A different shade of grey
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Itachi sorts the days by colours. Different colours for different characteristics of a day.
Yellow for happiness. Green for hope. Red for blood. Black for mourning. Blue for peace and comfort. He liked them best, those blue days.
He cannot remember when he started this or why, he has just always done so. It is unusual for a ninja, Itachi knows that. In shinobi life, there are only black and white, not different shades of grey. The good ones against the bad ones. That is what you are taught, what you live, from the beginning to the end. Shinobi do not see that it is never as easy as that. They don't want to, because it would make everything so much more difficult. Itachi, on the other hand, was too intelligent to not differentiate further, and for a while, describing the days with shades of colours brought him more happiness than grief.
He likes to remember those colourful days which are now long, long gone. His days are now nothing but a stained and blurry grey, sometimes lighter, sometimes darker, like rainclouds weeping from the sky. And it's not because his eyesight is failing him.
His days are now so grey, so lifeless, that he sometimes finds it hard to remember the colours. But they existed, the colourful days, back then when he was someone else, and he feeds off the memories today.
Yellow days were usually days he spent with his family, with his mother, his father, Sasuke, Shisui. Red – red was seldom, fortunately, except for the times of war, when all days were black and red. And then, when war ended, they were green, bright green and blue, and being the naive boy he was, he thought it would stay like this forever.
Life taught him better.
Itachi doesn't know anymore when exactly things started to go downhill and the days lost their colours, more and more, slowly but surely. He didn't wake up one day to find that there was nothing left. He cannot place the beginning, as well as he cannot foresee the end. And yet, he wasn't oblivious enough to not notice that the world was changing around him, and he was changing with it.
He grew up, and the more he saw, the fewer colours there were. They died as the child within him passed away.
Shisui was the first one to notice his odd and out-of-character behaviour, but just like him, his best friend wasn't a man to ask questions. They were good at that, understanding each other without words. And even when Shisui couldn't understand him anymore, he never said it out loud. Only his eyes incessantly asked the silent question: "Where are you, Itachi? Where are you?"
Itachi never answered, because he knew which "where" Shisui meant. And he knew he couldn't tell him. And so the days just grew darker and darker.
He started to avoid Shisui, because every time he saw his best friend now, he didn't see Shisui anymore. He just saw a dark, blurry figure, engulfed by a blood-red world. It made him scream inside.
The day he killed Shisui was pitch-black, tainted with crimson splatters. Which was ridiculous seeing that there wasn't even blood; not really, at least, because Itachi knows his thirteen-year-old self would have cracked had Shisui's blood actually covered his hands. He chose the manner of death on purpose, because it was bloodless, and because Shisui loved the water, and because water was blue, and he hoped a blue death would help Shisui find his peace.
It was the last coloured day of Itachi's life. Ever since, his days have been a dull grey. Itachi doesn't complain. He has come to terms with this, because he knows he doesn't deserve better. Sometimes, on better days, when he can remember, the light and gentle grey is comforting. On bad days, the darker shades drown him.
He is so used to the darkness surrounding him that he doesn't even notice anymore.
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