A/N: A Kisa/Ita! Only not really. Kind of. Maybe? You make the choice. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Or Itachi and blue Shark-men. *sigh*

Warnings: T for implied character death and minor coarse language.

Pairings: Kisa/Ita and some implied Ita/Sasu and Naru/Sasu

Discernment

Creaking, clanking, broken, drowned.

Kisame doesn't presume to think that he understands Itachi. Nobody understands Itachi.

Itachi is far too complex and layered, far too covered with film and gauze and fog to ever decipher and straighten into a normal person's concept of lines and rows and angles.

Kisame doesn't presume to understand Itachi, and unlike some who would be so foolish, he doesn't particularly need to understand him.

The missing mist-nin really is just a simple, uncomplicated guy, underneath the blood and salt and cloud-cloak.

Underneath the blue diamond skin and knife-slit gills and dull yellow eyes.

So Kisame doesn't want to understand Itachi.

But really, in the grand scope of things, that works out.

Itachi is enigma. Ghost and wisp and fragment of a forgotten idea, a purpose that has been built for so long and so far that there really is no goal left in mind anymore, only a blind following of a plan engraved deeper than it can be felt.

Trying to understand Itachi gives people headaches.

Kisame knows this, and he's a simple guy, so he ignores all of the power and angst that Itachi seems to wear with a certain amount of pride, the idiot, and watches out for the well-being of the kid.

People forget that Itachi really is quite young.

But Kisame doesn't. Kisame is older than them all, and he knows youth when he sees it.

Itachi's eyes are old, and his heart is old, and his mind is old.

But his soul is young.

X

Itachi goes out and stands in the rain, falling ever faster down and down, as though the pull of gravity was a lover's call, and Kisame wonders if it feels like pounding weights on Itachi's head.

Kisame watches him, dull eyes and sharp teeth, as Itachi tilts his head back and runs his painted fingers through the lankness of his hair once, wet and dripping.

He's been out there for over an hour now.

Itachi doesn't like rain.

Kisame does.

So this situation is a bit odd, and Kisame should be concerned, should want to know, but he knows there is no point and so he simply lets the strangeness of an Itachi enjoying precipitation slide over his subconscious and then away.

Kisame clanks out next to him, cloak swirling around his feet, boots metal sharp on clay-soft ground, and he rejoices in the droplets that coat his skin and make Samehada sing a little. He lets his tongue slither out and catch a drop or two.

The tang of dirty rain saturates his taste buds; a mix of run-off, metal ore, and matter that has gone hard and dead.

But it's wet, so who's complaining really?

He's a simple guy.

Itachi's crimson red eyes watch him.

He smiles, because that's his default setting. Kisame's default setting is a smile, like any simple guy, but it might be decidedly more bladed than average.

He is a shinobi after all.

Shinobi have edges, even the simple ones.

Especially the missing ones.

"So, what? You cool with rain now? Tryin' t'drown yerself? Thought that was my thing."

Itachi sniffs. Kisame smirks.

Itachi wouldn't be caught dead copying the mist-nin. And killing himself was, as he had referred to the subject before, beneath him.

Without a word, the younger ninja turns to walk sedately inside the cave they've bunked in. Kisame knows that he will start the fire and maybe, if he's in a good mood, put some stew on.

He's definitely in a good mood if he's playing in the rain.

Kisame lets the smirk grow and watches the sway of Itachi's soaked hair as he glides away. Then he turns his back on the cave and tilts his head back to open his mouth and drink down the dirty water, let it coat his throat until it bubbles in his lungs.

Kisame can handle staying out in a deluge for hours at a time, even a heavy, cancer-ridden one like this. He's a mist-nin. Itachi, on the other hand, is slender, body strong as a bow, bendable as a willow-branch. Steel in his limbs, but weakness in his blood.

If the kid is too much of a hard-headed, mysterious prick to see that, than Kisame will send him inside and stand guard all night.

He doesn't know why he will.

But that isn't really the point. Kisame never needs to understand the why.

The shark shinobi gargles a laugh in his water-logged throat, and closes his eyes on the sky.

X

Kisame doesn't know why Itachi gets his headaches after they seal a bijuu. The former Konoha-nin will leave a meeting, silent and stone-faced, and collapse for hours at a time, breathing quietly, evenly, and yet his eyes will twitch beneath the closed lids like scared fish.

Itachi often observes Naruto Uzumaki, the bijuu they've been assigned to, but doesn't attack. Kisame doesn't ask why. Kisame notices that Uzumaki's chakra curls around that of Itachi's younger sibling like a fist, and the two's smells are always mingled into a cocktail of suffering and need, topped with a bond stronger than anything a plain guy like Kisame could comprehend, but he doesn't dwell on it.

Kisame never offers comfort for Itachi's headaches.

Itachi wouldn't accept it.

But he stands still as a statue in front of Itachi's prone figure, and gruffly offers a bowl of whatever he's managed to procure that's edible when the kid wakes again, and never mentions it to anyone at all, ever, forever.

Maybe Itachi appreciates these little non-gestures, and maybe he doesn't.

Kisame never feels the need to ask.

X

Itachi has something to settle with his brother, Kisame knows. Or Itachi's brother has something to settle with him. Either.

The point is, Kisame knows that Itachi's main and sole concern in the multi-faceted and many-shaded world he lives in is his sibling.

Why the fuck that is, Kisame has no idea. Sauske doesn't seem to be the answer to the universe, the one who hung the moon, the equations answer. But who is he to question?

He is a simple guy.

But Kisame knows that it's the truth.

Itachi spends long hours staring into the distance of his sharingan, seeing the many different levels and hundreds of colors that all become scarlet, and Kisame might think he was thinking about his brother.

Itachi wakes suddenly from seemingly restful sleep, and there is sheen on his skin and spinning in his eyes, and Kisame could think he was thinking about his brother.

Itachi moves forward into the warehouse where he means to "Settle things." and asks Kisame to be certain no one but Sauske comes beyond this point, and Kisame knows he's thinking about his brother.

Kisame grips Itachi's bone wrist in his large blue hand. Itachi remains still, facing away. Everything about him is impenetrable, unconquerable, unchanging, and staid.

Kisame knows what's going to happen. He knows.

Because honestly, he's just a simple guy, and anyone could see what was going on if they have two working eyes and brain, and Kisame has all three.

He had a soul too, somewhere, but it drowned itself in rain and blood when he was younger than Itachi.

He had a heart, but it was shriveled and small and beating like a sea-urchin somewhere under spikes far too sharp to weed out.

It was far too simple a heart to begin with.

And Itachi is unmovable.

So he just twists the wrist carefully, and maybe Itachi moves to face him, or maybe he moves to face Itachi, but suddenly they are inches apart, and Kisame leans in and does what makes sense, the only thing that makes sense, to a shadow-wrapped idiot teenager and an achingly helpless hardass, to ninja who die.

He brushes his lips, chapped raw and blue as oceans and skies, briefly over Itachi's stupidly unlined forehead, and then, even more briefly, over Itachi's stupidly young lips.

It might have been a benediction; it might have been a curse. It might even have been a blessing, if shinobi who were blood-drinkers could give blessings, but Kisame knows they can't.

Kisame doesn't wait for Itachi's reaction. He doesn't need to see reactions in the face of someone who isn't going to hear something as simple as a curses and blessings underneath the complexity of genjustu and sharingan, family and love.

He clanks away with his coat swirling around his feet, boots metal-sharp on unwavering cement.

Behind him, Itachi's ever-seeing eyes memorize him walking away.

He walks away to face a posse of young'uns who don't know how deep water goes; a girl who simpers shallow and a boy who has teeth like his own, a giant who doesn't know strength and a brother whose eyes spin red.

The brother whooshes by Kisame and Kisame thinks how perfectly alike they both were, the silly, hard-headed, mysterious pricks.

Than he faces the rest of them who might be simple and might not be, and lets Samehada come out to play. A little bloodshed would be nice right now. Soothing.

His eyes might feel wet right now, but he is a shinobi and an Akatsuki and a monster and it doesn't matter because the sky is about to open above them and then he can blame the rain.

Kisame doesn't quest to understand the enigma of Itachi.

He's a simple guy after all.

Besides, he already does.

X

Fin

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A/N: I liiiiike it. XD What do you think?

Commentary is much appreciated.

Thankyou for reading!

-LuteLyre!