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Itachi is eventually discharged from the hospital, and Sasuke eventually leaves. Everything after that happens in a blurred, slow drip of days.
The healing process is slow. Itachi gets the large, heavy plaster cast taken off his leg and has it replaced with a walking cast, a big, hulking boot of a thing. He’s still supposed to keep his weight off it as much as possible, and between his doctor’s and Shisui’s terrifying admonishments, he has mostly listened. He rests, as much as the inactivity chafes. Jean gives him leave from work rather than fire him, which surprises him.
“You’re a good cook,” Shisui says. “You do good work and you show up on time, and you don’t fuss at her. She’s not going to fire you if she can help it.”
“And you threatened to quit if she did.”
“Well,” Shisui says with a sly little smile.
Shisui has been helping him, bringing him groceries, cooking for him, although Itachi has seldom seen him pick up a knife or spatula outside of work until now, keeping Itachi and his silver tabby cat company while they try to shake off the lingering cold of a long winter.
They’re out in the garden today, enjoying the rare sunlight. The scent of green, growing things is lush all around them. During Itachi’s convalescence, the plants have started to grow wild, and he doesn’t mind it as much as he thought that he would. There’s something enticing about all that riotous life exploding all around him. Standing by Shisui’s side, he feels nearly whole.
They’ve finished the tea Shisui made for them, their cups resting harmless on the concrete, and now Itachi considers the things he’d like to plant when the ground warms up a little more—heirloom tomatoes and deep red beets. Queen Anne’s lace. Maybe hellebore, for no other reason than that he finds it beautiful. He thinks of hellebore blossoms in Shisui’s sprawling, haphazard house.
The sharp smell of lime basil reaches his nose when Shisui puts out a hand to run his fingers over its leaves. His hands are familiar and sure. Itachi has seen them grip a knife and carefully measure out pills. They’ve worked the knots out of the parts of him grown sore from disuse and spanned tender across his bare skin. He knows the scars that run across their knuckles, the one hidden on the inner fold of a thumb, the small mole that caresses the inside of a wrist.
It strikes him that he wants more of this. More in any form it takes. So many of the things he’s left behind are smoking ruins, rooms full of broken mirrors, but this is something new. He decides something, then. The world moves not at all in response.
“Shisui.”
“Yeah?”
Shisui turns to look at him, the sun slanting warm across the planes of his face. Itachi’s breath catches in his lungs. His fingers tighten on the grip of his crutches, the hand cushions worn soft and gummy with use. Honesty is so hard.
“Sit with me,” Itachi says.
They sit on a pair of white, plastic lawn chairs that Itachi had saved from some forgotten trash collection day. Shisui looks at him, his head tilted, waiting. He looks back toward the garden. “It’s a nice day.”
Itachi swallows. “It is.”
Even having decided, it’s hard to begin. Itachi follows Shisui’s gaze out over the garden. He draws strength from its beauty. Its stillness.
“You asked me once why I don’t let you in.”
Shisui inclines his head to show that he’s listening but otherwise lets Itachi speak.
“When I was seventeen. Before I left Kyushu.” This is hard. Harder than he’d thought. It’s not only his secret to tell. This has stopped him before. “Sasuke kissed me,” he says, getting the words out in a steady rush.
He looks to Shisui for his reaction.
“Oh,” Shisui says. “Oh wow.”
Itachi hurries onward, now determined to get the rest of it out before he loses his nerve. “It was mutual. I kissed him back, and then I was so horrified by what I had done that I left.”
He looks at Shisui, who is looking at him with a tilted head and those intelligent sharp eyes. “And then you came here.”
“And then I came here.”
He waits for whatever will come, for Shisui to leave, to call him disgusting, to say he never wants anything more to do with him—or more unthinkable, to somehow understand what Itachi himself still hasn’t quite managed to.
Shisui stands. He walks in front of Itachi, who tenses, even as Shisui crouches down so they’re on a level. If he wasn’t still injured, he would rise, too. He doesn’t like feeling so exposed, so vulnerable. Shisui pulls him forward, careful of his injured arm, his injured leg. He wraps Itachi in a warm hug that smells like tea and slightly musty sweaters and Shisui. Itachi is stunned for a minute—too stunned to move and certainly too stunned to wrap his arms around Shisui in kind.
Shisui doesn’t say anything, just holds Itachi close. Gradually, little by little, he finds it in him to relax into Shisui’s hold. He lays his head on Shisui’s solid, welcoming shoulder. He breathes in the warm smell of him at his collar and allows his arms to come up to encircle Shisui.
“I’m sorry,” Shisui says. “That must have been hard.”
Itachi pulls back, studying Shisui’s face for any hint of judgment and finding none. “Why are you sorry?”
“I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m sorry you were alone. You’ve been alone all this time, haven’t you?”
Itachi bites his lip. “I’ve had you.”
“You still do.”
They’re quiet for a time. A crow calls in the trees.
“Thank you for telling me,” Shisui says.
“Thank you for listening.”
For loving me. For accepting all the jagged parts of me.
There’s more he could tell, but that will come in time. He thinks of fragile things made whole, of bones knitting themselves back together.
Itachi bends his head forward, lays it back down on Shisui’s shoulder, and rests.