The garden had softened at the edges the way Akane knew dreams did when the body asked for a different kind of sleep. The violet showed no seam, the tree kept its evening leaves, and the swing hung still. Kaguya's hand was still in his, her fingers cool, and the small warmth on his lips from a moment before had not yet cooled.
Akane looked at the sky she kept without a moon and then at the way she sat, as if sitting were a thing she had learned by watching others and had never been taught for herself.
'What does she not have?' he thought. Not the power, or the memory or the years. The garden gave her all three.
'What she does not have is the ordinary things.'
He had spent the last weeks going through the dreams of villagers to find boats, hair and stamina, but between those searches he had also slipped, without meaning to, into smaller dreams. A woman haggling over radishes and worrying about rain. A boy chasing a dog through stalls and dropping a rice cracker. The herbalist counting coins into a cold palm. The peach farmer from the D-rank last week, lifting crates and muttering about bruising.
An idea came in his mind as he thought of those mundane dreams and he felt like he could use those.
"Kaguya," he called, his voice warm like the sun in cold winters.
She looked down at him with her white eyes clear and asked, "Yes?"
"Have you ever been to a market?"
She considered the question as if it were more complicated than it sounded.
"I have seen courts," she replied. "I have seen temples. I have seen the red stone and the buried city. But markets? No. Markets were not built for me."
"Then let me show you one. The kind where no beast matters and no river moves. Where a thing costs three coins and a man argues about the third coin for ten minutes."
Her mouth moved a little at his words, "You argue about coins?"
"On D-ranks and always."
Akane started to work for her. He did not pull her into a different dream. Instead, he brought the dreams to them.
As he pressed his palm to the grass, the way he pressed it to earth to hear a Zetsu, and he reached for the fragments he had kept without filing them, the smell of oil heating, the clack of a stall shutter, the call of a woman selling pickled plums, and the way light fell through a canvas awning in the morning market on the street appeared around. He did not invent anything, he just tried his best to remember everything.
The edge of the garden started to change at his thoughts.
A lane opened where the violet had been, lined with low stalls. He did not make the whole town, or the whole street, just the honest middle of it, five stalls, a crate stack, and a dog sleeping near a sack of rice that was not quite solid when he looked directly at it.
The tree with no season stayed behind them, so the garden was still there, but the market was laid over it like a second colour.
Kaguya sat up a little at the sight, the swing under her creaked.
"Akane," she whispered.
"Do you see it?"
"I see it," she said. "It smells like salt."
"It is supposed to smell like oil," he replied, and he was pleased that it smelled wrong and still true. Dreams never got smells perfect nor he tried to make it.
He stood and pulled her up with him. Her hand was light in his. She wore what she had worn on the swing, a pale robe that was not a robe, simple and unmarked, but in the market lane it showed for what it was: not normal, not Konoha or to any stall owner's daughter.
They stepped onto the lane to look around.
At first the market ignored them. The dream figures moved because he had given them the moves he had seen: a man lifted a crate, a woman counted, a boy ran a short loop and stopped.
But then, as he tried to connect them with their real self, the figures started to noticed her. He was bit scared of how it would go and had expected it to be bad weird. The kind of stares that came before a shout, the way the capital crowd stared at Himari when Akemi whispered. But that did not happen.
Instead, the woman at the radish stall stopped mid-count and looked at Kaguya the way a person looked at a crane that had landed among sparrows. The boy with the rice cracker stopped running and stared openly, mouth a little open.
Kaguya touched her own sleeve, uncertain and surprised at her reaction.
"They are looking," she murmured, even though she knew it wasn't real.
"They are," Akane said. Villagers in their sleep knew beauty as a simple signal. She was tall and pale, and her eyes were clear. Her hair fell straight, and her skin seemed to hold a different light. "It doesn't seem to be the bad look. Instead, the good weird, like the out-of-the-world person."
"Out of the world," she repeated. Kaguya did not sound displeased, but she did sound noticed in a way she had not been before. In the garden, no one looked at her except him but here, she felt different.
A small girl in the dream, built from the herbalist's granddaughter who sometimes slept near the stall, came close and reached toward Kaguya's robe, then stopped a hand's breadth away, shy.
Kaguya looked down at the small hand, then at Akane.
"May she?" she asked.
"I don't know." Akane said. "She is not really here completely, but it is not like she is a full fake of herself. She is just a memory of a child who is really asleep on the fourth street."
"But she looks as if she wants to."
"The want is also memory," he spoke a moment later and tomorrow he might get the answer to his questions.
Kaguya knelt, so her eyes were level with the small dream child's. The child's dream face smoothed, as dream faces did, accepting the impossible.
"You are very beautiful," the child said, plainly, like how children said such things. The words were Akane's memory of how children spoke, not the child's own.
Kaguya's expression moved, a small and unguarded thing.
"Thank you," she replied softly.
The child smiled and ran back to its mother-stall, and the market resumed its loop, but the lane kept its new texture: people who noticed her and then made space, the way a crowd made space for something breathtaking and not quite of the same place.
Akane felt a tug at his own sleeve.
He had given the market too much weight and the garden was thinning now. Dreams did have a cost, even his.
"We should do something too," he continued. "Not just look."
"What can we do?"
"A D-rank," he said, remebering one of the missions. "The one I did last week. Peach sorting. You lift a crate, you sort, you do not bruise. The farmer watches like a hawk."
Kaguya laughed then, a short sound that surprised her. "You want a goddess to sort peaches?"
"I want you to sort peaches with me," he smiled playfully at her gesture of calling herself goddess.
"So we are not goddess and apostle. We are two people with a crate."
He reached for the stronger memory, fibre of crate wood against palms, fuzz on peach skin and the farmer's call, "Top row faces out, you mule," the way Kushina had laughed when he told her and Mikoto had corrected the farmer's grammar in retelling.
A crate appeared near the radish stall, solid enough. Peaches lay in it, a little too uniform because he had not seen every peach individually, but warm from imagined sun.
Akane lifted one. He set it down in the sorting tray, stem line aligned.
"Like this," he said. "You turn the bruised ones in. You do not stack faces against faces."
Kaguya picked up a peach. Her fingers were too careful, as if the fruit might break if she wanted it too much. She turned it, studied the blush, and placed it with excessive gentleness.
He watched her hands. They were unmarked and pale, the one that had held his hair and the edge of a swing for a long time.
"Not that gentle," he said. "It is strong enough."
"I did not want to hurt it," she replied.
"It wants to be held," he said. "Try again."
She did. The second peach she set with a little click against the tray, satisfied.
"Good," he said. "Now faster. The farmer pays by crate before noon."
Kaguya glanced at the dream farmer, who stood with arms crossed because Akane had given him that posture. The farmer continued to stare at Kaguya the way everyone stared, but now with the added calculation of a man who saw two unpaid workers sorting his stock and did not know whether to thank them or chase them.
"You invented a hard master," she commented as she looked at the farmer and then the surroundings.
"I remembered him," Akane murmured. "He is real. He really says mule."
Kaguya set another peach, then another, and the crate began to empty in the way crates did when two people worked without speaking. The lane sounded different now, not looped haggling but small thuds of fruit, the breath of work, and the occasional word.
"You are good at this," she said after a while.
"I have done many crates. You are good for your first crate."
"I have sorted worlds before," she said, lightly.
"Then peaches should be easy," he countered.
She smiled without looking up and they continued.
Then a peach slipped. Not because she was clumsy but because he had not held the dream steady. The fruit rolled off the tray and hit the lane and did not bruise, because he had forgotten to give it bruising.
Kaguya picked it up and held it. The lane wavered a little at its edge, the canvas awning thinning until the violet showed through.
"The cost," she said.
'He is tired.'
"Yes," Akane just gave a nod and didn't mention anything else. It was his first time connecting so many people's dreams together and now he understood that dreams that were built from many small sleeps thinned faster. He could hold the garden, or the market, but not both at this weight for long.
"Keep the crate," she asked as she thought of everything, his situation and his wants.
"I can keep the garden," Akane said, not caring about the load on himself. "The market must go."
"Keep some peaches then," she said.
He tried and placed a single peach from the crate into her palm and tried to make the dream remember it as a kept thing. The peach stayed warm for a breath, then its edges softened. Dreams could not keep what he wanted forever.
Kaguya looked down at the fruit that would not stay.
She did not cry. She did not need to. Her face did what faces did when a small thing stood in for a large one.
"You will bring a real one," she said at first, as if testing the words for weight.
Then she lifted her eyes to him, white and clear, and said it properly, the way she had never said anything before, with longing that had been kept behind a long quiet.
"I will wait for the tomorrow where you will bring a real one."
Akane felt the sentence as though it had hit something that existed, but couldn't be named.
For the first time since he had learned to knock on her cell from the inside, Kaguya had said aloud that she wanted a tomorrow where she was not in her cell, a tomorrow that was also his tomorrow, where a peach could be carried without a dream.
He held her hand tighter and stared in her eyes.
"I will."
The market faded. The stalls went first, then the crate, then the peach in her palm that had never been more than remembered fuzz. The dream girl with the rice cracker waved once and dissolved, and the woman at the radish stall resumed counting without a subject, and then she too was gone.
The garden remained. The tree with no season, the leaves like early evening, the swing still. The violet sky showed no moon, because Kaguya would not keep the shape of her prison where she was free, and yet for a moment Akane understood that she kept it there by not keeping it, the absence itself a stone in her pocket, as Seramu kept her sister.
Kaguya settled back onto the swing. Her robe was again just a robe. The otherworldly light that had made villagers stare was quiet, but her eyes held the small warmth that had been on his lips before.
"The crack is not in the gate," she said, as if to herself. "It is in the waiting."
"The peach was not a toy," Akane replied, repeating her old warning in new words.
"No," she murmured. "It was ordinary. That is why I wanted it."
She leaned, and her hair fell forward. He did not move and looked into her white eyes, and the moment held, thin and clear, and then she settled back, her hand still in his, the garden still quiet.
The dream did not end. It softened further at the edges, and Akane knew that the rest of the night still belonged to them, but differently now, not only to reports or rivers or beasts, but to a tomorrow that had been named.
In his bed, the shadow clone breathed. Beyond the Senju wall, the river was a low, even sound, and the market on the fourth street was still closed, its shutters clacked, its peaches still on trees outside the village, waiting for a crate and a real hand.
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PS: SKSKSKS! I had a lot of fun writing this chapter, specially that line, "I will wait for the tomorrow where you will bring a real peach." To be honest, I wanted this chapter to be romantic but I had to idea how to have a niche date. Then saw a reel of finding meanings in mundane things and this line came in muh mind and then the whole chapter became a puzzle for this line to fit.
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You guys can support me at my ptreon.com/kaoski (˵◝ ⩊ ◜˵マ Chapter 122 is out there, plus various original one-shot stories. Exams are over btw! Hehehehehehehe!