Throughout the entirety of Sasuke's life, there was only on thing that never changed. He never stopped loving the thrill of going up against an unpredictable opponent. As a Genin, he had the benefit of having his most formidable, and most unexpected, challenge sorted right into his own team. Naruto.

He could hear his own breath coming out in labored pants as he darted into the trees nearest him. At times, he thought he could feel the chakra pumping in his veins along with the blood, as he dodged, lunged, and molded, always with the knowledge that his opponent would not go down any more willingly than he would himself. It was always a fight until the other fell to the ground in exhaustion. Sasuke never hesitated to use his Sharingan during them, knowing that if his dobe of a teammate had half a chance he would use whatever advantages he possessed, so long as it meant being the one left standing at the end of their match.

Eyes flashing, he checked the area around him, seeking out any signs of movement in the trees around him, looking for a patch of color that would distinctly not belong in the summer foliage. Naruto's skills had improved since they became teammates, but he had one fatal flaw: his astonishing talent for noise. A crash from behind had Sasuke whirling around, already pouncing from his branch to tackle the orange form behind him in mid air.

They hit the ground together, the blond landing under him. Another body launched itself at them from behind, and Sasuke had to draw back enough to stab a kunai into its stomach before its weight could unseat him from his perch. But in the few seconds it took to make the third form disappear in a puff of lavender smoke and released chakra, his teammate had managed to hoist himself up enough to throw his body against Sasuke's. Naruto reversed their positions, Sasuke's midsection squeezed tightly between the leaf-strewn ground and his teammate's knee. A kunai tried to station itself below the his chin, but Sasuke refused to lay still. The tip of his own weapon found its place in the hollow of Naruto's tanned throat at the same time one pressed against his own. Blue eyes met red, trying to stare one another down before the grudging admittance of the tie. They kept their weapons in place for a short while longer, as if the winner could be determined by whoever reacted to what they both knew first.

Growling. "Sasuke-teme. . . "

Sasuke's eyes blinked open reluctantly in the dimness of a cold, pre-dawn light. Under the blankets, his leaden body stoutly rejected the idea of leaving the bedclothes, and as the dark shapes of the furniture in the room around him began to come into focus, he inwardly grumbled at the strict consistency of his internal clock.

There use to be a fleeting moment of unease whenever he opened his eyes to find himself in this unfamiliar room, which was steadily becoming more familiar, just as he once felt when he left the Leaf for the Sound a life time ago. Just as it had back then, time was forcing the unease out of him and replacing it with a weary sense of acceptance. In the early days, when he would wake up tense and wary, his body would only slowly relax with the knowledge that Orochimaru would not be summoning him for morning training, soothed by the memory of nearly three months, and a successful, unsatisfying murder.

~ K ~

Most people think well of planning out the future. It's possible they really believe that by simply saying what they are going to do with their short lives, they can somehow predict how fate will treat them. Most plans don't work out as they are intended though, or they are discarded with time. It's very rare to find someone who honestly do manage to kept themselves resolutely locked into a specific course of action, year through year. They live out their plans, their goals, and the smartest of them die in the fulfillment of these ambitions so that they wont have to see how they wither away afterward without the one objective that gave their lives substance. After their lives become meaningless.

Sasuke had hung his life on a goal since the age of eight. At some point, though he couldn't recall exactly when, the notion had entered his mind that somehow in the destroying of an idol he could not completely shake free from admiring, he would also be destroyed. It had been that thought, and few others, that had given him the will to submit to whatever trials were needed to become stronger. From turning away from the heart-softening comfort of would-be sympathizers at his family's gravesite, to eventually swearing away his body in return for the favors of a snake allied sannin. Though Sasuke's promises were never fulfilled, due to the very person that he had sworn to kill. And when that person was killed, the satisfaction that Sasuke had so long imagined evaded him. Possibly, it was because after eleven years of training in total, from the time he swore revenge to the day that the deed was committed, the actual showdown had taken less than two hours. Or it might have been for the fact that Itachi's death had been caused not by any form of Sharingan technique, or even the chidori, but by a simple, straight cut across an elegant throat. A lucky shot.

When Itachi died, it was with his deadly eyes darting to the side, seeing Sasuke's face but remaining as unreadable as ever. . .right up to the moment that the three pupils of the Sharingan moved to perform their very last attack on the little boy that had been so easily tossed aside before.

Sasuke had been unsuspecting of the attack. If he were totally honest with himself, he had still been staring at the liquid red line that had followed his knife across Itachi's throat, blinking in amazement as it grew wider, spilling the lifeblood of the one person he hated most into the open air, as if it were nothing. The opening that he had used to attack had been so simple that he really had thought Itachi would block him. During their fight, the most extreme damage that the younger Uchiha had managed to leave on his brother's person had been by accident; a swipe at his brother's chest that had been rather gracelessly intercepted, resulting in the severing of the last two fingers on Itachi's left hand. A clean cut so smooth that it might not have even been noticed in the heat of the moment, had the sunlight not glinted off a thin ring of metal on one finger. Foolishly, Itachi's head had turned toward the shine, just for a split second that was long enough for his foolish little brother to dart forward and rake a kunai across the exposed throat. When it was over, and Itachi's attack had seized him, Sasuke had fallen forward, knocking into Itachi and sending them both to the ground. Sasuke was fairly certain that Itachi was already dead by then. Feeling the warmth seeping out of his brother's body, which remained unmoving and stiff under his, was the last thing that Sasuke felt before he succumbed to the Mangekyou Sharingan, and the nigthmare that Itachi had left for him.

He was sure that when they were discovered later, their bodies had not moved. The only thing that might have changed was that Itachi's blood may have begun crusting over in the noonday sun, or Sasuke's drool may have pooled on his brother's chest. Sasuke himself didn't wake up until nearly a week later. During that time, he passed in and out of dreams that he originally thought were the last remains of the Mangekyou attack, but later decided were a diluted mix of dreams and memory. Images stuck in his mind, like a smoldering fire reaching up into the sky, and a tall dark figure standing beside it, feeding a wrapped body to the flames. Another was the image of a cloudy blue sky above his head, slowly moving by as he was carried in someone's arms, limp and defenseless as a doll made of rags. But his clearest dream involved getting up from a bedroll that smelled too much like someone else, as if it had been used by someone who traveled often with distinct taste in shampoo and after shave, and walking between the trees to find water in a forest that couldn't seem to stop spinning. The dream ended with Sasuke shaking from cold in a stranger's arms again, and being unceremoniously dropped on the ground while someone jerked off his damp clothes and rubbed his freezing body dry with a towel. Toward the end of the dream, when Sasuke was just drifting off into the blackness that separated one fuzzy vision from the next, he heard the man that had brought him back saying to himself, "For the love of. . .next time I see one of your family members pass out in a lake, I'm letting them drown."

When Sasuke came out of his jutsu-induced state, it was with short periods of rising sensatory receptiveness. First at meal times, when he became aware of the taste of food in his mouth, and fingers that stroked his throat until it went down. Then came the awareness of being held while he was fed, and the ridiculous struggle for the other person to pry his clenched teeth apart long enough to get the food inside. After one encounter, when Sasuke sat mutely in his mind, unable to help with the battle to get substance past his stubbornly closed jaws, he was even able to hear the sound of the porridge bowl being lowered and a muttered, "I'm getting too fucking old for this" that followed.

From there, Sasuke's awareness increased to hearing the man's voice, and later other things around him. The moment that he regained full consciousness was when he felt himself being picked up and arranged in the position that had his head angled upward to avoid choking, with a hand stationed by his jaw and ready to apply pressure should his teeth clamp shut on the spoon. He felt the gentle coaxing on his jaw and willed it to open. At the same time, he heard, "Come on, kid, you got to eat something."

After the spoonful had been placed in his mouth, Sasuke focused on swallowing on his own. Then again. Each time, he felt the presence of the other's man's hand dropping to the column of his throat, first with its usual stroking, then gradually fading to just checking to see if the muscles were moving accurately. Finally, when this victory was repeated a few times and he felt safe, Sasuke tried speaking.

"I'm nineteen. . .I'm not a kid."

There was a pause, and then Sasuke felt the spoon being inserted into his mouth again, and swallowed. His caretaker's response followed:

"I'm thirty-one. Yes, you are."

Another spoonful was shoved into Sasuke's mouth. Obediently, he took it. But once he had let several pass down his throat, curiosity made him speak again.

"I can't open my eyes."

"There's a blindfold tied over them," the other voice answered. "It keeps the sun from shining on them."

"Oh."

"Do you want it off?"

The spoonfuls stopped coming, and Sasuke heard the sound of the bowl being set down before he nodded his assent. Then his caretaker's hands were around his head, fiddling with a cloth that he hadn't noticed was there until it had been mentioned. Vaguely, Sasuke wondered who this person could be to have realized how sensitive his eyes were to light after they were drained from over using the Sharingan, and then the blindfold was lowered. His vision was blurred at first, but he registered blue hovering before his eyes. Sasuke had to blind several times in quick succession before he regained the ability to see straight. The face of his captor came into focus afterward, and Sasuke felt his body stiffen where it reclined on the cot. The person siting next to him was dangerous, a person that he had only learned the name of became he was purportedly one of the greatest obstacles between him and accomplishing Itachi's death.

He was Hoshigaki Kisame.

~ K ~

When Sasuke came to be Orochimaru's underling, after a rather gravitative battle with his former teammate, he was reassured that he had made the right choice. Unlike in the Leaf Village, where his goal was treated as a personal interest, Orochimaru made it the subject of daily discussion. Orochimaru seemed to know a wide range of facts about Itachi, from his most commonly used attacks to his favorite foods, and which of said foods could and could not be poisoned. Sasuke had the unnerving feeling that if asked, Orochimaru could draw him a map locating every freckle and birthmark on his brother's body. But all the same, the intimate knowledge was never rejected or scoffed at. As uncomfortable as some of the facts told to him were, they were reassuring. They bore witness to the fact that now his training had a purpose that aligned with his ultimate goal to see justice come crashing down on his brother's head.

Though, he was ordered not to call his mission such.

"There is no such thing as justice, Sasuke-kun."

Instead, Orochimaru had Sasuke refer to his goal as what it was: murder. The plotting and executing of the death of a specific person, who may or may not be expecting it to happen.

Throughout the years of training, the subject of his brother's partner had only come up once. Orochimaru summed Kisame up in one brief, informative lecture. The blue-skinned man was a fugitive from the Mist, and yes, the gills on his face did work. For that reason, Sasuke was warned not to challenge Itachi in a marine environment. Kisame was a swordsman, and had a great deal of chakra at his disposal, which Sasuke was told rather bluntly that he could not match and not to try. He was cautioned against approaching both Kisame and Itachi together for the simple reason that Itachi and Kisame had been working together for many years, and that chances were they were more than capable of synchronizing their different attack styles and snuffling Sasuke out faster than a lighted candle left out in a hurricane. His only hope of returning from the final battle between Uchiha and Uchiha, Orochimaru had said, was to have Kisame thoroughly distracted and far, far away.

"If by some chance of fate, you managed to kill Itachi without taking steps to avoid Kisame," Sasuke was told, "and if you are too drained to escape afterwards, do not fret: Kisame will kill you."

With Orochimaru, Sasuke devised a plan to have Kisame distracted by subordinates of his teacher, while Sasuke went on to face his brother. But that plan was forgotten the day he found his mentor's body sprawled out on the floor of the kage office in the Sound. The snake sannin's eyes had been dilated, his face contorted in pan and cringing as he let out periodic cries of terror. Whatever was causing the distress written on Orochimaru's face had been unclear to the observing Uchiha when he entered the room, until he examined the signs closer, the twitching, the drooling. . .and then he had left the plans they made together as he left the sannin himself: for dead.

He had already been trained to recognize Itachi's work.

He knew that when Orochimaru came out of the nightmare playing and replaying inside his head, if he ever did, he would be useless to the Sound. There was a chance that perhaps the Sound's next kage would keep him alive and cared for in honor of his previous position, but Sasuke knew more likely the snake master would be killed. Deadweight was not something favored in the hidden village that Orochimaru had founded.

When he left the kage office, Sasuke noticed a body slumped further down the hall that he hadn't seen before. Propped in a sitting position against the wall, its face angled downward, Sasuke wasn't able to confirm its identity. But the hair was silver, and along the length of the man's arm and spider-webbed across its palm, Sasuke could see a trail of blood. Whether it was a corpse, or merely the form of someone who had been wounded in defending or avenging the Sound's leader, Sasuke didn't stop to find out. He slipped out of the Sound Village as quickly as he was able. In the history books of the Sound, Leaf, and Sand after the war between the three countries ended, he would probably be written as the coward who fled from his master's side at the sight of his death, or possibly even the murderer. Sasuke didn't care.

The chances that he had managed to exit the village unseen were unlikely. Right along with his departure in the nation history books, there might also be a quote from some passerby saying, "I saw Uchiha Sasuke running after the murder. He had his Sharingan activated, and there was spittle in the corners of his mouth. I tried to wish him good day, and he nearly stabbed me in the chest with a kunai still held in his right hand." By the time that caution managed to catch up with him and replace the frenzied need to find his brother before it was too late, he was miles from the village.

His success in finding Itachi as quickly as he did came after, and was largely due to the help of innkeepers, who were sympathetic to the plight of a timid stranger whose older brother had decided to play a hurtful prank by moving ahead in their backpacking trip without him. Sasuke found Itachi within days, and killed him within the span of a few hours. And if there was an initial sense of success or relief afterward, Sasuke missed it when he keeled over on top of his brother's corpse and promptly sunk into oblivion.

When he woke up and Kisame removed his blindfold, and furthermore decided that it was better for him to keep it off, an error in his plans became evident. He had gone against Orochimaru's warnings and attacked Itachi without a care as to whatever else was around them. Kisame had not been distracted; the only reason that he hadn't been present at all during his fight with Itachi was because he had been in a nearby town, securing lodgings for the night. He had attacked Itachi head on, the moment that he saw the briefest flash of a red and black cloak amidst the sand and stone of the bleak climate. He had been as careless as he had been at the age of thirteen. None of what he had learned with Orochimaru had come into play during the fight. And yet. . .he was alive, and Itachi was dead. And the wrath of his brother's infamous partner did not come crashing down on his defenseless body afterward. Instead, the blue-skinned Akatsuki member had plucked Sasuke's unconscious body from the rocky sands and carried it back to the room that he had been planning to share with Itachi. Then Kisame had carried him farther the next day, and the next. Sasuke did not need to ask where after is eyes were uncovered.

The location of the Akatsuki base, though touched upon several time during his training, had never been revealed. Orochimaru never forgot that Sasuke's loyalty lay first with his own ambitions, and if he was willing to betray his home village, he would need far less reason to betray his second. Nevertheless, there were certain landmarks that he had learned to look for, indications of what country and what climate that he should look to when he was finally ready to confront the weasel of the Uchiha clan.

And so, it didn't take him long to realize that Kisame was taking him to face the Akatsuki, a living testament to Uchiha Itachi's demise. He supposed, for a while, that revenge would be taken out on him by the missing nins who had known and worked with his brother for almost eleven years.

Again, he was wrong.

Sasuke's strength improved rapidly after he regained control over his jaws. By the third day after the blindfold's removal, he was able to walk on his own, though shakily. By an eccentric streak of concern, Kisame always made sure to match his pace to the Uchiha's so that whenever Sasuke began to fall, his blue-skinned captor was within reach. On the seventh day, Sasuke had not only re-mastered the art of balance, but was also carrying the smaller of the two packs Kisame had been dragging through the desert. Which, Sasuke later found out, when hunger made him sift through its contents, was Itachi's.

Sasuke knew better than to try to escape while he was on the recovery. For one thing, he knew for a fact that though his build might have been better suited for speed than his captor's, Kisame's longer legs combined with how his endurance and current health surpassed the Uchiha's own, made the outcome of any attempt at running painfully obvious.

But Kisame seemed not to be aware of that.

It was common knowledge that missing nin usually prefer not to take prisoners; after all, any baggage that breathed can also kill. So when Kisame first disappeared from camp for a time span of two hours, Sasuke initially credited it to the possibility that he might be one of the shark nin's first prisoners. But Kisame never seemed to realize his ongoing mistake. Even when Sasuke's strength returned to normal, Kisame still left camp every evening. Sasuke imaged that occasionally he felt eyes on him after the other left, but had to admit that even with his Sharingan activated, he never saw anything to support his suspicion.

Why he didn't take advantage of those long evenings to disappear into the surrounding cliffs and sand dunes, Sasuke was reluctant to admit. One evening he had stood up and started walking away from the campsite, and had even gotten far enough away on the flat land that the campfire looked like nothing more than a tiny dot on the horizon by the time he turned around. He had stared first at the campfire in the distance, then at the dark plane he had been walking towards. He stood still for five long minutes before he started walked again. Kisame had already returned to camp by the time that Sasuke got back, and looked genuinely surprised when Sasuke walked into the circle of light and sat down across the fire from him. Neither of them spoke, except when Sasuke announce that he was willing to take the first watch.

The next day, Sasuke had to grudgingly admit to himself that he wasn't struggling against his captivity. And since Kisame hadn't appeared concerned about hunting him down, he wasn't being held captive either. And that led to question of why he was still travelling with his late brother's partner. By the end of the day, Sasuke still didn't have an answer.

. . .Where else would you go?

Sasuke discovered the reason he eventually settled on when he curiously dipped into his brother's bag for a spare shirt when his own began to smell. The very scent of Itachi, clinging to his clothes, was enough to make Sasuke's body tense in expectation. It gave him an urge to look around for the kunai coming at him from when he was child, naively viewing his brother, spattered in their parents' blood, and thinking for one moment that he had been a hero instead of a murderer. . .

Sasuke had selected one of his brother's tank tops and quickly closed the bag. The chill that lingered with him for days afterward gave him all the reason he needed to stay on with Kisame: Itachi was dead, and though he remembered feeling the warmth exude from his brother's corpse, there was something in him that wasn't convinced that the scene in his memory had really happened. He was now bound by an uncharacteristic instability that would not let him disappear until he had seen some sort of a reaction to what he did. He needed something, anything to tell him that the blood stains on his shirt were really from the nightmare figure still frequenting his dreams, and that Itachi wasn't hiding somewhere, alive and unharmed, waiting to commit another life-altering event.

Bu Itachi never did step out of the shadows in the corner of Sasuke's eyes, and Kisame continued to regard him carefully, like a pet that only might not turn on the hand that fed it. Their pace toward the steadily growing mountain range in the distance never once slowed. Conversations between them were short. Sasuke imagined that it was due to the mutual caution they felt in regard to one another. There was also a stiffness to Kisame's movements that Sasuke couldn't quite discern the cause to. For reasons that neither of them wanted to challenge, they rarely met eyes, though Sasuke was aware that he was constantly watched. He did the same to the former Mist nin.

During a rainstorm that neither of them petitioned to stop for, Kisame fished Itachi's cloak out of his own pack when Sasuke's own clothing proved insufficient. In the intense cold that came with the downpour, he hadn't thought to be repulsed by the stiff fabric around the collar, or the fact that he knew exactly what had dried there to make it that way, or even wonder what the shark nin had done with his brother's body. Instead, Sasuke only pulled it more tightly around himself and carried on at Kisame's heels. After the storm ended, the cloak stayed on the nineteen year old. Kisame never asked for it back, and though Sasuke thought that once he caught the shark nin staring pointedly at him as he laid it out as part of his bedding at night, he never offered it.

Their pact of not speaking to one another unless necessary was broken abruptly when their path touched the foot of the mountains. Kisame stopped his younger charge short when he turned around sharply and fixed him with a deliberately cold look. For the first time since voluntarily returning to Kisame's camp in the middle of the night several days earlier, Sasuke felt as if his presence was surprising to the blue skinned man in front of him. Though now it wasn't a grudging caretaker that dealt the look, but the shinobi that had matched Uchiha Itachi glare for glare for over a decade.

Kisame bluntly asked, "Are you coming with me?"

Sasuke had stared back at the other missing nin, noting the weathered slash in his hitai-ate, the gills, the inhuman teeth. For a moment, he wondered how Itachi had first reacted to the creature in front of him. The partner that should have cared that Itachi was gone.

"Do not fret: Kisame will kill you."

Sasuke's voice when he answered was flat and sounded chillingly unlike his own. "Where else would I go?"

Silence followed. Then a nod. Kisame ducked off the set trail and into the brush that grew around it. He left Sasuke to follow after him, never letting out a warning when he was going to take a sharp turn, or in which direction. Sasuke learned quickly that molding chakra into his feet on the gravelly earth required concentration to keep from sliding downward with a layer of pebbles stuck to the bottoms of his sandals. He kept his complaints to himself though, and followed the former Mist ninja up into the mountains, matching his speed when he could, fixing his eyes on the red and black cloak when he couldn't, until Kisame suddenly ducked into what he had taken to be a shallow nook in the solid rocks around him. He knocked four times in a peculiar order against the rock face, and then walked inside when the surface seemed to slide out of his way of its own accord.

~ K ~

Orochimaru, conscious of his ward's occasional spurts of impatience, had been careful about what information he gave out about the Akatsuki members. He knew, and Sasuke knew, that there was an equal chance of any one of them creating a pot hole in Sasuke's road to success. The snake sannin had spoken most freely of his former partner, listing the puppet maker's strengths and weaknesses in criticizing tones that told Sasuke there had been little affection lost between comrades when Orochimaru turned traitorous to the organization. When word had reached them that somehow the former Sand shinobi known as Sasori had managed to survive a rather crude succession of sword attacks following the abduction of the Sand Village's kage, Orochimaru had turned up his nose and said that of course the puppeteer would be too stubborn to let himself be killed by Leaf shinobi.

The list had been ordered from who his mentor had judged most likely to interfere to the least, naturally starting with Kisame and moving downward. But the list had moved slowly, and when Orochimaru had died, it had still not been finished, leaving Sasuke only partially schooled on Itachi's comrades. And so it was with a quiet wariness that Sasuke stepped into the shadows of the Akatsuki base, Sharingan activated and standing close behind his sharkish guide.

He knew who the Akatsuki members were, more or less, because of rumors that had reached him in the Sound before his late sensei's death. The organization had lost a fair amount of its secrecy when they began hunting down the demon vessels. He also knew that the leader, though said to be a formidable man, made sure to have at least one of his agent teams stationed at home base at all times. Apparently, he wasn't stupid.

But Sasuke did not know anything about the blond creature that casually greeted them as they passed down one of the dark, winding tunnels. The person was bird-boned, and had a peculiar kind of bold cheerfulness to his voice that was almost disarming. Sasuke blinked at the man, who he had only realized was a man when he heard the decidedly male octaves of his voice. One visible large blue eye flashed, looking over Kisame, and then Sasuke. The color, combined with the voice, made something jump in the back of Sasuke's mind, an echo of another blue eyed blond who at first glanced seemed too brash and informal to be a shinobi at all, but Sasuke didn't let the memory linger.

"Kisame, Itachi," the blond was saying as he came nearer to them. "Did you just get back? Sasori and I are supposed to. . ."

The blonde's hand, half raised in a wave, paused and allowed Sasuke to make out an unusual slit running across the palm. Deidara, Sasuke's memory supplied instantly, Sasori's rumored replacement partner after Orochimaru turned traitor.

"Kisame, un . . ." The mouth-sporting hand was lowered. The one eyebrow that was revealed by the man's hair arched as he stared hard at Sasuke's face. Dumbly, he stated, "That's not Itachi."

"No," Kisame agreed without missing a beat. The blue man's head turned enough so that Kisame could look over his shoulder to observe his quiet companion as he spoke, as if humoring the other by checking to make sure. "No, it is not."

"Un." Deidara's subtly bird-like features became more noticeable when he cocked his head to one side. Particularly, the odd point to his lips, which made Sasuke half seriously wonder if he ought to protect his eyes incase the older man suddenly decided to start pecking at him.

Kisame moved to go around Deidara without another word more. Sasuke followed, staring back when he felt the blue eye on his face. For a second, he felt relieved to be going away from the curiously staring blond man, but the feeling was quickly snubbed when he heard hurriedly footsteps start up behind him, followed by Deidara brushing past his shoulder to catch up with Kisame.

"Un," he said, unperturbed, "so where is Itachi?"

Kisame was silent for a moment. He answered stiffly, "Gone."

"Gone?" Deidara echoed normally, uncomprehendingly. "It's not like him to let you do the mission report, un."

Staring at the back of their head, Sasuke couldn't tell if Kisame showed any signs of surprise at his comrade's failure to grasp his meaning.

"Un, Sasori-danna says that someday Itachi's going to go around breaking all our mirrors because he doesn't trust his own reflection not to ruin him, un."

They rounded a corner at the back of the hall, and Sasuke felt the ground angle slightly downward. They were going deeper into the mountain.

"Did he go into town?" Deidara asked when Kisame didn't respond to his last statement.

"No," Kisame said in a voice that could have been barbed as he continued to stare pointedly into the hallway ahead. "Deidara, he's gone."

"Un," the bird-like shinobi replied; his tone was still too light for him to have understood what Kisame was trying to say. "Well, one of the girls from that jewelry place he likes told me his order came in the last time I was down there. Are you sure he didn't go to pick it up?"

"Deidara."

"Un?"

Kisame stopped walking abruptly, halting their procession in the middle of the stone hallway. When he turned around to look at his younger comrade, Sasuke instinctively drew back. Deidara only blinked up at Kisame.

"Deidara, Itachi is not in town. He's gone."

Sasuke was able to trace the path that the bird-like Akatsuki agent's eye took as it raked over Kisame's face, taking in the bags that were so hard to see with the shark-nin's unusual complexion, the unyielding line of his mouth, and the clear tension in his shoulders.

"Un, you look like hell. . ." he said after a moment. Then the blue iris darted to one side to fix Sasuke with a look that was less curiosity than before, more examination. "Who did you say that kid was?"

Kisame let the breath come out of his lungs in one puff. "Later, Deidara. Sir Leader will want to see me."

Kisame pushed past Deidara before another question could be asked. As Sasuke moved to follow, the blond man turned a look on the blue nin's back that was partly confusion and partly offense at being so abruptly brushed aside. Either way, Sasuke was sure that he felt eyes on his back for a full five minutes before the tunnel turned into stairs. Kisame led him downward.

Thankfully, they did not encounter any more organization members for the rest of their descent.

As they went farther into the mountain tunnels, the air began to grow warm and damp. Sasuke began to sweat, and wonder vaguely how the inside of a mountain managed to get so humid. When one side of the tunnel gave way and in its place Sasuke saw a cavern baring a large, steaming, clear pool far below that seemed to stretch out for several yards, he understood. Hot springs.

The lighting disappeared in time with the rising heat, as they went further into the mountain's labyrinth innards. Kisame maneuvered his way around the stone corners and jutting steps with an ease that Sasuke assumed to have come from years of traveling these stony pathways, but Sasuke could only squint into the blackness and look to his outline form for clues as to when the path would suddenly change. He got the feeling that Kisame was listening to his footsteps, either to test how well he was able to predict the path, or to make sure that he was still there.

Sasuke nearly stumbled twice, and thought that he heard what might have been a chuckle disguised as a quickly blown out breath at least once, before the appearance of a thin line of light cutting the shape of a rectangle into the blackness caught his eye.

"Sunlamps," Kisame explained as they passed what must have been a door, apparently able to pick up on Sasuke's interest from just a momentary pause between steps. "Zetsu likes it down here because of the humidity. When he's not scouting other countries, he lives down here with his apprentice."

Kisame never even turned to glance at him, nor did he stop walking when Sasuke did.

"Oh."

Their walk ended at another door marked out by a sliver of light, where Sasuke was told to wait out in the narrow hallway until he was called for. Kisame dropped his pack on the floor, rolled his shoulders to get sensation back into them, and then went in alone.

Sasuke likewise let Itachi's pack hit the floor, the door's opening filling the hallway with a dim light for just a moment, during which his back just happened to be turned away. Afterward, Sasuke felt out the wall behind him, found a smooth spot, and leaned against it. Distantly, he could feel the chakra signatures of the other Akatsuki agents in the base. None of them were close enough for his eyes to detect their chakra, save for Kisame in the other room, but that source was too large and unmasked for him to miss. It wasn't the same for the leader, he noticed. As Sasuke's eyes focused on the faint shape of the door across from him, he could still see Kisame's chakra seeping out from the crack above the floor, but that was all. Whoever else was in that room was either unusually gifted with hiding their chakra, or had discovered a way to keep it from going beyond the confines of the room. And more. Straining his ears momentarily in the silence of the hallway, Sasuke noted that he could not even hear the faintest murmur from beyond the door.

A thin hair of suspicion stood up in the back of his mind. While slinking down to where he had dropped Itachi's travel pack, Sasuke was extremely aware of the fact that despite how peculiarly uncaring Kisame might pretend to be, he was now unarmed in the heart of an organization that had one hell of a reason to be angry with him.

Itachi's bag was smaller and lighter than his partner's for a reason, Sasuke found out after a moment of searching. Most of what Itachi needed was able to be carried on his person, which included the tools of his profession. Sasuke felt cautiously around the spare clothing articles inside, looking for the cool edge of a kunai or shuriken, but there was nothing Itachi left behind to help his little brother protect himself. He was about to close the bag when something within it shifted and cold metal finally brushed against Sasuke's finger tips. Too small to be a weapon, and too heavy to be a button sprung loose from a stray garment. Sasuke pulled the item out to examine it in the near lightless hallway. His Sharingan provided some help in penetrating the darkness, but it wasn't necessary. Sasuke laid a small ring on his palm, tracing its shape with one finger. Smooth metal, and something else. Pinching it between two fingers, Sasuke lifted the ring first to his nose, then down to his mouth where his tongue darted out to taste the mysterious matter caked around the edge of the ring. Dried blood. But like all shinobi who managed to pass Academy level, Sasuke knew that blood didn't dry on metal, and so while he picked at the crusted surface, he tried to think of a name for the hardened substance. Skin, maybe. Or muscle. Or just meat.

He almost had the ring clean when a thought struck him. Itachi's finger. The light bounced off a ring his brother had been wearing. Sasuke had thought that it was the ring the Akatsuki had given Itachi when he joined their ranks, a part of his brother's uniform. But the ring Sasuke was holding now was plain, bent and worn to match the shape of a finger joint that was constantly forming a fist or clenching around the handle of something or other. And it was crusted with dead matter that had stuck to it when a kunai had sliced through the flesh and bone.

Kisame, Sasuke thought distantly. The shark nin must have spotted it when he found Itachi's body. The ring that had cost its own his life.

"Um. . .Itachi-san?"

The sudden voice behind him made Sasuke jump. He stood instantly and turned, Itachi's travel bag still open on the floor behind him. The outline of a man was standing in the middle of the narrow hallway, less than three feet from Sasuke. He could see the subtle chakra swirling in the air around him, but somehow he had failed to notice the other man's approach. However, before he could identify the figure from the briefings with his deceased sensei, the person in front of him stiffened and cautiously took one step back.

He asked, "Who are you?"

Sasuke startled. Deidara had seen him in full lamplight and had only realized that he wasn't Itachi as a second thought, but this person was looking at him in near blackness, and still. . .

The door between Sasuke and the stranger opened suddenly, spilling light into the hallway so that Sasuke flinched before letting go of his Sharingan. The other person across from him seemed to flinch too. His observer, Sasuke noticed, was older than he thought. His face was covered, but when the light brought the other's body into greater detail, the shape and size suggested that he might have been as old as Kakashi. Give or take.

Kisame nodded in greeting to the hallway's extra occupant. "Hello, Tobi."

"Hello," the other man nodded back briefly, but when Kisame's head turned to Sasuke, the masked mssing nin demanded, "Kisame-san, where's Itachi?"

The way that the shark nin's shoulders abruptly stiffened made Sasuke raise an eyebrow. Turning back, Tobi's head cocked to one side as Kisame stated more bluntly than he had with Deidara, "Itachi's dead."

"WHAT?"

The two word sentence couldn't have been met with a louder answer. For the second time, Sasuke flinched as Tobi's incredulous shout echoed down the hall. He thought that he even felt a momentary bubble of warning chakra from the leader's office.

"Orochimaru?" the masked man asked, but Kisame had already recovered from the ringing in his ears and was motioning for Sasuke to come into the other room. Sasuke did so, stepping momentarily in front of the person identified as Tobi. Sasuke noticed that the mask had only one eyehole carved into its surface, and wondered absently if the Akatsuki had a fondness for one-eyed fighters and if he ought to tell them about his former sensei from the Leaf. He paused in mid step, and in mid—ridiculous—thought, when a turn of the man's head made the light shine directly into the mask's eyehole for a second, and send out a brief flash of a dark red pupil. Kisame had to reach out impatiently and shake Sasuke back into motion.

Before the door closed behind him, the shark nin lingered to mutter something to the man outside that Sasuke couldn't hear. He glanced at the blue man's back as he waited, contemplating how he could ask about the unusual eye color later.

The leader's office wasn't as light as the tunnels above that the majority of his employees used, but still notably easier to see in than the stone passageway that led to it. The room itself was sparsely decorated, though Sasuke assumed that it wasn't a room specifically meant for entertaining anyway. The leader himself sat behind a large desk at the end of the room, where the lighting dramatically cut off. Sasuke glanced upward to see if there was a missing light bulb, but a jab at is shoulder from behind told him that he was not supposed to do that.

The leader had his chair turned away. Sasuke stared at the back of it, aware of Kisame now standing directly behind him, like a living wall between himself and the door.

"I've been told you killed Uchiha Itachi." The leader's voice was deep and only bordering on curiosity. Sasuke answered only when he felt a nudge from Kisame that told him he was expected to.

"Hai."

There wasn't so much as a pause from the man in the chair. "Outside of the Sound?'

"Hai."

"Orochimaru," the voice went on, "was declared dead several weeks back. Sources have informed us that his death was actually an execution when his body was found in an unoccupied state. His spare body was reported to be missing afterward."

Sasuke knew that the term "spare body" had been adopted by some of Orochimaru's less respectful underlings to describe his status in the Sound. Sasuke frowned at hearing someone outside the hidden village blatantly using it. The leader continued, "Kisame has also informed me that when his last mission was carried out, Orochimaru was left in a surprisingly docile state."

Silence followed, during which Sasuke got the feeling that Kisame's eyes were boring into the back of his head. He didn't know what he was expected to say, and so remained silent, waiting to hear why this information was being told to him.

The leader's chair turned slightly, and through the shadows obscuring his view of the man's face, what Sasuke thought of as an unnaturally bright golden eye fixed onto him. It stayed on him for a long time, during which Sasuke had the distinct feeling that he was being sized up and weighed like an animal for sale. When the man spoke next, Sasuke wouldn't have blinked if he were asked to open his mouth and let the shadowy figure examine his teeth. But instead he was told, "Kisame also tells me that after Itachi's death, you returned with him to this organization of your own will?"

There was a light nudge on Sasuke's shoulder.

"Hai."

The bright eyes stared at him, and at another persistent nudge, Sasuke stared right back. He forced himself to hold the critical gaze, striving to keep his face impassive. This was someone that even Itachi had bent knee to, and that fact in itself was alarming.

Tension ebbed in Sasuke's shoulder when the chair turned again, and the blazing eyes went back to study the shadowy wall behind the leader's desk. "Very well then."

Kisame's hand stayed station directly behind Sasuke's shoulder. Sasuke wondered if the leader would see it.

"Welcome back, Orochimaru."

While the muscles in Sasuke's jaw suddenly decided to try impersonating strings of cooked spaghetti, Kisame skillfully took control of his movements, spinning him around and swiftly applying pressure to his back so that by the time his eyebrows had risen in shock, Sasuke was already back out in the hallway with the office door shut behind him.

In the darkness, he couldn't see the shark nin's face, nor even see if the masked shinobi from before was still there, but he heard the sound of gravel moving on the stone floor when Kisame picked up one of the two bags they had left out there. Then Kisame's voice:

"Let's go. I'll show you to your room. . .Oro."

~ K ~

It is unreasonable to think that, when two individuals spend a number of years together in close proximity, they would not adopt some of one another's traits, no matter how guarded or resistant one of the two parties may be. This had doubtlessly happened with Sasuke in regards to his former mentor. Though he had never gone so far as to join Orochimaru in his affinity for snakes, he knew many of his old master's quirks. He knew that Orochimaru had an unfathomable love for watching shark meat being diced and prepared for supper. He preferred to have it burn whenever possible, to which there were multiple raised eyebrows, but no comments when a perfectly prepared dish was dubbed too raw and sent back to the chef. Sasuke also knew that Orochimaru had a strange obsession with boys with long dark hair. Orochimaru insisted that every boy with brown or black colored hair, Sasuke included, grow it out for his amusement. Sasuke had thought it rather strange, but it was a small detail. Then also, Sasuke had noticed about two or three years after going the Sound, that Orochimaru preferred to watch his prisoners be put to death. The Sound's kage had a favorite method that involved a snake slowly inserted into the prisoner's mouth until it was startled by the unfortunate condemned party's gag reflex, startling the poisonous creature into attacking the back of the throat. Orochimaru said that it was a test of the prisoner's will power, to see how much control over their body they could exert in the face of certain death. Sasuke thought that it was just a sick excuse to see his pets being deep throated.

But of course, to the best of Sasuke's knowledge, he had shown none of those traits since leaving the Sound. Nor anything else that would have led Kisame to mistake him for Orochimaru inhabiting a new body. But cautious of other ears that could have been listening, Sasuke kept silent until the shark nin had led him back up into the lighter tunnels, and then down a wider passageway with two doorways on either side. They went into the first one they came to on the left side.

"I'm not Orochimaru," he said quietly after he had pushed the door shut behind them. Kisame was already turning to face him.

"I know."

"Then why did you. . .?'

Sasuke's question trailed off at the sound of footsteps echoing from outside the doorway. When the sound faded off, Kisame didn't leave him a chance to restate the question. He demanded to know just how much Sasuke knew about the organization. Sasuke had thought about dodging the question in turn, but the way the shark nin's cool eyes held him reminded him that he was looking at someone who had dealt with Itachi's evasive behavior for nearly eleven years. And despite the simple picture that Orochimaru had painted of him, Kisame had the upper hand. Sasuke recited what he knew of the Akatsuki, the nine members policy, the sort of missions that they carried out, and brief personal backgrounds that Orochimaru had given him on the some of the members. Kisame listened to him, and then filled in potholes in Sasuke's knowledge to help him maintain the image of Orochimaru.

"And that's all Orochimaru told you?" Kisame pressed when they were finished.

Sasuke frowned. He where he was still standing between the former Mist ninja and the door, and he thought that Kisame's eyes were resting somewhere around his hitai-ate rather than on his face. "Is there something else I should know?"

The shark nin's eyes lowered back down to meet his for a second, then Kisame coughed and shook his head.

"No, I guess not," Kisame said after a moment, during which Sasuke's confused frown only deepened. Kisame hurriedly went on to inform him of the next most important concern. Which was that, given the circumstances, he was now under house arrest. "Just until the Leader is sure that you're really who you say you are."

Sasuke thought about commenting that he never said he was anyone, but dismissed the notion as childish. Kisame rose to leave. "If you need anything," he said as he passed around the Uchiha, "my room's right next door."

Sasuke nodded, but Kisame lingered by the door.

"You, uh. . .might want to avoid Sasori if you can. Just until you're cleared."

Sasuke nodded again, fully understanding at least this part of his instructions. Then Kisame stepped out of the room and closed the door, leaving Sasuke alone in Orochimaru's old room.

During the weeks that followed, Kisame left the base frequently on missions. Sasuke built on Kisame's advice and avoided all Akatsuki members to the best of his abilities. Though no one approached him, Sasuke kept in mind that he was playing the part of a traitorous comrade who was still pending readmission into the fold. Before he left on his last mission, Kisame had hinted that the Leader might decide to have Sasuke watched, and if Sasuke's experiences with Tobi in the lower tunnels had meant anything, he decided that the chances of him noticing were slim. So Sasuke kept his guard up at all times, aware of the fact that his brother's former partner had not warned him of what to expect should the organization decide that trusting Orochimaru again was not a risk they were willing to take. After all, Kisame and Itachi been on a mission to exterminate their traitorous former comrade when he found them.

But installed in the heart of the Akatsuki under his late mentor's name, Sasuke was in no position to pose questions. From the calculating sideways glances he received whenever he passed Sasori in the hallways, he got the feeling that somehow Kisame had trapped him on a delicately balanced point that could all too easily be upset by the first uncertain movement. So he waited out Kisame's absences, aware that when the shark nin was present at the base, the likelihood of him being stopped and confronted by another agent was lowered.

Sasuke couldn't be sure how much safety he could assume he had in Orochimaru's room opposed to anywhere else in the base. The room was cramped both because of its size and because of the multiple stacks of boxes that lined two of its four walls. Sasuke took chances peering into the other three bedrooms along the hall—Kisame's first, when he stopped the former Mist shinobi to ask about what they were supposed to do for laundry. Another time, he had looked into the room directly across from his, when the door had been mysteriously blown off its hinges by an unknown source. Sasuke, who had just been coming down the tunnel, had seen Sasori standing with his arms crossed on the other side of the doorway, while Deidara gestured rapidly, trying to explain something or other.

Kisame had heard the explosion from inside his own room and come out to stand beside the curiously eaves-dropping Uchiha.

"Something interest you?" he had asked Sasuke after glancing in at the not-too-uncommon sight of the two artists arguing over the beauty of explosion.

"All the Akatsuki have roommates," Sasuke stated slowly.

"Yeah," Kisame's tone indicated that he did not known why the fact would interest the shorter ninja. "The Leader wanted to do that for one reason or another." He shrugged and gestured toward the empty door frame. "No one really seemed to mind, other than those two."

"Hn." Sasuke lowered his voice, despite being sure that Deidara's volume would effectively keep the former Sand and Stone ninjas from hearing him. "What about Orochimaru?"

Kisame glanced over his shoulder, back toward the open doorway to the room that Sasuke occupied alone, and answered, "Beats me. Oro was here long before I came around."

Sasuke was silent for a moment, thinking of the other Akatsuki members he had seen. Even Zetsu, he knew, shared his humid room with his unofficial partner, Tobi. Then he thought of Kisame's room, large enough for two. "What about Itachi?"

Even with his head still turned toward the argument in the other room, which was now dying down to Deidara grudgingly making the rhetorical promise that he would stop blowing up his clay statues in their room, Sasuke could see Kisame shifting his weight, stalling.

"We shared a room," was muttered out after a moment.

Turning away from his partner, Deidara looked out into the hall, probably to survey the damage done to the doorway, and Kisame and Sasuke promptly turned away before either could be caught staring.

Sasuke returned to his room and thought idly to himself that, perhaps he had actually been cheated into using a closet that Sasori had thrown his former partner's belongings into after Deidara had joined the organization. Either way, Sasuke only needed to glance across the way to where the metal hinges to Sasori and Deidara's bedroom door were still letting out little trails of steam to decide that he was perfectly fine with his sleeping arrangements.

In the snake sannin's room, Sasuke was only able to find a few pieces of actual furniture buried under the boxes. There was a single twin bed on one side of the room ,which needed to be aired, but other than that was perfectly usable. A desk was found in one corner, empty and seeming to only serve the purpose of holding more boxes. And then when he cleared away the boxes at the foot of his bed, of all things, he found a television set. Sasuke peered at the civilian contraption for a moment, trying and failing to remember any time that he had seen his former mentor express an interest in technology that couldn't be harnessed into a sound-based weapon. Then after turning it on for a moment, he promptly reburied it upon seeing that the thing, lacking an antenna, was as useless.

Sasuke let the boxes escape his inspection for a bit longer, mostly due to the sheer number of them. He could almost have made the mistake of calling Orochimaru a pack rat, if not for the fact that he had perfectly clear memories of Orochimaru disposing of objects, and people, once they'd lost their usefulness. Anything he found in Orochimaru's room, he knew, would either be something that the snake sannin had thought expendable, or too dangerous to take with him when he left to form the Sound.

The first box that Sasuke delved into held nothing but clothes—the Akatsuki uniform mostly, which Orochimaru had doubtlessly had no problem parting with when he left. Sasuke had begun wearing the uniform shortly after going on probation, but even if Orochimaru hadn't been too tall for his clothing to fit, Sasuke would still have had no need to keep the box's contents. At some point, Kisame had noticed Sasuke looked to be almost identical to Itachi in terms of body type and, somehow managing to be both considerate and chilling at the same time, the shark nin had suggested handing over Itachi's remaining clothes rather than wasting material on new uniforms for Orochimaru's second body. The Leader had approved.

Crouching down over the box, Sasuke plunged his hand into the rumpled old clothing. His nose wrinkled in distaste when dust flew up at him in response. As he felt curiously around the bottom, he glanced at the towering stacks of still unopened boxes, and wondered whether anyone would think he was being out of character if he decided to dispose of some of them. There was no point in keeping old garments around if no one could use them. . .

Sasuke frowned when his fingers bumped into something solid. It was blunt and nonmetallic, and when Sasuke pulled it out from under the layers of red and black clothes, he blinked at it in confusion. It was a video cassette tape. Staring at it, Sasuke turned the tape over in his hands, looking for a label that wasn't there. His eyes moved to the castle of boxes he had built at the foot of the bed, hiding the antenna-less television set. Sasuke spent a moment sitting beside the clothes box, trying to remember whether there had even been a VCR slot on the television. Then he got up.

He tossed the cassette tape onto his bed as he crossed the room and went to work on dismantling the structure he'd made from Orochimaru's castoffs. He stacked them across the room one by one, forming a waist-high wall that divided the room so that whoever came in would find a nice little barrier between them and Sasuke's television. The fact that Sasuke found the thought amusing was a testament to how the weeks of idleness were wearing him down.

When the television set was uncovered, Sasuke picked up the videotape again. Again, he looked for a label of some sort, but there wasn't even the sticky residue of a peeled sticker. The film visible inside was divided equally on both sides, indicating that it had only been half done when it was last viewed.

He knelt in front of the television set and found the VCR slot built in near the bottom; apparently, the entertainment device had served a purpose after all. Sasuke thought about rewinding the tape before watching it, in case it turned out to be something too complicated for him to graps mid-way through playing it, but the television set switched on automatically when the cassette was inserted. The screen turned bright blue for a second, before abruptly jumping into play mode.

"-ame."

Sasuke glanced up from the control buttons instinctively at the sound of the painfully recognizable voice. His hand promptly fell listlessly to the floor in front of the control panel as he stared at the images on the screen.

He recognized the background from the brief glimpses he managed to get of the room Kisame supposedly shared with Itachi, but his attention was turned to one of the two beds on which the camera had been focused. Itachi's head was lolled back on Kisame's shoulder. Sasuke stared stupidly at his brother's open mouth and closed eyes, noting the frustrated expression but failing to grasp its cause.

Kisame was holding Itachi on his lap. Sasuke blinked and let that bit of information sink in, even as his eyes raked over the two forms, from the damp strands of hair that were clinging to his brother's temple, to where his legs were tangled together with the former Mist nin's. And the first thought that came to him was the absurdity of how petite hi brother looked against Kisame's wide chest. There was one strong blue arm barring Itachi's upper torso, pressing his slender form back against his partner and holding him still as a sharp set of teeth dug into the junction between neck and shoulder. Likewise, there was a second arm reaching across Itachi's hips, holding its position even as the former Uchiha heir tried to buck against it. Itachi made a deep throated sound of frustration, but his partner seemed to ignore it as he ravished the tiny wound his teeth left in the smooth white skin on Itachi's shoulder, tongue dating out to lap up the droplets of blood as they came.

"Kisame. . ." Itachi growled out as he executed a particularly hard jerk of his hips, which only resulted in the arm holding him captive against his partner's body tightening. His hands, Sasuke noticed after a moment of staring, were encased in Kisame's embrace along with his torso. Though from the way that the shark nin's lips quirked upward in the face of a tone that would have made any sane shinobi fear for his safety, it seemed that neither of them wanted the Uchiha to actually break free.

Kisame grinned as he continued to work his smaller partner's neck, only lifting away long enough to ask tantalizingly, "Is there something you want, Itachi-san?"

Itachi's eyelids cracked open to nail his partner with an unsatisfied glare. Below, Kisame rolled his hips teasingly, and the glare melted away. Itachi's eyes closed, and his back arched, pressing hungrily back against the movement. In response to Kisame's question, he turned his head so that his mouth was closer to his partner's ear and ground out a single word.

"More. . ."

Sasuke watched as Kisame's mouth trailed lazily up to his brother's jawline, pretending not to notice the increasingly desperate body straining against his for relief. "More what?"

"Kisame!" There was warning tone in his brother's voice, but it was forgotten when Kisame rolled his hips again, and Itachi's normally passive face contorted in an uncharacteristic mix of pleasure and need. And Sasuke came to the belated, idiotic discovery that his brother had an erection. And that he was not only siting on Kisame's lap, he was sitting on him.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you," the shark nin said close to Itachi's ear, while one hand release its hold on the other's unblemished scheduler to trail down to one dusky nipple, "the best way to get what you want is to ask nicely?"

The lines in Itachi's forehead deepened. He didn't waste so much as a second after Kisame released his hold on his upper body. The shark nin had barely finished his mock scolding before a hand latched onto the back of his head, jerking him forward to crush his mouth against' Itachi's. Sasuke felt nausea bubble up from his stomach at the sight. He could clearly see the glimmer of wet tongue passing from between one set of lips as his brother dominated his partner's mouth.

Itachi finally pulled back with his eyes still closed and erection still standing at full attention.

"Touch me," he ordered with his hand still buried possessively in the shark nin's hair. He leaned in a nipped once at Kisame's lower lip. "Now."

Kisame's hold on his partner's hip had already weakened when his attention was taken over by Itachi's kiss. Now it moved as the latter's hips began rocking. Relief only showed up momentarily on the Uchiha's face as the movement he craved finally came, then he began to move faster as Kisame's fingers closed around the part of him that had been ignored, making amends. Itachi's pace picked up speed. His hips began to thrust out, slamming themselves back down onto Kisame's lap as his head once more sought support on the shark nin's shoulder. Kisame met him each time, hand vigorously working to keep up with the demanding pace being set by his younger partner.

Sasuke's eyes dilated, skewing the image of his brother repeatedly impaling himself on Kisame into fuzzy shapes amidst the sounds of pants and pleased groans. Up until he heard Kisame say his brother's name. He blinked his eyes back into focus just in time to see one set of blue fingers dig into the skin around one hip. Kisame's eyes squeezed shut as he pulled his partner's body closer, face burying itself in midnight black hair as he released into the murderer of the Uchiha clan.

Itachi waited a moment, unmoving in the shark nin's embrace, before he covered Kisame's hand with his own. Wordlessly, he encouraged rough fingers to curl around him as he guided them to moving again. Faster and faster. . .Itachi's head began to arch, lips parting, leaning back against Kisame's teeth stroking his neck, and . . .

Sasuke stabbed the off button on the VCR with his finger, hard enough to make the joint pop. He ignored it as he continued to stare at the screen as if the sight of his brother approaching orgasm was still playing there. Distantly, he noted that when he drew his hand away it was shaking. But he remained where he was until he heard a knock on his door that made him jerk away from the television set sometime later. His wall was still up, and in his hurry to get to the door, he nearly ran into it.

"Come in!"

Kisame opened the door a second later. When his eyes landed on the wall of boxes, he peered curiously at the younger shinobi. "What are you doing in here?"

"Nothing," Sasuke said quickly, and then inwardly smacked himself. No other response would have been a larger confirmation that he was doing something. He just stopped himself short of turning to look at the television to make sure that it hadn't decided to make things worse by suddenly switching itself back on.

"Are you alright?" Kisame frowned at him, and Sasuke tried desperately not to stare at the teeth he'd just seen teasing his brother's neck. "You look pale."

Itachi. . .he. . .

"Is there something you want?" Sasuke asked curtly, directing his eyes to somewhere over the shark nin's head since staring at him seemed impossible at the moment.

"Is there something you want, Itachi-san. . .?"

"The Leader summoned you," Kisame said. The undertone of concern that had been there a moment before disappeared, and Sasuke hoped that his relief wasn't too evident. "You're in."