The scroll did not say anything about the Rinnegan.
Finn read it twice to be certain. The Shapeshifting Technique's activation requirements were listed clearly, and none of them involved the Rinnegan in any form. What it required was a living sacrifice — a person, willing or otherwise, used as the medium through which the projection was created. The mechanics after that were the mechanics of a very sophisticated cloning technique, with the living sacrifice acting as a kind of anchor.
He had assumed, from the context in which he had seen it deployed, that the technique was Rinnegan-dependent. That assumption was apparently wrong. The technique was old — the attribution on the scroll traced it back to a Rain Country ninja of the Warring States period, possibly two hundred years ago. The Rinnegan had not existed in the hands of anyone relevant at that time. The association with Nagato had simply been the association of possession: he had found this scroll in Hanzo's collection, which was apparently where it had been sitting for decades, and had used it.
Finn set the scroll down and thought about what that implied.
Hanzo had found or acquired it from somewhere and kept it without deploying it, possibly because the living sacrifice requirement was not something he wanted to use or could use without political cost in a country he was trying to hold together through reputation. A technique that visibly consumed a person as fuel was not one you deployed where witnesses could draw conclusions.
The technique itself was remarkable. A projection with one hundred percent physical and chakra similarity to the original body, carrying all capabilities including bloodline limits and carried ninja tools. The limitation was chakra — the projection operated on a percentage of the original's reserves, not on its own generation.
With Finn's reserves, a projection running on half of what he carried would last for several continuous days of combat.
"This is worth learning," he said, and added it to the pile he was taking from this room.
He was still organizing his thoughts about the technique's classification as a forbidden technique — living sacrifice, the second category of the three, the one that covered violations of basic ethics around human life — when the knock came.
An Akatsuki member. Young, nervous in the specific way of someone who has realized they're reporting to a person who could kill them without logistical difficulty.
"Lord Konan has found the bodies. She's asked for you."
Finn looked at him. "The bodies of Yahiko and Nagato."
"Yes, Lord Finn."
He had given the bodies to Orochimaru, who had given them to Danzo, who had apparently decided that delivering them to the Hidden Rain Village as part of some secondary leverage play was more useful than holding them. He had not anticipated this specific outcome. He noted it without surprise — Danzo made decisions based on Danzo's interests, and Finn was not always going to be able to model those interests in advance.
He followed the ninja.
Konan was kneeling on the floor of a room in the building they'd been using as a staging point, and she was crying in the way of someone who has been keeping the grief at a functional distance for two weeks and has just lost the ability to do that.
Finn stood at the doorway and did not go in.
He had made this happen. Not the grief itself — that was Hanzo's work, and before Hanzo, the design of a dead man in a cave who had needed Nagato's pain to serve his plan. But the specific texture of this moment, Konan kneeling in front of two bodies she had just recovered while believing that Konoha and Hanzo had conspired to kill the people she loved — Finn had shaped that. He had chosen the story she was living inside, and she had believed it, and it was working.
He stood at the door and felt the thing he felt when he looked at situations he had caused and could not honestly call good.
After about ten minutes, the crying shifted. The worst of it settled into something quieter. Konan wiped her face with the back of her hand, turned, and looked at him.
"Nagato's eyes," she said.
Her voice was composed in the way of someone who is composed because the alternative is worse. "They're gone. Just the sockets."
Finn kept his expression neutral. "His eyes were clearly unusual. If Hanzo doesn't have them—" he let the pause land — "then they went to Konoha as part of whatever arrangement was made between him and Danzo."
Konan's jaw tightened. "Konoha."
"Don't," Finn said. Not harshly. The way you say it when you can see someone about to walk toward something that will cost them everything and accomplish nothing. "Konoha is not one person and not one decision. You don't know how high this goes. And even if you did — Yahiko and Nagato are gone. If you walk into the Hidden Leaf looking for the people responsible, you're giving them another body."
Her eyes went through several things.
He was right and she knew it and knowing it didn't make it easier. There was also the complication of Jiraiya — a Konoha ninja, their teacher, the person who had given them the foundation to survive their childhood, and now potentially associated with the institution that had killed two of the three people she had survived with. The grief of that was a different kind of complicated.
"The fate of ninjas," she said finally. Quoting something. Possibly something he had said earlier. Possibly something older.
"It is," Finn said. "And you didn't come from an easy country. You know what it looks like."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "What do you need from me now."
"Arrange the burial," he said. "After that, help me stabilize the organization and the village. When that's done—" He paused and asked the actual question. "Are you staying or leaving?"
She looked at him. He could see her turning it over — what staying meant, what leaving meant, what she wanted versus what she thought she could bear.
"I'll stay until it's stable," she said. "Then I'll go."
He felt two things at the same time, which was relief and something else smaller and less comfortable that he didn't particularly want to examine.
"Good," he said.
He meant it about the leaving, and he meant it about the good. He had no honest version of what he was doing in this country in which Konan staying permanently and eventually learning the shape of what had actually happened ended well for either of them. Distance was the kindest available outcome.
"This organization you're giving up," he said, "and this country — they're going to become something completely different from what Yahiko built. You know that."
"I know."
"Then take whatever's left of what you came in with and take it somewhere the Rain Country can't reach. Find a place where being a ninja is something you used to be." He held her gaze. "Live like a person. Not a legend, not a martyr. Just a person."
She looked at him for a long time.
"I'll try," she said. It came out like something she wasn't sure she believed but was willing to attempt.
"That's enough," Finn said, and turned and left before the moment could become something else.
The Hidden Rain Village was settling into new order in the tentative way that cities do when they have changed hands — the infrastructure continuing to function because infrastructure is practical and people need to eat, while the social layer above it recalibrates to the new reality. Akatsuki members were moving through the streets in a way that was still slightly uncertain, conscious that they were now the authority rather than the opposition.
Finn walked without particular purpose, letting the layout of the place organize itself in his memory. The headquarters would move here — Orochimaru and Sasori were already in transit from the Bird Country base, relocating equipment. Kakuzu and Juzo were somewhere in the Rainbow Country, finishing whatever they'd gone to finish, and the message had been sent. They would come here when they were done.
He was thinking about all of this when something in his peripheral vision made him stop.
A patrol of former Rain ninjas who had agreed to serve the new administration was moving through the street. Standard formation, reasonable alertness, nothing notable. Except the third man in from the right was slightly built and kept his face angled down in the specific way of someone who has learned to avoid being looked at directly.
And who, in Finn's admittedly comprehensive recollection of this country and its population, had no reason to be in this patrol at all.
"Hey," Finn said, to the patrol generally. They stopped. "The silver-haired one. Third row."
The man went very still in a way that could not be described as the stillness of a person with nothing to hide.
Finn smiled.
"In all this rain," he said pleasantly, "why is someone from the Land of Water working a ninja patrol in the Rain Country? You could have had a much more comfortable career."