Ah, Itachi.
My dear, dear boy.
You know I am not something measured by rulers or bowls, scales or maps. I am insubstantial and can only be identified by the critical examination of events so few bother to understand. Like loyalty, freedom, and love I cannot be quantified. However, unlike loyalty, freedom, and love, I exist.
What are the likes of loyalty, freedom, and love but potent genjutsus so easily created by weak minds, as you knew the day you acquired eyes capable of seeing past such? Your family's power could have used those illusions to build a fragile foundation upon, but they instead chose to build with fear and reputation.
Bah, also illusions.
You know what true power is like; they only thought they had true power.
Arrogance is also an illusion, and you were always too practical to fall for such an illusion. You are, after all, as good as you know.
Bless them all for such lovely dreams though, for the innocence maintained by such is as true and real as myself.
You first knew my taste when you realized that which they lived for could only be destroyed by death. Like revenge I linger, bittersweet - but the body is merely a tool that is honed and trained to ignore petty biological functions.
Ideals such as justice and prudence are merely chains, trapping the innocents to their fragile foundations, and the only liberation they could ever know is through death.
You were all too ready to oblige.
Perhaps it was the only way in which you ever obliged everyone. With one betrayal of this so-called "friendship," you freed yourself from the chains and soared to the very pinnacle of insight of the human soul.
Ah, but you have no soul. That was the price the devil demanded for your insight.
Except...
Except that you now realize how much more the devil has demanded; of how truly expensive is the soul. Like Ouroboros who circles about to capture its own tail in its mouth, you realize too late you are being consumed. Not by illusions, of course, but by truth, for nothing hurts worse than the truth.
Your insight is coming to naught - for in achieving the ability to see, you have lost your sight. You gained everything at the price of all, and now you can only watch as that which you most prized, most valued, dwindles beyond your oh-so-human reach.
You can see the souls of humans, look in to the depth of illusion, but to what extent and to what end?
"Itachi. How bad has your eyesight gotten?"
If there were such things as justice, you would be dead for your crimes.
But you know there is no such thing existing that is justice - just another elaborate illusion. You have not believe in such illusions since you paid the price.
There is no justice.
Anyone else and this would have been funny. This would have been hilarious. But not you; you never did have an appreciation for the subtle things of life.
Name me. Give this lingering bitter flavor an identity; one that is intangible, but identifiable.
Only-
Yes.
- irony.