[log] after the walls fall

[callmelegion]

Who: Pain, Konan
Where/When: Konohagakure; on the morning when the marriage event has ended (September 3rd).
Status: Closed / Active
Style: Paragraph, switches between first/third/second person. May have many annoying stylistic flourishes, alas.
Warnings: Nagato misconstruing the world in his usual style. Angst. ABUNDANT :FFFF, and yes, the :FFFF

Comments

[papercutrose]

They are in Madara's house. Konan has become aware of this down to her hair follicles; they stand on end at the back of her neck. To her skin, which is crawling with the invisible electric charge of him. Madara. Madara and his entire family of irritating Uchiha.

Who are all dead, which makes Konan privately certain that the property is densely haunted.

She feels eyes in the silence and emptiness, since Uzumaki ran off and Madara teleported himself away. The hugeness of the rooms, the high ceilings, the smell of aged wood and resin. The weight of history, and she has enough of her own. It's more than enough kami for her to carry. She shivers and gathers her arms around herself.

Konan stands in the Moon Gate of Madara's house. Halfway between in and out. Undecided. Shifting her weight from either foot. Watching Nagato mess up Madara's expensive manicured garden.

Which now troubles her a bit, Nagato harming Madara's property. Madara really... doesn't... deserve that.

She turns that thought over and frowns at it a little. Madara actually... not... deserving all the hate and cold anger she can summon.

Or Nagato can summon, for that matter. And he can summon a damn sight more.

The weather has turned, but Konan has opened most of the windows and doors. It's as if there is a residue, invisible and odorless, left behind. The places where Uzumaki Naruto sat on the veranda, the bedclothes still mussed from Madara lying there earlier, spouting off a honeyed mouthful of poetry. Ridiculous! Both of them in the house, sharing their bed. But it isn't her house, and it isn't even her bed. She has no idea where the hell she is, in fact. And more to the point, what the hell she's been doing. With Madara! And with Uzumaki Naruto, at that, who is really not very much younger than Yahiko was, and who has an infuriating habit of resembling him, and really, she can't think about it.

She has just helped herself to a nice portion of sake from Madara's liquor cabinet. She suddenly has a perfect understanding of exactly where it is. It's the only good to come of anything.

"Nagato?" she tries, but the wind tears the word away.

It's genuinely cold for perhaps the first time this year. Summer has rusted away and died, and the madness that overtook their lives has lifted. The wind is swirling around like Nagato's many hands, weapons in most of them, his eyes restless and searching for a target, anything to seize and tear apart. He sits still and the wind tears at the once beautiful garden for him. He sits in the middle of a storm darkening like a forming bruise, it's spiral epicenter in his hooded eyes. The purse-string tension around his mouth. He really doesn't have to say a word.

She has more serene moments.

"Failed? What are you talking about..." Trailing off as she hears the sharpness in her own tone, attempts to bottleneck it and drain it off. She feels like she wants to scrub every inch of this house, the paper screens, the tatami, like there are fingerprints over everything. Like they've been invaded and robbed. She leans hard against the curved inside of the gate, ruining it's beautiful Zen symmetry.

"Nagato..."

It's her own gathering storm, that sigh. But she knows. Always she knows. She knows she has to hold it together.

It. His power. The ambition, Akatsuki. The unspeakable, himself.

Because half the time she honestly can't tell him that he has any emotional vulnerability. This is blasphemy. To this twisted religion, she thinks. To this pathetic life. Where they will medicate a world sick with war by inciting more war. She thinks about it and imagines pouring the whole bottle of sake down her throat. That would help her a lot more.

And then, collects herself.