Characters: Itachi, Sasuke
Summary: Tsukuyomi has its price.
Pairings: None
Author's Note: Another really short drabble. Sorry, if that's not where your tastes lie.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
His greatest mistake was the use of Tsukuyomi. It had been Itachi's first usage and though he'd read reports of what it was alleged to do to the victim, how can a report truly cover the full breadth of the damage? How can words on paper truly capture the depth of the damage inflicted by Tsukuyomi? There are no words that can adequately describe the full ramifications of using a torture genjutsu on the fragile mind of a eight-year-old child.
But Itachi knows, when Sasuke falls to the ground, retching horribly and twitching on the ground, his whole body caught in some paroxysm of grief and agony.
He'll never forget what Itachi did to the clan now.
Seeing him there, Itachi can finally guess at the enormity of Tsukuyomi, after seeing the effects firsthand—after performing it himself.
The reports did tell Itachi something, though. They said that there was a price for performing Tsukuyomi, though they wouldn't say what that price was.
Itachi can see that price before him now, so vivid, so aching, so palpable that he can almost taste it just like he can taste the mephitic copper tinge in the air.
Sasuke is down on his knees, whimpering, sobbing, his eyes bleeding—No, wait. It's only the tomoes of the Sharingan spinning angrily, new infants screaming into life, a new life to settle into the hollow of Sasuke's chest. A new corruption.
He isn't the same. He never will be again.
He's been broken and his pieces still shatter on the ground. Maybe Sasuke will be able to tape himself back together, maybe someone else will do it for him. Itachi doesn't know. What he does know is that pieces will scatter away in the wind and rain before any reparations can be done and Sasuke will never be whole again. He'll be a creature with half a soul; the soulless half will scream and devour and eat the rest in a vain attempt to soothe itself.
Itachi himself feels empty and hollow as a reed flute. The process that started when he saw the life drain away from Uchiha Shisui's eyes like a lime being drained of its juice has completed itself with the breaking of Sasuke's mind.
He didn't think that any empty feeling could be more cavernous than the slaying of Shisui, his parents, and countless cousins and aunts and uncles and the servants of the Uchiha clan. He's hollowed out his heart and still that can't extinguish pain.
But now, though the agony is so intense that it would kill almost any other, anyone who wasn't convinced that they were doing the right thing, Itachi feels… Feels like a rotten, hollowed log. Something that's decaying on the dank, damp floor of some remote forest, where no one can ever see its downfall from a great and mighty oak of the forest.
He understands now.
The price that Tsukuyomi demands was too horrific to put into words, for, as in all things, mere words can not describe the depth of such matters.
The price it demands of its victim is half of the soul, to feed on.
And for the user?
All of it.