Konan

A pale paper flower has adorned Konan's blue hair since her childhood, pinned into a neat bun above straight, short locks. Her eyes are grey, ringed with lavender shadow, and a labret piercing sits below her lip. She wears the standard Akatsuki cloak, her ring set on the right middle finger and inscribed with the character for white, and tints her nails orange.

Beneath the mantle hides a far more revealing navy garment that bares much of her arms, back, and midriff, where further piercings encircle her navel, while blue leggings that double as her footwear end in white heels and her headband rests at her hip. As a girl she wore plain clothing, later a karate top and skirt during her years training under Jiraiya, and at Akatsuki's founding a black cloak with purple stockings and a Rain forehead protector, the only time she was ever shown with one.

Composed and sharp-minded, Konan mirrored the quiet steadiness of her partner Nagato. The warmth of her childhood, when she was the bright and gentle counterweight to Yahiko's toughness and Nagato's fragility, gave way after loss to a grave, near-silent adult who rarely spoke at Akatsuki gatherings. Even so, she consistently put her comrades' lives before her own and showed more feeling than most of the group, visibly pained whenever her past resurfaced. She had loved Yahiko, and he her.

Toward Pain she offered unwavering devotion, obeying without hesitation and reading his mood even when his face gave nothing away. The villagers of the Rain, seeing her winged form, came to call her God's Angel. Once Nagato spent his life to revive Konoha, she transferred that fierce loyalty to Naruto Uzumaki, ready to throw the whole village behind the boy she regarded as light itself against the darkness she named in Tobi.

War left Konan orphaned young, and Yahiko took her in before the two of them rescued a dying Nagato and his dog. The trio survived together and were eventually found by the traveling Sannin. The paper flower Konan folded from their discarded food wrappers so charmed the group that Jiraiya, against Orochimaru's colder suggestion, stayed to train the children. Out of that bond grew the original Akatsuki, whose reputation soon spread. When a masked man calling himself Madara offered his aid during the Third Shinobi World War, Yahiko turned him down, but the group's rise unsettled Hanzō, who seized Konan and forced Nagato to choose between her life and Yahiko's. Yahiko ended the standoff by driving the kunai in Nagato's hand into himself, and a grief-stricken Nagato wiped out their attackers.

With Tobi's backing accepted, Konan and Nagato rebuilt Akatsuki as a mercenary band of S-rank rogues while Nagato, as Pain, seized the Hidden Rain. Posing as the slain Hanzō, Konan helped keep the illusion of his rule intact and personally brought in members such as Sasori. Trained by one of the Sannin, she was a formidable kunoichi with a sensor's awareness and command of several natures, but her signature was paper. Her Dance of the Shikigami dissolved her whole body into sheets she could shape into blades, shuriken, explosive-laden clones, and the wings that earned her angelic name, and she could even flood a lake with paper concealing hundreds of billions of explosive tags. Only oil, which robbed her of control, reliably countered the craft.

She stood beside the Akatsuki through the sealing of several tailed beasts and joined Pain's assault on Konoha. When Naruto's words moved Nagato to give his own life restoring the village's dead, Konan gathered his and Yahiko's remains, renounced the organization, and handed Naruto a bouquet of paper flowers as a vow to help him build peace. Her final stand came when Tobi arrived at Amegakure seeking Nagato's Rinnegan. She nearly destroyed him with a ten-minute barrage of explosive tags, only for him to endure it through Izanagi at the cost of an eye. He then ran her through, trapped her in a genjutsu to pull Nagato's location from her, and killed her, and one of her bloodied sheets drifted back to settle on the old marker she and her friends had once left behind.