By the evening meal, something had shifted.
Nohara Rin couldn't identify exactly when it happened or what had caused it, but the three men who had been ignoring her for two days had apparently silently revised her status from "present but irrelevant" to "present and acceptable." No one said anything about it. The temperature in the room simply changed. She sat next to Finn, held her bowl carefully, and listened.
Kakuzu and Biwa Juzo were talking at the other end of the table with the easy fluency of people who had been arguing about the same things for long enough that the arguments had become comfortable. She had initially assumed they disliked each other — something about the energy of their first few interactions had read as mutual irritation. But watching them now, she could see that the irritation had somehow curdled into its opposite. They were talking about missions. About what commissions were available and which ones were worth accepting and how to structure the terms to maximize return with minimum complication. The affection in it was concealed under the practical content but clearly there.
Orochimaru and Sasori were at the other end of an entirely different kind of conversation — the kind where both parties kept producing observations that the other person wanted to respond to at length. She'd caught fragments of it. Sharingan. The Uchiha clan. Kakashi's transplant as a data point. The two of them had the specific quality of researchers who had just discovered they were working on adjacent problems.
Sasori was young-looking in an unsettling way — permanently preserved at whatever age the puppet conversion had stopped his aging — and had the manner of someone who operated at a significant intellectual remove from most things but could be engaged on specific topics. The Sharingan was currently one of those topics.
Finn was eating without talking. This was apparently normal. He had the specific quality of someone who could be entirely sociable and entirely silent depending on whether he had anything he wanted to say, and right now he didn't.
He glanced up and caught her looking at him.
"Eat your food," he said pleasantly. "You've been staring."
Rin's face went immediately warm. She looked down and took several bites in quick succession.
Orochimaru finished saying something to Sasori, paused, and looked directly at Finn.
"I'll be going back to Konoha in two days."
Finn raised an eyebrow. "That soon?"
"I need to arrange a few things. Settle some business. After that—" Orochimaru said it the way someone says they're planning to change apartments. "I'll be living here permanently."
There was a small silence while the table processed this.
Finn looked mildly impressed. "Big news in the ninja world, then."
"S-rank defection," Kakuzu said. He said it flatly and with the specific quality of someone doing rapid arithmetic. "One of the Three Sannin. Konoha's signature ninja. The bounty alone—" He paused, savoring the calculation. "Second highest in this organization, probably. Right after Finn."
"I don't particularly care about the ranking," Orochimaru said.
"I care," Kakuzu said.
Orochimaru looked at him. "If something happens to me, you're going to collect my body, aren't you."
"I would never," Kakuzu said. He said this with the quality of someone who absolutely would. "The chicken and the eggs, Orochimaru. I know which one to preserve."
Orochimaru absorbed the metaphor without apparent difficulty. He was aware that Kakuzu's relationship to him was primarily one of financial appreciation, and he found this less offensive than a person with more ego might have.
Then Kakuzu said: "Speaking of which — your reincarnation technique. The soul transfer. How's the development going?"
Orochimaru looked at him with mild curiosity. "Why do you ask?"
"Just wondering if it's close to finished."
"What's your interest in it? You have the Earth Grudge Fear. You have more lives than most shinobi will ever see. Are you looking to change vessels? I can teach you when the research is mature, if that's what—"
"No." Kakuzu waved this off. "I just want to know if it's close."
"...Reasonably close," Orochimaru said, watching him. "I'm confident in the fundamental approach. The remaining technical problems are solvable."
Kakuzu smiled. It was a specific smile — the one that appeared when he had identified a financial opportunity and was pleased about it in a way he wasn't going to explain immediately.
"Excellent. I support you fully," he said. "Really. My sincere encouragement."
Finn looked at him. "You have bad intentions."
"I never have bad intentions."
"You always have bad intentions."
Kakuzu let this pass. Then he said: "When you transfer your soul to a new container, the previous container gets left behind. The original body, empty." He paused, letting this develop in his own mind with visible satisfaction. "That body will be worth considerable money. Orochimaru of the Sannin, S-rank wanted criminal — there are multiple parties who would pay very well for that. And the person selling it wouldn't even need to worry about reputation implications, because technically Orochimaru is still alive. Still here. It's completely above board."
The table was quiet.
Biwa Juzo, to his credit, had no obvious reaction, having apparently decided to watch.
Sasori's expression communicated something that was technically unreadable but that Rin, sitting across from him, was beginning to understand as deep existential weariness.
Orochimaru turned to face Kakuzu directly. "Could you modify the discarded body before the transfer?" He already knew the answer; he was asking to see where the conversation went.
"Could you? Add some distinguishing features? Improve the presentation? Make it more interesting to potential buyers?"
"The modification would significantly increase the difficulty of the technique. There's no reason to do it — I can use a transformation technique for disguise if that's what I need. So no." Orochimaru said this with finality.
"What if it made a considerable amount of money?" Kakuzu said.
"Is my life more important or is money more important?"
"Money," Kakuzu said, without hesitation.
Orochimaru turned away from him, picked up his chopsticks, and began eating in pointed silence.
Kakuzu reflected on this for a moment. Then, as if the thread of conversation hadn't been severed: "Fine. The unmodified body, then. And the new container, whenever you cycle to the next one. Those belong to me. Is that agreed?"
"Kakuzu," Orochimaru said, without looking at him, "I have a Kusanagi sword within arm's reach at all times."
Finn laughed. The laugh was genuine and had been accumulating for the last few minutes. Even Biwa Juzo made a sound.
Rin, behind her rice bowl, processed the last several minutes of conversation.
Orochimaru — one of the Three Sannin, the man who had declined consideration for the Hokage position, a shinobi whose seniority in Konoha was exceeded by essentially no one except Sarutobi Hiruzen himself — was planning to defect from Konoha. In the next few days. He was sitting here eating dinner with this group as if he'd already moved in, because apparently he had.
She thought about this. She thought about what it meant for someone with Orochimaru's standing in Konoha — his history, his reputation, his decades of position and authority and institutional weight — to look at this organization and decide that this was preferable.
She was here because she'd died and been brought back and had nowhere else to go. That made a certain kind of sense.
Orochimaru was here because he apparently wanted to be.
She found this confusing and, despite herself, exciting. If someone like Orochimaru was willing to walk away from everything the Leaf Village represented to be here — if this was the thing he'd chosen — then whatever this place actually was, it was more than it looked like from the outside.
Maybe she was a born bad woman after all.
Kakuzu, who had been muttering something to Biwa Juzo about projected earnings from the Orochimaru body inventory problem, said suddenly and with complete sincerity: "Both the old vessel and any future containers. All of it belongs to me. I'm registering this now, publicly, with witnesses."
Everyone continued eating.
Finn was thinking, while he ate, about what Orochimaru's defection meant in terms of the larger picture.
It was earlier than the original timeline — the Third Shinobi World War hadn't ended yet, and Orochimaru in the version of history Finn remembered had defected after the war's conclusion, which had contributed to Hiruzen's accelerated decision to step down. If Orochimaru defected now, while the war was still technically ongoing, the political timeline would shift accordingly. Hiruzen might stay longer without the scandal forcing his timeline. Or the scandal of the defection might actually accelerate it. Hard to say.
The Yamato problem remained solved by its absence. Orochimaru had moved away from the Wood Release infant experiments when his research direction shifted, which meant the person who would have existed as the product of those experiments simply wasn't going to exist. Konoha had lost a capable future structural ninja who used Wood Release to build things. The world had also lost a generation of murdered infants. The ledger was not ambiguous.
As for the war itself — the Third Shinobi World War was essentially over in everything but the formal declaration. The Hidden Mist's loss of the Three-Tails had been catastrophic to their specific plan, and without that plan there was no coordinated push from the three-village alliance that had been forming. The Hidden Rock had lost its daimyo and the Kannabi Bridge in quick succession. The Hidden Cloud was in a defensive posture following the Third Raikage's death. The war had been massive and sharp at the peak and was now deflating toward whatever settlement the major powers would agree to call a conclusion.
Finn exhaled.
"Why the sigh?" Orochimaru asked, glancing over.
"Just thinking about the Hokage question," Finn said. "You know my preference."
"My becoming Hokage would have been the optimal outcome," Orochimaru agreed, without irony. He had actually entertained the idea, at various points, before concluding that the administration of a village was not compatible with the research agenda he considered more important. "Unfortunately, you missed your window to advocate for it."
"I did advocate for it. Hiruzen didn't listen." Finn said this with the specific tone of a complaint that was also not entirely serious. "Minato Namikaze is competent. It's fine. I just think the research output would have been better with you in the chair."
Orochimaru looked at him with the faint pleasure of someone receiving a genuine compliment delivered in the form of mild criticism, then returned his attention to Sasori.
Kakuzu and Biwa Juzo resumed the economic analysis of Orochimaru's various future bodies. Biwa Juzo contributed primarily by asking questions that extended the conversation, which was probably at least partly about extending the period in which Kakuzu forgot to bring up the outstanding debt.
Nohara Rin lowered the rice bowl a few millimeters, looked at the table, raised it again to cover her face, and decided to eat quietly until someone said something that a person from Konoha's ninja academy could theoretically process.
Not a single normal person. Not one.
She ate her rice.