The garden held him without asking for more.
The violet sky stretched endlessly overhead and showed no moon, as it never did where Kaguya kept it. She refused to place one there, even as decoration, even as a small white disc low on the horizon.
The sky she kept was vast and depthless, the way the world had been before her sons lifted the earth into the heavens and made a prison out of it. The tree with no season stood at the centre, its leaves the colour of early evening, and beneath it the swing hung still.
Kaguya sat on the swing. She watched him approach as though she had been counting the time since his last visit and had found it too long.
"You came back," she said.
"I said I would," Akane said as he sat on the grass at her feet. The desert cold was still on him, a thin rind under the skin of the dream, and the garden took it slowly.
She reached down and ran her fingers through his hair, a slow, possessive motion that undid the careful knots he carried the way a quiet room undid a long day. He let his eyes close under her hand.
For a while they said nothing. They were in the garden, the kind of place that did not need to be filled.
Then Akane spoke.
"Zetsu reached Roran," he said. "The blood was taken. It was past the white stones by morning. I left a clone breathing in my bed and went with Katsuyu where she was summoned."
Kaguya's hand did not stop. She listened the way she always did, without hurry, as if time in the garden were a different substance and could be poured out generously.
He told her about the pale Zetsu past the white stones, the small Katsuyu piece riding damp and quiet and the White Zetsu that had taken Himari's shape with that blood and waited where the sand met the stone of the buried city.
He told her the hair was right and the small tilt of the head was right, not perfect in daylight but enough at night.
He told her about the seal frame, the lines cut deep and filled with dust, the same symbol Mito had shown him when she taught him to think about storage and release. He continued about how he had asked the copy to step to the edge of the frame, how nothing had happened at first, but then the stone had warmed against the cold air, and a low hum had moved through the rock the way water moved through a pipe.
He told her about the pale light gathering in the lines and running a short way before stopping, as if it had met a hand. The way the Zetsu-Himari's skin had rippled from wrist to shoulder, the way its hands had tightened without meaning to, and the way small grains of sand at the edge of the frame had lifted a finger's breadth and fallen again.
When he finished, she was quiet for a while. The swing did not move.
"What did it mean to you?" she asked.
"That the blood remembered," Akane replied. "Even in a copy, even through Zetsu's skin. It knew the shape of the hand."
"And the will did not," she said.
"No." He opened his eyes and looked up at her.
"It answered, but it did not open. The copy was enough to wake it, not enough to hold it. The blood remembered, but the will did not."
Kaguya considered his words carefully. The ancient thing that lived beneath her gentleness showed for a breath, then faded.
"The Vein is not a gate you open with a key," she said. "It is a river you learn to sit in. Your copy dipped a hand in the water. The water recognised the shape of the hand, but the hand had no weight to hold the current."
"Then the girl must learn to swim," he said as he thought of the plans for Himari.
"She must learn to hold the current with her own hands," Kaguya said. "Not to be copied or carried, but to stand at the frame and keep her feet while the river tries to take them."
Akane sat with what she said.
"She is not ready," he said. "She kept her teeth through two attempts on her life, but she has not learned how to bite. She survived a house that wanted her dead, but that is a different craft."
"No. What she needs now is a house that will teach her to want the river."
"The queen," he said.
"Seramu lost a sister and kept the grief like a stone in her pocket for seven years," Kaguya said. "She will teach the girl what the blood means, if the girl is allowed to go to her. The letter you sent has begun that work. But letters move slowly, and courts move slower. You will need to make the girl stronger yourself, in the meantime."
"How?"
"In dreams," she said, as if it were obvious. "The way you made the small one strong. The way you made the girl with the dark eyes remember that she was not alone in a room, before the dream stopped."
'Mikoto.' Akane thought of the garden where Mikoto had sat and cried alone. Then stopped crying and composed herself, the way she did when she folded the empty oil paper into a neat square.
"You will not tell her to hold a river," Kaguya went on. "You will not tell her the word Vein, and you will not show her a seal."
"You will tell her to hold a breath, and then a longer breath, and then a bowl of water without spilling it, and finally the river will learn her hands before she learns she is touching it."
Akane nodded at her thoughts. The instruction was plain and careful, and he understood what she wanted to convey.
"By the way, I did this without telling them," he said.
Kaguya looked down at him as she heard those words.
"Who?"
"Grandma and Tsuna."
"The summit gave me a condition. Do not touch the Vein until we understand it. I touched it to understand it. If I had told them tonight, they would have been angry, and if something had gone wrong, the beating would have been deadly."
Kaguya's hand stilled for a moment, then resumed.
"Then you chose the harder road," she said. "To act and to carry the cost alone until you have something worth showing them."
"I will tell them later," he said. "When I can show them the shape of what I learned rather than the shape of what I risked. The copy woke it and could not hold it. That is worth something."
"It is," she murmured.
"You knocked, and it answered. That is one lesson. The beating you did not receive can wait until it is a story rather than a risk."
For a while they said nothing. The leaves rustled in the cool wind, and Kaguya's hair flurred as the wind spread.
Then Kaguya spoke, softer, and the tone changed the way the light changed when clouds covered a field.
"What are your plans with the beasts?" she said.
"Grandma said the Chakra that powers the bridge and the formations and the message tags would betray us if we built more," Akane said. "Kurama's Chakra would leak the Nine-Tails' signature, and villages would detect it. She said the power was not a toy."
"That is why the Vein is not optional for you," Kaguya said. "The river carries no beast's scent."
She looked toward the violet distance, the way a person looked toward a sea she had not seen in a long time.
"There are nine of them," she said. "One of them lives in the sea near the Land of Water. The third. Isobu. Kiri keeps it the way a court keeps a sword it has not learned how to hold."
Akane sat up a little.
"They hunt Uzumaki to make a Jinchuriki," he said. "Ordinary men asking about hair colour and stamina and way of speaking. Way of speaking, hair, high stamina. I thought it was boats. It was blood. The slip of the tongue said they are looking for Uzumaki survivors. The chain led to the Kiri Council and the Land of Water's Daimyo. They want blood that can carry a beast and not break."
"When that beast disappears from them, the hunt loses its reason," she said.
Akane looked up at her.
"Two birds," he said, repeating the calculation he had made at the summit when he said two boards, one for day and one for night.
"Two birds," she agreed. "Kiri stops hunting because the sword is gone, and you gain a second source that does not leak the Nine-Tails' signature. Near the forest of the slugs, where it is safe and quick to reach."
'Near the Katsuyu forest,' he thought. 'Of course.'
"How do you move a beast that lives in the sea?" he asked.
Kaguya's fingers traced a slow circle against his hair.
"Not tonight," she said. "You asked me to show you how to move a beast, and I will, but tonight is too full. Tonight you knocked on a river and learned that a copied hand is not enough. That is one lesson, and the beast is another, as it requires a different kind of hands."
Akane breathed out. The relief was small but real, the kind that came when a board was named clearly.
"So I teach Himari to hold water," he said.
"You teach her to hold a breath and a bowl of water," Kaguya said. "And the river learns her before she learns she is touching it."
He closed his eyes again.
The garden was quiet, the swing hung still, and the tree held its evening leaves without dropping them.
The violet sky showed no moon because Kaguya would not keep the shape of her prison where she was free.
For a moment it was only the two of them, and there was no report to give and no river to measure.
Akane reached up and found her hand where it rested against his hair, and he held it without asking, the way he would have held Kana's or Tsunade's if they had been there. Her fingers were cold, and she did not pull away.
"You are thinking again," she said, a light flick to his forehead.
"I am thinking that we have spoken of rivers, beasts and courts, but not of you," he said.
"What of me?"
"The sky you kept without a moon," he said. "The world before your sons lifted the earth. How was it?"
Kaguya looked at the violet above them, the depthless place she had held for him.
"Green," she said, after a time. "And then white. When I was first set under, the sky was so vast that a person would believe it was the only thing in the world. But that is quite a lonely beauty, and I prefer a garden with a swing."
"You were lonely."
"I was," she said. "Until a boy learned how to knock on my cell from the inside and then complained that I did not visit him often enough."
"I did not complain."
"You counted nights," she said.
Akane smiled against the edge of the swing. The complaint wasn't really fair since he was the one barging in her dreams, but that wasn't the point.
"I will try not to count them after tonight," he said.
"You will," she said. "But you will count softer."
She leaned down, not far, and her hair fell forward, pale and straight. He did not move and looked into her white eyes.
The moment held, thin and clear, and then she settled back, her hand still in his, the garden still quiet, and small warmth on his lips.
The dream did not end, nor did he plan to. It had softened at the edges, and Akane knew that the rest of the time belonged to her, not to reports, or the beasts or any plans they had left in their mind.
The night was young, and it could be said for them too.
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You guys can support me at my ptreon.com/kaoski (˵◝ ⩊ ◜˵マ Chapter 121 is out there, plus various original one-shot stories. Exams are over btw! Hehehehehehehe!