disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, and I make no profit from fanficcin'.
First attempt at Pein PoV this time around. I wanted to make him seem a little otherworldly and mystic -- as in, he doesn't think quite as a normal person would think?
drabble #3 - rating: (T) for like, a line of sexuality
who holds the God
The dead eyes look up to him from the machine.
He cannot look into them.
The body of The One He Came From, in six pieces – head, arms, legs, and torso. Tubes and metal connect the pieces, bind them; the form is mutilated, lacerated with sores, dying.
Bloody piece of meat, sterilized and surrounded by the mechanical – by the fake. Its eyes are still bright.
Pain looks down.
He knows – she tells him – that the rinnegan and the technology and the six bodies have re-wired his neural pathways, have done something to him; have fed the thing inside, where the quiet wrath awaits in the dark soil, ready to be nourished by his rain.
He does not touch the body.
She calls him by this name sometimes. Nagato.
It's afterwards, usually, when they're together in bed and her head is to his chest.
He lets it go, this name. Lets it drift through the current of mind; tiny nuances flash and flicker behind his eyelids, goosebumps on his forearms, like something stirs and rises out of the depths.
Konan, he calls her. He uses her name often.
It grounds him – in a world where he glimpses the colours of chakra and twelve points of vision and the individual droplets of rain, crystallized and magnified; he sees all the angles of the architecture, knows them intimately; knows the billows of the clouds.
And every inch of her.
He knows the pain. Remembers it; it disperses now, into all of the atmosphere, all through all of him when he watches from the ledge. Blends.
Seven spikes through his ears, three spikes through his nose to six points, two on his lips; black anchors in each body drag them down, stick in the flesh and make it remember. Konan makes him remember.
He will answer to the identity of this form, if someone recognizes it.
There was Nagato the name, and the person in the mirror, the pain, the sense of something more and deeper, Amegakure, and her. And he does not wonder what he is, because he is God.
God has existed forever.
Some days, a reminder comes up out of that deep place, and disturbs him. Jiraiya-sensei. And he remembers again.
"We'll move, soon," he tells her, when they're shaken.
Konan. The letters anchor him, more than the piercings.
She has existed in his world, forever.
The rinnegan; one loop, then another. Eternal, endless, like them, as their bodies come together again and again, as he sinks into her hot wetness, and feels.
They curl up afterwards; she inhales deeply, he cups her breast and looks over her shoulder. Stares out the window and recalls the world, and thinks of all the large countries crushing the weak. That deep dark place where the powerful crushed the weak. And something died.
The ability to care about the meaning of this destruction died.
It tastes bitter.
Their power, their war: the taste is still in his mouth.
Runs down all his pathways in all his bodies and the mind hidden behind the rain thinks and turns in the tumult; you'll feel it, and you'll suffer; you went against God.
Suffering in everything, he tells her. Thinks about. Dreams about.
"It's only a matter of time," he murmurs.
He's imagining from how many angles he will see the light – when the ultimate weapon of the Bijuu fills the heavens and God's fist closes upon nations. A thought: anticipation. Mingling in his mouth with the taste of the war, and it's even more bitter.
"Nagato," she says.
Her voice brings his eyes to her.
Flesh, warm, soft shampoo smell and powder; the rinnegan traces the corners of the papers that flutter over her cheeks; her eyes heavily lined with kohl and bruised shadow.
Nagato, he thinks; not entirely dissipated. That bloody flesh, and those memories (he knows), but Nagato will die for each pound of flesh, each shortening of his lifespan, until Nagato is gone, but now she holds him. Cradles him with her familiarity. Konan.
She has always been here.
He rubs his nose to the flower in her hair.
They stand together and look down.
And soon, he says, we'll hunt the fox.
His hand on the machine; steady, feeling the body's heartbeat go through all of him.
There's another body at the gate, even now, he says. I can see.
I'll go, Konan says.
Leaves him staring at the chaos in his mind.
She puts him back together again, every time.