The dreams he searched were ordinary.
That was the first thing Akane noticed as he moved through them, one after another, the way a man moved through rooms in a house he did not own.
He had done this a hundred times, a thousand times, slipped into the sleeping minds of the unaware and read whatever they had to show him. It was as natural to him as breathing, and it had never once felt like trespass.
Tonight, it felt like listening.
The first dream belonged to a fisherman. He lay on his back in a bunk that smelled of rope and salt, and his sleeping mind showed him the same thing it always showed him: the sea, the nets, the long pull of a day's work done well.
Akane moved through it like water, touching the edges of the dream, looking for the shape of something that did not belong.
And it was there. Faint and buried under the ordinary, but there.
It was a memory of a conversation on the dock with a stranger in clean clothes, asking about the people who lived further inland and, most importantly, asking about their hair. When he was done watching the scene and remembering the face of a person, he moved ahead towards the new suspect Zetsu had mentioned.
The second dream belonged to a merchant's wife. Her mind was full of ledgers, prices and the small humiliations of trade. But underneath the numbers, he found the same shape again.
A man had come to her stall and had bought a small thing, but paid too much for it. There was silence between them, and then he had asked about a girl he had seen in the market, a girl with red hair. The lady had a confused look at the start, but since she didn't want to let go of profit, she attributed the information to a random girl she found different, not caring whether she had red hair or not.
He remembered the faces of the two and continued to look into different suspects.
The third dream belonged to a small boy. He was dreaming of a fishing net he was learning to mend, and his hands were clumsy yet eager. In the corner of the dream, there was the same stranger, the same question and a description, about red hair, odd speech and a way of talking that marked a person as not from here.
Akane moved through dream after dream, and the shape repeated itself like a pattern in clothes. There were the same questions, the same descriptions, the same careful, probing interest in the people of the island, the people who had come to the island and the people who had ever passed through it.
Looking at the dreams, he understood that it was not random and somebody was deliberately trying to find a clue.
Akane found what he was looking for in the sixth dream, in the mind of a young sailor who had signed on with one of the strange boats.
The sailor was dreaming of home, of a woman on a dock, and of the ordinary ache of leaving. Underneath it surfaced a conversation he had heard overhead, like a fish breaking water. His captain was speaking to a man in a dark coat, and there were some words he had caught and carried without understanding them.
"...bloodlines. The old ones, the ones who scattered."
"Red hair?"
"Red hair, and the stamina. They mark them with the hair, and the survivors carry the markers."
The sailor's dream rippled, the woman on the dock wavering. Akane reached deeper, pulling the thread of the memory toward the surface. He felt the dream trying to resist, but it was just a sailor's dream, something he could easily control.
Hence, He held it and decided to continue the dream.
"...an Uzumaki," the captain said. "That is what they are asking for. An Uzumaki."
The word landed in Akane's chest like a blade, and his body went cold.
He felt it happen the way he had felt it happen once before, in a memory he had seen in his mother's and aunt's; the atrocity that happened to Uzumaki, and the world had first shown him what it was capable of.
A cold started at his spine and spread outward, reaching into his hands, his feet, the roots of his hair. The dream around him went still, the sailor's mind going quiet as if it could feel the change in the man who was standing inside it.
"Uzumaki."
He had not heard that word spoken aloud in years by someone else. He had kept it inside, in the place where he kept the island and the faces of the people he loved, the place that belonged only to him.
It was his family's name, his people's name, the name of a clan that had been forced to scatter across the world like seed from a torn hand, and he had spent his whole life making sure that no one on this island ever had to hear it spoken like that again, like a target meant to be hunted.
He stood very still inside the sailor's dream, the cold still spreading through him, and he made himself breathe.
An Uzumaki, that is what they are asking for. That is what he had thought too, but tried to dismiss it until there was good proof.
It was not about hair or Odd speech, or even stamina. Those were only the markers, the signs by which you recognised the thing beneath them.
The hunt was not for people with unusual characteristics. It was for the survivors of his clan. It was for his mother, for Mina, for Shizuka, for Makoto and for anyone who was of their use.
The hunt was for him too.
Akane withdrew from the sailor's dream with the care of a man removing his hand from a wound, and he stood in the empty violet vastness of the Dream Space, alone, the cold still working its way through him.
He had thought he knew the shape of the threat. He had grown up with it, the way a man grew up with a scar.
The raids had come when he was young: the boats of men in dark headbands who had crossed the water looking for bloodlines, and they had decided to continue to improve their skills since then, as fighting was the only way to survive in this world.
They had killed a squad of them, a full squad of Hunter-Nin, sealed the bodies and sent them away to be dumped in the territory of another village, a false flag to send the hunters looking in the wrong direction.
That had been years ago, and the raids had stopped. The questions had faded, and the island had learned to breathe again. Because of that, he had told himself the danger was over.
But it seemed the danger had not been over. It had only been waiting.
He opened his eyes in the dream, and he moved to continue.
The chain from the dreams was long, and he followed it all the way because there was nothing he wanted to miss.
The sailor's captain came first. He was asleep in his cabin, and his dream was full of money and the nervous pride of a man who had sold his crew's questions to a higher bidder. Akane read him like a ledger.
The captain did not know who had hired him. He had been paid through a middleman, a merchant in the port town of the nearest island, a man who dealt in information and did not ask where it went.
Akane found the merchant's dream from the captain's.
The merchant was a careful man, the kind of man who kept everything locked, and his dream was a maze of locked rooms. Akane walked through them anyway, one after another, until he found the room where the merchant kept the names he did not want to think about.
The name he found there was not of a person, but a village. A coastal settlement in the Land of Water, a place that did official business with the government and unofficial business with everyone else.
And behind the village, there was another thread for Akane to follow.
He followed it through the dreams of clerks, couriers and minor officials whose daily life included handling information and jobs their seniors didn't want to work on. Through the small men who passed messages, took their cut, and never once looked at what they were passing.
He followed it up through the layers of the Land of Water's administration, past the petty corruption which he couldn't be bothered about now, and the careful bookkeeping. The quiet way that the government of a hidden village and the government of a country had learned to bleed into each other.
And at the top of the chain, he found the two names he didn't want to handle right now.
The Council of Kirigakure and the Daimyo of the Land of Water.
Akane stood at the end of the chain, in the dream of a man who had never known he was carrying the thread, and he read the shape of what he had found.
It was not a raid, and it was not a squad of Hunter-Nin crossing the water to snatch a bloodline the way they had tried to do when he was young.
This was more organised and deliberate. It was the government of the Land of Water and the leadership of the Hidden Mist, working together, spending money, sending men, and asking questions across a dozen islands about a clan that had been scattered and hunted for years.
They were looking for an Uzumaki.
As he watched the dreams, he understood that they weren't told to kill, and that was the part that chilled him more than the rest.
It was a research order. They wanted a live Uzumaki, a survivor as a specimen. They wanted to study the blood, the stamina, the chakra, the seals that his people had carried for generations.
They wanted to understand how an Uzumaki body held power, because they were building something, and they needed the pieces.
The Jinchuriki.
The word rose from somewhere deep in the dream, from the papers, the plans and the ambition that had been festering in the Land of Water for years.
They were building jinchuriki, containers of the great beasts, and they had decided that an Uzumaki was the perfect vessel. It had already been proved in the past.
The bloodline had the strength to hold a tailed beast, and a clan whose very existence had been bound to sealing, to power, to the long art of containing what could not be contained.
They did not want to kill his family.
They wanted to use them.
Akane stood in the violet darkness, and the cold that had started in his chest had spread to every part of him now. He understood, with a clarity that hurt, that everything he had built was suddenly smaller than the thing that had come for them.
'Escaping is easy, but leaving is never easier. Fighting against a coalition of villages? Haha."
"Haha! These fuckers. These motherfuckers."
He had told himself the island was safe. He had told himself the raids had ended, the threat had passed, that the world beyond the water had forgotten the people who lived on this shore.
But it had not forgotten.
It had simply been waiting for a use for them.
He thought of his mother, asleep in the house above the beach, her red hair, a little grey now, her hands still strong from a lifetime of work.
He thought of Mina, and others who were living a free life right now, without any worries and fear of getting hunted.
He thought of the sea, and the boats that had begun to arrive, and the questions that had been asked in every village for months.
And he understood that the island's protection had never been a wall.
It had only ever been the hope that no one would think to look.
As he ended the dream, Akane opened his eyes outside.
He was lying on the mat in his room, the island dark around him, the sea moving below the house in its patient, endless rhythm. He lay very still, letting the last of the dream-current drain out of him, and he went over everything he had learned the way he always did, turning each piece over to see where the seams were.
The Council of Kirigakure.
The Daimyo of the Land of Water.
Jinchuriki research.
A hunt for Uzumaki survivors that had been running for months, that had touched a dozen islands and had been asking in every port about hair, the odd speech and the kind of stamina that marked a bloodline.
It had started asking before he had come home. Before the boats had increased and before the island had felt the first ripple of it.
The world had been closing in on his family while he was in the Capital, playing games with Daimyos, winning bets and building bridges. The world had been looking for them.
He had not known.
He lay in the dark and listened to the sea. The weight of everything he now knew settled over him like the cold that had not quite left his bones.
His family was not safe. The island was not hidden. The people he loved carried a thing the Land of Water had decided it wanted, and it was not going to stop asking questions just because he wished it would.
He closed his eyes, and in the dark, he began to plan.
Not for a raid or a war. The hunters had not come with knives, and they would not meet knives. They had come with questions, with money, with the patient machinery of a government that had decided to take something that did not belong to it.
So, they would meet questions back.
Akane lay on the mat in the house above the beach, and he thought about the Council of Kirigakure and the Daimyo of the Land of Water. He thought about the bodies of their Hunter-Nin that they had sealed and sent away, all those years ago.
The false flag had worked once.
It would work again.
The sea moved below him, patient and indifferent, and somewhere across the water, a government that had decided his family was a resource was going to learn that it had made a very expensive mistake.
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