Chapter 2: pick up the pieces
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 Lily (fonsetorigo on LJ) for looking over this chapter as I was writing it.
Konan leads their group ahead.
The rain sluices her cheekbones. Wets her lips.
They are rumbling behind her, some as young as herself. Some younger.
She feels as if she's all bones – all bones and thick joints; wood and stiff jerky. The human is bleached away in war, in a mission. It's a lesson she learns better in the coming years, but this is her first acquaintance with a truism: in battle, when leading a charge, you are not a woman. You are not a person. You are a machine.
What you love doesn't matter. What you feel, in any respect, does not matter. If you hurt, it's all the same. If you bleed, or if you die, the war goes on.
So your face forgets that it once learned how to smile, because smiles are irrelevant. They have no place here.
They march ahead, and she, with care, keeps her boots from catching in the rocky soil.
This is, of course, her home, where she's lived all of her life, and someday, it is likely to be her grave: the hills and flatlands and craggy plateaus of the Rain Country, where the sky cried most of the land's vegetation away, and the industrialization of Amegakure proper bled the turf until it became this: a wet desert.
Far away, now, from the sorghum fields.
Nagato actually thinks it will all change today.
He's dreamed of this for a while, especially after nights of too much drink.
Yahiko can make it happen. He's always been someone who can make things happen, almost as if by will alone, since his is a powerful and forceful will.
They've never been in the city of Amegakure no Sato proper; street rats don't go there, but on this day, the doors will open for them.
"Stop looking so glassy-eyed," Yahiko says, and shuffles along ahead. "You need to keep your mind on this mission."
Nagato mumbles something like an apology.
"No, it's okay. But they're not here. Damn it."
"Do we keep going, then?"
Yahiko breathes out hard and puts his hands on his sides. "Maybe it's time we went ahead and found Konan and the others."
He looks, Nagato thinks, like someone who has a bad feeling about the situation. His face scrunches up, and his jaw hangs and his lip juts, because Yahiko's lip was always very, very good at jutting.
"Yeah, okay. They're not here. They're not here. Whe-ew. Okay."
"Yahiko?"
"Hey! Don't start. Don't get me all worried, okay?" he replies, like someone whose composure is about to come crumbling down. "It's fine. Let's just go back and find Konan, and everyone else."
It's fine; I'm sure it's fine, he keeps saying – like if he says it enough, it'll be embedded into their reality as the truth. We're fine. Let's just keep going. Let's just not think about it too much.
Let's not worry ourselves.
But Nagato is not worried, because Nagato is not thinking in such terms; he's thinking, rather, of the sensation of that place he's visited before. Those dark doors – that other world. That other person looking out from his eyes. (His eyes, his eyes, his eyes.) And he remembers what Jiraiya-sensei told him, but -
But.
Butbutbutbutbutbutbut.
"What does it feel like?" Yahiko asks, when he catches up with Nagato, and throws his arm around his shoulder, and his teeth are chattering from the rain. Winter is coming, soon. "Eh?"
Nagato pushes his wet hair back from his eyes, and looks at him sincerely, and asks, of course: What does what feel like?
And Yahiko just shakes his head and laughs, like the answer is obvious, and they keep walking together, wearily, as if the world isn't maybe crashing down somewhere. As if they're not on the edge of everything they've always wanted. Everything Nagato has ever really wanted.
As if a lifetime of hopes held with bated breath aren't about to make his legs collapse.
And finally, Yahiko answers:
"Being an adult."
It really was the day when everything changed.
Konan is bending over to massage a knot from her cramping legs when she feels the cool press of the blade at her throat.
She opens her mouth.
You know that you're the two most important people in my life -
he's written.
I wish I didn't get the sense that I'm about to fail you.
"What are you doing - ?" she gasps out, and feels immediately foolish.
Boot to the mid-back, heel pressing in, and she crashes to the ground.
Splits her lip. Tastes bloody rock, mud, and rainwater.
Nagato knows – in some way, on some level – that he's not right.
He loved his parents, as most children love, and when he lost them – when he buried them with his little hands – he entered a new world (one of starvation and wandering and perpetual what-ifs), but he thinks, sometimes, that there's something which died with them. Some capacity to be human, or normal, or proper. It's like an injury inside him: a pain, which has been filled with pus and toxic, and which is now cancerous and swelling.
And not even hearing that his eyes are descended from a legend makes it feel any better.
If anything, it makes it worse: his eyes didn't save them, did they?
It was Yahiko's dream he took, because he had no dreams of his own.
And he loves Yahiko, and he loves Konan, but even his love feels shaded.
Like maybe he's afraid to get too close, or else he'll infect them with this disease, too.
But they love him. They do, and really, more than anything – some days more, even, than his dream of peace – he just wants to love them back, wholly and utterly, and it frightens him, the intensity for which he thinks he could love and need them, and the degree to which it makes his chest thud and tighten and ache.
Because he could be hurt all over again.
Because gods weren't ever meant to be human.
Because being human is harder, still.
The ropes go around her wrists.
Loop, loop, loop.
And she, with her nose scraping the ground, knows her power has been taken away.
Knows she's failed them.
And a man's hot breath is near her ear, and a man's rasping, grating voice – twisted by some strange device – a sick mechanical lullaby, poisonous, and Konan thinks she could almost, just almost, suffocate in the muck.
"You make it all too easy," he says. "You're no shinobi, at all."
She remembers, in a flash, her hatred of the violence to her body – to other bodies – and how unnatural it's always felt, and she thinks with remorse that he's right. He's right, and she's failed them. Yahiko and Nagato – she's -
It wasn't important enough to me, she knows, suddenly.
Her hot tears mingle with the rain.
She wanted it to be important enough, because they always were important enough to her.
It is the first time – though certainly not the last – she learns that loving someone is not sufficient.
It will never be sufficient.
It will never be sufficient, Nagato is certain, when he looks up and sees the hemp chewing her arms.
"Damn it," someone who must be Yahiko says beside him.
The rain muffles and distorts the words, and their exhalations. They've been running, so everything out of their lungs is hard and harsh and makes them almost double over.
But all Nagato can see, up on the precipice, is the green of her eyes.
Which were too bright for this place.
You've done things I haven't.
This is what Yahiko said.
You've killed. You've.
He sighed.
You're a man, buddy. Yeah, I know all about it. You're terrible at keeping secrets. You're shit at it.
And to this, Nagato replied, very sincerely: Haven't you done all - ?
And Yahiko didn't say a word, at first. Then, just: Heh. Man, don't be dumb. Don't be dense with me.
He shook his head and put his hand on his kunai, holding onto it as if readying himself – which maybe he was. Preparing for what would come next.
Look, I've never ... actually... had to kill anybody before. And I've – neveractuallybeenwithagirl.
And Nagato could think nothing more than that this was the strangest day of his life: on the eve of peace, with Hanzou waiting for them, and Yahiko speaking so bizarrely. So openly. It was discomfiting, to say the least.
Yahiko, you're my best friend.
No, don't get all sappy like that. I don't need pity. Don't go there.
And he laughed, but it sounded distant and sad, and scarcely like a laugh, at all.
It's just. Y'know, I wanted to hate you, Nagato, for being such a dependent whiner. I wanted to hate you because you took all my ideas and didn't even come up with your own. And I wanted to hate you because everyone I loved always loved you best. Sensei. Konan. Every-fucking-body who mattered ... always loved you best.
Of course, Nagato denied it: insisted it wasn't true. That it was just a different kind of love.
Nah, don't say that. Don't bother. You know better. We know better. They always loved you best. I always knew. But you know what gets me?
The holes near their feet were filling.
Their toes and the wrappings on their calves had gotten soaked.
What gets me, Yahiko said, and don't take this the wrong way. 'Cause I don't mean it like that. But.
"I always loved you best, too."
But being beloved doesn't mean much.
What it means is what you stand to lose.
All of Jiraiya's words and all of Jiraiya's love and Konan's love and Yahiko's -
- and the love of his dead parents -
- doesn't save him.
And his love does not save them.
Maybe it dooms them, because Konan is screaming and crying like he's never heard her scream or cry before, and someone's blood is covering his palm: warm spill over his fingers, cramped cold on the weapon. And his best friend dead at his feet. Dead like everyone and everything, like where it all goes in the end.
I'm sorry, sensei.
I wanted to be what you saw in me.
Konan's screams are the last thing he hears before he goes under.
She hits the ground, softly, opens her eyes, and feels a wave of dull soreness.
Beside her is the body of the first person she met after her parents died.
The first friend of her own age (exactly her age; born on the same date).
The first child who was kind to her.
Who saved her, when she was alone.
Who is dead.
For her. And for them.
"Konan, hold onto Yahiko and stay down," Nagato tells her.
Konan does as she's asked.
His face looks sad and soft – vulnerable. Yahiko seems gentler with his eyes closed, with his features relaxed. His youth shines through, revealing what has always existed underneath their leader's fearless, carefree exterior. She holds him, and feels the warmth leach from his body. Thumbs the blood from his lips with her long fingernails.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, with her chin pressed to the crown of his head. "I'm so sorry."
She looks at Nagato, who is hurt, and all the sound seems so far away – the rage that rips souls and hearts and organs from their owners, that turns the rain red with gore; drowning out the noise of her small breaths. She thinks she tells him to stop, but then her heart is in her ears, and everywhere, people are dying and trying to kill, and the world is a swirl of chaos, and Yahiko is dead in her arms.
And Yahiko is gone.
And Nagato is gone, too.
Because when she was bound, she asked them – begged them – to leave her behind, and they did not listen.
They did not listen.
For the first time, Konan knows she is different.
Amid the suffering, the chaos, and shock, and loss, the words of a woman from another world and life twist through her mind.
Maybe if I had had interest in myself, she thinks, dizzily, then this wouldn't have happened.
But it's far too late for that now.
"I can't actually move, Konan," Nagato admits, afterwards.
Which makes sense, he supposes, because his spine is jammed with black rods; the fatty tissue has dissolved from his skin: sucked clean out by the jutsu, and they are - just the two of them now - situated on the flatlands below the crest of a hill, and a fresh garden of corpses has taken root all around them.
Excruciating doesn't even begin to cover the pain, when it hits.
He would fall down, if he could, but the spikes anchor him: tear through skin and muscles and puncture the spinal cord so there are parts of him he can't move or feel any longer.
Such as his legs, which a moment ago were flaring with agony.
Now, they may as well not exist, for all that there's no sensation in them. He can look down enough to see their condition; between the exploding tags and the fat extraction, they look something like chicken bones when all the soft tissue has been boiled clean away. Steam curls upwards around the soles of his feet, and melted, smouldering flesh is peeling off in chunks.
But he can't feel them. Everything he can feel, meanwhile, is pain. One big ball of pain.
"That was a stupid thing I did," he mutters, and then throws up.
And throws up again.
And again -
And by this time, his upper body sways enough from the nausea that he tilts, and he feels Konan catch him, and by this point, there's nothing left inside him and he can only dry-heave from the sheer rawness of his nerve endings, from the blistering misery of being so exposed. Spots are exploding all along his vision: all within the ripples of the rinnegan and through his blood vessels.
"That was a stupid thing you did," Konan agrees, sobbing, and wipes his hair from his face and holds him, and kisses his forehead. "Don't ever do anything like that again. Please. Promise me."
"I'm not sure - " he gasps " - I'll be in any condition to make it to an again. But I promise."
She looks at him disbelievingly.
Then shakes her head. "They're all dead, Nagato. They're all dead."
"Not all," he corrects. Regards her wearily out of his bleary eye.
"Don't worry about him. I'm safe now. We're - "
But she apparently can't complete the sentence. She just cries in that sniffling, suck-nose manner that he was once so accustomed to utilizing. It reminds him of a wounded animal, all that sniffling and trembling. Nagato has almost never seen Konan cry, come to think of it. Maybe he never has, he realizes. Yet what he notices most is that it isn't full-throated; it's tiny and recoiling and pitiful. Kitten tears.
A wave of guilt shadows him, for contributing to those sounds of hers.
He wants to tell her he's sorry, but he's not. He doesn't regret anything.
It was a stupid thing to do, but it was the only way. He'd do it all over again. Right now.
He wants to tell her it was all for her, but it wasn't.
It wasn't all for her, and it wasn't all for Yahiko, and it wasn't all for himself or his ideals.
There were other factors. There was blood lust, pure and simple.
And he wants to tell her it will all be okay, but their best friend is dead, and their peace is destroyed before it began; their dreams have been laid to waste, or at least set back, and their group is scattered.
And she's holding him, who is crippled, and can't even walk.
So "it'll be all right" just doesn't cut it.
"It's not over," is the only solace he can give.
"Nagato - "
His eyes drift closed. "We're not going to die here. We're not going to waste his sacrifice."
"You should've left me behind."
"Konan, don't talk nonsense. We couldn't have done that and you know it." It's slightly aggravating, that she'd say that. Like that was ever an option. Like it could even be considered. She's sweet, but sometimes, Nagato thinks, she gets these confusing ideas. "Anyway, Yahiko died with his last words saying that we should survive by any means."
"I didn't think he'd do that," she whispers, and it's like she's not listening – like she hasn't heard a word. "Why did he do that? Why did you let him?"
She says it like she's only just realizing it, and maybe she is. Her tone is hushed; frenzied, and Nagato knows if he could turn to see her, her eyes would be wide with delirium: "He's gone, Nagato. He's not coming back."
I would have chosen you, he almost tells her, but the words fail to escape, and there's only a groan of physical suffering as his ribs and face throb. The sense of betrayal in the thought, the feeling of heresy, is nerve-wracking in and of itself: they were so close, choosing one or the other would have been like a mother forced to choose one child to live and one to die.
For any of them. For her. For Yahiko, too.
I should've never had to choose – he thinks.
"I guess I have to be the leader, now," he says.
His tired eyes drag to the bloody body, and the pangs of sorrow begin to creep through the hurt and shock of it all. Memories and nostalgia for their childhoods seep into him, overlapping with memories of the deaths of his parents: it's like they've been slaughtered all over again. Like he failed all over again. Like he couldn't not fail. Like he just can't not fail, because the design of the world ensures that success is impossible. And Yahiko, who always dreamed big – who could make anything happen – is dead. Gone. Just wiped out.
He's not coming back.
Nagato remembers the conversation from just before the world came crumbling down, and knows (of course, retrospectively) that Yahiko must have known he was going to die.
And he knows, also, why he made the choice to die.
But he decides not to breathe a word of it to Konan. There's no sense in making her feel worse.
And what's done is done.
What's done really is done.
"Nagato," Konan says, again, and now she sounds panicky and breathless. "How are we going to get anywhere? We can't... we can't move... I just... "
Because apparently the trauma of the carnage, and Yahiko's death, has subsided just enough for her to realize that they're completely alone, stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no one to help them, and Nagato's legs can't function. Nor can much of the rest of him.
"I'll make it, Konan," he assures. "Look, just... give me time. I'll think of a jutsu. It's what the rinnegan is for."
But she looks skeptical, of course, when he turns to her.
And completely heartbroken.
He sighs. "I need a new pair of legs."
And when the words leave his mouth, the abrupt, chilling idea accompanies them.
"I need a new pair of legs," he repeats, "and I know how to get them... I think. Konan, will you help me?"
"Of course I will."
"This is a big request," he insists, because her answer was so automatic, and she doesn't know yet. She just doesn't know, and the idea is so horrifying, but. "I'm sorry. It's a big request."
"What is it?"
"It's... these rods. They're in my spine, Konan. I'm no anatomy expert, but the spine is what lets a person move. If I could conduct my chakra - "
He frowns in concentration. " - if I could... maybe I could send the nerve signals out through these spikes. Send them into something else, and move it around."
"Like a machine?" she asks, innocently.
"Like a person."
"I don't understand."
He says, quietly:
"Please trust me."
It's a curious and perhaps selfish thought, but Konan wishes Nagato would cry. She's never told him, but she's always loved that he cried, and maybe a part of it is that she felt he was crying to make up for what she herself could not do. She didn't cry when her parents died. It wasn't because she had any steel in her, then. It was only that she could not cry. The water just wasn't in her. It wouldn't come. Gravity could not drag it from her eyes.
She was a wispy human being who grew up in aether and paper flowers and wandering about, dancing and dreaming and taking comfort in her friends. She grew up in Yahiko's rough embraces. She grew up with her fingers in Nagato's long hair, and her lips to his lips. Their joy supplanted her joy and their tears supplanted what she could not offer, and their dreams became her dreams, too.
Or, rather, she wanted them to be.
But she's a teenager now, and only lately coming to the realization that maybe their dreams were never her dreams: at least, not enough to sustain her. Not enough to drive her to become a valuable asset on their team. Not enough to make her take to the violent lifestyle – the warrior lifestyle, which her body has always despised. And if she'd understood this sooner, would Yahiko be alive? Would Nagato be so injured?
And this, finally, is what made her cry: her own smallness.
Because she is a very small person.
She once found a baby bird with a bent wing. She wanted it to fly. She took it in and fed it crumbs and its little chest puffed in and out, but after a few days, she came in and found it dead: a pile of feathers. Nothing more.
She almost cried, then. But she couldn't. She felt a tightness in her chest and stomach. She cupped the bird in her palms and carried it to Nagato, who looked down solemnly, and together, they buried it behind the house their sensei was using.
They buried so many things, because they were always trying to care for some piece of life.
But the bird, she knew, was herself. She was born with a bent wing.
And so was Nagato.
He got away from it, though. His maturation took him further from her, or so she's always worried, but he became someone; he really became someone amazing, in some ways. But as for herself? She's still a small person. She wanted to be one of those kunoichi you hear about who becomes a legend; she entertained such thoughts, sometimes. Being loud and drunk and punching a fist through a tree; well, there was glamour in that. But she couldn't be that. And maybe she didn't want it enough, or maybe she didn't have it in her. But she is, simply, a very small person. A fading person.
And she knows it's too late in life for this to ever change.
And yet, Konan wishes Nagato would cry, because Yahiko is dead. He's gone forever, but Nagato hasn't shed a tear, and this doesn't seem right. After the initial outburst which stunned and frightened her half to death, Nagato has been eerily calm – and that may be even more frightening. She knows him. She knows him better than anyone.
She may have even known him better than Yahiko did.
She can sense the cool rage that's radiating off him.
The funny thing is, she and Nagato have never said their "I love you"s. Not once during those years growing up together. They didn't say those words when she wiped his soggy cheeks. They didn't say those words when they first kissed, nor when they first made love. And they don't say them now.
It was understood when they buried the bird – when they looked down into the pit and were haunted by all the same memories, and the same experiences. It was understood when they spoke softly in the middle of the night, to one another, in their tent, while Yahiko snored nearby. It was understood in their touches.
They could not speak the words, because the words might give way to loss, and they - both of them - knew it too well, and were too afraid, so if they breathed those words aloud, they would surely die.
Konan knows they have been saying those words all this time.
She is saying them as she removes Yahiko's clothing – as she takes the black poles which have split off from Nagato and begins to refine them with the kunai that entered Yahiko's abdomen.
They say in war, in life, in near-fatal injuries, you will do anything to live: unspeakable things, and things that you cannot later conceive of yourself as having done. Konan and Nagato know this, because they remember some of what they ate on days when there was no other food, and they won't talk of it now.
Konan knows this is another instance of such a separation of the self from its pre-meditated outlook on day-to-day existence: because how could she do this?
She doesn't know with what strength she begins to insert the shaved off black metal into what was once Yahiko.
She does not cry, then, and she does not hurt, and she does not mourn for their friend any longer. She sets about the task – and sees it, in some sense, as a task – and cuts, and hones, and cuts, and hones, and punctures his arms.
Feels the flesh give before the harder substance.
Tears the cartilage of his nose as she slips the bars through it.
Konan has heard stories: men whose legs were hacked off abruptly, so they had to shove their hands into the sockets and bite down against the pain to quench the blood flow. Or people who, pinned down, had to cut off their own limbs to free themselves, to escape.
You ask: how can you do that? How can anyone do that?
And maybe the answer is only that sometimes, you have to.
She's always been told that she has such pretty, soft hands. She's always been told that she folded paper so intricately, with such attention to detail.
Her skilled hands – her fingers which give such attention to detail – are perfect for this.
For fitting everything together. For finding where to pierce the nerve endings.
In the lips, so he can speak. A slender bar through each ear, for hearing – and his voice guides her, directs her - I think it'll work there, Konan - clipping and attaching fragments to the thin tissue.
And the stomach, which is smooth and flat – and where, for the only time, she hesitates, because it feels so cruel to drive these alien objects into him. The penetration, the violation of the body – it feels analogous to the fears a woman in a war zone lives with, but no, he is dead. She's not hurting him.
It feels like a desecration, when the stomach acid rises and she hears the body gurgle in a post-death paroxysm, and for a moment, horror seizes her.
Complete and utter horror: like they're going down a road straight to hell, for doing this.
And she's never been a superstitious girl.
"You're almost done, Konan," Nagato says, gently. His own arms dangle, spindly now, and his body is propped up, but hunched and almost doubled over, in spite of everything. He watches her out of one eye, and that eye has a pained, crazed look to it. But his voice remains even.
Disturbingly, perfectly even.
She finishes with the neck, with the legs, and then sometime – a world and a daze later, she hears Nagato telling her that he thinks this is enough, that it's all right now – and she moves aside, and he lifts his shaking hands.
And wracked by tremors that almost undo him and make each motion tedious and arthritic -
He forms hand signs.
When Nagato's eyes open on Yahiko's face, Konan feels the chill return to the base of her spine. There again is the sense that they are trespassing into a world of the forbidden: a world where mortals don't belong, and should they keep going, there's no turning back. But this was the only way. It was the only way for them to escape. It was the only way for Nagato.
He does not speak, at first. She helps him up in that body, because he appears disoriented, and stumbles, but that's to be expected. Yahiko? she wants to say. Nagato? Who are you? Even though she knows. Logically, she knows.
His first act, after dressing himself again, is to take the kunai from Konan's hand.
One stroke on his hitai-ate, one dragged slash, and the symbol he wears will never be the same.
Konan shrouds Nagato's real body in paper, because he says the double-vision is making him feel worse. She's careful with his open wounds, and he moans softly, but insists he will make it.
They return, all alone – just the two (three) of them – to their tent.
They do not talk, and they sleep through the night.
"Look this way when you speak to me," he says at about noon the following day, after she's tossed and turned all night in a hot sweat, with nightmares of burying Yahiko and of death and destruction and carnage fizzling over her subconsciousness.
She was certain she'd wake up and he would be alive again, and Nagato would be whole. If she closed her eyes tightly, then opened them -
But the silhouette with the orange hair in the doorway does not belong to the right person.
She looks down at her hands, and shivers, and it is like a dream when he pads over to her and takes her hands in his. And leans close, so he's breathing in her hair.
"I just can't seem to wake up," she hears herself say, weakly, but the prickle of his mouth when his kisses nip her is very real.
We need to bury Yahiko, she keeps almost saying, because she keeps feeling like there's a Yahiko to bury somewhere – some deed gone unfinished. Because she and Nagato are used to burying things, and burying them together, and so they must go out now, and find Yahiko, and bury him.
But Yahiko isn't dead, because how can he be dead? He's standing right here. He must have never died. "Where is Nagato?" she asks. "And where did Yahiko go?"
"You have a fever, Konan," says some person whose hand presses to her forehead. "The rain's made you sick."
"I think we have to see Hanzou today. Where is Nagato?"
And she starts to cry. Really cry. Horrible sobs that quake her entire body, and she feels that embrace of that person who is not either of her friends, and Yahiko's voice speaking a tone he'd never use, and it makes her cry to hear it – the wrongness of it all. Because some things just aren't meant to exist in this world, and Yahiko should not be speaking Nagato's words.
She does not struggle as he removes her cloak, and goes limp as he lays her down on their sleeping bag, and lies down beside her. She feels like her body will split into paper seams, and she feels like a hand is reaching up between her ribs and squeezing her insides.
"I'm still getting used to this jutsu," he tells her, "and I'm still in pain. I'm no good for doing anything right now."
He's still not a right fit in this body, in his words – this body: as if, whose body is it, really? As if: don't talk about Yahiko like that, but there is no Yahiko. But how can Nagato behave as if there is no Yahiko? And why aren't you crying, whoever you are? She wants to ask. But he keeps talking very pragmatically about his body's wounds, and bodies, and wounds, and how he has to recover before they can make their move.
And gradually, as she begins to relax into another fever-sleep, Konan realizes by and by that Nagato is especially traumatized.
Before or after a particularly intense, sharp pain, there's sometimes a moment in which you can talk very calmly during the stunned instant while the pain is setting in. It's different with a persistent, nagging headache, but the worst injuries can sometimes knock the wind from you and reduce you to perfect, point-blank clinical clarity or numb, hazy mumbling.
So he talks quite methodically about how they must go on to continue Yahiko's dreams, and how they're alive, and about this body, and this jutsu – all in very mechanical language, like everything is just a machine – and how she needs her rest and he needs his, and his eyes and muscles are still adjusting.
And she, shaking so badly, manages to reach up and run her fingernails through his hair and across his neck, and kiss him, all the same, and assure that she's with him, and it doesn't matter what form, because he's still him, and they'll carry their losses, and when the time comes, she will go with him to Amegakure no Sato.
"And we will bury Yahiko together."
As they are doing.
As they are doing.
notably: I'll be honest; the first part of this chapter was damned hard to write, because turning that much sheer Crazy into a coherent 'fic scene is challenging. "Nagato goes nuts and HOWLS AT THE MOON" does not an easy fic incarnation make. So I skimmed it a little; if you read chapter 447, you have a good visual image there of what Konan and Nagato were going through. I, for the purposes of this 'fic, mentioned the carnage in passing more so as to shift the focus to their feelings and their grief.
I do love some Nagato/Konan fluff... after, you know, a ton of bloodshed, horror, death, wtf-ery, and violence. Fluff is the least they need, man. I guess this fic would probably technically fit the "hurt/comfort" genre, at times.
On the issue of the body switch: It's hard to know how they would react to this, because I think they'd be so traumatized it'd be hard to really settle on one reaction. We know that in the later canon, Nagato and Konan don't seem to regard Yahiko's body AS Yahiko anymore (since, well, really, he's not); they seem very detached in that respect. But how did they feel initially? Aside from confused and disturbed? It's kind of a lot to take in. I imagine they were overwhelmed, which is the feeling I was going for here.
One or two more parts until the 'fic is completed. There's still porn to be porn'd and Akatsuki to form, and yeah. Cheers! Hope you will stay tuned for more.