Hanzo running was the cleanest possible outcome. Finn had been turning over the problem of how to let Hanzo escape in a way that didn't look deliberate, and now the problem had solved itself. He watched the last body-flicker disappear and moved on.
Nagato was on the broken ceramic floor.
He had fallen when the Gedo Mazo was sealed, his legs still not functional, and was pushing himself upright on his arms with the expression of someone whose mind is moving faster than the situation allows. The statue was gone. The valley was wrong. The masked man was still here, and that masked man had used the Almighty Push — his technique, the technique of the Rinnegan — and had not been defeated by its counterpart.
The questions Nagato was holding were visible in his face.
Finn looked at him and felt something he did not particularly want to feel, which was sympathy.
It wasn't complicated, the feeling. Nagato's life had been a sequence of arrangements made by people who needed him to be a certain thing at a certain time. The Rinnegan in his skull had been placed there before he was old enough to remember it. The plan he had been built into was not his plan. He had believed in something genuine — Yahiko, peace, the possibility that human beings could be reasoned with — and he had been moved around a board by forces that used those beliefs as leverage. He would die as a chess piece without ever understanding the board's full shape.
The ninja world produced people like this reliably. Obito had been built by a similar process. Two people who should have been ordinary and good, fed into a machine that required them to become something else.
Finn thought briefly of himself. Marine Admiral. He had believed in something too, once. He had served justice inside a system that produced the same outcomes as the system he now operated outside. He was being honest about this in the way that people are honest when the comparison is unfavorable and they make it anyway.
The sympathy he felt for Nagato did not change what happened next. He was aware of that.
"You're Orochimaru," Nagato said, looking past Finn with the sharp focus of someone who has been doing preliminary threat assessment and has just arrived at a conclusion. His eyes moved to Finn. "And you — are you from Konoha?"
"No," Finn said. He pulled the white mask off. "My name is Rodriguez Finn." He paused, and then said the rest of it plainly: "Rest in the Pure Land. This world is too dark for someone who believed in it the way you did."
Nagato's expression shifted — recognition of the name, calculation, something else underneath.
He started to speak.
Finn crossed the distance at the speed that lightning-infused movement allowed, and his hand closed around Nagato's throat before the sound finished forming.
The Almighty Push detonated instinctively — the way the repulsion had stopped every other attack, the reflex firing before the decision could catch up. Finn's grip tightened through it. His hand was not a technique. His hand was his hand, and his hand had held things more powerful than a reflexive burst of chakra pressure.
The snap was small.
Nagato went still. The blood came from his mouth in a slow run, and his breathing lasted two cycles, and then the Rinnegan's concentric rings lost their light in the way that exceptional things lose their light — all at once, without warning.
Finn set him down.
"You are ruthless," Orochimaru said. He was standing behind Finn with Konan across one arm and Yahiko's body across the other, both unconscious, both breathing.
"Villains die when they monologue," Finn said. "I am, at minimum, adjacent to a villain at this stage of my life. I'm learning from the pattern." He looked at the valley. "What do we do with the bodies?"
"You have a plan for that already," Orochimaru said.
"Danzo," Finn said. "Nagato and Yahiko both. He agreed to help Hanzo eliminate Akatsuki's leadership — he can take formal credit for having done so, which is close enough to accurate that he'll accept it. Hanzo gets his version of events: Konoha's Root killed the leadership and took the bodies. The public story writes itself."
And the private logic followed naturally: with Nagato and Yahiko in Danzo's possession, Hanzo couldn't contradict the narrative from a credible position. He was the villain of the piece from every angle. Nothing he said about tonight would be believed by anyone who was not already on his side. Danzo would manage the bodies the way Danzo managed everything — quietly, in the dark, for maximum leverage.
Which suited Finn perfectly. He had no further use for Nagato's body. He had use for the eyes.
Orochimaru set Konan down, produced a small case from within his cloak, and crouched beside Nagato. The extraction was practiced and careful, the kind of technique that had been refined through years of working with materials that didn't improve through careless handling. Two glass vials, a specific preparation solution, a seal applied to each vial. He handed them to Finn.
The Rinnegan, preserved and portable.
Finn took them and looked at them for a moment — the purple rings still faintly visible through the solution, the pattern that shouldn't exist in this era, the eyes that belonged to a plan that was now going to go slightly differently than planned.
"I'll deliver the bodies," Orochimaru said, already sealing Yahiko and Nagato into a scroll with the same efficient care. "You take the girl and go."
"Antidote," Finn said.
Orochimaru produced a small vial from the same cloak. Finn caught it. Orochimaru walked into the Rain Country's gray and disappeared in the direction that Konoha was not.
Finn stood in the broken valley for a moment.
No survivors on either side — Hanzo's men and the Root contingent and the Akatsuki fighters were all somewhere under the ceramic floor, sealed by the same technique that had frozen the valley's bottom. The only things above ground were Finn and Konan.
The only people who knew the full truth were Finn and Orochimaru and Hanzo, and Hanzo's version of the truth had no audience willing to hear it.
He picked Konan up and moved.
The hunting cabin was small and old and smelled of pine and old fire. Finn had found it by the simple method of looking for it, which in the Rain Country's mountain zone took about forty minutes and resulted in something that had a fireplace and a door that closed, which was sufficient.
He had the rabbits cleaned and on the fire before Konan's color came back fully. He had administered the antidote — through the sleeve, which was the most convenient delivery point without requiring anything he was not comfortable requiring — and then arranged her on the cabin's one sleeping surface and let the fire do the rest.
He was in the middle of applying chili powder to the first rabbit when he took a proper look at her for the first time.
The Akatsuki cloak was hanging near the fire, drying. Underneath it: backless. He had not expected that. He had respected the unexpected discovery by not looking for longer than the discovery required, replacing the outer cloak with a blanket, and returning to the rabbits with the slight internal comment that she was apparently a more complicated person than her presentation suggested.
"She is beautiful," he said to the fire, which did not disagree. "But the situation is what it is."
From the moment he'd made his decision in that valley, Konan's role in his plans and the relationship he could honestly maintain with her had been defined. He had no energy for the mathematics of attraction overlaid on ongoing deception. He had made enough compromises today.
He applied salt and turned the rabbit.
Konan sat up.
"Yahiko! Nagato!"
The shout came with her full body — she was upright and reaching before she finished saying both names. Then the cabin registered. The fire. The rabbits. The man she didn't recognize sitting beside them. Her hand went to her side and found the cloak gone and her hands empty and she processed that in order.
Nothing wrong. Not harmed. Rescued.
The vigilance didn't disappear, but it reorganized into something more manageable.
"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was controlled. The tears hadn't started yet. "Have you seen my companions?"
"Rodriguez Finn." He flipped the rabbit. "Yorozuya."
Recognition. Something complicated moved through her face — she knew the name, probably from the wanted materials circulated by the major villages, possibly from Jiraiya's intelligence. The name meant he was not Konoha. It meant he was not Hanzo's. It meant the situation she was waking up to had at least one axis she could orient by.
"You saved me," she said. Then: "My companions—"
"Yahiko is gone," Finn said. He said it flat, because the alternative was to say it with preparation and performance, and she deserved neither. "I don't know about the other one."
She already knew, from his face. He could see her knowing.
He began to explain. The Yorozuya, the contract on Hanzo of the Salamander, his arrival at the valley. What he had found when he got there: Danzo Shimura's Root operatives in cooperation with Hanzo, the ambush that had already been executed, the red-haired young man — by the time Finn arrived, beyond any help. The extraction of Konan, the only thing he had been able to accomplish in the time he had.
He held Yahiko's death back from its real sequence and Nagato's death back from her entirely, for now. Not permanently. But for now.
Konan listened with the stillness of someone whose shock has passed the stage where it produces visible responses and arrived at the stage where it simply sits in the body, heavy and permanent. She knew Yahiko was dead. She had seen him fall. Hearing Finn confirm it didn't change the fact; it only removed the last fraction of unreality.
The tears came quietly. She did not try to stop them. She sat in the firelight in a blanket with her hands in her lap and cried in the way that people cry when they are not performing grief for anyone — steadily, without sound, her face not doing anything dramatic.
Finn looked at the rabbit.
The shame he felt about the performance he was about to deliver was real and he did not dismiss it. He acknowledged it and set it aside, which was a thing he had gotten better at over the years.
"Tell me what happened," he said. "From the beginning. How did you end up in that valley with Hanzo?"
He asked with the expression of someone who genuinely didn't know.