A/N: Happy Valentine's Day 3

Uchiha Itachi's To-Do Lst:

1. Wake up crying.

I console myself with the reality that this doesn't happen often and never any time but the waking moments of the early morning when no one is around to see. Still, waking with the aching, sodden feeling of tears isn't something I enjoy. It isn't something that should happen. It makes the rest of the day seem dismal and dark as it stretches out before me.

Because through-out the day I expect to see him behind me, beside me, coming to meet me, and he is never there.

For now, it means being an hour late or more for the day that gapes in front of me. I can't make myself burrow out from under the covers when I can't catch my breath. Crying solves nothing. It leaves you feeling drained and used. I can hear my father's teaching of control, my Granfather's rebukes for strength as I struggle to find either inside me. I won't find anything. They've been stolen by the cold emptiness—the sudden hole in my life deeper than anything I ever learned from them.

So there's nothing for me but what isn't these mornings, huddled under the covers and trying to breathe as sometimes tears break into sobs, and the mindless noises of the grieving: the remaining, the searching, the alone. Getting up just means looking at that emptiness, having affirmed what I already know.

I'm going to have to get out of this bed, and he won't be there.

2. Go to the lake.

This time of the year, no one of importance lives on the lake. There are some people who live on the lake, but most have gone back to their jobs and lives as the water turns frigid and ice gathers at the edges. It never gets cold enough to freeze, because it's not really a lake. It's a man-made pool of water that is still subject to the river's currents.

I spent the hot summers of my childhood here, under the care of my Great-Uncle and Grandfather. I met him here when I was too young to remember it.

It's cold enough my breath pools in front of me as I walk, scarf around my neck and hat pulled firmly over my ears. I head down the sloping ramp to the wharf, sliding in the frost. Trees thick with Spanish moss rise naked overhead, and the sky is a dismal grey above. It's early, yes, but not early enough. I should be in classes, but I'm here. Soon, people will gain the heart to scold me, but not yet.

Not yet.

Kisame waits in his boat. He sits and works with his hands, mending rope of twisting it into new shapes. A broad man of indiscriminate race, Kisame has been on the river longer than I can remember, seasonally launching in and out of a shotgun house on the lake. The man's distinctive boat and his stories are all I knew of him until recently. About a month ago, I think. Yes, a month ago. Not long at all, really, but an eternity for the right reasons.

Kisame looks up as I come nearer, his face creasing into a wide, many toothed smile. "Good morning!"

"Good morning." The words are muffled behind my scarf. I slowly make my way out onto the wharf, taking the weathered boards gently beneath my feet, and remembering many falls on similar places as a child, and having to pull splinters from my hands—or have someone else pull them out. Teeth were always a good enough substitute for tweezers.

"I'm about to head out." Kisame puts the rope away and looks at me with oddly yellow eyes. I know the time. I know he usually leaves more than an hour earlier, and I'm late on all fronts. I bow, stiffly, still awkward even as he steadies the boat and I step in. He hands me a life preserver, and I struggle into it as he starts the engine and backs away from the wharf. Dressed as I am, I'd sink rather than swim. Kisame tugs his on vest closed, and I settle into the forward seat of Samehade, his little speed boat. He named it for the larger boat he works off the Southern coast in the summer and spring months, before the cold draws him home. Here—I'm not sure this is home for him.

As the boat gains speed, the cold air turns painful. It cuts through clothes easily, knifing next to skin and stealing the warmth from the body. I imagine the only way one could be colder would be to dip into the water, which would numb you so quickly it wouldn't matter. I'm shivering in minutes as Kisame slows a bit to sweep closer to shoreline, which varies between sandy stretches and underbrush tangled banks. The farther we get from the dam, the more wild the banks get. We pass the family's house, half a mile onto the river proper.

I keep my eyes on the banks, which is hard. After a while, with the wind pulling tears from my eyes, things blur together. Once, I see something. Kisame cuts back, but its only driftwood. We go down five miles, which takes more time than usual. I see a Great Blue Heron rising from the bank, wings thrown open against the sky. I'm numb by the time Kisame returns us, slicing across the lake and slinging us back against the wharf.

I stutter to my feet, aching stages of cold stiffness. When I almost fall trying to step from boat to wharf, Kisame catches me with a broad hand on the back of my thigh, pushing me from the boat to solid wood. He says his good byes, that he'll see me tomorrow. My jaw feels wired shut, and I simply bow and begin to walk back up the hill.

3. Get on with Life.

I ride the bus to class. My fingers still feel clumsy from the cold, and my body shivers every once in a while, trying to shake the feeling of the cold wind. Compared to the open boat, the bus feels hot and claustrophobic. The air tastes old and stale, and I feel half smothered. I long for the cold of the river, the open boat and the isolation the rushing wind causes.

I keep my eyes on my hands, folded particularly in my lap and reorder my thoughts into calmness. If I do not think of things (the smell of people, the pressing closeness of the air) then I can ignore them. I can feel normal, as if he will be waiting for me when the door opens, or will hurry in and cram himself on the seat next to me. I feel a burning and order those thoughts away as well. Days like these are more difficult, but I have control. I am not emotional or irrational.

A man sits across from me, long legs clad in black. I can barely see the orange book in his scarred hands without moving my head. Hunter orange book, I catalogue to keep focus, in hands with bitten nails and more scars than most people have in this age.

It takes me most of the ride to realize I know those hands, and when I glance up Kakashi is looking at me as if he has been waiting all this for me to look up. It's also that carefully considerate look most people use for me now, but I can feel the cold in my cheeks this morning, the hollow ache in my eyes.

I struggle to form a greeting, saved by the buzzing of my phone. I pull it from my pocket, and see my father is calling. I let the buzz continue, blaming my cold clumsy fingers when I only find the buttons in time to listen to Father's voicemail. He chastises me about missing class. He tells me I should move back home for now. I let the message run out, and sit listening to the mechanical prompt while staring out past Kakashi's ear. I know him well enough, and tolerate him better than most people, but today I stare out, let the words in my head fuzz to white instead of speaking.

I should speak, I know it. I should reach out an connect and focus on what is here, but the word won't form in my mind today. I can't unwire the cold jaw the river sewed shut.

The bus lurches to a stop. I get up, sliding my phone away into a pocket. I take two steps for the door and Kakashi's fingers catch my sleeve.

"This isn't your stop, Itachi-kun." His voice is ruffled, thread-bare velvet, the faint rasp of misuse raising goosebumps on my skin. I look at him; he looks back calmly, as if this is nothing strange. The doors close without me. I sit back down beside him as the bus lurches to a stop, looking at the hands on my knees. His knuckles run up my arm as he stands for the next stop, and I get off at the right stop.

4. Fail

Days like these are harder, I admit. Meditation does nothing more than quiet the aches. Distraction does nothing more than dampen the howling. The fact of the matter remains: I am here; he is not. To kill that voice is to kill him, and I have not found the killer in myself yet.

I have missed two classes. Three remain. Almost four hours of lecture, recall, thinking, questioning. I am above most of the people in these classes, but when the Professor looks to me for the answer in a class that really doesn't care, I'm looking away today. At my hands, at the floor, at my notes which consist of a blank paper adorned with the date and class. And a name. A name. His name. Please don't call on me, because that is the noise that will come out, and we need to pretend I am all right—that I am coping and functioning.

Everything boils down to white noise, rattling around in my head until I find myself staring at the paper, and the Professor sitting on the table in front of me, saying my name. Class has ended. I gradually look up. He asks if I'm all right, still in the delicate stage of pity and unable to chastise me for inattention. It all washes over me, words not really mattering, but the sentiment.

It's okay. No one expects anything of you right now.

Which is why I must hold myself under such rigid control-no one will call me to account, so I must call myself to account. The gentle words and voices, the understanding, they do nothing but undermine my progress. They make it okay to be not okay, which isn't how I want to be at all. I have to learn to go on, because of the words no one else will speak aloud to me.

I leave class, leave campus, walk the hour home to the sorry little apartment that seemed like such a freedom before. The city air tastes stale, worse than the bus. I want to feel the crisp air of the river on my face. I want to draw my hands through the frigid waters, and walk the dead banks until I can move no more.

I want—and that is the problem. I want.

I make it inside and close the door. I kick off my shoes, stumbled out from under my backpack before tripping into the bedroom. I don't manage to get my coat off before falling into the bed, wrapping the covers over myself. I wrap it tight enough the first deep breath hurts against the constriction, but it feels like it holds me together as things try to fall apart.

I cannot fall apart. Not yet. Not now. Not here.

5. Get up and try again.

Mother brings Sasuke by for a visit at six, promising supper into the fuzzy speakers of my phone. My father chastises me for not returning his call in another voicemail. He says this proves his point. I should move home. I know what mother will say when she comes to visit, what she will ask, how she will try to distract me. I also know it will work for a few hours, and I will sleep without nightmares tonight.

Still, I don't answer the knock, staying cocooned in the bed. I close my eyes and feel too warm, still muffled in my coat and hat. I close my eyes and see nothing, feel nothing but the phantom waves rocking my body back and forth.

My mother calls my name. Sasuke's feet thunder through the house. I close my eyes tighter and strangle myself on an impossible thought, wish, dream, and let myself be uprooted from the bed my small sticky hands, and burning laughter.

6. Go back to the river.

"I'm sorry." It's the weekend. I've been in Kisame's boat five hours, chilled and numb past shivering. He presses the thermos of hot chocolate into my hand.

"I like the company." He shrugs, and his bluff voice makes it impossible for me to know if he speaks the truth or not. I burn my lips and tongue on the chocolate, swallow it too fast. He lets me cough it out, and I swear he's smiling.

"No one else comes." It's cold. Now that I feel warmth, it's painfully cold and all my joints ache.

"It's hard to come back day after day when it's so cold. Most people lose interest in the dead pretty quickly," Kisame admits, sipping from his own thermos. He doesn't guard his words, and the syllables wrap around me. Maybe he can say them because he doesn't know what they mean. What he meant, what I meant, or anything like that.

"Most." My leaden tongue fails to force any scorn behind the words.

"Normal people. The living are more interesting," Kisame shrugs and glances at me, leaning forward to pull the rescue blankets more firmly over my toes. So he does it because I am interesting, not because he wants to find anything. I look away, and the sun begins to slip below the horizon.

"You are supposed to move on." Mourn, yes. Pay the dead your respects, but pass on into your living life as the pain dulls and fades. I feel I haven't tasted pain yet, just bitter ash on my numb tongue. Still, I try to move on. Most days. Some days I come to the river and sat for hours in the cold, feeling the waves rock me gently back and forth, or I lay muffled under covers, crying like a child.

Kisame chuckles, thick white clouds in the fading light. "If they don't find him—in five years or ten, you'll still be coming to here."

I look out across the black water, ripples catching white light as they move across the surface. "Will you be here?"

"If the season is right." And at my look, his dark face splits into a white smile. "I'll teach you to drive so you can go when I'm not here."

"I know how to drive a boat," My voice sounds soft and childish in the dark pressed against his. My hands feel small on the thermos, my reasons and feeling tiny beneath the opening dark of the sky. I lean my head back and open my eyes wide.

"Right…he must have taught you," The casual mention sends thrills down my spine, choking up to my tight throat. I can't breathe for the angle of my neck, and I see darkness. Blackness. Endless space until the stars come out to stud it with reference points.

This is what death is like. What it is like to be under the river water at night.

I feel Kisame turn the wheel to drive us closer to the shore. I close my eyes and let the motion rock me. Back and forth-up and down, like the waves lapping the shore.

Like a corpse bobbing up and down in the darkness of the river.

Kisame calmly grabs the thermos I drop in the river, and doesn't comment as I choke out the warmth I just drank into the darkness.

7. Dream.

Always, always, I dream of the river. I dream of the new cold and running down to the edges of the water, being snatched away by greedy hands that swing me into the air like a child. I dream of my cousin, my best friend, my other me, pressed to my back and laughing hard enough to force the sound from my mouth.

I dream.

There lives a grating stupidity in dreaming of what is not—a haunting insanity that feeds the day time longing and desires that can no longer be filled. Sometimes I half wake, the sound of gentle breathing in my ear, the gentle warmth, the feel of a hand through my hair in an age old ritual. Then I wake with a jerk, and the room is cold and empty. If I fall asleep fast enough, I will return to the river, and walk through the pines and sycamores to the secret place no man knows, and no woman can find.

If I fall back asleep, I can wrap my hands around him. If I sleep, he is there.

And I wake crying hard enough to choke.

8. Find Shisui's body.

The first morning Kisame lets me drive is bitterly cold and brittle. My gloved and mittened hands curl around the steering wheel as I gently begin to guide the boat down the river. Kisame sits in my usual perch, hair ruffled, the wrist he slipped and sprain before coming down to meet me exposed to the cold air. I can see the swelling from where I stand, the thickness of his joint, the obvious power in his frame. I feel delicate and fragile, hands cupping the wheel gently and hesitantly as we go along. I feel vulnerable this morning, huddled small under the wide winter white sky.

Slowly, the boat gains speed. I can feel his hands guiding mine, whispering little reminders as the wind whips by me. It's too cold for this. I know it. He knows it. Kisame knows it, but no one says it as we move faster, breathless in the frozen air. I start to shake despite my many layers. There is ice at the edges of the lake. Kisame says something about not falling in, how cold the water would be, how quickly hypothermia would set in.

He watches the banks in an idle way, looking for what he knows we won't find in all the places we've looked. The colder it gets, the less likely resurfacing will be. Maybe that's why he lets me drive instead of his professed wrist pain, letting me cut through the water in irregular patterns that make no sense but soothe something. We pass the House where I spent my childhood's summers running to the banks of the river and being thrown in by arms hardly older than my own. But, I've always been small, delicately framed. I've always been the younger, the weaker—the one to be protected, the cherished darling of laughing lips and caring arms.

Kisame glances at me as I slow the boat and cut the engine. "Did you see something?" I run the boat close enough to beach it and stand up, grabbing the anchor line. Kisame watches me as I pass him, stepping lightly from the boat to the back. I stumble on the firm ground, gaining my balance after a moment. I tie the line around a thin birch, and start down a small, shallow, boggy inlet. I hear Kisame shift in the boat, then hear his heavy tread behind me.

Until the hard freeze, the bank had been muddy, and I can see foot prints frozen into the ground: small feet spaced in the confident steps of someone who knows the ground. Someone has come here often. Kisame makes a comment on this, voice not really anything as I weave under branches and the inlet deepens into something more like a little river itself.

I…I remember finding this place. I remember the secret delight of finding such a secluded little pool of water, so clear and deep and ours. I pause and think on this, gazing into a deep little pool where the current curls sluggishly, and Kisame steps up beside me. He freezes, hand touching the back of my arm.

The exaltation steams from his mouth, a soft curse or blessing to ward off evil.

Tangled in the roots of the bank, the limbs and leaves fallen from the trees, and sealed under a soft film of ice is what we've been looking for. It strikes me suddenly that I've known this all along. Where else would he be but here? I've come here before, haven't I? Someone has left burnt out candles and sodden paper cranes in brilliant colors all around the roots and even on the ice.

"You knew where he was—that's why I saw your bike at the house all those times. You were coming here…" Kisame sounds astonished. The sound of his voice, his breathing so loud in a place that should be silent, jars me. I look back at him, and it all crashes down on me.

"I killed him. I loved him, but I killed him." I look down, feel the shaking intensify. I remember it now, though the cold has done much to preserve him, and the ice obscures, enough is wrong to turn my stomach violently within me. I feel cold hands slid past my clothes, tugging and pinching, chilling me to the quick. "Why did I do that?"

I take an unsteady step towards the water, slipping in the icy mud. I fall towards the ice, and the thoughts of crashing through into the corpse is terrifying.

He grabs my arm and turns me roughly. The forest spins around me. The candles and cranes pass in glorious colors, flashing against the darkness of the water.

"Why did I do it?"

I don't know if I say it, if I scream it, if it echoes from the water itself. It's all I hear, all I see, and now I remember.

9. Wake up.

I sit in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in two blankets. The cold wind rubs against my face. Kisame pilots the boat across the water with ease, the gentle sound of the engine cutting through the sound of the water lapping at the boat. I can see the trail the speed boat leaves behind. Churned water and waves. Disturbed water and foam.

"Here." Kisame hands me a thermos. I drop it twice, letting it roll across the boat. He picks it up each time, handing it back to me. I pull off my mittens and manage to hold it for a few seconds. He unscrews the top, and I smell the sharp, bitter scent of coffee. It strike me suddenly as a clean smell. A good one.

"I'm going to call the police when we get to my place," Kisame speaks softly, below the sound of the waves, and I feel wrapped in a bubble of unreality. I take a hesitant sip of the coffee. It burns my lips. I remember what happened now. I remember burning lips, teasing smiles, tugging hands and Shisui's mouth twisting into words he'd never told me before. I remember it. I take another drink, and my lips burn. My tongue heats, my cheeks flush and eyes water.

I choke.

I also remember my hands—small, delicate little lily white hands he'd always teased me for—around his neck. I remember holding him down until his warm throat became cold, until my hands became too numb to feel him. I held him down until I felt him no longer, and then, what did I do?

I took his eyes—the ones he used to look at me so. And I kept them, because they always belonged to me.

"And you knew the entire time, you knew…" Kisame shakes his head. I expect to see revulsion on his face. Fear, judgment, or wariness swimming in his wide face and broad features. It isn't the look he turns on me. It isn't the reaction I expect. I take another scalding swallow of the coffee that burns its way into my guts.

"Why did you do it?" Kisame asks, no doubt in his face or eye that I did it.

"I loved him." It's the reason I've struggled with this month, I realize. As it is the nights I have visited him I wake crying. I loved him, and I killed them. I can't separate those thoughts, linked and nestled in my mind. I'm crying now, burning like the coffee before freezing on my cheeks.

I lean back and look up at the faded blue sky scarred with grey clouds. I take a breath, which crackles and breaks open in my chest. The first floundering cry isn't loud enough to even turn Kisame's head. The next is truly worthy of Shisui, high and loud against the oppression of the sky. Here it all falls down on me. Now my evasions run out,

I will never see him again. He is gone.

And I am the one who killed him.

10. Move on.

Kisame hears of the murders before he sees me. I can tell in the sideways look he shoots me, that little pause in his step before he walks towards me. My mouth tastes stale—like old sex and cigarettes. My eyes feel gritty and red, my body scrubbed and bruised beyond recognition. He walks closer in measured steps, and I know why. I know what I see.

I saw it myself in the truck stop bathroom. The hollowed out face, the darkened features, the deepened lines and haggard look of one too many missteps and regrets. The face of a killer. I found the killer in me, and we're on speaking terms now. We decided to keep his memory around. We like it best, and tears taste sweet in the cold hours of the morning.

"I didn't love them quite as much as Shisui," I greet him. He greets me by handing me his coffee cup. I drop my half-finished cigarette stub to the ground. He settles his hands in his pockets, looking me over as I taste the scalding, bitter coffee. The burn on my lips covers up memories.

"Madara told you." Kisame looks me over again. Someone walks by a whistles, asks Kisame where he found such a hot catch. Kisame flips him off.

I nod, slowly. "I left my bike in the Mark Twain National Park."

"That's a long ways out of the way."

I nod and take another sip. Kisame toes the backpack at my feet and sighed before picking it up. "Guns are better where we're going, but you'll have plenty of chances to drown people."

"I'll learn to shoot." I slide from the hood of his car, thinning my lips at the thought of drowning someone else. Drowning is mine. Drowning is his. I finger the necklace under my shirt and slide into the passenger's seat. The car smells of fast food and cigarettes. Stale sweat and smoke from hours on the road. A dancing hula girls sits on the dashboard with a bobble headed shark.

"Don't fancy juvvie?" Kisame asks as he turns on the car. It rumbles in a way similar to the speed boat Samehade. I close my eyes and feel the rocking of the waves. I feel panic. When I am away from water, I am away from him.

"They'd let me out eventually, and there's still someone I love." And I could confess in vivid detail enough they might keep me, but I can't bring myself to spew out the details of the deaths. I see no reason to be so crass and disrespectful, especially to him. I open my eyes, looking past the battered cars huddled around the small diner, the men and women walking in and out. Kisame turns the car south, muttering something under his breath, that vague fanged grin on his face. I settle back, calming with the thought that more than the river, Shisui loved the sea.

Almost as much as he loved me.