Chapter 1: in a misty world

Title: Shards of the dying sun.
Genre: Angst/tragedy + romance + general.
Characters/Pairing: Nagato, Yahiko, Konan. Pain (Nagato) x Konan. Eventually to be conducted in Yahiko's body, too.
Rating: R (M).
Warnings: Violence and sexuality. The latter is likely to get more explicit in the upcoming segments, 'cause that's how I like it. Actually, the former will get more explicit in the upcoming section, as well, and if you're familiar with the canon story for Yahiko, Nagato, and Konan, then you should know precisely why this is. In any case, consider yourself warned. :)
Summary: So it's close to this: there are three. One boy knows himself, and is interested in himself, and everything. The other boy has lost himself, and does not know who he is. The girl is outside of herself, in the middle, and draws her hopes from the boy who knows himself and draws her sense of purpose, individually, from helping the boy who does not. They are balanced, during this time. Perhaps more balanced than they could understand. It's this which allows them to live.
Disclaimer: Don't own Naruto. I really wish I owned Pain and Konan, though, just so I could save them from the fail that canon ultimately beset upon them.

+ a big thank-you to my friends: Anat_Astarte (LJ), Herongale, fonsetorigo (LJ), and lady_tigerfish (LJ), who listened to me whine about this, and looked over it some in advance. Cheers!

"Once upon a time," let's say.

Once upon a time, because this is how the story is supposed to begin.

Once upon a time, there's a girl. She's sitting in her bedroom, wrestling with the hair which Mommy just cut for her. And this girl - whose hair by the way is a shade you've never thought hair would be before, and whose eyes are bright in the light of the stars because the sky has no rain in it – yanks the teeth of the comb through, cuts and tears the strands as she does so, because she's not careful, and so soon all of her hair (which is blue, yes, blue hair like the flowers that the rain has drowned) breaks at the ends and is short and shorn and jagged.

She gives up on her hair, eventually, this girl does. At least for now.

She's five, and knows mostly this: today her mother has shown her how to press flowers – how to tuck the folds so she can take the little blue sheets and re-make what the rain has destroyed: re-make it for herself. And on the evening she gives up on her hair, this girl begins to tuck and fold, forming the flowers to sit on her windowsill, under the stars, to bring back what the rain has taken away.

A year ago, flowers bloomed under her window.

Now, there's mud.

Within three days, Mommy and Daddy are gone, and so is the house, and the window, the bed, the starlight, and the comb with the sharp teeth.

The flowers, too.

Now, there's mud.

The rest, let's say, is "once upon a time".

Konan has no interest in herself.

She's too young to know, but the truth is, it's gone.

She loses it, somewhere, if it was ever there. She is six years old and has lost a lot of things, so maybe that's where it went.

After her parents went outside one day and didn't come back, she leaves everything behind, as she's been left behind, and she's sitting outside one day and huddling down against the wet cold, when she meets a boy. The boy looks like someone who is very interested in himself. He looks like someone who knows where he wants to go, though she's too young to really think of him that way. She just knows he looks "nice", and he smiles at her.

"Hi," she says, and she's shaking with hunger and fatigue.

"C'mon," the boy says, and gets her back to a cave, where everything is so dark; she almost falls down inside. She's been seeing visions of her parents flitting around this dead land, but when she chases them, they disappear into the rain that's drowning her. Her legs aren't working right. The boy says a thing like: "Wow, I can't believe you're not crying."

(Though she didn't know she wasn't.)

He lights an oil lamp, and he gives her bread and cold soup. Sometime later, she stops shaking a little.

"Being out there alone is dangerous," the boy says, and wags a finger.

She blinks away the rain in her eyes and nods.

"You could get killed," he says, and she nods to that, too.

"Jeez, you sure don't say much. What's tha matter with you? How long were you out there in that rain like that, with no food? Man."

"I don't know," she says.

"Well, okay. Eat up."

He's someone who prods a lot, which is how she thinks of him, really, but that's all right, because she needs to be prodded to live right now. If no one were pushing her, she knows – even at that age, she knows – that she would've died down in the dirt, under the pouring sky.

It is a horrible place. It honestly is.

Still, she likes to go for walks. Yahiko tells her it's risky, that she shouldn't, but he doesn't try to stop her. He's busy doing what he does, which is going off to steal and keeping watch over the supplies he's collected – the crates and bags and their contents.

Konan can hear the background noise of battle; exploding tags and soldiers' screams, and she's used to them, now, and she's hungry a lot of the time. Her stomach gets sore, and she gets accustomed to this. It swells and roils and keeps her awake sometimes with the pain. But she makes it through from day to day, which is more than many, after all.

There are all these half-sunken buildings that look like the corpses of houses. They jut out of the ground, and she wonders in passing who might have lived there, and how they might have lived, and where they've all gone. Gone, gone. Her head is always like that: full of flowers and things that are gone, somewhere else in some better or quieter place. So sometimes, she can't even hear the sounds of those things dying in the near distance.

She's out walking like this one day when she finds the second person who will be her life.

Konan is drawn to Nagato because he's someone else who has lost himself out there somewhere.

She doesn't make that connection. She just knows he looks hungry and sad. So she gives him some of her bread, and he looks at her blearily.

He's even more lost than she is, actually. Konan is someone with no interest in her person (that she does not yet know), but Nagato is someone without himself; someone shaken through, reduced to pieces and tatters. She can't even see his eyes under that red hair, and she wants to brush her hand across his forehead for a better look.

When his dog is licking his fingertips to catch the crumbs, Konan watches the way he tilts his head and looks confused, like every thought is some kind of question, and he can't understand the world.

"Are you sure?" he had asked her.

"Is it okay?"

"Where are we going?"

The dog is a kind of life Nagato is trying to take care of, and Nagato becomes a life Konan tries to take care of. She takes him back to the cave, with her hand tentatively pushing his back and shoulder, and she grabs him when he stumbles.

So it's close to this: there are three. One boy knows himself, and is interested in himself, and everything. The other boy has lost himself, and does not know who he is. The girl is outside of herself, in the middle, and draws her hopes from the boy who knows himself and draws her sense of purpose, individually, from helping the boy who does not. They are balanced, during this time. Perhaps more balanced than they could understand.

It's this which allows them to live.

And they do live, for a while.

The dog does not. It passes on, as most things do, and Konan swipes the dirty tears tracks from Nagato's round cheeks. Yahiko isn't always with them. He's often up ahead, such as he is when their pet dies. He's in a stronger place, Konan knows, and Nagato knows it, too. He's not like them. He's different. They all three care for one another, but Yahiko is just -

He's not bleeding the way they are. Nagato's arms are full of the still-hot body of fur and blood - twitching and thrashing with the aftershocks of dying nerves and muscles, and Konan just looks at him, and inside her, a string tugs like: that's us. That's us in your arms. Or maybe it's you, and I'm in you.

The dog was theirs. Nagato is Konan's. Nagato and Konan are Yahiko's. This is the order, and they know it in the instinctive, primal way that a salmon knows which way to swim and when. They are Yahiko's. Nagato is Konan's. He's her charge. She found him. She dries his face. She lifts him up, as Yahiko lifted her up. And he murmurs thanks. Almost unheard.

And though hers is blue like the flowers she wants to re-make for this land and cannot, and his is red as the blood still inside him and filling his body, even their hair is the same: hacked poorly by parents who went on to disappear, ripped to split ends by the teeth of a comb, wetly tickling their necks and shoulders.

Nagato bites down on the insides of his cheeks and sucks in his breath and chokes on his sobs, and Konan stands with him, and knows she always will.

Nagato is aware, on some level, that he has no self, but he is six, and so he wouldn't quite put it like that.

Their self-perceptions are more of a nagging feeling, at that age (but even later, they never know themselves, and that's why - ), but Nagato was someone's child, and now he's not. And it's this feeling of being lost that haunts him when he looks through the wastelands; it's living as garbage, thrown away and meaningless.

War is chaos. War is emptiness and desolation and the shuddering ground splashing mud into his mouth, and if you're left behind, then that's what you are: left behind. Like there was no purpose to even being born.

His country is being torn apart, and he doesn't completely understand.

He wants to understand, though. He wants to understand why there's dirt on his hands from where he has been making mounds for the bodies of his parents. He wants to know how to get rid of the ugly, toxic blackness that's coursing through him and churning in his gut, trickling in his veins. Like the rain is washing the mud up into him; it's circulating, and he wants it out.

He wants a tonic of an answer: clean enough to fit on the line of a page.

Give me a word, he prays to the emptiness, as the war thunders on around him.

She saves him, like an angel, and takes him to Yahiko, who gives him -

Not an answer, no. But the path to an answer.

Nagato recognizes in this other boy someone who can find answers. Yahiko isn't like him. He's not always asking questions. He doesn't need questions. His parents are dead, too, but he's going to live on, he says. He's going to live on, and that's that.

Nagato wishes he could satisfy himself that easily. If only he could say it, and think it, and have that be the end.

"I'm going to be the god of this world," Yahiko says in frustration.

And he says it with conviction, so Nagato watches in awe.

And maybe for a moment, that ugly feeling lessens.

Maybe, he thinks -

Nagato does not bury the dog. He leaves it on the ground. There's not time for a burial. Yahiko has already gone ahead. Nagato hears, vaguely, as he's told to stop crying, and Konan is standing back with him – alongside him. They look up as their friend makes another speech, all the while knowing, painfully, that they aren't on that level.

He's always somewhere they're not, but that's all right. They have him, and maybe he can be a sort of portal to that other place: so they can look inside at this world they cannot actually touch.

It's Yahiko, after all, who brings them to the ninja from Konoha.

Konan's first thought, when she sees Nagato and Yahiko on the ground that day, is that Nagato isn't hers, anymore.

Her body almost freezes up, but instead she runs to him, helps him while Jiraiya helps Yahiko, but her heart is thudding thudding thudding, saying he's not mine anymore, because he's not his own anymore, either. He's someone else that day – that day he's on the ground, under the storm. He doesn't look at her with his eyes covered by the curtain of his hair; doesn't spit the sludge from his lips.

Nagato is a thousand miles away, lost to some world of pain and confusion, far beyond this ravaged country, and even after they've been tucked into their sleeping bags, Konan can feel him wandering away.

She rolls over, keeping her eyes squeezed shut tightly, counting the chirps of the crickets in the dying night. The rustle of movement accompanies Nagato's departure; his feet swish-swishing on the tatami mats – the sliding of the door and the howling wind that fills the room like the moans of their lost parents calling out to them, and Konan looks at Yahiko.

Thinks: Please, please. Don't go, where I can't follow.

Where Nagato is going.

The next three years are like the sunshine.

Like the years before the world fell down, when maybe Konan had interest in herself and maybe Nagato had a self to have interest in. Yahiko is the same as ever, because he can be.

Konan never tells her sensei that she is not so enamoured with ninjutsu, but she thinks he may know.

Konan likes rain that falls when the sun is shining and the sky is almost cloudless – rare as it is - and Konan likes the oranges their sensei cuts for them; she likes to dance in circles, barefooted, on the mats. She likes to help with the dishes, because it gives her something purposeful to put energy towards, and she can look outside the window and watch Yahiko and Nagato sparring, then Yahiko wielding his stick at insect nests while Nagato crouches to the damp earth and touches the back of his hand to some little life that's dying, some tiny plant.

In his eyes are rings. Circles.

His eyes go on forever.

Nagato looks at her wonderingly when she gives him a flower to replace the one he watched die, but in this land, they are always watching the death of some small life; some dog or some plant. The frogs are singing, sobbing in the marshes. In the firefly summer, when the trees sway and drip, the sunset heats the clouds to pink-lavender and orange that burns through one end to the other, and Konan, with aching fingers, weaves the faux-flowers into Nagato's hair – unlike Yahiko's, which is too resistant. And he wouldn't let her, anyway.

"I think he's going to leave, soon," Nagato says, and picks at a dandelion.

"Sensei?"

"Yeah."

Konan hesitates. Continues braiding in the flowers. "What do you two talk about when you go off together?"

He shifts, so she feels the lie:

"Nothing."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Nothing important."

"Okay," Konan concedes.

"I have to stop crying."

And this time, she is the one who shifts. Pulls her fingers from his hair. They hurt from forming hand signs all day. The joints are stiff from patterns and motions she's been unused to, and she does not think she will ever get used to this violence on her body, on any body. It's somehow unnatural. This is why Konan does not like ninjutsu.

She shakes her hand, so the little red strands clinging like wisps to her fingertips fall away and descend to the ground.

She doesn't say: I don't think you should.

Not then, or ever.

Though maybe she should have, she will think someday.

The world of puppy smiles in the land of death becomes another place. Their sensei is from a different world, and he brings them a sliver of this world, and there is clothing warm on a line and him sitting at the table, nodding and scrawling notes with his leaking pen. There's food now - fish caught from the nearby rivers, and cooked fowl, though the latter makes Konan's stomach ache sometimes. They're growing stronger. So much stronger, says Jiraiya-sensei. And it won't be long, they all know.

Before, they were children in a land not made for children, and now they are children in a universe that opens itself to them – that gives them the breath to gust from their lungs as they chase each other around the tall weeds behind the house they occupy. Someone else's house, once. Someone gone, gone, gone.

Yahiko has plans, and Nagato disappears with Jiraiya-sensei sometimes, and Konan knows there's some bond between them, and she knows Nagato is slipping from her even when he's with her. There's someone inside of Nagato whom she doesn't know; a stranger locked in his forever-eyes.

Sometimes Nagato sinks in himself when the three of them are sitting outside on the porch, eating berries, and their teeth are stained black and blue, and Nagato's head begins to hang. And Yahiko hits him on the back and says something that Konan knows is meant to help.

Nagato is no longer always sinking. Sometimes he's far off, reading or thinking. He's not crying so much anymore. He barely cries at all, though his eyes refuse to smile.

And maybe a smile is too much for eyes like those.

The truth is, there's one Yahiko and one Konan, but sometimes there are many Nagatos. Nagato the crying, and Nagato the serene and pensive, and Nagato who is made of a darker substance still. Nagato alone, walking and dragging his sandals through the red-brown of the earth with the line of the horizon glowing against him. Nagato who is never quite satisfied.

Who is hers, hers, hers - who was hers until the day when she found him on the ground and knew what was growing inside.

Nagato's light is the brightest she's known, and she's attracted to it like the moths to their oil lamps, but sometimes he lives like an eclipse unto himself.

Konan wants to know his mind, and does, on the night they're at the edge of the forest, away from their encampment, with the bonfire light blazing to the treetops. She captures his mind with her lips to his lips and her hands in his hands, brushing over the calluses where he's held the kunai knives.

It's like waking up into a dream; those first kisses, and their hot small bodies in the dry night on the eve of autumn, with squirms and pink cheeks and an unsatisfied need itching, burning between them.

In two days, their sensei leaves.

And Konan envies the part of Nagato he takes with him, off to the land beyond the mountain peaks.

It's actually Yahiko who cries.

His features drag themselves down into a soggy mess of sobs, puddling over the love he had for that man. Yahiko loves loudly, with all of himself, and Konan puts her arms around him and pats his shoulders. It's okay, she says. It's okay. Yahiko, you can't keep crying, forever.

When Nagato cried, it was because he was incomplete, but when Yahiko cries, it's because he's whole.

And yet something has changed. Konan can feel it when they return to their little house, when they slide the door open, and Nagato disappears from them.

As he does more and more often now.

Nagato no longer needs them in the same way.

Because Nagato has killed.

Because Nagato has gone to a place where neither of them could follow, into the forever of his eyes, beyond the mountains, when the dead painted his fingers red and the rain cleansed him again.

Nagato lives in a land of shadow and death, one with the war, and on some higher level.

And then Nagato lives with them.

Come, come.

You must be so lonely, being God.

Slum children can make love.

Or mate, perhaps. War children: dropped out of mothers now dried up and dead, their footprints growing with age as their careers track a history through the farmlands, with their umbilical cords cut off from their sources - yet always around their necks like nooses dragging them from womb to tomb. Wild children, tamed for three years. They surge with a life unlike that possessed by the children of nobility, in cities not sinking, against sunsets not burnt and blazing.

It's in the sorghum that they set their bodies down and curl their toes to the rhythms that create life – that affirm life.

It's been five years since sensei left, and the organization has just begun. It's sprung up wild and tangled from Yahiko's imagination, and from his persuasive powers, as he's found and rallied other children like themselves. He was always good at that.

Yahiko is Konan's brother, or he may as well be. They were meant to be siblings. They share similar eyes, and a birth date, and when he teases her, and Nagato, it's like. She is glad they are his.

Konan feels bolder - with a flower in her bobbed hair that she's cut again today (a soldier's cut), the dark lines she's smeared across her eyelids, and roughspun cloth hiding the form she's been shaping in her teenage years.

Konan is sprouting out in directions she never knew she could, and it's been embarrassing and painful. Yahiko pointed out her chest, once. Went so far as to poke it.

Konan felt herself turn a shade of pink which didn't match her colours.

Coming into yourself is difficult, when there's been no interest there for years.

It's an older woman with sun-cracked skin and tied-up hair – one of the organization - who shows Konan what to do for herself each month, and what more central use for her paper jutsu there may be. It's miserable, and Konan can't say why, but it makes her feel like filth.

It makes her feel like filth when this woman says, "The world will never listen to you. This is the path we walk. We wear the mask. People like us."

Women, she doesn't say.

"Yahiko and Nagato will listen to me. They always have," Konan answers.

"I pray that you're right, and the days are changing," the woman murmurs. Tips her rice hat, and leaves.

Konan forgets about that conversation, and many others. The sorghum grows tall and catches the wind. Sings its flute melody over her skin; goose prickles on her arms - and eating dates in the evening, in the tent. Kicking the rain water from her boots and standing at the curtain of their newest residence, where business is conducted. She watches the clouds beyond the curtain and wishes the limits of the human imagination and the physical space could be less than they are, such that she could fashion origami castles for herself. And for Nagato, and Yahiko.

It's one evening when the rain has turned the sky prismatic with moisture. The moon is plump and the clouds are an inviting halo, and Konan thinks, she really thinks, if she believed in God -

Nagato is with her, and they've been into the sake, and Yahiko is negotiating, and he's told them to wait for a short time, and they have nothing to do but wait, so Konan asks, "Why did you reject leadership?"

His breath is hot and sharp and sparked with alcohol. "I'm not meant to be a leader."

"I see potential."

It's hardly a whisper.

Pause. "He would've wanted it, anyway. There's no reason to make a scene."

"He offered it to you."

"But he would've wanted it."

Konan knows he's right about that point.

"And I don't have to lead to utilize my ninjutsu," he adds. "So it doesn't really matter. You know he really would've wanted to be our leader. It's best this way."

"I want him to be happy, too," Konan replies. Swallows another shot. The burn goes down her throat. "Both of you, more than anything. I just don't want you to..."

Falters.

"Underestimate yourself. That's all."

He hms. "I don't, really. Not anymore."

She can't tell if she thinks he's lying. Maybe he's not. Her brain is fogged and her lips are tingling and she with her hooded eyes regards him against their firefly backdrop. He'll probably always be a quiet and retiring person, just as she is. He'll probably always be someone whose Self isn't all there; pieces cracked or missing. It's good that they have Yahiko.

"I think we're drunk," she admits.

"Tipsy," he corrects.

"All right. Touch me."

"What?"

Doesn't even sound like a question. More like: "What."

And she giggles. Nearly snorts.

It's because her breasts are heavy and swollen and aching under the roughspun cloth, which is suffocating her with scratchy hotness, and right now it's rubbing too hard against her nipples and arousing her even more – now, when her body has changed in all these ways, and she's foggy, and her sensitivity is at its peak. But Konan can't quite articulate this. So she half-closes her eyes and says, "Just, please."

She begins to lift her robe; he reaches out, as if to halt her, but then he twists the fabric in his hand for a moment and lets go. Reaches closer.

His fingernails scrape through the hot sweat running across her tight abdomen.

Konan jerks the sack (it may as well be) over her head and strips away the makeshift undergarments, letting all of herself fall out.

They go down in the sorghum, and clothes vanish in stages, or not at all, until their lips and tongues fumble over one another, and there's all that hot metallic taste, and the taste of sake, and the taste of rain: when they can make their mouths fit together, lock like jigsaw puzzles clumsily catching.

Their hitai-ate don't even come off; their foreheads just clink against one another, and their windburnt noses nuzzle like a prayer said in silence, in unison.

Her breasts fill his hands. Oh - and her belly corkscrews. Sore; pleasure-pain from the way he cups them, and massages the buds of nipples.

The lamps filter through the haze of rain and Nagato's breaths gust over the sound of the wind, and his hair tickles her face as she moans softly at the feel of the familiar tightness deep inside; in her belly and chest and between her legs, and she moans sweetly, plaintively, for him to continue – continue please. Please.

Slum children can make love. Can rut – maybe more crudely speaking – in the fields, in the tangle of heady desire and the absence of restraint, or society. If they can survive to mate, they will mate to survive. And so the actual sex is short, because he comes too soon and she doesn't come at all (until afterwards, when she touches herself and finds the sufficient strokes to clench and unclench the muscles that have frozen and gone rigid in her arousal).

But what she mostly remembers is how coiled her body can become, and how hard it can spasm, and how his breaths taste in her own mouth, feel in her own throat. Konan sucks her fingertips and finds the flavour of herself, and sake, and the rinds of crisps from dinner crumbled powder-fine across her nails. She remembers how her paper flower droops over her eyelid and sags, how her hair is disheveled and needs combing like you wouldn't believe, but above all there, there's this feeling of weightlessness.

It's different from how she's felt all her life, having no interest in herself.

It's as if she's up in the place with the stars, fallen off the shore, off the waterfront - where the line of the sky meets the land, where the water ends, and there is only clarity, pink and orange and purple and black.

As if all the colours of her native country have washed through her. Her spirit drinks them to the core.

Like the thrum of a string song running through her veins and tickling her stomach, as Nagato kisses her shoulders and neck and back, then massages her muscles in semi-circles, squeezes until she takes his long fingers and mouths the sweat away.

Konan walks back to their tents when the stars are out fully - with lovely bruise-bites on her neck and upper arms. On her breasts, teeth-flowers blossom from where the throbbing skin was sucked.

She remembers the sensations that accompanied these decorations, every one, and pockets each away inside folds of memories. Covers herself up with the high-collared robe. Hides every inch.

And sleeps.

"All right, you jerks - " Yahiko says, and drags Nagato forward a bit by the wrist, and then runs to Konan, who is crouching behind the makeshift hill, on the other side of which is a trench. " - hey, wait."

She looks behind herself and swipes a handful of crusted over dirt off her boot heel.

"Hey, Konan, stop that! You're not even paying attention."

He fists her bun and gives it a yank.

"Yahiko," she growls (in as much as Konan ever growls), "you stop it. We're not ten anymore, and I'm paying perfect attention. What is it that you want?"

"You spend more time worrying about your hair and makeup and clothing than you do worrying about our mission," he tells her, and sounds a little bemused. "Not scolding. Just, you know. You do."

And it's a kind of strange moment. A kind of surreal moment. You might refer to it as an "epiphany", if you were so inclined. But an epiphany of what?

Konan looks up, looks at the back of her friend's head, where he's tying his hitai-ate, and tufts of orange-red hair flatten under it.

It's another of those moments: a moment where she feels there's something she's thinking or meant to say that she can't quite capture with her mouth or mind. "Our" mission? Our mission?

It's never been our mission, Yahiko.

Her eyes shift toward Nagato, who is looking downward, somewhere off in thought.

It's been everyone else's mission, Konan realizes.

Everyone's but mine.

And this, for all that it hits her, is a frightening thought. And maybe she's not accepted it yet, or allowed herself to. Because if it's not her mission, she thinks, then what is her mission?

Not her hair or her makeup or her clothing, as he suggested.

She watches Yahiko as he reviews the map for where they're going now, and she swallows hard.

Not her appearance in any respect, no (because she has no interest in herself). He was all wrong about that. You were all wrong, Yahiko – she wants to say. That's just something I do to pass the time.

Not her origami, though it's important to her. It's important to her for a reason – one that she's never thought Yahiko understood, and when she really lets herself think about how he doesn't understand, she aches in some dull sense: a throb all over.

(And Konan knows she wants to believe that Nagato is different, and different from most boys she's met, and that he understands - but maybe he doesn't, either.)

Not those things. Not any of those things are her life. Her priorities.

"All right," Yahiko says, and sucks in a breath. "I need you guys to listen carefully, because here's what we're going to do."

Konan rises, slowly, and she moves to stand behind him, and Nagato moves to stand behind him; they really don't look at one another, now, and it's noon and the sun is sweltering – drying up all the mud, which is now cracking underfoot. And when Yahiko looks forward, the sun is on his face, burning sweat trails down his temples.

Konan can only see his expression from the side, but she thinks his face is still too youthful to wear such a serious expression. It doesn't fit him well.

"And Konan, I have a very important role in our mission for you," he adds.

Folds the map, and puts it away.

"Our mission", again.

My mission is just you two, Yahiko, she doesn't say.

Because maybe it would sound frivolous, to him. To them. Like her looks, or origami, her lack of interest in jutsu, or herself. Frivolous – most pursuits are – when contrasted against the need to bring peace to a warring country.

Paper drops from around her wrist, from out of the sleeves of her cloak. She crushes it underfoot.

"We're going to see Hanzou now," Yahiko says, more solemnly than he's ever said anything.

Konan nods, and Nagato nods. And their footsteps are loud on the broken ground.

It's been dry lately - too dry for the season, but they all know the rains will return.

And soon, very soon, the sky opens, again.

It's raining when they get there.

Raining harder than it has in days – weeks, even – enough to earn Rain Country its name. Nagato stands among the puddles and looks up. It's all streaming down his face. Plastering his hair to his skin.

Konan stands beside him with her jaw clenched, and thinks she must look a perfect warrior. The robe hides her body. The metal of the kunai knives is digging into her sides and hips. As she stands there, Konan remembers the techniques her sensei taught her; they rush into her mind in whorls of paper shuriken. She's ready. She's ready. She can do it, if need be. If he – if anyone – tries to hurt them -

She can kill. She is ready to kill.

Hanzou shakes Yahiko's hand. The meeting continues.

Here's the agreement: Hanzou will give them supplies if they go on ahead, but a vast bulk of their group is missing.

Yahiko apparently expected this.

"I'm taking Nagato with me. You both know why," he murmurs, with a slight conspiratorial glance at the other boy.

Yes, they know why. Presumably, no one else knows about the rinnegan, and Yahiko, as their leader, stands to be in a perilous situation. If he's going out alone, he might get attacked. He'll need back-up. Nagato will be his bodyguard. They've already gone over the plan. Konan knows her part of it.

"Take care, little sister," Yahiko says. He sounds as optimistic as ever, but there's a bite of something in his voice. Tension. Worry. Yet his tone sing-songs over such trifles, and he slaps Konan's back. Gives her shoulders a stroke. Sloppily kisses her cheek with a fierceness which takes her aback. "I'm sure you'll be fine. I trust you."

"Jeez, Yahiko. Jeez. I told you not to call me that," she teases, as they always do. "We have the same birthday. I'm not your little anything."

Then more seriously: "You don't have to talk that way, though, Yahiko. Really. It's not like I'll never see you again."

Yahiko just kind of smiles in that way he does, and yanks Konan's bun – like usual, and like usual, she says, "Cut it out!"

Of course, she doesn't yell it very loudly, because half their people are nearby.

These motions are like a rehearsal between the two of them, now (three, when Yahiko can involve Nagato more in his side of things); it's practiced and expected. A sort of dance: step-step, the kind of things only friends and siblings and faux-siblings can understand. Yahiko can't not give them a hard time. They can't not respond according to what the designated response is supposed to be: mock-indignation, in the majority of such cases.

These are the precious pieces of their childhood that they carry with them even now that they are the leaders of a rebel faction so strong it has caused Hanzou to take notice.

They need their pieces. And they need Yahiko.

He's never mentioned it, but Konan knows (and Nagato probably knows, but he's never mentioned it, either) Yahiko must be aware that she and Nagato have been going out to the fields together, and visiting one another's tents. Lounging about in their quiet appreciation of things. They've made no effort to hide these goings-on, though they are not given to being demonstrative in front of others - and indeed, even as Yahiko says his enthusiastic goodbye, Nagato stands aside looking pensive, and his own departure is silent.

But Yahiko is too keen on them both not to grasp what's been happening for a while now, though maybe he tries to unsee it.

Maybe it weirds him out, thinking of them like that. Nagato, his partner in crime, and little sister?

But it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter, because there are so many more important things in this world than kids messing around.

Though in the end, they were really nothing more.

== part one of a fic I have been working on for a few days, since I was disappointed with chapter 449, and hoped to write my own take on Nagato(Pain)/Konan; I'm simply hoping to embellish/fix the canon story, and add in my own bits. To that end, a good bit of material is being re-told here. I hope that's not too off-putting.

my nods: I don't write in the hopes of capturing any particular form of literary style, but I always think some modernist works are filtering through my mind a little. Cane, by Jean Toomer, kept filling my thoughts as I sought to describe the scenery. The bit about "slum children making love" v. how more noble kids do it I penned with Nabokov in mind (Humbert Humbert's laments at the beginning of Lolita), and Konan as a girl with no interest in herself was somewhat inspired by Milkman Dead, the protagonist of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, who is described as having lost all interest in himself. There are also little bits of T.S. Eliot-inspired moments in this piece, but they'll probably become more apparent in the next part.

(Which is not to say I try to make my work even remotely resemble the works of any of the aforementioned authors - not that I even could if I desired to do so - only that little lines or stylistic flourishes or ideas get trapped in my head and play like records.)

I wrote most of this chapter to "Redemption", by Conjure One (great song to write to) and "Grey Street", by Dave Matthews Band, which ends up being a very Konan-appropriate tune. :)