That Was the Big Idea

by Winter Weatherman

It's a shared effort. Speculative PeinKonan, some AU qualities.

4. Getting it Straight

"For religion, for resources or for ideology," Nagato tells the Akatsuki members. "for love or for spite or just because, all are reason enough to start wars."

Although, Nagato thinks now, alone in the darkness of the cavern, long after the end of the six day ritual. All of these things are my justification. My excuse. And the Konoha will of fire...

Is something he feels. It's not will, though. Not the divine inspiration of previous generations. More a dream, he thinks. An idea. An idea so big, like the power. Too much power for one person, one mind, one pair of hands to hold alone.

So that person, he thinks, acquires extra sets of hands.

And a benefactor. The question of who's fault it is- all of this- still troubles him, he has to admit.

Or- who's responsibility. Is it that he and Konan are just cowed pawns of Madara, frightened children that Madara bullies and controls? No...

Not that simple. Nagato thinks. The hologram buzzes around him, little insect-bites of sound and machine whine. And beyond that the darkness and vast underground space, and the little bits of charge in the air, the kicked-up moisture. Yahiko's body can sense that. Even through the hologram.

Opens his eyes on the cold grey daylight of Amegakure.

The question of why still seems unsettled for him. Even if, he thinks, he seems to shy away from it. As if it were best not to look too closely. Or because he'd rather not have to know, and understand fully- and allow- his real motivations.

It's simple for the Leader, though. The Leader wants to dominate and control the world. The Leader wants, therefore, to destroy the economy and then collapse the governments. The Leader wants to then be the only power around, the biggest king of a pile of wrecked countries.

Very simple, Nagato notes. Amegakure buzzes and drips under his feet. Down twenty levels, from the spiretops where he sits, on the pipe hand of his statue. Down to the drainage grates and the flooded roots of the towers, down into the sunken floodplain that Amegakure is bogged into, slowly dissolving away in the rain. Sinking deeper.

It's simple for Pein. Pein does not play political games. Pein has no particular ideology. Pein gets called a demagogue occasionally by journalists, but it's not true; Pein doesn't incite hatred, he doesn't feed lies and propaganda to the public, he doesn't whip them up in a frenzy- at least not intentionally. He simply takes action-Hazou and his entire network are thrown into the fire. Pein doesn't say a single word, rather all of his words are provided by Nagato. Delivered by actors. Conjuring a mystique, but all of that is just the power of myth. And Pein has no reasons or thoughts, so for him it is the simplest of all.

Not so for me. Nagato watches the clouds. They are rising in high thick white banks up over the skyline. Their bottoms are heavy and purpled, blistered with water. I could stay in the mindset of the god, and simply be pure mindless action. But he doesn't want that, even when the perfect excuses are presented to him, he still wants to know why. The real reason. The reason that the human being has, the human heart has. Not the god's reasons, which are- just because he can. And because he can- he must.

Still, nothing that complicated, Nagato thinks. Nothing that esoteric.

For me, he thinks, it's just suffering. We suffered, and it broke us.

And with that suffering came the blinding light, the opening crown chakra, the sudden stroke of lightning and the parting of the heavens, the rinnegan, planted in his flesh like a raindrop striking smooth waters- rippling.

So, the power then. Given this power, I am therefore chosen to use it. He turns the Akatsuki ring on his thumb, looks down at it's small circular face. It's raindrop insignia. Konan is right, she's usually right when she says he's investing too much emotion in things. You're always right when you have something bad to say, he teases her, but it's true. This is Madara's symbol. Madara's ring.

Madara's organization.

But his own power. The power belongs- to him. Himself and Konan, since he has never fully trusted his own judgment. He looked to her, always, to listen to him, sort him out, make sense of his cloudy, dreamy head full of half-ideas and wisps of vision. The power didn't make him any more certain and decisive. It just gave him more airspace and more torn pieces of cloud. A wider, deeper universe. Just more to look at, and he thinks that even the great theologians never come close to any answers. As they seek the ways and nature of god...

Just more questions. Endless answerless questions to ask himself under a wet Amegakure sky. Asking himself pointlessly at that, because he knows he doesn't really want to look. He knows he really doesn't want to know. He knows he needs all the glorious theatrical lies and alibis from Madara, and the sweep of Madara's magician's cloak. Dazzling him- and with his own power, the rinnegan belongs to him. But not the will to use it. That's something conjured by the master illusionist, Madara and his glittering lies. Like water into wine, Nagato thinks. Like the magic justifications. Madara taking him up high over the city, sweeping his arm high and wide. And Madara then looked down at Nagato, and he said- you're not powerless.

Don't you see? he said. You're not powerless anymore.

So give me the will to use it. Nagato thinks, his eyes closed now, his shoulders crumpled and his forehead pressed to the shaking nub of his fist. Give me the courage in my convictions. Give me all those things you said you would. Give me the reason, give me the answers, give me permission.

And having done that, absolve me.

Their benefactor and their apologist, Nagato thinks, hands to his eyes now, fingers pressing his eyelids shut. Their manipulator and their assailant. Their savior, that much is true- Madara.

Konan has in fact just had yet another visit from Madara. She has handled it herself, Madara does not need to see Nagato now. Or rather, Nagato does not need to have to deal with Madara, his mood is fragile. She lets Madara in the door. That alone is almost too much for her.

And she was busy anyway, steadying the course for the good ship Akatsuki. Putting out fires in Amegakure's chain of city management. Or reading the reports of fires put out, crises averted. She doesn't mind this work, this is structural and interesting to her. And it lets her be alone. There's only one person she ever wants to see. And she often needs space for herself, even from him. Madara barges in. Well- she lets him in. But if she didn't let him in, he'd ooze in some other way. She no longer bothers with any of the polite niceties. Oh, it's you. She doesn't ask him in either, and she knows he's shrewd enough to pick up on all of this.

Madara is full of nothing she wants to hear, as usual. Kakuzu and Hidan were recovering a bounty for Kakuzu, not the six tails like they were supposed to. And Hidan tortured a Konoha team captain before finally killing him. The captain's ninja team ambushed and- in a manner of speaking- killed Hidan. Hidan is immortal, but he is now in a million little exploded pieces deep in a sealed pit on a very remote patch of land. The remaining Konoha-nin cut out all five of Kakuzu's hearts and killed him.

So they're both dead.

So what it is, therefore, is that Hidan has not only gotten himself killed, he's also gotten his partner killed. This is ever more violent stupidity than Konan expected of him, and she says as much to Nagato. He's out on his statue, thinking. Being somewhere between himself and Pein, likely. His face is white and sculptural in the thin grey light. The clouds are billowing slowly, sagging heavily overhead. The wet wind is stripping the water off the pipes, cold and merciless. There is just enough cloudy white light coming through to make all the wet surfaces harshly bright, as sharp as polished barbed wire. Nagato is shivering, and ignoring it, which is nothing new. She can feel it when she puts her hand on his shoulder. His cheek is ice-cold and wet when he kisses her, nuzzles her. His hands are freezing.

"I suppose your opinion is that we should leave him there.." he's sighing. She's sitting beside him, her hand in both of his now.

That is exactly Konan's opinion.

He'd just hate us for it if we retrieved him. is what she's thinking. He'd thank us with a spike in the throat. He'd lay in his stupid symbol and spout his usual garbage about sacrificing us to his god. More like his ego. What she says is: "We don't have the time and resources to get him out of there, assuming someone else of Kakuzu's level could be found to sew him back together. If we rescue him, we do it after the plan completes."

"Sensible, as always." Nagato says.

And, as he holds her and strokes her hair as the wind blows it hard off her face, he mutters: "....well, say it. You might as well just do it."

"And he's not Yahiko." Konan says, giving him permission to just let this useless walking temper tantrum go, put his sympathy and emotional energy towards something else. Their other problems. They have plenty: Itachi's younger brother has apparently killed Orochimaru and is now gunning for Itachi- and letting the entire world know it, which is a level of recklessness that gives Konan some pause. Itachi and Kisame are hunting the Yonbi, and that's a delicate operation. Konan is getting a headache again. She has work to do. There are the usual kisses and then Nagato is back to his contemplation of Amegakure policy- which is what he's supposed to be doing, though clearly he's not- and she's back to covering Madara's ass.

Because we're losing members, she thinks, standing over the maps, pen in hand. And mostly to Konoha. She looks over to the wide ragged shape of the Fire Country. This is not really a surprise, Konoha has historically been very strong. It's a young village too, barely over a century old. The shinobi system came from Konoha. Peace and stability- for the five countries- did too. But that only pushed the struggles to the margins, down into the sinking valley of Amegakure. What's the phrase? she thinks, twirling the pen in her fingers idly. Shit rolls downhill. All of the shinobi world's waste waters of conflict drain down to drip though Amegakure. Konoha sent as many problems their way as anyone else.

And not just to Amegakure, to Akatsuki too. Konoha killed Sasori, and now they've killed Hidan and Kakuzu. Konoha is actually being a serious disruption, Konan thinks. The Kyuubi is there. Madara came from Konoha. Itachi came from Konoha. Jiraiya came from Konoha.

And when he was through, he returned there.

And we stayed here, she thinks. in the sewers, to fight with the other rats, to drown. She's getting upset and this is not good. So she takes a break, puts down her pens. Drinks some tea and looks over her designs. This one is meant to be a quick-healing jutsu. It will allow her to not only reconstitute her body, but restore it. Instantly, in a clean shuffle of white paper.

The geometries here are far too complex to draw out completely, so she's mapping a much reduced model. But this one still only has a few hundred cells, a few thousand faces. Even her stellated polyhedron on it's bookshelf, the first elegant model of this theory, is only a hundred and twenty cells. The body is trillions of cells, and even the cellular brickwork of paper is complex and layered and interwoven... There is so much to align there, so many angles. So much to build. So many interesting connections and structures to think about.

She really has to focus on Akatsuki nonsense, but she's getting distracted. Absorbed in the crystalline structure of the jutsu , she picks up her aluminum triangle and maps out the lines. Just a few more, a few hundred. A few pieces of origami paper to quickly fold the most basic atomic level of the shapes, push them through the jutsu, dismantle them, reconstitute. She crumples one in her fist and does the same. It reassembles, perfectly. She smiles. Nagato says this is her angel smile. The one like a carved renaissance statue. Ageless, pale, as pure and indifferent as marble.

Inhuman. She's going to have to do further tests, probably on her arm and hand. The complicated articulation of the fingers is a good test case. She'll put a kunai through the web of her palm, either drag it up through her fingers or down to carve through the knot of wrist bones and then slide through the parallel bones of her arm. The real test will be a wound in her heart, or possibly a deep abdominal slice, something immediately life threatening. But that's for later, when she knows for certain that the jutsu works. The hand is useful too, it's basic ninja strategy to try to injure hands, destroy the ability to form seals, disarm your opponent. But her paper can give her extra hands, extra limbs, she can have as many as those pictures that Nagato likes so much, the Hindu deities with a halo of hundreds of elegant hennaed arms. She can use the jutsu itself to form the seals.

And she'll have to do all of this while Nagato is out dreaming on his statue. He doesn't like seeing her put knives through her body- ironically, she thinks, putting her little finger to the cold ball stud under her lip. Though that's Nagato for you, complicated. Self-contradictory. I contain multitudes, he likes to say, paraphrasing Whitman; as usual he prefers a poetic explanation to anything more coldly rational. Death is a subject that reason cannot touch, at least around here, she thinks. Between the two of them, their bad memories and their immortality jutsu. And she'll also have to do something about the blood just in case she can't catch that in the jutsu too, so probably it's best to do this outside. Where Nagato's Pein self can feel everything that's going on. Problematic.

Never mind. Akatsuki business must be taken care of. Hidan and Kakuzu's remaining jinchuuriki will have to be assigned to someone else, probably to Itachi and Kisame. The others will likely have to at least partially be shouldered by herself and Nagato. She scowls faintly. Back to the maps. Back to making things structurally right again, despite the sudden implosion of two of the support staff.

And the intrusion.

Madara comes in person, because being a misery to herself and Nagato is likely one of Madara's great joys in life.

Aside from the fact that he is not allowed to call them or know where they live. Granted, she thinks. But he could send a falcon with a letter. She'd prefer that. She could refuse to answer him then.

But the situation is what it is. They are stuck. And they do what anyone mired in an inescapable mess does, they rationalize. She is quite aware of it. And Nagato attempts, futilely in Konan's opinion, to have sympathy for Madara. He lived in war, and grew up in war. He was harmed and consumed by war. He has some excuse for being such a hawk, Nagato would say, usually while they were in bed, and they were both feeling good and relaxed. And sentimental, Konan thinks. Too sentimental.

Madara has nothing but excuses, Konan thinks.

And she has her own complicity in this.

There were times when Madara would come to the tower, and Konan would let him in. And she'd watch him waltz in, casting a lazy proprietary eye around- at the tower, at them. His two little underlings. His chess pieces. And so, she consents to opening the door to him, but she draws the line at offering him tea and in fact often has to elbow Nagato from falling into his manners.

For her own part, Konan stays coldly, tersely civil. Barely civil at times. But civil. I think it's time for you to leave, Madara.

Or- the man you're speaking to has never lost a battle, Madara. That's one of her favorites. Madara's lost a battle or two in his time, most prominently to the Konoha Kage almost a century earlier. This is why Madara is a countryless wanderer now, and why he hides himself in the Akatsuki organization. And why she and Nagato are necessary, Konan thinks. Camouflage. Dupes. People close, but not too close. People to stand in the light and be his figureheads. People to be visible. When the axe falls, it won't be on Madara's head. People to take the fall for him, Konan thinks. People in Akatsuki are already taking that fall.

And why he's endlessly raving about his sharingan eye. Which frankly, Konan has seen, mapped for it's chakra geometry- and so far has yet to witness any of it's alleged breathlessly celebrated grandeur. She's not very impressed by eye techniques, it's the higher order jutsus that are really interesting. Even Nagato's rinnegan is like a delicate, powerful optical tool to peer into them for her. But only a tool. And Madara's sharingan is a construct of bloodied seams and jury-rigged parts. It's like the electrical grid of Amegakure, prone to overcharging and shorting parts of itself out. Madara is full of disgusting stories about how he fed it blood and body parts, eyes ripped out of the heads of his own relatives. And while Nagato feels that this is mostly Madara speaking metaphorically- theatrically, as always- Konan takes him at his word. Madara has had a long career of slaughtering everything around him, everything he ever touched. And he's touched them, touched herself and Nagato, shaped them into something he owns, at least partly. Madara's bloody fingerprints are all over them, now. He's had his hands on them for fifteen years.

We'll be just like him someday, Nagato says, sometimes. When his depression is particularly bad.

Not if Konan can help it. She tolerates this man. Barely. She lets him know it. Madara is still a sore loser about that defeat, those other defeats, all those other people who have put him back in the garbage heap of history- where he belongs. So Konan twists the knife a little. And Madara inflicts little emotional flesh wounds on Nagato. Because Nagato is a softer target; and Madara knows that both Nagato and Konan know this, they know that he knows it, multiplies the psychological cruelty of it, and smiles his innocent little charming smile, and keeps doing it. Over and over...

And Konan stands, silent, tense, suddenly inflamed by a recurrent vision, a crystal clear picture of herself slapping Madara's hand off Nagato's shoulder, slapping Madara's stupid orange mask off his face, standing over him just beside herself with fury- get out! Get out! Get OUT of my house! Get away from him! Leave us alone!

And never does it.

Madara came with news of Hidan and Kakuzu, and Konan listened, nodded, showed him out. Same as always.

We always do that, she thinks.

We always do nothing.

A recent example, she thinks with cool distaste. The death of this Akatsuki footsoldier Sasori. She and Nagato both think it's wrong for Sasori to die and rot alone in that cavern, and for the Akatsuki members to snicker over his corpse. It bothers him, it offends her in some more intangible way. But they say nothing, Sasori's empty puppet shell is still there, two swords through it's heart like a marionette with a pair of scissors stuck in it's back.

Nagato weighs and ponders and dwells on their motivations, on Madara's, on where this is all going. She does the same, and they both agree that they should get away from Madara before he does the same thing he's done to every other person ever involved with him, before he finally gets around to doing it to them.

Knowing this. And still, they do Madara's bidding, they brush off Madara's insults, they take Madara's orders.

Konan stews and glares and imagines paper slicing open the soft parts of Madara's face- but opens the door for him. Lets him sit down. Listens. Nagato falls further into his fascination with transmigration and Konan turns herself a bit more into a geometric construction and they do nothing. They love one another and they're probably going to get burnt and consumed by the detonation of this plan, but they keep going. They know that Madara must have a final step to dispose of them once the beasts are collected, a way to get rid of his last little newly inconvenient dupe- they do nothing. They do nothing to stop it. They just can't save themselves.

Right now, Nagato is outside probably considering whether Madara's last cruel little insult was partially their fault, or something they deserve karmatically. Right now she's drinking tea and drawing a hypershape for a new jutsu. Considering reassigning the six-tails. Considering whether she and Nagato should have any wine that night, if they'll likely need to be clearheaded come morning, if any holy hell will go down in Amegakure or in Akatsuki and....

We were always this way. she thinks. There is no mystery here.

Always. Yahiko was the person of action. She and Nagato were quiet, bookish children. Cringing shadows at the neighborhood houses where the children were gathered, because there was some raid, or some attack, or some fighting moving into the area, and the adults and older kids had to go and try to do something about it. Her mother was gone- long gone- by then, run off with some other man. And her father was an engineer, off trying to help the city keep itself from being blasted apart. She was already alone by then, already acid and cynical, at least in her own mind. People patted her shoulder and called her a sweet little girl, she looked right through them. But she was sweet, she was kind; certainly in comparison to the way she is now. Nagato was soft and teary, but she already felt she was all hard angles inside. How old were they then? Five.

Nagato's mother was a medic, and not a military one, not a ninja, just a normal doctor. His father was a mid-level bureaucrat and Nagato said they used to have parties, they were wannabe intelligensia. They had one child, much like Konan's parents, that they weren't much interested in. Konan's father had never had much time for his wife, much less his daughter. And Nagato's parents were like the intellectuals in any war- saying outrageous things and listening to poetry and music in their salons, but when the fighting broke through they died like everyone else. Konan and Nagato were semi-friends at the places where the children were left to be guarded by the adults too old to do anything else They were both too shy to really talk. But they both didn't like the other kids. They didn't want to watch the war on television or play board games, or whine about their parents being busy. They didn't want to pester the elders watching them for cookies and juice. They were alone. That was the first reason they were together. Konan learned origami from one of the elderly men, someone else's grandfather. It was meant to keep her busy, keep Nagato from crying so much. So she made him a crane. Her first one. She had an idea back then that she could make one for her father too. Stupid, really. Her father would have thrown it out.

These were the kind of plans they made. In retrospect, she thinks that they had nothing better to do, there were no interesting books around, the schools had all been shut down, either bombed to pieces or become to attractive as targets for the same. Or for hostage takers. They weren't normal kids. And he was so sad, so she made him a crane. And he wiped his eyes, and picked it up to look at it.

He couldn't tell her what was bothering him any more than she could tell him why the folds and angles of the paper wings were so amazing to her. That was all right, they understood one another in an instant way. There was no one else. There was only their absent parents, and if Konan's father wouldn't want anyone to come and see him, then Nagato said maybe they could go visit his father at the city hall offices when the fighting wasn't so bad.

But then Nagato's father was killed when the city center was torn apart. Then his mother was gone too, the hospital attacked and everyone butchered, the doctors dying, their throats freshly cut, falling over the patients they were trying to shield. There was no one else left. So Konan took Nagato's hand and had a plan to go find her father. But her father was gone. Where? No one knew. And finally it turned out that he had been part of some Amegakure underground insurgent group. His cell was exposed and all members were lined up and killed. And then they were alone, Nagato and herself. How old were they then? Six.

They ran away from that neighborhood house. The neighborhood was falling apart, drowning in the tide of fighting then only ten or twenty blocks away. Sooner or later the forces would wander through looking to loot for supplies and ammunition and find the houses where the old and the children were stashed, kill them all, burn the house with the bodies in it. The elders were going out to fight, and most of them weren't coming back. She and Nagato ran off, it was the only time they did anything. Taking action only when pushed into it. And running off to nowhere.

It was like we were rats jumping a sinking ship, she thinks. Crazed. We knew it was over. Soon the soldiers would come and then they would both die like Nagato's mother. Children were getting impaled on sharpened street sign poles and roasted over fires, the newscasters were losing their composure, the elders were hollering for the televisions to be turned off, the children were whining less and starting to get silent and terrified. Something possessed her and Nagato. They waited for the others to sleep, then they ran.

They ran and they were cold and hungry, afraid of the endless rainy night full of darkness and echoing sounds. And distant explosions. And the dead and dying, the headless corpses in the gutters. What food they could scrape up, but so little because everyone was looting by then. And they were tiny children, unable to fight for anything. Mostly just good at hiding. They found an apple tree in the stone debris of what had been someone's back yard. It was autumn. Cold. But the fruit was still there, and not so badly rotten. That got them through a day or two. But not so many days, at most they were out and alone for a week. Likely hypothermia would have gotten them as soon as the season turned, just one good frosty night out in the freezing rain and they would have never woken up. They'd be another pair of small bodies decomposing away in the soggy muck of the city.

Had Yahiko not found them.

We owe him everything, Nagato says, often. We owe him our lives, and the time we have with one another, and everything we do now. We see his dream through.

They see through his dream of vengeance.

Or maybe that's not quite the word, she thinks. Yahiko was different, very different from herself and Nagato. He had staunch parents, salt of the earth people who hung Amegakure flags and stockpiled weapons. A bunch of older siblings who were in various militia groups. He wasn't at the places where the children were hid because he was off helping his brothers and sisters. He was six, but he refused to go.

Gutsy, she thinks. Willful. That was Yahiko. Yahiko up in the towertops, up in the blinding wet sunlight from the storm he'd just kicked apart. Kicking the puddles and howling his triumphant joy at the sky. Hey! I did it! I did it! The rain stopped! We don't have to just take this! We don't have to take anything! Yahiko up in the direct glare of the sun, his hair flaming orange and gold and- no, now Konan is crying. This is not the sort of thing she does. Not even Nagato cries, not anymore. She wipes her eyes. She shuffles her skin into paper and back. No marks then. No swelling, no wetness. No swollen eyes. Done, and through with. Yahiko never liked it when anyone cried.

Tough, she thinks. Always. Tough and friendly. He found them in that backyard with the apple tree. Hey, you guys can come out. It's just me. I'm a kid too. He was like that, sure of himself. Like he was your friend already.

But you couldn't really say he was an intellectual, not like herself and Nagato. When they had a plan about saving their money, maybe trying to get out of Amegakure and getting into one of the universities out in the surrounding countries, Yahiko said that was fine. He was excited for them; he said he'd come too, take ninja work and help them pay for their tuition. But he wasn't like them, wondering endlessly. His views were set. Wrong and right. Simple, direct ideas about how things should be, how things should be handled, what the three of them should do. And because of that, because of his courage, he was always their leader. Always.

And they followed. Yahiko took charge, and they helped him, and they were better off for it. Yahiko found food, he found dry places to sleep. He found paper and pencils, and books for Nagato, and in the wasteland of butchered families and moving armies and demolished houses, he found them a protector and teacher. He found them Jiraiya.

And after Jiraiya...

They were the gang of three. They were a faceless menace. Demon children. Yahiko's rules were simple. They worked together. They watched one another's back. If anyone messed with any of them, the other two would find that person and kill them. Yahiko didn't play around. Hit 'em hard, make 'em remember, he said. Show them we mean it.

When their various enemies finally got a look at him, they usually opted to mess with either the girl or the pale shy boy instead. And then Konan and Yahiko- or Nagato and Yahiko- would go out, just like it was an assassination contract. Find that person. And sometimes they'd hang the severed head on the pipeworks, or leave the body on it's former doorstep; and very, very quickly, they had themselves quite the reputation. Wild children like feral cats in the rubble of the city. Best left alone.

How old were they then? Fifteen or sixteen. A few years after Jiraiya, and in fact more or less the same age as this Uchiha Sasuke. And like him, Konan thinks- too much power and too little maturity to temper it. They were very blatant in those days. They had no restraint. Yahiko never saw much point in grey areas, half-measures. Eye for an eye, he said. We kill 'em and then we think about peace. He thought the origami was kind of neat, but he didn't really understand it. He'd listen to Nagato talk about human nature and meaning of existence for about five minutes; and then he'd say: think about that stuff later. Do what you've got to do, then think. Then wonder. You guys need to get it straight.

And later on Nagato would say, I wonder if he's with us right now. Wondering if Yahiko was haunting them, standing right in front of them, screaming his invisible ghost lungs out at them. Get it straight! Come on! Don't get so tangled up in thinking. Do what you've got to- protect yourselves. Geez, you guys, come on!

But Nagato has since decided that ghosts likely don't exist- and if they do, they no longer count as self-aware entities. And Konan has never had much use for anything she can't put on graph paper or break down to folds and creases. Maybe if ghosts had energy, chakra , something Nagato could see and describe to her, that she could deconstruct down to lines and angles. But they don't. If they do, if they exist, neither of them has ever seen one. Some people in their line of work go crazy- crazier, really- and become convinced that their victims are haunting them. But this has never happened to Nagato or herself.

But sometimes Konan does notice her protractor or her pencils moving around her study overnight. She sees the static rippling over Amegakure, the deep unearthly howl of the raging wind, and she wonders. She tells Nagato, who looks disturbed and thinks, but never comes to any kind of conclusion he's happy with. They go forward. Alone. Together. In love. Busy. A great far-sweeping plan of world domination. Madara breathing down their necks. Nagato putting another sharp piece of metal into his face. Konan finding yet another cellular level of her heart to freeze-dry, model, map and turn to cold architectures of paper.

It wouldn't be this way if Yahiko were there. They both agree on that.

Yahiko, never compromising. she thinks. Would he want this? Akatsuki, obviously, is a bad idea. But the rest? Not the thin official justification of world domination, but the real plan. The real idea. Would he want it? Would he be here with them right now- probably kicking Madara in the face and cussing him out. Wrestling Madara to the ground and twisting his arm back for insulting Nagato- you take that back! You take that back right now you son of a bitch or I'll really hurt you! But helping. An Akatsuki ring on his finger and a cloak on his back. Going along with this. The way she and Nagato are. Doing something to change the world.

Or maybe he'd be like Jiraiya is- probably- now. Because Akatsuki is gnawing little holes into Konoha and it's ninja, and somewhere Jiraiya must wonder if he should not have just let those three kids starve to death. Or freeze to death. Or get raped and killed by some roving band of AWOL soldiers, fed to packs of wild dogs for a laugh, something like that. There were plenty of people like that running around, people driven mad or bored or too desensitized to care anymore. Just another bunch of orphan brats. If Jiraiya knew, wouldn't he choose to let the future mass murderers die in the mud as helpless children?

And if Yahiko could know what they're up to now, would he do what he did?

This is hard for her to say.

This is more Nagato's sort of question. And he isn't sure. He doubts himself too much, Konan thinks. And she gets too distracted by the lines and angles, the structures, the parameters of the plan. Both of them lose the plot.

This is exactly what Yahiko would say. Both of you guys, get with it! Yahiko wasn't brainy, not like she and Nagato are. But he was smart, clever- savvy is the word. She and Nagato were never savvy, never wise to the ways of the world. For all Yahiko's disinterest in studying, she thinks, he had an adamantine canniness to him. He knew where to hide and where to steal food and when it was safe to move under cover of darkness. And which people could- probably- be trusted, who had to be avoided completely. He had no fear of the gangs or the soldiers, you guys be quiet and they won't see us, he would say. And they never did.

He said- Hey you guys, come out! He's not a bad guy! And Jiraiya wasn't.

He said- I'm gonna save you both! Nagato, do it! These guys can take me instead.

And- I said I'd save you. Now it's my turn.