Sex, in Uchiha Itachi's opinion, had a nasty way of causing problems. He had arrived at that conclusion abruptly, standing in the doorway of the Akatsuki kitchen, precisely twenty-five minutes prior to the situation he found himself in currently. His thoughts on it before had been much more reasonable: sex was nice—it was like a hobby that one dabbled in from time to time when the mood struck. Sometimes frequently, sometimes not, depending on how one's luck faired. He had come to that opinion carefully over the better part of ten years, starting around the time of his initiation into the Akatsuki and cementing it on his twentieth birthday. It had gone unchallenged ever since, right up until the events of twenty-five minutes ago.

He had made a point of abstaining from an overall opinion on it, it actively controlling the lives of countless men and women all across the elemental countries and beyond, for as long as possible. Itachi had naturally had ideas about it when he left his village at age thirteen, picked up from rowdy peers in the ANBU locker room and the occasional stray novel secreted from the adult section of unassuming bookstores. But when he was in Konoha, he by and large had the impression that trying anything bolder would be met with unfaltering disapproval because of his age. And so it was a year after he left the Leaf that he finally began trying it, and in doing so approached it as logically and aloofly as he could. A firsthand experience, after all, outweighed a dirty romance story written by a drooling, and Itachi's opinion, overrated hermit, in desperate need for creative writing lessons.

Going in with an open mind, he had gone through some tempering in sorting out potential partners. The women that he chose were usually met along the way between the location of one mission and another. Waitresses were the most common, some pretty, some just pleasant enough to linger in his thoughts after the evening wound down and Kisame had gone off to sleep. But always, they were forgettable, regardless of residence, appearance, or blarney, and always out of his mind when he and Kisame set out in the morning.

From his reading material, he knew the term "one-night-stand" applied.

There were only two instances when Itachi encountered problems with the morning after part. Both were during the early months of his experimentation, when he discovered a tidbit of useful information that his novels hadn't warned him about in regards to girls closer to his own age. It was from those experiences, confronted with confused eyes and trembling lips that would have set Konoha's favorite novel writer to shame, that Itachi learned two things. One, that for his particular interests, he needed his partners to be experienced enough to avoid unclear messages that might lead to bouts of uncalled for sobbing. The other was that in some cases, it was better to leave beforemorning.

Kisame, for all his blithe banter during their work, had quietly pretended not to notice when Itachi began disappearing at inns. Itachi suspected that it was a chosen ignorance rather than an actual one. At one point, Itachi was even sure he caught the shark nin grinning behind his palm when Itachi went so far as to smile at a bosomy hostess in the Snow County as she seated them at their table. But while Itachi was sure that his partner had been able to surmise exactly what he was going off to do during missions, Itachi was equally certain that Kisame had no inkling of the experiment Itachi had engaged in at their own base. Itachi had been fifteen when he made his last leap into unknown territory, which was quickly followed by a crash landing that put him in position to start an entirely new chapter of sexual exploration. It had been in December, when Itachi had been base stationed with Kisame and two other comrades. And after having too much of what he would later realize through his shark-like comrade's playful teasing, had been alcoholic eggnog, Itachi had consented to a number of things that he might not have considered doing had he been sober. Kisame had been exhausted and gone to bed much earlier in the evening, while Itachi had stayed up with two other comrades, one of whom would eventually disappear as well, either to sleep or possibly from realizing what was unfolding and deciding it was not his business to step in when two S-class shinobi had made up their minds. And the next morning, Itachi had felt a sincere pang of sympathy for the two young girls he had left feeling guilty and confused during the clumsy first year of his experimentation. However, unlike those girls, his partner had not been a beginner, and had already learned about what to do with drunken virgin morning-afters, and by the time that Itachi had woken up in the wrong bedroom, sore, groggy, and feeling a vague sense of guilt over two women whose names he couldn't quite remember, Orochimaru was already well on his way to the Wind Country with Sasori for a mission that kept him safely away for months.

Luckily, Itachi's limited emotional attachment to Orochimaru had helped to restrain some of the swirling emotions he might have been tempted to feel when factoring homosexuality into his overall decision on how he felt in regard to sex all together. His opinion of it had finally been drafted and sealed in his mind five years later, and so had remained confidently ever since. There were some ridged edges to sex that could go either way, whether one's partner was young or old, male or female, but overall it was nothing to get particularly worked up about. That was, until new information caused his judgment to be revoked.

"So, let me get this straight," the Leader said sharply, fingers interlaced on the polished wooden surface of his desk, "you're saying that you accidentally stabbed your partner?"

From his own side of the desk, Itachi glanced soundlessly at the gold and red tinsel piping the edges of a shelf above the Leader's head. Maybe it was significant that Itachi's new revelation on sex came about on the anniversary of that night from before that he was well beyond grueling over, or perhaps it was just by an odd coincidence.

"Do you know how much canceling your mission would cost?"

Every Akatsuki member, even Tobi with his questionable attention span, had an inkling about the Leader's customary mood around the civilian winter holidays, ever since the year that Kakuzu had dragged his partner back to the base only a few days short of setting out, due to an incident involving Hidan and a large group of passionate, but benevolent, carolers on the River Country border. The specifics of the event were not particularly known to Itachi, having joined the organization several weeks after the alleged incident, but he was observant enough to notice the drop in the Leader's patience level every year, and how certain other organization members might try it by way of their personal or explosive quirks, and respond accordingly. There was a reason that no one wanted to stay at the base over Christmas Eve, even if the details weren't common knowledge to all of the Akatsuki members.

While Itachi was contemplating the tinsel, and wisely waiting for the subtle tone change that would signal a safe invitation to speak, the organization founder was reaching for a small hand-drawn chart laid out on his desk with the names of the three Akatsuki partner teams waiting for instructions somewhere out in the labyrinth-like base passageways—one team that was scheduled to leave, one to remain for another month, and one that was just checking in. The Leader glanced up after a second to check with the clock mounted on the wall across from his desk, then shook his head.

"You were supposed to leave for the Tea Country in three hours," he said. The faintestsuggestion of weariness was laid into the last words along with the irritation, an aggravated sigh.

That was the sign Itachi was waiting for. He opened his mouth.

"And no, I can't send you on it alone," the Leader snapped quickly, as if reading his agent's thoughts. Beside the chart, another short stack of papers sat waiting. Hidan had once said that the Leader's office looked like he was setting himself up to be a kage. At times, Itachi agreed with him. On the Leader's desk, there was an organized army of papers sorted into rows like soldiers ready for battle, summarizing the status of his eight agents and their current missions. Within reach of his chair, the Leader had had a furnace put in specifically for the sake of disposing of those papers once their necessity expired, maintaining the secrecy demanded by the organization while providing extra warmth when the base's faulty heating system broke down. Skimming the summery of the mission that Kisame and Itachi were supposed to have been preparing for, the Leader explained a bare shade more gently, "The distance is too far. If your eyes were to start acting up, we would have no way of getting back up to you, especially not with who we currently have here." He glanced down at the chart again, and then made a mark on the page with his pen. "And even if that weren't the case, this mission required Kisame's brawn."

"I see." Itachi chose to maintain a soft voice level.

"Good." Setting down his pen, the Leader looked back up at Itachi. His fingers re-laced themselves over the one clear spot on his desk. "Now, please explain to me exactly how an S-ranked shinobi can accidentally stab someone?"

Itachi was quiet again for a moment; however, this time he couldn't honestly credit it to a signal in his superior's voice. Keeping his eyes focused diligently on the Leader's face (the nose if not the eyes) he took a breath, and then said as non-reluctantly as he could, "The knife slipped."

There were very few people in Itachi's acquaintance who would ask him why he chose to stab someone, and even fewer who would expect a straight forward answer. However, the man that Itachi was standing in front of at the moment was the one person who had the power to demand exactly that, made worse by the fact that, thanks to a certain comrade and his unfailing preaching nature and impaired sense of judgment, the person in question was currently on edge to the point of snapping the desk in front of him in half at the first sign of yuletide-related problems.

One of the Leader's eyebrows arched dangerously as he waited for Itachi to go on.

The Fire Country runaway's eyes found their way back to the tinsel again, pausing to phrase a more adequate answer and ignoring the heat in his face that he would have liked to fight back.

Exactly forty-five minutes ago, Itachi had been peacefully chopping vegetables in the base kitchen, no thoughts of the Leader's ironically seasonal office decor or maiming his partner in mind. Simply preparing for dinner, that was all. In the Akatsuki, there had always been a systematic assigning of chores for the four shinobi that were always stationed at the base to keep their lair from falling into ruin while the Leader pushed busily away at his never-ending legion of papers. It was only recently that a problem had come up with the Leader's planning, which now had him assigning to a solo agent who, until the death another agent, had not actually been solo. Zetsu had the Leader's schedule, with its now unreasonable amount of housework, at a loss. It was supposed to have been Zetsu's turn in the kitchen, as well as cleaning toilets, disposing of trash, grocery shopping, and pulling out the hairs stuck to the Leader's comb, among other mundane tasks. In the past, when Tobi was almost constantly circling the Grass ninja for attention, there had never been a problem. But, as if Sasori were throwing a wrench into the finely tuned mechanics of the Leader's carefully structured order from beyond the grave, the balance was destroyed. By an unspoken agreement, Itachi and Kisame had begun taking on some of the extra chores until their Leader found a new way to handle Zetsu's base stationed periods. Tonight it had been with the cooking. Itachi suspected that Kisame might have stepped in before to nudge their green comrade along to keep them from eating raw meat on more than one night already, and so he had taken it upon himself to initiate dinner on his own tonight.

Before Itachi's established view on sex was recalled, Kisame had been buying groceries in the village, while Itachi, staying behind so that if their leafy comrade found his way into the kitchen there would be someone ready to herd him back out in the direction of the agents' bathroom and the Leader's bedroom, had begun preparations with what was already at their disposal. Carrots, onions, peppers... However, Itachi's knife had been dull, and so he'd gotten up to sharpen it. Easy, save for the fact that the sharpener in the kitchen seemed to have disappeared. Itachi had spent several minutes looking for it in the drawers, and wondered whether he ought to ask Zetsu before pushing the idea away. Then, naturally, he went to find the one he used for work. A kunai and a butcher's knife did have notably different shapes, true, but overall the substitute had worked just fine. He thought it might make the knife rather unsanitary though, which is what led to the incident that had him standing in the Leader's office a matter of minutes later, eyes on the tinsel and wondering how he was going to explain why his partner was getting stitches put in upstairs.

He had passed Kisame in the kitchen doorway on his way back from their room. He'd turned his head in passing to ask one small question:

"Where is the dish soap?"

It was a simple question. A very simple question, particularly for someone who had been reining Zetsu in from licking the juice off the raw meat packaging for the past several months. Kisame could have answered it without thinking, Itachi was sure. But when the shark nin turned his head, he froze, staring as if the Samehada had just stood up and spoken to him, first above Itachi's head, then back down at him. Correspondingly, Itachi had paused to frown, annoyed that he'd have to repeat himself, but then a hand had landed on his shoulder, and without a word, his opinion on intimacy, sex, and everything that took place on Christmas Eve six years ago was ripped away and roasted alive when every hormone in his body ignited in one abrupt, startled moment.

But even with that, Itachi might have been able to snatch back enough composure to protest, could have asked Kisame what the hell he thought he was doing, had the part of him under assault not happened to have been the same one needed for speech. Instead, he had stood mutely still, thought process slowing to a screeching halt, while a radiating warmth slowly crept into in his stomach and settled there. He'd only registered dumbly, that his head was tipping back as if on autopilot after Kisame's fingertips moved up to land lightly on the side of his throat, and that yes, that was Kisame's other hand on the nape of his neck; yes, those were his teeth; yes, that was his tongue playing with his upper lip...

"Hey guys! Merry Christmas, un!"

...And yes, that was Deidara's voice snapping like a whip into the hallway. Simultaneously, when Itachi heard the sudden cheerful greeting from down the hall, he felt Kisame's body become rigid. A moment later, it was followed by the shark nin's weight pressing down on his shoulder, and Itachi was very certain that he heard a muffled curse by his ear as Kisame, already standing close to him from a moment before, crumpled over his shoulder. It took Deidara all of fifteen seconds to run down the hall toward them, five of which were spent standing wide eyed and staring at a spot on the floor near their feet. It took Itachi a little longer to react while his brain revived itself. Deidara was popping his head under one of Kisame's arms and wrenching him upright before Itachi, mouth still open to a small slit, regained coherency. Blinking, he'd looked at Kisame, then Deidara, whose head was bobbing up and down and asking something about walking and bleeding, and what was wrong with Itachi.

And to himself, Itachi could only think that a second ago, he could have sworn he was holding a knife.

To the Leader, still waiting with his eyebrow quirked and that expression on his face that warned he was the man who could make Kakuzu burn down a bank without pinching a single note if he wanted to,Itachi made his voice flat and tried to keep himself from looking back up at the colorful plastic decorations again, as he said, "He startled me."

"Startled?" the Leader echoed. Another paper was picked up from the stacks on his desk, and with a glance down he pressed further with, "Funny, Deidara's report doesn't mention that."

Itachi resisted the urge to flair at the mocking comment. Don't get annoyed… Even if Deidara had scribbled that report when they came in together only a few minutes ago. Instead of pointing that out, Itachi said calmly, "Deidara was standing behindKisame."

"I see. He managed to get a good view of the injury though." The Leader flicked his line of sight toward the chart, laying across two stacks of papers to his right, then to another open file next to it that appeared to be a map with the location of Kisame and Itachi's former mission, among other locations where other agents were supposedly stationed, all circled in red. He idly set down the report he was holding. "You had to stab him in the foot?"

Itachi, after making eye contact to affirm the need for an answer was no longer as urgent as it had been earlier, pointedly looked to the side. Hidan, unreasonable as his religious convictions were, was expected to cause trouble on this holiday. The circled area over two regions away from the River Country was a testament to the fact that it was now all but considered in Hidan's contract after the incident that the Leader was so sore about. Itachi, on the other hand, was not meant to ever come remotely close to being the target of the fiery yuletide rage that could make Deidara, raving from the sight of blood so close to dinner time, clap all three of his mouths shut on a word. Arguing that he was hardly the person who attacked first was not a good idea. Itachi stayed silent.

The Leader turned back to reading Deidara's report. Still standing in the same place across from him that he had been for the last half hour, Itachi could see the bright eyes skimming swiftly across the page, then stop suddenly when they came to something that made him look up with his eyebrow quirked again. "…Was it really standing straight up?"

Itachi nearly choked on his own breath in the instant it took him to realize that the Leader was pointing to a line of writing on Deidara's report, then schooled his face back to neutral. He wouldn't provoke the Leader by scoffing at the accuracy of a theatrical comrade's commentary, Itachi decided when his head almost tipped to the side to deliver a look at the Leader's last attempt to prod him for details.

Finally, the Leader set the report aside. Dark gloved fingers laced together once again over the little spot of empty space on his desk top. With an authoritative tone, the Leader delivered his orders. "Tell Zetsu that I want him to be ready to leave by midnight. I suspect that our spy in the Tea Country may be planning to turn on us. If this is the case, his methods may be better suited for...disposal."

"Yes, Leader-sama." Itachi nodded his head.

"Also," the Leader went on, "until further notice, both you and Hoshigaki are to remain here. Depending on how long it will take for our medic to return from the Fire Country, you may be immobile for sometime."

"...Understood."

"Dismissed."

After bowing his head again, Itachi turned to go.

"And, Itachi," the Leader's voice cut in one more time, when Itachi had one foot in the hallway. Itachi looked back over his shoulder, face carefully blank as he waited for one last detail to convey to his comrades.

"Next time, please try to avoid the mistletoe."

~ K ~

After the door clicked shut behind the former heir to the Uchiha clan, the Leader finally let his shoulders slump as he pushed down a groan. Gently, already leaning back into his chair, he pressed his fingertips to the side of his head. This really wasn't a good week for Itachi to stab his partner. The decidedly non-platonic flush to Itachi's skin when he came in with Deidara babbling behind him had been far from unnoticed, likewise his hesitance to talk about what had caused it. It wasn't that hard for the Leader to put together a guess as to what led to where, but at the moment the state of his agent's sexuality was nowhere near the most important topic on his list of possible organization conflicts. Not since the year of the incident that shall never, ever be spoken of had he had a Christmas that looked so unreasonably irritating sitting squarely in his future without any signs of compromise in sight.

Sighing, he picked up Deidara's scribbled digest of the evening's first incident and threw it into the trash can under his desk, which he made a mental note to light the contents of later in the evening. The chart listing the schedules for his agents, he relocated to another corner of his desk to be adjusted later as well. If Itachi and Kisame were going to take over the remainder of Zetsu's base period, he was going to have to find a way to have their missions completed by other agents, even if that meant eventually sending word to Kakuzu to risk bringing Hidan back into Christian populated areas. Tobi wasn't going to be happy when he heard about this. He wasn't happy to order it, but Kisame and Itachi were one of his better teams and that meant assigning them a good number of the mission requests that came in.

Pulling open a drawer on the right-hand side of his desk, the Leader pulled out yet another file and laid it open on the free space of his desk. Scribbling a note, he clipped it to the inside flap, then on a second thought, made another note about possible friction coming up in Kisame and Itachi's partnership in the future to add to their file when he had the chance. Next, closing that and setting down his pen, he reached back into the drawer with his free hand, shuffling sightlessly around the odd objects until he found one that he had already memorized by touch over the months since Sasori's passing and the installment of his replacement agent. He leaned back into his chair again as he unscrewed the cap, shaking out and swallowing two small white capsules.

Sweet headache relief...

Even a glance at the folder, ironically marked with the code name "Team 1i" to diffuse the tension linked to its contents, was enough to make the Leader's head throb like it hadn't since that one time he will not think about. Tobi and Deidara, the Leader thought, just might live to outdo Hidan and Kakuzu on the Dysfunctional Partners Scale. Really, he had been counting on Zetsu's staying with them over the holiday for more reasons than one... But, upstairs, probably even while the Leader was contemplating whether he could possibly build a barricade over his office door that could withstand Deidara's clay with the papers he had stacked around the room, Itachi was walking down the hall on his way to inform Zetsu of his new assignment, completely unaware of how much he was going to regret the former Grass Nin's absence in the hours to come.