Chapter 3: a terrible beauty

Title: Shards of the dying sun.
Genre: Angst/tragedy + romance + general.
Characters/Pairing: Pain (Nagato) x Konan
Rating: R (M).
Warnings: Violence and sexuality. HEED PLZ.
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 everyone who looked over this chapter in advance for me. You know who you are.

"It's a jutsu," he tells her.

Massages his eyelids on the eyes which still aren't right in this face.

"Are you in pain?" she asks.

"Delirious with it."

"Oh."

"It's a jutsu," he repeats. "Like the statue. Nothing more extreme. I'm still me."

"I know," she says. Adds: "Nagato."

"It was the only way."

Konan sits on a stool in the corner, with her hands folded in her lap. There is mud and rainwater in her hair, on her skin. It's dying to clay in the grooves of her palms and caking the slim tissue between her fingers. The mud has gotten under her cloak; it's all over her chest and thighs, and across the soles of her feet. Her sickness is fading. She and Nagato slept. They cooked their dinner. They ate in silence. They are alone. And she has no energy, but she refuses to lie back down: she's been making busy with cleaning the pots and tending the evening fire.

Sleep isn't helping. They can both agree on that.

Konan, at least (Nagato seems to have a renewed liveliness, and he's pacing), feels like she could lie down and sleep the remainder of her life away, but that's the problem: it's too embracing, sleep. It feels like too much heavy nothingness. It's the sensation of being smothered beneath gauze or drowning in a pool of warm water, and she wakes aching and miserable and drained, full of phantom thoughts.

When she kneels down and peels the top of the paper shroud aside, she feels him watching her from behind. She can see the bones through his skin; could count his ribs, if she lifted his clothing.

He looks out at her from one eye; hair obscures the other.

She wants to rip that paper aside and get a look at what's left of his legs.

"We're going to Amegakure no Sato tomorrow."

His lips are broken.

"How do I look to you right now?" she asks.

"Better than I look to you," he says, and coughs, through a mouthful of phlegm.

She props him up, and he coughs; twists himself enough so that he coughs towards his shoulder. Sucks his breath and clears his throat. His exhalations are harsh and laboured, shaking his now worn frame.

"Cover your eye," he tells her, and she hesitates, but does so.

He holds his fingers up. Very close to her face, so he's nearly touching her nose.

She counts the seconds, and at ten: "The other one, now."

And at ten again, she uncovers them. "Unfocus," he says, and his fingers blur.

She's done this trick before, as a girl, with her own fingers, or near objects before her eyes – during moments of rest, lazily staring at whatever was in her field of vision.

"If you focus, it will become clear," Nagato says, "but close one eye, then the other, and you see you're getting two different things. That's the only example I can begin to give you."

That's just it: his eyes take him to a place she cannot understand, mentally or emotionally. She cannot – no one else can – know how it feels to look at the world from two sets of eyes. She cannot know the mysteries of what those supposedly-legendary eyes must see. It is akin to a language which she cannot speak, and never will. And it makes her feel far from Nagato, all these pieces of him she cannot touch, but here he is, unnervingly cool against her hands.

They are alone.

It comes to her, as she's examining his injuries: they are alone.

"It's just like before," she murmurs. "Everything is gone."

Starting over, like all those years ago.

"You need to wash off," says his other voice, from the opposite side of the room, in that way which sends the shivers up her spine.

She does not turn. But Nagato succeeds in convincing her (it does not take much), and he heats the water buckets, wrestles her from her robe, and helps her into the metal basin they have been using for a tub. She sinks down: feels like she could pleasantly melt, and the heat washes into her sinuses and she feels open and the sadness begins to pour inside once more. Nagato soaps her and runs his fingers through her hair, which she washes fitfully, as the water turns brown.

And then she stands up, shivering, as he pours another bucket – cooler this time – and dumps it down her, rinsing the remainder of the muck away. She trembles, and towels off, and afterwards, he assumes her former position on the stool, with his chin in his fists, and she sits with her back propped against the wall and looks up at him, blinking slowly. He thumbs her lashes.

We were trained for this, she thinks. Trained by Jiraiya-sensei. Trained in the organization. Trained by life: War is hell. It's true.

And shinobi do not show their feelings.

"I'm going to pour one for myself, now," he says.

"How does it feel?" she asks, lifelessly. "Is the pain beginning to ebb? Does it hurt in – that body?"

She turns away when he undresses. She doesn't mean to, but her own body takes the initiative.

"It disperses the feeling," he answers. "There's more of me now."

Gradually, she turns a little. Then a little more. Until she's looking at him: in the mix of light from the candles and stars. The patches around the black chakra-conducting inserts are red, as if blistered; his hair is matted and plastered to his forehead by sweat, and his eyes are foggy and tired – probably matching her own.

"Do the piercings hurt?"

"No," he says, "those are where the sensations are coming in. Those may as well be my nerve endings, now. But this body does hurt."

He looks down. She follows his gaze – to where a fatal-looking cut runs clean along his abdomen. It will always be there, now: someday, a long, brownish-pink, faded scar - where the skin will grow hard and rise upwards.

"To save us," she whispers.

"Another casualty of war," he says.

Don't talk about him so coldly, she thinks. Doesn't say. Her insides are knotting up with memories, with the sound of her friend's voice – the tone and the laughter which is now lost to her – him always at their sides, for years, growing tall beside them, and suffering beside them, and keeping them secure and on the straight path. How many times did they each think – each say to themselves – that it was good they had Yahiko?

"I'll miss his laughter, most," she says, without really thinking.

Because she and Nagato never laughed, otherwise. Only when he goaded them to it.

She'll miss his laughter, and his smiles: which will never return.

"Everything dies," Nagato says. "Birds and plants. Dogs. Parents. Friends."

His voice is not like Yahiko's; it is hard-edged and full of ice chips.

"He was with us, and talking to me. And then he was against me, and falling, and his blood was on my blade, and covering my hands. That's how life works for us, Konan."

Her back presses into the wall, and she raises her hands to her mouth; bites down on her broken nails. She cried, earlier, but now once more, the water is frozen inside of her. She is as dry as the paper she folds, and the pain comes and goes in waves.

"That's how it is in war. We know that now," Nagato says.

And Konan remembers all the little lives they tried to save: the flowers that wilted and the bird with the broken wing – the puppy which followed Nagato and wagged its tail when he offered it bread. She remembers those distant losses from a time back when they could scarcely speak to convey what they felt, and they could not name or know their loss: they knew only that they had been someone's children, and then they were not.

Konan does not even remember her mother's and father's faces, nor the shades of their hair. She cannot look into them, in her memory, and find herself; nor can she look into the mirror and find them.

At least Yahiko and Nagato had been able to remember those whom they came from.

All Konan remembers, from her first years, are the blue flowers which used to grow where she lived, and which died.

All of her life, she has been folding paper in her hands in the hopes of re-making them. Holding onto them.

"They're going to come after us." Her throat is parched. "Nagato, you know they probably will."

She does look. She watches with wide, transfixed eyes that come into focus – as the water runs all down the naked flesh, and he soaps himself, and the faintest hair of a wince twists his face at the feel of the lye on his (his? Whose?) fresh marks.

"Perhaps," he agrees. "If they haven't come to the conclusion that we've died. But we're going to them before they can."

"What do you have in mind?"

His breathing heaves his chest, and his own eyes look like they did the night in the sorghum fields, when he had had too much to drink.

"Finishing what we started."

It's no surprise: she sensed it shortly after Yahiko died. Nagato's words, then – and the hints he's been dropping, since; the implications of it all. She can hear the cold, calcified fury that's been leaking through his detached tone, and she remembers, like a nightmare, those horrible sounds and that terror as the blood flowed, and all around her, humans screamed and died. It was muted by the shock, by losing Yahiko, and his warm body in her arms, and her cheek to the crown of his head, but -

She remembers.

He rinses himself, and his hand comes down on the edge of the basin, and Konan thinks he looks like he wants to just tear the tin to pieces.

He could, too. Nagato really could.

"I'm tired of living like this, Konan. So we're not going to, anymore."

Coming home to a ragged tent -

Cleaning yourself with lye soap and hard water that's almost as dirty as you – that scrubs off your skin in flakes, even as it scrubs off the dirt -

No running water, and no certain meals, and growing up eating things you'd rather forget -

That's life in a war zone. No orphanages, no. No adults. Begging, you get used to that: you lose your shame in a hurry. And then you mourn for your shame, but only after you've managed to feed yourself at last. And the loss: everything is transitory. Parents go, and every other organic thing does.

Dreams die, and so do dreamers.

And everything you think you've held onto all these years to make for yourself a happier future?

It's all a lie. There are no answers; not here.

And Nagato decides he's had enough.

Jiraiya told him: I think you have to find your answers for yourself.

And he agrees: but not any answers Jiraiya probably would've sided with.

Yahiko said: I'm going to end war. I'm going to become God of this world.

And he's dead.

He's dead, and that's how death is curious. He was there, with them all these years, and now he's gone. Taken out of the picture. Erased. And, thanks to Nagato, a number of others were erased right along with him.

It's a funny thing, an impossible thing: that feeling like your heart is swelling up with hope, and then. Just.

Nothing.

Because -

Nagato's heart had been swelling. Jiraiya-sensei had given him hope. And Yahiko had given him hope. Yahiko's dream had sustained him, and his sensei's words - the power inside of him, and the insistence that that power meant something, and the insistence that a will towards a positive future meant something: yes, he had believed. The world could be changed. The small Rain Country could be saved. He could be saved. It could happen.

He read everything he could get his hands on during the years following his sensei's departure. He was one of the few orphans who was fortunate enough to remember how to read, and this made him especially valuable to Yahiko's organization. Nagato knew things about the world. He knew things about the Great Nations. Even if he preferred not to take on a leadership position, he was valuable to the cause.

And his heart had been filling up. There would be peace. He would have a real home. A roof over his head: an actual roof – not tarp that the rain would drench through. He could tell everyone the truth about himself, and Konan, and marry her, finally. Give her stability, too.

He had not forgotten about the relationship, unspoken and unplanned as it was, but there was so much else to sort through. She understood.

And what happened?

Jiraiya-sensei abandoned them to die. Yahiko is dead. The organization is gone. And his body? There's no undoing the damage. He'll live in pain for the remainder of his life, but there was no other way. And that's what Nagato finds his mind hanging up on: there was no escape.

All of the answers he had sought? Didn't accomplish a thing.

The reading? Meant nothing.

The hope? Wasted.

And he and Konan have their lives, but how do you even begin to pick up the pieces when your lives are almost all you have?

(Even the face in the mirror is not right; is not his.)

Crippled and living on some disgusting life support system: that's all this is. Life support.

So they can lick their wounds and curl in pain, in misery, and shame.

So the guilt, remorse, and hatred can burn them away -

- when there's no solution, and no path to resolution, and no one to lash out at -

And Nagato decides he's had enough.

"If I have more bodies, I can be invincible," he says at the dawn of the next day.

Konan gives him a weary look, but says nothing. They pack up, and she packs him up, and together, they depart. They leave their meager belongings, and they do not look back. They will not look back. They will not be returning.

"We could die," she says. "This is like walking through death's door."

He knows. He voices this. But between dying, or continuing to live like trash, there is no choice.

The choice has been made for them.

Maybe it was taken out of their hands the moment Yahiko's life was, and the moment their own lives were tossed aside – Nagato used to bring about a means to an end; a tool of war, and Konan a hostage – shame, always shame. Remorse, and rage at nothing. At everything.

It's the helplessness that's killing him, so he resolves not to be helpless.

They walk for ten miles - as their canteens drop to the ground, empty.

Fifteen and Konan is panting slightly, but she looks like she's trying not to. Remember your training, Nagato tells her. Remember your chuunin exams?

"I remember," she says.

Twenty and she's looking worse for wear, and the sun is passing on in the sky, and it's almost evening already. They have been walking all day, through the hills and valleys and crags.

"Now," he says, and she lifts her hands, and scatters.

They've saved all their chakra for this.

And when he lifts his hand, and the gates to Amegakure bend – bend, bend – until they tear off their hinges, and metal rips and screeches and blows into the air -

Paper gusts into the airflow.

He walks inside.

It's the feeling of being disembodied that's frightening.

Like you could blow asunder at any moment.

Or, in this country, as if the rain could wash you away.

But there is no rain: he's seen to that, somehow. The sky is clouded and ominous.

And it doesn't feel like herself, and it's easy enough to think it's not herself, because herself is all over the place, and herself is coming together as she watches, from her forming eyes, and twists her hand, as the paper covers a mouth and a face and she hears – feels, from those spider-webbed non-nerves that connect each sheet – a body suffocating, gurgling and drowning into itself, and thrashing.

It thrashes for too long, and then it's still, and all she can see is the band around its head with the four slashes like those she once wore.

Sheets twist, become fingers, and her hands become fists by her sides, with her fingernails digging into her palms, reminding her that the skin is there, and she can dig to the blood – if she wants.

She looks down.

Wills the paper to curl away, and the dead eyes stare at her without reproach. Blue. The face is nondescript. But young, like hers. Could be her age – and Yahiko's. A mess of freckles, and chapped lips. Soggy black hair.

No, she thinks, and squeezes her cloak at the chest; bunches the fabric against her sternum: No, there's nothing there. It's all empty.

"End your jutsu," Nagato yells from somewhere under the sky, and the wind almost blows the words away. "I'm going to light the city."

"Do you want me to stay with your body?" she asks, or thinks she does -

- must have -

- because he replies: "Hide it."

When she gets to Nagato, he feels too light in her arms. But she lifts him. Cradles him, and everything is exhaustion and air and weightlessness as she makes her way through the updraft and up the base of a tower, where, gasping, she lays him down on one of the overhanging stones – where so much metal is twisting down at her, with faces and eyes and tongues and teeth.

Amegakure.

It must be heaven.

Or hell. Some place in their stories. Some afterlife.

Konan is looking up into a demon's face, looking down into hers.

Nagato coughs.

Someone is yelling behind her as the next gravity pulse crushes the rocks, and if she turns, she'll see him crunching bones on a skull or with a hand underfoot – with the fingers smashing, bending backwards, or popping down into the pits. Battle is noise. She reaches forward; frees more of Nagato, and he slumps, tilts his head. Then looks forward, and over her shoulder, and past her: very alert, and says, "I'm going to concentrate."

The fires cut the last word off at "tra-". Konan cringes.

Nagato's head falls, but she can see his eyes are still open. He's dragging the breaths in.

Konan turns.

Turns back to the chaos: doesn't know what possesses her to do it.

There's Amegakure, orange with the flames whose heat has been licking up her spine, and she runs, runs, past the slick streets, and over the pockmarks, beyond the straw huts dissolving, and through and under the smoke that trickles down her throat, into her lungs: burns. Coughs, and her eyes are watering, and there is some dying body groaning, begging please, help through a mouth of blood – and somewhere some cans of oil and tar and pitch and everything have been torched; have been smashed with a gravity well and have felt the tensei - the chakra; his – and the sky is full of cawing, fleeing birds, and the horses and mules almost trip her up.

As she chases the wraith through the streets.

Where he goes, where the flames make him glow orange, and shine on all his metal parts, and shine on his eyes – reflected off some broken window like liquid metal.

Come back, come back, come back.

(I helped make you.)

And her feet in the puddles, and people shoving her, and he's moving up ahead; ahead, parting crowds – waves of them – tossed through the air. Through shattering windows. Clearing a path. As if his feet aren't even on the ground, barely touching, and Konan just can't scream over all the sound, but the words are catching inside of her, anyway. So beyond the swarm, past the sidewalks and cobbled streets – and the lights are glowing in the evening sky, and she's never been beneath lights like these before.

Beautiful blue and green and red lights, flashing. Like insects.

The tower rushes up onto her; onto them – appears from nowhere, from beyond the throngs of vanishing humans and animals and buildings, and then the guards are charging: thrown back, crushed into the pavement. He's over the threshold, and fifty feet behind, so is she.

Konan runs.

He finds his mark on the third floor.

They are having a meeting. A dinner party of clients: ladies in perfume and dresses and food on the table the likes of which he's never been able to eat, not a day in his life, and men appareled in the armour and raiments of high society. Waiting. Just arrogantly waiting, while their city has burned. Waiting, he thinks, like people who never lose. Who never even consider that they could lose.

And, oh - the looks on their faces when they turn to the doorway.

Like they've seen a ghost.

"Yahiko," Hanzou says.

"Didn't you say you were tired of looking at my face?"

Nagato does not smile.

Hanzou looks him in the eyes. Then, his own eyes narrow. "You -"

A wave of his hand, and those in uniform around him charge – and there's a rain of blades, but he repels them, easily. Crashes through, and bounds across the table – across the room to where "Salamander" Hanzou is making another run for it: already has the hands raised, but this time, the five seconds are up in time for Nagato to grab him with his other jutsu, which pulls the much larger man up against him.

So they're face to face.

To face to face to face.

So he can smell, nearly taste, the sweat that's draining down his face beneath the heavy clothes; beneath the improbable device. So he can feel the shivers that belie the rigid attention and fearlessness of shinobi training.

He won't scream, but that's all right.

Nagato tightens his grip on his collar.

And he looks around the room, at the faces of the others in attendance; stunned and hesitant and uncertain, dazed and bleeding their fear into his atmosphere, and he can feel it over his skin like electricity, like the coming of a storm. The coming of rain. And thunder. And in that moment, the world is perfectly clear.

It's all so perfectly clear.

"Pray," he says, quietly. "For God's mercy. For mine."

Drops the body, and drops a black rod from his coat sleeve.

And then the quiet ends, and the blows begin.

Until the device is broken.

And the teeth break out.

And the nose smashes into the face.

Until there is very little left of the face.

Until the head is blood, and pulp.

It's only a matter of a minute.

And then he looks calmly – at the rod.

Dripping, as it is, with human remains.

His gaze shifts to the next person in line.

Konan wakes slowly. Stretches and yawns; rubs the sleep from her eyes, and lets the dreams subside in their fitful manner. She is sore, but not as sore as she feels she should be, and when she realizes that she is indeed waking up from a slumber, she sits upright in a start and pats the surface beneath her.

It's not a sleeping bag. She's not on a tatami mat, or on the ground in a tent.

There are sheets, and blankets, and an ornate covering of gilded markings smoothing across rumpled fabric of an expensive-looking red. And pillows. There are actually pillows. The feeling of being cushioned among so many soft, alien objects makes her feel curious. Memories that are not memories – sensations from another lifetime: a little girl in a bed - and she can almost feel the comb dragging through her broken hair.

"I found you outside the door of the dining room on the third floor."

That voice again. She doesn't think she'll ever grow accustomed to it. But there it is: Nagato, yes, at the window. With his hands folded behind his back. And the sunlight is falling through the beams of the window, such that his feet rest on squares of gold, and all the shades of orange-auburn in his hair are visible.

And it's just like Yahiko, but really, nothing like Yahiko, in the least amount.

"You must have passed out from fatigue."

"I did."

Then: "What happened last night?"

"Well," he says, "the revolution has come and gone."

Fidgets, and he's still facing away from her, and the way he wears his hitai-ate, and the way it pushes and shapes the flow of his hair: from behind, there is no difference. But the body is stiff and languid and contemplative.

"A terrible beauty has been born."

"What if someone attacks us?"

"There are no shinobi guards left to attack us within this city, and if by some miracle a few survived, they will be easy enough to dispatch. It is ours."

She climbs from the bed. Feels back in her body, once more. Like nothing from last night or the past few days has been real. There's soreness, but also the warm assurance of feet on carpet – real carpet – and a roof over her head, with the elements locked outside, for a change, and when she nears Nagato, she can feel the daylight on her skin. You're alive. Yes, I am. Yes, we are.

And they've won this round.

And for now, they are safe.

She can see her fragmented reflection in the glass. Her cloak is torn, and the motes of light filter through her, pure white. Her current flower is ruined with dirt. Likewise, her hair runs in wild disarray, and her shadow is smeared.

His eyes take in the sight of her in the glass, and just as she meets them and turns her attention towards his reflection, he moves to face her.

"I told you, Konan. We're not going to live like trash. Not anymore."

The window is half-open. The air smells cool, like it does after the rain has come.

And for the first time in many many sunrises and sunsets, her hands reach out.

Her long fingers spread, and the sun slides between them; fills up her eyes, and behind her eyelids, and then his hands find hers.

Their bodies find their way back into the bed, into the tangle of sheets and pillows and the soft territory of foam and springs, and his lips are on her lips. Finally. Finally. She could cry, from the sweet relief, and it doesn't even matter, then, what he looks like, because Nagato is Nagato, and she feels Nagato under his skin; in the flex of the muscles on his face, and its tautness. Tastes Nagato in the movement of the lips broken by metal.

"I thought I'd lost you both," she murmurs between kisses, and the gentle press of tongues. "I was so worried."

It is the first time she has admitted it: aloud, or to herself.

Don't scare me like that again.

The world is becoming a heap of cinders; or it already has become one, but it does not matter. It may matter later. It does not matter now.

Konan found him, years before, after losing herself, and she wants nothing more than to bathe in closeness and be held against what lies beyond these walls.

His hand pushes her hair from her forehead. Knocks the flower away. She opens her cloak. Slides her panties to her ankles and kicks them to the floor. Nagato is breathing hard, in that body. Have you even gotten any sleep? she wonders. Does not ask.

Lays her back, and his hands take hold of first one boot, then the other. Removes them.

Konan catches herself gasping as his hands flatten her to the bed. So her own hooded, dreamy eyes are caught staring up at his intense ones, staring down at her.

There's an aggression in him – a force - she's never experienced in their previous encounters.

As he kisses his way down her navel, and bites and nips and licks mark the path, she spreads herself, and they meld together when his hands shakily cup and massage her breasts, and she arches, and his lips and tongue work against her swollen clit.

Konan arches; buries her fingers into hair: that's the wrong texture, and -

Squeezes her pelvis, so she's tight almost to the point of pain when his fingers push in.

Squeezes and pushes, rhythmically, and shudders with a jolt as he flattens his tongue over her.

Konan just keeps ignoring the hair that's in her fingers that feels wrong, as metal scrapes her, tickles, and she feels her thighs shake as she pulls herself open, as he works himself against her - like digging, like chipping her to pieces, and she winds tighter, and she can see her breasts rising, pillowed on her chest, perfect points of her hard nipples, which fingers tweak and roll hard enough to leave pink-red in their wake.

And the bones and joints of his own killing fingers find something – aroused and swollen inside her, she does not know the part's name, as she pushes downdowndown, and the wet sounds; the sharp movement on the pulsing, over-sensitized lips, up to the clit, which throbs as his tongue curves against it. Throbs, until -

"Nagato," she cries out.

One hand in his hair, the other gripping the sheets; nails in so deep like she's trying to shred them.

Like she's trying to hold on for her life.

Konan comes, her back a perfect bow.

Coming, for her, is: when your body goes so tense that all the muscles contract.

Contract, and contract, until you're nothing but a hot, writhing coil. Until it's all hard and stiff and spasming the tension out. Rolling, pressing it from the inside out, until it's gone.

And then you just inhale.

Inhale the sunlight, and the rain, and the scent of fabric and dust and pollen.

Afterwards, he pulls his body across her slick skin, climbs the length of the bed, so his weight is pressing down on her, and she yanks at his clothing, such that soon both of their robes are spread out beneath them.

"Where are you?" Konan asks between kisses.

He knows what she means: "My body is taken care of. I'll show you, later."

It's good enough for now, when his eyes are making her feel wild, and her skin is ready: all the nerves feel hot, and close to the surface. When they are both completely divested of any coverings, and skin is on skin is on skin, her fingertips fall over the piercings in his forearms and she has a brief and crazy thought, like: This isn't right, because this body is -

And the memories start to rise, to choke, but she bites them back, and watches the ceiling, and lets him spread her: wide, with the strength of his chakra drumming in her ears. Vibrating through. Through. Through.

He could pull her apart.

But he does not, and will not.

Trembles, as she feels (oh) his erection against her, where she's now perfectly wet, and prepared, so the tip brushes her clitoris; rubs in slow, deliberate circles. Konan slips her fingers into her mouth.

Bites down at the sound of his hiss.

"Go on," she whispers. "Go on."

Sits at an angle, with a hand sliding down and massaging a pillow, and one of his hands covers hers, and her eyes widen, widen, widen at the sight of his body sliding into her body, where she can look down past the flatness of her belly and the teardrop swirl of a navel, to where she's open and glistening on his skin which is glistening and pinkredruddy. Flesh. So much. Between her. Sliding into her.

Inside. Inside. Through folds, and walls.

Penetration.

Easy enough, when she's slick.

Konan contracts; squeezes instinctively.

(even though it's not the right size; is a little longer, and a different shade, and she's only let one person in here before, but it's the same person, it must be, it must be, and her eyes are transfixed on the sight of him going into her)

- filling her -

She squeezes again. Moans, and pants, as his grip over hers becomes just shy of crushing.

It won't crush. Pressure, but not pain.

And suddenly, there's a sense of wrongness, of horrible wrongness that sinks in the pit of her stomach, and Konan just gasps, and gasps; breathes in heavily through her nose, so she's shuddering, and says, "Please. Move."

Looks at his face, where droplets of moisture bead on his temples and his lips are open, just barely, and his exotic eyes appear to be focused somewhere else, in some daydream somewhere, but he's staring intensely at her. The morning blazes him, and he looks like nothing human. Nothing human.

Like -

"Move," she entreats. "Fuck."

The word she knows from the years before she could sleep on a bed like this, and the memories are back, washing through, but then his hands hold hers above her head, and their mouths crash together again, as their bodies crash together, as she crashes into the pillows, into the cover and sheets and mattress; she curls a leg over his shoulder – slips it down his back, and bends her toes to stroke his skin.

As he moves over her. In her.

The rocking rhythm. Konan closes her eyes. Quivers internally at the feel of metal pieces. Stroking viciously - hot-and-cold.

The friction is almost unbearable.

(and it's all wrong, wrong, wrong)

Meld together: sinews, muscles dragging down her abdomen, so the signal of him vibrates through her, and his thrusts are slow, powerful, and it's like a force of nature – like a storm, or a tensei jutsu, and she can hear him swallowing his own gasps, even as he swallows hers: and his low, eventual moans (which she feels more than hears), as everything begins to shake, and she shakes, and she hears her name.

Says: "I'm here. I'm here."

Once more.

The world collapses into noise.

It's not all right.

It's not all right, when Konan looks at him afterwards, and thinks: That's Yahiko. I'm not supposed to do -

Leaves him lying face down on the bed, unaware, as she runs to the adjacent bathroom. Presses her hands to her cheeks, and blinks, and squeezes her eyes shut, as four days of memories are suddenly bearing down on her. A lifetime of memories. The three of them. Her "brother" is dead. He's dead. Really. She paces. Paces like if she walks back and forth, the grief will drain out.

Drain out: she glances at the shower, at where water runs like a luxury she's never had.

And all she feels is dirty.

And all she knows is dirty.

Konan can't even name it, now, or think it, or explain what she just did. What they've done.

She grabs at the faucet.

So there's a nice stream of water running in the background, swish-swishing as she sits, nude, on the toilet, and lowers her head. Cradles it with her forearms, and hums.

I'm not ready to let him go, she thinks.

I'm not ready to let either of you go.

Birth control. She thinks of what's in her, because of what and who he was.

Feels a wave of nausea. Suppresses it.

There are jutsu for prevention. The older women in the organization taught her these.

Even so.

And she just keeps seeing Nagato's eyes, and Yahiko's face, and the blood running down his mouth, and feels the sticky coating on her body of her release, and his release, and the shaking, thundering, of sex and battle and knives and dying things and noise, and days' worth of being hollow, of being like paper around nothing: and anger, for being held hostage. For being pinned, and threatened. Used. Used against them, like garbage. And years and years ago, running with them, sleeping alongside them, and him bringing her into that cave, and teasing her, and giving her things, and petting her hair.

And her petting Nagato's hair.

She just wants to scream.

At the people who tormented her.

At the country which orphaned her, and left her with no past. And no parents she came out of.

At Yahiko, for leaving her.

At Nagato, for hurting himself. For scaring her.

At both of them, for not listening to her.

Nobody ever listens anymore.

She's furious.

Konan realizes: She really is. Furious.

She catches her body seizing up, but doesn't let anything come of it; flips the faucet off and treads over to the shower. Turns it on. The spray is cold.

I need fresh air, she thinks, because it's like she can't get enough.

Like the high summer, when humidity bears down on her.

Flings the window open and sticks her head out. Takes in a whiff, and it feels good. Relaxing. Yes, that's it. So relaxing. Needs this.

So Konan takes in another deep lungful, and then a third, and a fourth, until she's nearly laughing herself silly from it all.

Then.

Notices, far below:

Water gushes down the pipes. She can hear its gurgle. Can see it splashing across the statues, down the storm drains and into the system of Amegakure. There has been a recent rain – a hard rain, befitting the country, and the waterways and channels run high, beneath her window.

And in what passes for a sewer, there float bodies.

Mangled, and staining the water red.

"I had to dispose of them, somehow," she hears him say, behind her.

Wonders how long he has been watching.

"Do you think I went too far, Konan?"

And for the first time, it becomes real to her.

Really real:

This is their life, now.

These are their lives.

Here.

"No," she answers, and means it. "You didn't."

notes: "A terrible beauty is born" - Yeats, "Easter, 1916", referring to the Irish rebellion; yeah, I'm a modernist-whore. What ya gonna do.

Weird, disoriented chapter, for weird, disoriented, traumatized characters. Yeah, it ended up making Nagato and Konan look pretty bizarre. Well, I think they are pretty bizarre. And it is uncertain as to how they would react to the trauma of having lost Yahiko, having re-animated Yahiko (as Nagato, naturally), uh, killing goddamned everything, and conquering a city, and continuing their relationship in a rather different and more disturbed form. And then the psychological violation of the body-switch. Yap. It was emotionally rough territory to address, but strangely, I don't feel I've ever seen a Pain/Konan 'fic which ADDRESSED it (including my own efforts). DUDE, THAT IS YAHIKO'S CORPSE. That couldn't have been just like, o hai, it's ALL OKAY, lol. She did grow up with this guy. I don't think any amount of mental gymnastics can - at least, initially - stave off the feeling of, omfg, did I just have sex with my dead platonic bff? (Time will tell if that feeling goes away, though.)

Written to the song inspirations of "A Fine Frenzy" (check out their whole discography; great stuff), and Regina Spektor, particularly "Blue Lips". The take-over of Amegakure no Sato was written to "Supermassive Blackhole", by Muse.

More to come. I haven't even gotten to the formation of Akatsuki, yet - so natch, there shall be more.