strid

Blood, sweat and tears

Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…

The first and most obvious bullet point was that Shisui loved Itachi, and had for a long time. He loved the way his lashes cast delicate shadows across his cheeks in the afternoon sun. He loved the way he leaned his weight against Shisui after a particularly rigorous sparring session, boneless and completely at ease. He loved the sound of his voice, the subtle changes in pitch that indicated tone, how it raised a note when he was amused, how it lowered and slowed when he was drowsy, drifting in and out of sleep. He loved the gentle line of his shoulders, the curve of his spine, the way he looked delicate to the point of seeming fragile but was strong enough to hold his own against some of the most powerful shinobi in the world.

So Shisui loved Itachi, but the thing was that he also loved him in the normal way, the way a best friend should—his sense of humor, dry and cutting and so bizarre at times that one could miss the joke entirely if they didn’t know him; the faces he made when Shisui teased him and the way he always knew the verbal punches to throw back to make Shisui bark out a laugh; the fact that he knew Shisui better than anyone in the world, that they were so familiar with each other that they could share an entire conversation in one glance, and that bone-deep, lifelong friendship was more important to Shisui than anything. It wasn’t difficult for him, then, to make peace with the fact that Itachi didn’t seem to return his more romantic feelings and wasn’t likely to start any time soon. That was fine.

Life went on. He dated other people. He buried his feelings as best he could, and if his overt acts of affection for his best friend sometimes danced too close to the line between amicable and amorous—well. Itachi never seemed to mind, so why should anyone else?

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Yes.