The evening air in Konoha had a slight chill to it, the kind that arrived after sunset and sat pleasantly against warm skin. The night market was already running — lanterns above the stalls, the smell of grilled food carried on the breeze, clusters of people moving at the unhurried pace of a village that had collectively decided the day's work was done.
Jiraiya had already gone back to Minato's house. What explanation he had prepared for the field research incident was not Finn's problem.
Finn and Orochimaru walked without a particular destination, falling into the easy rhythm of two people who had things to discuss and were taking their time getting to them. Not far ahead, a group of children were playing at being ninjas — chasing each other between the stalls, throwing rolled paper as improvised shuriken, arguing loudly about who had been hit.
Finn watched them for a moment and said, "Where the leaves dance..."
"The fire lives on," Orochimaru finished, quietly.
He stopped walking. His expression moved through something that came and went before it could be named, and then he turned and looked at Finn with the slight narrowing of someone recalibrating.
"Are you mocking me?"
"No." Finn smiled. "I'm just thinking that you're a more interesting person than you usually let on."
"Incomprehensible," Orochimaru said, with the flat dismissiveness of someone who did not want to examine the statement further. He started walking again.
After a few steps, Finn asked, "The Yorozuya is a named terrorist organization now. I'm wanted across the entire ninja world. You're still willing to stay associated with all of that?"
"Why wouldn't I be?" Orochimaru said, without the slightest pause. "Do you think I care about designations?"
Finn looked at him for a moment. "No," he said. "I don't think you care at all. I think you asked yourself the same question recently, and you came out here tonight partly because of what the answer was."
Orochimaru gave him a look of cold irritation that was its own kind of confirmation. "Boring question," he said.
Finn let it go.
He had been turning over Orochimaru in his mind since they left the restaurant. In the version of events he remembered — the Konoha Collapse plan, the Third Hokage killed by the hands of his own student, the series of choices that placed Orochimaru firmly in the category of irredeemable — it would have been easy to see only the snake, the cold intellect stripped of everything except ambition. But walking next to him on a night market street, watching the man move through the ordinary world of stalls and lanterns and playing children, Finn found he kept arriving somewhere more complicated.
Where the leaves dance, the fire lives on. The fire will illuminate the village and make new leaves sprout.
The second half of that sentence was the part people remembered. The first half was where the meaning actually lived. Orochimaru had said it automatically, the way you say something that was put in you so early it's stopped feeling like a choice. And then he'd been surprised to hear himself say it, which meant some part of him hadn't known it was still there.
"I always thought you were more like a snake than a person," Finn said. "But I'm reconsidering."
"What does that mean?" Orochimaru asked.
"Humans are complicated," Finn said, and offered nothing further.
Orochimaru looked at him with the expression of a man who found this answer inadequate and had decided not to dignify it by pressing for a better one.
Then a clear voice called out from the direction of a fried skewer stall.
"Teacher Orochimaru! Big brother!"
Mitarashi Anko was standing at the stall with a skewer in each hand, cheeks slightly flushed from the heat of the grill, eyes bright with the uncomplicated enthusiasm of someone who had been having a perfectly good evening and had just spotted people she wanted to add to it.
Orochimaru blinked. He looked at her, then at Finn, then back at Anko. "Big brother?" he said, with a flatness that carried an edge.
"He wouldn't let me call him that at Ichiraku either," Anko said, gesturing at Finn with a skewer. "I decided to anyway."
"He is significantly older than you believe," Orochimaru said. His tone was measured, but his eyes had gone briefly to Finn with a very specific quality of assessment — the kind that comes from a person who knows exactly how charming someone can be and is making a calculation about proximity.
Finn read this without difficulty. Orochimaru had brought up his student personally. Finn was, by any objective measure, the kind of person who could cause complications in a young woman's life if he chose to, and Orochimaru — who claimed to care about no one and treated sentiment as an inefficiency — was standing here being quietly protective about it. That was something worth noting.
"Calling you uncle would be a waste," Anko told Finn cheerfully, in the tone of someone who has considered the options and made a final ruling.
Then her expression shifted to the particular curiosity of a ninja kid who has just remembered she has questions. "Teacher — is he really Finn? Kakashi said he's an S-rank wanted criminal. The actual one?"
"Yes," Orochimaru said. His expression had returned to its default coldness, which he appeared to wear like an outer layer over whatever was actually running underneath. "He is also my associate. He's been given freedom of movement in the village for the time being."
Anko absorbed this with admirable equanimity. She considered it for a moment, then reached over and handed Orochimaru one of her skewers — fried meatballs, the fragrant kind — as if this were a completely normal gesture between them.
Orochimaru took it.
He didn't look at it. He didn't remark on it. He just took it, and held it, and continued walking when Finn continued walking. But he took it, and Finn noted that too.
He understood now, watching this small transaction, why the version of Orochimaru in the story had never been able to fully close the account on Anko Mitarashi. Every opportunity to be rid of the complication — a student who knew too much, who could expose him, who had tried to kill him during the Chunin Exams — and every time, the hand had stopped short. He had sealed her memories rather than taking the simpler route. He had invited her to come with him when he left. He had let her go when she refused. He had saved her life at the exam while pretending it wasn't what he was doing.
The snake, it turned out, had kept one person.
"Teacher still has things to discuss," Orochimaru told Anko. "Go enjoy yourself."
Anko looked between them one more time — lingering slightly on Finn, in the way of someone who was filing him under a category she hadn't fully decided on yet — then nodded. "Okay." She went back to the skewer stall without complaint.
They walked on. After a moment, Finn said, "Is it good?"
He was looking at the meatball skewer still in Orochimaru's hand.
Orochimaru didn't answer. He held it out sideways, and Finn took it.
"I won't be polite," Finn said, and ate it.
They walked in silence for a stretch. Finn was thinking, with a vague, unfocused quality, about what it would mean to have a student — someone you'd brought up yourself, whose thinking you'd shaped, who trusted you enough to eat skewers with you at a night market. He had never had that. The Marine career had been full of people he'd commanded, people he'd respected, people he'd occasionally liked. But the word "apprentice" pointed at something different. Something that would require staying in one place long enough.
"I want one someday," he said, without fully meaning to say it aloud.
"One what?" Orochimaru asked.
"Apprentice."
Orochimaru looked at him sideways. "Given what you are at the moment," he said, "the applicant pool would be limited."
"Maybe eventually," Finn said.
They walked a few more steps. Then Finn asked, "You came to find me on my first night in Konoha specifically. Something on your mind?"
"Yes." Orochimaru didn't hedge. "Shimura Danzo. Do you know who he is?"
"Root organization. Claims everything he does is for the village. In practice, a useful person who is also somewhat disgusting." Finn said it without particular heat, the way you describe a familiar landscape feature.
Orochimaru studied him briefly. He had not told Finn about Root. He had not described Danzo's structure or methods in any of their conversations. The specificity of what Finn had just said — accurate in every detail — meant Finn had sources of information that Orochimaru couldn't fully account for. He filed this, as he filed most things that didn't have immediate explanations, and moved on.
"He's interested in you," Orochimaru said. "He asked me to make an introduction. He wants to meet."
Finn's expression shifted into something that was approximately amused. "To be completely honest, that's part of why I came to Konoha. I was fairly sure he'd reach out once I showed up. Danzo is exactly the kind of person who would want to."
"You planned this far ahead?" Orochimaru asked.
"Roughly. The relationship between me and Jiraiya, and between me and your Sandaime — those are genuine on the personal level, but professionally, we are going to end up on opposite sides eventually. The village comes first for both of them. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation. Danzo is different. Danzo operates from his own priorities, dressed in village colors. That makes him actually useful to work with." Finn paused. "Hiruzen will eventually try to contain or manage me. Jiraiya will follow his lead when it comes to that. Danzo will try to use me — which is a much more honest position, and one I can work with."
Orochimaru considered this. Then: "You're reasonably good at reading people."
"Hard to survive without it," Finn said. He rolled his shoulder slightly. "Anyway — it's not late. Why don't we go now? I've been curious about this old man and I have something I want to talk to him about."
"What?"
Orochimaru asked it with the offhand quality of someone who expected either no answer or a deflection. Finn was in the Yorozuya. There was no particular reason to hide it.
"The Rain Country," Finn said. "I want to take it."
Orochimaru stopped walking.
He looked at Finn with the expression of a person reorganizing a prior assumption. "The Land of Rain," he said. "What's in the Land of Rain that you want?"
"Something significant," Finn said. "You'll understand when the time is right."
Orochimaru clearly found this answer unsatisfying. He also clearly recognized the tone as one that was not going to produce more detail if pressed. He started walking again. "If you want Danzo tonight, let's go. I'll take you there now."
"Don't you need to contact him first?" Finn asked.
"No."
The word was delivered with complete serenity, the serenity of someone who had not given a single thought to whether arriving unannounced at Danzo Shimura's secret base with an S-rank wanted criminal in tow might create complications.
Whether Danzo would mind was Danzo's problem.
"Then let's go," Finn said.
He had been looking forward to this conversation since before he'd left the Land of Birds.