Rain did not fall in Amegakure.
It arrived.
It flattened smoke. It glued dust to stone. It stitched the city together with cold patience until even rust looked freshly wounded. In Ame, weather wasn't a mood—it was governance. It kept secrets from lasting. It kept blood from drying.
Konan stood on a narrow ledge beneath a corrugated overhang and let the water soak the hem of her cloak until it pulled like a weight. Below, towers rose like broken teeth—metal scaffolds, pipe-spines, walkways braided together with stubbornness and corrosion. Everything held. Nothing healed.
She lifted two fingers.
A paper butterfly unfolded from her palm. Thin. Pale. Ordinary, if you didn't know better. The rain struck its wings hard enough to make it shiver—hard enough that paper should've become pulp in seconds.
It didn't.
Chakra kept it intact the way discipline kept breathing quiet. The butterfly flexed once, twice, and slipped forward into the rain as if it belonged there.
Konan watched it go without sentiment.
It wasn't a symbol.
It was a delivery method.
Information had weight. Information was worth more than blood. Blood was easy.
The butterfly drifted through a slit-window and into darkness. It traveled downward through corridors that smelled like oil and old iron. Past seals that didn't glow—because glowing was vanity. Past silent sentries who didn't shift their stance, because shifting implied uncertainty.
At the end of the corridor, a door waited. No sign. No guard visible. Just pressure in the air, like the building itself held its breath.
The butterfly touched the doorframe.
And came apart.
Paper softened, unfolded, then melted into a thin stream of pulp that slid across the threshold like a thought forced through clenched teeth.
Konan followed.
Inside, a single lamp burned low. Its light didn't reach the corners. It didn't need to. The room didn't belong to light.
A figure sat at the far end like a statue placed there centuries ago and forgotten. Orange hair. Piercings set into skin like punctuation. Eyes that weren't eyes—rings within rings, rippling outward into impossible calm.
Pain.
He didn't look up when the paper slurry gathered itself on the floor. He didn't have to. The report wasn't written in ink. It was written in memory.
Konan closed the door behind her. The wet smell followed anyway.
"Leaf," Pain said.
It wasn't a question. His voice was flat, but it filled the room the way rain filled gutters—inevitable, everywhere.
Konan nodded once. "Confirmed."
She did not say invasion. She did not say dead Hokage. She did not say children fighting in streets while adults bled like civilians.
Words were too small.
Pain's gaze lowered—not to her, but to the spreading paper on the floor. The pulp trembled. Then it rose in thin strips, lifting off stone like it had remembered how to fly.
The strips twisted. Arranged themselves into lines. Not readable text. Not a neat summary.
Impressions.
A map made of moments.
Smoke as a taste. Panic as a temperature.
The first strip sharpened into a narrow street—vendors' stalls overturned, a banner still flapping stupidly in ash. Bodies moving in clumps, too slow, too human. A line of dogs set like a ruler. A woman dragging two kids so hard their sandals skidded.
Pain spoke as the strips turned.
"Civilian flow collapses under pressure."
Another strip curved upward—rooflines. An alley mouth held by a living wall of insects. A Sand shinobi hitting the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"Containment relies on clans," Pain continued. "Not central coordination."
The paper shifted again—stadium roof. Violet flame stabbing the sky. A barrier that didn't feel like a wall. A decision.
Within it: an old man moving like the last spine in a body trying to stand. A pale smile. A sword too long, too hungry. Two coffins vomiting up ghosts with empty eyes.
Konan felt the report's memory snag in her own chest—not grief, exactly. Something colder. Recognition of a threshold crossed.
Pain's voice did not change. "One leader carrying too much."
The paper buckled. The impression went strange—not visual, not tactical. Emotional in the way pressure is emotional. A steady weight—present, constant—then abruptly gone.
A hole so clean it felt deliberate.
A village flinching and trying not to show it.
"…and that leader removed," Pain finished.
Konan's fingers flexed once inside her sleeve. She could still taste Konoha's atmosphere through her butterfly's return memory: smoke and incense and damp earth. And under it, something stubborn that refused to go out, even when the world tried to smother it.
The strips re-formed. Forest edge. A dragged line of heavy sand through dirt. Wrong breathing. A boy shouting a name like volume could fix it. Another boy on one knee, bleeding, trying to be a wall out of pride. A third presence arriving late—paper tags flaring and shattering under a weight that wasn't human.
Pain's eyes narrowed a fraction. Not surprise. Interest.
"Jinchūriki exposed," he said. "In motion. Unescorted. Unprotected by leadership."
Konan spoke, because this part mattered. "They moved outside the walls."
"By necessity," Pain replied. "Not strategy."
The paper showed a flash of orange—loud chakra, hotter at the edges than it should've been. A cage rattling because something else snarled nearby.
Konan watched the strip hesitate. In the memory, for half a heartbeat, the blond boy's face wasn't a grin or a shout. It was simply… human. Wet-eyed. Cracked open in public.
The strip folded itself away like it didn't want to hold that kind of detail.
Pain didn't blink. "They are still a village."
A final twist—leadership cluster. Two elders standing too straight. A bandaged man measuring the room. ANBU masks in a funeral crowd like needles in cloth.
Konan's jaw tightened slightly. Not anger. Wariness. Because she knew that kind of watching. She had lived under it.
Pain's tone remained even. "Vacuum forming."
The paper strips fell. The report was spent.
For a moment, the only sound was rain hammering the roof above them—steady, indifferent.
Then, in the far corner of the chamber—
a shadow shifted.
Not rain. Not light. Something else.
A man leaned against the wall as if he'd been there the entire time and the room had simply failed to notice. Orange mask. A spiral that pulled inward to one eye-hole, like someone had carved a vortex into a face and called it a joke.
Konan did not turn her head.
In this room, acknowledgment was permission.
The masked man made a quiet sound. Not laughter. Not quite. More like amusement leaking through a crack.
"Good," he said.
One word. A pebble dropped into still water.
Then, softer—almost conversational, like he was commenting on a play he'd already seen:
"Let Orochimaru soften them for us."
Pain did not respond.
Konan didn't either.
She watched the lamp flame bend in a draft that wasn't there and felt, briefly, the shape of the man behind the mask—presence like a hand on the back of your neck, familiar in the way nightmares were familiar.
The rain hammered. The city drowned slowly, as it always did.
Konan turned toward the door. As she stepped out, she allowed herself one thought—small, sharp, private:
Konoha thinks this was their storm.
It was only the first warning cloud.
Outside, the rain erased her footprints before she took the third step.
Outside the Leaf, the world went quiet in a different way.
Not mourning-quiet.
Predator-quiet.
The trees stood still, rainless, watching the village wall like it was a scar that had been reopened and stitched shut too fast. Even the birds kept their distance, as if the air itself had learned caution.
Two figures moved through the undergrowth without sound.
Cloaks black as wet ink. Red clouds stitched across them like wounds that never closed.
Kisame Hoshigaki walked with a long, rolling ease, sword wrapped in cloth strapped to his back like an insult waiting to happen. The bandages were darkened near the edge, damp from river mist—Samehada drinking greedily through fabric, always hungry, always rude.
Itachi moved beside him like a shadow given limbs—calm, precise, eyes forward.
They stopped at the tree-line.
From here, Konoha's outer districts were visible through gaps in branches. New patches of ash. Rooflines repaired too quickly, too fresh—wood too pale against older beams. A section of wall had been mended with mismatched stone that looked like a scar trying to pretend it was skin.
The village still smelled faintly of smoke, even from this distance.
Kisame tilted his head. "Looks like they had a rough day," he murmured, voice amused in the way sharks were amused.
Itachi didn't answer.
He watched the wall. Watched the movement on it. ANBU masks stood at intervals—more than before, spacing tighter, posture too straight. Not relaxed sentries. Not bored.
Wounded sentries.
Inside the village, something drifted on the wind—not smoke. Not incense.
A hush.
The shape of a crowd. The shape of a center point everyone orbited because they didn't know where else to stand.
Itachi's eyes narrowed a fraction.
He did not need to hear the eulogy to recognize what the village was doing. Konoha had rituals for grief the way it had rituals for training. Structure over collapse. Ceremony over screaming.
A mask over a wound.
Kisame glanced at him sideways. "You're staring like you've got a ghost in your throat."
Itachi's gaze didn't move. "They're watching their dead."
Kisame's grin widened a little. "Ah. The old man finally croaked."
No celebration. No gloating. Just a fact delivered like a joke. Kisame lived in a world where power had teeth and age was a meal.
Itachi's expression didn't change. But something in his posture tightened—so small it would've been invisible to anyone who didn't live by noticing invisible things.
A chakra presence pulsed faintly from within the walls. Hot. Loud even when it was trying to be quiet. Like a bonfire smothered under wet cloth, still finding oxygen through stubbornness.
Nine-Tails.
Not raging. Not unleashed.
Present.
Alive.
Itachi let his eyes soften slightly—not kindness. Distance. The kind of distance that kept you functional when you had to look at something that could split your ribs open from the inside.
Kisame followed his gaze toward the village center, then laughed under his breath. "They've got the fox still, huh? You boys really do keep trophies."
Itachi didn't correct him. He didn't explain jinchūriki like Kisame didn't already know. He didn't explain the difference between a trophy and a burden and a child.
Explanations were a luxury.
Kisame's hand patted the bandaged sword on his back like it was a pet. "So. What's the plan? Knock on the front gate? Offer condolences?"
Itachi blinked once. Slow. "We observe."
Kisame's smile sharpened. "That's your favorite word."
Itachi's eyes tracked the wall again—ANBU spacing, patrol rhythm, the way the guards' heads turned in unison when a bird landed too close. The village wasn't relaxed. It was braced.
Braced villages made mistakes. They grabbed too hard. They watched the wrong angles. They turned grief into paranoia.
And paranoia made openings.
Kisame leaned forward slightly, sniffing the air like a predator tasting weakness. "They smell scared."
"They smell injured," Itachi said.
Kisame chuckled. "Same thing."
Itachi didn't argue.
He thought of masks.
ANBU masks in a funeral crowd. A spiral mask in a dark room far away. A cloak with red clouds. His own face—calm, polite, untrustworthy in the way calm always was.
Kisame shifted his weight. "You think your little brother cried?"
The question was casual. Cruel only by accident. Kisame asked the way you asked whether it would rain.
Itachi's answer was softer than his usual silence. "I don't know."
It was true. And truth, sometimes, was the sharpest thing he could offer without bleeding.
He took one step forward—just one—then stopped again, listening with senses that didn't need sound. The village's rhythm was off. Too many patrols. Too many eyes. Too few anchors.
A leadership hole made everything louder.
Kisame hummed. "You going in or not?"
Itachi's gaze stayed on the wall. Then, at last, it shifted—slightly left—toward a thinner stretch of trees where the guard pattern overlapped poorly.
"We move," Itachi said.
Not dramatic. Not rushed.
Just… inevitable.
Kisame's grin returned, wide and bright and ugly. "Finally."
They slipped into motion. Cloaks whispering against leaves. Shadows swallowing their steps.
Behind the wall, the Leaf tried to hold itself together with ceremony and witnesses.
In the trees, two storms began walking.