"You're slow, even when you're falling." — Byakuya Kuchiki.
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The most dangerous place to be is that one benchmark before success. The venomous comfort that comes with the sweet thought, 'this is it!', is one that has killed many men on the last steps of their ambitions. It was a result of fluid plans and consecutive successes, a fertile ground for the budding of arrogance and a sense of inevitability.
Sadly, it was a natural flaw that came to everyone who found themselves on those steps. Everyone was victim to it, no one was exempt. Not Yamamoto, not Itachi, not the Hokages.
On that hallmark, by virtue of being halfway to their goal, there are two reactions people get when they look back to see how far they've come; some despair that there's still half left to go, while others are relieved that they have come halfway — and no matter which one they are, most often they lose themselves in either of these emotions.
Now for someone who has been at the literal bottom of Hell, to finally taste this tantalizing scent of inevitable victory, Kokutō didn't even have enough sober capacity to know that he was getting drunk on the moment instead of the victory.
Throughout the timeframe of them meeting Kokutō, from the moment he stepped out of the portal to this current moment in Hell, Itachi had kept one lying eye on him at all times.
The little twitch when he expected the ease of which the other Togabito would be dispatched. The little twinkling of mirth behind his eyes when he saw the evolved Kushanāda. The unbothered apathy at Murakumo's execution — throughout all this, Itachi watched for the truth behind his eyes.
Rather than Kokutō's direction, it was the minute relaxing and contracting of his eyes that led Itachi down here.
Kokutō's truthful eyes were coerced into whispering his little truths, and even with all that Itachi waited. Waited for the moment where his eyes would discard the whispers and scream in exhilaration.
And what Kokutō's eyes screamed was an utter act of betrayal. That this was his final act, his step before victory.
Itachi had kept his actions contained so he could draw out the branches of Kokutō's backup plans in the event that he didn't play out the act set up for him. What else had they taken into account when they lured him here? Surely they knew a healthy lot about him to target him specifically, were his thoughts, but so far all Kokutō was obsessed with were his chains being cut.
He was certain that escaping Hell was Kokutō's only reason for acting out this play, but if that was his personal goal then what was the goal of the people who gave Kokutō this role? How would their goals be realized even if Kokutō failed? Surely there was something that wasn't immediate but was crucial to this whole thing.
The only outlier on his part was Amaterasu's reaction to Hell and the Kushanāda's hostility towards it, ergo him.
Except that couldn't be everything. There was something he was missing in all this and it was due to the difference in perspective between him and the invisible hands. His ignorance of the angle being played out was messing up his projection of the game on the board.
'Kokutō is a loose end.' It was an obvious conclusion and if the enemy knew anything of note about him, they would know that he was good at pulling on the threads of loose ends.
'They'll kill him before I get the chance to.' He might be overestimating the abilities of his invisible adversary, but he preferred it to blindly underestimating the agency of his opponent.
Kokutō was doomed to fall off the steps of his ambitions at the last step…. No, his ambitions were doomed to a cascading end from the very beginning, and this was shown in the fact that his benefactors left him to follow along his single-branched plan.
Kokutō's despair echoed loudly in his eyes and Itachi was close enough to see it all. It was etched onto perpetuity as it reflected off sanguine orbs.
From the very beginning Kokutō had been wrong in his thinking that he would have to fight Itachi, or that Itachi would have to fight him in order to get the information he wanted. Ever since he suspected foreign influence, Itachi's concern had been how effective his reactions would be against whatever plans and traps the puppeteering hand had laid out for him.
The ringing snap of cast iron resounded with a sharp ting, loudly audible even through the noise of battle in the background.
A single chain wrapped around Kokutō's broke off in splinters along with a thrust of Reiatsu as Amaterasu showed off the reverse side of her blade; a focused pinpoint sublimation. There was no flare or passionate aggression to it. It was an apathetic disassembling that showed the Royal Matriarch of Desolate Flames unwillingness to partake in the pitiful dance in front of her.
Gone were the boisterous and excited flames and in its place was a foreign serenity that held everything in equal disdain and disregard. A mirror temperament.
Kokutō still had an expecting smile on his face when the chains broke, but it quickly changed when he saw no explosion of the cursed Hellish flames, but instead all his (betraying) eyes could lock on to was the pair of blood red eyes right in front of his face.
Ironically, he was extremely willing to fight against the black flames of Itachi's Zanpakutō to free himself, and yet he couldn't draw out that same fighting spirit in front of those eyes.
His perception stretched inward as the world around them melted away to reveal a crimson moon and an endless expanse of sand. He was frozen in place as he saw a hand reach out to hold his head.
Itachi ruthlessly dived into Kokutō's head and unraveled his memories to the world around them.
He dived deeper as he searched for the root of his ambitions and soon he found himself there, standing beside Kokutō as he watched numerous footage of instances of Itachi. His fight with the Espada in Hueco Mundo, his fight with the Hollowfied Captains, his first release of his Bankai.
Suddenly the world around him, Kokutō's memories, started glitching and falling apart which put a genuine frown on his face.
He pushed the memories deeper and didn't have to dig far when a memory played out by which time the world around him was already falling apart.
Kokutō was in chains speaking to a man in the dark but the glitches had grown so severe that he couldn't make out their words.
The Mangekyō Sharingan spun furiously as he dismissed every other part of the memory and focused on the man talking to Kokutō. As the rest of the unstable memory fell away, Itachi drew the man's memory closer until he was standing in front of him.
He attempted to enter the man's memories through his eyes while still in the remnant of Kokutō's memories but something surprising happened—
The man closed his eyes. His eyes, which were the only thing Itachi could make out of the darkness, were closed shut with him barely making out the mocking smirk on the man's lips as they opened to speak in the silence.
'Not this time,' his eyes read the obscure movement of the man's mouth.
The man's body started fading away and Itachi couldn't make out if that was in the original memory or was a result of the memory falling apart. Itachi decided to take one more gamble and pushed the memory further back to stop the man from fading away, which barely worked, and back to the point in the conversation where his eyes were opened.
He froze the memory in place but that still didn't stop it from crumbling away but that was enough as he could finally stare into the man's eyes, only for him to be shocked again as the man's eyes moved to stare directly at him.
The world instantly fell away when that happened and threw Itachi into an inverse world which fell away just as it appeared.
He deactivated his Sharingan but the frown was still on his face, a bigger one that was just as surprised and shocked at the rapid turn of events.
He wasn't entirely surprised that Kokutō's memories had been manipulated and altered but what really gave him shock was the memory of the man that acted as if he could see Itachi. The closed eyes, the words and the eye moving to stare at Itachi — it was like he expected Itachi to sift through Kokutō's memories.
If they were watching him like Kokutō's memories showed then, while a great security risk, it wasn't that surprising as it was shocking. They had read him like a book… or they had assumed a possibility and acted on it, both were worrying.
And still that wasn't all of it.
"He reflected an illusion on me with his eyes." He had instantly broken out of it, but the fact that they had placed a sequence illusion inside the memories to trigger when he made eye contact was a smart application.
It wasn't anywhere near strong enough to ensnare him but the fact that they did it anyway revealed a few things, nothing major but it was still something.
Kokutō slumped to the ground as a huge part of his memories were shredded. Itachi didn't know how brain damage affected souls in Hell and he wasn't particularly interested.
They were done here.
"Byakuya, let's go."
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