As Shisui pulled away Itachi felt an enormous wave of grief. It was as if, with a moan, he was suddenly as naked as he was. Whereas seconds ago he was sobbing into his pillow with lust, he was now sobbing only with loss. He didn’t notice this same pillow was now bright red, stained with his own sickly blood. Instead, he had been focused on the sensation of body on body that never failed to send a red alert to his mind- reminding him that not only was he alive, but capable of feeling. Capable of feeling the warmth of another human, capable of intimacy, capable of love, and that the loss that came with this was not just a possibility, but already his reality. Frozen sorrows were being thawed in the heat of the moment. Not echoing in the emptiness, but crowded out by plentiful sufferings. He missed the normalcy. He missed his brother. His mother, even his father. He missed his village. He missed Shisui- not the version that had just been thrusting into him, but the innocent boy that died that night by the river. Most of all, Itachi missed himself. The boy he used to be, before it all.
But he could never go back to the moments before. The lies and the politics always faded with Shisui’s touch, leaving only the cold truth behind. Grief was simply not something he could hide from. He couldn’t outthink it, couldn’t outmaneuver, couldn’t weasel away. And the increasingly unrecognizable man with the broad shoulders and the worried face, his lover, his protector- and Itachi was sure, the very one making him sicker and sicker with each passing day- try as he might, couldn’t save him from this.
This was his reality. His burden. His purpose.
Itachi was a grief barer.
Everyone’s met one. Someone so defined by tragedy it permeates every cell of their being. Most can only pity them from a distance, unable to relate but also unwilling, least their bad fortune be contagious. As a ninja, you meet many, but Kakashi Hatake stands out as a particularly potent example of the phenomenon. Mother dead in childbirth, father dead by suicide, mentor killed on the day of his own son’s birth. His closest friends dead at war, bloody, traumatic deaths, right in front of him. Rumour has it at his own unwilling hands. When he was younger, Itachi felt pity for the older boy. How awful, to live a life so defined by loss, he had thought. To never be more than the grief you carry.
And yet, it was now Itachi, life so constricted by pain and loss of his own making that he was unable to be touched, so fragile and bruised and diseased he fell apart with any act of intimacy.
And had he, years ago, cursed his brother to the same fate in a selfish attempt to save him?
He was sickened by the answer.
He pushed Shisui’s unfamiliar form aside, hastily grabbing a handheld mirror from the bedside, forcing himself to acknowledge his own empty eyes.
“You’re so fucking gorgeous” Shisui murmured, watching him.
Itachi didn’t hear it.
Violence begets violence and pain begets pain, but grief draws a line, he thought. We can be the cause of it, but grief itself is non-transferable. It’s too sticky, hiding in crevices too deep. It’s because Grief is not something that happens to a person. Grief is a person.
And looking in the mirror at a blurry, gaunt face, as the unfamiliar, deformed arms of his lover grabbed him by the hips again, Itachi realized that grief had become him.