It is madness. Konan's aware of that. Doing what they're doing.
Which is- not to mince words- take over the world. Which is- actually- something else entirely, that's just the cover story. Is it funny that lusting after power and control on a global scale is somehow more acceptable than...
...what they really want? What this is all really for?
Or maybe it's just more common to want power for it's own sake, she thinks. It's a more prosaic goal for a would-be demagogue. Though from what Nagato has said, most of the demagogues of the past thought they were doing good. Or at least pretended to think they were. Or maybe they actually believed it, were convinced of their own rightness, bought their own press. Vainglorious fanatics. Or because they were ideologues. Or both at once, the faith and the ego in a toxic combination of explosive personality. Where are she and Nagato on that axis? Nowhere, they pretend to want to take over the world.
Because it makes sense. It makes sense to someone with Hidan's attention span. Their theological pretensions only make it more convincing. Saving the world by destroying it. Even Hitler thought of himself as a savior.
Not that it's a bad idea, mind you, taking over the world.
There's something appealing in it's grandiose scale. Terrify the world and burn nuclear holes into it. They did this when they were with Yahiko anyway, on a smaller scale, with matches and razors and dismembered body parts and their own near-fatal arrogance. And they were just dumb kids, at that. Seventeen when it ended. They played at being demons. Now they really are supernatural. On some level; Madara's theological costumes for them aside, the rinnegan is very real. And so is what it can do.
Violent change. Accomplished swiftly and brutally, marks left on the record of history with blood. Indelible. More so than any quiet revolution, any gentle nonviolent methods. Fighting fire with fire, war with more war and a bigger death count, a deeper bloodbath, it seems crazy. It is crazy. But crazy seems to be the only thing that works, the only thing that moves nations. The wars are started by madman anyway... and all of this is just pointless, she doesn't believe in it. These reasons. She only has one reason. She observes the irony, bloodless as she is, her thoughts like neatly divided sections of paper. The ringleaders and instigators, the catalysts and demagogues, they always claimed an altruistic motivation. Very few of them flatly admitted they were out for greed and power.
So she and Nagato are unique in that sense. Doubly unique, since world domination is only their stated goal, their false goal to tell a squirrelly Akatsuki foot soldier who probably couldn't get his head around anything more complex. It's not what they're really out for, is it?
So, a beautiful madness.
Both of them now so bound up with Madara that they probably couldn't get away from him if they tried. Couldn't stop this even if they wanted to. All that pure weapons-grade power in their hands is prone to gigantism, to puffing up into sulfurous clouds, into a brutally efficient self-assembling war machine. And it has no off switch.
So a plan that neither of them could actually picture happening, coming true, is proceeding.
There are nine beasts, Itachi and Kisame are out hunting the fourth. They are not even at the halfway point of their capture operation. But yet, it's too late. It's really too late. If Konan were to tear off her ring right now, throw her cloak in Madara's face...
...no, they could never be allowed to just walk away. They are accomplices and they are witnesses, they know too much. Either they stay and play their part or she's dead, Nagato's dead, Madara will see them both, what's the word...?
Neutralized.
Silenced. One way or another. Either stay and take the money and the place to live, the tidy justifications, the reason for living- or take a death sentence. A very Madara-like choice, she thinks. Essentially his cardinal plan that he seems to offer to all his dupes. She remembers when he was blackmailing Deidara, and she only heard the story through Madara's overblown, exaggerated retelling. But they went to Deidara's workshop, they dragged him out. They gave him the choice and really...
...now all these dupes are dying, aren't they? Hidan and Kakuzu are dead. It's as if these ground-level Akatsuki members were meant to die in the process of acquiring the beasts. It's part of the elegant design of Madara's plan. Killed before they become inconvenient. And while she and Nagato still are useful to Madara, still are worth more to his plan alive than dead...
...they won't be when it's time to take the prize. And when their goal differs from his. And when Madara, old enough to have seen the century turn, certainly won't be in the mood to share his superweapon with two angry, aging overgrown children...
Who will, instead, get drawn down into the flying gears of the plan's machinery, crushed and ground up and disposed of just as their continued survival would become inconvenient.
So the Akatsuki members are dying. There are five beasts left, and they only have so many hunting teams. Only Itachi and Kisame, Deidara and Madara now. Madara has revealed himself and that means a new phase of the plan is in effect.
And Konan really should do something about this, protect herself and Nagato somehow.
And she doesn't disagree with this, she's all for the idea of somehow.. successfully double-crossing or escaping or somehow just defusing Madara as a threat. Fading off into the wet, blearily orange flame of Amegakure's sunset, with the superweapon or without, just with their goal accomplished, just with some pound of flesh extracted from the world. That would be enough, really, for her.
Sometimes she thinks it would be.
But instead she's sitting in a henge that looks more like a middle-aged librarian, or maybe some sort of accountant. She's drinking an overpriced and overcomplicated coffee drink in one of Amegakure's shiny new citizen-owned businesses. Thinking about killing Madara or just getting rid of Madara- which amounts to taking a magic wand to reality, because they are sunken in deep now, herself and Nagato, they can't save themselves. Thinking that and when she goes back to the tower she'll find Nagato and they'll worry about Amegakure business for the day. She'll make a decision about whether Deidara and 'Tobi' should be chasing the six-tails or the five-tails. She'll get to drawing a stellated polyhedron and forget about everything else, because the beauty of it's geometric symmetry will be so compelling...
And her rapid self-healing jutsu is coming together nicely. Something for when Madara finally has his finger on the trap door button, finally takes the time to put the dagger in their backs. Something for her, and also something for Nagato, should Madara try to unplug Pein's life support, try to somehow lock Nagato into Yahiko's body, or back to his old one. Something for her to construct a new body for him, for both of them, a paper simulacrum, if necessary. Just enough for them to flee, to buy them some time when it finally all goes to Madara's endgame. When Nagato is finished writing his speech, she'll ask him to help her work on building something that will synchronize nicely with his rinnegan.
Which can possess anything, it seems, any flat, preserved body. Anything. Nagato has some interesting commentary on that, stories of the Dead Sea Scrolls and ghoulish tales of golems, lifeless created bodies that could then be marked with a symbol, brought to life. The ripple of the rinnegan, he says, reaches out to all his bodies and links them, animates them. And while Madara provided the machinery and the first theological excuse, the catalyst...
...so much of this now is their work, their ideas. Their operation.
Their goal. They couldn't let that go now, couldn't turn their back on it. It isn't Madara with a gun to their heads, or the veiled threat of just eliminating them as AWOL soldiers. It's his most potent weapon of all, what they want. What they're afraid to want. What they want and just don't want to admit they want it.
Madara always has excuses, she thinks. Madara has the best excuses, and once you do his bidding he'll be happy to give you some of your very own.
Nagato is out on the statue when she gets back to the tower, sitting in the rain, his cloak slowly soaking through to a deeper velveteen wet black, a rich wet red. Not inside writing his speech. The weather is a slow drip, his indecision splashed over the landscape in patchy showers and a deep fissure in the clouds. Konan locks herself away in her study with a fresh cup of coffee, the stellations and the angles, the things that don't trouble her. Thinks about something else for a while.
Nagato is moping.
Or maybe brooding. Maybe that's a better word, he thinks. Examines his bad mood to see which one fits. There is a difference.
There is something else he's supposed to be doing.
But instead he's brooding, outside under the wet open eye of Amegakure's sky. A big crack down the middle of it, blue-black clouds deep in it's crooked well. The stone is drying as the water falls away down through the pipeworks, so Nagato lies back in the statue's cupped hand, steam from the tower's furnace rising in a slow curl from the mouth of the statue's pipe. The machinery hums under him.
He has Pein business to take care of, but he can't stop thinking about Yahiko. And maybe this is appropriate, he thinks. As his thoughts come into focus, moisture weaves together and rain begins to prickle at his upturned face.
Yahiko's face.
The gift of this life and this body, and it's greater ability to bear the sheer physical stress of the rinnegan. Really, he thinks, it was Yahiko who unlocked the door to all that power. Who set it in Nagato's hands.
And made one request.
His heart's desire, Nagato thinks. The one thing he really wanted; after going through such a determined flight of materialism and avarice, of hedonism like Yahiko needed to burn through all of that, all the things he'd never been able to have, just so he could finally boil down to what really mattered to him.
And that's why he did it.
Funny, given how unserious Yahiko tried to be, though. In everything else. Yahiko was dead serious about protecting them and surviving, but everything else was a game to him, a thrill. Even their work. Wetwork, that was the name for it.
Especially that, really.
It was a joke to Yahiko. Maybe that isn't the right word either. It was a costume, a mask, an assumed false identity. Demons.
Doing the dirtiest work imaginable. Washing their hands clean after. Turning back into themselves.
No remorse. Morality is a funny thing, in Nagato's opinion.
He has always despised Nietzsche's philosophy, but so much of it is applicable now...
...to Pein, who is so powerful that he is beyond suffering, beyond joy, and in fact seemingly beyond morality itself. His power levels the world around him. Everything is made so small and insignificant. His power warps the meaning of everything. Morality becomes meaningless.
Morality becomes nonfunctional. Because people could indeed decide to view Pein as a monster. They could fear him, or better- they could try to oppose him, or hate him, or somehow try to drive him from Amegakure. There's a word Nagato is looking for, the word for getting rid of Pein. Not evicted, since Pein is not something physically present. Ah, he's got it. Exorcized.
But people could try to exorcise Pein all they wanted. Pein would merely blow them away, a wave of his had. Magic. Now you see it, now you don't. Yahiko would say, the mission orders in his hand. The flick of his lighter. Burning little pieces out of Hanzou's operation. Pein was like that on a grander scale, a fire that could consume an entire city. And worse, Pein wouldn't think twice; Nagato has noticed that Pein, the Pein frame of mind, is tremendously single-minded. Morality does not apply to him.
It cannot touch him.
Morality still troubles Nagato, obviously, because Nagato is pacing around his study now. He is having to actually put papers away so he has room to do this. Paper everywhere, Konan's elegant deconstruction of her body. Well, never mind. That's a good thought, that a thought that reminds him of her, of being happy and dizzily in love. Which he is. Which Pein does not know, and in fact is constitutively incapable of feeling. But Nagato does, Nagato has always been good at feeling things too much and too heavily and wailing with sorrow about it. He'd think that all this overblown emotion would translate into a nice fiery speech for Pein, but the words are not coming and right now Nagato is actually really angry, right now he doesn't want to be happy. Yes, he wallows in his misery, he thinks, kicking a stack of scrolls aside. And yes, he enjoys it. Pain. It's contradictory pleasure. Why take the name otherwise? His thoughts are so global, so disorganized that there are papers covering all the shelves and the desk and stacks of scrolls on the floor and a whole series of plans for the bijuu weapon spread all over the sofa against the far wall. He sweeps the papers off the sofa cushions and throws himself down upon it.
Dramatically, he thinks. Pein is a drama queen. Or rather, Nagato is. Yahiko said so- with affection and good humor, with his teasing smile- but he still said it, and anyway, it's true.
Nagato doesn't like it, the way the press picks at him, at his motives, the way these self-righteous journalists criticize him. The way Madara does too, but it's so much easier to just spit this venom at an impersonal target. Strangers writing columns.
Fine- the way they criticize Pein. Fine. There is a difference.
The way others just accept Pein uncritically, worship at his feet, at his bloody footprints left dissolving in the rain, the way the entire city will tune in to watch this speech. And Nagato will too, safe and distanced at home watching the actor on television. Watching this disgusting raw adoration of power.
We do it, Konan says to him when he gets like this. because it works. It's the only thing that works.
Brutality. Why use the tactics otherwise? When his own family was killed- yes, brutally. He heard the stories about his mother. He saw the news report. He knows the sick feeling of terror and paralysis, being at the mercy of a mass killer. Hanzou. Or the relatively disorganized mess of warring factions in the city before that.
Never mind the details. Never mind who it is, which faction leader, what flamboyant name he's given himself. You would assume that people would be horrified by such a force. A monster. A mass murderer. And to most people in this city, it just doesn't matter. The rules for Pein are different. He can murder with impunity and still be above reproach. Still be worshipped.
And he is worshipped. Nagato can't get over it. He looks at the paper in fresh incredulity every day. It's certainly not that he was ever a starry-eyed idealist, rather he spent the first part of his life crying constantly because the world was so horrible and full of people determined to hurt others. Like those mercenaries that came into the hospital, killed all the doctors.
With machetes.
Before chopping up the patients too. Maybe some of them were killed by jutsus as well. There are many creative ways to kill people with ninjtusu. A very easy kill, from what the warlords said after. When they released comment, when they claimed responsibility. When still no one did anything, Amegakure continued to kick and flail and drown in it's own blood. It's throat cut. And it's the weak, after all, who are sick, who are wounded, and who try to protect others. Nietzsche was very sanguine on the concept of only the weak valuing protecting others. Of how the strong rightly believe the weak should be exploited or killed, that they deserve what they get. And while there's more to it than that, more nuance to the theory perhaps, Nagato finds it too infuriating, too maddening mirrored in reality. Pein's reflection in the puddles at his feet. Hanzou, admired because he was powerful, unbeatable, fascinating even to Yahiko, who needed something to vent his frustration upon. Because he was merciless.
There is nothing new about this. Konan says.
But Nagato still can't quite stop being amazed by it.
Or being angry about it, for that matter. Not that he's even known quite what to do with that anger. Other than swallow it and weep. Saying nasty things to the newspaper is about his limit. And he hasn't cried in years, so...
He has one solution and he doesn't know what to do with it, half the time. Pein's perfect theological alibi, his magic circle of a tautology- whatever a god thinks or does is automatically right, whatever I do or think is the act of a god. Madara's poison apple, his sweet promises, his devil's smile.
And the two of them as innocent and naive as children lost in the woods, in the dark garden of Amegakure where children were bayoneted in the streets. Taken by the hand.
Both of them. Madara took them up to the heights of the city, up to the tops of Amegakure's towering spiral of pipes. Up to the tallest building, in fact. Hanzou owned it. The guards were dazed by a red flash of Madara's sharingan. Then he took the two of them, Nagato and Konan, to the edge.
He said- You're not powerless anymore.
He said they would never again be helpless children in the muddy rain. He said too that they would no longer be part of the moveable slaughterhouse down there, killing so they wouldn't be killed, struggling to keep afloat, to keep their heads above water. They would transcend all of this, and it would never happen to them again, they would never lose what they had just lost. They would become impervious to death.
Because of the rinnegan.
Power. Nothing more grand or complicated than that. Madara took Nagato by the shoulders and looked into his eyes, and his sharingan was like a fresh wet droplet of blood. Made them both come very close to the lip of the building, to look down into the dripping abyss that plunged a hundred stories to the top street level, and then fell through another twenty sunken into the soggy land underneath it, down to the water. Hundreds of thousands of dead people there, a lifetime of murder flushed down into Amegakure's underpinning of pipes, bodies dumped and weighted to vanish into the water, bones speckled through the bog and moss at the city's thick stained concrete roots.
Madara made them look and told them to think about what was going on in the city, what had happened, what had been done to them. And by who. Hanzou, was it? Madara said lightly. His forces, wasn't it? That killed your friend? And to think of that and think of how it made them feel, and think of the power they had now. And put those thoughts together, dry their eyes...
"Then look," Madara said, sweeping his arm high and over the city. His flair for the dramatic. "See for yourself, and don't turn away. Look and see, and get angry, Nagato. And then- do something about it."
And outside, in the square divided windowpane sky Nagato can see from where he lies, sprawled messily and sulking, the clouds are bursting open. The blue underneath is pale, streaked with faint peach and pink reflections from the sun, which is setting somewhere under the heavy grey clouds clumping like cotton battening in the west.
The clarity, he thinks, came with the power. The power was like a flaming sword, lighting up the world for him, showing him the way...
He gets up. Runs a hand through Yahiko's hair, it's reassuring unruliness, the solid reliable strength of Yahiko's body.
He has a speech to write, just because it's getting colder as fall turns towards winter, as Amegakure's economy freezes and breaks down, as Nagato starts to get the feeling that the time is right, Pein's voice is needed. He clears off his desk and sits down.
He supposes... yes, that he can see the appeal. The comfort of having a god that cares about you, and will take care of you. And Pein is very prompt, as gods go. He gets results. He reads the newspapers and listens to the administrative chain so he can find out what the people need and make it happen for them. Or at least Nagato does, Nagato puts Pein out on the world stage. He writes Pein's lines and dresses Pein in his costumes and stage makeup, directs Pein from the shadows where no one can find him. And honestly, he thinks, no one would ever believe that someone like him could have anything to do with it. Someone like him... that old fiendishly simple and clever insult of Madara's, his genteel sneer- someone like you. Someone like Nagato with all this power...
So Pein will make a speech to reassure the public. Tell them about Pein's plan to fix this economic problem, and make things easier for them over the winter, make them feel watched over and protected. Not that Pein actually has a plan yet, Nagato still has to figure out what Pein can do about this.
Has to write Pein's lines... Get going on that and stop procrastinating and watching the rain, brooding about Nietzsche was maybe right and how angry he is. How bitter, really. How bitter as hell they are, as Konan puts it. Both of them. How they've grown into vengeful, furious, bitter adults, pretend-adults, people so incapable of accepting adult reality that they pretend to be gods and angels.
Though the power, he has to admit, is a very good support argument. So much of the rinnegan is a leading question of immortality, and from it he and Konan are quietly constructing a retirement plan, drawing out a series of immortality jutsu for themselves. And his rain is a kind of omniscience, Konan's ability to scatter herself to thousands of paper butterflies is the same. The rinnegan really is a promise of omnipotence, it's power is so bottomless and vast and so easy and...
..while Nagato used to be very disturbed by that and still is...
...it's hard to apply morality to that. Conventional morality. Wrong and right, when everything looks so small up from the tower, from the heights of Pein's endless powerful abilities.
And when morality is twisted up in the process of war, when all sides proclaim that their actions are the moral ones, the necessary ones, the justifiable ones. And now Pein can choose any of those justifications he wants. All of them work just fine for him.
Protecting Amegakure, like Yahiko wanted.
And doing away with Hanzou in particular, a final thank you gift to Yahiko's spirit, the fires lit in remembrance for him in all his excessiveness. Ending war- neatly, bloodily, by getting rid of this man, terrifying anyone they didn't bother to kill, blowing apart the civil war he promoted and, in Nagato's opinion, caused. Power, terror and mass killing. Tremendously effective.
It's no crime to murder a murderer. Madara said. At the time, Madara wore only a half-mask, red with black ink waves all over it. A restless current or a stark pattern of cloud. Or black flames. Amaterasu. The Uchiha clan had some interesting self-mythologizing going on, they named their jutsu after gods, and honestly seemed to edge towards considering themselves divinely chosen. Though that was just Madara, and maybe Madara wasn't really representative. Madara only covered his eyes back then, so as he spoke his white teeth would flash. Like the vivid white fangs of a huge predatory animal. Or like the Cheshire cat, his smile like the half-moon. The red glow of his voice, the hard maple richness of it, his seductive charm. He was so persuasive. It's only your inaction that troubles you, Nagato. Use your power, feel how powerful you are and I promise all these doubts will leave you. Glowing like a magical talisman in Nagato's memory, even now. Twelve years later. Madara's incandescent promises, as the sun drowns in it's bloody pool of fire, impales itself on the jagged edge of the horizon, Amegakure's cut throat.
The sun sets. The light begins to darken to a soft soggy blue.
Konan puts down her mechanical pencil. Over a star, a polychoron stellated out to it's crown of thorns, chakra given shape and depth and angle and structure. Because Nagato could see this, see the seams and blueprint lines of chakra itself. See where the jutsu were built from the ground up. Of from the sky down, because he talks about stars. About the sky. And his eyes saw through the prism of chakra, it's pentagram faces, five points and a prismatic center. Five satellite bodies; and at the diamond core, the bright flame-color of Yahiko's hair, Nagato's fiery crown of chakra, of enlightenment.
And a lot of moodiness. But she's used to this. She's known him long enough, and it's certainly no worse than her own foibles. Her habit of chilly intellectual distance. Her preference for crystallizing and blueprint-mapping her rage. And his. And what they plan to do with it. How they plan to remake the world.
By the whip, by the nine-tails. Which is amusing, she thinks, because Nagato has told her that the early ascetics used to beat themselves with nine-tailed scouring whips. They sought spiritual enlightenment through the pain. And really, what are the two of them doing if not an elaborate grandstanding act of self-destruction?
Or of world-destruction, really. Or deconstruction, to be exact. She prefers that. Destroying things, taking a wrecking ball to them- this takes no thought or artistry, it accomplishes nothing. Amegakure's final convulsion of a civil war only made her and Nagato into what they are now. To dismantle and reshape is more precise, it's the scalpel and the strategy and the vision. It's Nagato's elegantly depraved spin on Yahiko's hard moral absolutism- scare the world straight. And maybe he really believes this will happen. And maybe it will. But she just wants to hurt it badly.
By design. Pain is educational, after all. She agrees with Nagato there.
She can pinpoint the exact place where her migraine will start, her body is now a precise array of paper, given indexed measurements and watermarks and grain and square binding. There is an Akatsuki meeting at hand. She presses two fingers to her temple, the exact spot. Itachi and Kisame have given notice that they have the four-tails in their hot little hands. So the Leader will have to summon everyone for a meeting and a sealing ritual. She will have to adjust her attitude enough and both of them will have to stay sober this night, which is the real tragedy here. Nagato will have to stop moping.
Which he is. She can feel it. Feel him. Like the memory springing to mind, the moment she saw him, caught in the crossing of firelight, the heat drafts of Hanzou's city-wide funeral pyre. Hundreds of houses burning. His hair and skin glowing, golden, like the burning bush, like the pictures he'd shown her of the Christian holy spirit igniting, tongues of flame dancing over his head. A crown of flames. Nagato.
All his unstable power. And all her stabilizing influence that just makes them both further set into their shared madness. He's around, she can feel him. Through the tower's silence, as if setting the tenor of it's air vibrations, invisible frequencies. Not just Yahiko's power either, other powers. Complicated rinnegan jutsu.
Of attraction. Sometimes she does wonder if the rinnegan changed things between them, if only because it changed them so much. Both of them, Nagato is only the one who bears it's full physical brunt directly. She holds the operation together, upholds the support to keep him on his feet, keep him together, in so many ways. And she's not complaining. It's worked out. Between them, the love part, that's worked out very well. It's just the rest of their lives that are ruined.
It's just them that's twisted up, ruined. Somehow, some way that doesn't show. Psychologically, Nagato says, but he also says it goes deeper than that. Into esoterica, subconscious and spiritual, you almost need religious terms to describe what's wrong with them.
The two of them...
That's why they stand sometimes, in front of that old heavy-framed mirror upstairs in their non-bedroom. And undress one another; she'll rest her chin on his shoulder and touch all his creases and lines, all the places where he connects through his piercings to his rinnegan wheel of life far underground. All the parts that used to be Yahiko's but now are his; the way he reacts and the way his expression changes, and his eyes change, when she touches him. And he'll pull her in front of him, under his arm to rest against him. Open her cloak and unfasten her top, cup her breasts in his hands, that are now his hands, not Yahiko's. It always feels completely different when Nagato touches her. Different from memories of Yahiko's hand on her shoulder, or Yahiko's arms around her... Yahiko's completely different affection, in every way. This body so changed now, Nagato burning through it in ever motion. Watch one another as they do this. Just look at what they've done to themselves, look at all of this. The god and the angel. Nagato and Konan. All grown up now, no longer just dirty-faced street children in rags, arrogant teenagers washing off the blood of their victims. Now grown into two twisted adults, wearing black velvet and their moral depravity shamelessly, like they're proud of it.
And- absolutely it's a turn on, absolutely they get off on it- absolutely, what they've become. The sheer twisted perversity of it. The sheer obscenity against a world of moral hypocrisies that really never gave a damn about them in the first place. Flaunting their defiance to it, from how they've chosen to think and lead their lives, to all these theatrical Akatsuki clouds and cloaks and daggers, all this pierced costumery. We're a mess, we really are. Nagato said to her once, finally as they did this. As they were both flushed and would have to move on to something less teasing, some actual consummation. He was watching them, their eyes in the mirror. We're really messed up, aren't we?
And they are. They absolutely are.
We want this. he whispered thinly, their arms around one another. We know exactly what we're doing and we choose it. And we only want to let ourselves know it a little bit. The parts we find exciting, but otherwise we just want to pretend we don't know.
And that they somehow aren't quite aware of what's going on. Somehow not responsible.
And he's moping for certain, though she doesn't blame him for this. She doesn't get irritated with his moods. She finds him, puts her arms around him. Comforts him. And he comforts her, so in a tragicomic way, it works. And they become capable of living again, as if resuscitated from death one more time, their hearts electrified, linked to one another like the machine-aided rinnegan jutsu in the basement, all his bodies. They become capable of enacting vengeance. If she is an angel, she is an avenging angel. Their bijuu superweapon with blow thousands of miles of city and countryside into the stratosphere, and they can't save themselves. Can't stop themselves.
Because nothing can stop them now.
Because if they didn't do this, what else would they do with themselves?