[After, Graveyard]
[He hasn't been here long, but he's starting to find places he enjoys going to. The beach, the observation deck, the koi pond, the gardens, the guardian tree..... Kisame likes these little slices of nature far more than he does the more built areas of Marina. The graveyard isn't actually one he's sought out before, but it feels like a worthwhile place to visit. It's something he knows, if nothing else, something familiar in the strangeness of imprisonment--something about the finality is almost comforting. No matter what they do, no matter where they go, death is still death. Even here, of all places, a life is a life is a life. There's still the same value there, the same sentiment.
Except, it seems, for Itachi.
Itachi is always the exception, isn't he? Sometimes he seems so..... above and beyond the rest of the world, somehow. As though everyone else's petty concerns are meaningless to him. Like all he has to do is leap, and the chains will fall straight off him so he can soar. Not all the time, no--he's known Itachi long enough (maybe not well enough, but he supposes that can't be helped) to have seen glimpses of humanity in him like any other, even if sometimes it feels like Itachi can touch something greater than themselves. Even after he got sick, he seemed like that sometimes. And not only had he somehow returned from death and illness and blindness and age by being in Marina, but he had even been seen younger again for a day, returned from all the crime and sin and crisis of his adulthood. It was unreal.
That's what brings him to the graveyard, ultimately, seeing Itachi's younger self. And now he's looking at Itachi's older self again--or rather, the Itachi he knew. Had known. The Itachi who had finally had everything taken from him. Only it wasn't quite his Itachi, now, was it? This one had been Kitty's. Yet in the end, the result is the same--he's not sure how he should feel about that.
At least this place has a gravestone. He's been with Akatsuki for years, seen its numbers ebb and flow, its members die one by one. Since nearly the beginning, he's gotten to know them all, and watch them die. And not a single one of them has gotten the honor of a grave, until now. Cannibalism isn't the most ideal way to leave behind any sort of memorial, even if it's the most practical thing they could have done. Itachi's the special one yet again, isn't it?
It's not his Itachi--or anyone else he's known, for that matter--but he thinks it will do.
So Kisame stops to offer his greetings and a properly respectful bow, to trace his fingers gently over the carved letters, to murmur his well-wishes and apologies in near silence and thank him for what he's done. He doesn't offer a prayer--it seems senseless, and he doubts Itachi would have ever wanted one anyway--, but he does pad quietly around the edge of the plot to sit down and rest his back against the blank side of the headstone. He doesn't have any real purpose for coming here, not really, or even anything he especially wants to think about in particular. He's content to just sit with the ghosts of the past and admire the view, letting his mind wander where it will, past or present or future.]