"I've never been one for experiments - " lies, all of it, or at least subtle twistings of the truth " - but I just can't help but wonder: how did you master the Sharingan?"

"Patience," Kakashi managed. The younger man's gaze was as hot and slick and liquid as the chains that bound and burned his flesh, and was twice as difficult to escape.

Itachi shifted, and the illusion shifted with him. The missing-nin was too much of a master to use the exact same trick twice, but Kakashi had spent enough time analyzing his first encounter with the Mangekyou Sharingan - he could feel now, if not exactly see, how the limits of this illusion did not stretch out into infinity.

One more time and he could break out of it himself.

One more time after that and he could trap Itachi inside the illusion of his own making.

Kakashi knew it was masochistic - and sadistic - of him to be looking forward to not one, but two more encounters with Itachi's Tsukuyomi technique. But he didn't care. The giddy heat of anticipation burned hotter than the illusory flames around him and settled tight in the pit of his stomach.

"I wonder," Itachi mused. "If I carved your eye out and put it in the head of another person, how would they fare?"

"They'd go insane," the older jounin assured. The liquid chains of fire slithered further up his thighs, searing his clothing and branding his flesh, but it wasn't that much more painful than the first time he took off the bandages and saw the world through a pubescent Sharingan.

"Why didn't you go insane?"

"I was already insane."

Itachi's hands were small and pale and doll-like, and the fingers that pressed into Kakashi's cheekbone were too smooth and soft to be that of a ninja. "There are many levels of insanity," he said. "You've only swum the shallowest depths."

"Are you suggesting that you'd like to take me deeper?" Kakashi asked. The fires spat and crackled and scoured his bones, but his flesh did not melt away - not yet - and the heat was secondary only to the heat in Itachi's gently swirling gaze. The anticipation in his stomach tightened further.

"We shall see," Itachi murmured, and pressed a lacquered thumbnail to the delicate flesh beneath Kakashi's left eye, "just how well you take to the deeper waters."

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