Morning came from the night with the river water high. Akane, running fast under the bridge, crossed to the mission desk. The clerk had the slips stacked before he arrived, and greeted him with the same relief as every day that week.
Akane stamped, sorted, and carried the short pile across, and the clerk praised his stamp work with the same words. Akane accepted them with the same small bow, because some mornings the work was the disguise and the disguise was the work.
His D-rank was a short archive run to the Hokage building, two wrapped ledgers that smelled of old paste and sat heavy in the crook of his arm. He carried them up the side stair, where the air went cool, and the footsteps of clerks came muffled through the doors.
He signed for them at the archive hatch, waited while the keeper checked the knots, and carried the receipt back down. On the stairwell landing, past the rail, white caught the corner of his eye and was gone before he turned his head. Only an empty corridor and a door breathing shut at the far end.
He stood a moment longer than he needed to, listening. Nothing came back but clerk footsteps and paper. His hand did not shake as he folded the receipt, and he went back to the desk holding it where anyone could see it.
At midday, he ate at the Academy wall.
Kushina arrived with a cloth bundle and dropped it in his lap as if it weighed nothing. "You missed breakfast again. Eat before the afternoon makes you stupid."
"It was one breakfast," Akane said.
"It was two," Mikoto said without looking up from her tea, and Nawaki laughed so hard he nearly dropped his own bundle over the wall.
They ate in the shade with their legs swinging against the warm stone. Kushina had packed two extra rice balls and pretended she had miscounted, and when Akane raised an eyebrow at her, she looked away with great dignity and said the shop woman must have pressed them on her.
Nawaki stole one of those and ran three whole steps before Kushina caught his sleeve and took it back crumb by crumb, and Mikoto watched the entire chase over her tea without moving anything but her eyes.
"You eat like the afternoon owes you something," Kushina told Akane, inspecting his hands for ink much like Mina checking him for skipped meals, and finding ink anyway. "Wash those before you touch anything clean."
"Yes, ma'am," Akane said, and ate slowly, and watched the courtyard fill and empty with shouting children and tired instructors. For a little while there was nowhere else he had to be.
On the way home through the market, past the pickle stall with its sharp true smell, a pale scarf-end lifted over a rooftop stair and dropped out of sight before the stall woman's call had finished echoing.
Akane bought three plums, paid without haggling, and felt the woman's eyes follow him a step longer than custom allowed, as if she too had noticed something white where nothing white should be. He walked on as if blind, biting into the first plum so the juice ran down his wrist as any hungry boy's would.
'Twice today, and he still hasn't asked,' he thought.
The house smelled of tea when he came in. Mito was pouring, and Tsunade sat at the low table with a mission report she had already finished reading, her hair still damp from washing.
Akane sat down, took his cup, and did not wait for the quiet to settle.
"I sent Black Zetsu after it last night," he said. "The search is running."
"Black?" Tsunade asked. "As opposed to the white ones?"
"Madara's will, as he says, but it is bound to obey me because of Kaguya. It watches Madara, and it has watched him for years."
Mito was quiet for a moment. She wondered how safe it was, but with what she knew of Akane, Kaguya and the relationship between them, she knew her thoughts were just overthoughts.
"The black one," she said. "The one who carried my supplies all those years without ever showing a face. That was it all along."
Mito set the pot down with care. Tsunade folded the report and put it aside, and gave Akane the look she used on patients who hid their symptoms.
"After Isobu," Mito said as she remembered what he said, and it was not a question.
"After its sleeping place to keep a watch on boats, guard changes, and favoured water. Everything a man would need to walk up to it unseen."
"And Madara?" Tsunade asked.
"Hears nothing, like always. He is getting worse, at most 2 years if nothing happens."
The room was silent as Akane talked about Hashirama's best friend and Konoha's worst enemy.
'You seem to feel good, as you heard it.' Mito heard a voice in her mind, but she ignored it and tapped the seal on her belly. The voice disappeared from her mind with a roar, with some red chakra around her, which was collectively ignored by Tsunade and Akane.
A moment later, Mito looked at Akane and stared at him for a long moment, then she spoke, "Then tell us the rest of it. You did not start a hunt for a beast just to look at it."
Akane turned his cup once on the table, watching the tea circle the bottom and settle. Then he drank, set the cup down, and told them the whole design for the first time.
"When Isobu disappears from Kiri, the hunt loses its reason. They are hunting our bloodline because they need vessels. Take the beast off their board, and there is nothing to pour a vessel around. The boats go home."
"And the beast?" Mito asked.
"Goes to Katsuyu's forest, alive and unwatched, where no patrol walks. Not sealed in anyone. Not in me."
The kitchen went very still.
Mito's voice, when it came, held the particular softness she saved for her most serious moments. "An unsealed beast is a loose weapon, Akane. It wakes angry, and the nearest village pays. My whole life taught me that vessels are how power is held. I held weather inside my skin for longer than you have been alive."
"I know what you held," Akane said. "And I know what it cost to hold it, because the cost is sitting at this table. But a seal carries scent, and scent carries hunters, and Kurama's chakra already taught us that much in the summit."
"Kiri is hunting our bloodline boat by boat because they need a vessel to pour their beast into. If I seal Isobu in myself, knowingly I paint over my own forehead the exact thing they are hunting for. Even if they wouldn't know, I will become the vessel they need, gift-wrapped, and every hunter-nin from here to the sea gets a new reason to look for me. That is not safety. That is volunteering."
"It also spoke of it, you know," he added quietly. "Black Zetsu. It thinks my blood is too thin for what is coming and wants it to be sealed in me like it was sealed on you. It held the thought back for months because of Kaguya."
Tsunade's cup stopped halfway to her mouth. "It wants what?"
"To put a beast in me. For my own good." Akane met her eyes. "I refused, and that is the end of its thoughts."
The room was silent as Akane ended his thoughts. Tsunade was thinking of Akane, and some distrust for Black Zetsu began in her mind.
On the other hand, Mito looked at him for a long while, and something old moved behind her gaze, something that remembered being chosen.
"Parking a beast beside Katsuyu's forest," she said at last. "That forest has a name, child. Shikkotsu. Katsuyu's own ground. Who feeds it there? Who stands watch when it dreams badly?"
"Nobody," Akane said. "That is the point. No watch, no feeding, no seal to smell. The forest keeps slugs, not soldiers. It will sleep where something soft already sleeps."
"And if it wakes?"
"Then it wakes far from every village, and we will know before anyone, because the network will sit round it as it sits round everything."
"Besides, I don't think Isobu is stronger than Katsuyu. Let's ask Kurama about it." Akane said with a laugh. He knew of Isobu and Katsuyu, but it was different for others. So, Mito did ask Kurama, and she got the reply she wanted.
"It is true." She said as she heard Kurama's words about Isobu being a lazy beast, and it was indeed weaker than Katsuyu.
Tsunade had been silent through all of it, her tea untouched, her eyes moving between the old woman and the boy as if measuring both for a splint. Now she set her cup down with a small, flat sound.
"Your body," she said. "Your call. I have stitched enough people who let others choose for them. But hear my condition, boy. You come back. Every time, from every sea and every forest. That is the whole condition, and I will collect on it."
"I will," Akane said, and this time the promise felt heavier than the errand.
Mito poured for all three of them, though no cup was empty, which was her way of closing a subject without forgiving it. They drank. The river beyond the wall ran high, even with the night rain in it.
Late, in his room, Akane sat mending a strap on his sandal with the lamp turned low, when the floorboards by the window loosened without a sound and a pale face rose through the gap to the level of his knees.
"Twelve boats," the White Zetsu said, patient as roots. "They change at dusk and at false dawn. They favour the deep channel and never the shallows. The sleeping place is not found yet."
"Keep looking," Akane murmured, and tied off the strap with a small neat knot. "Tell the black one the count pleases me and keep the eyes on."
The face sank back down. The boards settled over it as if nothing had ever disturbed them, and the lamp flame stood straight again in the still air.
Akane set the sandal aside and lay down with twelve boats moving behind his eyes. Sleep took the boats one by one until even those were gone. Last went the deep channel, dark and patient, keeping its own counsel about what slept beneath it.
--
Support me at ptreon for early chapters and original novels, stories, poems and many more updates. ptreon.com/kaoski