Itachi always checks for the newcomers, as much as he can -- his hopes, his fears, everything inside him drives him forward. If Sasuke returns, or if someone else known to him arrives, he needs to be there, needs to know.
Still, he isn't expecting this. Isn't expecting the sight of sodden, unruly black hair, still trying to pull itself into the riotous waves that differ so strongly from the sleek, straight tresses more common in their clan -- for those familiar, dark-lined eyes and that all-too-familiar face.
The eyes, yes, those catch his attention, both because he knows they shouldn't be there and he's so quietly, profoundly glad they are.
"Shisui," he says quickly, gliding forward -- and realizes just as quickly that he needs to use caution. The cousin he has mourned so profoundly since his death in the Nakano river, falling a distance no one should be able to survive, a distance Itachi is all too certain he didn't survive -- and this confirms it, to his way of thinking. Ryslig is a land of death, a land of the dead -- he died before coming here, Sasuke did, and now Shisui, long-dead Shisui...
Who won't recognize him. He isn't Itachi, visually: he's a dark, vaguely human-shaped cloud of darkness that steams and smokes with an otherworldly aura, with blankly glowing white eyes and a voice that perhaps hearkens back to the startlingly deep tones that an adolescent Itachi had already begun to develop when Shisui died, but is now significantly far removed from it. Smoother, deeper, older -- and now hollow, a deep sigh of the wind with human speech intertwined.
How will his cousin know him?
He stops a little way out of arm's reach, just looking at him -- feasting his eyes on a face he never expected to see again.
don't mind me quietly screaming in the background
Still, he isn't expecting this. Isn't expecting the sight of sodden, unruly black hair, still trying to pull itself into the riotous waves that differ so strongly from the sleek, straight tresses more common in their clan -- for those familiar, dark-lined eyes and that all-too-familiar face.
The eyes, yes, those catch his attention, both because he knows they shouldn't be there and he's so quietly, profoundly glad they are.
"Shisui," he says quickly, gliding forward -- and realizes just as quickly that he needs to use caution. The cousin he has mourned so profoundly since his death in the Nakano river, falling a distance no one should be able to survive, a distance Itachi is all too certain he didn't survive -- and this confirms it, to his way of thinking. Ryslig is a land of death, a land of the dead -- he died before coming here, Sasuke did, and now Shisui, long-dead Shisui...
Who won't recognize him. He isn't Itachi, visually: he's a dark, vaguely human-shaped cloud of darkness that steams and smokes with an otherworldly aura, with blankly glowing white eyes and a voice that perhaps hearkens back to the startlingly deep tones that an adolescent Itachi had already begun to develop when Shisui died, but is now significantly far removed from it. Smoother, deeper, older -- and now hollow, a deep sigh of the wind with human speech intertwined.
How will his cousin know him?
He stops a little way out of arm's reach, just looking at him -- feasting his eyes on a face he never expected to see again.