[A year. What he would have given for another year with his brother, alive and whole, untouched by the dark stain all of the ruinous things between them. It was more than he could ask, and more than Itachi could give. They were both robbed—but Itachi more so than anyone else. He can feel that thought threaten to blacken within him, prone to the paroxysms of rage and grief he'd suffered in the aftermath of what he'd come to learn too late, such that now he finds his hand constricting around the teacup until skin is blanched white. A year, Itachi has been in this place without him. It isn't beneath him to feel envious.

He can see those signs now, subtle though they are, set apart from the cold and rigid figure in his mind eclipsing the past. He looks more human than either encounter, even surrounded by the room's unfamiliar strangeness. He looks well. Not sickly, nor a reanimated corpse halfway back to death.

Then, Sasuke's brow furrows. Itachi is withholding by nature, but it occurs to him that this severity isn't usual or logical, and that maybe...]

You don't remember? [It's a guess, fishing for something new in the impenetrable exterior of his brother's demeanor. Better than he ever was at disguising his thoughts.] The edo tensei.

[With anyone else, Sasuke would have kept the information close to his chest—might even have lorded it over a lesser soul, not deserving of his respect—but not with Itachi. Whatever brief, intoxicating surge of power he feels in knowing something that his brother does not is short-lived and guilty.]

I know everything, Itachi. Obito told me. You would have met him as Madara, but that wasn't his true persona. He lied to you. You sealed the Amaterasu within me and it failed, so he was able to approach me.

[After your death. After I killed you. Words that sear his heart now as if burned freshly raw.]