February 20 - Konan

With a wave of her hand, the paper wrappings fall away, leaving his face to the muted light. His eyes remain shut, his fluttery hands laying slack by his sides as they never did in life. An interminable wait beneath the pale paper has left his skin thick and clammy to the touch.

She has not seen his face in several years. Brushing the off-white papers away from his head, her hand barely brushes his cheek. Before her mind registers the gentle touch, her hand has fallen back to her side, fingers clenched. She shudders.

His body stays motionless on the stone slab, oblivious to her uneasiness.

The fallen paper shroud rustles and melds into her wings, extending their reach by a child's handspan. With a roll of her shoulders, she fans out the interlaid feathers and banishes the tenseness in her movements. Her wings nearly brush the faceless walls on either side. She examines them in their enhanced form for a moment.

Angel. Servant of the savior of this forsaken place.

From a distance, they think that her wings are elaborate, laden with filigree and lace and all sorts of fine embellishments. She is breath-taking, potent, and soaring high above, she will always reside in some higher plane of being, it seems.

For that, they will never see the world from on high as she does. They do not see that even their mighty Angel was once a half-drowned waif wading through miles of rain and disappointment. They do not recognize that even her storied wings are not pure white at all, but mismatched and shuffled together from all the detritus of her life. A lifetime here has taught her to hold on to the debris, the broken pieces left after the storm, because she has never had anything else to hold on to.

She loved him, once. Then he died, and his limbs fell slack, his mouth shut, but she held on still. She enfolded him in calligraphy parchments, outdated maps, dismantled paper lanterns, and they all faded to yellow in time. Now, the embalming fluid and the ceaseless rain have soaked into them, and they are no longer smooth and pristine. They have become worn out and exhausted just like everything else.

These papers could not even serve as kindling now.

They peek out at the edges of her wings, framing her feathers in a false golden fringe.

She feels the dampness of her village soaking through her paper-thin skin, but she does not feel cold. The weight of the rain bends her wing tips towards the ground. She lets her wings recede until only her somber robe can be seen on the outside.

She thinks of Yahiko, fire-bright, bursting out with outlandish ideas and childish enthusiasm the way a candle throws out extraordinary shadows against the walls. Yahiko, beautiful in his youth, tireless in all his endeavors, and now wasting away in death.

She looks at the corpse before her and sets to work.

-mm-

Notes: This is me getting all thoughtful and mushy and incoherent when I'm supposed to be in bed. Cheers. I wanted to finish this scene today, though.

Of course, I also wanted to write a scene for another of my series, and the story for my friend's birthday, and my Spanish essay... How productive I've turned out to be today. I just read a book for a couple of hours and then slowly plodded through my homework.

The idea here, which probably isn't clear, is that Konan is handling Yahiko's corpse to prepare it for becoming one of Nagato's Paths of Pain. I'm not quite sure where it ended up... I might want to come back to this one in the future.

I was interested to realize that I was writing this in present tense, since I don't do that all that much. I think I ended up with a little tense confusion, though... maybe I fixed it? Maybe?

This was supposed to have more on Yahiko and who he used to be, too, but he never really showed up. XD

Thank you for reading my rainy mush of Konan-ness! Next up is Yakushi Kabuto.