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snuggleboots · 4 months

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♡ in which i'm still having big feelings about kisame. naturally, i'm cramming the reader into said big feelings. have some genin and newly-graduated chunin kisame and reader, his one and only friend (´。＿。｀) it's dark, lots of death, so huge dni to minors. ♡

♡ might make this a dumb little series of drabbles, maybe? i'm sure as hell not dropping a whole thing in one post when it turned entirely into a chunin selection thing. it's choppy, probs has mistakes, but that's because i wrote it here and i am dogshit tired and slightly scared to post smth i just roughed out here :' ) ♡

Tags: kid kisame (6-10), kid reader (6-10), reader-insert, canon/reader friendship, dark themes, such as kiri's chunin selection, mentioned child deaths (the chunin selection), angst, shock/trauma.

It's a death of spirit, slow to manifest, to make your home in another person. The innocence of youth was never something fostered in the Land of Water, reclusive and cutthroat was the village that stands bastion in the heart of the island nation. Those of the Mist learn young that survival is a series of little deaths, each one an intangible shepherd to the next that awaits them.

Kirigakure, where connection is granted to budding shinobi for the sake of becoming one of life's many harsh lessons. It's when you're small, and your childish sense of hope is somehow still naïve and alive, that something so treasured as a comrade is allowed to be anything more than a means to an end. Sharing meals, and clinging to life by the skin of your teeth through missions too gruesome for children so young, one's genin team is often one's first true taste of friendship.

He was so young when you met, six years old at best; a competitive thing- oblivious of his own strength and rough at times, but fierce in his loyalty. It started then, a boy with a gruff heart too big for his body, and a sawtooth grin that looked more frightening than he ever bothered to actually be. He was your friend, with cute ears that stuck out and gills that sometimes flared in a way that made you helpless but to laugh, and an unyielding sense of self-assurance that made missions less frightening, so long as it was him that fought at your side.

Hoshigaki Kisame was not a monster. Not as you knew him.

Companions in a shared misery back then, you were each other's determined and desperate support through the trials of your paths; assurances shared with conviction carried you through the horrors that no heart so soft as yours should ever have been forced to witness. You wanted to heal, he strove to conquer the art of blades.

Children are, unfortunately, as precious as they are blind, and their pride is earned hard through enduring that which would cull their lessers. Together though, there was nothing that could stop the unbeatable two that made him and you. It was a connection found only by the miracle of chance, a friendship forged through the four years shared as junior shinobi. Your sensei, your third man - they existed beyond the bubble of two.

You were children together, once.

But in the Bloody Mist, you fight or you die. It was a death of heart to swallow the fear in your throat when it came time for selection. Ten years old by then; it was cold that day, and the pit in your stomach was nearly all-consuming when Kisame bid you the first of many goodbyes. 'Just in case', he'd said - his voice quiet, and heavier than you'd ever heard it then - just in case one of you failed to survive. It was better to say goodbye now than risk losing his chance if it had come down to facing you.

Through the chūnin selection your three-man squad became a bitterly victorious two-man cell. It was only a small mercy given to you by chance that you weren't forced to face Kisame, and not yet was he forced to turn his strength on his team. He survived by the ferocity of his blade whereas you weathered the terrified betrayal of your third man, a soft-spoken boy no older than you. A tracker - or, at least he would have been.

Surviving that was the first time you saw Kisame's eyes feral and searching, his developing muscles drawn taut and teeth bared like a wild animal as he tore through the small ceremony of fellow children-turned-soldiers that had proved their mettle in the slaughter, each newly minted journeymen shinobi drenched in the blood of their friends.

Some were too stunned from the shock of their own actions, most too numb to react to the Hoshigaki boy who sought you out like one drowning sought the ocean's surface. There was no pretence of honour or achievement to be found in the way his hands, still slick and stinking of iron, had gripped your shoulders when he finally found you, as if you were the only tether he had left to anything good.

Neither of you smiled that day. There was no crooked grin that greeted you there, and no stifled tittering that followed the frenzied flaring of his gills to welcome him in turn, not that time. Finding each other through the bloodshed as official chūnin, you both learned that no amount of conditioning could have prepared either of you for the reality of taking the lives of your compatriots. It felt different, somehow more visceral, compared to cutting down someone marked an enemy.

Kill or be killed, neither of you had any other choice. That day would not be the one that marked his end, nor your own. Not yet - he was manic and peaked, you were despondent and spiralling - not yet. You weren't ready. He wasn't ready. Not yet. It was a shame that you weren't built for killing, and an even greater one that Kisame's concept of a comrade, that day, began chipping down to you. You became the exception.

Fear is something any child is bound to experience in life; a crawling dread felt in their bones when something goes bump in the night. It wasn't fear he had felt, and he was a child no longer when he emerged as one of the several victorious. No, the young swordsman-to-be was a selfish boy, he knew, because what he felt when he'd shoved his face into your hair and squished his nose into the crown of your head was the shameful sensation of relief. So many had died horrible, gruesome deaths - but not you. You lived, you breathed, you were shaking like a leaf and staring through him, but at least you were alive.

He was surely broken, and at that point so were you, but at least you had survived.

Your body moved through the motions of a person after the fact, while each champion was recognised, your stare one thousand yards detached from the moment when the weight of your certificate soaked up the death from your killing hands. You hadn't had it a moment, hadn't had the chance to exchange it for your hitai-ate, and already it was marked with blood. You were meant to feel proud, strong for having outwitted and overpowered the others, too weak to serve the village - yet, you'd felt sick. Bile burned the back of your throat, swallowed down hard while your brain marked you a hypocrite that day, despite the ceremony of congratulations thrown in the faces of you and your peers.

It was a blur, what little remained of that day. You have no memory now, nor did you then, of dragging yourself to the baths, but you know that every time you closed your eyes you saw the faces of those you'd defeated. Their faces stricken with panic or wet with desperate tears, voices squeaky or hoarse in their last moments - your kunai buried deep in the throat of your squadmate, his tantō skewered through the fleshy part of your waist. Pain, in every manner of which it existed.

No matter how desperately you'd scrubbed, your skin left raw and burning, your breathing haggard and unbearably tight, the blood never seemed to wash clean from your hands. Kisame was a persistent one, perceptive for his age and unwilling to part while his brain somehow struggled to rationalise that you lived, even if you'd left his sight. He'd scrubbed your back and bid the little comfort of his company - a silent sentinel that never once mentioned the strangled sobs that wracked your body when finally, you'd worn through what little energy you had left.

You couldn't understand why you cried.

And he had no answer as to why you didn't feel clean - he didn't either, though it bothered him somewhat less than it did you. Then, he'd never had as optimistic an ambition as yourself. His path was always of the sword.

You'd managed to patch your own wounds, and then Kisame's - because that was meant to be your path. The medic, the healer, a preserver of life. The death of hope was dealt through the cold realisation that you would never truly be that. At least, not in this lifetime. Not like this.

You were naïve to have ever thought that the path of a medic was above the demand of bloodshed.

It was he who helped you fix your clothes when your fingers refused to, no words exchanged when he pulled you under his arm and guided you from the baths - it was good, at least, that you'd washed up before heading for home. The silence shared between you, then, remained unbroken out of respect for those unfortunate dead. Loyal to a fault, and in search of an excuse to be near, he'd helped you back to the tiny apartment you called your own.

You felt many things that he didn't, then - but it didn't make you weak. You survived selection, you'd survive this too, he knew.

Your home was empty, polluted with noise from the market district beyond your windows, inhabited at that point only by yourself - still a child, yet so alone. Long had the Land of Water suffered civil wars - and your parents' lives were claimed somewhere along the line, but at the very least he was there. This world had no shortage of children orphaned, and like you, there was no one left alive to have awaited his return.

His home was with you. At least, it was then.

You were children together, once.

That day, through a series of deaths both tangible and in spirit, began the first of many goodbyes. To childhood, to juvenile altruism, and to the hope of most things good.

But not Kisame.

Kisame was not a monster, not then, at least. Not ever when you knew him.

#kisame #kisame x reader #akatsuki #naruto #naruto x reader #writing tag #kisame hoshigaki #reader insert #the night we met by lord huron carried me thru this one #really want to work on making my writing more narrative rather than w/e it usually ends up being ugh #also want to write some comfort as an addition to this but that'll come later maybe #this is dark - but i cannot see anyone having a good time in the bloody mist era #i rly dont think they went easy on their genin given the whole - y'know - chunin selection being what it is

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