Akane checked the finished array sheets when he woke up in the morning. They lay drying on his desk, and he traced the closed curve with one fingertip, thinking of the wrist that had closed it.
He ate breakfast across from Mito without either of them naming what the day held. He went to the mission desk for a dull hour of stamps, and the clerk found nothing for him beyond the routine pile, for once a mercy rather than a slight.
At noon Tsunade led them to the courtyard's shaded corner and knelt. She bit her thumb, ran through the signs, Boar, Dog, Bird, Monkey, Ram, and slammed her bloodied palm onto the stone.
Smoke rose, and out of it came a Katsuyu no larger than a kettle, pale and damp and blinking.
"Tsunade-hime," she said, both stalks bowing each in turn, first to Tsunade, then to Akane, then to Mito, where she stood in the shade. "Tsunade's boy, and Mito-Sama. Three faces I know, under one sky. This will be a heavy asking."
"Little one," Tsunade said, bowing her head to the full depth, "I am calling properly because the asking is proper. Hear me out before you answer."
The small slug rippled all over, which Akane had learned meant attention, and Tsunade put it to her with full courtesy: a beast asleep in a far trench, watched by boats, in need of a new home where no patrol walks, and asked whether her forest would take it and what courtesy the forest required.
Katsuyu was quiet for a long while. Then both eyestalks rose together, which meant questions were coming.
"How big does he sleep?" she asked. "How long has he lain? Who will do the lifting, and with what hands?"
Tsunade answered each in turn, completely and without varnish: hill-big, years-long, a paper relay never yet tested, hands belonging to her grandmother, and Akane. Katsuyu rippled thoughtfully at the description, both stalks rising higher.
"The lazy one of the deep," she said. "He slept through my entire migration once, and woke annoyed at the quiet. I know him. Tell me your terms, Tsunade-Hime. I will tell you mine."
"You both always have heavy errands, never a sit-down," she went on, warm as rain. "One day you must visit with empty hands, just to sit."
"After this is done," Akane promised, crouching, "I will sit a whole afternoon and bring nothing."
"Two conditions," Katsuyu said at last, in her soft, wet voice. "The guest comes willing. Never dragged, never chained, never woken with iron. Wake it gently, with quiet and cool water, and no bindings on it while it settles."
"And the second?" Tsunade asked.
"He visits after." A small eyestalk bent toward Akane, unmistakable. "It will wake afraid in a strange forest. Let the first face it sees be a kind one it already knows from dreams. Promise me that, both of you, and the forest is open, Tsunade-hime."
Akane stepped forward and crouched so the eyestalks did not have to reach. "I promise," he said. "On whatever slugs hold binding." He felt the weight of it settle as he spoke, a future trip to a damp forest already writing itself into his days. He promised it anyway.
"Your word has been good so far," Katsuyu said, which was as close as her kind came to teasing. She dissolved into smoke with a small wet pop, carrying the question home to the forest.
Tsunade stood, wiping blood from her thumb, and said nothing about the price of either promise, which said everything about her opinion of both. "Willing and visited. Both were already the plan, so the forest costs us nothing we had not already decided to pay."
The rest of the afternoon went to preparation. In the back room Mito chalked her end of the relay across the floorboards in great careful rings, checking each against the finished sheets, while Akane ground ink and held corners and fetched water without being asked.
Twice she stopped him from helping further with one raised finger, and twice he sat back and watched her hands remember what his could not yet do. When the rings stood complete, chalk-white and exact, Mito walked them twice, corrected nothing. She nodded at the river stone Akane had fetched from the bank below the house, grey with one white vein through it, chosen for having nothing special about it at all.
"Now paper proves itself or lies," she said. "Set it in the heart."
Akane set the stone down in the array's middle. Mito laid her palm to the master ring. Kurama's chakra moved through her in a thin, careful sip, no more than a mouthful of tea. The air folded with a sound like a page turning, and the stone was gone. In its place hung half a breath of cold salt air, there and gone, smelling unmistakably of brine and deep water.
Tsunade crouched and sniffed the fading air like a tracker. "Sea," she confirmed. "Deep sea, not harbour. It went where the water is cold."
"Paper told the truth once," Akane breathed. He felt something tight in his chest loosen its grip.
"Once is once," Mito said. "Do not spend it twice before tomorrow."
That night, dinner was barley, in honour of the morning's message, and they ate it mostly in the particular silence of people saving their words for later. Tsunade reported two fevers and a broken arm from the hospital wards. Akane reported nothing, having done nothing reportable. Mito declared that the best kind of day. "Tomorrow proves paper true or false," she added. "Eat your barley."
Then she set her tea aside untouched and folded her hands in her lap.
"Do not touch me until I open my eyes." She said and closed her eyes.
Akane and Tsunade gave her the room's silence. The lamp burned low between them. The river filled the house's nighttime hours with its low, even sound and her breathing slowed into the rhythm of deep sealing work.
A minute passed, then another, and Tsunade refilled her own cold tea without a sound, rather than break the stillness by standing. Then a faint red warmth kindled under her robe at the belly, no brighter than coals banked for the night, pulsing slow as a second heartbeat.
Tsunade poured herself more tea through it, unhurried, like a woman pouring through weather she has known all her life. Akane sat still and watched the warmth breathe. He thought of all the years this had been happening in rooms he was not in, long before he was born. Mito's face in the red glow looked neither old nor young, only listened-to, like faces in temples.
The warmth dimmed. Mito opened her eyes.
"It is arranged," she said. "Kurama will lend his presence to the dream. He has one condition. It is not negotiable." She looked at Akane. "You will speak his name rightly and politely when you meet for his prestige, and thank him properly for coming. He is tired of being used unnamed by men who flinch from the syllables. Kin does not flinch."
"I will speak it," Akane promised with a light chuckle as he thought of the big-hearted tsundere fox. "Kurama. By name, politely and with thanks."
Mito nodded once, satisfied, and reached for her cold tea as if nothing at all had happened in the room. Akane turned the condition over in his mind. He found no thorn in it.
Later, in his own room, Akane sat with idle hands, waiting until the floorboards by the window loosened and the pale face rose through the gap.
"The black one's hands finished digging," the White Zetsu said. "The end sleeps in the trench mud, marked and waiting. The boats counted twelve at dusk, as always."
"Tell him the count pleases me," Akane murmured. "And tell him to sleep. The window is tomorrow's false dawn."
The face sank, and the board for Kirigakure had been settled.
'You wanted to hunt for my bloodline, huh!' Akane thought of everything that had gone on in the past few days, and a smirk formed on his face. With this, one of the boards was closing, and after this, he could start focusing on other plans he had.
He lay down with the pieces laid out behind his eyes like stones across a stream, the trench end planted, home end in Mito's hands, forest open on two conditions, and Kurama arranged on one.
Between him and the plan now stood only one conversation, held in sleep, with a beast that did not yet know his name.
He touched the peach on the altar as he passed into sleep, for luck he did not believe in, and went down to practise being gentle. He rehearsed the words he would carry into deep water, shaping them like Mito shaped strokes, until they came smooth.
(WN: Isobu, I have come to bargain. Haha!)
"Isobu. I come unarmed, with your brother Kurama's name in my mouth, and a forest waiting that has no chains in it."
He said the name aloud once, to the dark room, testing its weight like Mito tested wire, and it held steady without smoke or stink.