There is beauty in paper.
Konan notices this at a young age, when she is poor, hungry and has nowhere to go. She has few toys, but there are plenty of newspaper scraps. Her parents encourage her little fixation, they can keep her happy with paper.
Her fingers dart around the corners, a flip, a tug. She breathes life into detailed mimics, imitations of the flowers she's seen in people's windows and gardens.
Her mother notices her making a crane one day.
"There's an old saying," she coughs into her palm. "That if you make a thousand, they'll grant you a wish."
The words stick with Konan, and her imagination is vivid enough to take this as absolute fact.
She gets to 349 cranes when her parents vanish from her life.
/
It's hard to make anything when there is nothing to make it with, but she tries to persevere.
Yahiko thinks it's almost funny, how she shelters her dwindling pile of scrap paper and food wrappers from the rain. There's not much to laugh at these days, nor eat.
She gets up, and doesn't speak to him for a day and a half.
And in apology, he hands her a pile of paper that he tried, and failed, to keep dry from the rain. She doesn't know where he got it from, nor if she can use it for anything.
But she takes the pile gently, and tells him with sincere gratitude, "thank you."
Their fingers brush, a second too long, and her heart beats twice.
/
She has made it to 750 paper cranes by the time the original Akatsuki falls.
And their dreams of peace among it.
They were made in her spare time, usually out of candy wrappers or leftover paper from her weapons.. They serve no useful purpose, and she abandons them after she makes them. Under a temporary shelter… scattered in the trash…
She doesn't know why she bothers.
50 cranes later, and Yahiko stabs himself with Nagato's blade.
/
She understands the pang of hunger, the chill of fog, the smell of a corpse, but she doesn't know how to deal with a hole that has opened up in her life.
She loved him. Maybe. Almost.
How does she know what love is? Was?
She stops making the birds.
Nagato tells her she should make a wish, anyway. See what happens.
She tells him she doesn't believe in those fantasies anymore.
He holds her hand, and they keep walking.
/
Some time after that, she folds another 200 cranes in one night.
She doesn't tell Nagato.
She counts them carefully, and she buries them in the small garden outside their current base. They'd be leaving tomorrow.
She stands, silent, unmoving, for a long time. She isn't sure if she's trying to say goodbye, or promising to see Yahiko again, or if she regrets those three words that sat between the two of them for so long.
"There's no rush to say anything," he had laughed.
Maybe it's all of them.
But…
1000 cranes later, and their dearest friend was still dead.
Konan knows better than to believe in childhood stories, but a part of her hoped she'd been wrong.