The meeting point was outside Konoha's walls, in the kind of dark that exists between places — too far from the village for its light to reach, too close to the road for the forest to feel wild. A transitional nowhere.
Black Zetsu was still there. White Zetsu was gone. Obito was gone.
Finn stopped a few meters out, looked Black Zetsu over, and took a slow draw from his pipe. He had been working out, during the walk, what sort of excuse to reach for. Something about Obito's deviation breaking the coverage arrangement. Something about the chaos making it impossible to operate cleanly. He had several versions of it roughed out, each one calibrated for a slightly different reaction.
He didn't get to use any of them.
"Lord Finn." Black Zetsu stepped forward with the expression of a man who had rehearsed this. It was the expression of someone who considers themselves the wronged party and wants to establish that clearly before the conversation goes anywhere else. "I owe you an apology. It seems Madara had some kind of... episode. A mental and emotional one. The plan couldn't proceed as intended. I sincerely hope we haven't disrupted whatever you were doing in Konoha."
Finn paused.
He looked at Black Zetsu. He looked at the space where Obito wasn't. He looked back at Black Zetsu.
He's apologizing to me.
This was not the conversation Finn had prepared for. He spent a brief moment recalibrating, then let his expression shift — not into anger exactly, but into the particular controlled stillness of a man holding anger at arm's length through great personal effort. Something strained around the eyes. Something deliberate in how still his jaw went.
Black Zetsu read it immediately and his mood dropped another floor.
Right. The big man was running some kind of quiet operation in there, and Obito turned the whole village into a disaster zone. Of course whatever it was got ruined.
"Where is Uchiha Madara now?" Finn said. His voice came out flat and low.
Black Zetsu's internal response was vivid and immediate: Thank everything that Obito ran first, because if he were standing here right now...
"He felt terrible about the whole situation," Black Zetsu said carefully. "Too embarrassed to face you directly. He's already gone."
"He's embarrassed." Finn let a short, cold sound through his nose. "Fascinating."
Black Zetsu had no safe response to that and wisely produced none.
A few seconds passed. Finn looked at him with something that slowly, visibly softened from controlled fury into something more complicated — something that took Black Zetsu a moment to identify.
Sympathy.
What?
"You've been waiting here this whole time," Finn said. He exhaled smoke. "That tells me enough. You had a hard night too, Black Zetsu." A pause. "Having a teammate like that... I can't imagine. Nothing about your planning was wrong. The problem is Madara's. All of it." Another pause, slightly heavier. "We're both victims of the same man, if I'm being honest."
He looked at Black Zetsu with an expression of frank, slightly weary solidarity.
"And didn't I tell you before? Don't call me sir. We're friends. Just say Finn."
Black Zetsu stood very still.
He had been running on compressed fury since Obito came stumbling out of Kamui with the Nine-Tails gone sideways and his entire operation in ruins. He hadn't had anywhere to put it — Obito needed to get clear of the area before Finn arrived, so he'd pushed White Zetsu to move the idiot along and stood here alone, stewing. He'd been braced for Finn's anger. He'd been ready to absorb it, redirect it, manage it. It was his job to manage things.
What he had not been braced for was Finn looking at him like they'd both just survived the same bad commander.
He's not wrong.
The fury didn't dissolve. It just... found a new direction, settling back down onto Obito's head where it had always actually belonged. And into the space where the anger had been crowding everything else out, something else moved in.
This, Black Zetsu thought, was what distinguished genuinely great men from merely powerful ones. Finn had every reason to be furious. He'd had something disrupted, clearly. He was holding it, not throwing it at the nearest available target.
Uchiha Obito would have thrown it.
"Finn." The name came out a fraction easier than it usually did. "I'm glad you can see it that way. I really am sorry. I don't know what you needed to do in Konoha, but whatever it was — that's on us. Once I'm back, I'll put together a gift and deliver it to the Hidden Rain personally. It's the least I can do."
Finn shook his head. He even managed to look a little reluctant about the gesture. "That's not necessary. This wasn't your fault. I appreciate it, but..." He held up a hand. "Before I've had time to cool down — just keep Madara away from me. If I see him before I'm ready to see him, I'll break both his legs. I need you to understand that."
"Understood completely," Black Zetsu said, with more feeling than he intended.
And he meant it. He had already decided — standing here in the dark while Finn was still in the village — that haste was finished. The Moon Eye Plan needed a different pace now, because the asset at the center of it had proven catastrophically unreliable at the first serious test.
There were two things he needed to do. The first was to put Obito through whatever it took to make him functional: real experience, real consequence, real growth. The Akatsuki infiltration. The Uchiha clan situation. Side missions with actual stakes. The kind of work that hammered people into shape or broke them, and either outcome told you something useful.
The second thing was this. Standing across from Finn and building something real — not just an arrangement, but an actual alliance. A position where, when the time came, Finn's resources and Finn's reach and Finn's extraordinary capacity for pragmatic violence could be pointed in the same direction as the Moon Eye Project rather than against it.
Rain Country: real territory, real administration, real power base. Orochimaru. Sasori. Kakuzu. Juzo. And growing.
Compared to that, what did Obito currently have? Good eyes and poor judgment.
I should have found Finn years ago, Black Zetsu thought, not for the first time. If Madara had met him before dying, we might be having a completely different conversation right now.
But that was regret, and regret was a poor investment. The present was what it was. He had two preparations running in parallel, and he would work both of them until one reached maturity.
"The gift is non-negotiable," Black Zetsu said. "It's not about fault. It's a gesture. Let me make it."
Finn looked at him for a moment. Then, with the magnanimous patience of a man who knows when to stop arguing, he shrugged. "Fine. I'll accept it."
They spoke for a while longer — nothing of great weight, just the kind of conversation that fills the space after a shared bad night. Two men assessing what they still had, orienting toward what came next. Then they separated, each going their own direction, because their paths genuinely weren't the same and both of them knew it.
Finn walked until Black Zetsu's presence was well out of his Observation Haki's range. Then he stopped, rolled his neck, and let the tension of the performance leave his shoulders all at once.
He smiled.
"Right then," he murmured to himself, exhaling a slow stream of pipe smoke into the dark. "Time to see what I actually came away with."
The Scroll of Seals, sitting somewhere secure, waiting. Dozens of additional ninjutsu scrolls compiled across Sarutobi Hiruzen's entire career — Tobirama's techniques, Hiruzen's own developments, the accumulated technical literature of Konoha's senior history.
All of it.
"Flying Thunder God..." The words were almost soft, something between appetite and satisfaction. "And everything else besides."
He slipped the pipe between his teeth and walked on through the dark, in a very good mood.