a/n- mildly cracky, extremely self-indulgent, and completely unbeta'd. apologies for taking so long. procrastination, bad habit of mine.

Ever Again

Ever again, though we've learned the landscape of love
and the lament in the churchyard's names
and the terrible, silent abyss where the others have fallen;
ever again we walk out, two together,
under the ancient trees, ever again find a place
among the wildflowers, under heaven's gaze.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"We're us," Naruto says, and strangely, it's enough of an explanation. "We don't need to be normal, 'cause if we were normal, we wouldn't be us anymore, and that wouldn't be much fun at all."

Itachi doesn't know when Naruto started knowing the answers, or when the crane-mobiles in the corners started actually granting the wishes made, or when Kisame started tolerating the blond's presence enough to not kick him out first thing every morning.

And Naruto says, "We're us," he thinks that maybe that's it, that's why, even though he has a paper on the desk that's forming a pretty bird, and his mind is full of reasons why it can't be, why it's never an easy answer like that. Why it's not-

But Itachi has spent many years folding paper into wishes, and he thinks that it's probably high time that one of them came true.

I.

It makes Naruto grin, which Itachi counts a point in his books, and it's something simple and normal to make it all seem less crazy, which is close to impossible with them, because crazy follows them, simplicity eludes them, and normality just doesn't apply to them in the least bit.

And maybe it was the whimsy that originally caught his attention when he first started, first made it a habit. That was way back when he was still running away from everything, alone. And, maybe, it didn't ever loose its fascination because the irony of it made him smile.

It's something that's comforting, and unwinds the tension in his shoulders after a day of fighting, much in the way that throwing kunai and shuriken had been when he was still learning the basics. Mindless and repetitive, not something that needs complete and total concentration, and it always was easier for him to think when his hands were occupied with something.

It's a constant, the movements are more muscle memory than anything else by now, he doesn't need to focus at all while his hands do the work and his mind is free to wander. (And it makes Naruto smile at him, which is worth it in and of itself.)

II.

Sometimes, he wonders whether it would all be better if maybe they were more average, more of a normal couple than they are.

He asked Naruto, once. Asked when the blond was half-asleep from being woken up, curled under an almost-finished mobile on the bed. He'd answered, that if they were normal, then they wouldn't be them, and where would the fun be in that? He'd grinned sleepily, and yelled a "Good-night, Kisame," at the wall before immediately falling back asleep.

And maybe it really is that simple, doesn't need to be any more complicated than that, and maybe Itachi is reading too much into it. Maybe it is as simple as just being who they are, being what they are. But that can't be right, since nothing is ever that simple, never that easy, and sometimes he thinks too long about it all.

And the room is filled with tiny, origami cranes.

A finished mobile hangs in the corner of the room, strings swinging in a light breeze, there's a handful of garlands thrown over the back of a chair, and a pile of the finished birds sit on the desk next to a stack of paper.

Naruto's sprawled on his stomach on the floor, frowning intently at the untouched piece of paper in front of him. Itachi sits at the desk with a needle and thread, stringing the paper birds into long garlands that will be tied together into another mobile. He watches Naruto, and thinks about how in that moment, they can almost seem like a normal couple.

And he knows that soon, Naruto will get bored of waiting patiently, and he'll do something weird, or crazy, or both, to get Itachi's attention. Something like start babbling about nothing at all, loudly, facing the wall that's shared with the room Kisame occupied, since he knew the shark-man would be able to hear perfectly (paper-thin walls and all that), and he'll remember that normal really wasn't ever them, right before he drags the blond away from where he will be still yelling nonsense at the wall, before Kisame can come knock on the door and ask Itachi to control his pet. (Which had happened before, too many times in the past, and Naruto always just laughed it off, either not knowing, or not caring how close Kisame came to killing him, cheerfully, every time.)

III.

Naruto always makes an absolutely horrible amount of noise when he tumbles in through the window.

It baffles Itachi (absolutely boggles the mind) how someone as clumsy and noisy as he could have ever graduated from the academy, let alone be the trainee of one of the legendary sannin. (Sometimes, when he's busy with something else, he'll catch Naruto sitting silently and watching him without moving or making a sound, and Itachi will wonder if the clumsiness and loudness is an addition that the blond tacks on just for his (dubious) benefit. Then he'll do something characteristic and loud and chaotic, and Itachi dismisses it as wishful thinking.)

And it's always the window that's either right behind him or right beside him, perfectly positioned for him to bowl over Itachi when he doesn't look before leaping in, which he never does unless Itachi reminds him, and even then he doesn't do it because he says that unpredictability is what makes life worth living. Itachi says that it's just an excuse for him to be an annoying brat, to which Naruto will just grin self-deprecatingly and not even try to deny it.

It's always the window he hadn't planned on opening, whether for his paranoia refusing to let him sleep with his back facing any open windows or the door, or just for how predictable and inconvenient it would be (and completely in character) for Naruto to try and climb in the window currently occupied by an air conditioner or some other obstacle that he would tackle with the enthusiasm of a madman. Always that window without fail, and Itachi sometimes wonders whether the teen takes the time to scout out every building every time, and finds the route into the motel room that would cause Itachi the most amount of grief, or if it was just sheer dumb luck. (The type of luck depends entirely on the person asked. Itachi would say bad luck, and then frown when Naruto would grin wide enough to show all his teeth and boast about how good his luck is).

IV.

Itachi only leaves the windows all open out of habit, and a half-serious worry that once was not enough for Naruto to learn his lesson. (The one time he felt childishly spiteful enough to keep it closed, and locked to make the boy come through the window that he wanted him to, the blond (in classically blond fashion) had climbed the wall as he always did, and attempted to roll head first in the window as he usually did.)

The sound Naruto's skull had made when it hit the windowpane was even more spectacular than the racket he made during his usual entrances.

(And, of course, Itachi would never admit to being worried about the teen and his concussion (which Naruto liked to occasionally whine about it being his fault, but Itachi refused to accept any responsibility when it was all Naruto's fault). He only woke him up every two hours as instructed by the doctor (civilian doctor, who couldn't see through the genjutsu Itachi put on to stay unnoticed), who had discharged him into Itachi's care because it might have seemed just a tad suspicious if Naruto turned up dead in the motel room of a certain missing-nin, after being checked out of the hospital with a head injury by that very same missing-nin, albeit under a genjutsu. Really. It was completely unrelated to the smile that Naruto gave him when he wasn't expecting it.)

The routine's never different, the blond sitting up under the window sill and grumbling irritably and muttering a few colourful curses. Itachi knows by now not to interrupt him while he's acting like a ruffled cat (or fox), and pretending that he hadn't, in fact, made a spectacularly ungraceful landing when he tumbled onto the floor.

He grumbles for a few more minutes, tries (and fails) to smooth down his unruly hair, and Itachi ignores him as he always does. When Naruto goes suspiciously quiet, he looks up from the half-folded crane, just in time to see Naruto leap up from the floor in a smooth motion that showed more proof of his training than any of his other actions thus far. He collapses onto the bed next to the other man, and when he rolls onto his back, it's a struggle for Itachi to not roll his eyes at the production that is sure to follow.

"Itachi!" he whines, and tips his head back to gaze imploringly up at the older man's black eyes. "I'm-"

"Don't say it," Itachi cuts in, waves a hand dismissively and gives Naruto a glare that would (should) scare him into behaving, but Naruto insists on being the exception to the rules; plural, because it's every single rule that doesn't apply to him.

Naruto makes his eyes wide and pleading, stares up with those big blue pools, and Itachi knows that whatever it is he wants, he'll get, just like he always does. "But I'm hungry~!" he says in a whine, and blinks a few times, batting his obnoxiously long eyelashes.

Itachi hands him a square of paper to distract him, which does it's job perfectly, the blond now focused intently on copying Itachi's quick, practiced movements. Keeps him from being loud, and keep him from making Kisame pound on the wall that divides his room from Itachi's to get him to shut up. (They've had to pay for repairing the broken walls in no less that six different motels. Apparently, walls were paper thin, and apparently, Kisame had difficulty with judging his own strength when he was devoting the majority of his attention on not killing blond Jinchuriki's.)

They'll go out later, find somewhere that's open all night, Naruto will insist on ramen, which Itachi will fight, and then eventually cave after a few more eyelash bats, and it shouldn't be like this, shouldn't be Naruto just looking at him and getting his way, but it is, and the blond has a talent for puppy eyes. Like his own special bloodline technique. (And that would just figure, Itachi thinks, if he really did have something like that. Would explain quite a bit, and make him feel less weak-willed to always let Naruto have his way.)

V.

After joining the Akatsuki, unexpectedly, he'd found common ground with Konan and origami.

Rarely, when he stayed at the base long enough to have coinciding breaks in their busy schedules, they'd share tips, sometimes she'd show him a new model she had learned, and sometimes he'd share some of the hand-made papers he collected on the road, beautiful things, some of them pieces of art themselves. Painted with patterns and pictures, brushed with gold accents that gleamed in the sun.

It was more friendly than most of his interactions with the other members, the lot of them volatile and potentially unstable missing-nins. Konan was one of the few who didn't try to fight him or pick a fight with him, and her serene calmness reminded him a bit of the way his mother had been.

VI.

Itachi still doesn't quite know how Naruto manages to find him in whatever little town and motel that Itachi is staying in. (The room number isn't a question, he knows that the teen likes to smile at the girls manning the front desk, and charm the room number out of them. Sometimes, he also manages to charm a room key out of them too, but it doesn't ever stop him from climbing in through Itachi's window.)

"Don't you have any sense of romance, Itachi?" Naruto had shrieked at him one night after tumbling through the window. "Climbing in through the window is romantic, you know? Like those ones who were stupid and died."

(He'd heard the screams of alarm and the telltale crashes that indicated that Naruto had miscounted the windows and ended up in his neighbours room.)

"If you're Romeo," Itachi had said thoughtfully, "Does that make me Juliet?" And it had been worth it to see Naruto's mouth flop open as he stared at him in shock.

He'd regretted it a moment later when Naruto tackled him back on the bed, a wide grin showing off his sharper than average canines. "Damn right, Juliet."

Itachi had hooked a leg around Naruto's, and smoothly flipped them over so he was peering down at the surprised expression on the whiskered face.

"I don't think that Romeo climbed through the wrong windows every other night," Itachi had muttered in reply, leaning down to brush a kiss over Naruto's clavicle just to see him blush.

VII.

"I think that Sasuke tried his hand at ikibana once," he mentions carelessly, partially to see Itachi choke, and partially because it's kind of true. (And yeah, it may have been for the most degrading D rank mission given to a genin team in ever, and yeah, Kakashi may have had a huge hand in finding the mission that would make his team to work together and more than half-seriously contemplate pooling all of their money for hiring an assassin to kill him, because their sensei was insane. And, you know, maybe kind of competent at his job, but really more insane than anything else.)

"He wasn't very good at it," Naruto adds as an after thought, and frowns at the misshapen attempt at a crane he'd made. He turns to the side, and glares at the strands of cranes thrown over the back of an armchair, the dwindling stack on the table, and one crane that Itachi threads a needle though as he watches, the folds crisp and perfect.

VIII.

Kisame always found it absurdly hilarious when Itachi needed to buy more paper.

The habit was one that Itachi had picked up before teaming up with the shark-man, and one he'd kept up even after that.

He'd accompany him into the little shops that smelled sweetly like the candles and oils they often sold along with the paper. He'd always complain sourly when the Uchiha would take, in his opinion, too much time shopping, and Itachi would shush him and go back to picking out paper.

(Later in the evenings, Kisame would watch Itachi at the desk, and he'd laugh too hard at the memory of the genjutsu'd Itachi in the flowery civilian shops, carefully picking out paper with a frown of concentration on his face.)

IX.

Itachi can remember being a small child, and watching his mother fold paper birds, and hang bird mobiles in the corners with a small smile. He knows that he learned from watching her, memorized the steps to try out himself later.

He can remember that once, when he'd caught a bad cold and had been stuck in bed half-delirious with a fever, his mother had sat by his bedside and murmured nursery rhymes and fairytales and all manner of local legends she'd picked up when traveling for missions during her time as a ninja. Can remember her voice, gentle and loving despite the wariness she showed him when he learned skills too quickly or knew things that children his age shouldn't. Remembers legends, and silly stories about paper birds, that if you folded one thousand and strung them up into a mobile, that a crane would grant you a wish.

In the delirium of illness, that stuck with him, maybe the heat of his fever burned it into his mind, but he never forgot. Much, much later, on the run from the village and the ANBU in pursuit, that was when he got around to finally following the steps that he'd memorized, folding up his own one-thousand-crane mobile, and on a whim, he made a wish, and then hung it in the corner of the motel room to leave behind.

X.

The room is filled with tiny paper birds.

There is a mobile of paper birds hanging in the corner, and an almost-finished one spread across half the bed next to the sleeping Naruto. There are birds on the desk next to a stack of paper, and a needle and thread in Itachi's hands as he strings the last ones for this batch of one thousand.

Kisame is awake in the next room over, he can hear the shark-man's restless footsteps. Naruto is sleeping soundly, snoring softly, and Itachi thinks, hopes, that maybe it can be that simple.

It's quiet and late, dark and calm. And Itachi is hanging a mobile of one thousand paper birds in the corner opposite the open window.

His mother's voice whispering legends echo's in his memories as he says, softly so Naruto doesn't wake up, "Make a wish."

Then he hears Kisame laugh too loudly in the next room, which makes Naruto jump in his sleep, tumbling off the edge of the bed onto the floor with a shout. He watches as Naruto climbs to his feet, and starts yelling, angrily, at the wall facing Kisame's room, probably still half asleep, not that being awake would make him act much differently.

He doesn't stop it, doesn't want to and doesn't need to, all of it just a normal night for them. Just listens to Naruto yell at the wall until Kisame gets bored enough or annoyed enough to stop listening, and then watches when Samehada comes crashing through the wall, just as paper-thin as they always are, and lets Naruto hide ineffectively behind him.

"You're paying for that," he says, and doesn't mind when Kisame glares at him, Naruto now standing behind him, Itachi a buffer between the two.

His lips are quirked in a slight smile, and it's not normal by most people's standards, but it's them. (Like Naruto had said, full of unexpected wisdom and knowledge, it's them, they don't need to be normal because if they were, they wouldn't be them.)

Itachi doesn't pay attention enough to notice what Naruto says when he says something, probably a taunt, over his shoulder, and Kisame growls, Samehada held loosely but not threateningly. Naruto laughs behind him, a hand on his arm, and it's them, it's normal but it's them.

And he knows, that this time, it really is just as simple as that.

a/n- feedback is, as always, much appreciated. thank you for reading.