misteravengersyndrome
He is in Hell.
Tied around his neck are the ghosts of his past, and they drag him down, down, in a dark spiral that he can't quite seem to escape. First Itachi, then Konoha, he seeks revenge, retribution, justice for the ghosts in his head, urging him forward down a warped path of destruction. He knows it's all a lie, somewhere deep down in what remains of his soul, that revenge is transient and his famed detachment is merely a fragile mask, and so the ghosts urge him on.
(but it burns, oh fuck it burns, his quest for power searing his veins in liquid fire, jet black Amaterasu flames, the curse seal turning him to a demon, the Eternal Mangekyou setting his eyes towards the darkness and he's not sure he remembers what love is anymore because his life is blood red revenge and white hot hatred)
And he sees *them* again, and the look on her face as she tries to kill him and then as he nearly kills her and the looks on their faces as they try to drag him from the abyss tell him a story a million words never could. But the voices of ghosts long dead sound in his ears and so he turns his back on them and laughs. Laughs at their optimism, their hope-idiocy- in thinking that he could be saved, that he could come back, but that one tiny shred of his soul, the remnants of the piece that long ago threw him in the way of icy needles for *him* (because names evoke emotion, and he does not have emotions), that learned the call lightning from the sky from another *him* and may have even almost loved *her* enough to die for her, all of them really, screams, cries, howls in sheer agony, indescribably worse than the pain of activating that accursed seal for the first time. And no matter how hard he tries, he simply cannot suppress this small remnant of a different person from a different time within him entirely, but the ghosts cry out, and his path lies down, down past the darkness, into the flames.
This, he thinks, is Hell.