[Fic] december
Jul. 25th, 2011 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
suchacharmerDecember: It's sad quiet in our apartment, because Itachi doesn't talk much. He laughs even less. I don't laugh much either, because there's nothing to laugh about anymore. Especially in December.
Category: Chapter fic
Status: Work in Progress
Rating: R for language, drug and sexual references, mature subject matter.
Notes: Written in first person narratives alternating between Sasuke, Kakashi, Itachi, and Kisame.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Come on, we all know I’m not Kishimoto, don’t we?
November
II. The writing on the wall came tumbling down.
One of the windows in the living room has a crack in it, a deep, jagged crack that looks like a ravine for ants. It was like that when we moved in. On windy nights, the window whistles. Arctic chills in the winter, balmy hurricanes in the summer.
Itachi is standing by the cracked window when I finish brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink. (The bathroom sink gargles at me like a sewer creature is trying to escape, so I do my best to avoid it whenever possible.) Itachi just shakes his head at me.
He cocks his head a bit to the right, gaze narrowed in thought. I join him at the window, not knowing what he’s looking at and feeling distinctly out of the loop. I debate poking him in the side to get his attention. After all, he’s been in a fairly good mood the past week, but I don’t want to ruin his good mood so I keep my finger obediently at my side and settle for fidgeting until he acknowledges me. He has to at some point. He can’t just stare at the window all morning. He has to go to the Den.
A flock of Canadian geese flies overhead while I wait.
“What?” I ask when I can’t take the suspense anymore, watching him tilt his head this way and that, not being able to figure out if he’s looking at the window or out the window. One of the straggler geese passes by, squawking obnoxiously loud at the flock up ahead.
Itachi looks down at me, black eyes tired but friendly. He’s still in a good mood and I’m ecstatic for that – for him, because it’s been a long time since he was happy. I have no clue as to what has him so happy, but I’m not going to pick at straws. “I think,” he says, cocking his head again. “The crack is getting bigger.”
I look at the crack too, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t look any different, at least from back here. I step forward, laying my finger along the length of the glass crevice. Last summer, the crack ended just above the tip of my finger. Today, smack in the middle of autumn, it’s a sizeable number of centimeters above my fingernail. “Yup,” I say as I step back, lining up with Itachi. “It’s bigger.”
“Damn,” he curses softly. He realizes what word he used, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “Don’t repeat that.”
I grin smugly. He smacks Kakashi for that all the time. This is the first time I remember him saying a bad word. “You used a Kakashi word, Itachi.”
“I know,” he says. “He’s infectious.”
“That doesn’t sound nice.”
“It isn’t.” Sounds mean, should be mean, but he says it with a small smile. “Grab your coat, Sasuke. Don’t miss the bus.”
I never miss the bus. I can’t miss the bus because there’s no one to drive me to school. Itachi threatened to make me walk in the beginning. My theory is that I’m still scared he meant it. That wasn’t long after his trial. I’d been staying with Marina, our aunt who owns the building. She likes to pretend that we, but Itachi in particular, don’t exist. I know plenty of our family members feel the same way, the ones out in California. I know because I used to feel that way about him. When he threatened to make me walk to school in the ice and wind of March and I cried before drifting off to sleep.
March is also the month we finally held a funeral for our parents. We couldn’t do it in December, because the ground was so frozen and Itachi was arrested and there was so much craziness going on that I wouldn’t have wanted to do it then anyway. The only other funeral I’d been to before that was for Shisui, one year earlier. I don’t remember Shisui much, but I remember the funeral. I remember having to wear black and sticking close to Itachi’s leg the entire time while the adults cried.
At Mom and Dad’s funeral, which was more of a memorial service because their bodies had been cremated months earlier, I stayed as far away from Itachi as I could, hiding behind other relatives.
He didn’t cry during that funeral either.
I don’t know what it takes to make him cry. Death doesn’t work. Pain doesn’t work. Fear.
“Going,” I say for his reassurance. I’m the only one out of the two of us who seems to know that I won’t miss the bus. I head into the kitchen, which doesn’t take long because it’s actually the same room as the living room, only tiled instead of carpeted, and pull my jacket off of the back of the chair. Unlike Kakashi, who has way more chairs around his table than he needs, Itachi and I only have two chairs, one for each of us. Our apartment has exactly what we need. Or less than what we need.
Itachi lingers at the window for another minute before he grabs his coat and keys and follows me out the door.
The elevator doesn’t work. You press the button and nothing happens, permanently stuck somewhere between the second and third floor. We take the stairs down and up, even when we have groceries. Not that we have a lot of groceries, but milk is heavy when you have to carry it up three flights of stairs and the stairs are creepy if you have to walk up alone. They’re the kind of stairs that don’t have backs so that you can see straight down to the bottom. I’m not afraid of heights, but the floor is made of tile and some of the stairs are uneven. So I take my time in the lead.
Itachi is patient with my careful footing.
At the bottom of the stairway, next to the elevator that doesn’t work in the cubicle that poses as the foyer, are the mailboxes. There’re twenty in total, because it’s a small apartment complex run by the old woman who ignores us, five rows of four mailboxes. Except mailboxes gives them too much credit. They’re really more like mail slots. Or mail cubby holes. We had those in kindergarten. I could barely fit my lunch box into the cubby hole, let alone my coat. This coat would have no chance of fitting. I look like my cousin playing dress-up in this coat that falls down to my knees. All that’s missing is aunt Ginny’s high heels.
We don’t get a lot of mail aside from junk mail. Bills every month from the superintendent and some magazines filled with coupons. We don’t get packages like the woman who lives next door or letters from Russia like the bearded man downstairs. Itachi doesn’t even glance at the mailboxes more than twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturday, certain that there’s nothing there to see. I check every day. Not our mailbox, because Itachi’s right on that, but the rest of the mailboxes, our neighbors below and next door. I don’t know why I still do it. It used to be that I checked just our mailbox every day, when letters from our family in California came for me, letters I prayed would take me to San Francisco and away from Itachi. All I ever got were condolences and apologies. Itachi got whatever else came after the first few lines that always mentioned how unfortunate I was to be an orphan already, poor thing, and even though I knew the rest of the story was hidden under Itachi’s prudently placed hand, I kept hoping. They came further and further apart, but I kept hoping I’d read the next one all the way through and see that I had a ticket to California.
These days, I still check, just to see if the man’s family in Russia still loves him.
They do today. I see the familiar brown envelope. And something else, one block up, that makes me stop in my tracks.
At first, I think that I’m seeing something wrong. The woman who has a package every other day is the mailbox directly next to ours, so it might be that I looked too quickly and got them mixed up. But when I step closer, reaching forward to touch for assurance like I did the ravine in the window, the box is real under my fingers and in slot 5D. Our mailbox.
“Itachi?” I call out questioningly.
The frosted door creaks for a half a second and stops. If he turns around, I don’t see it. I’m too enthralled by the box stuffed into our mailbox, filling it from top to bottom and corner to corner. “What happened?” he calls back, always ready for disaster.
“We have mail.” Big mail.
Itachi sighs, letting the door shut. “I said something about not being late, do you remember that?”
“But there’s a package,” I protest. This is abnormal to the point where it’s exciting, like getting a present for my birthday. This doesn’t happen every day. “And it’s taking up all the room in the mailbox.”
He tosses a glare my direction, because when something doesn’t go the way he planned or likes, he glares, like a default. He only means it every once in a while. And you can tell. He only puts feeling into certain glares. The others are just perfunctory. “Late,” he repeats sternly.
“Package,” I repeat, poking it with my finger to prove it to him. It’s like he doesn’t believe me or something.
The glare changes to a look of curiosity almost immediately. It’s not every day we get a package in the mail. This is something of a special occasion. What kind of special occasion I can’t say, but special all the same.
Hesitantly, Itachi crosses the foyer and gives the box an experimental tug. Nothing happens. Whoever sent the package must have shoved and wriggled to make it fit, because there’s barely room between the sides of the box and the walls to slip in a fingernail. Itachi has a purchase only because the box is longer than the slot, so part of it is sticking out. It’s enough to fit a hand around the corner.
After a few extra seconds, the box comes free and slides out. On top of the box, all scrunched up from being stuffed in our mailbox, is a folded note on lined paper. He lifts up the notes and tears it from the box, the tape ripping off some of the lettering. The “s” is half gone, but the words are still as plain as day.
Now, I like Frosted Flakes. I like most kinds of cereal. But who would send us a box of Frosted Flakes when we can buy our own at the store? It’s not like cereal is that expensive that we can’t buy it ourselves. Some weeks we live off of cereal.
Itachi is reading the note, clarity registering on his features. So, at least one of us knows the answer to the Frosted Flake mystery. As usual, I’m the one who doesn’t. It reminds me of all the letters Itachi only let me see part of, leaving me in the dark to this day.
I ponder over the cereal, summoning all of the common sense I have in order to figure out who sent the box. There’s no address visible on the box, so that means someone had to have dropped it off. Kakashi is a possibility. He’s the only person we see often enough to hypothetically send us food. He’s one of the only people we know in Arden who knows where we live. But he’s also the least likely to send us anything because we’re at his house every single day. He can just give us the cereal, with milk, around his kitchen table in bowls with spoons.
Iruka and Kakashi had a fight, so it’s not him.
I never told Naruto where I lived.
The guys Itachi works with at the café? Genma who told me my hair was a character quirk and another guy who works in the kitchen. They see him too, though.
A truly horrific thought strikes me: What if the innocent-looking box of cereal is actually a bomb? Kakashi let me read an old newspaper story about a mailbox bomber. Maybe someone took a leaf out of his book, got creative, and came up with cereal bombing. Of course, a cereal bomber probably wouldn’t leave a note that Itachi would accept as nothing to be alarmed over. I’m letting my imagination run away with me.
The question bubbles up inside of me, eager to get out in the open air. I know the note has a name. It has to have a name, otherwise, Itachi wouldn’t still be holding it, eyes scanning it for the third and fourth times, the vaguest of smiles on his face. Not one of his unsettling la-la land smiles either, where his mind is somewhere over the rainbow and his body is left behind. This is the smile he gave me when I was five and snuck into his room to see him when Dad grounded him. A real smile, with teeth, where his eyes match his lips.
I forgot how much I missed it. Like his laughter, I’d nearly written his smiles off as impossible. Something he forgot how to do.
Seeing it again makes me happy. In the same way, it also makes me sad.
Smiling means something is okay with him again, and that’s great and that’s wonderful and that’s what I want for him after seeing him distant and practically emotionless for such a long time, but I feel like I’m missing something. A huge chunk of the puzzle that is my brother is missing and I don’t have any of the pieces I need to put the big picture together. One of them is in his hand, the others locked away in his brain where he won’t let me see. Itachi is made of secrets. He’s smiling now when he wasn’t before, and I don’t know why either way. It’s kind of like I’m watching from the outside, seeing him go from my brother who hauled me to my feet with a superior smile on his face after I fell on my butt roller-skating, to the almost a grown-up brother who works more than forty hours every week, and back again, without knowing why he’s changing. I have effect without cause. If Itachi were a question on one of Mr. Umino’s reading tests, I’d get it wrong. Minus five.
I keep getting farther and farther away. Pretty soon I’ll be in negative numbers, nowhere close to him who knows all. And he doesn’t want me to know all. If he did, he’d let me see the letter. Instead, he hides things from me, the important and insignificant alike, and brushes me off when I try to ask questions or even show interest in something before that night in December. I’m not a brain doctor, so I can’t help, but that doesn’t mean he should shut me out completely.
I’m part of his life. And they were my parents, too. If there’s one secret he shouldn’t be keeping, it’s why his finger ever made it to the trigger of Dad’s gun.
Itachi tucks the letter into his pocket and the box of Frosted Flakes under his arm, fingers hooking under the collar of my jacket to pull me along and out the door. He couldn’t be bothered to just tell me that we need to go now, just like he couldn’t be bothered to tell me how Dad’s gun ended up in his hands or what he finds so endearing about a box of cereal.
I don’t know what makes him cry, but I know that Frosted Flakes make him smile.
*^*^*
Watching little kids fall into piles of leaves never fails to amuse me.
I myself never remember doing it as a kid. I remember hunting for ants and drowning their colonies with water, throwing sticks at trees, but jumping into a pile of leaves never occurred to me. Leaves aren’t soft, they look like they would itch on bare skin, and the stems are bound to prick you in the eye.
Mud. Now I could play in mud forever when I was young. Anything that involved water could keep me occupied for hours.
So while I wait for Itachi in the lamp-lit park, I attempt to figure out the appeal of jumping into a pile of dry, dying vegetation. One boy in particular, looking to be about six or seven, has been at it for nearly a half an hour, his mother and father patiently keeping an eye on him as he plays in the illuminated dark of autumn night. He has a pile of leaves staked out as his personal playground, maintaining it by re-gathering as many leaves as he can each time he sends them into flight. Each jump is made after a short, awkward run, and each time I’m afraid that this time is the one where he won’t be able to make the distance.
Leaves fly. He laughs.
That flimsy pile of leaves would never support my weight. My ass would hit the ground without further ado and I’d end up cursing at the dirt. I would not be laughing, at least not for a week or so. After that, it would be the stuff of hilarity.
I try to imagine if Itachi would laugh if I made an ass of myself jumping into a pile of leaves like the six-year-old boy who thinks it’s so much fun that he can’t help but laugh every single time. I come up short. Having seen him smile sparsely in the past two weeks has been encouraging, but that seems to be the way he expresses his amusement as well as happiness. Laughter is noticeably absent when he isn’t half hysterical from a panic attack.
He doesn’t grin. He doesn’t smirk. He doesn’t chuckle or snigger. He just smiles these tiny smiles, like his lips and his brain aren’t connected and he doesn’t realize that they are acting on their own accord.
I’ll have to ask him about the appeal of leaves. He’s not that far off from childhood and I don’t think asking will touch on any of his taboo topics, but I could easily be wrong. Last week at the Indian restaurant, I mentioned something about loving the smell of the cigars my dad used to smoke and he clammed up on the spot, shaking his head briskly to steer me away from the topic. He was quiet for several long, uncomfortable minutes after that.
On the other hand, I did learn that he’s not the biggest fan of spicy foods. We won’t be eating in any more Indian restaurants.
I’ve learned a lot about him at our last two dinners, or at least, more than I knew previously. The first week, the week of his panic attack, I asked a few simple questions: What his favorite color is? His favorite book? The next week, I asked him about his job at the Red Lantern, and about Sasuke.
His answers were sparse, and more detailed on work than on his brother, but they were there.
I talked too, of course, to be fair. I talked more than he did, in reality, but that doesn’t bother me. If it did, I’d be the world’s biggest asshole. He’s willing to try a friendship, if I can be so presumptuous as to call it that, with me, so I will try as well, despite my doubts about all of this. It’s not that I don’t think he will try. I just think we’ll run into some kind of roadblock sooner rather than later. I don’t fully understand the boundaries he’s set. The basic idea, I get that. Don’t talk about his parents. But, being a psychologist, I understand the danger of associative thoughts. The abused – psychologically, physically, sexually – can experience a phenomenon wherein an innocent thought or question, like the cigar, will trigger a memory of the abuse. It’s commonly thought of as something that happens to those who experience loss, like smelling particular cologne reminds Benny of his grandfather or Deanna hearing her wedding song makes her cry over her dead husband, but it happens to anybody and everybody under the sun and their mothers. One word: that’s all it takes to remind someone of something a friend said over the music someone played the night when. . . .
I understand because I have them too. Everyone does. In some cases, it’s more extreme. In some cases, panic attacks ensue.
So yes, I will do my best to work around the blocks, because that’s a step in a different direction and we need to head somewhere different than where we’ve been. I hope that his desire to be around me is genuine. I want it to be. He sounded sincere in his apology and suggestion, but I’m not convinced. Not yet. And if, if he is sincere about working with me, then my next worry is that one of us will get fed up before he is able to pull down some of the walls that keep my innocent but harmful inquiries from hitting something sensitive and igniting a chain reaction. Like not being able to breathe.
I’ve been around victims of panic attacks before, but each one is as frightening as the last one. It’s unsettling, because there in nothing you can do for a panic attack. They go away in their own good time. I gave him a voice to listen to in order to keep him grounded and shielded him from gawking, but that was all. Breathing doesn’t help. Closing your eyes and counting to ten doesn’t help. Nothing anyone can say to you helps. It’s all up to time, even if you think it’s the voice telling you how to breathe.
Nice sentiment, but misplaced. Time deserves more credit than people are willing to give.
See it’s not that time heals. That’s another nice but inaccurate sentiment. Time makes it easier to heal, I believe that firmly, but it isn’t the primary agent. Communication is medicinal, and communication is what is made easier in time. The phrase “you are ready to talk?” is probably born out of this idea. Itachi’s problem with me, I think, is that he has the sequence wrong, his equation out of order and half forgotten. He has the talking part down. He knows that I want him to talk to me and that I’m not going to be satisfied until he does, but something he said to me the first time we met sticks out in my mind, and not in a way that assures me of anything.
"Because you can't change time."
I’ve never been under the impression that I have the ability to change time. I’ve wished for it. I’ve wished for it crumpled up in bathroom stalls after the shows, Deidara laughing outside and saying something he thought profound. We were a bunch of messed up idiots, Deidara, Sasori, and I, idiots in love with something we couldn’t have. Sitting there on the floor, I remember thinking that everything was okay before that last bottle, let’s go back to that. Never mind that the problem began years before at two o’clock in the morning, listening to my dad play the saxophone to the dead.
David Bowie had it right. Time changes us. We don’t change time. (1) And Itachi seems to have that mixed up.
It sounds like he thinks that I believe time will change if he talks to me. That I think I can make it go away. In reality, I believe the direct opposite. I don’t think trauma ever goes away. It’s something we carry with us as a part of ourselves. Once it happens, it becomes a part of who we are, part of our history. Nothing anyone can do or say changes what happened. He doesn’t know this, but we both believe the same thing. I said that to him as he sat in my leather chair, stony faced and silent. Granted, I said it in song lyrics, but I did say it. Never once did the words, “I can make this go away” come out of my mouth. I wouldn’t be a very good psychiatrist if I said something that asinine.
I started out the way I usually do and told him about myself. As soon as I found out that he wanted none of it, I gave him what he wanted: I offered him silence, asking no questions and offering nothing. And it all fell down from there, because getting what he wanted only made him dead set on hating me for all I’m worth and that just made me twice as determined to break down that wall and get to the center of him, where I could see him boiling from the inside. Turns out that he didn’t really want me to give him what he wanted, if that makes any earthly sense. Turns out he didn’t know what he wanted from me.
It’s a wonder anybody manages to get along at all, with all the wrong steps and miscommunications we tend to make.
And it’s almost funny, I have to admit, watching the little boy gather up leaves back into their pile and ready himself to run again, that after all the mistakes we’ve made since our first meeting in August, we’re back where we started. The only difference is that now he’s talking too. I just don’t know how long his mouth will keep moving. How long before I say something that will seal those lips of his shut again. How long before he has another panic attack and decides I’m not worth the trouble of trying.
I’d love for this to work. If this is all a part of adjusting to me, if this will give him a sense of comfort around me so that we can work on his emotional problems, then I’ll gladly concede defeat to my cynicism. I just have a bad feeling about all of this. We have a short messy history that I only anticipate getting messier. History tends to repeats itself and Itachi has a routine established. He’s driven ten other psychiatrists off of his case with his routine. Does he really see something in me that changed his attitude? Is something truly different from ten to eleven or is this just a ploy to keep me far, far off-topic from the things he can’t handle talking about?
I can’t tell.
And history isn’t promising me a thing.
It will be interesting to see, then, how he handles the box of Frosted Flakes I left in his mailbox. And by interesting, I mean nerve-wracking. I probably overstepped a boundary or two. Not that I’m sure of our boundaries, but there are things in life that are instinctual. Things you know are questionable without questioning.
The damned box was just so forlorn-looking at the back of my pantry, unopened. I don’t even like Frosted Flakes that much. They were on sale at the time, so I picked them up along with a box of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. The Cheerios are long since gone and the Frosted Flakes remain. I had to do something with it since I’m obviously not going to eat it anytime soon, and I know the kid’s having a hard time. It’s another one of those instinctual things. Rape or no rape, stubborn or not, he’s fifteen years old doing his best to raise a nine-year-old. Single parents have difficulties raising their kids, but Itachi has insisted on paying for his own dinners. He had a panic attack in the middle of a restaurant and still wanted to pay for his fried noodles.
His pride is what is going to kick me in the ass on this one. Itachi’s already proven to be one hell of a stubborn creature. In spite of his recent modicums of cooperation, I doubt he’ll see the cereal as anything more than an act of pity. And possibly an insult.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I have a PhD. I should be smart enough not to provoke someone known to be belligerent when it comes to me. It’s no wonder we have such a messy history. I keep going too far.
I feel better now that the Frosted Flakes are out of my apartment. Keeping them there was just as bad as throwing them away. And he does need help. I know it and he knows it, and that’s why this has been such a battle. He doesn’t want to go through what he needs. Call me a cynic or a jerk for saying this, but I still don’t think that he does or is going to change his mind about wanting to. I think calling a truce and giving me fragments of what I want to hear are his ways of appeasing me until he can find another way out.
That’s not what I want. That’s how I think this will end up. Itachi fought to keep me out of his life for three months. Now he’s voluntarily letting me see bits and pieces? Something doesn’t fit, something is off, and I think the wool is hovering over my eyebrows.
Recalling everything that’s gone wrong, I have the right to worry.
I pull my phone out of my pocket, checking the time. One minute to six. Less than once minute to six if I were looking at the face of a watch.
I know I’ll see him if I look up. Itachi follows the clock like it’s the law. On time to him means that he knocks on door at seven o’clock. Not seven o’one, not six fifty-nine. Seven o’clock, he says hello.
One of the people walking up the path is him. It’s probably the footsteps I can barely hear. He moves as quietly as he speaks. A pebble, the one that skittered off into the trees, is twenty seconds, ten seconds. The cardinal, the bird that doesn’t fly away for the winter, alighting to a bare branch is nine seconds, eight seconds. Cloth on cloth, shifting, changing as bones move, is seven, six, five, four, three, two, one seconds.
“Doctor.”
If I didn’t feel like cringing, I would have grinned. Some people say hello. And then there’s Itachi.
When I look up, I see much of the same picture I’ve always seen. He’s dressed in the same thing I’ve seen him in every time we meet. Black jeans, white shirt, and sneakers that have seen better days. On his face, and this is a new addition, he wears The Look. The Look, as far as I can tell, isn’t quite bad, but isn’t quite good either. It’s more incredulous than anything; I was graced with it more than a few times last Thursday. If pressed, I’d say it’s an improvement from the glares and blank stares. There’s emotion packed in The Look that isn’t anger, so the hopeful part of me says that we’ve made progress. Still, The Look isn’t reserved for happy times and appears when I say or do something he finds stupid. “Why would you even bother asking?” it says, and you have to decide for yourself how to take it after that, because Itachi won’t tell you: That’s when the hopeless side of me says we’re stuck.
“Nice to see you, too.” The best defense, I learned from childhood, is playing dumb. I smile at him innocently, a throwback to the days when I brought mud in from Boston row house backyards and tracked it across the floor. That mud would stay there for weeks before Dad came out of dreamland, his tone finally shifting from musician to father for a day or two.
Bad days, good days. Good moods, bad moods.
Before I can finish contemplate what kind of mood I put him in, a wad of crumpled up paper hits me in the chest. It lands in my lap. I recognize the paper immediately. The tic tac toe game I played with myself while eating a bagel at the kitchen counter is on the back. I tied with myself.
I think maybe I need a puppy or something.
“So,” Itachi says, wandering closer to the bench. “I got a package in the mail this morning. I don’t remember ordering cereal by mail, so I’m a kind of reluctant to eat it. See, there was no name on the note, which lent a stalker feel to the whole situation.” He sits on the bench, putting at least a foot of space between us, looking forward at the boy and his leaves. That much hasn’t changed. “Being the responsible adult that you are, I’m hoping you’ll lend me your opinion.”
“Think that highly of me, do you?” I stall, trying to pick out a meaning in his lack of inflection. Itachi tells stories as if they are clear cut facts, making it hard to hear his actual thoughts in the words.
“Hardly. But I heard somewhere that the elderly have wisdom.”
His sense of humor: Deadpan. His smile: Nonexistent. “I’m twenty-six.”
“Dear Itachi,” he begins, ignoring me. “You’re too skinny. It’s unattractive. P.S.,” He turns his head just enough to fix me with the mother of all Looks. The fucking queen mother. “The Frosted Flakes made me do it.”
If I could figure out how to take him – his mood, his temperament, his words that land flat – then I would be happy to give him an analysis of the note. Considering that the note is mine, it would be a breeze explaining the author’s intentions. But is he interested in the author’s intentions, really, or is this just another way of saying “why would you leave me a note like this and why would you think I’d take it well?” Is that what I’ll get when I decipher the code he spells out in dictionary words?
I can’t fucking tell.
Forget his pride, it might be my frustration with his voice that brings us down.
“Care to give me a diagnosis?”
Oh, he knows it’s me. Who else would it be? I don’t understand where this is coming from. The Itachi that I know doesn’t bother beating around bushes. He cuts right to the hearts of matters, which is what confuses me about the things he’s saying. With the right intonations, he could be playful. Funny. Jesting because it doesn’t really matter, I meant no harm.
At the risk of sounding like a teenager, yeah right. He doesn’t think like that. He isn’t playful. I meant the gesture to be casual and joking, but to him, I doubt it is. In not so many words, I insinuated that he doesn’t have enough food in his house. I implicated that he needs my help. My pity.
With all the pride he’s conceded in coming back to see me on Thursdays for dinner, my note is a slap in the face, trampling on what’s left of the independence he values. For the myriad of known and unknown reasons he has for resisting my involvement, taking care of his own state mind is the most important to him. And his state of mind is everywhere – in his work, his home, his brother, his barely there smiles and flat words. He doesn’t want me, a man he barely knows as more than an acquaintance, invading so quickly after he let me in so slowly. Too much to fast, that’s all it is.
I could say all of that in my analysis, knowing better than I acted. Perhaps he’ll appreciate honesty even if he doesn’t appreciate the sentiment.
“I’d say,” I begin slowly, looking again to the boy buried in a pile of leaves, making him my focal point because looking at Itachi is too confusing. What do you want? I have the urge to scream at him. Tell me what you want from me. Just tell me if you really want to be here or you’re only here to keep away from the leather chair. If you want me to go away for good, I’ll go, but I’m tired of guessing games. And laugh. I need to know if you can laugh when you aren’t half out of your mind. “I’d say that the writer is male, about six feet, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. He didn’t sign his last name because that felt wrong, and didn’t sign his first name because that felt wrong too. He didn’t know how you’d take it anyway, and he’s not going to say anymore because he still doesn’t.”
Analytical enough for you?
He doesn’t shift on the bench. Not in discomfort, not in defense, and not in preparation for whatever he’s going to say next. It doesn’t comfort me. It puts me on edge.
“You’re awfully serious today.”
Cringe, laugh, the lines are blurring.
I pull an Itachi and prescribe to the old silence is golden adage. All of the words I’ve come up with for how I feel would fill up pages and it’s still not clear, confusion reigning over articulation because I can’t say everything with only some things. I only have some things to go on.
Silence can tell you how heavy a heart is, but it can’t tell you why. That’s why he depends on it.
“Last week you were telling me about the neighborhood dog you taught the tango.” His voice sounds so far away, not being able to see him out of the corner of my eye. “Suddenly you’ve lost your sense of humor?”
“I didn’t lose it.” A mother sweeps down on her little boy, pulling him out of the leaves. A few cling to his sweater. She wants to bring him home, where breath doesn’t look like fog by the light of a lamp. I slip my finger inside the cuff of my jacket and rub the sleeve of my own sweater in response, the weave against my skin soothing me the way my thoughts cannot. Chilly doesn’t begin to describe the weather. Autumn is in full swing, winter is on the way and all I can focus on in the picture of the family I never had, because even that is better than the uncertainty I feel with the only relationship I’ve had with another person since I left the band back in Boston.
It’d be presumptuous to call it a friendship, but there’s nothing else to hope for now. The psychiatrist thing is a lost cause. Like my sense of humor at the moment.
“Ookay,” he says on exhale. A few beats of silence and then I’m blindsided. “Are you mad at me or something?”
A gust of wind rips through the park, scattering leaves and creeping up my sleeves. I don’t know how he isn’t cold, sitting there in only a pair of jeans and a short sleeved shirt. I shiver, close my eyes for a minute, thinking about it. Am I mad at him? No, I decide as the boy laughs one more time, down the path with his parents. I’m not mad at him. I’m frustrated and on edge, but I’m not mad. Not at him. I might be a bit mad at myself for letting this get to me, but I’m not mad at him. He’s being, well, himself. And I agreed to have dinners with him because I like him: unbreakable and broken, calm and panicked, neurotic Itachi. I’m attached to him not as a patient anymore, but as a person. Otherwise, I would have sent him off to a new psychiatrist, like protocol says I have to. The end.
But I didn’t and here we are, evading the things we need to say to move away from the beginning.
All I need is a yes or a no. Do you want to be here? Did I go too far?
“No,” I say succinctly. “I’m not mad at you. You didn’t do anything.” Anything to tell me anything. “But…” I turn to look at him finally, nearly regretting it when I realize he’s not looking at me. Getting the words out is a struggle. “Can you be absolutely honest with me? And I mean complete honesty, not the half-assed kind my old friend used to be with me.” I do wonder if he ever grew out of that.
Itachi does turn to look at me now, meeting my eyes. They’re the same black eyes as always, like the pale arms that have to be freezing without a jacket are the same, and the one piece of hair that doesn’t stay back in the ponytail he ties at the base of his neck is the same. I wear the same color, he wears the same colors, we sit together at the beginning of what I fear is something old, a still life in monochromes. I count the number of times I blink as beats of quiet pass on our parts, not wanting to look away in case I miss the emotion I’ve been looking for somewhere in the black.
He blinks and turns, finally, shaking his head briefly in what I think is as a precursor to “no.” Until he speaks and the words contradict the action. “What do you want to know, doctor?”
To be frank I didn’t think he’s say yes to the first question. Which he didn’t, in so many words. Still, since that’s all he’s going to give me. “Why are you here? Honestly. Is this where you want to be or are you just here to get me off your back?”
Itachi returns his gaze to my face for a second, then on a point just over my shoulder. “Honestly?”
I nod, breathing in wind, dying foliage, and the scent of coffee he brought from the café. I nod not knowing if I can handle it but wanting to know all the same.
I’d rather him hate me than simply put up with me.
Is it stupid to want a friendship with a fifteen-year-old who used to be your patient? Yes. Do I care? No. I should, because he’s giving me an ulcer, but I don’t regret being chilled to the bone with him. I don’t regret my choice. I don’t lament being here. And maybe he does.
It is what it is at this point.
All I really want is an answer.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be. I know you don’t know much about me, but at least know that. It’s because of you I’m here, not for you.”
I close my eyes to laugh at the sky. “Way to be cryptic.” He’s good at that. I knew that much about him.
“Maybe you just don’t listen.” He stands in front of me, just out of the way of the bicyclist, brushing away invisible dirt from his jeans. “The note. Unless you want me to take offense, I don’t. I can’t anymore. I know you feel sorry for me and I know you want to help. I know you care. That’s what has us here and not me in some other chair and you talking to a stranger. This note,” he says, picking it up from its resting place on my thigh, fingers cold, “is nothing different from anything you’ve done.” He opens it, reading it to me again. “Dear Itachi. So formal. You’re too skinny.” His eyes drop down to his own waistline and over to mine, going up until he finds me face. “It’s unattractive.” Paper crunches in on itself as he crumples the notes back into a ball, stuffing it in the pocket of his jeans. “I swear, it’s like you want me to pick a fight over this. I thought we weren’t doing that anymore.”
The moon makes his skin glow. I tilt my head back, the note replaying in my head again like it’s been doing all day. This time though, his voice is in the words. This time, though, there’s something else. I see his casual stance, the crinkled note in his cold hands, the way his eyes moved.
No fight. No fight in his tone, no fight in the meaning.
“I thought I was being friendly. Am I supposed to be mad at you?”
It all seems so silly all of a sudden. Nothing, absolutely nothing he said had an ounce of anger in it. Nothing he said had happiness in it either, but so little he’s ever said has. I figured it out before from words. So why, this time, weren’t words enough?
A smile, a dumbfounded smile, makes its way to my lips. Dumbfounded by how complicated I made our relationship, looking at the old instead of the new. The emotion was in his words all along. It was in the way he stood in front of me, the way he put the note back into his pocket instead of the garbage can behind the bench, and the way he didn’t come right out and tell me I shouldn’t have left him cereal.
I was too busy looking for the fight to see the play.
“No.” I get to my feet, putting us at a closer proximity than we’ve been since I shielded him from curiosity at the restaurant. So close that he has to take a step back to avoid bumping knees with me. “You were. You aren’t, so, forget I said anything about that. New question for you.” I side step around him, bumping his shoulder so that he turns with me before I take a few step backward, looking both ways behind me to avoid running into dogs and small children. “If,” I say as I lead us across the path, Itachi following only because I’m not speaking loudly enough to be heard from any kind of distance, “I throw myself into this pile of leaves and land on my ass, will you laugh?”
“Is that with you or at you?”
So effortlessly I see it now, the play in him. I wonder again if, as a child, it wasn’t as hard to find through the flats. If his tone joked like his words do. If he laughed with things, at things. If he laughed. Amazing enough that he jokes with me, I can’t imagine that sound coming out of his mouth when he’s not in a panic.
Yet, I’m dying to find out.
“Either.” The heels of my shoes touch the base of the piles of leaving the boy in the sweater jumped in before his parents took him home. I let myself fall backward then, trusting that it won’t hurt me if it didn’t hurt the boy. I never played in the leaves as a kid, but for the sake of here and now and tomorrow, I’m willing to find out where the fun is.
They aren’t soft, I find as I nestle farther into my cocoon. They aren’t hard either, but they aren’t soft, and I was right about the prickling. The crisp edges poke at my neck and tickle my hair. The only thing they have going for them is warmth. I’m warmer than I’ve been all night tucked into a pile of leaves, looking up through the branches to the starry sky. Skies are always more clear in the cold. Night in November is cold.
“Aren’t you cold?” I ask suddenly, lifting my head to see him. “You have to be freezing without a jacket on.”
He takes one step forward, bringing him close enough that I could touch him if I stretched. The second time tonight he did so voluntarily. “I’m freezing, actually.”
“Hnn,” I grunt, my shell of my ear chilly from being exposed to the air. I probably don’t want to know why he doesn’t wear jackets in fifty degree weather. And he probably doesn’t want me to know. So I’m going to do the smart thing and wait for him to come around on that. We may be back at the beginning, but it’s a different beginning, a beginning where he stands close to me and jokes with me, in his own way. “I’m feeling positively toasty,” I inform him, letting my head flop back into the leaves.
Through the crinkle of leaves against my ear, the faint sound of laughter sneaks through. It’s curt, more like a chuckle, and probably at me, but it’s good to hear.
“You’re an idiot.”
History be damned, I decide as he nudges my shoe with his toes, urging me to get up so that we can get to the restaurant before he wastes away.
It is what it is, now.
*^*^*
Sasuke bites his lip. One small hand is curled into the sleeve of his shirt, the other tucked under his leg for warmth my house doesn’t give. No air conditioning in the summer, no heat in the winter. The radiator helps in the kitchen, but we’re in the living room and the space heater I have isn’t powerful enough to reach beyond the cluster of couches and chairs to the narrow foyer where we sit on the floor.
Having the door open also doesn’t help either.
Itachi sits in the doorway, half in the house and half on the porch, gaze fixed on the board of marbles that looks like the six-sided Star of David at our knees. He looks just as absorbed in the game as his brother is, although Sasuke hasn’t noticed. Chinese checkers (2) is a faster-paced game than chess. Faster, however, doesn’t mean easy. You don’t have to memorize certain possible moves for specific marbles, capture players and you don’t have to protect your queen, but you still have to think five steps ahead, visualize your paths across the board to occupy your opponent’s end of the star. And you have to make your move in ten seconds.
It’s been about ten for Sasuke now, as a matter of fact.
“Stuck?” I ask.
Sasuke curls into himself in preamble to concession, the Santa Fe blanket I draped over him at the start of the game slipping fully off his shoulder blades to pool around his bony frame. “There’s nowhere to move,” Sasuke explains, eyes never leaving the single marble in question waiting to get into my end of the star. “I can’t jump over two of your marbles and going backwards doesn’t do me any good.”
“Hmm. So, in other words,” I pretend to muse, ripping off a portion of my cinnabun and perching it on his knee. “You’re stuck.”
He scowls as me. I have to hand it to him, that scowl is looking more and more menacing every passing day. In a few more years, he might figure out how to yield one without making me want to laugh at him. It looks too big on him, like the jacket he wears that comes down to his knees. He doesn’t fill it out the right way. “Yeah, well,” he begins to counter, sulkiness fading slightly as he inspects the cinnabun. “You’re stuck too.” He licks some of the frosting off of the top of the bun and points to my end of the star. “Your marble doesn’t have anywhere to go.”
I look down at the board, realizing that I’ve been paying more attention to him since my last move than the game. He’s not mistaken; my end of the board is a mirror of his, my last marble stuck behind two others. Neither of us have any more options.
Well damn.
“You know what this means, don’t you pretty bird?”
Sasuke pops the piece of pastry into his mouth and shakes his head. “Not really. I never know what you mean.”
Dishes clatter in the kitchen sink. Iruka is in there, pretending that we aren’t all out here. I made dinner, he’s cleaning up, and I’m in here playing Chinese checkers with the kids. It’s almost domestic. “It means,” I say, munching on what’s rest of my cinnabun, “that we call this one a draw.”
Sasuke still isn’t looking at Itachi, but if he were, he’d see him lift his lips in what I assume is a smile. It’s unusual to see him express any kind of interest in our evening games. Of course, it’s also unusual to leave your door open in November, but I’m not one to follow convention any more than I’m one to ask questions. He likes the wind, I like keeping my door open all year round and for whatever reason, he’s interested in the game. We all mesh tonight.
“Draw,” Sasuke repeats, rolling the word around on his tongue. “Spelled like drawing with a pencil kind of draw?”
I nod.
“Are you going to tell me what it means?”
I smirk at him, to which he responds by getting to his feet with an exasperated sigh. If he’d been any other kid, he would have stomped away in a huff to the shelf. Sasuke, though, Sasuke doesn’t stomp or through temper tantrums. He drapes the blanket over his shoulder and walks purposely to the shelf where I keep the dictionary, the blocks and diamonds of color trailing behind his like a cape. Book in hand he sits back down in front of me and with practiced ease skips the first few letters in the Webster’s dictionary until he comes to “d.” He’s getting better and better at navigating the dictionary; finding the word he wants rarely takes him longer than a minute now, whereas in the beginning it could take up to five. Since I chose from the onset not to dumb down my speech for him I had to teach him a way to keep up with me. It’s only fair to let him play catch up.
“Draw.” He reads for a few moments, eyes widening as they scan down the page. “Kakashi, there’s a whole bunch of them.”
“Yes,” I say sagely. If I had a beard, I’d stroke it. “The English language is phenomenally tricky that way.”
“Look at the noun, Sasuke,” Itachi advises. He shifts until one leg is tucked under the one still bent at the knee, his back braced against the inner frame of the door. “He just enjoys being difficult.”
“You, kiddo,” I reprimand with a supremely fake air of entitlement, “are impeding on my ability to shape his young mind. How is he going to learn anything if you hand him answers?”
Sasuke mutters something under his breath, one of the words sounding suspiciously like a profanity Itachi would not approve of. I smirk at the little guy’s show of defiance. I can’t wait to see how Itachi handles him three years from now. For his sake, I hope the kid doesn’t turn out to be too much of a smart-ass. “Okay,” he concludes after a minute of reading. “Draw. ‘A contest that ends with both sides having the same score or neither having won.’” He mulls over the new information for a few seconds before venturing forth his answer. “So, we tied?”
“That we did.”
“Oh.” He quickly studies the board again. “I didn’t win, then.”
“No.” Closer, but not there quite yet.
“But you didn’t win either.” Ever the astute student of mine, a wide grin appears on his face, replacing the earlier furrow of contemplation. He wraps the blanket further around his frame, filling the cloak triumphantly. “I can live with that.”
“Don’t get cocky yet,” I warn halfheartedly. Quite frankly, I’m proud of him. I’m not the one who keeps him in the dark, after all. “You haven’t beaten me in chess yet.”
“I know,” Sasuke replies succinctly. “But I will.”
I arch an eyebrow, a motion which has become a hallmark of our exchanges. “Such confidence in one so young. Where do you get it from?”
“Wild guess,” Itachi interjects.
I shrug innocently. Even though I don’t inquire verbally, I do wonder what’s brought about the change in Itachi’s demeanor as of late. The change isn’t glaring, but it’s there, looking at our nightly games instead of past them. I don’t know whether to describe him as happy; happy and Itachi have never been words I thought would go together. But I can say with certainty that he strikes me as less uptight. Something is helping him unwind and be part of our ritual. Even if only in some words and a gaze. It makes me wonder, since he’s here and not in a place named vacancy, if I should ask him to play.
After a quick moment of deliberation, I decide that it can’t hurt. Besides, I want to see if he’s willing to venture even further. He’s right on the edge of us, unlike Iruka, who’s off in the kitchen and on the outer limits. I have to say, though, I’m surprised he’s here at all. Tonight of all nights. Saturday isn’t a wild night for me, but since I’m an anomaly in the world of men I don’t hold him to my traditions. He can go fuck his boyfriend if he wants. I’m not going to stop him.
“Another game, then?” I suggest as I stretch. “Itachi?”
Itachi blinks for a second, processing semantics. “Are you asking for permission or are you asking me to play?” he asks with a faintly incredulous air.
“I think he’s asking you to play,” Sasuke answers for me, but with the same incredulous tone as his brother. The combination of it is new and awkward. My words in Itachi’s voice.
“One game.”
If not for the fact that it’s happening right in front of me, I would not have believed it. Itachi looks tempted. Like his interest in the game, like his interest in us, it’s covert. He doesn’t bite his lip as he thinks about it or hum while debating pros and cons. The temptation is in his gaze, in the way it lingers a few extra seconds on the marbles. Seconds, months ago, he wouldn’t have spared to begin with.
“Not tonight,” he says, motioning to one of the many clocks. Nine thirty-two. “It’s getting late and we still have to walk home.”
One of these days, I’m going to have to offer to drive the two of them home, even though I dislike driving and elect not to when I don’t have to. The distance between our abodes spans a few minutes by car, twenty by foot. “Too bad.” I assume devil’s advocate for a moment, leading him on until I hear what I want to hear. Same as what Sasuke would love to hear. “Another night, then?”
Chapter Seven-Part II
Category: Chapter fic
Status: Work in Progress
Rating: R for language, drug and sexual references, mature subject matter.
Notes: Written in first person narratives alternating between Sasuke, Kakashi, Itachi, and Kisame.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Come on, we all know I’m not Kishimoto, don’t we?
November
II. The writing on the wall came tumbling down.
One of the windows in the living room has a crack in it, a deep, jagged crack that looks like a ravine for ants. It was like that when we moved in. On windy nights, the window whistles. Arctic chills in the winter, balmy hurricanes in the summer.
Itachi is standing by the cracked window when I finish brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink. (The bathroom sink gargles at me like a sewer creature is trying to escape, so I do my best to avoid it whenever possible.) Itachi just shakes his head at me.
He cocks his head a bit to the right, gaze narrowed in thought. I join him at the window, not knowing what he’s looking at and feeling distinctly out of the loop. I debate poking him in the side to get his attention. After all, he’s been in a fairly good mood the past week, but I don’t want to ruin his good mood so I keep my finger obediently at my side and settle for fidgeting until he acknowledges me. He has to at some point. He can’t just stare at the window all morning. He has to go to the Den.
A flock of Canadian geese flies overhead while I wait.
“What?” I ask when I can’t take the suspense anymore, watching him tilt his head this way and that, not being able to figure out if he’s looking at the window or out the window. One of the straggler geese passes by, squawking obnoxiously loud at the flock up ahead.
Itachi looks down at me, black eyes tired but friendly. He’s still in a good mood and I’m ecstatic for that – for him, because it’s been a long time since he was happy. I have no clue as to what has him so happy, but I’m not going to pick at straws. “I think,” he says, cocking his head again. “The crack is getting bigger.”
I look at the crack too, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t look any different, at least from back here. I step forward, laying my finger along the length of the glass crevice. Last summer, the crack ended just above the tip of my finger. Today, smack in the middle of autumn, it’s a sizeable number of centimeters above my fingernail. “Yup,” I say as I step back, lining up with Itachi. “It’s bigger.”
“Damn,” he curses softly. He realizes what word he used, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “Don’t repeat that.”
I grin smugly. He smacks Kakashi for that all the time. This is the first time I remember him saying a bad word. “You used a Kakashi word, Itachi.”
“I know,” he says. “He’s infectious.”
“That doesn’t sound nice.”
“It isn’t.” Sounds mean, should be mean, but he says it with a small smile. “Grab your coat, Sasuke. Don’t miss the bus.”
I never miss the bus. I can’t miss the bus because there’s no one to drive me to school. Itachi threatened to make me walk in the beginning. My theory is that I’m still scared he meant it. That wasn’t long after his trial. I’d been staying with Marina, our aunt who owns the building. She likes to pretend that we, but Itachi in particular, don’t exist. I know plenty of our family members feel the same way, the ones out in California. I know because I used to feel that way about him. When he threatened to make me walk to school in the ice and wind of March and I cried before drifting off to sleep.
March is also the month we finally held a funeral for our parents. We couldn’t do it in December, because the ground was so frozen and Itachi was arrested and there was so much craziness going on that I wouldn’t have wanted to do it then anyway. The only other funeral I’d been to before that was for Shisui, one year earlier. I don’t remember Shisui much, but I remember the funeral. I remember having to wear black and sticking close to Itachi’s leg the entire time while the adults cried.
At Mom and Dad’s funeral, which was more of a memorial service because their bodies had been cremated months earlier, I stayed as far away from Itachi as I could, hiding behind other relatives.
He didn’t cry during that funeral either.
I don’t know what it takes to make him cry. Death doesn’t work. Pain doesn’t work. Fear.
“Going,” I say for his reassurance. I’m the only one out of the two of us who seems to know that I won’t miss the bus. I head into the kitchen, which doesn’t take long because it’s actually the same room as the living room, only tiled instead of carpeted, and pull my jacket off of the back of the chair. Unlike Kakashi, who has way more chairs around his table than he needs, Itachi and I only have two chairs, one for each of us. Our apartment has exactly what we need. Or less than what we need.
Itachi lingers at the window for another minute before he grabs his coat and keys and follows me out the door.
The elevator doesn’t work. You press the button and nothing happens, permanently stuck somewhere between the second and third floor. We take the stairs down and up, even when we have groceries. Not that we have a lot of groceries, but milk is heavy when you have to carry it up three flights of stairs and the stairs are creepy if you have to walk up alone. They’re the kind of stairs that don’t have backs so that you can see straight down to the bottom. I’m not afraid of heights, but the floor is made of tile and some of the stairs are uneven. So I take my time in the lead.
Itachi is patient with my careful footing.
At the bottom of the stairway, next to the elevator that doesn’t work in the cubicle that poses as the foyer, are the mailboxes. There’re twenty in total, because it’s a small apartment complex run by the old woman who ignores us, five rows of four mailboxes. Except mailboxes gives them too much credit. They’re really more like mail slots. Or mail cubby holes. We had those in kindergarten. I could barely fit my lunch box into the cubby hole, let alone my coat. This coat would have no chance of fitting. I look like my cousin playing dress-up in this coat that falls down to my knees. All that’s missing is aunt Ginny’s high heels.
We don’t get a lot of mail aside from junk mail. Bills every month from the superintendent and some magazines filled with coupons. We don’t get packages like the woman who lives next door or letters from Russia like the bearded man downstairs. Itachi doesn’t even glance at the mailboxes more than twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturday, certain that there’s nothing there to see. I check every day. Not our mailbox, because Itachi’s right on that, but the rest of the mailboxes, our neighbors below and next door. I don’t know why I still do it. It used to be that I checked just our mailbox every day, when letters from our family in California came for me, letters I prayed would take me to San Francisco and away from Itachi. All I ever got were condolences and apologies. Itachi got whatever else came after the first few lines that always mentioned how unfortunate I was to be an orphan already, poor thing, and even though I knew the rest of the story was hidden under Itachi’s prudently placed hand, I kept hoping. They came further and further apart, but I kept hoping I’d read the next one all the way through and see that I had a ticket to California.
These days, I still check, just to see if the man’s family in Russia still loves him.
They do today. I see the familiar brown envelope. And something else, one block up, that makes me stop in my tracks.
At first, I think that I’m seeing something wrong. The woman who has a package every other day is the mailbox directly next to ours, so it might be that I looked too quickly and got them mixed up. But when I step closer, reaching forward to touch for assurance like I did the ravine in the window, the box is real under my fingers and in slot 5D. Our mailbox.
“Itachi?” I call out questioningly.
The frosted door creaks for a half a second and stops. If he turns around, I don’t see it. I’m too enthralled by the box stuffed into our mailbox, filling it from top to bottom and corner to corner. “What happened?” he calls back, always ready for disaster.
“We have mail.” Big mail.
Itachi sighs, letting the door shut. “I said something about not being late, do you remember that?”
“But there’s a package,” I protest. This is abnormal to the point where it’s exciting, like getting a present for my birthday. This doesn’t happen every day. “And it’s taking up all the room in the mailbox.”
He tosses a glare my direction, because when something doesn’t go the way he planned or likes, he glares, like a default. He only means it every once in a while. And you can tell. He only puts feeling into certain glares. The others are just perfunctory. “Late,” he repeats sternly.
“Package,” I repeat, poking it with my finger to prove it to him. It’s like he doesn’t believe me or something.
The glare changes to a look of curiosity almost immediately. It’s not every day we get a package in the mail. This is something of a special occasion. What kind of special occasion I can’t say, but special all the same.
Hesitantly, Itachi crosses the foyer and gives the box an experimental tug. Nothing happens. Whoever sent the package must have shoved and wriggled to make it fit, because there’s barely room between the sides of the box and the walls to slip in a fingernail. Itachi has a purchase only because the box is longer than the slot, so part of it is sticking out. It’s enough to fit a hand around the corner.
After a few extra seconds, the box comes free and slides out. On top of the box, all scrunched up from being stuffed in our mailbox, is a folded note on lined paper. He lifts up the notes and tears it from the box, the tape ripping off some of the lettering. The “s” is half gone, but the words are still as plain as day.
Now, I like Frosted Flakes. I like most kinds of cereal. But who would send us a box of Frosted Flakes when we can buy our own at the store? It’s not like cereal is that expensive that we can’t buy it ourselves. Some weeks we live off of cereal.
Itachi is reading the note, clarity registering on his features. So, at least one of us knows the answer to the Frosted Flake mystery. As usual, I’m the one who doesn’t. It reminds me of all the letters Itachi only let me see part of, leaving me in the dark to this day.
I ponder over the cereal, summoning all of the common sense I have in order to figure out who sent the box. There’s no address visible on the box, so that means someone had to have dropped it off. Kakashi is a possibility. He’s the only person we see often enough to hypothetically send us food. He’s one of the only people we know in Arden who knows where we live. But he’s also the least likely to send us anything because we’re at his house every single day. He can just give us the cereal, with milk, around his kitchen table in bowls with spoons.
Iruka and Kakashi had a fight, so it’s not him.
I never told Naruto where I lived.
The guys Itachi works with at the café? Genma who told me my hair was a character quirk and another guy who works in the kitchen. They see him too, though.
A truly horrific thought strikes me: What if the innocent-looking box of cereal is actually a bomb? Kakashi let me read an old newspaper story about a mailbox bomber. Maybe someone took a leaf out of his book, got creative, and came up with cereal bombing. Of course, a cereal bomber probably wouldn’t leave a note that Itachi would accept as nothing to be alarmed over. I’m letting my imagination run away with me.
The question bubbles up inside of me, eager to get out in the open air. I know the note has a name. It has to have a name, otherwise, Itachi wouldn’t still be holding it, eyes scanning it for the third and fourth times, the vaguest of smiles on his face. Not one of his unsettling la-la land smiles either, where his mind is somewhere over the rainbow and his body is left behind. This is the smile he gave me when I was five and snuck into his room to see him when Dad grounded him. A real smile, with teeth, where his eyes match his lips.
I forgot how much I missed it. Like his laughter, I’d nearly written his smiles off as impossible. Something he forgot how to do.
Seeing it again makes me happy. In the same way, it also makes me sad.
Smiling means something is okay with him again, and that’s great and that’s wonderful and that’s what I want for him after seeing him distant and practically emotionless for such a long time, but I feel like I’m missing something. A huge chunk of the puzzle that is my brother is missing and I don’t have any of the pieces I need to put the big picture together. One of them is in his hand, the others locked away in his brain where he won’t let me see. Itachi is made of secrets. He’s smiling now when he wasn’t before, and I don’t know why either way. It’s kind of like I’m watching from the outside, seeing him go from my brother who hauled me to my feet with a superior smile on his face after I fell on my butt roller-skating, to the almost a grown-up brother who works more than forty hours every week, and back again, without knowing why he’s changing. I have effect without cause. If Itachi were a question on one of Mr. Umino’s reading tests, I’d get it wrong. Minus five.
I keep getting farther and farther away. Pretty soon I’ll be in negative numbers, nowhere close to him who knows all. And he doesn’t want me to know all. If he did, he’d let me see the letter. Instead, he hides things from me, the important and insignificant alike, and brushes me off when I try to ask questions or even show interest in something before that night in December. I’m not a brain doctor, so I can’t help, but that doesn’t mean he should shut me out completely.
I’m part of his life. And they were my parents, too. If there’s one secret he shouldn’t be keeping, it’s why his finger ever made it to the trigger of Dad’s gun.
Itachi tucks the letter into his pocket and the box of Frosted Flakes under his arm, fingers hooking under the collar of my jacket to pull me along and out the door. He couldn’t be bothered to just tell me that we need to go now, just like he couldn’t be bothered to tell me how Dad’s gun ended up in his hands or what he finds so endearing about a box of cereal.
I don’t know what makes him cry, but I know that Frosted Flakes make him smile.
*^*^*
Watching little kids fall into piles of leaves never fails to amuse me.
I myself never remember doing it as a kid. I remember hunting for ants and drowning their colonies with water, throwing sticks at trees, but jumping into a pile of leaves never occurred to me. Leaves aren’t soft, they look like they would itch on bare skin, and the stems are bound to prick you in the eye.
Mud. Now I could play in mud forever when I was young. Anything that involved water could keep me occupied for hours.
So while I wait for Itachi in the lamp-lit park, I attempt to figure out the appeal of jumping into a pile of dry, dying vegetation. One boy in particular, looking to be about six or seven, has been at it for nearly a half an hour, his mother and father patiently keeping an eye on him as he plays in the illuminated dark of autumn night. He has a pile of leaves staked out as his personal playground, maintaining it by re-gathering as many leaves as he can each time he sends them into flight. Each jump is made after a short, awkward run, and each time I’m afraid that this time is the one where he won’t be able to make the distance.
Leaves fly. He laughs.
That flimsy pile of leaves would never support my weight. My ass would hit the ground without further ado and I’d end up cursing at the dirt. I would not be laughing, at least not for a week or so. After that, it would be the stuff of hilarity.
I try to imagine if Itachi would laugh if I made an ass of myself jumping into a pile of leaves like the six-year-old boy who thinks it’s so much fun that he can’t help but laugh every single time. I come up short. Having seen him smile sparsely in the past two weeks has been encouraging, but that seems to be the way he expresses his amusement as well as happiness. Laughter is noticeably absent when he isn’t half hysterical from a panic attack.
He doesn’t grin. He doesn’t smirk. He doesn’t chuckle or snigger. He just smiles these tiny smiles, like his lips and his brain aren’t connected and he doesn’t realize that they are acting on their own accord.
I’ll have to ask him about the appeal of leaves. He’s not that far off from childhood and I don’t think asking will touch on any of his taboo topics, but I could easily be wrong. Last week at the Indian restaurant, I mentioned something about loving the smell of the cigars my dad used to smoke and he clammed up on the spot, shaking his head briskly to steer me away from the topic. He was quiet for several long, uncomfortable minutes after that.
On the other hand, I did learn that he’s not the biggest fan of spicy foods. We won’t be eating in any more Indian restaurants.
I’ve learned a lot about him at our last two dinners, or at least, more than I knew previously. The first week, the week of his panic attack, I asked a few simple questions: What his favorite color is? His favorite book? The next week, I asked him about his job at the Red Lantern, and about Sasuke.
His answers were sparse, and more detailed on work than on his brother, but they were there.
I talked too, of course, to be fair. I talked more than he did, in reality, but that doesn’t bother me. If it did, I’d be the world’s biggest asshole. He’s willing to try a friendship, if I can be so presumptuous as to call it that, with me, so I will try as well, despite my doubts about all of this. It’s not that I don’t think he will try. I just think we’ll run into some kind of roadblock sooner rather than later. I don’t fully understand the boundaries he’s set. The basic idea, I get that. Don’t talk about his parents. But, being a psychologist, I understand the danger of associative thoughts. The abused – psychologically, physically, sexually – can experience a phenomenon wherein an innocent thought or question, like the cigar, will trigger a memory of the abuse. It’s commonly thought of as something that happens to those who experience loss, like smelling particular cologne reminds Benny of his grandfather or Deanna hearing her wedding song makes her cry over her dead husband, but it happens to anybody and everybody under the sun and their mothers. One word: that’s all it takes to remind someone of something a friend said over the music someone played the night when. . . .
I understand because I have them too. Everyone does. In some cases, it’s more extreme. In some cases, panic attacks ensue.
So yes, I will do my best to work around the blocks, because that’s a step in a different direction and we need to head somewhere different than where we’ve been. I hope that his desire to be around me is genuine. I want it to be. He sounded sincere in his apology and suggestion, but I’m not convinced. Not yet. And if, if he is sincere about working with me, then my next worry is that one of us will get fed up before he is able to pull down some of the walls that keep my innocent but harmful inquiries from hitting something sensitive and igniting a chain reaction. Like not being able to breathe.
I’ve been around victims of panic attacks before, but each one is as frightening as the last one. It’s unsettling, because there in nothing you can do for a panic attack. They go away in their own good time. I gave him a voice to listen to in order to keep him grounded and shielded him from gawking, but that was all. Breathing doesn’t help. Closing your eyes and counting to ten doesn’t help. Nothing anyone can say to you helps. It’s all up to time, even if you think it’s the voice telling you how to breathe.
Nice sentiment, but misplaced. Time deserves more credit than people are willing to give.
See it’s not that time heals. That’s another nice but inaccurate sentiment. Time makes it easier to heal, I believe that firmly, but it isn’t the primary agent. Communication is medicinal, and communication is what is made easier in time. The phrase “you are ready to talk?” is probably born out of this idea. Itachi’s problem with me, I think, is that he has the sequence wrong, his equation out of order and half forgotten. He has the talking part down. He knows that I want him to talk to me and that I’m not going to be satisfied until he does, but something he said to me the first time we met sticks out in my mind, and not in a way that assures me of anything.
"Because you can't change time."
I’ve never been under the impression that I have the ability to change time. I’ve wished for it. I’ve wished for it crumpled up in bathroom stalls after the shows, Deidara laughing outside and saying something he thought profound. We were a bunch of messed up idiots, Deidara, Sasori, and I, idiots in love with something we couldn’t have. Sitting there on the floor, I remember thinking that everything was okay before that last bottle, let’s go back to that. Never mind that the problem began years before at two o’clock in the morning, listening to my dad play the saxophone to the dead.
David Bowie had it right. Time changes us. We don’t change time. (1) And Itachi seems to have that mixed up.
It sounds like he thinks that I believe time will change if he talks to me. That I think I can make it go away. In reality, I believe the direct opposite. I don’t think trauma ever goes away. It’s something we carry with us as a part of ourselves. Once it happens, it becomes a part of who we are, part of our history. Nothing anyone can do or say changes what happened. He doesn’t know this, but we both believe the same thing. I said that to him as he sat in my leather chair, stony faced and silent. Granted, I said it in song lyrics, but I did say it. Never once did the words, “I can make this go away” come out of my mouth. I wouldn’t be a very good psychiatrist if I said something that asinine.
I started out the way I usually do and told him about myself. As soon as I found out that he wanted none of it, I gave him what he wanted: I offered him silence, asking no questions and offering nothing. And it all fell down from there, because getting what he wanted only made him dead set on hating me for all I’m worth and that just made me twice as determined to break down that wall and get to the center of him, where I could see him boiling from the inside. Turns out that he didn’t really want me to give him what he wanted, if that makes any earthly sense. Turns out he didn’t know what he wanted from me.
It’s a wonder anybody manages to get along at all, with all the wrong steps and miscommunications we tend to make.
And it’s almost funny, I have to admit, watching the little boy gather up leaves back into their pile and ready himself to run again, that after all the mistakes we’ve made since our first meeting in August, we’re back where we started. The only difference is that now he’s talking too. I just don’t know how long his mouth will keep moving. How long before I say something that will seal those lips of his shut again. How long before he has another panic attack and decides I’m not worth the trouble of trying.
I’d love for this to work. If this is all a part of adjusting to me, if this will give him a sense of comfort around me so that we can work on his emotional problems, then I’ll gladly concede defeat to my cynicism. I just have a bad feeling about all of this. We have a short messy history that I only anticipate getting messier. History tends to repeats itself and Itachi has a routine established. He’s driven ten other psychiatrists off of his case with his routine. Does he really see something in me that changed his attitude? Is something truly different from ten to eleven or is this just a ploy to keep me far, far off-topic from the things he can’t handle talking about?
I can’t tell.
And history isn’t promising me a thing.
It will be interesting to see, then, how he handles the box of Frosted Flakes I left in his mailbox. And by interesting, I mean nerve-wracking. I probably overstepped a boundary or two. Not that I’m sure of our boundaries, but there are things in life that are instinctual. Things you know are questionable without questioning.
The damned box was just so forlorn-looking at the back of my pantry, unopened. I don’t even like Frosted Flakes that much. They were on sale at the time, so I picked them up along with a box of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. The Cheerios are long since gone and the Frosted Flakes remain. I had to do something with it since I’m obviously not going to eat it anytime soon, and I know the kid’s having a hard time. It’s another one of those instinctual things. Rape or no rape, stubborn or not, he’s fifteen years old doing his best to raise a nine-year-old. Single parents have difficulties raising their kids, but Itachi has insisted on paying for his own dinners. He had a panic attack in the middle of a restaurant and still wanted to pay for his fried noodles.
His pride is what is going to kick me in the ass on this one. Itachi’s already proven to be one hell of a stubborn creature. In spite of his recent modicums of cooperation, I doubt he’ll see the cereal as anything more than an act of pity. And possibly an insult.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I have a PhD. I should be smart enough not to provoke someone known to be belligerent when it comes to me. It’s no wonder we have such a messy history. I keep going too far.
I feel better now that the Frosted Flakes are out of my apartment. Keeping them there was just as bad as throwing them away. And he does need help. I know it and he knows it, and that’s why this has been such a battle. He doesn’t want to go through what he needs. Call me a cynic or a jerk for saying this, but I still don’t think that he does or is going to change his mind about wanting to. I think calling a truce and giving me fragments of what I want to hear are his ways of appeasing me until he can find another way out.
That’s not what I want. That’s how I think this will end up. Itachi fought to keep me out of his life for three months. Now he’s voluntarily letting me see bits and pieces? Something doesn’t fit, something is off, and I think the wool is hovering over my eyebrows.
Recalling everything that’s gone wrong, I have the right to worry.
I pull my phone out of my pocket, checking the time. One minute to six. Less than once minute to six if I were looking at the face of a watch.
I know I’ll see him if I look up. Itachi follows the clock like it’s the law. On time to him means that he knocks on door at seven o’clock. Not seven o’one, not six fifty-nine. Seven o’clock, he says hello.
One of the people walking up the path is him. It’s probably the footsteps I can barely hear. He moves as quietly as he speaks. A pebble, the one that skittered off into the trees, is twenty seconds, ten seconds. The cardinal, the bird that doesn’t fly away for the winter, alighting to a bare branch is nine seconds, eight seconds. Cloth on cloth, shifting, changing as bones move, is seven, six, five, four, three, two, one seconds.
“Doctor.”
If I didn’t feel like cringing, I would have grinned. Some people say hello. And then there’s Itachi.
When I look up, I see much of the same picture I’ve always seen. He’s dressed in the same thing I’ve seen him in every time we meet. Black jeans, white shirt, and sneakers that have seen better days. On his face, and this is a new addition, he wears The Look. The Look, as far as I can tell, isn’t quite bad, but isn’t quite good either. It’s more incredulous than anything; I was graced with it more than a few times last Thursday. If pressed, I’d say it’s an improvement from the glares and blank stares. There’s emotion packed in The Look that isn’t anger, so the hopeful part of me says that we’ve made progress. Still, The Look isn’t reserved for happy times and appears when I say or do something he finds stupid. “Why would you even bother asking?” it says, and you have to decide for yourself how to take it after that, because Itachi won’t tell you: That’s when the hopeless side of me says we’re stuck.
“Nice to see you, too.” The best defense, I learned from childhood, is playing dumb. I smile at him innocently, a throwback to the days when I brought mud in from Boston row house backyards and tracked it across the floor. That mud would stay there for weeks before Dad came out of dreamland, his tone finally shifting from musician to father for a day or two.
Bad days, good days. Good moods, bad moods.
Before I can finish contemplate what kind of mood I put him in, a wad of crumpled up paper hits me in the chest. It lands in my lap. I recognize the paper immediately. The tic tac toe game I played with myself while eating a bagel at the kitchen counter is on the back. I tied with myself.
I think maybe I need a puppy or something.
“So,” Itachi says, wandering closer to the bench. “I got a package in the mail this morning. I don’t remember ordering cereal by mail, so I’m a kind of reluctant to eat it. See, there was no name on the note, which lent a stalker feel to the whole situation.” He sits on the bench, putting at least a foot of space between us, looking forward at the boy and his leaves. That much hasn’t changed. “Being the responsible adult that you are, I’m hoping you’ll lend me your opinion.”
“Think that highly of me, do you?” I stall, trying to pick out a meaning in his lack of inflection. Itachi tells stories as if they are clear cut facts, making it hard to hear his actual thoughts in the words.
“Hardly. But I heard somewhere that the elderly have wisdom.”
His sense of humor: Deadpan. His smile: Nonexistent. “I’m twenty-six.”
“Dear Itachi,” he begins, ignoring me. “You’re too skinny. It’s unattractive. P.S.,” He turns his head just enough to fix me with the mother of all Looks. The fucking queen mother. “The Frosted Flakes made me do it.”
If I could figure out how to take him – his mood, his temperament, his words that land flat – then I would be happy to give him an analysis of the note. Considering that the note is mine, it would be a breeze explaining the author’s intentions. But is he interested in the author’s intentions, really, or is this just another way of saying “why would you leave me a note like this and why would you think I’d take it well?” Is that what I’ll get when I decipher the code he spells out in dictionary words?
I can’t fucking tell.
Forget his pride, it might be my frustration with his voice that brings us down.
“Care to give me a diagnosis?”
Oh, he knows it’s me. Who else would it be? I don’t understand where this is coming from. The Itachi that I know doesn’t bother beating around bushes. He cuts right to the hearts of matters, which is what confuses me about the things he’s saying. With the right intonations, he could be playful. Funny. Jesting because it doesn’t really matter, I meant no harm.
At the risk of sounding like a teenager, yeah right. He doesn’t think like that. He isn’t playful. I meant the gesture to be casual and joking, but to him, I doubt it is. In not so many words, I insinuated that he doesn’t have enough food in his house. I implicated that he needs my help. My pity.
With all the pride he’s conceded in coming back to see me on Thursdays for dinner, my note is a slap in the face, trampling on what’s left of the independence he values. For the myriad of known and unknown reasons he has for resisting my involvement, taking care of his own state mind is the most important to him. And his state of mind is everywhere – in his work, his home, his brother, his barely there smiles and flat words. He doesn’t want me, a man he barely knows as more than an acquaintance, invading so quickly after he let me in so slowly. Too much to fast, that’s all it is.
I could say all of that in my analysis, knowing better than I acted. Perhaps he’ll appreciate honesty even if he doesn’t appreciate the sentiment.
“I’d say,” I begin slowly, looking again to the boy buried in a pile of leaves, making him my focal point because looking at Itachi is too confusing. What do you want? I have the urge to scream at him. Tell me what you want from me. Just tell me if you really want to be here or you’re only here to keep away from the leather chair. If you want me to go away for good, I’ll go, but I’m tired of guessing games. And laugh. I need to know if you can laugh when you aren’t half out of your mind. “I’d say that the writer is male, about six feet, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. He didn’t sign his last name because that felt wrong, and didn’t sign his first name because that felt wrong too. He didn’t know how you’d take it anyway, and he’s not going to say anymore because he still doesn’t.”
Analytical enough for you?
He doesn’t shift on the bench. Not in discomfort, not in defense, and not in preparation for whatever he’s going to say next. It doesn’t comfort me. It puts me on edge.
“You’re awfully serious today.”
Cringe, laugh, the lines are blurring.
I pull an Itachi and prescribe to the old silence is golden adage. All of the words I’ve come up with for how I feel would fill up pages and it’s still not clear, confusion reigning over articulation because I can’t say everything with only some things. I only have some things to go on.
Silence can tell you how heavy a heart is, but it can’t tell you why. That’s why he depends on it.
“Last week you were telling me about the neighborhood dog you taught the tango.” His voice sounds so far away, not being able to see him out of the corner of my eye. “Suddenly you’ve lost your sense of humor?”
“I didn’t lose it.” A mother sweeps down on her little boy, pulling him out of the leaves. A few cling to his sweater. She wants to bring him home, where breath doesn’t look like fog by the light of a lamp. I slip my finger inside the cuff of my jacket and rub the sleeve of my own sweater in response, the weave against my skin soothing me the way my thoughts cannot. Chilly doesn’t begin to describe the weather. Autumn is in full swing, winter is on the way and all I can focus on in the picture of the family I never had, because even that is better than the uncertainty I feel with the only relationship I’ve had with another person since I left the band back in Boston.
It’d be presumptuous to call it a friendship, but there’s nothing else to hope for now. The psychiatrist thing is a lost cause. Like my sense of humor at the moment.
“Ookay,” he says on exhale. A few beats of silence and then I’m blindsided. “Are you mad at me or something?”
A gust of wind rips through the park, scattering leaves and creeping up my sleeves. I don’t know how he isn’t cold, sitting there in only a pair of jeans and a short sleeved shirt. I shiver, close my eyes for a minute, thinking about it. Am I mad at him? No, I decide as the boy laughs one more time, down the path with his parents. I’m not mad at him. I’m frustrated and on edge, but I’m not mad. Not at him. I might be a bit mad at myself for letting this get to me, but I’m not mad at him. He’s being, well, himself. And I agreed to have dinners with him because I like him: unbreakable and broken, calm and panicked, neurotic Itachi. I’m attached to him not as a patient anymore, but as a person. Otherwise, I would have sent him off to a new psychiatrist, like protocol says I have to. The end.
But I didn’t and here we are, evading the things we need to say to move away from the beginning.
All I need is a yes or a no. Do you want to be here? Did I go too far?
“No,” I say succinctly. “I’m not mad at you. You didn’t do anything.” Anything to tell me anything. “But…” I turn to look at him finally, nearly regretting it when I realize he’s not looking at me. Getting the words out is a struggle. “Can you be absolutely honest with me? And I mean complete honesty, not the half-assed kind my old friend used to be with me.” I do wonder if he ever grew out of that.
Itachi does turn to look at me now, meeting my eyes. They’re the same black eyes as always, like the pale arms that have to be freezing without a jacket are the same, and the one piece of hair that doesn’t stay back in the ponytail he ties at the base of his neck is the same. I wear the same color, he wears the same colors, we sit together at the beginning of what I fear is something old, a still life in monochromes. I count the number of times I blink as beats of quiet pass on our parts, not wanting to look away in case I miss the emotion I’ve been looking for somewhere in the black.
He blinks and turns, finally, shaking his head briefly in what I think is as a precursor to “no.” Until he speaks and the words contradict the action. “What do you want to know, doctor?”
To be frank I didn’t think he’s say yes to the first question. Which he didn’t, in so many words. Still, since that’s all he’s going to give me. “Why are you here? Honestly. Is this where you want to be or are you just here to get me off your back?”
Itachi returns his gaze to my face for a second, then on a point just over my shoulder. “Honestly?”
I nod, breathing in wind, dying foliage, and the scent of coffee he brought from the café. I nod not knowing if I can handle it but wanting to know all the same.
I’d rather him hate me than simply put up with me.
Is it stupid to want a friendship with a fifteen-year-old who used to be your patient? Yes. Do I care? No. I should, because he’s giving me an ulcer, but I don’t regret being chilled to the bone with him. I don’t regret my choice. I don’t lament being here. And maybe he does.
It is what it is at this point.
All I really want is an answer.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be. I know you don’t know much about me, but at least know that. It’s because of you I’m here, not for you.”
I close my eyes to laugh at the sky. “Way to be cryptic.” He’s good at that. I knew that much about him.
“Maybe you just don’t listen.” He stands in front of me, just out of the way of the bicyclist, brushing away invisible dirt from his jeans. “The note. Unless you want me to take offense, I don’t. I can’t anymore. I know you feel sorry for me and I know you want to help. I know you care. That’s what has us here and not me in some other chair and you talking to a stranger. This note,” he says, picking it up from its resting place on my thigh, fingers cold, “is nothing different from anything you’ve done.” He opens it, reading it to me again. “Dear Itachi. So formal. You’re too skinny.” His eyes drop down to his own waistline and over to mine, going up until he finds me face. “It’s unattractive.” Paper crunches in on itself as he crumples the notes back into a ball, stuffing it in the pocket of his jeans. “I swear, it’s like you want me to pick a fight over this. I thought we weren’t doing that anymore.”
The moon makes his skin glow. I tilt my head back, the note replaying in my head again like it’s been doing all day. This time though, his voice is in the words. This time, though, there’s something else. I see his casual stance, the crinkled note in his cold hands, the way his eyes moved.
No fight. No fight in his tone, no fight in the meaning.
“I thought I was being friendly. Am I supposed to be mad at you?”
It all seems so silly all of a sudden. Nothing, absolutely nothing he said had an ounce of anger in it. Nothing he said had happiness in it either, but so little he’s ever said has. I figured it out before from words. So why, this time, weren’t words enough?
A smile, a dumbfounded smile, makes its way to my lips. Dumbfounded by how complicated I made our relationship, looking at the old instead of the new. The emotion was in his words all along. It was in the way he stood in front of me, the way he put the note back into his pocket instead of the garbage can behind the bench, and the way he didn’t come right out and tell me I shouldn’t have left him cereal.
I was too busy looking for the fight to see the play.
“No.” I get to my feet, putting us at a closer proximity than we’ve been since I shielded him from curiosity at the restaurant. So close that he has to take a step back to avoid bumping knees with me. “You were. You aren’t, so, forget I said anything about that. New question for you.” I side step around him, bumping his shoulder so that he turns with me before I take a few step backward, looking both ways behind me to avoid running into dogs and small children. “If,” I say as I lead us across the path, Itachi following only because I’m not speaking loudly enough to be heard from any kind of distance, “I throw myself into this pile of leaves and land on my ass, will you laugh?”
“Is that with you or at you?”
So effortlessly I see it now, the play in him. I wonder again if, as a child, it wasn’t as hard to find through the flats. If his tone joked like his words do. If he laughed with things, at things. If he laughed. Amazing enough that he jokes with me, I can’t imagine that sound coming out of his mouth when he’s not in a panic.
Yet, I’m dying to find out.
“Either.” The heels of my shoes touch the base of the piles of leaving the boy in the sweater jumped in before his parents took him home. I let myself fall backward then, trusting that it won’t hurt me if it didn’t hurt the boy. I never played in the leaves as a kid, but for the sake of here and now and tomorrow, I’m willing to find out where the fun is.
They aren’t soft, I find as I nestle farther into my cocoon. They aren’t hard either, but they aren’t soft, and I was right about the prickling. The crisp edges poke at my neck and tickle my hair. The only thing they have going for them is warmth. I’m warmer than I’ve been all night tucked into a pile of leaves, looking up through the branches to the starry sky. Skies are always more clear in the cold. Night in November is cold.
“Aren’t you cold?” I ask suddenly, lifting my head to see him. “You have to be freezing without a jacket on.”
He takes one step forward, bringing him close enough that I could touch him if I stretched. The second time tonight he did so voluntarily. “I’m freezing, actually.”
“Hnn,” I grunt, my shell of my ear chilly from being exposed to the air. I probably don’t want to know why he doesn’t wear jackets in fifty degree weather. And he probably doesn’t want me to know. So I’m going to do the smart thing and wait for him to come around on that. We may be back at the beginning, but it’s a different beginning, a beginning where he stands close to me and jokes with me, in his own way. “I’m feeling positively toasty,” I inform him, letting my head flop back into the leaves.
Through the crinkle of leaves against my ear, the faint sound of laughter sneaks through. It’s curt, more like a chuckle, and probably at me, but it’s good to hear.
“You’re an idiot.”
History be damned, I decide as he nudges my shoe with his toes, urging me to get up so that we can get to the restaurant before he wastes away.
It is what it is, now.
*^*^*
Sasuke bites his lip. One small hand is curled into the sleeve of his shirt, the other tucked under his leg for warmth my house doesn’t give. No air conditioning in the summer, no heat in the winter. The radiator helps in the kitchen, but we’re in the living room and the space heater I have isn’t powerful enough to reach beyond the cluster of couches and chairs to the narrow foyer where we sit on the floor.
Having the door open also doesn’t help either.
Itachi sits in the doorway, half in the house and half on the porch, gaze fixed on the board of marbles that looks like the six-sided Star of David at our knees. He looks just as absorbed in the game as his brother is, although Sasuke hasn’t noticed. Chinese checkers (2) is a faster-paced game than chess. Faster, however, doesn’t mean easy. You don’t have to memorize certain possible moves for specific marbles, capture players and you don’t have to protect your queen, but you still have to think five steps ahead, visualize your paths across the board to occupy your opponent’s end of the star. And you have to make your move in ten seconds.
It’s been about ten for Sasuke now, as a matter of fact.
“Stuck?” I ask.
Sasuke curls into himself in preamble to concession, the Santa Fe blanket I draped over him at the start of the game slipping fully off his shoulder blades to pool around his bony frame. “There’s nowhere to move,” Sasuke explains, eyes never leaving the single marble in question waiting to get into my end of the star. “I can’t jump over two of your marbles and going backwards doesn’t do me any good.”
“Hmm. So, in other words,” I pretend to muse, ripping off a portion of my cinnabun and perching it on his knee. “You’re stuck.”
He scowls as me. I have to hand it to him, that scowl is looking more and more menacing every passing day. In a few more years, he might figure out how to yield one without making me want to laugh at him. It looks too big on him, like the jacket he wears that comes down to his knees. He doesn’t fill it out the right way. “Yeah, well,” he begins to counter, sulkiness fading slightly as he inspects the cinnabun. “You’re stuck too.” He licks some of the frosting off of the top of the bun and points to my end of the star. “Your marble doesn’t have anywhere to go.”
I look down at the board, realizing that I’ve been paying more attention to him since my last move than the game. He’s not mistaken; my end of the board is a mirror of his, my last marble stuck behind two others. Neither of us have any more options.
Well damn.
“You know what this means, don’t you pretty bird?”
Sasuke pops the piece of pastry into his mouth and shakes his head. “Not really. I never know what you mean.”
Dishes clatter in the kitchen sink. Iruka is in there, pretending that we aren’t all out here. I made dinner, he’s cleaning up, and I’m in here playing Chinese checkers with the kids. It’s almost domestic. “It means,” I say, munching on what’s rest of my cinnabun, “that we call this one a draw.”
Sasuke still isn’t looking at Itachi, but if he were, he’d see him lift his lips in what I assume is a smile. It’s unusual to see him express any kind of interest in our evening games. Of course, it’s also unusual to leave your door open in November, but I’m not one to follow convention any more than I’m one to ask questions. He likes the wind, I like keeping my door open all year round and for whatever reason, he’s interested in the game. We all mesh tonight.
“Draw,” Sasuke repeats, rolling the word around on his tongue. “Spelled like drawing with a pencil kind of draw?”
I nod.
“Are you going to tell me what it means?”
I smirk at him, to which he responds by getting to his feet with an exasperated sigh. If he’d been any other kid, he would have stomped away in a huff to the shelf. Sasuke, though, Sasuke doesn’t stomp or through temper tantrums. He drapes the blanket over his shoulder and walks purposely to the shelf where I keep the dictionary, the blocks and diamonds of color trailing behind his like a cape. Book in hand he sits back down in front of me and with practiced ease skips the first few letters in the Webster’s dictionary until he comes to “d.” He’s getting better and better at navigating the dictionary; finding the word he wants rarely takes him longer than a minute now, whereas in the beginning it could take up to five. Since I chose from the onset not to dumb down my speech for him I had to teach him a way to keep up with me. It’s only fair to let him play catch up.
“Draw.” He reads for a few moments, eyes widening as they scan down the page. “Kakashi, there’s a whole bunch of them.”
“Yes,” I say sagely. If I had a beard, I’d stroke it. “The English language is phenomenally tricky that way.”
“Look at the noun, Sasuke,” Itachi advises. He shifts until one leg is tucked under the one still bent at the knee, his back braced against the inner frame of the door. “He just enjoys being difficult.”
“You, kiddo,” I reprimand with a supremely fake air of entitlement, “are impeding on my ability to shape his young mind. How is he going to learn anything if you hand him answers?”
Sasuke mutters something under his breath, one of the words sounding suspiciously like a profanity Itachi would not approve of. I smirk at the little guy’s show of defiance. I can’t wait to see how Itachi handles him three years from now. For his sake, I hope the kid doesn’t turn out to be too much of a smart-ass. “Okay,” he concludes after a minute of reading. “Draw. ‘A contest that ends with both sides having the same score or neither having won.’” He mulls over the new information for a few seconds before venturing forth his answer. “So, we tied?”
“That we did.”
“Oh.” He quickly studies the board again. “I didn’t win, then.”
“No.” Closer, but not there quite yet.
“But you didn’t win either.” Ever the astute student of mine, a wide grin appears on his face, replacing the earlier furrow of contemplation. He wraps the blanket further around his frame, filling the cloak triumphantly. “I can live with that.”
“Don’t get cocky yet,” I warn halfheartedly. Quite frankly, I’m proud of him. I’m not the one who keeps him in the dark, after all. “You haven’t beaten me in chess yet.”
“I know,” Sasuke replies succinctly. “But I will.”
I arch an eyebrow, a motion which has become a hallmark of our exchanges. “Such confidence in one so young. Where do you get it from?”
“Wild guess,” Itachi interjects.
I shrug innocently. Even though I don’t inquire verbally, I do wonder what’s brought about the change in Itachi’s demeanor as of late. The change isn’t glaring, but it’s there, looking at our nightly games instead of past them. I don’t know whether to describe him as happy; happy and Itachi have never been words I thought would go together. But I can say with certainty that he strikes me as less uptight. Something is helping him unwind and be part of our ritual. Even if only in some words and a gaze. It makes me wonder, since he’s here and not in a place named vacancy, if I should ask him to play.
After a quick moment of deliberation, I decide that it can’t hurt. Besides, I want to see if he’s willing to venture even further. He’s right on the edge of us, unlike Iruka, who’s off in the kitchen and on the outer limits. I have to say, though, I’m surprised he’s here at all. Tonight of all nights. Saturday isn’t a wild night for me, but since I’m an anomaly in the world of men I don’t hold him to my traditions. He can go fuck his boyfriend if he wants. I’m not going to stop him.
“Another game, then?” I suggest as I stretch. “Itachi?”
Itachi blinks for a second, processing semantics. “Are you asking for permission or are you asking me to play?” he asks with a faintly incredulous air.
“I think he’s asking you to play,” Sasuke answers for me, but with the same incredulous tone as his brother. The combination of it is new and awkward. My words in Itachi’s voice.
“One game.”
If not for the fact that it’s happening right in front of me, I would not have believed it. Itachi looks tempted. Like his interest in the game, like his interest in us, it’s covert. He doesn’t bite his lip as he thinks about it or hum while debating pros and cons. The temptation is in his gaze, in the way it lingers a few extra seconds on the marbles. Seconds, months ago, he wouldn’t have spared to begin with.
“Not tonight,” he says, motioning to one of the many clocks. Nine thirty-two. “It’s getting late and we still have to walk home.”
One of these days, I’m going to have to offer to drive the two of them home, even though I dislike driving and elect not to when I don’t have to. The distance between our abodes spans a few minutes by car, twenty by foot. “Too bad.” I assume devil’s advocate for a moment, leading him on until I hear what I want to hear. Same as what Sasuke would love to hear. “Another night, then?”
Chapter Seven-Part II
