A/N: Dedicated to my second round of Pleurisy in as many months, written in fifteen minutes before I headed to the doctors. For any who read Ascendant, this is why I'm so slow.
--Asphyxiate--
Itachi can't breathe. His chest is tight, hot, broken, with pain stabbing into him at each breath. He breathes in quick, shallow, panting gasps that bring so little air he might as well be holding his breath. He can't hold his breath. It makes his chest burn hard and fierce, and he has to scrunch his eyes shut to block out the burning.
Itachi is no stranger to pain. He has a high tolerance to the feeling, but pain, day after day, week after week, stretching into months and years with no foreseeable end except in death, can wear anyone down, no matter how strong or indifferent they may be at the beginning.
It's a pitiful think of such a great man brought so low by the pain of his own body. It's a cruel world that allows such a brilliant flash of existence to be so smothered by the rising pollution of disease. Maybe, considering the life of this man, it's justice. Maybe, this is retribution of the highest kind, striking down the Icarus of a generation.
In those panting, parted lips there might be a prayer. Itachi isn't sure himself, as one arm wraps around his chest, squeezing in a vain attempt to dampen the pain at least a little. It doesn't, but it adds a sense of comfort to the fraying senses. It makes him feel like he's not falling all apart with each, stabbing, painful breath. It makes him feel like he's not dry drowning.
He is, and it's so obvious. Sweat gathers on his face in the middle of fever, which only eggs on the misery of the not-breathing, not-drowning, not anything but a stasis of pain and the pitiful space between each gasping little breath.
Because Itachi can't breathe. The ever present, never fading pain stirs after all this time a deep, resounding terror in Itachi's body. He closes his eyes to the world, and all that exists is those little pained gasps of a landed fish begging for more air. Begging to be put in the water and drowned. It makes him forget Sasuke. It makes him forget the gallons and gallons of blood spilling over his hands and body. It makes him forget.
Then Itachi knows: He is dying.
And he laughs and it hurts and all he can do is cry, because pain wears everyone down in the end. Except, this is no end.
It is only the beginning, and Itachi knows it.
And that is the reason Itachi cries.