Boy meets girl: again [Part 1 / Complete]
Who: Pain and Konan
Status: Closed
Style: Present tense, paragraph form.
Where/When: Himorogi; approximately an hour or so after Pain has awoken in Kannagara
Warnings: none yet; will edit if necessary
What you are not aware of is that it makes him afraid.
Afraid: unsettled, your word, might be better suited.
Nagato has not dreamt for many years, lying in the darkness.
In the tower; the mausoleum, with only the dead and Konan to keep him company: the dead, Konan, and his own thoughts, such that dreams have become his waking world.
Controlling the rain, and feeling the air, and walking among the gods, as a god, and sometimes it becomes difficult to tell when he is awake, and when his Rinnegan is plunging him into another stupor.
When he is in the pods, as well as standing on the ledge, and looking down at the country that lifts its many hands to his many hands, and invokes God's mercy.
Or God's wrath.
Sunlight on his eyes - the original incarnations thereof - which have not seen its like in many years, and which look back at him now, wearily.
And he does not like seeing himself, seeing himself.
Seeing the waste he has become, and seeing the waste who has become him.
Seeing the face who, so long ago --
Was someone else.
And all around, his fourteen eyes blink at life and his fourteen ears hear sounds. Sounds that are not water, or Konan's timbre. Life that does not fall to paper, or die, or become a part of him. Life like what he thought - what Nagato thought - he might have for his country, for home, in a land so far away, before Amegakure no Sato; before he became entombed by the city which conquered him even as he conquered it.
Wherein his body and heart rotted inside the metal tangle, like the shades of the prison house.
And now that which should be soothing, he supposes: life - is unsettling. Is frightening, yes. Because he has grown up losing it. Parents, and animals, and friends. It is as if it is there to die. And he has destroyed so much of it, himself. Or brought it pain, like that which he has endured. To create a harmony of some kind, because this is how he understands the world to work.
“Konan,” he says. “Konan, are you here?”
Because if she is not.
Because he is alive only through the dead, and through his own dead.
And he cannot otherwise live amid such life.
It is grotesque.
There is too much here. Too much for fourteen eyes to see, and too much for fourteen eyes to hear, and too much light, and too much green. It almost burns. And he wants her nearby, again.
Though he will not say any of this.