All –Both, not all, not yet, because Sasuke isn't old enough and hasn't seen enough, done enough- Uchiha's have eyes that look like bruises.

Madara thinks this as he looks into Itachi's face, staring at the eyes, those priceless, coveted eyes, that are as red as the blood that enabled them to come into being.

The area around both of their eyes is a dark, purple-reddish color, so much to the extent that seems to sink both into and out of the flesh, and the rest of their faces is so pale, so white, that it seems like the madness that is inherent in both of them has bleached away their skin color.

Madara is very aware that he is mad.

He also knows that Itachi is just as mad as he.

He thinks that one day, he will kill him –because every Uchiha ends up killing the one that they love, this is a fact that both have come to terms with long ago-

Madara thinks that; but knows that he himself will never kill Itachi, because Itachi is too much like himself.

The most he will ever do is to let Itachi die, but he ponders the fact that he will not mourn him. He cannot see Itachi existing without him, and on the same thought, it is impossible for Itachi to stop existing while Madara still lives.

He –they- are sure of this.

Both of them think that when mirrors reflect across time, they will cast ever-distorted images, and they are these macabre reflections, standing side by side on this cliff, wondering at how alike they are.

Both could very easily love the other, and they do, but it is a narcissistic love, because what they love in the other, they love even more in themselves.

Madara looks sometimes into Itachi's eyes, and knows that Itachi wants to kill him, wants to destroy him utterly.

Itachi looks into Madara's eyes and knows that Madara love ripping him down from his burning pedestal of martyrdom that will ultimately be his funeral pyre.

Neither can find it in themselves to care about the world burning outside –because they just couldn't care at all anymore, not about anything outside of themselves and certainly not about a world that they despised- and after all, they had set the world on fire in the first place.

Both of them were warriors, the once-in-a-lifetime kind that are all too rare and at once terrible to try and describe. Madara was the first great warrior of the Uchiha clan, and Itachi was the last.

He had insured that long ago.

No matter what Sasuke dose, he will never be able to surmount his older brother's actions, and this is the way that both Itachi and Madara want it.

In a way, to the outside world, and even in Akatsuki, their existences are the things of story book legends, the one who managed to survive the dead, and the one who death seems to follow.

Neither of them is sure which is which any more.

Their ghosts have intermingled with their fingers, trailing after them, and Itachi is surprised to find one day that he can somehow remember fifty years before he was born, and Madara sometimes has dreams –Or nightmares, nothing can really frighten him anymore, not with what he's seen and done- about three year old Sasuke coming to him for help.

They love each other, as they have told each other before, but in a small part of each of their beings, both of them think that they are waiting, just a little bit, for the perfect chance to turn around and stab each other in the back.

It is twisted, their relationship with one another, and they would not have it any other way.

Sometimes, in a grotesque parody of affection, Madara will lean over and run his fingers down Itachi's face and pause, always, always on his eyelids.

His fingers will hover over the thin skin, barley brushing against the only layer between him and jeweled ruby-like weapons far greater that any amount of steel.

It would be so easy just to press a little bit harder, a tiny bit more demanding, and

-stopstopstopstop, you don't want this, this is badbadbadbadBAD-...

Those thoughts halt him, just before Madara can actually do it, can actually commit the deed –the sin- that would neutralize the threat that he knows is there.

Itachi never flinches from those ill meaning fingers, and when Madara draws back, the first thing he sees is Itachi's smirk.

He walks off, trying to put aside the anger that rises up suddenly on those occasions.

Why is it that the younger Uchiha knew that he couldn't do it?

Candle flames are the only things that light Itachi's room any more- other, of course, from sunlight-

Madara thinks that it is because anything else hurts his eyes.

The younger will never admit to this, because that would be all too much like admitting to weakness; this is something that Itachi refuses to do, even to himself anymore.

Madara knows that his theory is true, because he can remember his own failing eyesight so long ago.

He remembers exactly how his eyes were healed –corrected, because healing implies that his eyes were salvageable-

Itachi does not want that path for himself.

He truly does care about his younger brother, and Madara does not press the issue, despite the fact that Madara really, can't find it within himself to care about a person who he has never truly know, relative or not.

He would much rather Itachi have the ability to see.

But still, he will not question his –Student's? Relative's? - Judgment on this matter.

Because Madara once loved his own younger brother just as much.

And though all the rest of the world thinks, and believes them to be murderers

–which, of course, they ARE. But though they kill and torture (and sometimes, in a small, not-quite so-forbidden-or-hidden-part-of-themselves they do enjoy it, having that fearsome power and using it; after all, what is the use of a weapon that is never drawn?) and do all sorts of other things that people don't know about and probably don't want to learn about-

But they don't-didn't- want to hurt their siblings.

But Izuna ended up dead anyways, and sometimes Itachi wonders if it is his worst fear if Sasuke will turn out the same way.

Selfishly, Madara quietly wishes that it would.

That the younger of the brothers would die, and there would be yet another parallel drawn silently between their lives.

That Itachi would be further wounded and broken apart into something that an outsider could never fix.

But something that Madara could understand.

It is perhaps, the cruelest thing that he could wish for, but Madara has never been one to try and please others.

It doesn't matter, since Itachi has taken steps to prevent that from happening.

All of his, cobwebbed, delicate lies –hate me, despise me, and, one day, kill me- all constructed so that Sasuke will never sacrifice himself for Itachi the way Izuna sacrificed himself for Madara.

The two Uchiha sit together, and Madara tells Itachi, without trying to be delicate, or tactful about it (And when has he ever?) that telling those lies to his brother is the most selfish thing he was ever done.

And Itachi, upon hearing those words, smiles. Recognizes them as the truth. And refuses to care.

He may be saving his brother, but he knows that after he dies, Madara will tell Sasuke the truth, and it will break him.

Madara is vindictive, and cares just enough for Itachi not to do this before the plan is set into motion, but he, in a way, hates Sasuke.

Itachi knows that, and proceeds to set up the figurative dominoes that will all come crashing down.

Itachi truly is cold hearted.

Madara hopes that he has become someone that Itachi recognizes as being if not important, then at least dangerous.

He wishes sometimes, when he has stayed up too long, and Itachi is sleeping beside him, scowling and having retreated into Madara's room for the night, in order to escape the bloody after-images that are imprinted on his mind, that he has become a sort of...figure to the younger one.

(Not a parental figure, be cause Madara certainly doesn't want for Itachi to turn against him the way he turned against the long rotted corpses in the far away Uchiha district. Never mind that Itachi already has, in essence, already betrayed him)

He may not have become one, but he is, -and this is a fact that both acknowledge, however grudgingly, because there is no way to deny or refute it- the closest Itachi has to any kind of important person.

The younger rarely lets down his guard any more, and the knowledge that Madara had seen him at his weakest, when he was thirteen and crying after the massacre, had-did- inspire a macabre sense of trust in him.

Madara was the only one who he could, or, indeed, would turn to when the coughing grew so violent that his frame (Still, even now, much more slight and thin than most others) shook with the effort of suppressing them.

Nobody else in the organization knew about the sickness, and the burden of caring for his dying pupil was solely the elder's twisted privilege-pleasure-

Itachi hated that Madara did know about the tuberculosis, but knew that he had no choice but to rely on him for the treatments.

Madara found saccharine amusement in the fact that he was the one person that Itachi truly despised, (and, at the same time, loved, but that was a fact that neither bothered to examine to closely; if they did, the events that most definitely would come to pass could and would become something painful for the both of them) and he was the one that the younger had to rely on.

He enjoyed knocking him down from his crumbling act.

He loved protecting himself in a cocoon of well meaning lies.

But at the same time, they both knew, and could do nothing about it, that they were extinguishing any hope that they had of living happily.

Perhaps they already had.

Itachi was tired of waking up; waking to peace, waking to war, waking to watch as all those around you died for duty. He was tired (so incredibly weary that sometimes he just wanted to lay down his huge burden and simply...let it go) of waking and killing and waking up somewhere else, wherever he-his skills, his ability to kill- was needed.

Waking, and standing by, quietly observing, as everyone else was laid to eternal sleep.

He wonders sometimes, twisting the idea around and around in his head, circling with out break, or reprieve, that that in and of itself may be the reason he has become so attached to Madara.

Itachi will never have to wake, and see Madara fall.

And that gives him a comfort that he didn't know that he needed.

The elder Uchiha has twisted so long ago that truth and lies have twined closer and closer together, until they are as inseparable as the sin present in all good intentions.

He just wants now, now that he can sense this...this, game coming to a close, to watch his world burn.

The black flames are beautiful and are as captivating to him, to the both of them, as the frail wings of a dragonfly.

So enticing the prospect seems, as the both of them spiral farther and farther into numbing madness, just to watch those guttering flames devour the world.

In a way, both are solipsists.

Nothing matters beyond them selves, because nothing else is real.

It was all too easy for Itachi to come to that conclusion, gazing as he did into the before-world, the after-images, and the truer reality of the sharingan.

Ever movement, carried out before the other person even realizes that they are going to move.

Ever image colored with the moist crimson of burst veins and fallen bodies (broken promises, all of them)

Not even his sensei is exempt from this rule.

He lets the knowledge rush over him, pulling him under in a stifling embrace just like Mikot used to, when he was young and fragile and needed those comforts from her -help me, oh, mother, where were you, help me, help me, I'm slipping under and just look at me for once and see how far I've fallen-

He is the only person in the world that moves at once.

Madara sees only himself through his eyes, and if he once could see others, those moments have faded away, and all that is left are his dolls, his playthings (so very easy to cast aside, every inch of the ancient man a bored child) and him.

He had once held on to the glass orb of his life with a crazed fervor, until he had opened his hands to find it crushed to dust.

The older man is the bitterer of the two, and one of the first lessons that he ever taught his prodigy (his, his and no one else's) is that the world doesn't care.

You fight and die for family honor, and it doesn't ever matter.

You are insignificant, you are worth nothing unless you can carve your way into the history of this blood stained charade.

Itachi was young then, back when he was content to crouch, with bruised skin and bloody eyes, and listen to his teacher's words.

They seemed like magic, to the both of them, Itachi seeing a way that he could rise higher, improve and evolve until he burned away himself and all his tiny, almost invisible flaws in a wave of perfection; and Madara weaving his words in ways that were almost forgotten to him, in a manner of guidance that had lost meaning when Izuna died.

For someone that has taken so many lives, Itachi has no knowledge of what death is.

Madara does.

He has a deep personal knowledge that many other don't, not even Orochimaru, with all of his experiments and theories.

He knows that the grasses and plants will smooth over-smother- the bodies of the dead, and that in twenty, ten, a hundred years, nothing will remain of those that thought they were making a difference.

No death affects the world in any measure of permanence, and this line of thought gives way to his other belief: No life ever affects the world forever.

Once you have died, once you are dead (because there is a difference somewhere, but the discussion is long and theoretical and tedious and there is no meaning or need for it now) the worlds, your friends, your family, inevitably forget you.

Itachi was shocked when he learned this lesson, when he learned the distinction of how quickly a person becomes a body, and they both think (one amused as he always is, one accepting and apathetic) that even though the Uchiha ancestor isn't present for this revelation, he will be the one most pleased that his pupil has learned it.

Itachi has to learn it.

He has to know that he is just one more in the sea of hundreds, and he is expandable.

It is a cruel lesson, but Itachi never grows angry for his disillusionment.

It is the reason that he accepts that he will walk towards his own death a traitor.

It is partly why Madara will let him.

They cannot care for each other in the traditional way, or even in a way that would make sense to their colleagues. But Madara will let his student go, he will let Itachi die, and Itachi will do nothing to cling to life or to him.

Sasuke will learn the truth, and he will break, and Madara will go on and be sure that despite everything, Itachi will never be allowed to disappear from the elder's life completely, that he will never rest while Madara lives. (And Madara will live. He is sure of that. It is, perhaps after all, his greatest talent)

Letting Itachi rest in final peace would hurt Madara, because that would be too much like killing himself.