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The Naka River glitters blue when the sun strikes it. Turquoise, aquamarine, and the lapis of the deep seem to shine along with the delicate shade of ultraviolet that Itachi can only ever seem to see in his bird form. The river is pleasant to the touch, and the jealous predators that sometimes watch him from the shore can’t get to him here in the deepest part of the waters.
He taunts them sometimes. As a joke.
“Something’s going to bite you one of these days, you know,” Shisui says, heaving himself up on the shore.
“Is it?” Itachi says mildly. “I’d like to see it try.”
Shisui watches as Itachi presses the water from his long, black hair. It twists over his shoulders and down across his back, as pretty as the sea serpents who swim in the deep.
“Oh?” Itachi asks. “You’re staring.”
“Wondering if I should take a bite out of you.”
Itachi huffs, a short puff of breath through his nose. He opens his mouth for a clever retort to Shisui. He’s been getting quicker with those lately, and Shisui looks forward to it with lazy anticipation—but the thought is lost as the ugly sound of human speech wafts up from the bend of the river.
Itachi dives back into the water and Shisui right after him, tugging on their coats as they go, sleek human skin erupting into a flurry of white feathers.
They’re already long gone by the time two human children crowd their way up to the shore, one of them pointing at the pretty birds far out on the river with a gap-toothed smile.
“Come away from there,” says the other with the authority that only comes from being thirteen and old enough to know what you know. He pulls on his sister’s arm too hard. “Yue says the birds here are youkai.”
A pout, a bribe. A smooth stone to skip along the surface of the water. The swans are forgotten, and intelligent black eyes watch from the curve in the river, almost out of sight. Itachi has a pang thinking of Sasuke, a fleeting heart’s urge, and follows Shisui’s white tail toward home.
* * *
“Tell me a story,” Shisui says one day while they’re sunning on the bank.
The hot season is here, and the touch of the sun feels delicious across Itachi’s back. He’s drowsing so heavily that he almost doesn’t hear the request, and it’s not until Shisui’s fingers graze his skin that he thinks to respond.
He startles faintly at the touch before reaching out to still Shisui’s curious hand with his own, eyes still closed, head still pillowed on his remaining arm.
“You know all my stories,” Itachi murmurs.
“Do I? That can’t be right.”
“You’ve been with me since we were hatchlings, of course it’s right.”
“And boys,” Shisui says. “Don’t forget that.”
“Mm. Once upon a time, there was a gosling and his kin, and his kinsman wouldn’t stop talking.”
“Hey?” Shisui laughs. “I’m told my presence is very charming.”
“By who?” Itachi asks, fully awake now. He pushes himself upright, sighing about the loss of the rest of his nap, but he’s smiling. “I’m the only one who’ll spend time with you.”
“Don’t you think I’m charming?”
Something passes between them then, a kind of tension Itachi’s never felt before, a certain intensity in Shisui’s eyes, and Itachi shivers in anticipation. He licks his lips unconsciously and tastes salt.
“Hey,” Shisui says. “Do you want to go swimming?”
The moment passes, blinked away so quickly that Itachi could believe that he’d imagined it if it hadn’t been one of many—they’ve been happening more frequently lately, like a slowly cresting wave, and Itachi wonders what happens when it finally breaks. Shisui doesn’t wait for his answer, only tosses himself into the water with a distinct lack of care that splashes Itachi and his newly-warmed skin.
Itachi sputters and leans over the edge to splash at Shisui in retaliation, but of course, Shisui is already wet, and the childish gesture only makes him laugh like Itachi has delighted him. He swims away, out of reach, which is unfair when all Itachi wants to do is touch, and it’s this that finally convinces Itachi to get into the water with a long-suffering sigh.
Shisui has often teased him that he hates swimming for someone who is, at his basic core, aquatic, and Itachi has only ever been able to reply that it’s different . For one thing, the water is cold this way.
It’s cold now, despite all the heat of the sun, when Itachi slides back into the water with a shiver. He is never cold until he takes off his feathers. Before, he has goose fat and eiderdown to insulate his small body, powerful wings nestled around his ribs to keep them warm. Like this, he has only thin, fragile skin, sensitive enough that even the scrape of rocks against his feet brings him pain, and it makes him petulant, although none but Shisui know him well enough in this form to see it.
“I don’t see the point,” Itachi complains, floundering ungainfully toward Shisui and never quite catching up until Shisui treads water to let him. Swimming like this always makes him feel a little like he’s going to drown. “We could just put on our skins and go home. There are better ways to do this.”
None but Shisui know him well enough to nudge Itachi’s nervous bad mood aside, treating it like nothing more than passing weather without giving Itachi the impression that he’s being dismissed.
“Maybe,” Shisui says. He grins very brightly. “But isn’t this more fun?”
Shisui kicks off from the shore and rolls onto his back, arcing an arm through the air to sluice through the water, propelling himself like the humans do. He moves very quickly like this, though not as fast as he could, and the sun sinking below the mountain has made Itachi nervous for no reason he can name. He wants to tell Shisui to come back, but he doesn’t.
Shisui swims against the current of the water, sometimes stopping and letting it carry him before picking up that swimming motion again. The final time he does it, he lets himself drift, enjoying the feeling of his blood pumping in his ears, the sound of his own heart, and the lapping embrace of the water everywhere it touches. His feathers can’t feel like his skin can.
Shisui drifts so far that Itachi’s heart is in his throat, its throbbing beat much too fast, and he pulls himself out of the water to stand on the shore and call to Shisui, suddenly frantic.
Shisui doesn’t hear him with his ears submerged under the water as they are, but he soon comes back, swimming upstream to stop in front of Itachi and his heaving chest, his smile falling as he takes in Itachi’s fright.
“Hey?” He pulls himself out of the water, the better to rest his head on Itachi’s shoulder, ear to neck, frigid skin against skin. “Your heart. It’s moving so fast.” Shisui puts his palm against Itachi’s chest, the better to feel.
“I got. Scared.”
“Hmm,” Shisui hums gently, so Itachi can feel the vibration of his throat. “It’s fine. You’re fine, and so am I.”
But he thinks of it—Shisui gliding through the water like something Itachi didn’t know. It nettles its way inside him like a burr beneath the skin.
Have you met other friends? Itachi thinks to ask, but of course, there’s no way to do so. Swans don’t have feelings like this. He doesn’t have the words.
But Itachi finds himself on the banks of the same river, taking off his skin, the better to practice swimming the way Shisui does. He exhausts himself, burning his fragile skin pink, and gets many bellyfulls of water that make him feel ill but not much else for his troubles. Unfamiliar brown eyes watch him from the shore.
“You swim like a dying fish,” a girl calls.
She dresses like the people of the village, in simple clothes the color of the earth. Her arms are wound around her delicate legs, hands clasped at the knees. Itachi blinks water from his eyes, the droplets stinging and getting caught in his lashes. She has hair the color of charred wood and a nose that turns up at the tip. A sharp smile. If Itachi were Shisui, perhaps he would stay to make friends. But he is only himself, so he takes his skin and flees.
The girl comes to watch his swimming lessons now, shouting directions that don’t make sense to him. She’s far too noisy, scaring away the schools of fish that would otherwise swim around his heels. He swims near the bank one day, exasperated. There is a small freckle beneath her eye up close.
“Why do you watch me?” Itachi asks.
She only cocks her head, for of course they don’t speak the same tongue.
She offers him something sticky and sweet from a wrapper. The color of rose, the color of mint. He nearly chokes on it in alarm and inhales mouthfuls of the heavy river water to unstick the gummy substance from his throat.
Her eyes go wide, and she winces and passes him a bamboo container filled with sweet, clear water. “Sorry,” she says.
He drinks her water. He takes another bite.
He will never know, in the end, if she’s the one who stole his skin. One day he returns to the shore to find it gone, and not all of his searching will bring it back. He tries to communicate what he’s looking for to a girl who watches him with wide eyes. He makes frantic gestures, and he’s still naked on the shore. She holds up her hands. She combs the grass with him, inch by inch, but in the end night falls and she tugs him home with her, careful hands for a spooked creature.
He does not take it well.
A swan separated from its kin is a terrible thing. He beats her home apart with wings that are not wings at all, flying metal cylinders and pots of ink from tables, baring teeth and snapping them when she draws near, but human hands can do a satisfying amount of damage.
But he is not satisfied in the end. In the end, he sits in the rubble of the home of his friend or jailer, bleeding from a wound on his face. His hands are bruised. He had not actually managed to do violence to the more sturdy wooden furniture in the home, although there is a dent in the table in the shape of his palm. The shards of an inkwell cut his feet, and a new feeling settles unwanted in his chest. It is heavy like lead. Heavy like the stones that sink to the bottom of the Naka River, never to be seen again.
“Sorry,” he says. A single word he has gathered.
She looks at him with wide eyes that are after all the color of sunlight through amber.
She bites her lip and shakes her head, pushing aside broken objects to take a seat beside him on the floor. He still flinches from her touch, skittish, but she gives him something sweet to eat, and it is enough to let him stay still while she tends to his injuries.
He does stay with her. In time, Itachi learns that her name is Izumi. She can’t pronounce his name, but it makes Itachi laugh to hear her try, and she finds that she likes to hear him laugh. The first time it had happened, it had startled the both of them. The braying, honking sound that came out of his mouth was so unfamiliar that Izumi had laughed herself off her chair.
Itachi finds work in the village, and people assume that he is slow or mute. He’s unbothered by it, eyes inescapably looking toward the direction of the sea.
“My cousin,” Izumi says gently, touching the owner of the fishery on the arm. “He grew up speaking another language, but he is very quick. He’ll be a good worker for you.”
Zhi Fang had looked at Itachi with an appraising eye and nodded. “We’ll try, yes?”
Itachi learns new words working with Zhi Fang and his men, some of them that make Izumi sputter and blush and once kick him out of the house into the snow for a fortnight, which had made Yamamoto laugh until he turned purple as he made a pile of fish-smelling blankets for Itachi on the floor of his bareswept cabin.
He slapped Itachi on the back hard enough to nearly bowl him over. “And that’s the kind of talking you don’t bring home to your woman, and this is why.”
“She’s not my woman,” Itachi says. His speech is slow and still heavily accented—he has trouble moving his lips to form Japanese words the proper way, but he can make himself understood just fine.
“Well,” Yamamoto says on a long, pregnant pause. He stuffs his pipe with more tobacco, the spicy, cloying smell of it making Itachi’s eyes water, but he now knows better than to complain in the homes of those that are kind to you. “Whatever she is. We ought to be good to those who are good to us.”
He closes his tobacco box with large, gnarled fingers chapped by wind and sea, and Itachi thinks, as he closes his eyes, for some reason of Shisui.
* * *
Memory is subject to erosion. Itachi thinks it now, with words he once would not have dreamed of, but it gives him little comfort.
He has friends and useful work. He wears clothes that keep the touch of winter off his skin, and he knows now that the hot months that used to bring afternoons on the banks of the Naka River with Shisui, sun hot on his skin, are called summer, and yet it all starts to feel like a distant dream. He wonders sometimes if Shisui was a dream he made up, if his hands have never been anything but hands, fragile and pale and good for manipulating objects and holding lovers alike. He wonders if the warmth and freedom of the deep water was only ever a fantasy in his mind.
It wakes him with his heart pounding in the dead of the night. Sometimes he finds himself by the river, the only one awake in the whole of Konohagakure, trying to find something he lost long ago in the reeds.
Izumi worries, he knows. He hears her stirring in her bed as he rises from his own, putting on the clothes he now owns, heavy jackets and scarves a poor imitation of eiderdown, to stand on the bank of the Naka River and watch.
He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for. He always returns home empty-handed.
In the distance, he hears a waterfowl call, a beacon for predators in the night, and though Itachi can no longer understand the words, it tears a sob from his throat.
* * *
One night, on a night like any other, Itachi is out among the reeds. He sees something familiar in the grass, a white so pure it seems to glow, even in the dark—his skin at long last, untouched by the ravages of time.
Its pure beauty holds all of Itachi’s efforts, all his attempts at happiness and duty and other fragile, breakable human concepts, up to the light as the worthless things they are. The relief he feels makes him a liar, and the lies of long years are so easily shattered.
He reaches for it with shaking fingers, biting back a sob that is still, after all this time, more swan than human. He tugs it on, feeling his neck lengthen, his arms twist and bend, nestling against his ribs where they’ve always belonged. His fingers splay into a dozen dozen pinion feathers, and he beats his wings, testing them out for the joy of it.
He spares a final thought for Izumi, but the thought is fleeting and light. Words are such a burden, and he sheds them all one by one.
And then there is only a lone swan gliding out across the water, making its joyful way home while a boy with naked wet skin and curly black hair watches from the shallow end of the river, his small smile submerged beneath the water that is so brilliantly blue, even without all its colors.
He is cold for the first time.