She's right about how Madara operates, Nagato has decided. Madara first sets them up, the serene god and the indifferent angel. Then moves to shatter both- infuriate her, paralyze him. Control them both.
The god is a force of nature, drowned and numbed by a stratospheric scale of power that renders everything meaningless. The angel is a witness, mute and uncaring. Still, indifference is her Achilles heel, not his. Not until recently. Before the latest daily atrocity from Madara, there is the sealing.
This jutsu is new, Nagato has been planning it for some time. But he never quite knows how these things will work until he does them, they are mostly flashes of insight glimpsed in the timeless otherspace of the rinnegan. He has ideas. He always has a lot of ideas, intuitions, visions of how things will turn out- ideally, of course. This illusionary dragon jutsu to link these nine beasts together is one of his best, he's very proud of it. He's always liked cooperative jutsu, the way they use many ninjas at once, and the way their energies and concentration all comes together-
-to unity. Even these Akatsuki; who can't get along and, to be honest, probably don't even want to get along, would go out of their way to not get along. They work together, all of them. The harmony of so many deeply different people, and then- the Ichibi is sealed.
And the Kage is dead, but this is necessary. The Leader is not concerned. The Leader is a bit like the stone monolith that will seal and hold the beasts: black and fearsome and holding a weighted silence. Being the Leader is a bit like becoming a monster, which intrigues him.
At any rate, the Leader is a very businesslike person, so the Kage dies down in the dust and without ceremony of any kind. His body has in fact turned to dry, cracked clay. As if he were just another one of Sasori's ball-joined puppets, made of wood and string and counterweights full of sand. Ashes to ashes, Nagato thinks, inside the black emptiness of the Leader.
The meaning of this death, if any, will be a matter for Nagato to figure out- later, the Leader could not possibly be less concerned. Likely the Leader will order Zetsu to dispose of the body as soon as the sealing is complete.
And the Leader does not so much as look at the small pale corpse, slowly spider-webbing with cracks and falling apart.
It's actually himself that Nagato is thinking about at this moment. His lack of concern. The Kage is dead- and he doesn't care. He wonders, is it just that he didn't know the Kage? Or that this person is just an inconvenient vessel for a tailed beast, something to shuck like a sunflower seed, discard, forget about? His complete indifference is fascinating to him.
They are among the war wounded, he thinks, and not for the first time. Himself, Konan. The survivors, but not unscathed. Not by landmines or bomb jutsu, not like the buildings pockmarked and cracked and scarred. Not like the amputee soldiers, the ninjas smashed open on the wet concrete killing floor of Amegakure, their blood dripping down into the pipes and seagulls feasting gruesomely on their wet red innards. Not so vivid, immediate, not something that easily understood, even by the two of them. They still have all their fingers, their limbs; no- the damage is invisible. Like minute internal bleeding, he thinks. Something injured so deeply inside of him that it would take years to show the effects. It would not show up at all until adulthood.
So yes, maybe he has grown into a monster. Maybe he has. This too, somehow is far less horrible to him than it should be. He was not a bad child, not the way other children were naughty or disobedient, but there was always something not right about him. He wasn't the way other children were- too quiet, too incomprehensible. Too ineffectual and impossible, too much for his parents to deal with in their limited time, the country was being invaded. Not worth, he thinks, any particular emotional investment... as if they already knew on some level that he would be of no help to their family, and lost before it would matter anyway.
Or he would lose them, which really is the same thing. And it doesn't matter, they were not around very long. Not long enough to have a lasting effect on who he is today. There weren't very many families left in his generation once the smoke cleared. Just a lot of orphans, invisible wounded. Sasori is one of them, he's almost the same age Nagato and Konan are. Only a few years older. Sasori and his body turned to wood, to parts, to chakra strings and a kind of quietly, carefully self-maiming immortality.
Still, maybe the only way to grow in a world of monstrosities is to become monstrous yourself.
Monsters, Nagato muses silently, guiding the jutsu. Miracles. To him these two words are linked, twinned. There is no reason, not logically, but together they are things that are rare- so shocking and different, so transformative. They scorch the surface of society, disturb everyone and everything around them. And from that dissonance comes new, violent change. The rinnegan is both, miraculous and monstrous.
New, monstrous ways of thinking. After all, he thinks, only a monster was capable of hefting Amegakure out of it's sinkhole of history.
And another monster, he thinks, comes to our door and troubles us. And we are pushed to our limit, incited into something new and dangerous. For better or for worse.
He opens the Leader's eyes.
Now, near the ritual's end, the Akatsuki members are quiet. They've expended their energy, and now all are settled and focused. The Leader nods. Silently approving.
Though there was trouble. Far more than expected, as Konoha-nin came streaming out of the east to rush to the Kage's aid.
Curiously. As Konoha and Suna have not been traditional allies. But, then again, Nagato has heard stories of this Kazekage. It's a very young man, a boy of only sixteen. Only a bit older than Konan and himself when they lost Yahiko. And yet here this person is, running Sunakagure. And here comes his historical enemies, rushing to save him.
A miracle, he thinks, Nagato smiling under the black static of the Leader, in the service of a monster.
At any rate, the Leader handles it. Nagato had a premonition about it, you could say- the eventualities resulting from nine kidnappers effectively paralyzed over the sealing of their freshly snatched prey. In fact, Nagato, for all his ineffectual wispiness, was the designer of all these extravagant jutsu. The Leader is merely a voice of commanding authority. Pein is merely numb mindless power. It takes a human mind, a feverish kind of insanity, to come up with ideas like this. In the end, he thinks, it's not Pein who is responsible, or who even pulls the detonation switch.
It's himself.
And the shouten jutsu is Nagato himself, all his doing. Pein has this ability, a way to be in two places at once and inhabit another body to the point of seeing through it's eyes, feeling it's pain and exertion. Nagato found a way to displace it and share it, apply it to entire separate people. The Leader merely assigned it.
To Itachi and Kisame, who despite what Nagato himself may think of their attitudes or trustworthiness, still have performed beautifully. Both have easily synchronized with his jutsu, and the Konoha-nin have been effectively delayed, the Ichibi is sealed. The ritual finishes.
Nagato opens his eyes.
Back in the tower. Konan has already disconnected her holographic self from the cavern. And retreated, Nagato thinks, to her study. To be the practical one, and keep things running smoothly in this wreckage of a village all around them. This slowly healing wound, he thinks.
Sasori is dead. The news comes finally in the slow, long aftermath of the struggle with the Konoha-nin. Itachi and Kisame have long since been disconnected from the jutsu, Deidara and Sasori have engaged the Konoha squadron that finally broke in to the cavern. As Nagato sits out on the statuehead and rubs his tired eyes, the Leader is appraised that the Konoha nin have destroyed the cave in their battle with Sasori, and made off with the Kage's corpse.
And Deidara blew himself up to shake off his Konoha pursers. But survived.
Sasori was killed by his. The death is finally confirmed by Zetsu in the onset of a grey, wet morning.
Nagato looks out at the grey wet face of the city. It's patched industrial towers, it's liquid neon glow. It's subliminal noise of generators and fans and rainfall. He can imagine Konan's response, conjure the sudden flash of ice in her eyes from this tangled electrified corpse of a city.
Good riddance. is what she'll say.
Or worse- How can they tell?
He'll tell her after they sleep. Though as the primary strategic planner, she'll have to be informed very soon. Nagato himself tends to focus more on the philosophical implications, the overall vision, the actual staging of the plan is not his forte. But then again, he and Konan are the same that way. So theoretical; so taken with ideas that neither of them can seem to remember to take action. They get lost in thought, forget everything other than the idea, the concept. They're not used to being reminded to do anything about it anymore, Yahiko is long gone.
In fact, both of them almost seemed baffled when the Ichibi's jinchuuriki was caught, when things actually started to happen.
Still, this can wait for later. The ritual makes the bones in Nagato's hands ache, his head buzz with the echo of the hologram, having had that sound cocooned around him for days on end. Changing bodies seems too hard, too much trouble; and all of them would feel the aches and pains in god realm anyway, god realm has very intense sensory feedback. Getting injured or roughed up in a fight hurts the most in this body by far. Maybe that's why Yahiko was always so enraged when they were attacked, mugged for their money or food. He was driven to fury by the pain.
How appropriate, Nagato thinks. How ironic and twisted and wrong. Yahiko was nothing like Konan and himself. The real irony is that he can't quite decide what Yahiko would think, would say, if he could be here right now.
Never mind. Time for rest.
Nagato is not leaving for the safe houses without Konan. Firstly, he has to find out which one it will be today, that's a Byzantine security procedure that she directs and he finds entirely overwhelming. And he never leaves her if he can help it. She's probably shut herself in her study, buried her head in her books.
And reminding one another to sleep is one of the things they do...
He was right, that's exactly where she is.
With all of her massive collections of paper. But hers is much more neatly organized than Nagato's own, despite having much more of it. Her scrolls and books tend to be put away in a logical sequence that seems to let her find anything she wants quickly; she doesn't ever walk around the tower wondering where she left a particular set of notes the way Nagato does, having set it down and wandered off on some other tangent of thought. Most of her work tends to stay in here, where she can concentrate, and where Madara is implicitly forbidden to enter. Most of her origami is here, and it's become bigger and more complex as the years have passed. It all has incomprehensible multisyllabic names now.
On the top of her bookshelf is the massive model of a geodesic... something, Nagato has forgotten the exact name. It's very long and mathematical. The years have brought her away from the flowers and animals of her youth, and now she mostly builds vast complex geometric figures, some of which are apparently four dimensional- though Nagato has only ever understood the first few sentences of her explanations of this.
"It's the final stellation of a hecatonicosachoron, with 120 cells and 720 faces." she says when he asks, having come in and looked up at it. It's perched in it's multicolored glory, casting a complicated shadow behind it from the low angle of her desklight. She's made it out of hundreds of pieces of origami paper. Nagato remembers seeing it in various stages of construction. An experimental piece on the way to learning to split and reconstitute her own body, she said. Paper and flesh, she said, are the same, the material doesn't matter. All that matters is the geometries of chakra. Like this, she said, touching his closed eyelid, meaning the rinnegan and it's concentric circles. And like that, the six bodies, the complex machine-aided jutsu. Something this had made clear to her, her own startling new jutsu had flowered soon after.
A four dimensional flower in fact, Nagato thinks; and is able to smile slightly about that, be in love with her where the Leader and Pein are both powerless to feel anything. The jutsu she made, her body unfolding and opening and expanding. Like an angel gracefully shedding the limits of her flesh; an act of epiphany like the opening of his third, hidden, higher rinnegan eye.
"I think I'll never remember what it's called." he says to her, sick with love for her. Completely unable to be anything but overwhelmed by it. She's at her drafting table and he's gone over to cuddle her under his arm.
"It's just a convex regular polychoron," she replies lightly, as if this were something completely normal to say. "You can think of it as a four dimensional dodecahedron. It's not very complicated at all..." But now she's teasing him gently, or maybe it would be more that she's teasing them, because they've had this conversation many times before. Nagato would ask what the beautiful, complex shape she was building was called. She would answer, but somehow the long technical names would never stick with him. And in truth, he just likes to talk to her about them, to hear her speak such a different, precise language.
Like the strange divine words of an angel, he thinks. Beyond man's understanding.
Beyond his, anyway. He is a philosopher, and while both of them were good students, his experiences with math to date have been more than enough for him. This is why they are a team, co-conspirators. This is why god has his angel.
"...what are you working on?" he says. "We should get some rest." This gesture, putting his arms around her while she works at her designs and plans is so familiar. It's the inverse of the other gesture, where she comes up on the statueface to find him lost in thought. Floats over to him and showers him, sometimes, with her silent weightless cloud of paper butterflies. Her flesh, he thinks, always. The geometric beauty of her body. Just before she envelops him entirely.
Even on the day he met her, she had already exhausted the existing origami patterns. He remembers her planning out new ones, drawing them out with anything she could get her hands on. A sharpened stone in the mud, if necessary. A stub of a pencil Yahiko, ever resourceful, had found alongside the roads, or in the soggy rubble of burnt-out office buildings. Maybe some newspapers they'd found too, and hung to dry for her. These days, though, she has real architect's tools: a steel compass and many rulers. Her mechanical pencils sit in a neat box on her bookshelf. Her designs have long since become staggering. Mind-boggling, really.
"Just some mapping." she says. As she gets up to gather her cloak, he picks up one of her schematics.
"The hell's that?" Yahiko would say cheerfully, upon encountering one of Konan's diagrams. Or else, his perennial favorite: "That's a lot of lines!"
"It's a diagram for your origami jutsu?" Nagato asks her, over his shoulder. As opposed to being just for her origami, though he supposes these things are one and the same now.
"Not yet." she says, from the bookshelf. She's putting her pencil away, re-stacking her rulers. "That's the net of a dodecicosacron. See how it's face-transitive? And remember how we found out that all chakra is a hexagram prism from the rinnegan?"
Nagato does remember, and he remembers being able to follow about a quarter of her theory. But it's true that the rinnegan does work in circles, cycles, and in six points. His own jutsu designs come from his imagination, his intuition, and his interpretation of theological patterns against the insight of the rinnegan. Her schematic is immaculate and precise, so unlike his own messy digressing notes, full of bits of unconnected thoughts and ideas. Of possibilities. Not like this hard crystalline science. He looks and there are hundreds of shapes and angles; beside it a neat column of Konan's hyper-precise notes, as if etched by a laser.
"I'll make it into a crease diagram tomorrow," she says. She's come up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. "because those are made for supercomplex figures."
"...supercomplex is the word," he says. "exactly. What was it called?"
"A dodecicosacron." she rattles off effortlessly. "With 60 faces. Beside it there- that's a dodecicosahedron." Her hand moves around him, strokes the line of his thumb. Such a small touch, and yet... He smiles, secretively. This is how it starts, the tiniest things just like that. She indicates the second, even more complex drawing. Then, for his benefit, her voice turned soft and gentle. "It's different. But also the same."
"It's beautiful... even though I can't really see what it is." He can't see it, the way these shapes come together, the way her ideas work. It's beyond him, and her notes have to be approached with caution because they can give him unpleasant calculus flashbacks if he looks too closely. But somehow, he thinks, they manage to come so close to one another anyway.
"Just star polyhedra." she says indulgently. She fastens her arms around his waist.
"The stars hidden from me.." he murmurs, and puts the schematic down on her drafting table. "Ready to go?"
She nods- pressed against him so he can feel it. "Change of plans." she whispers.
He was tired, she thinks, when he came in. Drained by the braying and neighing of the Akatsuki barnyard animals. But now, he's different. Now they have one another's full attention. She was tired too, maybe. Maybe more annoyed than tired. But that was before she watched him, listened to him. It reminds her of how he told her that it was the moment that she took him seriously, she listened to him, accepted his ideas, that gave him the confidence to take them seriously himself.
And she became the planner and architect of that castle of dreams. He was the visionary, the seeker of the higher ideals and higher meanings. And together, she thinks as she rests her cheek against the warmth of his body and the soft fabric of these heavy Akatsuki cloaks, they're constructing something even she can't quite map out. But something maybe like the chrysanthemum she made for him, lavender paper to symbolize the opening of his crown chakra to the million-petalled flower of violet-white light. Symbolizing and speaking for her- I don't see what you see. But I believe you.
And- I'll help you.
It's not just his dream anymore. It's not just him being a mess and impractical and... Yahiko, she thinks, would throw his hands up with both of them. Whatsamatter with you guys? What the fuck are you talking about?! They've grown together, encouraged one another. Love saves them, but it seems to enable them too. It seems to not protect them against Madara, against that poison apple, the forbidden knowledge, all Nagato's favorite metaphors for it- that temptation. Love just gave Madara more ammunition, she thinks.
Made it worse, actually.
But it's too late, it's happening. So Nagato is the one who comes up with the words, the concepts, the fire of the dream. An empire; but he doesn't like this term. A myth and a legend, and a movement; a philosophy that will change the world.
"Remind me." she whispers to him. "It's not an empire. It's not an ideology either..."
"A radical religion of violent peace." he says. "Because nothing else has ever worked." He's let his head fall back against her shoulder. Yahiko's tussled red spikes brush against her neck and jaw. His hands are on her forearms, wrapping her arms around him.
"Like your four dimensional star. Something we can't see yet. But it exists..." he's trailed off, contentedly, as she presses closer. "...nonetheless... mmm.." As her arm shifts fabric over the little stainless steel ring in his right nipple, and he feels it like the distant twinge of his old body, down in the water. "...remind me, remind me of why this is possible.."
His voice has become breathless almost, she wants to flatten her hand over his chest, touch him through these heavy clothes. Those piercings are easily sensitive enough for him to feel the pressure, to shiver. His hand has found hers, and is guiding it.
Because it doesn't matter, she thinks, what you use to construct your better world. You can make anything.
And from nothing, from a scatter of discarded wastepaper, two terrified war orphans. You could make anything from anything, as long as you knew how to fold and construct it. That was her insight. But the big idea, the nuclear detonation and the gasp of realization from the surviving world- that was all his.
His hand presses hers to his chest, flat-fingered, to his heart maybe. To the hard edge of the piercing that she can feel through the fabric. But she has a better idea, she pulls his cloak open one-handed. Then there's only the thin woven mesh shirt under it, and the warm skin of his muscled chest, the silkiness of the areola. She ignores the piercing for now, strokes the skin around it in a slow circle. Feels him quiver.
"Because we're together." she says quietly. "And because.." But he's turned in her arms, he's lifting her up to the drafting table she's just cleared and returned to it's level angle. "...no, it's not strong enough.. um.. I don't know where..." But he's already decided, he's carried her to her neat, mostly empty desk. They get her desk lamp set safely out of the way, they're beyond enjoying destroying their property at moments like this, replacing it is a hassle. And sometimes they'll take all their clothes off, but today she just shimmies out of her panties and he unbuttons his pants, their cloaks meld them together in a velvet matte sea of black, those vivid red swirls of cloud.
Like the metal swirl of the piercing at the base of his penis against her as he moves, thrusts deeply, rolls his hips against her; the swirl of his rinnegan eyes that are still somehow his and normal and just the same Nagato she's always known. Even this pierced, strange, multi-bodied Nagato. Even this bloodless, papered-over, sectioned version of herself. These Akatsuki cloaks, it's what normal is now. Just his lips soft and the metal in them warmed with his body heat, his arms cradling her, no confusion whatsoever about the name she gasps, and calls for moments later.
No words before that. Sometimes they'll talk, but this time they're silent, she's moving with him, grinding her hips back against him and running her fingers through his hair, squeezing him with her internal muscles before he says anything. It's just their shared broken rhythm of harsh breathing and the patter of rain on the windows, and then-
"Sasori's dead." he gasps. "...the Konoha-nin got him..." She rolls her muscles tightly around him and he groans. She's still fuzzy-headed and limp from the orgasm, not really in any shape to chat. She needs to think that one over a bit anyway. She tightens her muscles, seizes him. Sits up slightly to press her lips to the tight cords in his neck and the streaming current of his pulse.
"...upset?" she manages a moment later.
"...haven't decided yet..." he gasps, his breath hot on her cheek. He's tensing, it will be a matter of seconds. "...but I've been thinking... about the causalities.. the hundreds of millions of people... " His shoulders shudder under her hands. "..and I don't care, I just don't care..."
And after all this time, he still tastes like Yahiko when she kisses him, like the trace of Yahiko's sweat clinging to his clothes and the scent of his skin. But his voice is rasped and heated and all Nagato's, even the different tenor of Yahiko's vocal cords has been transformed.
Made into something completely different than either of them were. A composite adult, made of two kids who were too damaged to ever grow up quite right. Or maybe she and Nagato are that composite adult, together.
"I don't care either." she whispers.
"...there's something wrong with us..." he hisses, his back arching, thrusting deep into her, pressing her back against the hard wood surface.
She opens her eyes, sees his closed tightly, his face creased with brief little folds of pleasure in the cold overcast morning light. Watches the last hint of Yahiko vanish from him as he comes.