just be all of those and I might just be mesmerized; Iruka shows emotion, let’s the players flit across his jaw and eyes, there and alive and moving through the stages of what we’ve been through the years.

I smile, which is unnerving, I know, I’ve been told before, smile at Iruka in snug jeans and lightweight red sweater. I smile and watch his face come alive again. Concentrating on that instead of the notes in my hand, the lies I’m holding. “It’s a very nice house, Iruka. Especially the porch. It will look great with a glider, maybe some potted plants. You can keep them in the kitchen, you know, when it gets cold.” I toss the notebook back on the table, where I found it, hearing it skid a few inches after bouncing on impact. “I hear it gets great afternoon sun.”

“Kakashi,” he says, like he’s talking to a wounded animal. “Don’t jump to conclusions, okay. I was just looking.”

“More so than the rest, it seems. Something about it struck your fancy.” I lean my hip against the table, looking back down at the stupid little notebook with Iruka’s crimped, penmanship-of-the-year award writing. “Must be the airy kitchen. Does it have a nook, Iruka, because you should really invest in a place with a nook.”

“Don’t,” he snaps violently, the final bite of the “t” trailing off into a pregnant pause where I swear I can hear whispers, angry whispers of all the things he’s been dying to say. He falters, the words he might have said dying out as thoughts on his tongue. “Ju-just don’t.”

In a way, he did say everything. Silence can speak a thousand, a million times louder than words. I’ve said a lot through silence. I say it now, my gaze steady as I appraise him. I don’t yell when I’m frustrated. I don’t even raise my voice unduly. It’s all unnecessary, because words sting, words lacerate no matter how softly or how loudly they’re said. Even unspoken words, the ones I’m biting down, hurt.

Iruka, he needs words. He needs words now, jaw twitching with the need to say something that will make this moment better. I’d rather let it lie; let it seep under the surface to simmer with everything else. This too shall pass. He won’t be here forever.

He laughs, then, which I wasn’t expecting. A soft, sad, weak laugh that barely carries its weight. The words, they follow. “It’s funny, you know.” I sense before he even says it that he means funny in the ironic kind of way, just because he can’t find humor in this house. He needs a new house, a spacious, empty one that he can fill with his furniture and his memories and forget about the way mine is choking him. “I thought I might have some good news for you.” He crosses the room carefully, still treating me like a skittish animal. Or just like a crazy person. “I found a place to live. I should be out in two weeks.” He reaches across the table for the newspaper, folds it, and takes it to the drawer along with the notebook. Shuts it away. “Can you hold on for another two weeks?”

Can I? I don’t know. This is hard, this he and I, draining in a way that ghosts aren’t. I’m tired of it, tired of him being here, just so tired of waiting for something big to happen. For us to break in half or dissolve, like all the hardness in my face is doing.

I wonder, when he leaves, if I’ll miss him.

I sigh, rubbing the eye with the scar running through it, feeling ten times more exhausted than a normal day at the cemetery. “You’re a glutton for punishment, Iruka.”

Iruka grins an ironic grin to match the ironic laughter. It’s a sad grin, but isn’t most irony sad? His lips part to say something, maybe cheeky, maybe grateful. The knock on the door leaves them at the part.

I know I’m not expecting company.

“Kakashi,” Sasuke calls, warily this time, “someone’s here for Iruka.”

Iruka offers no explanation before hurrying off to the living room to greet his mystery guest. I frown, catching something I missed before. He’s wearing shoes.

Unlike me, Iruka doesn’t wear shoes in the house. He takes them off almost as soon as he walks in the door. All at once, pieces of the puzzle click into place: the missing car keys, the closed door, the cologne, the clingy red sweater.

I follow him. I don’t hurry, because it’s going to happen whether I’m there or not, into the room where plates are shifting under my earth, changing and rearranging. The guy in my house, a guy with hair nearly the same color as mine and a smirk that I’m not fond of as he introduces himself to Sasuke, is dating Iruka (2). He doesn’t have to say it. I know it already.

“Kakashi,” Sasuke says from his corner of the couch. He looks more puzzled than I’ve ever seen him before, and just as worried. “Why does Iruka have two boyfriends?”

“Two?” the stranger to me says easily, slipping an arm around Iruka’s waist. “I wasn’t aware you were dating anyone else, babe.”

Iruka looks up at me, momentarily apologetic. “I’m not,” he says simply, the truth of it stinging more than I thought Iruka capable of. It hangs there, tempting me, practically daring me to say something to the contrary. “He’s just a friend of mine.”

I won’t, though. It’s true, after all. And Iruka wants the truth. I nod.

Iruka nudges his boyfriend in the ribs and whispers something in his ear. He nods, gives Iruka a squeeze and walks out the door. At his back, Sasuke sends a glare worthy of his brother’s praise. I’m surprised the newcomer doesn’t feel it boring a hole into his spine.

“Not mad, then?” Iruka says as soon as the real boyfriend is out of earshot. “Not that I would know. You don’t tell me anything.” A half-chuckle tumbles from his lips. He’s looking at Sasuke instead of me. “Fine. But it’s funny, you know. With all the lies. It’s just funny. Funny that when I went to see him at practice, you weren’t there. No one was.” He laughs a bit more, sounding too hysterical and not at all like him. I think he might be catching onto something. Still laughing, leaving Sasuke frozen like a deer in the headlights in the aftermath of his gaze, Iruka crosses the room and kisses me. Fully, sloppily, and just as desperate as his laughter. In my ear, which he finds after leaving me dizzy on a shifting earth, he whispers something. It’s a loud whisper. I think the whole world heard him. “The kid’s not the only observant one, Kakashi.” His breath, warm and hot and smelling of mint, tickles my ear. “And you’re not the only one who can keep a secret.”

He’s backing away from me, step by step closer to his empty house with the airy kitchen, to buying paint. He leaves the door open, like he’s supposed to, sprinting down the stairs, past the dying tree in my yard that he says is an eyesore.

I think the branches sway as he passes.


TBC

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(1) The heat Itachi feels isn’t characteristic of a panic attack. A description from a friend of mine who experiences them and a bit of internet research tells me that the most common symptoms are: dizziness, heightened colors and sounds, crawling sensations, choking. The heat he feels is mostly psychosomatic and will be detailed more in a later chapter.

(2) Anyone want to take a guess as to the identity of Iruka’s boyfriend? I’ll let you know next chapter, but for now I thought it’s be fun to see you all make assumptions.


Whoa. *Blink dazedly* I’m done with this chapter? Really? I feel like I’ve been working on it forever. Well, on to Chapter Seven!!!!