Konan came in the morning.
She had packed whatever she intended to take, which was not much — Yahiko and Nagato's ashes, their few personal effects, nothing that belonged to the organization or the country. The conversation was brief. She thanked Finn for his help. She said what she meant and did not perform anything she didn't mean. He accepted the thanks without deflecting them, which was the only honest response available.
Then she left the Rain Country, and the morning continued without her.
Finn sat in what had been Hanzo's courtyard with a cup of tea going cold at his elbow and the Rain Tiger at Will scroll open across his knee. The technique was practical and worth understanding properly — the rainfall as a perception network, chakra infused into the cloud layer rather than projected outward, covering the entire village without the steady drain of an active sensory technique. He was working through the mechanics of the initial chakra investment when the music started on the other side of the courtyard.
He didn't look up immediately. He had been listening to this particular sound for the past two weeks and had found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn't mind it.
The harpist occupied the garden bench near the stone wall, her instrument positioned between her and the rain that fell three meters away and stopped at the courtyard's covered edge. Her hair was silver-white and her eyebrows were silver-white and her eyes were silver-white, and she had made no apparent effort during her entire time in this courtyard to conceal any of these features, which remained remarkable given that she had been operating as a disguised Genin in the Hidden Rain Village for several months before he found her.
Shiraki Yuri. He had first seen her in the Land of Earth, in the daimyo's castle, in the middle of a performance that Jiraiya had been considerably more interested in than the evening's politics. She had been the most sought-after courtesan in a country of people who competed intensely for that kind of attention, and she had noticed Finn and Jiraiya noticing her, and she had maintained the poise of someone who was very accustomed to being noticed.
Then Finn had killed the daimyo, and she had apparently been associated with the wrong people when the accounting was done afterward, and she had fled — through the Land of Earth, eventually to the Rain Country, where she had done what someone with her resourcefulness and her genuine if limited ninja training could do, which was to acquire a Genin registration under a name that was not her name and wait for the situation to clarify itself.
He had spotted her in the patrol on his second day in the village. The silver-white hair had not been covered. He remained unsure whether this was an oversight or a conclusion she had reached about the futility of concealment.
The music ended. The last note held in the wet courtyard air.
Finn took an appropriate sip of tea.
"What would you like to hear, sir?" She said it with the professional evenness of someone who had been saying versions of this sentence for years and had not yet decided whether to stop.
He looked at her. "Can you actually use ninjutsu?"
She blinked. It was not the question she had been bracing for. "Three chakra natures. I know some techniques."
"That's why you were able to stay a functioning Genin without being immediately exposed," he said. "Not because Genin is the ceiling of your ability."
"Genin is the most inconspicuous registration," she corrected, with the particular composure of someone who has decided that if a correction is warranted it should be delivered regardless of audience. "Not a classification of my capability."
Finn laughed. It was genuine.
She had survived the daimyo's collapse, a cross-country flight, several months of embedded life in a village that had just experienced a change in power, and a career ending in the manner that careers ending usually did in this world. She had done all of it with apparent calm and without asking anyone for help. He found this interesting.
He looked at the scrolls on the table beside him, and then back at her.
"Would you like to learn more powerful techniques?" he asked.
Her composure slipped for a fraction of a second. This was clearly not what she had been expecting either. "I thought..." she started, then stopped.
"You thought I was keeping you here as a hostage," he said.
She didn't deny it.
The suction was gentle — he brought her across the courtyard by her momentum rather than her weight, a careful application of the same force that had stopped Hanzo's Water Style dead in the valley. He caught her chin in his hand, tilted her face up toward his, and looked at her with the frank assessment of someone who has made a decision and is informing its subject.
"I first noticed you in the Land of Earth," he said. "There wasn't a better reason than your face. I had every intention of taking you out of that castle after the daimyo was dealt with, but Jiraiya got in the way and I got distracted, and then I forgot." He paused. "I didn't forget. But I moved on to other things."
She looked at him with the specific expression of someone who is frightened and knows that showing it will not help.
"You're genuinely beautiful," he said. "I've met many beautiful people. You're still notable." He let her go and stepped back. "My rooms tonight. Pack what you need."
She recovered faster than most people did from that kind of announcement.
"That," she said, carefully, "seems beneath someone of your standing."
"I only asked whether you wanted to learn ninjutsu," Finn said pleasantly. "You raised the other matter yourself and then called it beneath me. This seems like you talking yourself into a situation."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her composure had the texture of someone who would very much like to say something cutting and has correctly assessed that this is not the moment.
"Would you like the ninjutsu?" Finn asked.
A beat. "Yes," she said. As quietly as someone could say something and still have it heard.
He picked up the scroll that had been sitting at the edge of the table since morning.
He looked at it for a moment without speaking.
Konan had handed it to him when she left. He had not been expecting it. She had been carrying it since childhood — a family technique, the paper escape scroll, passed to her from family she didn't remember through whatever chain of custody had survived the country's successive disasters. Jiraiya had taught her ninjutsu, but the paper escape had come from before Jiraiya, from a scroll she had carried in her bundle since she was small. She hadn't understood it until she had the foundation to understand it, and then she had built the rest of what she was on top of what the scroll contained.
The 600 billion detonating tag technique. The paper sea. The way she could convert her entire body into folded paper and move through the air in configurations that nothing biological should manage. All of it had started here.
She had given it to him as a gift. A sincere one. The most sincere kind, which is the kind given by someone who is done with the part of their life the gift represents, and is giving it away because they want the years it took to mean something after they're no longer carrying it.
He had stood there holding it and felt the specific discomfort of being given something genuine by someone he had wronged.
Finn handed the scroll across the table to Shiraki Yuri.
"This is advanced," he said. "Not bloodline — it's a secret technique, transferable, learnable by anyone with the right foundation and enough patience. Once you have it properly, you'll have something worth having." He paused. "It also suits someone who prefers not to be found."
She took the scroll with both hands, looking at it, then at him. "Whose was this?"
"Someone who decided to stop being a ninja," he said. "She wanted it to go somewhere useful."
He left it there.
A sound from the corridor — the particular cadence of a ninja reporting who has been standing outside the threshold for slightly longer than is comfortable.
"Lord Finn. Lord Orochimaru and Lord Sasori have arrived."
He was already moving.
At the doorway, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder at Shiraki Yuri, who was still holding the scroll with the careful attention of someone who has just been given something valuable and is trying to determine the exact nature of the obligation attached to it.
"Don't forget my rooms," he said. "Tonight."
She went red in the particular way of someone who has too much composure to respond to something and not quite enough to be unaffected by it. Her mouth closed. Her eyes did something that would have been an excellent glare if she had been in a position to glare.
Finn walked into the corridor.