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Six months ago.
“You’re bringing Itachi, aren’t you?” Iruka had asked you - he was throwing an engagement party that weekend for him and his soon-to-be-husband, and he inquired about your guest. You smiled at him and shrugged. “I’ll see if he can go,” you replied.
Four months ago.
“Would you and Itachi like to join us for dinner?” Asume asked, his girlfriend Kurenai at his side “We’ve made reservations for a nice place in town and we’d love for the two of you to join us,” she chimed in. At the thought of a delicious meal and a fun night out with three of your best friends, you agreed instantly.
Five years ago.
“I heard that you and Itachi are moving in together,” Kakashi had said during one of your training sessions, “that seems like a big step. Are you sure you’re prepared for that?” You shot him a confused glance and repositioned your body as you ensured your defense from his next attack. “I’m moving in with my best friend,” you smiled as you successfully blocked his kunai, “I think we’ll be just fine.”
You and Itachi were practically joined at the hip - you did everything together, you were rarely seen apart. He was your other half, your soulmate, and was the person you planned on spending the rest of your life with. Platonically, of course, but it took an embarrassingly long amount of time for you to come to the realization that the majority of people do not see it that way. You shared a house, a cat, objects, secrets, everything . It should not have been a surprise to you that Itachi’s own family even believed you two were dating.
“Whenever you’re done with your little date, I need my brother to train with me,” Sasuke had grumbled at you. You were in the kitchen at the Uchiha home getting a glass of water when he had snuck up behind you, practically attacking you with information you didn’t want to hear.
“W-What?” You asked, turning around in an instant, “a date? Itachi and I are just friends.”
Sasuke huffed and shrugged. “Sure, I don’t care. Just tell him to meet me at the training grounds in an hour.”
When you went back to the study to tell Itachi, he was just as shocked as you were.
“I hadn’t considered that people would view our relationship like that,” he said, his mild and pleasant voice echoing gently through the room. You huffed in response, cheeks turning a shade of pink, and cringed at the idea.
“You’re like,” you gestured at the air in frustration, “like, my best friend! How could anyone think we’re dating?”
“To be fair,” Itachi chimed in, “we do live together and it’s unheard of for an unmarried Uchiha to do such a thing.”
You scoffed. “Your weird clan traditions aren’t a good reason for people to think we’re dating, Itachi.”
He shrugged. “We also own a cat together,” he thought back to Miss Diana, who was likely sleeping soundly in your shared apartment at the moment.
You revisited your relationship with Itachi in your mind - he was basically your entire life, having been your best friend since you were teens. He’d been there for you during your darkest moments, the ones that left you up late at night crying in the bathroom, hair pulled back as you desperately tried to wipe your tears and avoid his eye. You’ve witnessed Itachi in all of his moments - his graduation from the academy, the day he stood up to ANBU leader Danzo, and the aftermath of said event that left him shut in his room for days on end as he dreaded the repercussions of publicly shaming a massive political figure and revealing top-secret information. You sat on his bed as he would distract himself with a book for all hours of the day, simply watching as he buried his nose in the book in front of him, hair falling gently in front of his face and disguising any emotion he may possibly show during his time of vulnerability. Itachi was everything to you, and he would most certainly say the same for you.
The two of you are bound together far beyond what societal expectations can describe - your relationship is more intimate than a marriage, yet there’s never been a moment of romantic or sexual intrigue between you. You share a life together and desire nobody else to be with, and yet you could only call yourself his friend. You were more than that, in the end, but it was the only word that could describe your relationship.
You fondly remember the moment that you began considering Itachi to be your person . He’s always been an early riser, something you’ve always despised, and you’d often come into the kitchen in the morning to see Itachi hovering quietly over his own cup of green tea. You would grumble at him aimlessly as you complained about being awake before making yourself a cup of tea and sitting across from him. One morning, however, you lazily stepped into the kitchen to find Itachi with two cups of tea. He’d made one for you, with just enough sugar and milk added to suit your taste, and placed it across from him on the table. He watched you make your tea every morning and, out of the kindness of his own heart, decided to begin making your tea too.
It was a small moment, really, but it held a large significance in your life. It was the moment that you realized Itachi was the one person in your life that you could trust completely - he knew everything about you in that moment, and you never once considered that trust to be anything less than honest. The second your realization hit you, your morning grumpiness seemed to fade away drastically. By the third week of waking up to a fresh cup of tea already prepared for you, you’d greeted him with a warm hello.
“Maybe we are dating,” you mused. You watched him close the book he was hovering over and turn to you, face absent of emotion.
“Wouldn’t that imply a mutual feeling of something more than platonic?” He asked, eyebrows furrowing slightly at his confusion. You sighed and shrugged. “I don’t know,” you said, “but we’re basically married.”
Itachi, after staring at you for a few seconds in deep thought, suddenly rose from his chair and made a beeline toward a shelf of old books within the study. He traced his fingers along the spine of the books until he found what he was looking for, then he returned to the table and began flipping through the pages. He tapped his finger on a paragraph of words once he finally had found it, nudging the book toward you gently. You looked over.
“Here,” Itachi spoke lowly, “this is an old book on sociology. I read it in its entirety for a course I took during training.” The idea of Itachi reading an entire book on sociology, either for a class or for his own enjoyment, was not at all a surprising thought. “It describes a relationship similar to ours, one that lacks a sexual or romantic intrigue while remaining the same level of intimacy as a traditional romantic relationship.”
You looked over the words on the page and desperately searched for the word that could finally describe your relationship with Itachi. Your eyes scanned, line by line, for the answer to this burning question. However, there was no single word to be found - instead, there was simply a passing sentence in the midst of a paragraph about marriage.
‘Marriage, in its traditional sense, is the legal binding of two individuals in a romantic relationship. There is both emotional and physical intimacy in this relationship, but its defining factor is the commitment to one another in both a legal sense and a societal sense. Marriage is the commitment to each other through things such as children, domesticity, and mutual trust. However, there are relationships, while quite rare, that lack romantic and sexual connection while maininting the societal status of marriage.’
You sigh.
“I wish this gave us a word,” you said just above a whisper, “but there’s nothing there.”
Itachi looked through the remaining pages within the chapter, but he didn’t find any information that could prove useful to either of you. In the end, he ended up returning the book to the shelf and packing up his belongings to head back to your home.
You and him were walking along the path through the dimly lit forest when he referred back to the book.
“Perhaps there was no word to define our relationship because there simply isn’t one,” he stated, and you hummed in confusion. You prompted him to go on.
“We look and act like two individuals bound by marriage, but we are not. We don’t need a legal binding to be committed to one another.”
“Yeah,” you mumble as you gaze into the dark forest at your side, “it’s something more than that.”
Itachi thought for a moment. “What is more important than love?” He asked, as though the question had an answer.
You shrugged. “The soul, maybe?” You suggested, and you looked back toward Itachi. He was looking ahead into the path before you, watching the fireflies spring to life as the sun started to disappear under the horizon.
“Then perhaps we are soulbound.”
You smiled at the word, and something in your heart settled.
The memory of your first fight with Itachi had sprung to your mind. He was being particularly ignorant of your presence that day and you were refusing to have any of it. When he ignored your question for the third time in a row, you finally lost your cool - it wasn’t until you realized he started crying that you were getting upset over nothing. The tears flowed down his cheeks silently as he turned away from you in an attempt to hide his face. You stopped in your tracks instantly and all the anger in your chest had instantly disappeared.
After giving Itachi room to breathe, you discovered that he was ignoring you because he was upset and didn’t want to burden you with the load of his issues. He got frustrated at you for suggesting that you would be open to listening to Itachi’s venting at any time of the day.
“We’re not soulmates,” he sneered, clearly bothered by what you suggested. “I don’t need your pity or your sympathy.”
You made up that evening. You made him promise to at least try to open up to you more - whether or not he made that promise with the true intentions of fulfilling it, seeing the slight upturn of his lip when you forced your pinky around his was enough to satisfy you. Itachi was your best friend, after all, there wasn’t any way you were going to stay mad at him.
“I think that’s what we can call it,” you whispered.
“Hm?” He replied.
“We’re soulbound.”
Itachi smiled and looked toward you. Suddenly, something in Itachi’s chest settled and just felt right . The two of you, walking together in the dark forest after a day of reading and relaxation, felt like the best possible evening he could ever ask for. He watched you absentmindedly tap your fingers against your palm, a movement that you always did when you were lost in thought. In that moment, he thought of his future with you - he thought of the thousands of cups of tea that he would make over the course of his life, the kids that he would want to raise with you (if you wanted them, of course; Itachi was happy to be a father, but would never want to force you into something you weren’t happy to do), and the cats that the two of you would go to sleep with every evening. Itachi pictured all the different versions of himself during his life. In every single one, you were the one he wanted to wake up with every morning.
Itachi seriously considered his future with you during the remainder of your walk home. He considered the possibility of a romantic suitor entering your life at some point, but he still couldn’t imagine a life without you. He’d be glad to make a third cup of tea for whatever partner you had, he decided, as long as you were at that table in the morning.
“I think I like our relationship just the way it is,” you smiled once you got home. Miss Diana, upon hearing the noise of your entrance, rose from her soft bed and stretched her body out lazily before slowly trotting over to you and Itachi.
“I agree,” Itachi responded, kneeling down to pet Miss Diana on the head. “Whatever others may believe about our relationship is none of my concern.”
You nodded. “Besides, it’s not like I plan on ever having a partner anyway. You’re the best I’ll ever get.”
You kneeled down next to him and pressed your own hand into Miss Diana’s fur, feeling the gentle vibrations of her purr. You smiled.
This was the life you wanted.