When Finn and Orochimaru returned to the Bird Country base, Nohara Rin was awake.
This was unexpected, and it was also, in another sense, the only possible result. She'd been dead. The sequence of events — Raikiri through the heart, blood on the rain-soaked ground, the light going out of her eyes — had been real and complete. Then Orochimaru had held her soul back from the Pure Land while Kakuzu had done what Kakuzu could do with a shattered organ and threads that could find any seam. And apparently that had been enough. She was breathing. She was confused.
The confusion was understandable. Her heart had been destroyed. She had experienced death as a fact, not a near-miss. And now she was in a cave in the Land of Birds, alive, with the Three-Tails no longer sealed inside her.
She had taken time to process this. She was still processing it.
The explanation for what she'd done — stepping into Kakashi's Raikiri — was its own kind of logic, and not a bad one. She had understood her situation clearly by the end of it: she was sealed with the Three-Tails, Kakashi didn't know it, and taking her back to Konoha would complete exactly what the Hidden Mist had intended. Even if Konoha extended every mercy — and there was no guarantee of that, not for someone carrying a tailed beast that needed to be extracted — the extraction would kill her. The Hidden Mist would reclaim the Three-Tails afterward. She was a delivery mechanism for a catastrophe, and there was one way to interrupt the delivery.
She had taken that way.
What she hadn't known, couldn't have calculated, was what her death would look like to the person who'd been almost there in time. She hadn't known Obito was in the forest. She hadn't known Obito was alive at all. She had thought she was making a clean, clear sacrifice. She had not known what it was going to cost.
Meanwhile, in the base's assigned room, she had spent two days in a state of considerable alarm.
The room itself wasn't particularly frightening. The cave was gloomy and strange but structurally sound. The three people who moved through her field of experience, however, were something else.
The first was the figure who traveled inside a large puppet — a scorpion-shaped construct that looked like something produced by someone with an intensely specific set of nightmares and the technical skills to realize them. Sasori in his Hiruko shell moved past her room occasionally without acknowledging her existence.
The second was the stitched-together man with the broad face and the sewn seams across his body who had apparently been the one to actually repair her heart, and who had not spoken a single word to her across two days. Kakuzu moved through the base with the specific quality of someone who considered small talk an insult to his time.
The third was the man with the red lip tattoos who carried an enormous blade across his back and had the quality of someone who had made several professional decisions that most people would describe as extremely poor. She recognized him — Biwa Juzo, one of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen who had defected from the Hidden Mist. She knew who he was. That knowledge was not reassuring.
Three meals a day arrived. No conversation. No information. No explanation of where she was or what was happening. She could move around the interior of the base, but not outside. She'd thought about trying to get someone to talk to her and had concluded that none of the three were going to be receptive.
She was not in any immediate danger, as far as she could tell. She was also absolutely imprisoned in a cave with terrifying strangers, which was its own category of experience.
On the third day, a voice came from the doorway.
"Hey there, little one. Good to see you again."
Nohara Rin turned around.
The man in the doorway wore a silver-gray haori with embroidered tigers descending a mountain. A sword at his waist. A jade-inlaid pipe releasing a slow thread of smoke. And the specific quality of composed, unhurried ease that she associated with people who had been in enough dangerous situations that none of the individual ones registered as particularly significant anymore.
Rodriguez Finn.
She had seen him twice in Konoha — once at Ichiraku Ramen, once when he'd appeared on Hokage Rock and she'd gone with Minato-sensei to see him. She'd formed an impression of someone genuinely pleasant, considerably stronger than the relaxed exterior suggested, and apparently on reasonably friendly terms with Konoha's leadership despite the wanted designation that everyone was officially pretending not to notice.
She felt, in a rush that was embarrassing in its intensity, the relief of encountering someone she recognized.
"Mr. Finn." She crossed the room and stopped a few paces away, trying to compose herself. "Did you save me? I'm very grateful—"
"I mostly showed up afterward," Finn said with a wave. "Orochimaru held your soul back and Kakuzu did the repair work. I'm just the one who arranged it."
"Lord Orochimaru?"
This was confusing in a different direction. Orochimaru was a Konoha shinobi — one of the Sannin, deeply senior, known to Minato-sensei as someone due respect. Which raised the question of why she was here rather than in a hospital in the Leaf Village.
She started to say something about Konoha and Finn finished the thought for her.
"You want to go back. Check in on people. Let Kakashi know you're alive." He said this with a mild smile, no judgment in it.
Rin felt her face do something complicated. She had liked Kakashi — had thought she liked Kakashi — and then Kakashi had gently and clearly communicated that he wasn't going to go in that direction, and she had found, in the months since Obito's death at the Kannabi Bridge, that she'd been rethinking a great deal. Kakashi was brilliant and she respected him deeply. But Obito had been the one who...
She focused. "Can I go back?"
"No," Finn said. "Not for a long time. And no one can know Nohara Rin is still alive. Not yet."
"Why?" She couldn't stop the question. "I'm just an ordinary ninja. I don't understand why it matters whether I'm alive or dead."
"It matters to one specific person," Finn said, "and because it matters to that person, it matters to the very dangerous individual currently manipulating that person."
He took a slow pull from the pipe and exhaled.
"Obito," Rin said. The name came out before she'd processed it.
"Yes."
She stared at him. "Uchiha Obito. He's alive?"
"He didn't die at Kannabi Bridge. This is the long version." Finn settled his shoulder against the doorframe, the posture of someone who has a story to tell and isn't in a hurry. "He was badly hurt — half his body crushed. Someone found him and put him back together, more or less. He's been in a cave not too far from here, actually. The Land of Birds is close to where it all happened. As for how I know: when I was killing the Land of Earth's daimyo, I happened to be in the area, and I was paying attention to certain things I knew were coming." He paused. "Incidentally — after you died, Obito held you. He was... not doing well."
Rin processed this in pieces.
"Obito is alive," she said. "And he was there. He saw—"
"He saw everything." Finn said this without softening it. "Kakashi killing you with the Raikiri. He was in the forest. He was almost there in time."
She put her hand over her mouth.
"The man who found Obito after the cave collapse," Finn continued, "is someone called Uchiha Madara. Not a metaphorical threat — an actual historical figure who faked his death at the Valley of the End and has been running a very long plan in a cave while everyone assumed he was dead. He's the one who arranged the Hidden Mist operation. The ninjas who chased you, Kakashi not arriving in time, the plan to seal the Three-Tails into you — that was all his design. His goal was to break Obito. To destroy whatever made Obito willing to live in this world and care about it."
Rin lowered her hand slowly. "He used me. And Kakashi."
"Tools," Finn said simply. "Everything was a tool. The Hidden Mist, the tailed beast, Kakashi's Raikiri. All of it arranged to produce one specific outcome: Obito watching his best friend kill the person he loved most. After that, Obito wouldn't care what happened to the world. He'd only want it destroyed and rebuilt from nothing."
She was quiet for a moment.
"For a while," Finn said, "Obito wasn't going along with it. When I found out what Madara was doing, Obito still had things he wanted — he wanted to recover, go home, see you and Kakashi again. He hadn't turned." A pause. "Madara knew he just needed the right moment. He was patient."
"And now," Rin said.
"Now Obito has watched you die. Kakashi is responsible for it. Everything Obito had any reason to want for his own future is gone from his perspective." Finn looked at her steadily. "You were the only light he had left in this world. Kakashi was the only friend. Now one has killed the other. There's nothing left that Obito has any reason to preserve."
Rin's voice came out unsteady. "What is he going to do?"
Finn exhaled a thin line of smoke.
"Create a world with you in it," he said quietly.
Obito — I can only do this much.
He didn't say the second part aloud. He thought it, and let it pass.
Rin's eyes went wet. She was a shinobi and she had spent two days in a cave holding herself together by sheer effort, and this was the sentence that broke through.
"I want to go to him," she said, the words coming out with the specific force of something that has been decided rather than considered. "I want to tell him I'm not dead. That he doesn't have to do this. That the world hasn't taken everything from him—"
"If you go to him now," Finn said, and his voice was level and not unkind, "Uchiha Madara will know his plan failed. And Madara will make sure it doesn't fail by removing the complication. Which is you. Possibly both of you, if Madara decides that a broken Obito is more useful than a hopeful one." He let this settle. "You are alive right now because no one who would use you knows it yet. The moment that changes, you become a piece on a board again."
Rin said nothing.
The tears came down without any particular drama.