The Rinnegan
The people call her an angel when she is actually a woman, and every woman has needs.
The Rinnegan is the eye of cycles. Of this life and the next, of death and rebirth, of rise and fall, of attraction and repulsion.
Konan leaves him at the same time every night, retires to her room, returns to help him clean up the mess.
It is not so surprising when Nagato, a younger Nagato, realizes Konan has fallen for Yahiko, who is still alive in these memories. Stings, yes, but never surprises. So obvious, now, in hindsight. He didn't even need the Rinnegan to see it.
Nagato had always been the first to cry and the first to tell Yahiko maybe they should go back home (hovel) instead of risking a lynching if the foreign soldiers found them during the hunt for food (scraps). Never mind that they would go another night hungry. Even after the eyes came to him, he was still traipsing along at Yahiko's heels like a child after his father, like a boy after a man.
Why would she love the boy when she could love the man?
Nagato tries to do her the courtesy of closing his eyes most nights. It's not his eyes she wants to see staring back.
For all his power, a great many things are beyond Nagato now, trapped in this tattered husk. He can't realize Yahiko's vision, only a crude copy as twisted and shameful as his body. He can't rise on the strength of his own slim and slimming muscles (each day is atrophy and decay). He can't father a child.
For all his eyes see, he will never see her look at him the way she looked at Yahiko.
He puts it from his mind. That is not the kind of pain he will (wants to) share with the world.
The Rinnegan is the eye of cycles. Of Konan gasping, of Nagato whimpering, of the two resolutely not saying a word when she helps him into clean sheets.
It is the second time of the night when Nagato's eyes will not meet her own.
After all, the eyes she wants to see now look like his, perverted beyond recognition by this painful world. As is true of everything in their lives.
Corruption. This, too, is a cycle.
His eyes afford him the powers of gravity, of summoning, of souls, of regeneration, of assimilation, of annihilation and of so many more things even he has barely begun to understand. How wonderful to know his power has no upper limit, sitting in perfect unity with the pain that knows no bounds. Both will go on forever. Until the end of time. Like God.
Why would she love the god when she could love the man?
Nagato has none of his old warmth, nothing to soothe her to sleep at night. He is all hard edges, perched to cut deeply or crumble with finality if the other side does not yield. He is not soft and warm and alive and agreeable like the face that comes to her every night, first in the puppet flesh and then in the afterglow dreams.
He is not God. She is not an angel.
The Deva Path is not Yahiko.
Once a night, every night, they (can almost) pretend otherwise.
The Rinnegan is an eye of cycles, and the orphans of Rain sink lovingly into its whirlpool embrace.