Chapter Nine:
A Spark in the Rain
At that height of the tower, the cold was biting, the gusts of wind freezing the walls and permeating the air. Outside, the rain lashed the city. The constant rumor of its fall.
It had begun just minutes before: he saw the pale hand push aside the sliding door beside him and from then on his heart slowed as if holding back the blood rushing through his body. A thin continuous timeline that took him from the main room to climbing the spiral staircase behind her, both of them silent and with only the brush of her overcoat breaking the stillness around them. Each turn in the staircase led to an upper floor, but they continued upwards, until at last they reached the rickety hallway she now trod, its damp-swollen wood creaking with her footsteps.
Through the windows came the faint glow of the city. Soaring buildings. Lights and vertical metal and above them the black clouds and the occasional lightning flashing white.
But as they walked to the room without looking at each other Naruto felt that, far from blaming him for his absence, she only had room in her heart to celebrate the restoration of what was lost.
"Tea?" Konan asked.
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That night, when he held her in his arms again, she said to his ear, her teeth clenched and her voice a thread from the past:
"My jutsu symbolizes me."
She trembled against him like the reflection of the moon in water.
"A white page, waiting to be written."
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This city of metal and rain, Naruto thought, this city of rain and sorrow, was the perfect representation of the anguish that had tormented her heart. Dark, abandoned, suffocated in its own confinement that only allowed its buildings to go upwards, to a sky always gray and tearful.
"I want to save it," Konan said, standing in front of the window, her gaze lost in the city. "I want Ame to have the peace the three of us always longed for."
In her icy voice, the word "peace" came as a sigh. Her statuesque attitude at times still disturbed him. Motionless, her eyes stripped of all luster, her skin extraordinarily white.
They were facing the large window of the main tower. Curtains of water falling against the glass. The vastness of the city in front of them, awash in the storm. Konan had told him that Nagato -Pain, rather- used to go there, as well as frequenting the tongue that sprawled on the floor above. He would watch the rain, and from time to time he would make it stop, to stop falling. But now there was no one to hold it back. And the rain was falling.
Constantly.
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He had come after her letter, the one Tsunade had shown him. But since he came they hadn't talked about it. Naruto felt, from the first moment he set foot in the tower, that he was finally accessing her most intimate side. It was there, on those stairs, on those floors, on those balconies facing the rainy abyss, in those halls, that the moments that shaped Konan's sad past took place. He saw her walk silently through the corridors, as if she remembered, as if in every corner, or in every turn of the wall there was a fleeting image that surfaced within her. A past that began in abandonment; that restarted with Yahiko, both children and helpless; that continued with Nagato; that continued with hope to change the world; that zigzagged between love and death; to end in the deepest despair and loss of all she loved. From one day to the next with Yahiko. Gradually, vainly with Nagato. As if life had grabbed her by the throat and shown her twice that nothing was hers and everything belonged to fate.
It was in the middle of that same day, hours before, when he had just arrived and they were walking together through the torrential streets, that they heard, compressed by the roar of the city, a distant explosion, followed by a column of smoke. Naruto tries to run, but soon the papers envelop him and he is carried away by the sinuous current that lifts him from the ground like a whirlwind. He senses that he is flying, that he is moving at great speed. Needles of cold air seeping between the cut and identical papers. And soon the dizziness in his stomach disappears, he feels he is descending, and his feet touch the ground again. As soon as the white cocoon disperses around him, he inhales the heavy, burning, smoldering smoke of the burning tent. Fire so voracious that it dries his forehead and lips, despite the rain.
Konan moved his hands at a speed he had never seen her execute before, and at once the drops from the sky came together as if answering the call of the heavens and fell in spurts that converged on the very heart of the fire. For a moment, a flash of the fight Kakashi held with Zabuza peeked into his memory. A similar technique, but more advanced. She managed to form the water impulse with mere rain, without need of a nearby body of water.
Flames smothered, timbers wet, crowd gathered around her. Silence almost perfect, a unanimous reverence almost obliging.
"Angel." That's all they murmured. "Angel, angel."
She raised her voice and ordered all the stores in the city to be checked for flaws that could cause another fire. Her voice soft and cool despite her strength. Her hand gestures light. The trickles of water running down her soaked overcoat. When he saw her, he forgot that he, too, was soaked: such was the naturality with which she conducted herself in the rain, to the point of making him forget the constant weeping of those desolate lands.
Dispersed the villagers at her command, Konan returned to look at him. Strange scene, Naruto thought. To see her, her mysterious beauty, in that sweltering city, her face outlined by the neon lights of the businesses.
"Let's go," she said.
They made their way back to the central tower, the one that stood out among all the others. But down there, at the foot of the steel skyscrapers, Naruto could feel the seclusion of Amegakure. As they both walked side by side, the narrow alleys, the cramped structures followed one after the other. The city secluded upon itself, like a heart that laments its sadness and refuses to open.
Naruto watched Konan walk beside him.
"That's the first time I've seen you use a jutsu that doesn't involve paper."
Konan looked at him. In the overcast dusk, her amber eyes still glowed.
"How many chakra natures do you wield?" he asked.
"A few," she said. "Water, Earth, Wind..."
"Wind?", Naruto said, puzzled. "I possess Wind nature, too."
"I know," she said, smiling subtly. "Also, Yang nature."
Naruto froze in his tracks.
"Yang?"
She slowed down in front of him. And raised one of her eyebrows and asked him, just like she did that time at the restaurant in Konoha:
"Are you underestimating me, Naruto?"
He smiled. "You're beautiful."
And he saw, in the still expression on her face, the slight push of a smile on her lips and a twinkle in her eyes, before she resumed walking.
"How did you imagine I use my paper?"
Naruto thought about it, following her. It had always fascinated him how she could move that myriad of papers at will as if they were an extension of her mind. But, more than that...
"How does it feel turning into it?", he asked, walking again by her side.
"Turning into paper?"
"Yes. When you disperse into hundreds of those small papers to travel somewhere. And what's the moment you actually turn into it? I recall you telling me Sasori cut you in half with his puppet of the Sandaime when you when to recruit him to Akatsuki."
"My consciousness is in all of them, but I can only hold it in a single piece of paper. It's hard to explain. And it's exhausting; the truth is, I can't move around indefinitely like that."
They disembarked at the end of the street, and Naruto suddenly felt a puff of damp air on his face, followed by a crash of water further down from where they were. The lake of Amegakure.
Immense, gloomy, unnerving. Only an old metal railing protected them from the rocks that descended into the water.
"As for the Shikigami Dance jutsu," Konan continued, looking at the lake that looked like a sea, "it is basically a transformation technique that I maintain continuously. When I start the technique, I can feel my body turning blank, my nerves disappearing, everything becoming... Void."
"You are immune to any physical attacks," Naruto said. "You can even levitate and fly extremely fast."
"Yes," she said. "Jiraiya was the one who urged me to hone my paper techniques. With time, I learned how to make my paper harder, to not let it get soaked by the rain, to let it flow following my thoughts."
The sun was almost disappearing over the horizon. So large was the lake that the wind generated a swell that crashed against the metal ledge, like a sea whose tide was breaking against the stones. The water of the sky melting into the lake. Her blue hair fluttering in the wind.
She turned to walk on, but not before saying to him:
"Come, there is something I want to show you."
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They descended endlessly through the floors of the tower. At a certain point, Naruto had the feeling that they were underground. A sort of tightness in the air. Until the staircase vanished at the lowest floor. Next to it, the large black mouth of the entrance to a room. Konan stepped forward, with a looseness that evidenced her frequency to this place, and flipped a switch.
One by one, the ceiling lights turned on, revealing a hall. On the sides, large metal cylinders followed one after another. Weapons hung on the walls; some documents rested on tables here and there. But those cylinders, especially the six against the right wall, were what caught Naruto's attention.
"The Six Paths of Pain..."
"The Paths used to be stored here," Konan said. "They are empty now, of course, as you destroyed them in your fight with Nagato."
"Back then, when you were taken hostage by Konoha, you managed to reach an agreement to send Nagato's and Yahiko's bodies here, to Amegakure."
"I did," Konan whispered. "They rest in a place I prepared for them."
"Where?"
Konan looked at him.
"You will see soon enough."
"I thought that's what you wanted to show me."
"No," Konan said. "It will be a day where there are no other things to see that would stain the memory of them."
She looked over his shoulder. Naruto turned around and, standing on the opposite wall, alone, identical to the others, was another cylinder. It wasn't lying down like the others; it stood almost erect in front of them.
"Who's there?" Naruto asked, intrigued.
Konan inhaled.
"There's Hanzo."
Silence of a crypt. Only the damp rush of air sliding down the walls.
Konan reached up and sent one of her papers through the darkness, and, folding it, lowered it against a small lever on the side of the cylinder. Noise of pressurized air. The cover projected forward and moved to a side, so slowly that the faint pale light from the ceiling came in at an angle, as if a cloud were being cut from the sky.
White eyes glowing motionless in the darkness. Stalking without a breath of life. The corpse marked by light and shadows, stiff. The edges of the breathing mask insinuating themselves in front of eyes that never blinked.
Konan snuggled closer to Naruto. He, having managed to detach himself from that predatory figure, saw a strain in her gaze. As if she was expecting that at any moment that body was going to suddenly move. For the first time, he saw her frightened. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her close against him.
"Do you do this often?"
"Do what?" she said without looking at him, unable to suppress a slight crack in her voice.
"Seeing Hanzo."
"No," Konan said, "I haven't done it in a long time. I could only do it now because I'm with you."
Naruto returned to stare at the corpse that lay standing before them.
"He looks... frightening."
He thought Konan would tell him to imagine when he was alive, but he received no comment. The presence of the corpse, even if it was totally inert, oppressed her.
"You told me about the civil war that devastated Ame years ago."
Konan gulped.
"It was a long time ago. It started before you were born, at the end of the third shinobi world war." At the implication of the age difference between them, Konan seemed to relax and rested her hand on his back. "It ended when you were taking the Chunnin exams, just before Orochimaru attacked Konoha."
Naruto felt her warm touch. A protective mood over him, as if suddenly she had a child by her side.
"Hanzo had become increasingly paranoid since Yahiko's death. He knew Nagato was out there, in his very city, in the very rain, looking for nothing more than to kill him. He retreated behind rows and rows of security, of hidden places, as he continued to rule."
Konan now looked blankly at Hanzo's body.
"It wasn't a war, precisely. It was Nagato's revenge." She looked at the rest of Hanzo's clothing: his vest, his greaves, the gloved hands; as if examining him. "I...," she said, pained, "did not share Nagato's intention to kill his entire family. I knew that nothing would bring Yahiko back, even if I dreamed of him every night. But he was blinded by rage."
"A rage that lasted fourteen years..."
"It wasn't easy. Nagato was crippled by Hanzo when we were ambushed. We had to constantly look for safe places to escape from him. When Nagato recovered and mastered the Outer Path he was able to handle the Six Paths of Pain and act from afar. Neither Hanzo nor Nagato wanted to destroy Amegakure in the process. Perhaps that was the only thing that united them: their desire to protect the village. Over time, Hanzo became more and more reclusive, and grew older. All it took was a faint breach in his security, and Nagato was able to find him, and murdered him."
"Jiraiya told me about the fight Hanzo had with him, Tsunade, and Orochimaru," Naruto said. "A jounin battalion wiped out, the three of them near death, and Hanzo with barely a scratch. Jiraiya believed that no one he knew could stand up to him alone."
"He didn't know what Nagato had become," Konan said.
Naruto squeezed her hand.
"And you, what have you become?"
Her violet eyelids palpitated and her eyes lifted to his. As if looking expectantly at the most fortuitous circumstance of her destiny.
"I became what you made out of my sadness."
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And when he had her entirely in his arms again, when he sank his fingers in her hair, and lost himself in the hollow of her neck and the perfume of her skin, he heard how she arched, making him feel the soft caress of her breasts, and said to him, with clenched teeth and her whole body in tension:
"My jutsu symbolizes me."
Trembling against him like a drop at the edge of an abyss.
"A white page, waiting to be written."
He embraced her and only knew to sink his nose in her neck and inhale the sweetness of her skin, of kissing the pale body that mounted him, until he told her:
"You must fill it yourself."
She pulled her face away and looked up at him.
"You always hoped someone else would be by your side like a light shining on you. A beacon of hope. Like Yahiko, like Nagato." He pushed her hair away from her eyes, which glittered golden in the dimness of the room. "Be it yourself. Be that light you're waiting for. And I'll be by your side."
"I don't know if I'll be able to ignite that light."
"I can be your spark," he told her. "I could be your spark. But once it's lit you have to carry it."
Konan looked into his eyes, their faces still in the room that was again darkening on one of the few days in Ame where the clouds had melted away.
"Kiss me," she said.
He pressed his lips against hers, and drew her close to him again. They loved each other little by little until they loved each other violently and fell into the blankets, their cheeks heated and their eyelids heavy with tiredness. They tangled under the quilt, between muffled murmurs, icy feet brushing against each other without losing the rhythmic beat of their breaths, her body naked and mysterious like the violet eyelids and the blue hair inches from his face; him facing the window and with her under his arm.
And the stars shining.
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I can't believe it's already been three years since I wrote and published this story.
This chapter, this fragment, came together as all my stories always do: one image, from which others emerge and connect themselves; and before I knew it, I wanted to write it.
I can't say for sure how often this story will continue. Initially I considered it finished, but my imagination has surprised me. Or maybe it was the characters that claimed my attention. Any writer knows the demanding presence of the characters that dwell in their mind. They haunt them, they ask them to be written, they beg to be narrated.
As I finished translating this piece, more images sprouted in my mind again. Like the turning of a page to see what's there on the other side, waiting for you, already imagining but never sure. The story will take a more global scale from now on. And of course, Konan and Naruto will continue to be the center of the story. The drums never stop. Rain always falls, sooner or later.
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I would love to hear from all of you again.