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in my nothing, you meant everything to me
[The world comes back in blinding white, an abrupt end to consciousness that isn't restful — he's awake, and everything is very wrong. In one tormented moment, panic is all that centers his mind. It overwhelms the torrent of thought and funnels it into instinct. He's somewhere else. He's in the past — on a medical table beneath articulate hands, syringe plunged into the vein of an arm as experimental doses of chakra-enhanced antitoxins flood his bloodstream. His body jolts upright, turned wildly on the clean and clinical bareness of his surroundings, fumbling for the buckled straps that should be holding him down. Except that when he reaches with both hands to assist, only one is there.
Sasuke stares straight down at his lap. His left arm ends in a sudden severance, sleeve hanging lank and loose, useless to his purposes. Slowly, the pulse of his heart like a rippling pool of water, he calms. Slowly, the rest of what has happened — pain and madness, dark gaps between loss with bright light at the end of a long tunnel — all of it drifts back into memory. He relaxes, easing back onto the cot with eyes turned up to the ceiling. His vision is divided in half by a veil of red; Rinnegan, ever-active, continues its gradual drain of chakra reserves. A drain that he notices is less severe than usual. Expected; he is imprisoned.
His head rolls on the pillow, fringe of hair swept across a brow, studying the room. It's unfamiliar to him. Logic skips in immediately after, because if he is imprisoned, shouldn't he be wearing the blindfold and the binds reinforced by fūinjutsu? Yet he is entirely unrestricted.
With what minimal strength Rinnegan possesses, he peers out through the four walls around him, glimpsing hallways that make no sense to him if he is still within Konoha's subterranean dungeon. More awake and alert now, reeling from the fugue of a dream he's certain wasn't real — What are you willing to do to erase your regret from existence? — it is then he senses it. Through the gauzy blankness of his perception, there are two chakra signatures in immediate vicinity of this room. One he knows well: cool and blue, colored in equal tones of assurance and guidance, the pillar of a man who had tried to reach him in his own way.
All of Sasuke's awareness swings, instead, on the dark red center of the other. The one of his nightmares and his dreams, the one he has chased for endless grief-ridden years, the one he would recognize blind and deaf and dumb at only a pale wisp of presence, the one that cannot be here, because he is dead, because Sasuke killed him with his own two hands.
Itachi.
He stumbles badly in his fit to stand, right hand knocking the small table beside the bed so hard the lamp on it topples and rolls off in a clatter. His concentration becomes singular, obsessive. He's at the door, into the hall, pitted like a hound upon that trail, following it in complicated path through rooms he's never seen in his life. None of that matters. Everything has become secondary to his destination.]
Sasuke stares straight down at his lap. His left arm ends in a sudden severance, sleeve hanging lank and loose, useless to his purposes. Slowly, the pulse of his heart like a rippling pool of water, he calms. Slowly, the rest of what has happened — pain and madness, dark gaps between loss with bright light at the end of a long tunnel — all of it drifts back into memory. He relaxes, easing back onto the cot with eyes turned up to the ceiling. His vision is divided in half by a veil of red; Rinnegan, ever-active, continues its gradual drain of chakra reserves. A drain that he notices is less severe than usual. Expected; he is imprisoned.
His head rolls on the pillow, fringe of hair swept across a brow, studying the room. It's unfamiliar to him. Logic skips in immediately after, because if he is imprisoned, shouldn't he be wearing the blindfold and the binds reinforced by fūinjutsu? Yet he is entirely unrestricted.
With what minimal strength Rinnegan possesses, he peers out through the four walls around him, glimpsing hallways that make no sense to him if he is still within Konoha's subterranean dungeon. More awake and alert now, reeling from the fugue of a dream he's certain wasn't real — What are you willing to do to erase your regret from existence? — it is then he senses it. Through the gauzy blankness of his perception, there are two chakra signatures in immediate vicinity of this room. One he knows well: cool and blue, colored in equal tones of assurance and guidance, the pillar of a man who had tried to reach him in his own way.
All of Sasuke's awareness swings, instead, on the dark red center of the other. The one of his nightmares and his dreams, the one he has chased for endless grief-ridden years, the one he would recognize blind and deaf and dumb at only a pale wisp of presence, the one that cannot be here, because he is dead, because Sasuke killed him with his own two hands.
Itachi.
He stumbles badly in his fit to stand, right hand knocking the small table beside the bed so hard the lamp on it topples and rolls off in a clatter. His concentration becomes singular, obsessive. He's at the door, into the hall, pitted like a hound upon that trail, following it in complicated path through rooms he's never seen in his life. None of that matters. Everything has become secondary to his destination.]
no subject
he thinks of bodies being left where they fell, as the slow creep of nature overtakes the rot, and says: ）
Take them if you wish.
（ the drumline of his regret is never far from his mind, and sasuke has struck on it with the precision of a lightning strike — very likely, he does not realize it at all. in many ways, he is barely even a person. a formless ghost, anchored to the world by the weight of their clan, the deaths. amorphous, except for the shape itachi poured him into and stoppered off.
sasuke is trying, clumsily, to connect with him. itachi knows full well why, but knowing something rationally is not quite the same as being able to fathom it on any level but the intellectual. he studies him a moment, the line of his nose, the jaw that's no longer a stubborn haven to lingering baby fat. the eyes. even without the sharingan active, no one could ever fail to see the stamp of the uchiha lineage upon him.
it is so strange to see him grown.
even when i hated you, he had murmured, i still missed you. ）
Viveca is responsible for the restoration of my vision. You would not be aware of this, but our father had the Mangekyō as well.
（ horrifying implications from the local eldritch terror. ）