Konan was not the kind of person who stayed in grief for long. That was not character — it was training, the particular conditioning of a child who had grown up in a country that kept finding new things to take from her. She had learned early that staying submerged was a choice, and that surfacing, however painful, was the one that kept you alive.
The question pulled her up.
"Hanzo of the Salamander," she said. The hatred in her voice was not loud. It was the settled kind. "He is a despicable coward who calls himself the protector of this country."
She told Finn what had happened. The invitation, phrased as an opportunity — Hanzo's willingness to use Akatsuki's communication networks for post-war negotiations with the major powers, to serve the Rain Country's recovery. The organization's decision to accept, because refusing a peace overture from the Rain Country's own ruler would have been a contradiction of everything they stood for. The walk into the valley that had felt wrong from the first turn.
Yahiko dead. Nagato — she didn't finish that sentence. She didn't know about Nagato.
"He didn't want to negotiate," she said. "He wanted to eliminate us. Absorb the organization. Unify control of the country under himself."
"That's the shape of it," Finn agreed. He was turning the rabbit on the spit without particular urgency. "Someone should have told you at some point that you were naive."
The words landed, and something moved through her face.
"Someone did," she said quietly. "We knew."
Finn said nothing. She had answered more honestly than he had expected, and he left space for it.
The fire did what fire does. The rabbit browned and dripped. Outside, the Rain Country resumed its standard weather.
After a while, Finn pulled the rabbit off and broke it, handing a section across to Konan without ceremony.
She took it and ate. Not enthusiastically. But she ate, which was the relevant thing.
"The Yorozuya," she said, after a few minutes. "You were in the area for Hanzo."
"There's been a standing contract on him for some time," Finn said. "Multiple parties. I accepted the most recent one before we came through." He shrugged in the way of someone reporting on logistics. "I arrived in the middle of something already in progress. The Root operation was ahead of schedule. By the time I understood the situation and reached a position to do anything about it—" He let the sentence complete itself.
Konan absorbed this without visible skepticism. The Root Organization of Konoha cooperating with Hanzo of the Salamander was a piece of the picture she hadn't had before, and it accounted for things she had seen in the valley that hadn't made sense in isolation. She filed it and moved forward.
"You're still going to kill him," she said.
"I'll try," Finn said, in a tone that was doing a specific amount of work.
She looked at him for a long moment. Then: "Despicable."
Finn laughed. He didn't disagree.
She ate rabbit in silence for a moment. Then she straightened, in the particular way of someone who has finished one stage of a conversation and is beginning the next.
"I'll hire you," she said. "To kill Hanzo."
"You don't need to," Finn said. "He's on the contract already. He'll be dealt with eventually."
"He dies at someone else's hands and what does that mean to me?" The question was calm, not heated. "He needs to die where I can see it. I have to be there when it happens."
Finn stopped chewing and looked at her.
"Hatred is the most tedious thing there is," he said.
"You've never had reason to hate anything," Konan said. Not accusatory. Observational.
He thought about this genuinely, which was not something he had planned to do. It was accurate. He had grievances, irritations, professional enemies, but the deep settled hatred that rearranged a person's entire purpose around a single object — he had never experienced it. Perhaps luck. Perhaps some gap in his character that he had never noticed because it had never been tested that specific way.
"Maybe," he said.
"So." She set the rabbit down. "What do you want for it. Name the price."
"I don't need money from you," Finn said.
"I know." Her voice was level. "I said name the price."
She meant it fully — he could hear that she meant it fully, that the offer extended to whatever she could give and she had already resolved herself to the fact of it. He felt his face do something involuntary.
"You have a specific misunderstanding of my priorities," he said.
"I'm stating my willingness," she said. "Nothing more. I need you to know there's no limit to what I'm offering."
He looked at her and understood that she was telling the truth. She had nothing left to protect by holding anything back. The two people who had constituted her reasons for caution were gone. She was operating from the other side of that.
He also understood that accepting anything along those lines, having made the decisions he had made today, would be a particular kind of degradation that even he was not willing to perform.
"I'm not interested in that," he said, as plainly as he knew how. "What I want is something you might actually have."
She waited.
"Ninjutsu," he said. "Hanzo carries five S-rank techniques, by intelligence. Alternatively, three forbidden techniques. I'll take either set as payment."
"I don't have any of those," she said.
"Then you're a poor client and this is a difficult conversation," Finn said.
She looked at him with the expression of someone who is deciding whether to be angry and has concluded that anger is not useful right now.
"Besides money," he said, "what can you actually offer?"
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she was still going through the inventory. Then she said, clearly and without hesitation:
"The Rain Country."
Finn stopped.
"I'll give you the entire Rain Country."
He looked at her. She held his gaze without blinking.
"Explain," he said.
"Yahiko and Nagato and I led Akatsuki. They're gone. That leaves me, and I have final authority over the organization. Akatsuki has the loyalty of a significant portion of this country's population — the people who never followed Hanzo. If you kill Hanzo, the remaining power structure collapses, and what's left is what Akatsuki has built." She paused. "I'll transfer control of the organization to you. You'll have Akatsuki's networks, Akatsuki's membership, and Akatsuki's standing in the country. Which is to say, you'll have the Rain Country."
Finn did not perform surprise. He was surprised, but not in the way that required performance.
"That's the dream Yahiko built," he said. "You're giving it away."
Something crossed her face, quiet and brief. "It was his dream. I was there because he was there. The dream died when he did."
She said it without drama. That was what made it land.
Akatsuki had always run on Yahiko's personality, on his specific brand of conviction that was strong enough to hold together people who had no other reason to stay. Without him, the architecture remained but the load-bearing element was gone. Konan knew this. She had known it before Finn said anything.
She had nothing she wanted to build. She had one thing she wanted to do. This was the most direct path to doing it.
"I'm interested in that arrangement," Finn said.
The smallest change in her expression. Not relief exactly. The dissolution of a particular kind of tension.
"Then you'll help," she said.
"Let's call it agreed."
He went back to the rabbit. She sat with her hands in her lap and the fire between them, and the Rain Country kept raining outside the window.
In the cave that had been Uchiha Madara's residence and was now simply a cave with a new occupant, Obito sat cross-legged with a scroll open and his attention somewhere else.
He had felt the Gedo Mazo summoned. He had felt it active, which meant Nagato had deployed it, which meant the Hanzo situation had escalated faster than expected. He had settled in to wait for it to return when the summoning contract resolved itself — the statue always returned to this cave when it wasn't being actively maintained.
It had not returned.