Chapter Text
Sarada storms off to her room the second they get back to the house, slamming the door as though it has the power to seal him out of her life forever.
Whatever.
Kawaki doesn’t expect gratitude, he doesn’t expect to be understood. A long, painful life had taught him that he needed to do what he thinks is right, everyone else be damned, which includes Sarada. If she hates him for it?
Good.
It’s better than Naruto, who had tried to convince him he was a kind human being. Better than Boruto, who still sees him like a brother. Better than Mitsuki who clings him like a hangnail, and a whole hell of a lot better than Eida, who only cares about him selfishly, wanting to make him out to be someone he’s not, someone capable of returning the kind of love she wants to fulfill a desire all her own.
In comparison to Eida, he finds something gratifying in Sarada’s loathing, the contempt that saturates their every interaction resonating with the same hate he feels for himself. She hates him, and he hates himself. It’s validating that one of the few people in the world now capable of seeing Kawaki for who he truly is agrees with his assessment that he’s little more than a piece of garbage, meant to be discarded after he serves his purpose.
But Sarada’s pigheaded inability to not follow doctors orders?
That pisses him off. It’s his business to make sure she heals fully, that her abilities not only recover but continue to grow. And it’s not just because Shikamaru put him in charge of her; it’s a matter of personal interest as well.
At least with Sarada in her room, he can lie to himself that she’s resting.
He eats cold noodles out of the fridge, his first real meal of the day, washed down by a can of iced coffee. Just when he’s about to go up to his own room to shut out the rest of the world for a few hours, he’s called in as backup for a Claw Grime sighting just outside the village. Hours of investigation later and nothing to show for it other than a bunch of freaky footprints, he reports his findings to Hokage Tower, and, in the process, gets pulled into a useless meeting about patrol formations that he hadn’t been asked to attend in the first place.
Back to the house by the late afternoon, he finds a shopping bag outside his bedroom door, indicating that Eida returned after blowing more of the stipend the village supplies her with on bullshit clothing he doesn’t care about. He kicks it into his room without bothering to look inside, takes off his coat, and flops face-first down into his mattress.
Later, he wakes with a start, body sweating, heart pounding and lungs starving for air. A Jigen dream. Been a few weeks since he’d had one of those, but the bastard is always lurking inside of him, a reminder that he will never be free, will never know peace, until every single Otsutsuki is dead.
Should have expected Jigen to check in after what happened with Himawari that morning. A quick shower washes away the sweat and the sense that his skin is crawling. He’s almost feeling good by the time he puts on pajama pants and a shirt, walking barefoot downstairs into the downstairs living area, the lights off and the room empty.
Good, because the last thing he needs is another late-night spat with Sarada when all he wants is a goddamned sandwich.
Now, Kawaki must hate himself more than he previously realized, because why else would he have bothered to glance down the girls’ hallway when passing by, noticing the thin line of light coming out from beneath the door to Sarada’s room?
He glares at it, as though glaring at it could make it go out, then heads for the kitchen, grabbing a prepackaged egg salad sandwich from the fridge.
Girls stay out of the boys rooms, boys stay out of the girls rooms. It was a rule laid down by Shikamaru long ago, and a rule Kawaki lived by not out of compliance but because he had no desire to violate it. What the hell would he want in a girl’s room anyway? The only reason that he’d ever walked down that hallway in the first place was to get to the laundry area located outside their bath, and that was only on rare occasions when he returned from a mission gross enough that he didn’t want to leave his clothing in a hamper, stinking up his room.
Just yesterday, it would have been unthinkable for him to consider knocking on one of their doors, but as he’s hunched over the table, eating his sandwich, that’s exactly what he’s considering, and it seems like his only option, too. She’d fallen out of a fucking tree that morning like a bird having a heart attack. She’d worn herself out against orders. From the way she’d been grabbing her face, it had been easy enough to surmise that she’d used her Sharingan, too. And to what end? Annoying the shit out of him? And now, when she’s supposed to be sleeping, she’s up at—Kawaki pauses in his internal rant to check the clock of his shoulder—she’s up at a quarter after two in the fucking morning.
His indignation carries him all the way to her room, his half-eaten sandwich left in the kitchen. At some point, she’d added a palm-sized Uchiha crest to the door, declaring it to be her own. That’s where he knocks, square in the middle of the red fan. Loud, but not loudly enough, he hopes, to wake either Daemon or Eida.
He hears nothing at first, making him wonder if she slept with the light on, and he’d never noticed before. What a shithead he’d be if he woke her in order to tell her to go to sleep. But before his mind wanders too far down that path, the latch turns and Sarada jerks open the door. Whatever annoyance she had at being interrupted magnifies tenfold when she sees that it’s him doing the interrupting.
“What do you want?”
The only thing intimidating about her is the murderous glare coming from behind her glasses. Beyond that, she’s wearing the same red robe she had on the previous evening, its belt haphazardly tied on the side as though she’d just thrown it on. Her hair is washed, but unstyled, lying flat in a kind of shaggy pixie cut. She’s wearing slippers.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed. Well, thanks for the heads up…” Sarcastic response delivered, she goes to shut the door.
Kawaki puts his hand in the door jam, knowing it’s going to hurt when it’s slammed on his fingers, but figuring it’s going to hurt less than a pot of hot coffee to the lap. She stops just short of closing the door on his hand, yanking it open wide this time, giving him a full view of her bedroom.
If her bedroom is any indication, it’s clear that Sarada isn’t the one who decorated the downstairs bathroom. Her room is smaller than his, but still bigger than any of the bedrooms in the Uzumaki home. Its walls are a deep red, reminding him that Eida went through an interior design phase about a year ago and forced Sumire and Sarada to come along. There’s a black and white painting over her bed, something abstract, brushstrokes of gloopy paint evoking the feeling of leaves carried on the wind. Her bed is a futon on a platform, white mattress covered by a black comforter and a red blanket with matching square pillows. It appears made but mussed, sat on while not being slept in.
One side of the room has an open closet displaying mostly black outfits, the other side has an alcove with a little makeshift office nestled into it in front of a large window looking out at the night. On the desk is the book she was reading last night, pages marked with little colored tabs, and a notebook full of neat handwriting.
“He can’t be saved by some ninjutsu bullshit.”
“Excuse me—”
Kawaki jerks his chin towards the book. “It’s about sealing jutsu, right? If that could have gotten rid of Momoshiki, don’t you think Lord Seventh would have at least tried it?”
“We don’t know what he did and didn’t try. It shouldn’t stop us from looking into other possibilities.” Her whisper is harsh, trying to broadcast her outrage as quietly as possible, given the other people sleeping in the house.
“Boruto is his son , Sarada. You don’t think he tried anything and everything in his power to stop Momoshiki from taking over? Just because this is the first time it’s bothering you—”
He must have started leaning forward during their argument. Either that, or she took a step forward to get right in his face. “Oh, so let’s just kill him. That’s your plan. Kill him and tell Himawari what an awful person he is. That he murdered his parents. That he betrayed the village. You know he’s not guilty, but you just lie about it. To Himawari of all people.”
He should have known she’d been a little more pissy at him than usual since that morning, but it was hard to tell when she was just generally disgruntled versus being riled up about something specific. It’s not his fault that the span of her emotional scale exists on a range of annoyed to irate.
“She should know the truth—”
Sarada grabs him by the collar of his t-shirt; Kawaki grabs her wrist to keep her from shoving him backwards into the wall. “You’re telling her lies, bastard.”
“I’m telling her the truth in a way that she can understand.”
Sarada tightens her grip on his shirt, he tightens his grip on her wrist. She looks him over, eyes blacker than the night sky outside. “You’re just upset that she doesn’t hate him because that means she doesn’t hate you.”
Oh, bravo. Fantastic observation. Instead of Hokage, maybe she should look into a career as one of the counselors they keep trying to force him to see every time he goes in for a physical.
“I don’t expect you to understand.” He uses her wrist to push her backwards, far enough that she’s forced to let go of his shirt before he releases her. “What I expect you to do is go the fuck to bed.”
“Fine.” She spits out the first consonant as though there’s another single syllable f-word she’d like to say in response. She walks over to her bed and kicks off her slippers before sitting down on it. “Happy?”
“Eight to ten hours,” he reminds her. “Actual sleep, not reading stupid books.”
“A good captain knows they shouldn’t give orders their subordinates can’t follow,” she snips back.
The idea of not being able to sleep is laughable to Kawaki. But, then it hits him. “Bad dreams?”
Sarada picks at her comforter rather than look at him, probably in denial that he’s still talking to her.
“Are they new?”
Kawaki has a pretty good idea of what might have happened to Sarada to stir up nightmares recently. Not that it’s something he hasn’t been dealing with for a while now.
“For me, yeah. Sumire… She used to have bad dreams sometimes. Stuff about her childhood. She’d come over to sleep in my room, or I’d go to hers. But I’m not used to getting woken up by them myself.”
Kawaki isn’t sure he’s ever had a good dream in his life. They’re all terrible, the past that haunts him creeping up even in the only place he ever finds peace. So, he decides to tell Sarada what he tells himself whenever he wakes up in a cold sweat. “Dreams are just our way of working through things. They can’t actually hurt you. Just remember, a nightmare is just processing reality. Reality itself is the real horror.”
Sarada sits on her bed, staring at him, somewhere between aghast and pitying.
“Anyway, sweet dreams,” he says, reaching over to flick off her lightswitch before closing the door.