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, AU
Status: Work in Progress
Rating: R
Pairings: KisaIta, KakaIru, a bit of GenRai

Notes: Well, here it is. For once, I really was speedy about something I promised I'd be speedy about. This chapter takes the record for length at thirty-three pages long, so park yourselves somewhere good and comfortable.

Chapter One-August I & II
Chapter Two-August III & IV
Chapter Three-September I & II
Chapter Four-September III & September IV
Chapter Five-October I & October II
Chapter Six-October III & November I
Chapter Seven-November II



***
Come on, we all know I'm not Kishimoto, don't we?

December I
I. Just around the corner, there’s a man who knows your name

Time doesn’t make sense, if you really stop to think about it.

At eleven fifty-nine, it’s November – the month of fallen leaves, creaking floorboards, Kakashi’s philosophy book, paper turkeys, packages in the mail. With rain not cold enough to be snow. The month Itachi promised to play a game and Kakashi gave me a marble for safe-keeping, while we wait for him.

November is the month Iruka left.

There were boxes on the porch that Sunday morning. Three of them, stacked like a tower by the front door, leaning slightly to the side. Kakashi didn’t write his name on them, but I knew they belonged to Iruka. No one puts their own things out on the porch unless they’re leaving, and I smelled coffee before I even made it up the steps. Before I even saw the boxes.

He’d been brewing it all night. Pot after pot and cup after cup of coffee from midnight to 8 a.m. It smelled like he’d painted the walls with it.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to smell coffee and not think of him. My brother smells like coffee too, but not all the time the way he used to. On Thursdays and only Thursdays, he smells slightly different. The coffee is still there, but it’s buried under other smells, ones I can’t always identify; sharp, spicy scents that sting my nose and make my eyes water and thick, sweet aromas that vaguely remind me of peanuts. The smells come from plain white bags with plain white boxes he says are for me. He doesn’t tell me what the food is until after I take a bite, which isn’t fair, because I don’t like onions and the chicken he gave me definitely had onions in it. I wouldn’t have eaten it if he’s told me first.

I pushed it away after that, washing the onion down with Kakashi’s coffee. Coffee tastes better than onion, and smells better than the sharp, spicy aroma he brings back with him.

Coffee smells like the way things are supposed to be.

Iruka didn’t smell like coffee. Even after being around for two months, he smelled more like the candles mom would light around Christmas and the red berries on wreaths. I don’t know how he managed to escape it between Kakashi, Itachi and me. I suppose it’s because he left as often as he stayed. To be with his other boyfriend.

In that way, not much has changed. We still play chess during dinner, the house still creaks when the wind blows through the open door, and Saturday is still a day for graveyards. The sugar bowl is in its place on the counter, the mint blanket on the arm of the couch. None of Kakashi’s books have moved, none of the furniture has shifted, none of the knick-knacks on the shelves have disappeared. Nothing in the house, it seems, belonged to Iruka. Three boxes full of clothes and nothing else. Where did Iruka keep all of the things in his life that came before Kakashi’s house? The books, the photos, the music he’d hum under his breath?

Kakashi thinks they’re with his other boyfriend. The one who called Iruka babe and asked me my name, ready to forget it afterward.

Mizuki, who smelled like cigarette smoke that made me want to cough.

As horrible as it sounds, I don’t think I’ll miss Iruka. For as long as he stayed, I never really got to know him. He was never with us. He’d eat at the counter while Kakashi and I played round after round of chess, grade homework in the living room with the radio turned on low as he hummed. Come in late, just as Itachi and I were leaving.

There without being there.

It’s what I once imagined meeting a ghost would be like, before I actually met one. Because ghosts, Kakashi’s proven to me, are very, very there. You feel them, whether you want to or not.

I wonder if Iruka ever felt them. I don’t see how he couldn’t have. Not a minute goes by in Kakashi’s house when I don’t feel them. Finding them there is unnerving, but you don’t feel so strange around them after a while. They’re comforting, in a way, simply because I can always count on them to be there. I don’t know if they have names, or if we’re supposed to know them, but I give them my own names, and they don’t object. I call the sunflower clock in the hall Maria, ask her what time it is before I look for myself.

Sometimes, I wish I could have taken Iruka by the hand, led him to Maria and introduced them myself. Maybe that way he would have seen. Maybe that way, he would have been there.

Maybe that way, we would miss him.

But the way things are, November is fading into December and leaving him behind. Second by second. On clocks like Maria, you can see time in detail; watch the ticks of the second hand as it passes over all the numbers. On clocks like ours, you can’t see the seconds going by. You can count them in your head, if you want, but in the end you can only trust that the green numbers glowing across the room will change all on their own accord, without you.

Thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty seconds until November is gone, and it doesn’t make sense that I could miss it with a blink. That it’s happening already.

Between the green glow of the alarm clock and the streetlamp light peeking in through the crack in the curtains, I can see mostly everything in the room. The closet by the foot of Itachi’s bed has a broken door handle on the right side that gleams slightly. I can’t tell if it’s from the crack in the curtain or the glow of the clock, but it flickers when I lower my eyes, like a candle. The big fan we keep in the corner for summer nights is off, replaced by the hum of the finicky radiator in the living room. The dresser with the big mirror on top hulks against the wall by the door, the bottom drawer left open from my impatience to get my bare feet off of the cold floor and into my bed.

If I sit up, I can probably see parts of myself in the mirror. I’ve done it in the daylight, when I can see my whole reflection instead of only the parts that catch the light. But since it’s too cold to do that, I content myself with making out bits and pieces of Itachi. His hand, curled across his belly; his shoulder, peeking out from the two dollar shirt we found at the thrift store; his nose, half hidden in shadow. He has dad’s nose. That’s what mom used to say.

Seeing his arms and shoulder exposed to the cold sends a shiver down my spine. I don’t know how he does it. The room is almost as cold as it is outside. I’m a little cold under the blankets.

Then again, once December is here, he’ll take to the fire escape without any blankets. Without a coat or shoes.

I’d like to just crawl into bed with him. Brave the chill of the floor and huddle up at the other end of his bed, buried under the blankets. I used to do it all the time when I was younger –when I couldn’t sleep, or when I had a bad dream. He’d stir out of sleep as soon as I climbed up, blink blearily at me, and murmur something before he slipped back into dreamland. He didn’t mind, back then.

My guess is that he’d probably mind now. Not because he likes me any less or doesn’t care about the bad dreams I have, but because he doesn’t like being touched. The first year was the worst. If I so much as brushed his hand when reaching for the cereal he’d go stiff as a board. Hugging him, if I’d ever wanted to while I was mad at him, wasn’t a good idea. It still isn’t, as far as I can tell, and even though I’ve thought about it and he’s getting better bit by bit, I’m scared to see what will happen. If he’ll get that blank look on his face, go stiff, and pull away.

That’s why I only touch him if I have to rescue him from the cold of the fire escape: He forgets himself out there.

Outside the wind whistles as it blows through the gap in the window – a tiny gap that we’ve tried to fix, but it won’t budge. The air lifts the curtains up and out, looking like my old version of ghosts, shimmery and lightweight. If it blows highs enough, you see glimpses of the tiled roofs across the street, the wires of telephone poles. Moonlight, lamplight, rain…

Snow.

I blink, sitting up, making sure it’s not just the dust that collects and swirls under the lamp. A few seconds pass and I’m sure it’s snow, because it’s everywhere out there, from what I see before the curtain flutters back against the window pane, sucked tight when the wind tries to pull it through the gap.

Snow at midnight. Itachi isn’t stirring.

Snow is falling, the clock says twelve o’clock and November is over, gone for another year, all before I have anything to say about it. I feel like I’m the only one awake to see this, even though I know I’m not, and it strikes me that this is the way I want it to stay. Itachi doesn’t have to know what happened here tonight. He doesn’t have to know that it’s December. We could just stay here, in the dark, where things are finally getting good again.

He said goodnight to me. Goodnight and sleep tight, the same way Mom used to. He didn’t kiss me on the forehead, or even come to the room with me, but he said goodnight from the couch, tucked into the corner with the book he’s been working through all week. He has a stack of them on the end table. They’re the only books I’ve seen him with in a month.

It can’t be all that unpleasant, living in the past. Kakashi lives there all the time. He never stops. I don’t usually envy him. He seems lonely sometimes, even when I’m around, but if he can keep Iruka away, I should be able to keep December away.

I don’t want Itachi to start forgetting himself. Not now, not when he’s just starting to remember.

That Itachi scares me.

Mom told me once that wishing on the stars would make my dreams come true. All you had to do was pick a star. She said it didn’t matter which star, because every star is a wishing star if you desperately, desperately want something. Because wishing stars don’t work for things like days off from school or toys, or the everlasting bowls of ice cream. Wishing stars only work for your heart.

I was so entranced by the rise and fall of her voice that I nearly forgot to make a wish. But when I remembered, snapping out of the thrill of an explanation that felt more like a story, I wished for snow. And that night, it did.

So I went on believing in wishing stars. For years, I believed that if everything else failed, I’d have the stars to fall back on. I wished for the pain in Itachi’s back to go away, for dad to come home early, at least once. I wished for rain in the middle of July.

I wished for my parents to come back.

I haven’t wished on a star since one let me down. Moms are story-tellers. The stories are good and sound so perfect, but in the end, they are what they are. Stories. And even the desperate ones can’t do the impossible. Desperation didn’t bring mom and dad back, and it has yet to bring Kakashi’s friend back either. Sometimes, desperation can’t even do things that are possible. I figured that out watching Iruka, slowly forgetting how to fight for the things he wanted.

Iruka liked to play pretend instead. And I think that’s what you have to do – live in the past or play pretend. Pretend, for tonight, that the clock didn’t change to midnight. Pretend that Itachi doesn’t notice his bed dipping down as I climb onto it wrapped in my blankets, my knees knocking into his feet. Pretend that he doesn’t ask me what I’m doing over here and just lay my head against the wall, listening to the wind and the snow and December, settling down to ruin us. I pretend that, in the few seconds where Itachi watches me and waits for an explanation that I won’t be able to give, that he understands how badly I want all of us to be happy, away from the fire escape.

I pretend that, maybe, the star that let me down was just the wrong star. Maybe there are other stars up there, right now, that can give me what I want. One of them can stop time. Another can stop the snow.

Itachi sighs, mumbles something I don’t hear as more than syllables and lies back down, edging his feet away from me. Maybe he’s pretending I’m not here. Maybe he’s pretending it’s alright. I don’t really know. All I know is that it gives me a few seconds to take a breath. A long, deep one that I pretend is sleepy and contented when it’s really relieved, and just the tiniest bit hopeful.

A few seconds can change a lot. If Iruka had played pretend for a little while longer, just pretended that things would work out later on down the line, would he still be here now? Would he have made it to December? I’m not sure anyone really likes playing pretend, but sometimes, you need to feel better. To keep going until something can change.

I feel bad for him. Those boxes will smell like coffee for weeks.

***

According to the radio, the snow came just past midnight. The window frosted crystalline, the crack in the window let in the cold, and the temperamental radiator let it stay. By the time morning rolled around, Sasuke and I could see our breath in the air.

Sasuke spent the whole day with Kakashi and me at The Den, surprisingly unexcited by the unanticipated day off from school that the weather had given him. At his age, I remember living for even the chance that school would have mercy and give us a day to horse around in the snow. Sasuke merely graced the radio announcement was a tacit acknowledgement, before he reassumed his position as window sentinel, surveying the scene beyond with obvious discontent.

I didn’t know if I should ask him why he looked so distraught. I’m not his confidant. I settled for letting him be, hoping that he’d snap out of his mood in his own good time. Knowing Sasuke, he will. He’s resilient.

Knowing me, I wouldn’t be able to help him anyway. I keep secrets. I don’t ask and I don’t tell.

It’s not that he doesn’t deserve to know what happened. Of all people, he’s the one that should know what kind of family he really had. But I can’t talk about it with a trained psychologist. There’s no way I can talk about it with Sasuke. There’s so much I’d have to explain. Why Mom dreaded the nights Dad didn’t come home right after work. Why our own grandparents don’t come to visit anymore. What rape means.

Of all the things, that’s the one I dread the most. How can I possibly explain something like that, something that still sends tendrils of hot helplessness shooting up my spine to someone who doesn’t even understand what sex is? And if he could understand all of the ways it damaged me, would he turn on his memory, too? Would he still see our mom as a saint and our dad as a patron, loving us from a distance? Would I still be the bad guy?

The truth is that I’d rather he sees me as the bad guy. One of us should be able to have some good memories. One of us should be able to lay flowers over their grave, if only because Mom is buried with him.

There were a few times when I wanted to. Mom was a saint, as much as she knew how to be. She didn’t deserve the bottle of gin I broke over her grave any more than Sasuke deserved to see me do it. She didn’t deserve to be buried with him.

I pause for a moment. I can feel the flush of heat threatening at the base of my neck, wanting to take over. Not a panic attack yet, since my breathing hasn’t changed, but a significant, burning reminder of why I keep my silence. His hand would rest there, light as a feather and always hot for some reason. Possibly the alcohol, heating his blood. Possibly my imagination, and my fear of the closed space into which it drew us.

I crouch down near a fence, reaching for a handful of snow and consciously not thinking of anything but the snow. The cold crunches under my palm. I push down, burrowing until my wrist is gone and the chill creeps up to my elbow. To anyone passing by, I look like I dropped something. Something rather important, because I’m willing to stay there for almost a minute, fingers wriggling in the bank.

As to what I’m looking for, their guess is as good as mine.

When I have just enough feeling in my hand for the sake of flexibility, I withdraw and rise from my crouch. My hand seeks out the hot spot on the back of my neck and settles there until it leaves.

Heat is how I remember my father. Cold is how I chase him away.

As I wait for the tingling feeling to subside, I focus on other things. I study the street sign, crooked white letters announcing that I’m on Burberry Street, less than one block from my destination. Something hit the pole at some point because it leans at a frighteningly precarious angle that rivals Italy’s famous tower. A car. A kid on a bike. I look down at the sidewalk, following the path my feet took to get here. I have small feet, I realize, as I spy another pair of footprints walking in the same direction before they cross the street just up ahead of me. Somewhat elfin feet.

I roll my eyes wryly, knowing good and well that a thought like that had to have come from Kisame. I would never call my own feet elfin. After the vastly entertaining dinner, during which he likened Sasuke and I to elves, I’d expect nothing less from him. Despite my best efforts not to be too accommodating, part of him has taken up residence. Unfortunately, it’s the part of him that delights in torturing me. Incessantly.

Amazingly, Kisame transformed. Once he realized that I wasn’t kidding about turning over a new leaf, he became almost an entirely different person than the one I knew behind the desk. One I almost don’t recognize.

He looks the same. He continues to dress almost exclusively in blue and, I suspect, not really brush his hair in the morning. But his eyes are different now. They’re still as blue and vibrant as before, but they don’t hold as many concerns as they did before. I didn’t know they held that many until they disappeared.

Apparently, I was on his mind far more than I imagined.

I flex my hand on my neck, digging my fingers into my skin. If I were to pull away, there would be white imprints left on my skin that would fade away in ten seconds of so. Only imprints. That should be the last of the memory.

I count to five, just to make sure I’m not jumping the gun, concentrating on the snow. White, like the imprint of my fingers. Smooth, cold, and light. Sasuke used to call them ground clouds, toss up handfuls of powder into the air where they’d glitter if they caught the right light. He’d spin around in circles until he was dizzy and fall to the ground. Once there, he’d spread his arms and legs and flap, making the sloppiest snow angels I’d ever seen.

Sasuke probably doesn’t remember that. He was barely three at the time and said ground with a “w” instead of an “r.” I find myself wishing that he does, because this is one memory that isn’t dredging up other things along with it. Far from it. I realize with an odd, overwhelming kind of clarity, that this is a good memory. Among all of the bad ones I continuously push down, I’ve practically forgotten that good ones still exist. Perhaps even deeper down than the bad ones, if one surfaced so unexpectedly that it rivaled epiphany.

The heat on my neck is gone entirely.

The snow must be doing this to me. I’ve always been aware that the cold has a calming sort of effect on me, but this is different. This isn’t numbing. This is feeling, remembering and somehow not regretting the slip.

This is what some people call okay.

It’s a nice feeling. Airy, vague, and insubstantial, but nice all the same. Though I have to wonder, thinking of the hand I plunged into the snow and the welcoming embrace of freezing midnights, how long “okay” will last before it turns into something devastating. Truly good evades me yet, and I still don’t know if I can handle that kind of remembrance any more than I can handle the truly bad. Things can start out good and end up bad without much effort. I understand that perfectly. Memories are no different.

Moving forward is a necessity now. I took a few steps backwards to make amends with Kisame, but now I have to go forward again. Taking him with me and somehow not letting him get too close. We’re working on something that could be friendship, in time, and keeping him at a distance, even if it’s only a small distance, will help keep things in perspective for me. I’m not asking, nor do I want, for him to heal my wounds. But if something beneficial should happen as we figure out the parameters of our relationship, then I’ll only be convinced that I made the right move in resisting at first. I can’t talk in a chair. I might be able to talk if I’m not afraid of having my innermost thoughts pried away from me.

The chances of talking with him like that, candid and unafraid, aren’t likely. I don’t expect it, and if he has any sense, he doesn’t ether. Still, we stand a better chance this way. Close, but not intimate. And not strangers. Strangers look at you funny when they see you standing in the middle of the sidewalk with your hand pressed to the back of your neck. They stare and point and whisper and want to know what the hell is going on.

Friends don’t do that.

Of course, time also flies when you’re having fun. Clichés don’t comfort me. Time flies whenever it wants. Like when something dreadful is around the corner.

Time used to fly whenever I had an appointment with Kisame. The last hour of my Thursday shift would pass by before I knew what was happening. One minute it was five thirty and the next it was six twenty-six and time for me to clock out and begin that all too short, despicable walk to the psychiatrist’s office.

A walk that is familiar to me now.

I don’t know when it became familiar, exactly. Not familiar the way the walk from the café to Kakashi’s house has become, but familiar in the way that a half-finished book feels. You don’t know which villain will turn out to have a heart or which hero will have the Achilles heal, but you have ideas. Opinions are still forming from the way one man disappeared when he was needed most, the way one woman said the right thing at the right time. That one look he gave her. You could end up being completely wrong, and you may even expect it, but you’re so engrossed in fleshing these people out to the fullest that you don’t care.

A good book does that to you.

It’s unnerving, this familiarity, the way I know things about him now, when a couple of weeks ago his personal life was alien to me in all respects. I can rattle off about a dozen facts right off the bat, stupid little tidbits that don’t mean anything, but at the same time mean everything. He’s a Scorpio who identifies better with the Libra. Spicy foods are his favorite. He loves grape flavoring but not actual grapes. His favorite color is actually green, but he thinks he looks better in blue. He knows all of the lyrics to Don’t Stop Believing by Journey. He learned to read music at the age of four. His hometown is Boston. He was suspended three times in high school for disturbing the peace, although he didn’t specify exactly what that meant. Fireworks make him jumpy. He doesn’t care for dogs and loves cats. He can’t bluff, even for poker. He’s allergic to ragweed. He sleeps best to the sound of silence.

Knowing the last one, for some reason, bothers me the most. The revelation came out in conversation last week, the same week I found out he was born in Boston. He was telling me about his childhood home and his neighborhood, the three blocks that were his adolescent stomping grounds. The corner store that sold gum and pop. The cassette player attached to his hip as he roamed around with his friends, teasing girls. The front stoop they sprawled out on in the early evening. The quiet nights that followed the loud days.

As he spoke, I imagined him lying on his back in bed, head turned towards the screened window. The dead heat of summer was upon him. Sheets thrown off. He was my age, I think, in my reverie, but only because that’s familiar to me, like heat of July. He lay in bed, halfway to sleep before that one minute where the crickets ceased chattering and dogs stopped barking and the traffic hit a lull, and he drifted away.

He’d stopped talking by the time I finished thinking, waiting for me to maybe, possibly, share something in return. But I had nothing for him. I was too caught-up being guilty with intimacy to find a watered-down yet sincere version of the truth to give back. These conversations are an exchange where he receives a penny for every nickel he gives me, but he tolerated it in good humor. He didn’t press.

I took a sip of my water, giving him a watered-down but sincere upturn of my lips and not telling him that I fall asleep the most easily to the sound of rain.

I’m unfair to him. I know I am. He answers all of my questions while I answer just under half of his, and some of those answers are only partial truths. I told him that I haven’t had a best friend since the fourth grade, but I didn’t tell him that it’s because I couldn’t think of any other excuses to explain the bruises on my forearms. That I chose to close myself off from the other kids so that I could keep and eye on my brother, always afraid that something would happen if I wasn’t next to him when dad came home. That my young life revolved around the fear of people finding out what was going on.

Fear. Always fear. Even now, I fear giving too much away. I look at the fragmented bits of his life, little pieces of nothing that say everything about him. His life is somewhere in all of the pieces. In grape flavored popsicles and sticky, purple lips. In the principal’s office, waiting for a verdict. In the walkman attached to his hip. In singing Journey when no one was listening. In the records on his office walls.

More than ever, I want to know if he was a musician. And more than ever, the answer terrifies me. If I can already connect the dots with so little in his life, what dots has he connected in mine? After all, he knows what my father did to me. He knows that the abuse and the rape are the driving forces behind everything I do and don’t say. I’ve proved that to him several times over – by my campaign to keep him out and even by the arrangement we have now – that even in death, my father has a hold on me.

Only the little things are left now. The little things that trigger the one big thing.

I don’t want to break yet. I don’t think anybody really wants to break, but some people have more of a reason to fear it. And aside from telling him truths that leave mostly everything to the imagination, I’m running out of ideas that will stave off the inevitable. I’m going to have another episode in front of him. I just know it, the way a farmer knows when the sky is going to open up and feed the earth. The way children know there’re monsters lurking in the closet.

And nobody wants to face the monsters.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep up this tenuous balance, this talking but not talking, so that he’s close but not too close. Not wanting to bear my soul, but knowing that he’s going to see part of it when I break. And knowing it’s coming, thinking about it just up ahead, will probably only make it happen sooner.

That, really, is my only other defense for now – not thinking about what’s coming, the same way I deal with what has been. The old standby.

Not thinking about, as I walk, how I know I’m almost there; not by the street sign that marks Randall Avenue, but by the blue Dodge pickup on the corner that always seems to be there.

I’m almost two minutes late at this point. Chances are very, very high, however, that he’s still not outside to meet me. Apparently, we’re close enough these days that he doesn’t have to worry about punctuality. I thoroughly disagree, but I’m not going to begrudge him a few minutes, especially since I’m late too this time around.

Five minutes is about my limit.

Luckily, he doesn’t keep me waiting more than another minute. Right after I make myself comfortable sitting on the brick wall surrounding his apartment complex, the double door on the right opens. Kisame, dressed in his usual blue, strolls out leisurely. He’s never in a hurry, from what I can tell. He’s just not the kind of guy who is hassled by time.

We’re polar opposites on that front. I’m not a fast walker, but that’s because I constantly allow myself the correct amount of time so that I don’t have to rush. Kisame seems to walk at whatever pace suits him, even if he was supposed to be there ten minutes ago. He doesn’t plot his day around the clock.

I envy him for that.

“Hey, you,” he greets as he comes closer to the wall. “Beat me again I see.”

Our heights even out a bit when I’m sitting on the wall, putting my gaze level with his collarbone. He’s not wearing a button down shirt tonight. From what I can see underneath the coat, it appears to be a grey sweater.

I shrug. Forty-five seconds. I could tell him, but I won’t. “An amazing feat, I know. You live so far away.”

“Your subtle sense of humor never ceases to amuse.” He closes the gap between us until there’s only about a foot of space left. I don’t mind, not the way I used to. He’s not a threat anymore, as long as he keeps his hands to himself. And I don’t see him doing that. The only times he’s ever touched me were when it was necessary, and I can’t blame him for either of those. He did what he thought he had to do.

I don’t know if he still refrains because of that time I jerked away from him in the café, or simply because he has good senses. Either way, needless. I deliberately swing my foot, just to prove to myself that I’m not in a dangerous situation. It very nearly comes in contact with Kisame’s kneecap.

Kisame sighs, shaking his head at one of us. “I’m going to be the first one here one of these days. Really. I am. And you’re going to be so surprised that your mouth is actually going to drop.”

Forty-five seconds. I laugh softly, but not for the reason he probably thinks. “No, you won’t.”

He opens his mouth as if he’s going to protest, but instead all he does is laugh back. “Yeah, you’re right. I won’t.” He shoves his hands in his coat pocket. Blue and grey tweed. That surprised me. For some reason, I expected leather. “I don’t need you expecting things of me.”

I could have said any number of things after that. That I will never expect things from him. That I don’t want to expect things from him. That I already expect things from him. But even if I’d wanted to say any of those things, I’m distracted by the fact that he’s now conducting a thorough search of his person. Jean pockets, front and back. The inside slit of the jacket. Back to the coat pockets.

“Damn,” he says without meaning it, patting his pockets one more time. Just to make sure. “Yeah, this is why it’s not good to expect things of me.”

“Better you realized it here than in the restaurant,” I remind him practically. “I don’t think they let you work off your dinner this day and age.”

He’s still patting his pockets absently, convincing himself that no, his wallet is really not there. “No, I don’t suppose they do.” He stops patting himself, which is a shame because I was just catching onto the rhythm he’d picked up. “Okay. I’m going to run upstairs really quick and grab my wallet. Then we can go.”

I nod my consent, pulling my legs into a cross-legged position that hurts my ankles but instantly warms my legs. “I’ll be here.”

“Of course you will.” He tosses me one of his charming smiles that might be an apology for the delay and turns around and takes a step. But only a step. He half turns around, haltingly, and when he speaks his voice matches. I don’t think he’s sure he should say what he wants to say, and when I hear what it is, I’m not so sure either. “You can… I mean, you could, if you want. Come upstairs, I mean.” He shakes his head, rearranging his jumble of words into better coherency. “You can come upstairs if you want.” He motions jerkily with his shoulder, asking me to take in the surrounding scenery. “It’s cold out here, you know.”

I know. I know because there’s still a lingering chill on my neck where I pressed snow against it. And he knows that I have a high tolerance for cold, so his excuse is about as thin as the ice on the sidewalk.

My body reacts quickly, the way it used to when my dad told Sasuke to go to bed. Sweaty palms, quickened breathing, a thick sense of foreboding in the back of my throat. A burst of fear that nearly sends me shaking.

The creeping heat.

But then I look at him. I look at the discomfort in his posture that says he’s regretting he ever let the words out of his mouth. The hands shoved in the pockets to disguise twitching fingers and the hunch in his shoulders. I look at the conflict in his blue eyes, the overwhelming need to take it back and the irrational hope that I’ll be okay with the invitation. That what he’s done is alright. I look at the way he’s waiting for me to make the next move, the lip he’s biting so fiercely it might start bleeding. And I look at all the things he’s not: Proud. Cocky. Selfish, arrogant, and unfeeling. Entitled.

He’s not my father, assuming he can have whatever he wants from me.

Maybe I should listen to the fast rise and fall of my breathing. Maybe I should get down from the wall and walk away. Forget we ever tried this. But I don’t. Instead I concentrate on right here and right now, and on all the things Kisame isn’t. All the reasons I don’t have to fear. As I think of all those things, my breathing slows back down. My heart stops beating so hard. My throat clears so that I don’t feel like I’m choking.

He crossed a line. We both know that. But he’s not like that. He’s not my father, and even if this is more intimacy than I’m comfortable with this soon, it’s going to be okay.

I have to make this okay.

I take a long, drawn out breath to rid myself of any shakiness that might still be vibrating in my muscles, and say a silent thank you that they didn’t lock in fear. Kisame stops breathing. I hear the hitch and say a silent thank you that he’s still waiting on me. Waiting for me.

“Alright,” I say so softly that I almost don’t hear myself. He does though, because his shoulders jerk up in surprise, and the look on his face is incredulous. Incredulous and, above all, relieved.

“Alright?” he repeats on an exhale, questioning that I really said what he thinks I said. Giving me another chance to back out, if I want to.

“Alright,” I say again, my voice loud enough for both of us to hear clearly. To convince him that I mean what I’m saying, I unfold myself from my sitting position and hop down from the wall, putting us back at our usual height difference.

He doesn’t smile at me. Not exactly, but the tension leaves his shoulders, and the conflict lifts from his eyes. All that’s left is that irrational hope now, and in the strange, unconventional relationship that we’ve cultivated, I figure that it’s pretty damn close to the perfect reaction. “Alright.”

His apartment, like mine, is on the third floor. We take the stairs up, his longer legs carrying him up considerably more quickly. I follow at my own pace, full of a mixture of bewildered anticipation and trepidation Secretly, guiltily, I’ve wondered what his apartment looks like. If it’s anything like his office, with records on the wall and autographed album covers on the shelves. That’s where the anticipation comes from. The trepidation is realizing that I’m going to see for myself and not knowing if I’m ready, from not being sure if coming up here is the biggest mistake I could make and I that I should have said no and walked away.

I know I’m pushing my luck. Our luck. But this is something that has to happen. Needs to happen.

I conveniently forget the fact that seeing even more of his personal life is exactly what I don’t want to happen. There’s something else at stake here, though, something that seems, somehow, more important.

Kisame needs to be the person I think he is. I don’t want this to be just another bad memory.

I pray, as we reach the top of the stairs, to a god I don’t have much faith in anymore, that this won’t be just another bad memory. I pray, as the door swings open with the keys dangling from the lock, that I won’t regret doing this.

He goes right in. I hover in the doorway a moment, a little afraid to step over the threshold. I take in my surroundings instead, distracting myself from my nerves. Like Kakashi, he has hardwood floors. A darker, cherry-toned wood. The walls aren’t blue, but a rich cream color. I didn’t expect that. The ceiling, however, is a shade of blue that thoroughly distracts me from everything else. It’s like the sky is in the room with us, the sky that falls before the sunsets. Light and dark at the same time.

I wonder if he painted the ceiling himself, or if the ceiling sold him the apartment. It would for me.

“Bear with me, okay?” he says from in the kitchen. I see the edge of it from where I stand, the island that separates the kitchen from the living room. “I’m not entirely sure where my wallet is, which is probably why I ran out without it.”

I make a noise of assent, daring myself to take another step. I’m so, so close and yet I can’t bring myself to take that last step. I hate myself a little for being such a coward, especially now that I’m in the doorway.

One step.

“I thought I saw it on the coffee table earlier, but it’s not there so…” I hear the sound of a drawer rolling open, then closing a second later. “You don’t happen to see it lying around, do you?”

I can’t see much of anything from my vantage point, so I don’t feel entirely unjustified when I answer no after a few beats. I don’t see his wallet. I see brown leather couches, creamy walls, and airy windows that look out over a snow covered yard. I see a pair of his shoes by the door, and a coffee mug he left on the coffee table. I see another one of his jackets on the piano tucked away in the corner.

A piano. I imagined this, him having a piano. I don’t even know how the idea ever got stuck in my head, but one day I pictured him behind a piano, and I haven’t been able to banish the notion ever since. It makes so little sense, really, that I would assume such a thing. Almost as little sense as it makes that there’s actually one here.

He never mentioned a piano.

Unconsciously, I take a step forward. I don’t know what I want to do, exactly. Nothing that makes sense. But I have the urge to run my hands over the lid, convince myself that it’s really here. That I put the pieces together so perfectly.

That there’s something he hasn’t told me.

I’m only a foot or so inside the door when Kisame crosses the room, heading right for the piano. “I think I just had an epiphany,” he informs me, unfazed that I’m fully through the door now; I honestly don’t think he realizes that I haven’t been in the actual room all along. “I didn’t wear this jacket to work, where I had my wallet last.” He picks up the jacket on top of the piano. “I was wearing this one. So it should be…” he pauses as he plunges his hand straight into one of the pockets, smiling as he strikes gold. “Right here.”

“Great,” I murmur quickly. “Can we go now?”

The smile drops instantly from his face. Damn him for recognizing more than just impatience. I think he’s starting to know me too well. “Everything okay?” he asks quietly. Concerned, always concerned for me. Always cautious with me.

Fuck, just once, I’d like to be okay.

I take a deep breath, not caring if he notices my struggle or not. What do I have to hide anyway? He already knows my deep, dark secret. He already knows what I’m afraid of giving away.

I need this to be okay.

“Do you play?” I ask out of the blue. I don’t think I’ve ever asked him a question about himself that he hasn’t asked me first, and the action is so foreign that I feel clumsy. “The piano?”

Kisame’s eyes widen, and I think all of the blue in the ceiling-sky enters them at once. He looks away from me, at the piano. Sadly, bitterly, at the piano. “I used to,” he says softly. He looks back at me, all of the blue back in the ceiling. And I miss it. Guiltily, secretly, irrationally. “I used to play.”

There’s something so sad, so poignant in his voice that I stop dead in my tracks. I was so close to finally asking all of the questions that I’ve been wanting to know for so long. Is he a musician? Was he ever in a band? But looking at him now, standing in front of the piano that I imagined all on my own and seeing him thrown so far off-kilter that I’m reeling, I don’t have the heart. Because I know what it’s like to stand in front of someone and feel so exposed that you want to crawl under your own skin. Because I know he’ll never be anything but patient with me.

Because we all have secrets. Even Kisame Hoshigaki.

“I bet you were wonderful,” I say sincerely. Slowly, deliberately, I take a half-step backwards. Leading him, letting him follow. Another half-step, and I’m almost back through the door. “I am dying of starvation.”

I can’t describe the sigh that escapes his lips. Relief that I didn’t pursue further. Disappointment that I didn’t. A mixture of both. I can’t tell. But he does follow me. He doesn’t say anything, but he follows me. Down the stairs, through the lobby, and out the double doors. Past the wall that protects the property. It’s a strange game of follow the leader, one way too old, the other way too jaded.

But still.

“Where do you want to go?” Kisame asks finally, signing the unspoken agreement. We won’t talk about what happened upstairs. Not right now. Perhaps one day we will, when we’re both ready for it. Perhaps one day I’ll talk about my dad. But not now. Now, we’re going to put this aside for another day.

We’re going to move on. This will not be a bad memory.

There are so many things I could tell him, like I’m in the mood for pasta or, for god’s sake, nothing spicy, but it’s not about the food. Things that are needy. Whiny. Sentimental. Things he doesn’t know I can be yet. “Doesn’t matter,” I decide on after a while, emphasizing it with a shrug. And truly, with this vague, airy, insubstantial feeling that has settled over me, it doesn’t.

I can only hope that, one day, he understands that.


December
II. That, by any other name, would smell like sex.


He hasn’t said anything yet.

I watch him on my belly from the blanket we spread out on the ground, under the dead tree. Not the Santa Fe blanket. Kakashi says that one’s not allowed to leave the house again. This one is from the closet in the hall, where he found the boxes that packed Iruka away. He pulled it down from way up on the top shelf, murmured that he’d forgotten he had this as he handed it to me.

It smells like cold winter air now, but when it was first placed in my arms, it smelled like closed spaces. Of dust and, like the rest of Kakashi’s house, faint but living memory.

Blackbirds fly in a circle in the center, trying to get away. But they aren’t going anywhere. There’s no where for them to go now.

With the hand that’s not propping up my head, I draw pictures in the snow with my fingers to pass the time while Kakashi finds himself. Circles and spirals. Curlicues and swirls. Line after line after line, each one deeper than the next. I think about drawing Kakashi, too, with Obito, but I don’t think my finger in the snow can make sense of what I see. I don’t think any picture I could draw can. What happens here every Saturday needs something more than lines and shapes and color. What happens here is made of languages that are foreign and familiar and tricky and easy all at the same time. Languages that I think we all know how to speak, but have either forgotten how or haven’t had the chance yet. The language of silence. The language of regret and desperation. Of hopes and fears. Grudges. Stubbornness. The language of guilt. The languages that whisper in the corners of Kakashi’s house that refuse to leave, no matter how many times he leaves the door open.

So many languages that you can get lost in them.

He’s lost in them now. You see, the trouble with understanding so many languages is that you can lose sight of one of them. You can forget. And in a moment like this, you have to know all of them at once to make sense of it.

I wonder what he’s missing. I’ve never seen him at a loss for words at the grave. He’s always had the most words here. Not all of them, of course, or he wouldn’t come back here week after week, but more words than he has in the house. More words than he has anywhere else.

He’s worrying me with his silence here.

It’s not me being here. Never me. Something else is wrong, something that has to do with the pages and pages he’s ripped out of his philosophy books. They’re all over the floor, tucked in the corners and under the furniture. In the open where we sit and step on them. Something to do with God. Fate. Nihilism. Things I don’t understand.

Even in a troubling silence, he manages to comfort me by being unpredictable.

I look down at the meaningless shapes I’ve been drawing, and realize that they’ve arranged themselves into a circle. Swirl, spiral, curl, corkscrew, curl, spiral. Twelve of them, like the numbers on a clock.

The lines I drew point at where the two o’clock hour would be. Beyond the grave Kakashi leans against in the snow.

His legs must be getting cold by now. I think he’d like another blanket to ward away some of the cold, but I don’t want to disturb him. Not yet. Not until I think he needs me to.

Besides, I don’t know how much help I’ll be for him. I’m lost too.

My drawing in the snow now looks like a tribal tattoo I once saw in a National Geographic magazine. It decorated the chest of man as dark as coffee before milk. He wasn’t smiling in the picture, but he looked proud. The article explained what it meant, but I didn’t have a dictionary with me and still don’t know what virility means. But I guess that doesn’t matter. He knows what it means, and he’s the one who has to wear it.

Sadly, my drawing means nothing. Not even to me, the one who drew it. I’ll probably never be an artist. Artists are passionate about their work, live for it. I read about Picasso and Van Gogh as I ate Kakashi’s ham and cheese omelet, men who were revolutionary in the art world. Men who saw the world in ways that no one had before.

Men who could probably paint the scene in front of me.

Kakashi is not only silent but also still, as much of a statue as the grave he leans on. He reminds me of the statues carved into the fountain in the park, contemplative and steadfast as they look out from under a steady downpour of water. Almost miserable, but determined, all the same, to keep seeing the world.

I’d love to be one of those men in the art books. I’d love to look at Kakashi and know where to start, and, more importantly, where to end. To look at his face and know the color of languages.

What colors would Kakashi be in the eye of an artist? What color is his language on a mid-morning in December? Something light and airy, like the snow that surrounds him? Something dark and heavy, like the shadow of the grave? Or something in between, something miraculously dark and light at the same time?

I recite names of colors in my mind, recalling as many crayons as I can from the tin I kept in the drawer of the desk I used to have. Crimson. Lemon. Lavender. Cerulean. Forest. Burnt sienna. Violet. Lime. Brick. Mauve. Tangerine. Cream. Colors, I think bitterly, that have nothing to do with me. They’re nothing but names, and names aren’t much of anything real. They can’t describe the things that matter. Cream can’t explain what the snow on the ground means to me.

The snow that fell when I wished it wouldn’t on the day I wished hadn’t come.

The past three nights at home have been sleepless for me. I sleep fitfully, half-awake because ever squeak from Itachi’s bed is him getting up and leaving the room. Every dog barking outside is the push he needs to leave me alone in the dark.

Every morning I look out the kitchen window at the wrought iron bars and imagine him there, knees to his chest as he stares. The same image that I see on the ceiling I gaze at as I lay awake, waiting for the night that I know is coming.

These past three nights I’ve realized just how empty the apartment is. How noises echo in all of the spaces where I once would have had toys, books, puzzles, coloring books and paper to draw on. Crayons to draw with. And I don’t know what happened to all of it. Some of it I know we sold to make rent for the first month, but I insisted we keep a few things. My under-the-sea puzzle. The crayons.

Those boxes in the closet. I’ve never been brave enough to open any of them. They aren’t labeled, and if Itachi put them in there unopened, he probably has a reason. And I’ve always been good about listening to reasons. Crazy, nonsensical reasons.

I’m so tired of it sometimes. But what can I do? I think reading between the lines is quickly becoming the only way I can read. I can’t go back to the other way now, the way I was before Kakashi. Where everything is empty and I know nothing about anything.

Where words are empty.

No, this way is better. This way, even though it may take a while before everything is clear, time will tell what’s on Kakashi’s mind. Because the longer you look at something that’s standing still, the easier it is to understand the language, to see the color in all of the darks and lights.

Kakashi doesn’t hide from me. Not like he hid from Iruka.

In good time, I tell myself, feeling old and wise as a philosopher. This, I think, should be my mantra. The mantra Kakashi taught me to recite.

One o’clock, if I were to open the boxes and find the crayons to put my clock on paper, would be the crimson hour. Two o’clock would be the lemon hour. Three o’clock for lavender. Four o’clock for cerulean. Five for forest. Six, burnt sienna. Seven, violet. Eight, rose. Nine, brick. Ten for mauve and eleven for tangerine. Cream is the twelve o’clock hour.

Because I don’t want to see it when it happens. And it will. Everything, Kakashi told me, will happen in good time.

“Pretty bird,” a voice says softly, almost a question if not for the fact that Kakashi doesn’t ask those.

I look up from the clock to find his gaze trained on me, in that way that makes me think he doesn’t need to ask questions because he knows. Just by looking he knows everything I want to say, everything I want to be, and everything I ever will be. I see him doing it more and more lately, looking at me like he’s taking me apart. It’s not scary, because I prefer that he sees me, but why, when he looks through everything else, does he commit me to memory?

Then again, there are things that even Kakashi doesn’t know. Like the fire escape. He doesn’t know about the fire escape.

“Your mouth was moving,” Kakashi explains. He shifts against the head stone and there’s a cracking sound from his knee. I know how he feels. My shoulders are stiff with the cold. “Talking to yourself?”

That’s the way Kakashi is. Asking the things he already knows instead of the things he doesn’t. But I don’t mind. I don’t know what I was saying. I didn’t even know I was doing it.

I shrug, the motion popping my shoulders and the beginnings of pins and needles in my arms. I shouldn’t have stayed in this position for such a long time, but I was waiting for Kakashi to break the silence. My name isn’t the first thing I thought he’d say, but, for the moment, I’m too grateful that it’s broken too care.

Relief doesn’t stay though, when I hear more than just the sound. Pretty bird. He called me Pretty bird. Never, ever, has he called me by my nickname in the cemetery. That was one of his commandments, and he just sinned against himself.

Something is very, very wrong.

“You’re quiet,” he goes on, gaze still fixed on me. “You’ve been quiet for the past few days.”

Almost, but not quite a question again. He’s curious today. His almost-questions are more than just teasing. They’re aiming at something, and I don’t know what. I don’t know what he wants from me, or what he’s going to say or do. All I know, is the last time he took an interest in my mood, he ended up soaking me with a garden hose in the backyard. And he laughed. Really, truly laughed for the first time in front of me.

He makes me wary when he laughs. I don’t want to hear it again.

Still, I can’t not say anything at all. Kakashi can’t carry a conversation. He depends on other people to take up where he leaves. Depends on me to finish what he starts, no matter what the consequences are. If I’m not what he depends on me to be, what good am I here? I might as well be invisible to him. And I hate being invisible.

For him, I move my mouth. I move my mouth because he wasn’t, wouldn’t, won’t. I’ll talk for him so that he can find himself. So that I’m important to him still.

So that maybe we can mend what is broken here.

“I don’t like the snow,” I confess, neither sadly nor bitterly even though I felt both waking up on the first day of December. Pretending was fine as I fell asleep, but the truth was harsher in the morning. The snow is here. December is here. The fire escape waits for him.

Kakashi hums in his throat, breaking his gaze on me to scan the cemetery. With the air too cold to melt it, the snow lingers at the feet of the graves, in the branches of the dead tree overhead. If a strong wind passed through, it could snow again. Just for me. I’d have a second chance to catch snowflakes on my tongue. “It is bleak, isn’t it?” He touches a finger to the stone. “Bleak and beautiful.”

Two more languages that have colors. Bleak. Beautiful. Idle, meaningless small-talk.

I roll over onto my back, through the branches and up into the sky. There are ghosts up there too, looking for a way to finally go home. “Obito is quiet, too,” I tell him, still looking up into the sky. Maybe he’s up there. “Maybe he went home.”

I hear the sound of cloth shifting and rustling, the crunch of snow. His shadow reaches me before he does, tiptoeing over. Then he’s standing over me, just for a second, looking down with the same very knowing look he always has before sidestepping me to lie on the blanket. His head is at my toes, my head at his hip. “I don’t think he knows where home is anymore.” His voice sounds far away because he’s saying it to the sky. “And I can’t help him, because I don’t either.”

I don’t know what to tell him, what to say to comfort him. He’s lost. Obito’s lost. I’m lost. We’re all lost.

But I can’t help thinking, as I feel body heat gathering between us, that I could touch him and make sure he’s still solid. That I could reach out and find him. And before I can think about whether or not he’d want me to, I press my palm against his thigh. The denim of his jeans is chilled, but under that there’s heat, warm and comforting and solid the way I need someone to be.

I don’t care if he does anything back or not, but I’m not disappointed when I feel his fingers on my knuckles, tapping without a rhythm. One here, one there. He doesn’t even ask what I’m doing, like Itachi did the other night. He just lets me, and taps away without a care.

“What did he look like?” I ask the question I’ve always wondered, unafraid of the consequences this time. With Kakashi’s fingers, jarring yet soothing, tapping against my knuckles, I feel fearless. “Obito?”

For a few moments, I almost think he won’t speak, half-lies or not, but soon the smooth-rough drag of his voice fills the cold but not empty air. His voice is still faraway, but the tap tap tap on my knuckles keeps him next to me. “A little bit like you, pretty bird.” Tap tap and tap. “And a little bit like himself.”

As he picks up his narrative, a monologue to me and only me, I keep my eyes on the sky. I watch the clouds form and reform, the hour passing by. He talks at a pace so slow it could put me to sleep were I not afraid to drift away. I don’t hear all of it, don’t understand all of it, but it’s good to hear him talk, just to me. For me. I almost feel guilty for taking him from Obito on his holy day, but if he’s lost that’s not my fault. Kakashi and me, we found each other.

Obito, if he did get lost in the clouds with the blackbirds, is more than welcome to listen too.

***

Once December descended, the café became the site of a winter festival. Lights are strung around the perimeter of the room, looping gently up and down in a swooping parade of fireflies. Garland adorns the window ledges and the frame of the door. The vases on the tables that formerly held a single lily each now hold one or two holly branches. In the evenings, when we dim the lights for the couples who stop by for a cup of coffee, the holly branches are silhouetted against the tea light candles that, in honor of the season, smell like winterberry. Instrumental versions of all the essential Christmas songs go on for hours. And hours. And hours.

We’re classically Christmas here in the Red Lantern.

The worst of it, though, isn’t the lights and candles, which are mesmerizing at night, or the assorted flora. It isn’t even the broken record Christmas ballads. The worst of it is the mistletoe Genma hung over the kitchen door. Counting the one currently going on at this moment, I’ve already witnessed about three dozen ambushes since it’s been up. Some of them are completely innocent, just quick kisses on the cheek or the lips. Some of them, however, are not so innocent. Some of them involve teeth and tongue. Like this one.

Raidou fluctuates between being highly annoyed and highly pleased about it all.

All I can do is keep my eyes averted and pretend I don’t know what’s going on behind my back. I have no problem with them making out like horny teenagers, on principle, but I do wish they wouldn’t do it quite so often. Or, more to the point, when I’m standing right there and can’t easily avert my eyes.

I don’t know if they realize this or not, but they’re blocking the entrance to the kitchen. And table five needs the salt shaker refilled.

I mutter a few choice words under by breath that I severely doubt they hear in their euphoria and start considering all of the ways I can tactfully interrupt their love-fest. Clearing my throat is always an option. Subtle, but to the point. Throwing the salt shaker at them sounds like it would bring me the most amusement, but Raidou would disapprove. Excuse me is the politest way to go, but hard to do without sounding snarky.

Not that Genma doesn’t revel in a good snark.

I give them a few more seconds as I decide what to do. I suppose I should count myself lucky. The coffee cup clutched in Genma’s right hand is probably keeping them from getting too hot and heavy, like the wall incident a few days ago. From what I can tell, he doesn’t seem to be as good with his left hand as he is with his right hand. Combine that with the danger of piping hot coffee, and this has all been rather tame. Still, there’s a time and place for things like this. Not in a restaurant, for instance.

I look at the ceiling, the kitchen door behind them, the floor by their feet. Anywhere but at their faces. But I get glimpses of it anyway, snatches that make up a whole picture. On my way from the floor back to the ceiling, I see Genma’s hand on Raidou’s waist. From the ceiling to the kitchen door, Raidou’s hand on the small of Genma’s back. From the door to the floor, Raidou’s hand in Genma’s hair, and the tilt of their heads as one leads and the other follows.

A smile on Raidou’s face as I stop trying to avoid them and just look. They still don’t notice, too wrapped up in each other.

I wonder if I’ll ever have that with someone. It’s not something that I ever imagined. I don’t entertain many fantasies, because I’m nothing if I’m not practical. But I find myself wondering, for the first time, what it would be like to care about the person touching me. What it’s like to be tender.

He never tried to kiss me. For that, at least, I’m grateful. It means I still have something left that’s mine. Something I can still give. Which is good, because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to handle having sex. The guy who wants to be with me is going to have to be a saint. But kissing. I think I can handle kissing someday. When I let myself think about it, I think maybe I might want to.

“Itachi,” Genma says, breaking into what had apparently become a trance since I didn’t realize they were paying attention to me now. He’s turned three-quarters into a kind of profile that shows me the upward flip in the corner of his mouth. Smirking. Caught me looking.

Raidou is more apologetic. “Sorry, Itachi.” He glares half-heartedly at his boyfriend. “He’s incorrigible.”

I roll my eyes. “You don’t mind.”

Genma smirks again. Raidou rolls his eyes and heads back into the kitchen without another word, leaving the two of us alone in the alcove.

A moment of assessment transpires, me gauging how easily I can slip around him, Genma probably wondering exactly where he wants to start. Me and Genma alone is rarely a good situation. He barely has discretion when my brother is around, so talking alone with him can be something of a nightmare. And I can tell by the lingering smirk on his face that he has something to say. Probably about voyeurs.

“Table five needs salt,” I cut it before he can say anything. I offer him the saltshaker with a no-nonsense expression that he never takes seriously. He takes it slowly, with obvious amusement. I make my escape and turn on my heels.

I hear him snort with mirth behind me.

Ignoring him, I pick up the freshest of the coffee brews and make my rounds. We’re slow right now. The snow has kept people indoors for the past few days. Our regulars, of course, can’t be kept away come hell or high water, but the less faithful find their pajamas more appealing on a bitterly cold Saturday morning. I don’t blame them. If my apartment were actually warmer than the air outside when I wake up in the morning, I might want to stay in my pajamas too.

Especially because I have to walk here.

Luckily, I enjoy the walk. Since the outside temperature doesn’t differ dramatically, stepping outdoors in the morning isn’t as much of a shock as it is for those with working radiators. More bracing, certainly, but not bitter.

I’m fine with the cold. But for Sasuke’s sake, I wish our distant aunt-cum-landlord would do something about the heat. I’ve left her three complaint slips since the beginning of November, and she has yet to call a repairman. Sasuke shivers in the morning, and pretends his hands aren’t shaking. For Sasuke, this cold is bitter.

He says he knows there’s nothing else I can do, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. Even when we’re on top of the bills, like we are now, thanks to the constant leftovers from Thursday dinners and the extra food Raidou hands me at the end of the day stocking the fridge cutting down on grocery expenses, I feel like I’m failing him. And the way he’s adjusted to the state of our lives, with a quiet, uncomplaining air of maturity I never expected from him in the beginning, only aggravates my guilt. Sometimes, I almost want him to scream, lash out at me in anger like he did at the funeral. Sometimes, I want him to hate me. He should, rightly, hate me for the life I tore away from him. I sometimes hate me for the life I tore away from him. Like a slap in the face, I realize, at the oddest moments, that he’s forgiven me before I’ve forgiven myself.

I never even said I’m sorry.

For some people, forgiveness is in their nature. I can only believe that this is the case with Sasuke, the remarkable child that he is, because I don’t know what else to believe. I don’t know why, how, he’s forgiven me.

The phone behind the counter rings. Twice, the first accompanied by clinking cups, the second ring obscured by the frenzied sizzle of a frying pan in the kitchen. Genma picks up between second and third rings, and even though I can’t hear him because his voice is a husky low into the receiver, I know what he’s saying: “Good morning, this is Red Lantern Café. How may we help you?” Textbook polite and perfect, the way he says it when no one can hear him but the inquirer. The accidental spy that I am, he didn’t realize once that I’d come back for something as the phone rang. When he knows I’m there, or when he knows Raidou is around, he changes it to the unprofessional tone we’re used to, the jokes and smiling words that make people like him before they know him. He’s the favorite waiter here, not me, all because he makes formality into familiarity with a “What can I do you for?” But when no one is listening, it’s “How may I help you?” and “Anything else, ma’am?” I swear, he smiles the same slow, lazy smile for both, so I don’t know which one is real and which one is the act. What he’s even acting at I don’t know, but it’s so convincing that, like just about everyone else, I just sit back and watch the show.

A woman with a soft voice asks for more coffee. I pour on autopilot, say you’re welcome when she says thank you. She’s not one of our regulars, and she’s alone aside from the company of editors and columnists. Passing by? Trying something new?

Genma would have asked, I think. That’s why he’s the favorite. I just keep walking by the booths, farther and farther from his voice.

As is the way with karma, of course, it catches up with me.

“Itachi,” he calls. He doesn’t have to call loudly, but it’s jarring all the same since the café is so quiet. One of our regulars looks up from his bagel with cream cheese, decides nothing is wrong, and takes the bite he put on hold.

Not wanting to hold a conversation on opposite sides of the room, I fill Mr. Delaney’s cup with a nod of acknowledgement to his thank you and join Genma at the counter. He’s still holding the phone, his hand cupped over the receiver.

“For me?” I ask, figuring he just wants to ask me a specific question about the café that he doesn’t know. He’s the personality, but I’m the encyclopedia. At some point, without realizing it, I memorized the menu. With the prices.

“Yup,” he surprises me by replying, holding out the phone without further ado. The fraternal part of my brain panics for a moment, convinced it’s something about Sasuke. But Genma doesn’t look worried; he looks positively smug about something. The flipped-up smirk is back.

I take the phone from him, tentatively, voice cool as I say hello. Genma hangs around, so I resort, a last-ditch kind of effort, to asking for an explanation with my eyes. Sort of a cross between “Is something wrong?” and “What the hell are you up to?”

He unfolds my unoccupied hand and puts the saltshaker in the cup of my palm.

“Itachi?” the voice on the other end says. My stomach drops a little, for reasons I don’t care to dissect, because I know that voice almost instantly. The last time I heard it over the phone was in August, but the last time I heard it in person was Thursday night, saying goodbye.

“Hey,” I say back, baffled. In August, he called to change the time of our appointment. But it’s December now, and we haven’t been anywhere near his office in a month. The landscape of our relationship is different now. I don’t know what this is about. “Is something wrong?”

He chuckles, startlingly low in my ear. “Why do you automatically assume something is wrong when I’m involved?”

“It’s not just you.” I assume everything is wrong. As of yet, I haven’t seen an everything that’s right.

He hums in agreement. Since he can’t see me, I allow myself a small smile. I like that he doesn’t try to joke back with me, or make things forced and awkward, trying too hard to make me like him. Letting it be, in a way, almost makes it funny. “Everything’s fine. I’m just calling to see if I can coax a cup of coffee out of you. I’ve had a craving for pumpkin spice.”

“You’re better off with French roast,” I say for the benefit of Genma, who is quite obviously eavesdropping under the guise of enjoying a pastry on a plate. “The pumpkin spice is gross.”

He makes a face. Pumpkin spice is his favorite.

Kisame chuckles again, having learned to recognize that I sound much the same when I’m being lighthearted as I do when I’m serious, which has cleared up a lot of potential misunderstandings between us. “Truth is, I’ll take whatever. I’m not picky when it comes to the coffee there. You guys have some kind of secret: I’m sure of it.”

“Mm-hmm. Well, if you want coffee, you’re going to have to come down and get it. I’m not a delivery boy.”

“That’s okay with you?” He sounds surprised.

I’m equally as surprised. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

I hear the hesitation, even over the phone. A quick stutter of his breath. For a moment, I’m not sure this conversation is going to go any further, that we’ll get stuck in the old trap. But then he sighs, tired of something. “Because you said it wasn’t.”

A light dawns for me, a memory of the promise I insisted, no, demanded he make. Looking back, I can’t believe I was ever that adamant about keeping him away. That feels like such a long time ago. Years instead of months. In the back of my mind, there’s a part of me that wants to dwell on how I could forget I said something like that, but a bigger part of me is willing to overlook it. After all, if I didn’t remember, how important was it, really? “That was before.” The “before” hangs in the air between us, unresolved. Before what, exactly? That’s important too, but that same part of me that is willing to overlook details is at work. The part that wants to just keep talking. “You can come in for a cup of coffee whenever you want, Kisame.”

Genma, who is still eavesdropping and blatantly not caring that I know, takes a bite of his pastry. I think he’s trying to hide his smirk. Decent of him.

“Oh. That’s kind of good then. Because I really was going to ask you to bring it to me.”

“You live three blocks from here. It would have gotten cold before it ever got to you.” The bell above the door jangles halfway through my sentence. I look up, out of habit, to smile at the incoming customer and tell him to take a seat. But he speaks before I do, and I hear it in surround sound, echoes in my ear about a second after I hear it from his mouth.

“I’m not that far, actually.”

Genma pops the last of his pastry into his mouth and stifles a laugh. I stand there, feeling like a deer caught in the headlights with the phone in one hand and a shaker of salt in the other, unsure of what to say now that he’s actually in here. It’s not that I’ve changed my mind about wanting him in the café, but I didn’t expect him to be in front of me quite so soon. I have the distinct feeling, remembering how long Genma was on the phone before he passed it over to be, that I’ve been ambushed.

Because he’s responsible for the ambush, I feel no qualms about using him as an icebreaker. “You had a hand in this,” I accuse without vitriol.

He swallows his Danish. “Me?” He fakes innocent, then indignant. “I have no idea what you mean.” He turns to Kisame. “I have no idea what he means.” Loudly, in a mock stage whisper, “He likes to accuse people of things they didn’t do.”

“Does he?” Kisame says with the same air of innocence. He winks at me, gently reminding me that, yes, I have done exactly that, and to him. I raise my eyebrows at him, not out of contention, but rather, the tacit acknowledgment of something that’s become an inside joke. One of the first I think I’ve had outside of Sasuke.

“I’m sure,” I throw back, playing along by pretending not to play along and silently marveling how quickly the moment of awkwardness dissipated, “that I do not know what you are talking about.” Kisame is becoming more and more of a staple in my life. Even though he hasn’t stepped a foot inside of the café for months, his presence here is unremarkable, as if he’d been a regular. I pull a coffee cup out from under the counter, where we also keep the plates for the baked goods. “Pumpkin spice?”

He makes a noise of indecision, wavering between this that and the other thing. “Make it French Toast and make it to go. That way, I can take you for a walk and be back at the office before I have to meet my new patient.”

I pour coffee into a Styrofoam takeout cup, doctoring it the way I’ve found out he likes his coffee over the dessert he always treats himself to after our dinners. One spoon of sugar, a quick dash of milk. Hints of sweetness. “You want to take me for a walk?” I repeat, stirring the sugar with a thin straw. “With the café in this state?”

Kisame rocks on his heels, swiveling his head to look around the café. He sees an older gentleman with a steaming cup of coffee, a younger man with the beginnings of a goatee, a woman immersed in her newspaper, and a blonde woman with her toddler, buttering toast. He doesn’t see much. Five people. He doesn’t even know their names. But I know that the man with the fresh hot coffee is Mr. Delaney, who works with his wife at the corner store that’s open late on Sunday, but for some inexplicable reason closes early on Tuesday. I know that the younger man with the beginnings of a goatee is Jim Harkness, who volunteers at the fire station and dresses up as Santa during the Christmas parade. The blonde with her toddler are Bethany and Sarah, both lactose-intolerant. And if I ask Genma later, he’ll probably be able to tell me the name of the stranger with the soft voice who keeps company with written words.

He doesn’t see the same things I see. But he could, I realize, if he asked. I would tell him, I realize, as he waves to Sarah, if he asked.

“My break isn’t for another hour,” I say as a way of staving him off. I’ve already made up my mind as to whether I’ll go or not. I don’t know entirely why I don’t come right out and tell him, but I think it might have something to do with the way he’s looking at me, not like he’s trying see through me, but into me. Past the clothes and the skin and the bone to the things that matter. The things that make me. The things he’s getting better and better at seeing.

That’s the crux of it, really: I want to see how well he knows me. And how much he’s willing to fight me to make me go.

“Shame,” is all he says, looking at the watch on his wrist. “My break isn’t for two hours. Looks like we’ll miss each other.”

I raise my eyebrow in the substitute I’ve picked for an appreciation of wit – normally a smile – in his direction and rest my elbows on the counter. Minus two points for playing games with me. I don’t like being played with. “That is a shame,” I agree. To anyone listening, we’re nothing more than politely cordial, bordering on distant. But we know exactly what we’re doing. “It’s freezing out there.”

He looks out the window, past the lights that don’t have much glow in the midmorning hours and into the streets. Snow came again last night for about an hour, leaving a white dusting across the streets and sidewalks. Eddies stir in the intermittent wind that makes thirty degrees feel more like ten degrees.

It’s my favorite kind of weather.

“Frigid.” One more time he rocks on his heels, looking this way and that and this way and that way. A hum of feigned indecision, where he bites his bottom lip to look genuine. “Okay,” he says with a sharp nod. “I’ll come back.” Without saying goodbye, he ambles, still backwards, to the door. I do nothing to stop him. I just watch him, thinking about how breaking even is better than losing, even if it isn’t as ideal. He redeemed himself by walking away. He might even have won, in a way.

Besides, I remind myself as the jarring of the bells masks his departure and Genma’s bark of laughter simultaneously. I hate pumpkin spice.

I’ve only ever chased a few things in my life. Fireflies. Normalcy. Nightmares. Feelings. Never a person. At least, not one who was still alive. So this whole scenario is a bit twilight zone for me, hoping I don’t hit a patch of ice as I half-walk, half-jog to catch up with his long-legged stride. Which isn’t easy when you’re carrying a cup of coffee that you forgot to put a lid on before running out the door. I’m sure I look like a mess when I finally catch up to him. I feel the flakes of snow trapped in my eyelashes when I blink, and my wrist burns from where I couldn’t stop coffee from leaking. And I know I see a not-so-careful smile on his lips when he turns around to say something.

“Is that for me?” he asks as I take the opportunity to catch my breath. The cold takes your breath away out here. Kisame seems breathless too, and he wasn’t running.

Once I feel I can breathe normally, I substitute rolled eyes for a joking smile. “Well, I wasn’t going to let Genma have it.”

He laughs in his throat, and takes the coffee out of my hands. “No, we wouldn’t want that,” he agrees, sipping the cinnamon-spice as he takes one of his monstrously long steps forward. “He might start thinking you like him.”

I fall into step beside him, slipping into our increasingly familiar lull and crescendo of conversation. He talks, talks, talks, I say something that’s mostly true, and the proverbial crickets chirp. Then we start from the beginning. Idle conversation, generally about nothing in particular. Nothing earth-shattering. Peaceful. I find myself only listening to bits and pieces, drowning out some of it in appreciation of the quaint scenery. The tourists die off when winter hits in earnest, so the hustle and bustle of autumn travelers here to see the skyline no longer clogs the street. Some brave kids are playing in the snow as we walk, with brave mothers and fathers clearing the mountainous pile of white from the windshields of their cars. Noise is absorbed, the world serenely quiet except for the sound of Kisame’s voice, and even that resonates as no more than a whisper.

“This Italian bakery on the corner…”

“Real, honest-to-God jukebox shoved into the corner.”

“Could have stayed…”

“Thought I lost my key.”

We meander past the park, our meeting place of coincidence as well as convenience. Confrontation after confrontation took place in this park, stubborn children squabbling over who got to go on the swing first. Sometimes I can’t remember why I fought so hard. Sometimes I can’t believe he didn’t write me off as a lost cause.

Sometimes, like this very moment, I’m thrown off balance by how lucky I feel. For the first time in years, I’m starting to feel as if something, somewhere went right. It happened by accident, because I thought it would take longer to feel anything close to lucky. I was content at times, or relieved that Sasuke and I both made it through the day. But lucky? Far from it. I didn’t feel lucky to have survived my father. Bitter, guilty, and dirty, but never lucky. And I don’t know why I do feel lucky, all of a sudden. To be here, to listen to talk of nothing, to kick up snow with my feet. It’s a novelty, and I can’t decide if I like it or not, just because it’s so strange and so different that I feel out of my element. I don’t know what to make of it, where it began.

If I would feel the same walking alone.

I study the man walking beside me candidly. He looks the same as the day I met him, the same curly black hair as the day I met him, the same piercingly blue eyes outlined by strikingly high cheekbones. His attitude, too, is the same, exuding effortless goodwill towards men and the giddy elopement of humor and guile that makes him inherently harmless and, coincidently, charming. A happy accident, if I’ve ever seen one. The Kisame I met in August, despite knowing that he’s lain awake in bed waiting for the dogs to stop barking, hasn’t changed where it matters. He didn’t turn out to be secretly sly or two-faced or petty when he had me where he wanted me. He is what he’s always been, all happy accidents and unlikely marriages that seduce when I least expect.

Yes, he’s the same. Yet we’renot, and I can explain why about as well as I can explain God, or why my father did what he did.

“…everything happened in the basements.”

“There was another guy, don’t remember his name. Think it started with a…”

Kisame talks and talks, about something and nothing, like the lyrics he shared on our initial meeting. Trivialities about time I don’t much care about. I don’t remember the words. All I remember is how he blurted them out, right out of the blue, throwing them almost carelessly into the enormous space between us. He tossed them around like he tosses his stories around now, seeming not to care whose ears they fall upon.

Talking just to talk. For the sake of sound. For the sake of himself and no one else. Not for me. Not be profound.

Hindsight, I decide, is hardly a convenient sight. It‘s the sworn enemy of foresight, able only to make amends. Kisame, Kisame is the same. I’m the one who’s changed, because I can see now that he hasn’t. He isn’t a threat. I see, finally, that he never has been. And I don’t know when I started seeing him this way, docile and harmless instead of hostile and threatening. I imagine, though, it must have been right around the time I forgot that I’d forbidden him from the café.

All at once, I see what’s happened, in introspective, panoramic vision. My protective wall, the one I’ve kept up for so long, has holes in it. Big, gaping holes. What I can’t figure out, which might be the saving grace of us both, is who put them there. Did he break his way through, like I know he secretly wishes he could, or was it me, curious and sick of suspicion, who pulled them out to look at him with wide eyes, playing at innocence?

I’d like to think it’s his fault. I’d like to blame his charm turned trickery, luring me into this sense of security. I’d like, more than anything, for a scapegoat to be responsible for the way I’ve accepted him as a part of my life. But it’s not his fault. Kisame is who he is, and I can’t blame him for honesty. I can only blame myself for letting my guard down this far. For letting him talk and talk about nothing until he became real to me, bit by bit. And I can only blame myself for toying with the idea of returning that honesty the next time he asks a question. Because, I think, listening to him talk about the royal flush in a basement poker game with a not-so-careful smile on his face, that I want him to ask. About Bethany and Sarah and Jim and Mr. Delaney and Genma and Raido and Kakashi and Sasuke – all of the people who make up my world.

And I think, maybe, that I don’t mind. Not the way I thought I would.

“Your mind is somewhere else entirely today.”

I startle, snapping my eyes up to meet his face, all because I want to see what humor he’s in. Cautious. Good-natured. Teasing. Worried. All of them are options. Good-natured is the victor, his smile small but pervasive. No caution or worry there, which relaxes me in a way that I can’t begin to fathom.

“I mean, usually I get the sense that you’re in the same sphere as I am, even if you aren’t listening. But today…” He makes a motion that indicates that I’m out of it, waving his hands around his head. “Space cadet.”

“I’m listening,” I lie, not fully answering the question as per usual, which has become part of our routine, the same way Kakashi and Sasuke always play chess in the evening.

Kisame, as per usual, doesn’t call me on it. He rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, a habit he seems to have when he’s thinking about what he’s going to say next. “We should probably turn around. It’s going to take us a good twenty-five minutes to get back.”

“Twenty-five minutes?” I twist around in vain, looking for a clock that doesn’t exist. No magic hands of a clock appear to tell me what time it is. Bare branches spread their twisted fingers over my head. A black-and-white cat lounges on a porch across the street. Wrought iron pierces the sky behind Kisame’s figure.

Wrought iron that I haven’t had the displeasure of seeing in years.

“I know, I didn’t realize how long we’d been walking.” He makes a face, clenching and unclenching his fingers. “Should have figured. My hands are freaking freezing.” He looks down at me, shaking his head in dismay. “How can you not be wearing a jacket?”

I don’t answer. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I don’t have the words for how it feels to be here, outside this fence. Closer than I’ve been to them in almost two year.

God, it’s been almost two years.

I must have gone as still as the stones beyond the fence for long enough to be worrisome, because eventually I sense him turn around to follow my line of sight. To see where we are.

“Oh,” he breathes sharply. There is only one cemetery in Arden, several acres of land stretching towards the edge of town, where the creek runs. I’ve only ever been in the cemetery twice. Once when my cousin died, and the day I smashed the bottle of gin. It was winter both times, and all I remember of the second time is how the cold amplified the sharpness of the gin. Kisame’s never been in this cemetery. I don’t have to ask to know. People don’t go for walks in the cemetery unless they’re holding on to something inside.

He didn’t know. I know he didn’t, didn’t mean to bring me here. He loses himself when he rambles on the way he does, sifting through his memories. It’s not his fault that neither one of us were paying attention. That neither one of us saw this coming.

“Are,” he says, hesitant, substituting words for weak hand movements. “Are they?”

There, he wants to say. Are they there? It’s a yes or no question, but I don’t know how to answer, because I’ve never come back to find out. And for once, I find, I’m having a hard time lying, fearful of who might be listening. “You can’t see the graves from here.” By which I mean, yes, yes there are here, can we please just walk away now?

He curses, soundlessly, looking at me with a measure of guilt mingled in with the curiosity that he just can’t help. His first inclination is to find the heart. His second inclination is preservation. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to--”

“Don’t.” I say it sharper than I intended, but that was the only way I could get it out. Softly, to make up for it. “There’s nothing to apologize for.” Back to my normal tone, flat and full of meaning. “You really have to stop doing that.”

He nods, and for once I’m glad that he’s a psychiatrist and doesn’t need everything explained to him. He knows what I mean, knows that I don’t blame him for the way things are with us. Every once in a while, his intuition makes things less complicated. “Like I said, we should get back.”

We should get back. Genma can’t possibly cover me for this long, and I’m going to have to explain why I was gone so long to Raidou, and I get paid by the hour, and, fuck, who the hell lingers around a cemetery? But there’s a tug here, pulling on my mind, my body, my everything all at once that’s rooting me to the ground.

The overwhelming sense that I owe something.

So where I should say yes, I say nothing. Where I should walk away, I walk closer, the black iron drawing me forward like a magnet. I’m polarized with things left unsaid. We should go back, but my hands touch the cold metal and my sight is focused beyond them, overwhelmed by how alive a place of death can be. There’s a man there, with his little boy. They sit in the snow, just far enough away to lose identity. Just far enough away to feel like a different world.

They’re strangers, the man and the boy. But even though I have no idea who they are, I still feel a peculiar sense of breakage, fracturing, and somehow I don’t belong. Not there, and, at the same time, not here. Because Kisame knows almost as much about me as the strangers behind the fence.

“Itachi?” Kisame ventures, and I’m so tired of bringing out the uncertainty in him, the fear of breaking me. It’s not enough to hear him talk about jukeboxes and pool tables and barking dogs. It never has, and it never will be, no matter how long we pretend. And I’m sick to death of saying nothing, because that’s what breaking me, right now, at this very moment. My own silence.

Irony. I blame Kisame for that fact that I actually find it funny.

I grip the bars tighter, bracing for my own words. “Ask me a question.”

Kisame, who didn’t have time to brace, seems to fall into the bars. I don’t know if he’s shocked or relieved, and I don’t know which one I’d prefer anyway. We’re mirror images now, cold hands clutching cold iron, yet somehow nothing is numb. Everything is alive. “Ask you a question,” he mulls, testing the weight of it in his mouth. He mulls as he finds all of the things I found through the bars, stony angels and a little boy, too young to be surrounded by ghosts. He mulls until I think he’ll never say anything again, so lost in thought he is. He practically stumbles upon one, crashing into me with it. “What are you afraid of?”

Afraid. I’m afraid of so many things. I’m afraid of failing Sasuke, of losing him in the end because of the things I haven’t said to him. I’m afraid of my father. I’m afraid of what I did. I’m afraid of the way I sneak glances at Kisame’s eyes, and of the way I’m starting to trust him without question. I’m afraid of answering this question. But there are things he needs to know, just so that he finally understands that he’s not the one breaking me. I am.

“Sometimes,” I say softly, amazed by the sound of my voice. “I’m afraid of everything. Of what I’m doing, where I’m going, who I’m taking with me. But mostly--” I break off, thrilled and terrified by the feel of his gaze on me, riveted. “Mostly, I’m afraid of myself.”

Kisame breathes in and out, once, twice, the rise and fall comforting. It keeps me centered. “I think I know what you mean, a little,” he says after a while. “At least, I know what it feels like to wake up one morning and realize that you aren’t the person you thought you were.”

I laugh. It’s a little bitter, but I like the sound of it, the feel of it. It’s real. “I think I wake up feeling like that every morning.”

He laughs too. It’s not bitter, but it’s still real. “For me, though. Fear. Fear is looking at a bottle of wine and wanting to drink it.” He swallows the phantom wine. “All of it.”

We lapse into quiet again, one I don’t mind. Around us, in the graveyard with the man and the boy, the air still pulses with secrets and unfulfilled promises between the dead and the living. But between us the air is no longer quite so heavy, quite so alive and vibrant with things unspoken. Between us, the air is a little bit lighter. It won’t break me into pieces this time around. And maybe, because I could get used to this feeling, it never will.

We should get back. Genma will pry, Raido will want an explanation, and I need the money to keep a roof over our heads. It’s so easy, though, being here with him. Without him, I wouldn’t have stayed. I would have kept running, all because I’ve had things wrong for so long. Confession won’t break me: The sin of omission will. In the end, even if my father can’t get to me through memory, my silence will do it for him.

There’s no way around it. Not with Kisame the happy accident that he is for me, always the same and always on my side, even if I’m just really, truly understanding that. I can’t pretend that I don’t trust him anymore, or want him around. But if I ever want to keep him around, to keep feeling lucky and happy and bitter and laughing, he has to know who I am. I have to give him more than silence.

I have to break it. Before it breaks me, takes away everything I want. Makes my fears a reality.

Before I’m the man in the cemetery.

We should get back. But for the moment, I’m fine with staying here, lingering on the border of this world with me and Kisame and that world with the man and the little boy, fearful of the collision to come.

***

Kakashi’s marble catches the light from the street lamp as it rolls. I thought it was just plain white when he gave it to me, but when I looked at it closer, it’s really clear glass with white swirls on the inside. Like trapped snow.

I roll it on the coffee table, back and forth between my hands. Glass against wood is the only sound in the apartment besides breathing, just stopping it from being too quiet. In the beginning, I was counting the number of times the marble hit my right hand, but I lost count after two hundred and thirty-five and I didn’t want to start over. It’s enough to know that he’s been standing by the window for at least two hundred and thirty-five rolls of a marble, with no sign of remembering that I’m even in the room with him.

He hasn’t gone out, though.

He wants to, I think. His gaze hasn’t left the window since I sat down, and he keeps his hand on the window pane, right above the ravine in the glass. But he hasn’t opened the window. He hasn’t even unlocked it. It’s been a week since December came down and he hasn’t gone out on the fire escape. A week since December and he hasn’t gotten lost out there, staring at the place over the rooftops.

I see his reflection in the window. Emotions that I don’t have names for passing this way and that way, along with ones I know for sure – uncertainty, confusion, anxiety, and, right when the streetlight flickers, fear.

That’s more emotion than I’ve seen on his face in almost two years. So long that I can go back in my memory and recall the last time I saw him smile. It was in October, early enough in the month that the fallen leaves still had color. Itachi and mom had raked them into piles in the front yard, three round, painted hills that I ruined by running right into them. Mom laughed, diving in after me. Itachi watched, smiling from a distance until I ran over and tackled him. He let me take him down, I know that now. But at the time, I thought I was king of the leaves. And he let me.

That’s the way Itachi tells his lies, by not telling them. The way he stands so far away when he’s only right next to you.

By now, I’ve gotten used to it. I think I’ve come to expect it, knowing that the person standing next to me, sleeping in the bed across from me, is in two places at once. There, but not really. And it’s not that I miss him when he’s gone; he always comes back in the end. I want to know where he loses himself.

With Kakashi, I can see where he loses himself. At the kitchen table when he hands me a cup of coffee he had to put the sugar in himself. On the floor of the living room when I wrap myself in the only blanket he lets me use. And it happens, faithfully as clockwork, on the cemetery ground Saturday mornings when he talks to three people at once, entirely unsure of where he really is. I’m there to listen, to talk, to be whatever he needs me to be. So it’s not just that I’m there while it’s happening, but I’m a part of what is happening. I’m a part of Kakashi’s life in a way that I haven’t been part of Itachi’s since that October day he smiled at me and let himself be a part of my world.

He’s not part of my world anymore though. As far as I can tell, he’s not a part of anyone’s world except his own.

There should be a world for me and him. One where we talk about our days, laugh about something that happened, tease each other. Or maybe, even, just one where we know what to say to each other. I would love to know what to say, to not fear saying anything in case it’s the wrong thing that makes him quieter than before. Quiet and gone.

I want an apartment that isn’t empty space and echoes.

Kakashi’s house has things in it, things that hold memories. Bookends and ceramic bowls, clocks and un-hung paintings tucked behind the arm chair. There are blankets, magnets, chessmen, and marbles. Our old house, from what I can remember, had odds and ends in it. I remember the candle in the kitchen, all melted over, that we never lit but never replaced. I remember the knitting needles on the bookshelf in the living room, and the blanket that mom knitted with them. A blanket that was blue like the sky before sunset.

We don’t have that blanket anymore. I don’t know where it is, what we did with it, why no one asked me if I wanted to keep it. That was the blanket I curled up under when I fell asleep on the couch. I would have kept it, even in no one else did.

We don’t have much of anything from the old house. We took the comforters from our beds, the pillows, the couch from the back porch, a few lamps, and a bunch of stuff from the kitchen, but everything else – the knitting needles, the books from the front room, the family portrait in the living room – is gone. Gone, and no one ever told me where. That’s why this apartment echoes so badly. There’s nothing in it, no memories to fill the empty spaces. We left them all behind.

Or at least, we tried.

Tonight, though, with Itachi darkened against the white light of the street lamp, I think I can see them. They’re the shadows in the folds of his clothes and the creases of his neck, the scent of the old laundry detergent and an inquiring tilt of his neck when asking mom a question. They’re the breath fogging the window before Itachi could teach me how to write my name. They’re the confusion in his slow blinks. They cling to him when the light is right.

This is the first glimpse I’ve ever seen of them. He’s always thought I can’t see what he doesn’t come right out and show me, but that’s not true anymore, I realize with a sudden satisfaction. Kakashi’s taught me how to find the dark corners of people, where they can carry them easily and without remembering that they’re there at all. That’s where Itachi keeps them, the memories that he doesn’t want me to know he has. In his dark corners. But when the light is just right, you can see them. And nothing will ever make me forget that I finally know what I’ve always thought. I didn’t know what to look for or where to look before Kakashi showed me, and I still don’t know what they are, but I’ve always known that he has a secret. That’s why he’s so distant, so far away when he’s standing right beside me. He’s surrounded by memories that I don’t have, lying to me through his silence. I can’t reach him through them, and he doesn’t want me to.

He doesn’t want me to know that something happened to him in our old house. Something he tucks away in the corners of himself.

The street lamp flickers on and off, on and off, throwing the room into complete darkness before throwing it back into deep shadow. The light from the window is the only light in the apartment, illuminating the room just enough to be able to know that the couch has a pillow in the corner. I’m not supposed to be awake at all, this late at night, but I couldn’t do anything more than doze without Itachi in the room with me. I need the sound of him breathing to sleep deeply.

I thought I’d find him out of the fire escape. Instead I found him at the window, keeping company with his memories. His ghosts.

Twice more the street lamp flickers violently, and twice Kakashi’s marble seems to spark, like a match being struck. And when all of the flickering subsides, so too do the memories surrounding Itachi. The flashes scared them off, back to the corners he keeps them in when he’s not betrayed by tricks of the light.

“What are you doing up?” he startles me by asking. Out of contemplation, he can see my reflection in the window as clearly as I can see his.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I tell him honestly, although I don’t tell him why. He doesn’t need to know that, and it wouldn’t make a difference to him.

He doesn’t say anything else, but he does turn around, looking at me thoughtfully. I stare just past him at my reflection, seeing what he sees. A tiny figure huddled under a mountain of blankets in an effort to keep warm, absently rolling a marble back and forth. Someone who isn’t looking at him anymore. Someone he lost touch with.

I’m not surprised to see him move. I assume he’s going to bed, leaving me to follow because that’s what I’m supposed to do. But he doesn’t go towards the bedroom. He walks over to me. He walks over to me and kneels on the other side of the coffee table like we’re good friends who know what to say and how to say it. The problem is that’s a lie. We’re not good friends; we don’t know what to say and how to say it, and until all of Itachi’s secrets are out in the open, we never will. I don’t know what to say, even with him right in front of me and looking right at me.

I don’t know what to say, so I do the first thing that comes to mind and the only thing that seems to make any sense.

I roll the marble across the table.

And he rolls it back.

Back and forth the marble goes, just a flash of light across the space between us. I don’t keep count, because this isn’t just passing the time. This means something, if only for this one stretch of time. Tomorrow, everything could be the same blanks stares and indifference. But for this moment, I let myself believe that we’ve found each other again. That I’m getting closer to knowing what Itachi keeps in his dark corners.

That it’s not just Kakashi who prefers my company to that of ghosts.

The street lamp flickers and he looks guilty.

TBC