Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She’d barely managed to stand when the wave of chakra hits her, so revolting and wrong that it drives her back to her knees. Hands planted in the hot sand, stomach roiling, Sarada wills her unsteady gaze to focus and lifts her chin, squinting through blood-caked eyelashes at the sight above her: Boruto aloft, glowing blue chakra rippling his cape and hair as though he’s at the center of a storm.

The boy she’s been trying to save for the past three years, the boy she’s still accepting she loves.

Her Boruto .

But not hers at all. Not with that sadistic smile twisting his face into a half-mask of gleeful psychopathy, the other side of his face as placid as if he sleeps. The black scar in the center of his chest pulses an electric blue, geometric patterns extending down his arm, his leg, up onto his face, framing his one open lavender eye before proceeding up onto the broken horn that is now protruding from his head.

She almost feels bad when she hears the strangled cry that comes from Code’s throat as he grabs at his middle, the effect Momoshiki had impressed upon his stomach only seconds earlier doing its work. Red leaks through his shirt and vest, loops of innards bulging outward, held in place by futile hands. Uzuhiko spreads, shredding as it twists through him. He takes a breath before it reaches his lungs, his last exhale bringing with it an ejection of blood and bile that spatters upward like a gruesome fountain, painting the bright desert day with liquid crimson and flecks of organs.

Mitsuki is crumpled in a pile a few meters away having thrown himself over Sarada while she was still unconscious and taken the brunt of Momoshiki’s first attack. She crawls towards him, eyes on the back of his blue shirt so that when Code explodes like a squeezed grape, she doesn’t see it. Rather, she hears it, a sickening squish of insides followed by a wet pop and the spatter of viscera raining down.

Momoshiki’s cackle rings in her ears.

Rather than looking back up at him, Sarada finds herself staring across the sand to where Kawaki had been lying face down after nearly killing Jura before Momoshiki wrested control of Boruto and proceeded to beat Kawaki within an inch of his life. She expects to see him still passed out or looking up at the Otsutsuki high above, the object of his hatred laughing so easily at the carnage he’d wrought. Instead, Kawaki’s steel gray eyes return her stare as if to say, I told you so.

Chapter Text

Sarada bolts upright in bed, covered in sweat and gasping for air.

The IV line going into her arm nips, the electrodes monitoring her body’s activity, the blood pressure cuff, the heart rate monitor, all yanking her backwards as abruptly as she’d sat up. Outside the hospital windows, it’s early evening, but the room is bright with the glow of neon lights that reflect off the polished white floor and matching walls.

She uses the sleeve of her mint green gown to blot her face before turning to retrieve her glasses from the bedside table, carefully situating them over her bandaged right eye so she can at least see clearly out of her left one. Other than the beep of hospital monitors, the large room is silent and empty, the bed next to her unoccupied. No one waits for her to wake in either of the chairs in the room. The only sign that anyone else has been there at all is the flowers beside her bed, a bouquet of chrysanthemums clustered together in a rectangular vase, their yellow starburst blossoms looking like the petals of an exploding sun.

When Sakura stops by on rounds later, she finds her daughter lying on her back, clutching the nurse’s call button over her chest without ever having pressed it.

Her mother slips easily into bedside manners, eyes creased in a smile that’s warm yet professional. “How long have you been awake?”

Sarada turns her head toward the window while her mother pages through the chart at the foot of her bed, her pen scratching notes. “It was still light out.”

“Almost two hours! That’s the longest you’ve been up so far. Are you tired?”

Sarada shakes her head.

“Hungry?”

Another shake.

“Well, maybe you’ll feel differently if there’s food in front of you. I can ask the nurses to have a tray sent up, if you want.”

Sarada would have kept staring out the window at the black night of Konoha punctured by a thousand city lights if Sakura hadn’t rounded the bed, putting herself directly into her daughter’s line of vision. She’d dropped the facade of mild-mannered chief medic, in its place the concerned face of a mother. Her voice is as soft and soothing as a lullaby. “Do you want to talk to someone? We have trained counselors that specialize in mission trauma. I can arrange an appointment for one of them to—”

“How’s Mitsuki?” she asks, placing a detour sign in the middle of a conversation she didn’t want to have. No counselor in the world could understand what she’d been through, what she was still going through. Even if she told them the truth, none of them would be able to understand it.

There’s a marked pause before Sakura responds, a beat in which she lets her daughter know she disapproves of her redirection. “He’s stable. That’s what Orochimaru said when we spoke this morning. With all the resources available in his lab, he’ll recover, but it will take time to regenerate and heal. He has a long road ahead of him.”

“Konohamaru?”

“He has another round of surgery scheduled for tomorrow morning as we try to repair the ligaments and bones in his shoulders. Only time will tell if his chakra pathways can be fully restored or if his arms will have residual effects from the damage. That’s been an ongoing issue with injuries resulting from Shinju attacks.”

“Araya?”

Sakura sits down on the edge of her daughter’s bed, her hand hovering over her forehead for a moment before she pushes a lock of dark hair out of her eyes. “You should get some rest.”

“Mama, how is he?”

Her mother’s green eyes are the color of hospital gowns and medical ninjutsu, the color of healing. For once, the hopeful radiance in them dulls as she strokes her child’s forehead. “He left this morning, accompanied by Team 10, to take Yodo’s body back to the Sand. Himawari tried, but there wasn’t anything that could be done for her. Physically, he’s well, but—”

Sarada nods a little too quickly, not wanting to hear more. Not wanting to dwell on what it meant for Araya to lose someone he loved. Not wanting to contemplate if something similar had happened to her. The motion causes her head to throb, a pounding pain followed by a wash of nausea. She grabs the rail aside of her bed, closing her eyes.

“It’s your optic nerve,” Sakura says, her touch slipping to cradle Sarada’s cheek. “It’s adjusting to your Mangekyo Sharingan. Usually, we treat optic neuritis with steroids, but there’s not enough research on treating chakra-induced eye pain. Inflammation speeds the healing process, and we don’t want to inhibit that. Not when it’s related to sight.”

Sarada swallows down the bile burning the back of her throat. “It’s fine. I don’t need anything.”

“I’ll have one of the nurses bring an ice pack,” Sakura says, unable, either as a mother or as a doctor, to see her in pain and not do something . She leans down, planting a kiss on the top of Sarada’s head before standing.

“Thanks, Mama.” She sinks back into the pillows as her mother pulls up the thin white blanket, tucking her in as she did when Sarada was small. “And thanks for the flowers.”

Sakura’s hands pause in the middle of folding down the blanket to look at the vase. “Oh, those aren’t from me.”

Sarada skims through the possibilities of who could have brought them. Maybe ChoCho? Or Himawari? Or Sumire? Just the thought of her purple-haired friend’s name stirs up a torrent of emotion she’d been trying to avoid. Mortification and shame and guilt and hope—

“Kawaki did.”

Sarada blinks, the spiraling thoughts in her mind about Sumire skidding to a halt. “He what?”

The smile on her mother’s face, small and wistful, almost makes her as sick as the pounding in her head. “After Dr. Katasuke and Dr. Amado cleared him to return to duty, he stopped by to check on you while you were sleeping.”

“Yeah, right.” The idea of Kawaki checking in on her, much less bringing flowers with him—it was downright laughable.

“I know you two haven’t been close since your father…” Sakura trails off, clearing her throat. “Since his parents…” She pauses again, shaking her head, trying to find the right words. “I know things changed between you two, but you’re still teammates. Even before that, you two were friends. You practically grew up together.”

“Stop.” Sarada closes her eyes, sealing away the look of nostalgia that softened her mother’s features. Her mother, who remembers Kawaki as Naruto and Hinata’s son, whose memories are tainted with recollections of a black-haired baby playing with her dark-haired daughter.

“You used to trust him, and maybe you should try to trust him again. If you don’t want to talk to a professional, maybe you can talk to him. He was with you when—”

Sarada flops over, turning her back to her mother. “I said stop. Please, just listen to me.”

Her mother murmurs an apology, patting Sarada on the arm. “I need to finish my rounds, but I’ll be back when my night shift is over, okay? I’ll bring something better than hospital food. Maybe some dango or a yakisoba bun.”

“I just want to be alone right now,” she says, pulling her knees tighter against her chest.

“Okay, sorry.” Her mom brushes one more kiss to the back of her head, giving her shoulder a reassuring squeeze before leaving the room.

Sarada waits until she hears the door’s latch click back into place to open her eyes. When she does, the flowers are waiting directly in her line of vision. For the first time, she notices the three yellow petals that it had already shed lying wilted in the shadow of the vase.

Chapter Text

“Are you sure you’re ready to return to your mission?”

Sarada used to think the Hokage’s office was a place of light, the bank of windows looking out on Konoha inviting in the sun. Over the past three years, that assessment had changed. The warmth had little to do with the room itself. Rather, it radiated from the man who once sat behind the Hokage’s desk. With Shikamaru in the chair, it had become a place of smoke and shadows.

Sarada straightens her spine, hands clasped behind her back. “I’m fit for duty.”

Shikamaru looks up from the paper in his hand, a skeptical eyebrow raised. He takes a long drag of the cigarette in his other hand, then exhales. “That’s not what this medical report says.”

The Lord Hokage–Lord Eighth, though he hates being called that—has a way of pushing Sarada’s buttons like few others in authority could. Maybe it’s because of all the arguments that had passed between them since the advent of Omnipotence. Maybe it’s because he’s as blunt as he is. Maybe it’s because of the unspoken grudge he seems to carry against her father. Or maybe it’s because he’s not Naruto, and she needs no reason beyond that to dislike him.

This time, however, she tries to suppress the impulse rising up in her to fight him, stifling the urge to bite back when he questions her fitness. She isn’t running anymore, not from her heart and not from her ambition, which meant, among other things, she has to face the fact that Shikamaru was acting Hokage even if it leaves a bad taste in her mouth. Instead, she squares her shoulders. “I believe I can fulfill the responsibilities outlined in my surveillance mission.”

What her mother had recommended was for Sarada to take two weeks off to recover between being released from the hospital and returning to the house she shared with Eida, Daemon, Kawaki, Mitsuki, and Sumire. Perhaps Sarada would have agreed to it, too, a handful of peaceful nights of sleeping in her childhood bed and eating her mother’s cooking while she continued to heal. But that one brief conversation they had the day she woke up reminded Sarada yet again how much it hurt that she and her mother saw reality so differently.

Sakura wasn’t like the rest of the villagers, stewing in hatred for the rogue ninja who fled after killing Naruto or toward Sasuke who aided him. Perhaps it was that trust she’d spoken of to Sarada the other day, trust in her team, trust in her husband. She had mourned like everyone else when Naruto and Hinata died, a soulful, deep chasm of loss opening up inside of her. But whereas so many looked into a similar chasm and saw nothing but darkness, Sakura saw a kind of hope, trusting that neither Sasuke nor Naruto would have abandoned her in vain. No matter what her mind told her, she knew that there was purpose in her pain.

Her mother’s faith was like a warm blanket to Sarada, a boon in a world in which she found so few of them, but it did nothing to resolve the dissonance with which they perceived reality. If anything, it made it so much more painful when Sarada tried to explain Omnipotence to Sakura in hopes of bringing her comfort, and her mother received her words with a blank stare as though she’d been speaking an unintelligible language.

The compromise recovery plan her mother had agreed to instead was an extra two days of hospitalization for observation followed by restricted duties: no strenuous physical activity, eight to ten hours of sleep every night, visits to the clinic twice a week to monitor her condition, and a strict prohibition against using her doujutsu. If she followed doctor’s orders, she should recover in about two weeks, but the less she listened, the longer it would take.

Shikamaru sighs, dropping the medical report into a bulging open file folder on his desk that no doubt has her name on it. He taps his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, not even bothering to hide his annoyance. “It’s not like I have much of a choice. Recent events have rendered us short-handed. You’re going back there now, whether I think it’s a good idea or not.”

He sure as hell isn’t making Sarada’s newly-found commitment to compliance particularly easy. She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, modulating her response so it comes out in a measured, non-sarcastic way. “Yes, sir.”

“Now, a few things changed while you were gone—”

There’s a sharp rap on the door, followed by the voice of one of the shinobi guards who stands watch on the other side. “Lord Eighth?”

“Just one moment,” Shikamaru shouts back, taking the opportunity to snuff out the cigarette he’d been working on and pull out a new one. Filter clutched in his teeth, hand cupped around the lighter, he glances up at Sarada. “I figured I’d fill in both of you on this mission at the same time.”

Sarada’s heart drops and lifts at the exact same time, something akin to the feeling of an elevator car’s initial jerk reverberating through her stomach. She’d had a lot of time to think for the week she was in a hospital bed—too much time, in fact. Some thoughts were of nightmares brought to life, others matters of the heart. Most were too big for her to resolve while just lying there, any solution she came up with sending her in a circle that just returned her to the source of the problem in the first place. The only thing she’d come to any firm conclusions about was that she’d wronged Class Rep.

No, Sumire .

She’d wronged Sumire. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t because she wanted something for herself and was keeping it from another. Rather, she’d been lying to herself, and that lie had hurt someone else she cared for as well.

She didn’t know how to repair what had been fractured in their last conversation, a conversation that ended in Sumire running away, leaving Sarada behind, shocked. But she knows acknowledging the hurt and explaining where she’d gone astray was going to be the start of fixing things.

But just because she’d resolved to mend the rift between them, take the weight of her mistake squarely on her own shoulders so they could move on together, didn’t mean she felt ready to encounter her friend just yet, certainly not in Hokage Tower in front of Shikamaru. The Hokage takes a drag from his fresh cigarette, then a second one to ensure the orange-glowing tip is sufficiently lit.

“Let him in!”

Him?

Before Sarada can fully process what’s happening, the discord between her expectations and Shikamaru’s words, the door swings open. Kawaki imparts the guards outside with an unimpressed sneer before entering. Shoulders hunched, hands jammed in his pockets, he walks right up to the desk to stand beside Sarada without ever acknowledging her.

Chapter Text

Any day when he has to wake up before noon is gonna be a bad one, not that Kawaki has had too many good days in recent memory.

Nothing has gone well since that pair of Shinju bastards strolled through the front gates of Konoha as though they owned the fucking village. Making matters worse, after killing almost a dozen shinobi and forcing Kawaki to eat shit on a water tower, the big, bald Shinju with his ski-slope nose—Jura is his name—had been allowed to come and go as he pleased as long as his plans involved trips to the bookstore and not chowing down on Himawari.

What a fucked up situation.

It’s not as though Lord Seventh would have ever allowed a walking, talking, psychopathic tree to roam freely through the village for little shopping excursions. He’d at least have tried to pummel him—probably would have gotten killed or eaten doing it, which is why he’s safer where Kawaki had sealed him. Regardless, Shikamaru’s order to leave the bastard alone left a sour taste in his mouth. It was as though he’d attached a giant neon sign right over the faces on Hokage Rock, flashing lights broadcasting the phrase, “We’re pussies now!” with a little arrow pointing directly at Konoha. He’d known shinobi couldn’t be trusted to do anything other than die, but it was grotesque how unequipped they were to protect Himawari, much less anyone else.

He’d been thirsting for the power Amado freed in him, the power to rip down the sign Shikamaru’s edict had placed over their heads and smear “Dare to come at me, motherfuckers” in blood where it once had been.

Seemed like he had a pretty good chance of doing exactly that when he flew to the Sand, racing to support Sarada and her team in their mission against the Shinju. They hadn’t been in great shape when he showed up, one of the Sand kids dead and Konohamaru having gotten himself fucked up in the most embarassing way possible (on a date with a girl-tree). Pissed him off that Boruto had beaten him there, sparring with Code while dodging targeted attacks from Jura.

The new power that had been awakened inside of him had Kawaki feeling cocky. All his targets, right there in one place. There was a chance that he could end them all at once, keep his promise to that old geezer Amado to revive his daughter, free Lord Seventh, and die before Thursday if all went well.

It would have been the best week he’d had as far back as he could remember.

Instead, he’d ended up back on a slab in the Scientific Ninja Tool lab, his human parts battered and his cyborg parts busted. There wasn’t a single victory he could celebrate.

Sure, Code was dead, but he hadn’t been the one to do it.

They’d gotten Ryu’s Thorn Bulb Soul, but Jura had escaped with Matsuri’s clutched in the hand that remained after he tangled with Kawaki. And, really, did they actually need to bring Shinki back into the world? As far as Kawaki was concerned, he’s just another Kage’s brat who doesn’t even belong to their village.

As for Boruto? Well, he’d gotten away yet again, but not before losing control of Momoshiki and royally fucking things up for everyone.

Everyone includes Sarada, now standing beside him in the Hokage’s office, wearing that jacket he fucking hates. It’s like a thumb in his eye every time he looks at her. Sarada’s hands are clasped so tightly behind her back that it looks as though she’s liable to break a bone if she doesn’t chill out.

In the mission debrief he’d gotten from Shikamaru after being cleared to return to duty, he’d learned that she had single-handedly imploded Ryu into a wood chip confetti—something he hadn’t expected, being that by the time he arrived in the Sand, she’s been taking a nap in the desert. It took her longer to recover, too, because human shinobi were soft, squishy, and stupid, neither their bodies nor their minds equipped to face the threats of the Shinju or the Otsutsuki.

To think that she'd been the first one to take down a Shinju alone…

“Thanks for coming,” Shikamaru says, taking a drag off the perpetual cancer stick hanging from his lips. Kawaki glowers at him. It’s not as though attending the meeting had been a choice. If it was, he certainly wouldn’t have shown up at nine o’clock in the goddamned morning (or 9:07, being that he refused to arrive on time to an early meeting as a matter of principle). “As I was just telling Sarada, we’re short-handed right now. Team 10 has been dispatched to the Sand, accompanying Araya to handle Yodo’s body and revive Shinki, if that’s even possible. Mitsuki is out of commission until further notice. Konohamaru is out, too. I don’t even have a chief advisor at the moment.”

This is normally the point in any conversation that Sarada would spout off some brash nonsense about getting Boruto to help. It was always Boruto this, Boruto that with her. Oh, pretty please, Lord Hokage. Let’s throw a welcome home party for a murderous monster and feed him burgers until he turns on us. If you don’t, I’ll glare at you even harder than I already am.

This time, she stays silent, which seems to surprise Shikamaru as much as it surprises Kawaki, given the pause he leaves in his speech for some kind of interruption. When none comes, he clears his throat. “Now then, even though several new complications have arisen in recent weeks, I can’t reassign your current mission to someone else. Both of you are uniquely qualified to handle Eida.”

Uniquely qualified meaning she wanted his body.

If he gave two shits about himself or his dignity, he’d have fucked off when Shikamaru first revealed that he’d be shacking up with someone whose primary aim in life was to get in his pants. It gave him the creeps, being wanted by someone like that, someone who didn’t even know him well enough to see that he could give her absolutely nothing. Or maybe she did see it, being that she was able to see all, and simply settled for being delusional about him. Even worse was being played like a pawn by Konoha, an insignificant, little game piece without whim or will placed onto the board for the sole purpose of keeping her in check.

Thankfully for Konoha, Kawaki’s self esteem department had gone out of business long ago, and one more violation, ongoing though it was, didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, especially when she only dared to touch him with her eyes.

Now, why Sarada was critical to their mission?

That’s still a mystery to him.

Perhaps there was some ongoing covert operation, the parameters of which involved forcing him to live with a trio of girls and Mitsuki, who was definitely more in touch with his tender emotions than Kawaki could ever imagine being, plus an animalistic middle schooler. Three years with those girls and their conversations about the appropriate washing machine cycles for different fabrics, the fruity, flowery smells of their toiletries that wafted through the hallways from their bathroom, the hot-cold moods they seemed to cycle through, moods not directed specifically at him but toward life in general. One day, they’d be lying on one of the couches, clutching a pillow to their stomach, an empty bowl of chocolate ice cream left on the table despite all the times they’d chastised him for his dirty dishes. A week later, it was as though the same girl had grown a pair of butterfly wings, flittering around the house, up and down the stairs, asking if this shade of white eyeshadow was prettier than this other shade of white eyeshadow.

It was fucking exhausting. If he needed another reason to die, escaping from the societal expectation that he’d ever willingly share a living space with a woman again could be added to the list.

Shikamaru rubs his forehead as though the next words are going to truly be a drag. “I know we haven’t had any formal leadership structure on this mission before, but Kawaki, you’re going to act as team captain while Sarada is still recovering. There’s a list of restrictions she has to adhere to—”

“Excuse me, but what the hell?”

A whole 90 seconds of silence before an interruption might have been a record for Sarada, but for once, Kawaki doesn’t mind being that her indignation mirrors his. As if he’d ever be in charge of Sarada. As if Sarada would ever let him be in charge of her.

“Sakura specified that you need oversight. Who else is going to provide it?”

“Yeah, but—” She turns his way, a twist to her lips as though she’s judging the world’s biggest pile of shit competition. “Sumire can do it, can’t she?”

Shikamaru pins her with an irritated glare. “Sumire’s off the mission.”

It’s almost as if he watches in real time as the color drains from her face, disappearing like toilet water after a flush. “Off the mission?”

Apparently, Kawaki should have arrived even later than he did if he hadn’t wanted to witness Shikamaru delivering the latest drama resulting from too many girls living too close together for too long. He didn’t know the details of what had gone down—he hadn’t wanted to know them when Shikamaru brought it up the first time. But even Kawaki, with his below-average social IQ, had picked up on the simmering conflict between Sarada and Sumire. It had been more Sumire who was doing the simmering while Sarada was the negligent cook who’d turned on the stove, clueless that the water in the pot was slowly yet steadily boiling away.

It would have been easy to blame either of the girls for their lack of communication, but Boruto was right there at the center of it, and for Kawaki, it was simple enough to attribute yet another offense to him rather than to either of them.

“She asked to be reassigned to the Advanced Technology Institute to work with Akita Inuzuka on projects specifically designed to handle the Shinju threat. She’ll be liaising with both Amado and Dr. Katasuke, but she’ll be primarily located in Ryutan City. She wanted out of the house…” Shikamaru’s gaze flicks over at Kawaki for a moment, letting him know that perhaps he had played a not-insignificant role in her decision as well. “Out of Amado’s laboratory, too. She insisted that either I grant her request or let her resign. Didn’t leave me with a lot of options.”

“But Sumire and I were the only ones—” Sarada abruptly shuts her mouth, cutting off whatever she was about to say. It doesn’t take her long to change course, though. “There used to be four of us on this mission. Will two of us be enough to adequately cover Eida and Daemon?”

“Honestly? No.” Shikamaru leans back in his chair, rubbing his forehead with the hand holding the cigarette, narrowly avoiding singeing his own hair with it. “Recent developments being what they are, you’re now an S-rank shinobi, but you’re prohibited from using the strongest jutsu in your arsenal for now. If both of you were up to full strength, I wouldn’t be as worried if something went wrong. As of now, I’m assigning an elite team of sensory shinobi to supplement you in monitoring her. We’ve kept them out of her zone of influence thus far, so none of them have fallen prey to her charm. I want to keep it that way. They’re going to engage in remote, sensory monitoring, tracking her movements from afar. For now, you two just have to be present within the house.”

“I don’t wanna be in charge of her,” Kawaki finally says. Just what he needs is a thorn in his side becoming a full-scale pain in his ass.

“Too bad.” Entirely unsympathetic, Shikamaru plucks a copy of Sarada’s hospital release notes off his desk and thrusts them in his direction. “Here’s her recovery plan. It’s your responsibility to see that she sticks to it.”

“Don’t I get a say in this?” By now, Sarada has abandoned her previously contrite posture, hands planted on her hips, her hot coal glare planted on Shikamaru.

“Neither of you do. I give the orders. It’s your job to follow them.” He shakes the document at Kawaki. “Take it. Now.”

What a drag. He grabs the offered paper, crumpling it up and jamming it into his pocket.

What were a few more bad days to him after all?

Chapter Text

“I thought I told you to stop!”

It’s the second time she’s called out to him and the second time Kawaki has ignored her. As far as he’s concerned, his new role as captain doesn’t begin until they both get back to the house up on the hill, and he intends to take his sweet time getting there.

He’d wanted to take the slow way to the place where they’d been staying for three years rather than flying, a house the girls accidentally slipped up and called home every so often. Knowing that the sensory ninjas had been active since the disaster in the Sand, monitoring Eida from afar in their absence, Kawaki had allowed himself to slack off even more since he returned to duty.

His plans for the day?

Grab a can of iced coffee for breakfast, drink it while watching the clouds go on top of Hokage Rock, stop in with Amado for a blood draw to check the levels of nanomachines in his body to see if they were regenerating as expected, then show up sometime after lunch when Eida was usually absorbed in the afternoon lineup of melodramas, allowing him to slip into his room for an uninterrupted nap. Maybe after that, he’d grab some leftovers from the fridge and consider looking at Sarada’s recovery plan.

Unfortunately, the Hokage-wannabe seems determined to disrupt his agena, the click of her shoes against the stone floor in Hokage tower quickening, his own pace speeding up in hopes of getting to the stairwell at the end of the hallway before she catches up to him. Despite his best efforts, Sarada manages to overtake him, placing herself between him and the exit.

“I want to discuss this new arrangement.”

When he talks to other people, Kawaki usually slouches over, but with Sarada, he’s willing to leverage every inch of his six feet just to force her to look up at him. Though she’d suppressed it during their meeting with Shikamaru, her eyes have that feral cat look in them now, unflinching as she attempts to stare him down. From his perspective above her, his own face is a warped blob reflected in the headband tied over her short dark hair. He can’t remember a time she’d bothered to put it on in recent memory, and the fact that she’s wearing it now probably means she’s gotten some nonsense going on in her head that he doesn’t want to be a part of.

“There’s nothing to discuss.” A considerate person would let him end the conversation there, but when he tries to step past Sarada, she side-steps to block his movement.

“I can take care of myself. I don’t need you to babysit me.”

“Good, I’m glad we both agree.”

Rather than being satisfied with his response, Sarada narrows her eyes. “Were you even planning on following Shikamaru’s orders?”

“As long as you do what you’re supposed to for once, I won’t have to intervene.”

“For once?” Her offended response echoes down the hallway, probably disturbing some poor workers in the office next door.

Kawaki had been hit enough that he’s always aware of where someone’s hands are when they raise their voices at him, but Sarada is twinning his stance, her hands in her pockets just the same as his.

“You have a habit of not doing what you’re told, and it gets you hurt.”

Once upon a time, Kawaki’s nightmares had been given to him by others, visions of his father’s hand, Jigen’s rod. But he’d added his own entries to the carousel of horrors that rotated through his dreams over time, the sight of Boruto’s face when he’d accepted the mortal blow from Kawaki, how his determined blue eye had gone dull, sight slipping out of awareness into the escape of death.

Sarada was on that list, too, the memory of her eyes wide and surprised, so unlike Boruto who had been prepared and consenting. When he took that swipe at her on Hokage Rock, she looked at him as though she couldn’t believe he was the monster Kawaki had always known he’d been all along.

She hadn’t looked at him the same since then. Not that he could blame her.

“That’s really rich, coming from you.”

He stares down his nose at her, unsure when they’d gotten so close. “I know my own value to this village, Sarada. I have a purpose to protect the world from Otsutsuki and Shinju alike. If your eyes can do half of what was reported, you have that ability now, too. I’m not going to let you piss it away because a few weeks of following orders is a pain in your ass.”

Sarada returns his stare, unflinching. “I’m just another weapon to you.” It sounds like a statement, but with the way she says it, he knows she’s expecting a response he refuses to give her.

Yes, she’s a weapon. But she’d recently become something else, too. That, she doesn’t need to know.

“Are we done here?” he asks, taking a step back, putting some distance between the anger that had pulled them together like a pair of magnets.

He’s used to Sarada reacting, always primed to strike like a coiled snake, no matter the offense. It’s something new for her to look at him in a considering manner, almost as if she’s trying to take in the whole picture in front of her rather than looking at a single focal point. “Why did you bring me flowers in the hospital?”

Kawaki sighs.

Should have known that moment of weakness was going to come back to bite him in the ass. “Himawari made me do it. Do you think I wanted to bring you fucking flowers?”

That’s all there really was to it. He’d been on his way to the hospital, Himawari was coming back from visiting Inojin. When they crossed paths, she insisted on helping him pick out some flowers to take to Sarada.

Kawaki never felt the need to act like Boruto, and Omnipotence ensured that he would never have to, smoothing over the wrinkles in people’s brains so that the actions of Kawaki today were congruent with their memories of how the Hokage’s son behaved in the past. Himawari was his one exception. Push back though he tried, she never would stop viewing him as Boruto and expecting him to do all those dumb things her big brother once had. So, when she blinked up at him with those big, blue eyes, begging to help pick out the perfect flowers for Sarada, it had been impossible to say no.

Once again, there’s a dangerous beat in which he sees Sarada thinking over what he’d just said, poking around it to find the soft spots where it didn’t hold up. “Why did you come to visit me in the first place?”

“After Shikamaru told me what you did in the Sand, I wanted to see for myself.”

“While I was unconscious?” Her incredulity lasts for just a moment, then she shakes her head, stepping away. “No, never mind. That makes sense. I’ll see you back at the house.”

With that, Sarada turns on her heels, heading in the opposite direction, leaving Kawaki wondering why she’d bothered to ask in the first place.

Chapter Text

A Hokage’s responsibility is to protect the village from threats, no matter the cost. This was something that Sarada implicitly understood the moment she first saw Lord Seventh put his own safety on the line to protect the lives of others. He did it instinctively and without question, as though he’d been prepared to sacrifice himself for the village since the moment of his birth.

At one time when Sarada measured herself against Lord Seventh, daydreaming of her ambition to become Hokage, she used to ask herself if she had what it took to pay the ultimate cost when the time came, laying down her life so others could live. What she realized too late was that she should have been asking herself if she was ready to face the threats against the village, the power to confront them no matter the form they came in.

She learned that lesson the hard way when Kawaki’s bladed arm was on a collision course with her face. Time and time again, she’d played that moment over in her head, asking herself what she could have done differently to counter him. Whether her abilities were on par with that of a karma-wielding Otsutsuki wasn’t at the center of these ruminations, however. The fact was that she stood still when she should have acted, leading to disaster.

The failure was hers to own; she had been unable to, or unwilling to, see him as an adversary. Even after learning it had been Kawaki, not Code, who killed Boruto, there was a part of her that couldn’t believe a comrade who’d fought side-by-side with Team 7, who’d trained with them, who’d sat next to her and broke down when Jigen had kidnapped Naruto, was truly a threat. She had believed in the power of words and the way that Naruto had wielded them, never realizing that his words only had weight because of the strength behind them.

Sarada lacked that strength and feared she’d never be strong enough to wear the title of Hokage on her back. Naruto’s power had been omnipresent, as expansive and burning as his love for the village. What power Sarada did have was concentrated within her eyes, and her love was equally exclusive. The will to protect the village burned within her, but her heart was her own.

She’d purposefully looked away from the feelings that threatened to lead her astray, unaware that in doing so, she also was unable to see the path in front of her. Thus, she’d spent the past three years wandering aimlessly, declaring where she wanted to go without ever opening her eyes to see if she was going in the direction of her dreams.

There was one exception to her blindness, however, and that was Kawaki, the person she failed to face once before. She had promised herself that she’d never underestimate his potential again, both to murder Boruto yet again and to undermine Naruto’s vision of the village as a place where anyone could be welcomed and everyone treated as family.

Every time they’d clashed since, which always came in the form of verbal sparring in front of Shikamaru’s desk, Sarada had faced him head-on, forcing herself to see who stood directly in front of her for what he was: a threat.

He’d returned every refutation and retort she threw at him with the same regard as when he tried to kill her, treating her as though she was simply an obstacle in his way, begging to be cut down. But she refused to let him have his way. Her very presence before him served as proof that his will could be denied. Even though he tried to kill her once, Sarada still remained, thanks to Boruto and his promise to protect her.

Just as she couldn’t look away from him during those fights, she can’t look away from him now, the chrysanthemums that she threw in the trash as soon as she could stand having placed a puzzle piece in front of her that she couldn’t figure out how to fit into the bigger picture of Kawaki. Sure, she could believe that Hima had told him to bring her flowers, but the bigger question bubbling beneath was why he’d felt the need to see her in the first place.

Kawaki’s general demeanor broadcasted an air of leave-me-the-fuck-alone, not only that he wanted to be alone, but he believed himself able to handle whatever came his way alone as well. But when she probes further, asking him why he’d bothered to visit her in the hospital, his rigid shoulders sag as though burdened with a heavy weight. “After Shikamaru told me what you did in the Sand, I wanted to see for myself.”

It’s a bullshit answer, and they both know it. Did he expect black voids to manifest around her even in her sleep? Her response comes out even more skeptical than she’d intended. “While I was unconscious?”

In the pause that follows, his gaze on hers, she can’t help but notice how tired he looks, the dark lines under his eyes, the red veins threaded through his white eyeballs, the way his eyelids sag as though they’re begging to close.

Hey, Sarada. Do you hear me? All I need is a yes.

A familiar voice breaks into her head. Just as in real life, the tone teeters on a balance between upbeat and sarcastic, never tipping so far in one direction as to give itself away.

Inojin?

That’s not a yes , the voice in her head informs her. Get to a place where we can talk .

She’d already broken eye contact with Kawaki the moment she received the mental transmission, it’s easy enough for her to step back, letting an argument die for once. “No, never mind. That makes sense. I’ll see you back at the house.”

Whatever Kawaki does after she mumbles at him before walking away isn’t her business. It only takes her a few minutes to wedge herself into the alcove next to Konohamaru’s unoccupied office.

What’s up?

She swears she hears him snort, if that’s even possible given the limitations of the Yamanaka’s Mind Body Transmission technique. You’re going to have to get faster at responding if this is going to work .

If what is—?

Here’s what you need to know. He continues on, barreling through her question before she finishes asking it. This is an off-the-record transmission. It’s in violation of the Sensory Unit regulations. Are you ready to run to Uncle Shikamaru and tell on me?

Inojin, what—?

Could you stop messing with her? A second voice intrudes into her brain, no doubt facilitated by the first voice. The very man Inojin just named sounds a little more than peeved at her academy friend’s theatrics. He is right, though. This is off-the-records communication. Do you agree to be complicit in violating village policy to secure its safety?

Her first thought is, of course, she’d do anything to ensure the wellbeing of the village and its residents, followed quickly by, no, she’s not okay with violating the policies surrounding surveillance and communication that guaranteed privacy to every citizen in Konoha. But it doesn’t take more than a moment of deliberation for her to decide which is more important. I agree .

Good. Shikamaru continues, his voice grave. First, thank you for not making a fuss when I named Kawaki captain. That’s made everything easier.

It would have been more fun for me if you had, though, Inojin adds, earning a growl from the Hokage.

You’re lucky I don’t have any other options besides you , Shikamaru informs him before returning his attention to the task at hand. Sarada, I have a mission that I’m asking you to complete over the next two weeks. I’ve come to suspect that Kawaki and Boruto switched places, that Boruto is Boruto Uzumaki and Kawaki is living his life . I believe that you know this and have tried to tell me about it multiple times—

It’s like a gate is flung open in her chest, doors opening wide to let everything rush out. She’d tried so hard and for so long to make Shikamaru understand Omnipotence, to understand Boruto’s innocence. Now he does. I have! What happened was—

He cuts her off before she can get any further (or experience one iota more of personal satisfaction). Please, don’t try to explain it now. Not to me and not to anyone else. It’ll only confuse us. What matters is that I believe it happened. How it happened doesn’t matter. Do you understand?

I don’t, Inojin breaks in. But I don’t care, either .

Shikamaru releases a sigh she can hear even if it’s only in her head. Here’s what you need to know, Sarada. We’ve recently stumbled upon some information that suggests Naruto and Hinata are still alive and safe. Kawaki and Boruto having switched places suggests that it was Kawaki, not Boruto, who is responsible for their disappearance. Over the next two weeks, while Kawaki is overseeing your recovery, I want you to find out as much as possible from him. What happened, why it happened. Anything you can get out of him. We hit the jackpot if you ascertain their location.

Why only two weeks? she asks. It seems like an obvious question. Shouldn’t a mission so important be ongoing, just like their mission with Eida?

There’s something else I didn’t tell you in our meeting in my office, something I’m not supposed to tell you. Just as you’re recovering from the battle in the Sand, Kawaki is as well. It seems as though the Shinju’s attacks have a way of disrupting chakra even after wounds are healed if they sever a chakra pathway. You might have heard of Konohamaru’s condition.

Mine, too . This addition from Inojin seems to get a free pass from the Hokage.

Right, yours too. This extends to Kawaki as well. The nanomachines that run on chakra experienced a mass die-off when they repaired the damage from Jura. According to Amado, he’s functioning at half capacity at the moment. In other words, he’s vulnerable. I wouldn’t ask you to take this mission on if he was at full power. But, given the circumstances, I believe you have the ability to protect yourself if things go wrong. I wouldn’t ask you to take this mission otherwise, which leads me to my next point. Counter to Sakura’s restrictions, I authorize you to use your Mangekyo Sharingan to protect yourself if, and only if, you have no other option. I understand this might cause irreparable damage to your optic nerve, but it’s better than the alternative. This is an off-the-books arrangement. The only people who know about it are you, me, and Inojin.

Is Sumire on a similar mission? It’d make sense, wouldn’t it, if the only other person unaffected by Omnipotence is also engaging in covert intelligence gathering? And that would mean she hadn’t fled Sarada, hadn’t chosen to leave her alone, that there was some immediate hope of fixing their friendship.

Everything I’ve told you regarding Sumire is accurate , Shikamaru says, popping her hope like a leftover party balloon she’d just rediscovered. This mission is yours and yours alone . Do you accept it?

Her response is automatic. Yes, sir.

Excellent. Inojin will be responsible for regular check-ins with you. Anything goes awry, reach out to him, and he’ll get you in touch with me. Good luck in your mission, Sarada. The village is counting on you.

Chapter Text

For two and a half weeks, Sarada had been free. It hadn’t really felt like it at the time—Sumire’s words haunting her, the battle with the Shinju, Yodo’s death, Boruto…

Even the thought of his name is like a spike driven into her heart, the memory of him at sunset when he’d returned to Konoha to speak with her that now feels like an eternity ago, then a hammer driving it deeper in when she remembers Momoshiki wearing her teammate’s sweet, soft face, twisting it into a horrible mask of ugliness and evil. The mission was followed by a week in the hospital, a week of needles and nightmares, tests and assessments, bright lights and beeping monitors disrupting her sleep.

None of that had felt like freedom until Sarada steps up to the front door of the big house on the hill, still inside the village of Konoha but located far from the bustling life of the growing city, that she feels the door to her jail cell sliding shut again.

For three years now, she and Sumire had lived with Kawaki, Mitsuki, Eida and Daemon. It was easier for the boys, Kawaki, who didn’t have two shits to give about himself or anyone else, and Mitsuki, who was affected by Omnipotence and, thus, both believed that his sun was still beside him and was captured by Eida’s charm, blushing, stammering, and stuttering whenever she’d walk into a room. In other words, he didn’t have to pretend.

The effect she had on Mitsuki was one that Sarada and Sumire had to emulate, constantly aware of their every response to her, cautious to never let Eida or Daemon know they were immune. Sarada had learned to live with it, or so she thought, right up until the moment she’s three feet from the front door and realizes she’s about to walk back into that world again, an imaginary bubble carried by lies, its thin exterior prepared to pop the moment it fails to float.

Sumire had always been better at maintaining the facade, monitoring both herself and Sarada for the smallest slip-ups, giving cover to them anytime Sarada’s speak-first, think-later mouth would outpace her mind.

“I can do this,” she whispers to herself, hoping speaking the words aloud meant that they’d be true. The statement is accompanied by a double-slap on both her cheeks, preparing to face the task ahead alone.

Before she can give it another thought, Sarada bolts up the two stairs leading to the house, grabs the handle and yanks the door open.

By the time she’d gone back to the hospital to pick up her effects, to her mom’s house for a change of clothes, then a trip to the library to stock up on research material to make the most of her restricted duty, it’s early afternoon.

“I’m home,” she says, softly closing the door. Not that she really expects a response. It’s the time of day when Eida is usually lounging in front of the TV with Daemon sprawled across her lap like a human cat, oblivious to the world as she watches soap operas with one eye, her Senrigan activated to watch the show’s production process with the other. “Deluxe director’s cut,” she called it.

As expected, Eida is sitting on the couch with Daemon by her side, but the television screen is black. Instead, she’s facing the door that Sarada just walked through.

“We need to talk.”

Sarada freezes in place, her bag still on her shoulder, one foot in the genkan where she’d just taken off her shoes, the other on the little step into the house. “What?”

“I saw everything.” Eida’s Senrigan, which she’d apparently been using to monitor Sarada’s progress back to their house, fades from a galactic blue explosion to its usual ethereal aqua. “Everything that happened on your mission. What that girl Yodo said before she died. What you declared to Ryu before ending his short, little life. All those things you said about Boruto.”

Her first instinct is to deny it like she always does, not to herself this time, but to Eida.

Her face is flush, heart pounding in her chest, hand gripping the strap of her bag sweaty. The faster she can get away from Eida, the faster she’ll be able to get away from the torrent of mortification rocking her stomach. But was there really any point? If Eida had heard the words from her own mouth, how could she disown them?

Not even a “welcome back!” or “I’m glad you're alive” from this girl.

“It’s all a bit of a blur,” Sarada admits, buying herself time to hang up her bag as she walks into the room, bypassing the entrance to the kitchen. “But I know I meant what I said. I do have feelings for Boruto, and I’m going to stop running from them.”

“Come on, big sis,” Daemon whines beside her. “I don’t want to hear any of this gross girl talk.”

Eida pushes him away, leaving a shocked Daemon lying on his side, and stands, walking across the room to meet Sarada. Her long, bare legs cross one in front of the other like a runway model. She grabs both Sarada’s hands as if she’s congratulating her for winning a prize. “You must tell me about it!”

Sarada is half-pulled, half-dragged back to the couch. It takes every ounce of self-restraint she has not to rip her hands out of Eida’s grasp, reminding herself that she’s supposed to like the individual attention she’s receiving. She manages to work her face into a nervous smile, nervous that Eida’s touching her, not about the unexpected confrontation about her love life.

Once they’re on the couch, facing one another like conspiratorial gossips, Daemon climbs up onto Eida, draping himself across her shoulders like a mink stole, a disgusted one at that. “Dish,” Eida demands. “Tell me what it feels like to be in love.”

In love .

The phrase doesn’t quite fit all that Sarada feels. Does she have romantic feelings for Boruto? Most assuredly. But he’s her teammate, too. Her childhood friend. Her right-hand man. He’s always there to back her up, to pump her up, to support her.

Would she like to hold his hand? Yes. But just as much, if not more, she aches for him to once again be standing by her side. Bringing Boruto back came first. The messy feelings part could come later. Or at least that’s what she had thought, until Momoshiki…

Sarada looks down at her hands folded uselessly in her lap.

Don’t think about that now.

Eida seems to take her silence as confusion. “When you think about Boruto, where do you feel it? Here?” Eida taps a finger right in the middle of Sarada’s chest.

“When he’s with me, I’m happier.” That’s what she settles for. It feels closest to the truth without sharing too much.

“But you’re happy when you’re with me, too,” she asks, not understanding. Then Eida’s eyes light in revelation. “Yes, that’s it. Tell me how you know what you feel for Boruto is real. How is it different from what you feel for me?”

Luckily for Sarada, she’d had a front-row seat for how others react to Eida’s charm. She laughs awkwardly, a girlish laugh. “Well, when it comes to you…” For a moment she looks away, pretending to be abashed. “I get nervous when I’m near you, like I might not be good enough for you. My chest flutters, and I feel giddy. I want to make you happy in any way possible. Everything you do, it’s so perfect.”

“Is Boruto not perfect?”

Unlike her faked previous laugh, this one is real. “No, he’s not perfect. Sometimes, he’s the opposite of perfect. But that’s okay. He wouldn’t be Boruto if he was perfect.” An involuntary smile works its way onto her face as she remembers all his brash acts, his rashness that would disrupt missions, his bullheadedness that rivaled her own.

Eida leans forward, eyes bright. “But does he make you giddy, too?”

There were moments when it felt as though her heart forgot to beat when she looked at him, when his intense blue gaze took her breath away, when being near to each other suddenly felt as though they were both too close and not close enough at the same time.

Sarada gives Eida a sheepish shrug, as if to say, well, of course he does.

But those moments hadn’t been as frequent as another stronger feeling. When he was with her, Sarada was at peace. And protecting him was protecting a piece of her as well.

Eida often came across as a calm, cool older woman, but when it came to love, it was as though her inner school girl was released. “I want to hear you say it!”

“Say what?”

“Say how you feel about him! I want the words from your own mouth!”

She almost balks. Almost says no. Sarada’s feelings are hers and hers alone. And she needs to talk to Sumire about them before she shares it with anyone else. She owes her friend that, at the very least.

But could she defy Eida’s command?

It’s just three little words. How bad could it be?

Sarada looks down at her hands, still useless in her lap, not knowing what to do with themselves.

“Yes, I love Boruto,” she says to Eida, to herself.

Her confession is met with a high-pitched squeal as Eida surges forward. Daemon tumbles off her shoulders as she wraps Sarada in a tight, celebratory hug.

Sarada returns the embrace (how could she not?), arms around Eida’s shoulders, cheek pressed against her cheek. And it’s only then, at her new vantage point, that she can see past  Eida’s mass of looping hair to where Kawaki is halfway down the stairs, staring at the both of them.

Chapter Text

Kawaki liked to sleep.

It was his only hobby, his preferred diversion, his primary indulgence.

Didn’t matter what time of day it was. Didn’t matter if he was tired or not, either. After waking, he often felt worse than he did before he laid down. Knowing this never stopped him, though. The rest itself was never the point.

For Kawaki, sleep felt like he was being transported through time, unconscious and unaware of the hours that passed. Each time he woke up, he was farther from his past and closer to never having to wake up again.

Not everyone would consider that a perk of a lazy afternoon nap, but to him, it was time well spent. Better than stupid video games or boring tv or reading books. Who the fuck read books for fun?

Days punctuated by random naps fucked his sleep schedule beyond belief. But he wasn’t complaining. Waking up at half past 12 meant that there was no competition to get in the shower. Sleeping through supper allowed him to avoid awkward dinner conversation, or any conversation, really. And because his housemates were fully aware that no matter the time of day, if he was in his room, he could plausibly be sleeping meant that no one ever knocked on his door, lest they incur his wakened wrath.

Sleeping was the only thing that had made the past three years of living in a house with half a dozen residents remotely bearable. He even had his own bedroom upstairs, across the hall from the other one in which Mitsuki slept. Or didn’t sleep. Whatever that weirdo did at night to recuperate his energy.

Boys upstairs, girls downstairs. Those were the rooming orders that came from Shikamaru when someone in Hokage Tower realized that Lord Seventh's son shacking up with a trio of teenage girls was a shinobi scandal waiting to happen. Daemon was the sole exception, sleeping in the big room off the main living era with Eida, guarding her even in sleep.

Kawaki’s room has floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the ancient forest behind the house, blinds he keeps perpetually closed to block out the light. The walk-in closet is filled with new clothes bought by Eida, most of which still have the tags on them. There’s a reading lamp by his bed that he never uses for reading, an over-sized chair he never sits in next to a table containing a pair of artistically lopsided vases that only get touched when the cleaning service comes to do the dusting.

The only thing that interests him, the only thing he really cares about at all, is the wide bed lifted off the ground on a polished wooden frame. It has two soft pillows and a heavy, fluffed comforter. Not even in Naruto’s house did he ever come close to anything as welcoming or luxurious as that bed. Whenever he has nothing else to do, Kawaki could be found there, either trying to sleep, sleeping, or just having woken up.

Now, sometimes, those afternoon naps have a way of coming back to bite him, getting in the way of a full night of sleep, which was his favorite type because it was the longest.

That’s what happens tonight, waking up at some ungodly hour when everyone else is sleeping. First, he flips his pillows over to the cooler side and buries his face in them, hoping to fall back asleep.

No such luck.

He rolls himself up like a burrito in the comforter, and when that doesn’t work, he sticks his feet out of the end, hoping to modulate his body temperature.

Again, no luck.

It takes a little more tossing and turning for him to fully give up and wake up to the reality that there’s only so much sleeping a body can do until it reaches its limit, and his limit had been surpassed long ago.

He flicks on the light and checks the clock. Just after one in the morning, which leaves open the possibility that he can get up, get a bite to eat, watch some stupid TV, and get back to sleep before dawn.

His wrinkled sleeveless undershirt is on the chair that serves as his hamper. Beside it, Sarada’s recovery plan is on the table where he left it after reading, the creases in the paper smoothed out. All she really has to do is sleep more, do less, and not over-exert herself. It’s pretty similar to what Amado had told him to help his nanomachines repopulate his blood stream. Despite having given it to her straight in Hokage Tower, he has to admit that there is no reason why he needs to keep an eye on Sarada. Sakura’s orders weren’t anything she should be unable to handle herself.

He throws on the white shirt and a pair of green pajama pants from the closet. The hallway is empty, the house quiet other than the perpetual hum of the high-tech ventilation system. The first-floor lights shouldn’t be on at this hour, but the glow reaching the top of the stairs tells a different story.

He would have turned back if his stomach hadn’t reminded him of the untouched order of curry takeout in the fridge. He’d been awake when the delivery order arrived, but there was no way in hell he was willingly going to sit down at a table with Sarada and Eida, not after witnessing the older girl extracting a coerced love confession out of Sarada.

Why’d it matter so much to hear her say what everyone had known all along?

His first steps down the stairs are silent, hoping he can sneak past whoever is awake and make it to the kitchen unseen. But the moment he can see Sarada, she’s already looking back at him. Her short, dark hair is tied away from her face in a red silk scarf that matches the red robe she’s wearing. It’s a short robe. Not as short as the shorts she usually wears, but short enough that he doesn’t look too long at the way she’s sitting with her legs folded beneath her, glasses on her nose and book in her hand. Whatever the hell she’s doing up, the one thing that’s clear is that she’s not following orders.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” he says once he reaches the bottom of the stairs, muttering it as he walks past her on the way to the kitchen.

“Is everything you say hypocritical?”

It’s rare that the two of them are alone together, even rarer that one of them isn’t purposefully avoiding the other’s existence. He ignores her little dig at him. Let her squawk. She doesn’t understand; she’s never going to understand. It’s not worth starting a fight that might wake the cyborg siblings and ruin everyone’s night.

“You have until the time I’m done eating to be back in your room.”

She looks over her shoulder at him, scowling. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”

“I’m your captain,” he shoots back from behind the refrigerator door.

As expected, that shuts her up. For all her grandstanding, Sarada respects that shinobi shit through and through, ranks, regulations, processes and procedures. Sure, she’ll rebel against Shikamaru, give him some lip every time she sees him, but she always stops just short of revolting completely, her idiotic belief in the shinobi system keeping her tethered like a dog on a chain.

He tears through the cold curry, straight out of the container and into his mouth. Doesn’t bother to heat it up. Doesn’t bother to sit down. One of the perks of eating alone is there isn’t a chorus of girls judging his manners. Leaning on the sink in the kitchen, he can see through the dining room to the couches where Sarada still sits, turning another page in her book, unbothered.

Kawaki’s used to going solo, to doing it alone. The only person he usually commands is Delta, who has the mouth of a harpy, the body of a sex doll, and the will of a wet noodle. No matter what words she says, Delta always obeys in the end. He hadn’t sought to be in charge of anyone, didn’t want it at all, and yet it bugs the shit out of him when he’s done eating, and she’s made no moves to leave the couch.

He throws the empty container in the trash, banging the lid loud enough that she’ll hear it, flings the spoon in the sink, and pours himself a huge glass of water before drinking it with audible gulps. All that noise, and she’s still just sitting there, nose buried in her book.

What a contrary bitch .

Given no other option, he puts himself directly in front of her, his arms crossed over his chest. “You wanted back on this mission, right?”

From where he’s standing, he can read the title on the book’s spine: An Unabridged History of Sealing Jutsu by Uzumaki M.

Great, nothing like being disobeyed in favor of a boring-ass book.

Sarada looks up at him from above the rim of her gold-framed glasses. “I did.”

“And you agreed to the recovery plan. That means sleeping.”

“I did sleep.”

“For 10 hours?”

“For as long as I could.”

Kawaki had come to cultivate a grudging respect for Shikamaru, a Hokage who did what had to be done rather than dicking around while everything just got worse. But with Sarada now looking at him with the exact same glare she used in the Hokage’s Office, Kawaki decides that Shikamaru might have a bit of a soft spot for her, because in his place, she’d have been demoted back to academy student faster than she could have said Hidden Leaf Village.

“And how long was that?”

Sarada shrugs. “Maybe an hour.”

Perhaps a bit of Hinata had rubbed off on him, the way Kawaki instantly snaps his arm up, pointing his finger to the hallway down which the girls’ bedrooms were located. “Go to sleep now.”

“You can’t make someone sleep,” she says, closing up her book.

Well, that was true. If Kawaki had that ability, he’d be upstairs right now, snoring instead of arguing with her.

“Go to bed, or first thing in the morning, I’m marching you back to the hospital and making you stay there.” When she doesn’t immediately get up, he adds, “I’ll tell your mom.”

“Fine.” The way she says it, it’s clear that she doesn’t agree with him. It’s more of a “fuck you” than a “yes, sir.”

Book in hand, she stands up, gives him one last sneer, and marches down the hallway in her bare feet, leaving Kawaki to stare at the Uchiha crest embroidered on the back of her robe.

Kawaki flops down on the couch, shaking his head, and grabs the remote.

Chapter Text

Last thing he remembered was watching an old movie featuring an ancient alien from outer space laying waste to a cardboard cityscape. The screams of women, the wailing of sirens, the crackle of flames, all playing at a low enough volume that Kawaki had drifted off to sleep around the time that the useless cast of politicians and military officers ordered an airstrike doomed to fail on the rampaging monster.

“What are you doin’, drooling on my favorite spot, you big ugly loser?” If the high-pitched screech hadn’t woken him, Daemon landing squarely on his back with the impact of a bomb dropping would have. The moment Kawaki opens his eyes, he begins choking. A ring of pressure tightens around his neck, squeezing harder as he sits up. Daemon is locked onto his back, his hands in Kawaki’s hair and legs around his shoulders, whooping like some western cowboy trying to stay on a bucking bronco.

Kawaki wheezes, a helpless “ hrrk ” coming from his throat when he tries to inhale. He grabs for the invisible force cutting off his air while rocking side to side, trying to dislodge the demon child on his back—

“You have to stop thinking of strangling him,” Eida says as she walks out of the bedroom beneath the stairs where she and Daemon sleep. Despite just having woken, as evidenced by the royal blue satin shorts and matching pajama top she’s still wearing, her loops of long, flowing hair are perfectly coiffed in a way that defies gravitational explanation.

Easier said than done .

With Daemon still on his back, the bottoms of his bunny footie pajamas in Kawaki’s face, he closes his eyes, pushing back the thought of wringing that little monster’s neck and searching for something to cool his murderous thoughts.

It comes in the form of chocolate taiyaki, golden brown and warm in his hand, the burst of nutty sweetness when its filling meets his tongue. The memory of Naruto buying him one for the first time follows, the street they were walking down the afternoon he first tried it. The image of Sarada comes with it, a younger version of her, who’d chosen to tag along with them, chasing the shadow of Lord Seventh.

Kawaki sucks in a hungry lungful of air as his own phantom hands release him.

“You should know better by now, you big dummy!!!!” Daemon shouts, slapping the side of Kawaki’s head, and for a brief second, the choking sensation reappears before he can get it under control yet again.

“Daemon, stop antagonizing Kawaki. You know how he is in the morning.” Eida admonishes her little brother as she walks to the kitchen. “Come, let’s eat before the food gets cold.”

With acrobatics similar to how he’d launched himself onto Kawaki in the first place, Daemon does a backflip off of him, landing right behind Eida as though he’d been following her all along.

Breakfast?

Before the mission to the Sand had taken Sarada and Mitsuki away, before Sumire got the shits of them all and left, breakfast had been the only time anyone bothered to cook in the house. The rest of their meals came from the plethora of takeout options available in Konoha, a parade of meals packaged in plastic containers, both delicious and soulless. Breakfast had been the exception to that, and on the rare mornings when Kawaki was forced to wake up with everyone else, he might have enjoyed it.

The food, to be specific, not sitting down with any of them.

However, in the four days since he’d gotten the greenlight from Amado to go back to the house, he’d learned their morning meal had devolved into a haphazard chaos of grab-what-you-can rather than a formal event. Cereal boxes sat open on the counter, dried splashes of milk on the table, a butter knife jammed into the toaster. It made sense, being that neither of the Kara siblings could cook (not that Kawaki could, either). That task had belonged to Sarada and Sumire, both of whom played a role in the house that was somewhere between Eida’s domestic companions and her handmaids.

The moment he sniffs the air, he smells the smoky savoriness of frying bacon and the siren song of freshly-brewed coffee. He turns around, looking at the clock on the wall above the L-shaped dining table, displaying the unholy hour of seven-thirty-in-the-goddamned-fucking-morning, to where Sarada is busy in the kitchen beyond, a red apron covering her usual black romper and belt.

Kawaki registers a few things all at once.

One, his plan to stay up and make sure Sarada was going to stay in her room all night failed when he fell asleep.

Two, there’s no fucking way in the world she’d actually slept for eight hours if she is now fixing breakfast.

Three, it’s before noon and, therefore, destined to be an awful day.

Four, and most pressing at the moment, he needs to get to the table before Daemon lays waste to the bacon.

With a groan, he gets up, unsure if the crick in his neck came from sleeping at an awkward angle on the couch, being ridden like a mechanical bull first thing in the morning, or his accidental attempt at self-strangulation. The pain is a little reminder that the nanomachines in this blood stream still aren’t working right, buzzing around in his body the way they’re supposed to, repairing small bits of damage before he can even feel it.

His annoyance only grows when he walks into the dining room where Eida is filling Daemon’s cup. The table is set. Coffee, juice, and milk all out. There’s a basket of assorted breads, some sliced cucumbers, a selection of pickles. A plate of peeled oranges stares him in the face, their surfaces stripped clean of pithy strings.

No way she threw this together in a few minutes. Must have taken an hour. Minimum. He glances at the kitchen to find Sarada watching him over the edge of her coffee mug as she takes a sip, a smug look in her tired eyes.

“Yo, where’s the grub?!” Daemon demands, a fork in one hand, a knife in the other, as he bangs his fists on the table.

Eida shushes him, placing a placating hand on his head between the ears on his hooded pajamas like her little brother was little more than a high-strung chihuahua. “Calm.”

More like a waitress than a roommate, Sarada comes out with a platter of bacon in one hand and a warmed plate of scrambled eggs in the other, retreating back to the kitchen to get individual salad bowls for each of them. Daemon starts piling bacon onto his plate the moment it hits the table, not even waiting for Sarada to hang up her apron before he starts eating. With the siblings sitting side-by-side and neither Mitsuki nor Sumire there to provide any buffer, Sarada takes a seat next to Kawaki, still nursing her coffee.

As expected, there are only four strips of bacon left by the time Kawaki gets the platter. He takes three, passing what’s left (one) to Sarada. She sets it aside without serving herself, reaching past him for the carafe of coffee for a top off.

Using her knife as a guide, Eida directs a clump of scrambled egg onto her fork, not looking up. “So, Sarada, how did Boruto make you love him?” She says like it’s no big deal, usual dinner table conversation, certainly not as if she expected Sarada to jolt upon hearing the question and drop the entire carafe of coffee onto Kawaki’s lap.

“Fuck!” he screams, pushing himself back from the table as scalding liquid soaks through his pajama pants. He’s vaguely aware of Daemon’s laugh as he kicks off his pants to get the burning fabric away from his skin as fast as possible. 

“I’m really sorry,” Sarada says from the opposite side of the door after handing him a dry pair of pants and underwear. Usually, girls used the downstairs toilet, boys the upstairs, and thank god for that, because Kawaki couldn’t imagine sitting down to shit every morning while staring at a pink and white sign on the door that read “Have a seat, sweet cheeks!”

It’s just a shitter, he thinks to himself, slipping on his pants, wincing at the inflamed skin on his upper thigh where the coffee had landed. Who needs a fucking painting of flowers and a container of stinking potpourri and a bunch of lidded baskets on the shelf above the toilet that he wouldn’t even look in on a dare. No wonder Daemon walked all the way upstairs to use their toilet instead.

“Are you okay?”

For someone who had given him so much shit, Sarada seems genuinely concerned. Or at least embarrassed. That she’d dropped an entire pot of coffee. On his crotch.

Out of everyone in the house, he’s the least mad at her, though. Eida, who’d gone beet red the moment he was down to his boxers, staring at him without moving an inch while her little brother laughed so hard, he almost puked. At least Sarada had gotten him a towel and ice.

“It’s fine,” he grumbles. Okay, so his healing wasn’t fully operational, but he’s not going to go to old man Amado and drop trou. No way in hell was he having that bastard’s face inches away from his balls.

“Do you need anything?”

Well, he needed some fucking breakfast because Daemon had surely eaten everything by now. Some coffee, too, beyond what he could wring out of his pajama pants. Mostly, though, he needed to be back in bed, which was the one thing he couldn’t do as he’d made some important promises he couldn’t renege on. Not this time, anyway.

“Could you just leave me the fuck alone?” he asks, opening the door to find Sarada leaning on the opposite wall. The way she usually glares at him gives her the appearance of being several inches taller than she really is. But here in the hallway, somewhere between embarrassed and distressed, he’s reminded of how short she really is. It doesn’t suit her, looking small and ashamed. “And if you can’t do that, you could at least throw these in the fucking washer?”

Without waiting for a response, he tosses his soaked pants at her face and leaves her standing there, exasperated with him once more.

Chapter Text

Sarada hadn’t planned to spend the morning tailing Kawaki.

She’d fully expected that after cleaning up from breakfast and the unfortunate coffee incident, Eida would request companionship in some girly endeavor, which Sarada would have to go along with in the name of keeping up the ruse that she was affected by Omnipotence. Therefore, she was downright shocked when the blue-haired beauty insisted on going on a shopping trip alone (if alone included Daemon, that is). No Sarada allowed, full stop, entertaining no arguments about how the Hokage preferred her to be under escort when she was in public, more for crowd control than Eida’s own safety.

“Shika-dear won’t mind,” was all she said, which suited Sarada just fine.

While both she and Sumire had learned a lot about fashion by simply being near Eida and had developed their own individual styles accordingly, she wouldn’t go so far as to say she enjoyed watching the older girl try on clothing for hours. To make it bearable, Sarada had to constantly remind herself she was on a mission, a very real and a very important one, just to feel as though she wasn’t wasting her life away.

The brief fancy that she could catch a catnap to make up for sleeping so little the previous night, then return to her reading, disappeared the moment she saw Kawaki shrug into his coat. Because she did have another mission (one actually suitable to a shinobi), and Eida had just given her the perfect opportunity to work on it, though that was easier said than done.

From the moment Kawaki realized he could fly, it became his preferred method of transportation, allowing him to see all below (and keeping him far from any and all undesired social interactions). Whereas the villagers of Konoha saw his presence high above their heads as a comfort— look, the strong Hokage’s son. How much he’s grown! Even with Lord Seventh gone, his child is still here to protect us —it annoyed Sarada to no end. 

“Aren’t the bad guys the ones who usually float in the sky over the village?” she’d once asked Mitsuki back before she’d given up hope of getting through to him.

“How is it so different from running over the tops of buildings? Isn’t it just faster?” he’d replied, effectively shutting down her argument and the entire conversation along with it.

With Boruto now flying too, she has to admit that it does seem to have its advantages and couldn’t solely be a skill attributed to bad guys…

What is a bad guy, though?

Sarada shakes her head as she runs, dismissing the memory of the first time she’d seen Boruto do it, back when Momoshiki had taken over his body during the fight with Boro. Yes, both Kawaki and Boruto could fly because they were Otsutsuki, but Boruto was still Boruto… Except those disastrous times when he wasn’t.

A little voice in the back of her head reminds her that she, too, can fly now, so maybe it’s not the best barometer to measure someone’s potential for evil. The real problem with Kawaki flying, or at least Sarada’s current problem, is that it’s hard to hide from someone who is so high up.

He’d taken off heading west, away from the village and into the surrounding forest beyond. The trees give Sarada plenty of cover, but she has to stick to the lower branches to avoid being noticed. The chakra overexertion from the mission to the Sand, her injuries from that battle, the long days spent in bed—she can feel it all now while leaping from branch to branch. Her muscles are stiff, chakra control shaky. Pressure builds up behind her right eye, the start of a headache threatening to break through. Usually racing through the trees feels like freedom, but for the first time in years, it fails to come naturally. She has to pay attention each time she lands, each time she leaps forward again, exerting effort to coordinate her physical movements with her chakra flow.

Hey, Sarada.

Inojin’s voice lets itself into her head unannounced. Her foot skids as she loses control for a second, canting dangerously forward. Her arms whirl, keeping her balance as she concentrates chakra to the soles of her feet, allowing gravity to take her forward until she’s hanging upside down on the underside of a big branch.

A little warning would be nice , she grumbles back to him.

Sorry, I don’t come with a ringer , he replies, the sorry sounding not the least bit like an apology. It’s not like I don’t get interrupted every time Shikamaru reaches out.

That’s all I have to do? Reach out? Sarada had been looped in on many interconnected telepathic transmissions in the past, but she hadn’t considered the logistics for the Yamanaka clan member who coordinated them.

Yep. Think my name with intention, and I’ll respond. Anytime, anywhere within a 100 kilometer range of the village. Though, please don’t do it in the middle of the night unless it’s an emergency.

Gotcha. Balance restored, Sarada swings back up to the top of the branch and launches off again, heading in the general direction of where she’d last seen Kawaki. What do you need?

Tell me something you didn’t know yesterday.

He can’t see the confused look on Sarada’s face, but she makes sure he can hear it in her response. What?

You’re on an intelligence-gathering mission about Kawaki. What have you learned so far?

Sarada racks her brain for something, anything. He wears purple boxers?

Inojin’s tone drips with scandal. Sarada Uchiha. I don’t think Shikamaru expected you to go that far for the mission. Way to put it out all there for the sake of the village. Color me impressed.

Oh, no. No, no, no. It wasn’t like that! Not at all!

He chuckles, enjoying her panic. Sure it wasn’t. But I don’t think the color of his boxers is going to help find Lord Seventh.

Yeah, I know. After a moment, she asks, How much do you know? About Kawaki’s situation? About Lord Seventh? And about Boruto, too?

Well… He pauses, thinking it over. I know what my memories tell me. And I know what Shikamaru has said. They conflict. So, I’ve decided it doesn’t matter either way.

Doesn’t matter? Sarada can’t imagine taking such a causal view of such a serious situation.

If I think about it too much, my mind rebels. If I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. Treat it all as juicy gossip, and it works out.

Gossip that you can’t tell anyone, right?

She’s not quite sure what he means when he responds with a serious, Literally.

Sarada notices a dirt path near the route she’s taking, one that seems familiar, even if she can’t put her finger on why she remembers it. Did you need something other than the color of Kawaki’s boxers?

Yes, actually. Next time you visit the medical clinic for a checkup, stop by Hokage tower to yell at Shikamaru like you usually do—

I don’t yell at him—

Yeah, whatever, Inojin doesn’t let her defend herself. He has something for you.

Thanks.

For what? Bothering you? he asks. Before she can respond, she feels the direct link dissolve, leaving her alone.

Sarada slows in her progress, taking a moment to bound up the branches of a tall tree to survey her surroundings in hopes of seeing Kawaki, even if he’s just a small dot in the distance. No such luck, but at her new vantage point, she can now see the road winding out of the forest, leading to a rope bridge over a deep gorge. A light bulb clicks on in her head. That’s where she is, along the path to the restricted training grounds where Lord Seventh used to release Kurama during training drills for the village’s sealing team.

Certain that just a little use of her Sharingan can’t hurt, Sarada activates her doujutsu to take a closer look at her surroundings. Sure enough, she detects at least ten shinobi guards stationed in the shade of the trees to stop anyone from crossing the bridge.

She only used it for a few seconds, but even as her red eyes fade back to black, the pressure that had been building up behind her eye socket blossoms into an exploding headache. Wincing, Sarada slaps a hand to her eye, pushing back on the pain until it fades to a dull throbbing. Once she can continue, Sarada bypasses the bridge to cross farther down by means of a makeshift ropeline.

Who knows where Kawaki has gotten to by the time she reaches the other side. Her first attempt to execute her mission is already feeling like a failure, or so she thinks as she winds up the rope again to return it to her bag. But before she can wallow in self pity, a violent explosion rocks the area, a loud crack followed by a gust of wind that blows her hair back. Sarada looks up just in time to see one of Kurama’s bright orange tails lashing at the sky.

Instead of finding Kawaki with Naruto, Sarada finds him standing in the middle of a crater in front of Himawari, a long black metal staff in his hand. He looks down his nose at the girl, doubled over as she tries to catch her breath. “That was pathetic.”

“Sorry, big bro!” Even from Sarada’s crouched position hidden leaves of a tree a few meters away, she can see Kawaki flinch at the name. “I can only really control it when I’m mad.”

“Then you should learn to be mad,” he says, recovering his stoic mask before Himawari notices that it had slipped. “Let’s try again.”

She watches as the girl she remembers in diapers straightens, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath before a glowing orange cloak envelops her. Tendrils of her black hair rise up around her like flames, dancing with the overflow of chakra. The black markings on her cheek deepen, extending to her fox-like eyes, vertical pupils inlaid in brightly burning irises. For a second, it feels like those eyes flick toward Sarada, but they’re pulled back to Kawaki in order to defend herself. He comes at her, staff in hand, raining down a series of blows she deflects with the tails forming from her hair.

“If you’re not mad, be mad,” he demands. The way he fights her without mercy reminds Sarada of the brutality with which her own father once trained her to improve her Sharingan. “Your father is gone. Your mother is gone. You were betrayed by an outsider who was shown nothing but kindness by your family. By the village. And he turned on you. All of you.”

Each word hits Sarada like a knife that hurts more than her pounding headache. Because how dare he . When he knows Naruto is alive, Hinata is alive. When he knows Boruto is innocent. If Himawari isn’t mad, Sarada is sure as hell happy to be mad for her. When she gets Kawaki alone again—

The tails that had once pierced the sky blink as though weakening, the control Himawari has over them diminishing. The next time Kawaki strikes, his staff passes right through her hair. It’s only at the last second that he pulls the blow, stopping a fraction of a centimeter away from her cheekbone.

“What went wrong that time?”

Hima lets herself fall butt-first into the dirt, looking up at Kawaki with the same true-blue eyes she shares with Boruto. “That doesn’t make me mad.”

“How can it not?” Kawaki pulls the staff back, planting one end in the dirt so he can lean on it.

Himawari shakes her head. “Nope, I’m not having this conversation again with you.”

“Boruto killed your—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Her usually mild demeanor breaks, and orange light flaring in her eyes when she shouts at him. “What makes me mad is that there is an enemy threatening the village right now, killing people, hurting you, hurting him too, and I’m ordered to be stuck in stupid Konoha when I could be helping people. I could be helping you. I wanted to go with Team 10—”

“You are not allowed to leave the village,” he roars back at her, meeting her anger with his own as he bangs the end of his staff on the ground to punctuate each statement he makes. “You are going to stay here. In Konoha. Where you are safe. And you will always stay safe. That’s why you have to learn to defend yourself. To defend yourself, Himawari.”

“I’d rather learn to fight,” she bites back. “You understand, don’t you… Sarada?”

Busted.

The moment Himawari activated Kurama’s powers, Sarada had been found out. Kawaki turns around just in time to see her drop from the tree, glaring at Sarada as she walks towards them. “What are you doing here?”

“Watching you,” Himawari says, as though it’s the most obvious observation in the world to make.

“I’m not,” Sarada says, her words colliding with the, “She’s not,” that comes out of Kawaki’s mouth.

A stupid grin spreads out on Himawari’s face, not helping the headache that was growing inside Sarada’s skull one bit. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you two in the same place.”

Evasive social maneuvers are in order. “What are you doing?” she asks Himawari, ignoring Kawaki entirely. She’d known Kurama had been reborn in Himawari, but beyond her healing abilities, Sarada had yet to see it for herself.

“Training!” Hima stands up, dusting off the seat of her pants. “Big bro—”

“Don’t call me that,” Kawaki grumbles, almost like it’s an automatic response to hearing the name now, not really expecting her to obey.

Hima looks at Sarada and rolls her eyes as if to say catch a load of this sour puss . “He’s helping me train.”

“Weren’t you training with Team 10?” Kawaki sighs audibly in response to her question, broadcasting his annoyance both at being interrupted in general and being interrupted by Sarada specifically.

Himawari nods. “Yep, I was. But they’re out of the village for now—”

“—and you probably would accidentally kill them,” Kawaki adds under his breath.

Both girls seem to have come to a mutual agreement that Kawaki wasn’t a part of their conversation. “Except Inojin,” Sarada says, curious as to the arrangement that allowed him to stay in the village while the rest of his team was deployed.

The smile that had been on Himawari’s face flinches at his mention. “Yeah, except him. Aunt Ino recommended another Yamanaka clan member who would complement their team dynamics for the time being. But… he’ll get better.”

The girl’s usual optimism is absent when she says it, like a wish whispered into the night instead of something she’s certain of. A moment later, Himawari blinks away her seriousness, looking back at Sarada with a smile on her face that might have been forced. “Anyway, big br— Kawaki . Kawaki is the best person to help me. He’s strong enough for me to take on without worrying about getting hurt, and he saw Papa work with Kurama a few times, so he can give me some pointers. Which is more than you’ll do, you lazy fox.” She glowers downward at her navel, giving her stomach an annoyed poke that gets no response.

Kawaki taps his staff on the ground, annoyed. “Are you two done chatting yet?”

“Sorry,” Himawari says, more to excuse herself to Sarada than in response to Kawaki. “We have to get back to it.”

“Hey, wait a minute.” Sarada grabs Himawari’s shoulder, pulling her close enough to speak in her ear. “You can be mad that you can’t do more—you should be mad. Don’t let it make you feel helpless, do you understand me? Don’t look away from it because you feel as though you can’t do anything. Feel it and let it fuel you.”

Kawaki clears his throat at yet another interruption.

“Thank you,” Himawari says, meeting Sarada’s gaze as she backs away, her Uzumaki eyes like those of her father and brother, ever hopeful and unwavering. “For the advice, and for understanding.”

Chapter Text

Whatever Sarada’s advice had been, it’d worked.

The next time he attacks Himawari, she comes at him, fury aflame. Teeth gritted, eyes bright, claw-like nails extending from the tips of her fingers. Each strike of his staff is answered lightning fast, blows deflected by tails and hands and feet. What’s supposed to have been simply a training exercise for her turns into a workout for him, too.

Of course, he beats her. That time, and the next, and the one after that. But with each round, she’s able to maintain Kurama’s chakra longer, and each one takes a little more out of him. With his limiters again in place to facilitate his healing, Himawari has the upperhand in raw power. But she’s still untrained and untested. It’s not through sheer strength that he wins but through battle-won skill and instincts.

It’s Himawari who senses Sarada fall during their fifth round, her body slipping lifelessly off the branch where she’d been sitting, spying on him. When one chakra tail triples in size, shooting out toward the eastern boundary of the training ground, Kawaki assumes it’s a feint and acts accordingly, striking at Himawari unguarded side, expecting to be countered. Instead, the metal staff in his hands connects with her face, resulting in a sickening crack. Her head snaps to the side as she releases a pained shriek. Knocked off her feet, she rolls over and over until she finally comes to a stop on her back, staring up dazed at the sky. It’s only then that Kawaki notices the one remaining tail enveloping Sarada’s unconscious body, cradling it as she’s lowered gently to the ground.

“Hima!” Stomach churning, he runs to her side, chased by the memory of all the times Jigen had beaten him. It was supposed to be training, shinobi training like Naruto used to do for Boruto. He wasn’t supposed to hit her like that.

The connected chakra between Himawari and Sarada breaks, the tail itself dissolving to leave a warm healing glow surrounding each of them. She sits up, dusting the dirt and grass off the front of her yellow shirt. “Nice moves, big bro.”

The sight of her big, trusting blue eyes makes him even sicker, her unwavering belief that he’d never intentionally hurt her. He takes her chin, twisting it to the side to look at the concave dent in her face where his staff had landed. The speed of the Biju’s healing chakra repairs the damage while he watches, bone structure knitting back together, bruising fading almost as quickly as it had appeared. Just because she’s able to heal doesn’t mean it hadn’t happened in the first place. “We’re done for today,” he says, releasing her.

Hima tsks as though he was fretting a skinned knee. “Maybe you should worry about her instead.”

Sarada has managed to prop herself up on one arm, her free hand covering both her eyes. The dumb jacket she wears that doesn’t even fit has slipped completely off one shoulder. He looks back at Himawari who is standing, looking better by far than Sarada, before striding over to where she’d landed.

“What’s wrong with you?” he demands, staring down at her.

“None of your business,” she bites back.

“It is now.” He squats down to get a better look when she doesn’t turn her head towards him, pausing to yank the collar of her jacket up so it covers her bare shoulder. “How does a shinobi fall out of a stupid tree?” 

“Maybe I fell asleep,” she mutters, dropping the hand that had been covering her eyes.

Plausible, if he hadn’t known she slept in a number of trees during missions. Even when Himawari’s fading chakra around her fades, Sarada is still left grimacing. “You don’t look hurt,” he says, brushing past her lameass excuse.

“It’s a chakra injury, right?” This comes from Himawari who had come up behind him and is now  peering over his shoulder. “I can do a lot for physical healing, but not for that.”

“It’s nothing.” She manages to stand, wincing as she does as though the daytime light is far too bright. “I just need some rest.”

So that’s it. One little excursion, following him around as though she was the one ordered to keep an eye on him, rather than the other way around, and she’d already overdone it.

“Good job, Himawari,” she manages, putting out her fist to the younger girl, a smile on her face. “Keep at it.”

Himawari bumps it. “Thanks, Sarada.”

She avoids Kawaki’s disapproving gaze entirely when she turns around, bounding up into the trees and disappearing.

“You can go after her, you know,” Himawari says after watching him stare in the direction of where she’d gone.

“I should get you home safe.”

This is met with a teenage sigh of exasperation. “I have the Hokage’s entire guard on the other side of the bridge to escort me back to Konoha. Make sure she gets home safe. If you don’t want to do it  for her, at least you can do it for me. Please, big bro.”

He catches up with her on the near side of the gorge, watching as she whirls a rope with a kunai round and round before sending it sailing across the deadly drop. The sharp point sinks into the dirt on the other side, but when Sarada yanks on it to test its strength, the kunai falls loose, swinging backwards to clatter against the other side. He watches in silence as she winds it back up, intent on another try.

“Didn’t I tell you that you get hurt when you don’t listen?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

Swearing wasn’t Sarada’s style. She usually lets her eyes say the profane rather than having it come out of her mouth. The fact that she had resorted to curse words is further proof that something isn’t right.

Does he know how she’s feeling? Incompetent, underpowered, unprepared, capable of so much strength and restricted by circumstances beyond her control? Filled with anger at others, loathing herself for her own pathetic weakness?

Sure he does. Will he tell her that? Hell, no. Empathy will get him about as far with Sarada as that first kunai throw got her.

“I’ll take you home.”

Sarada twists around, looking him up and down as though searching for any other option that isn’t flying. “Like hell you will.”

Instead, she tosses her kunai across the gorge. Maybe she’s even more tired now or maybe she’s mad enough at him to be distracted, but this time, the tip doesn’t even hit its mark, the flat of the blade colliding uselessly against the side before falling.

Kawaki takes a step towards her. “I’m taking you home. Either you come willingly, or I’ll take you by force and tell Shikamaru that you’ve been using your Sharingan against orders.”

Back still turned to him, Sarada snorts. “Is that an order from my captain or a threat?”

“Both.”

“I can just go back to the bridge and cross there. If the shinobi are gone—”

“ Sarada. ”

She turns around, her arms spread wide in an exasperated gesture. “Fine. Fucking fine. Whatever you want. That’s how you do everything anyway, isn’t it?”

It’s just like Sarada to assume he wants to do anything he does. It’s like assuming he wants to breathe or eat or wake up in the morning. He does things because he has to, not because he gets another choice, which includes keeping Sarada from hurting herself. At least for now.

While she’s coiling the rope, Kawaki is forced to consider the ramifications of her caving in: what’s the least problematic way to carry her? He suspects Boruto wouldn’t have given the matter a second thought, scooping her up in his arms and ferrying her across like some kind of comic book hero. He couldn’t do that, but he wasn’t about to toss her over his shoulder like a sack of rice, either, her ass in his face. His eyes drift over her, considering all the parts of her he doesn’t want to inadvertently touch, and there’s a heck of a lot of them.

“What?” It’s not so much of a question than it is a demand that he stop staring, made as she glares at him from behind her glasses.

“Get on my back.” When she makes no moves to actually comply with his demand, Kawaki walks over and squats down, facing away from her. “On my back now. I won’t drop you.”

She steps forward, sighing loudly as she loops her arms around his neck. Kawaki stands, lifting her off the ground before walking forward, stepping off the edge of the gorge and into open space. His Otsutuski powers take over, carrying him off the ground. He adjusts his orientation as they begin to float until his front is parallel with the ground below, and Sarada is lying on his back.

“Any complaints?”

There’s a pause indicating that she has lots of complaints, just not about her position on his back. “No.”

“Good.” The moment he’s sure she’s secure, he wraps a hand around the arms encircling his neck to hold her in place before tearing off in the direction of the big house up on the hill at breakneck speed, ensuring that neither of them will have to spend more than a second longer than necessary in physical contact with one another.

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.

Chapter Text

"Are you experiencing any pain?”

Seated on the exam table, Sarada follows Shizune’s finger while the older medic shines a penlight into her right eye.

“No.”

“Headaches? Eye pressure?” Shizune turns to the tray and picks up a magnifying instrument to get a closer look

“No,” Sarada says again. She doesn’t like lying, but it’s easy to justify at that moment. Is she feeling any pain now ? No, a few aspirin tablets taken right before she left the house had cleared up the faint headache that had been bothering her. It’d been nothing like what she’d experienced yesterday, the pounding pain that had grown behind her eye as she watched Kawaki and Himawari spar. She hadn’t even seen anything that had happened after the third bout, blinded by how much it hurt. Eyes closed, drawing in slow, deep breaths, she had concentrated on telling herself over and over that the pain would pass, which it did after she passed out. 

“Look up, to the right, to the left, now down.” Shizune frowns a little, taking a step back. “Your optic nerve is still inflamed, but I suppose that’s to be expected. Recovery takes time. You’re getting enough sleep?”

“As much as I can.” Again, it isn’t quite a lie. Sarada is sleeping as much as possible, even if that amounted to maybe an hour or two a night and a few brief naps during the day. The first night she’d been back in the house and unable to sleep, she thought she’d functioned well enough. Today, though, her body feels more jittery than tired, like she’d downed two liters of coffee and gotten all of the side effects and none of the energy.

“Well, I don’t see anything immediately concerning.” She picks up Sarada’s chart and pulls a pen out of her lab coat, scratching down a few notes. “If the inflammation isn’t improving by your next visit, I’ll have to consult with your mother on a different course of treatment, maybe some pharmacological intervention. We’re not there yet, though. You’re free to go, unless you want to wait for Sakura to get out of the staff meeting. I’m sure she’d love to have breakfast with you.”

Sarada slides off the table, picking up the jacket that had been lying by her side. “I have a meeting at Hokage Tower this morning, but tell her I said hello.”

“And you tell Shikamaru that he’s not supposed to work you too hard while you’re recovering, okay?” 

It’s still early when Sarada leaves the clinic, swept into the flow of civilians walking to their weekday jobs. She’d decided that morning would be her refuge today, leaving before Eida and Daemon woke. Just as she’d suspected, Kawaki had decided that sleeping on the couch posed too much of a risk to do it a second time after his rude awakening at the hands of Daemon. With some okayu steaming away in the rice cooker, garnishes prepared to top the porridge, and the table set, she figured the other residents of the house could finish their own breakfasts from there.

After yesterday’s string of debacles, Sarada wanted to be as far from the house as possible. Away from Eida, who couldn’t stop probing Sarada about her love life. Away from Daemon and the mayhem that occurred whenever he walked into a room. Away from Kawaki’s constant and unexpected intrusions.

He was taking his little “oversee Sarada’s recovery” orders a little too seriously, getting into her space too often when both of them much preferred to avoid one another.

What had been the worst part of yesterday? Getting caught following him, and potentially arousing his suspicion that she was spying on him? Being ordered to wrap her arms around his neck and having to be flown back like some useless invalid? Or had it been when he had the audacity to come to her room, invade her single sanctuary in the entire house, taunt her about trying to save Boruto, then order her to go to bed as though she was an insolent child?

There’s only one person she can blame for their current arrangement, who happens to be the man she’s about to see. She’s frothing mad by the time she gets to the door of the Hokage’s Office, stalking past the objections of the guards and into his office.

The chaos of paper towers that always occupied the Hokage’s desk in Naruto’s day had been tamed by Shikamaru’s tenure in office. There’s a few neat piles in front of him as well as a computer screen, an overloaded tray of cigarette butts, and a coffee mug big enough to take a bath in.

“Oh, Sarada—” Despite being told that she was supposed to visit him, he looks a bit surprised to see her so early.

She marches up to her desk, planting her hands on its top. “This whole arrangement with Kawaki watching me isn’t working out. Tell him to cut it out.”

Shikamaru reaches for his cigarettes, tapping one out of the pack. “I gave you both your orders.”

She hears a second response from him in her head, not directed at her. I thought you told her to yell at me about Boruto .

I did , Inojin responds. Nice improvisation, Sarada.

What a drag. I can work with it. Keep yelling at me for a few minutes.

“I’m serious,” she says, not sure if she’s playing along or venting her frustrations. “It’s counterproductive to my recovery. Bring in someone else to do it.”

“If you haven’t noticed, I have more pressing things to be concerned with than your petty grievances.”

Petty grievances. That’s a good one, Inojin adds.

Sarada glares at Shikamaru as he puffs on his cigarette. I don’t like this arrangement .

Tough, he responds in her head. It’s our best chance to get you closer to Kawaki. He’d be suspicious otherwise. This way, he thinks he’s in control of your interactions. Take advantage of that. Don’t let the fact that you’re uncomfortable with it get in the way of your mission. Now, tell me that you proved that you don’t need supervision after the mission to the Sand.

Sarada blinks. What?

Just do it , Inojin adds.

She straightens, placing her hands on her hips. “Then let me take care of myself. After what happened in the Sand, it should be clear enough that I don’t need anyone else telling me what to do.”

Shikamaru leans back in his chair, sucking on the end of his cigarette while giving her a once-over, as if he’s sizing her up. “Do you know why you’re still a genin, Sarada?”

“Because I don’t follow orders.”

The Hokage exhales a cloud of smoke. “No, that’s not it. And it’s not about your abilities or strength, either. It’s because a chunin is a leader. A jounin is a leader. A Hokage is a leader. You? You haven’t proved you’re capable of leading anyone yet.”

She hopes for some mental remark to follow, softening his words, but none comes. “Yes, sir,” she says after a moment of silence.

“I have a diplomatic problem, though. Kankuro wanted me to extend his thanks to you for helping to recover Shinki’s Thorn Soul Bulb. He called me last night to say that his nephew had been freed, and the Kazekage is now recovering in the hospital as well. That’s all because of you, Sarada.” Shikamaru reaches into his desk and pulls out a small box, placing it between them.” I can’t give you a promotion. That’d be irresponsible when I know you’re not up to the job. But I can’t let the work you did go unrecognized, either. So, I’m asking that you take this as a token of appreciation, both from our village and from the Sand. You may not be able to wear it now, but you’ll have it for when  you can.”

Sarada picks it up, mind reeling. “Thank you.”

“Thank you ,” Shikamaru says, turning back to his computer monitor. “You’re dismissed. I don’t expect I’ll be hearing any more complaints from you about Kawaki in the near future.”

Sarada bows slightly, hurrying out of the office.

Knowing that the Thorn Soul Bulb was supposed to free a person trapped in a divine tree and hearing that it had, without additional complications, were two different things. If it had worked for Shinki, that means it’d also work for her father. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Sarada thought of what happened to Sasuke as her fault. She’d asked him to save Boruto, to become a rogue ninja once more, to abandon the village. Not only had he done all that, but he’d been willing to give up his life to protect Boruto. For her , not for anyone else.

That guilt was something she was just starting to grapple with, just like her conflict with Sumire, just like her desire to be Hokage, just like her feelings for Boruto. She’d been avoiding them because facing them head on would force her to grapple with the possibility that she might not succeed in her goals or save anyone she loved.

But hearing that Shinki had been freed meant that Sasuke could be freed as well.

She’s lost in thought by the time she gets to the bottom of the stairwell, not expecting to hear Inojin still in her head. Hey, did you look in the box yet?  

No, I—

We were asked to give it to you. Go ahead, open it.

Sarada glances around, making sure she’s alone, then pulls the little wooden box out of her pocket and slides the lid back. Nestled on a little cushion is a little piece of metal shaped like the head of a bolt.

She picks up the pin, turning it over in her hand, rubbing her thumb over the polished surface.

Is this what I think it is? she asks Inojin, not realizing he’s no longer there to answer.

Chapter Text

She’d been holding it so long that the metal feels warm in her hand.

Her first questions had been how and why ? How did the pin come into Shikamaru’s possession? Why had it been given to her? The most obvious answers seemed like the ones most likely to be correct: Boruto had given it to the Hokage because he wanted her to have it. It felt like physical confirmation that not only was Shikamaru on her side now, he was in league with Boruto as well.

It had been comforting at first, to hold a piece of him so close to her. A piece he wanted her to have. She’d clutched it in her pocket the entire way back to the house, not letting it slip from her fingers once. But by that evening, when she’s sitting in bed with the pin once more in her hand, she finds that the harder she squeezes it, the more the pointed edges hurt.

To Sarada, Boruto was like the sun on a spring day. Her skin warmed when he was near, all was overcast and gray with him gone. The simple act of standing beside him was like basking in his glow, a glow that was so familiar it often went forgotten until the sun threatened to set. In his presence, she unfurled and grew, reaching heights she might not have if he hadn’t been there to shine upon her. Her stagnation over the past three years felt like further proof of this truth.

She thought craving him had been a weakness, something that would hold her back. That relying on another meant she was incapable without him. That admitting she wanted him by her side meant she could never stand on her own. Thus, she’d acknowledged nothing, not her feelings, not her failing, not her fears.

In the Sand, she’d been forced to stare into the sun and all of its scorching truths. In that pain, she’d found power, a power all her own, a power born from love. She’d also found the will not to look away. Not ever again.

She clutches the pin in her hand, forcing herself to feel the pain.

Boruto had always been Boruto to her.

The child she’d known. Her smiling teammate. The young man who’d hugged her back after a moment of indecisive hesitation. He’d lost his eye to save her, keeping the promise he had made to protect her and their shared dream for Konoha’ future.

It had been impossible for her to see him any other way.

Or at least it had been until what happened in the Sand.

She wanted to rationalize away her unease.

When Momoshiki had emerged during their fight with Boro, he had saved her. He’d saved them all by destroying the rampaging monster who was sure to kill them in their weakened state.

She could apply that same logic to what had just happened in the Sand.

True, he’d brutally fought with both Code and Kawaki, but when the latter was subdued, he turned his fearsome wrath onto their enemy, utilizing all the jutsu in Boruto’s arsenal and twisting them to fit his own sadistic fighting style. The way he’d laughed, floating high above while bits of his opponent rained down like a fleshy hail…

Then, he’d turned on Kawaki once more. He’d relied on his Karma and scientific ninja tool enhancements while facing Jura, while fighting off Momoshiki the first time they clashed. So strange to see Kawaki turning to ninjutsu when cornered, a fireball that would have made an Uchiha proud blown right into Boruto’s face when he was picking Kawaki up by his collar, prepared to drag him away.

From her vantage point, shielding Mitsuki with her own body, Sarada couldn’t see much, but almost immediately afterwards, Boruto once again wrestled control of his body from Momoshiki and fled immediately after, but not quickly enough to stop Sarada from seeing the stricken look on his face as he stared down at his own red-flecked hands.

It would be easy to tell herself the same story as before, that Boruto had saved them from Code just as he’d saved them from Boro. Even with Momoshiki in control, he had been able to do good. To protect the people around him. When it appeared as though he was going to harm one of his comrades fatally, Boruto’s goodness had won out.

If she does that, though, wouldn’t she be the same Sarada as before, denying what had taken place directly in front of her? Making a deliberate choice to see what she wants rather than facing reality?

Part of the problem is that she knows just enough to delude herself. In the fight with Isshiki, she knows Momoshiki took control of Boruto, and she knows her father lost his eye, but never pried for further details. As for the battle with Code, the one in which Boruto died at Kawaki’s hands? She’s wholly ignorant of the circumstances that led to their deadly clash, why Kawaki killed Boruto the first time, why he decided he had to do it again.

She presses the pin to her chest and sighs. Perhaps Kawaki was right about the source of nightmares. Everytime she falls asleep, it’s the same dream again and again: Momoshiki wearing Boruto’s body, cackling at his carnage. Even if she tries to avoid it during the day, her consciousness returns to it at night, trying to justify the distance between the love she feels in her heart and the facts her mind can’t escape.

The clock next to her bed reads half past eleven, and even though her body is begging for sleep, whenever she closes her eyes, all she sees is Boruto with one lavender eye and a sickening smile.

In another hour or two, her “captain” is sure to show up and try to order her to bed despite the fact that she’s been lying beneath her covers since 8pm. It’d been an odd night in their big house, Kawaki out on some type of village business or another, and Eida had been occupied with a new stack of fashion magazines, ignoring Sarada—a welcome change, if she is being honest.

She’d tried reading, stretching, a warm bath, meditation—nothing had helped her sleep. And now that Sarada knows what she must do, there’s really no sense in waiting, is there? If Kawaki is going to barge into her room in the middle of the night, it’s only fair that she does the same thing.

Silently, she gets out of bed, ties her robe over the usual shorts and bandeau she wears to sleep, and puts on her slippers. She gives the pin one more squeeze before slipping it into her jewelry box and heading up the stairs, determined to get the answers she needs.

Chapter Text

He’d been asleep.

It had been a good sleep.  A dreamless sleep. A peaceful sleep. The kind of deep, dark sleep in which he could forget that he’s alive after closing his eyes. 

Kawaki pulls the pillow down harder over his ears, a futile attempt to block out the knocking on his door, the sound that had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him kicking and screaming into consciousness.

Whatever the fuck it is, he sure isn’t getting up.

The house is on fire? Good, they could all go down in flames.

The Shinju slaughtered Shikamaru? Lucky bastard.

 Daemon had eaten his weight in fried octopus balls and clogged the upstairs toilet yet again? That little asshole should know which end of the plunger to use by now. Let the shit water flow until he figures it out on his own.

Still, the knocking continues. Not loud, but insistent.

He opens one eye, lifting the pillow far enough to check the clock on his bedside table—just short of midnight.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that.

Hidari had been stalking around the Uchiha shrine earlier in the day, and Shikamaru had made the decision to keep it quiet and monitor the situation from afar.

As long as he doesn’t cause any problems, we’re not going to cause problems with him. I don’t want this to turn into a bloodbath. We don’t have the power to take on a threat in the village right now. You know that, don’t you, Kawaki?  

With Delta by his side, Kawaki had kept tabs on the Shinju from the air, watching him drag his big, clumsy feet around the large rock carved with names and adorned with banners of red and white flags.

This was the Shinju born of Sasuke, Sarada’s father. Kawaki had fought by his side and had the cold steel of his sword pressed to his throat, but he didn’t know much about the man himself. Watching the aimless ramblings of Shinju who wears his face, he’d gotten the sense that Hidari might have also been as equally clueless about his own identity.

Of course, it took Kawaki all of five minutes to make this observation, and for the rest of the long hours he was stationed in the sky above, he’d been bored as shit. It had been like watching a drunk on a dark street, trying to decide which house was his. Then, of course, after the threat finally disappeared into some claw marks, there’d been a report to give, followed by another pointless fucking meeting because the elders were once again pissed off (rightfully so, in his opinion) by the constant parade of murderous tree tourists in their village.

By the time he’d gotten out of Hokage Tower, it was dark, so he grabbed some takeout to eat on  the stone faces, looking out at the dark village he’d done his best to protect over the past three years. Not that it’d amounted to much once Code and Boruto had shown up.

The first good thing that had happened to him that day was getting back to the house late enough that he didn’t have to talk to anyone, sneaking a quick shower and crawling into bed around nine o’clock… which happened to be less than three hours before some motherfucker made the grievous error of waking him up.

One more time, he tries to squeeze the pillow hard enough around his head to muffle the knocking.

Once again, it leaks in.

Fine.

Fucking fine.

If they can’t get the message, he’ll have to shove it down their throat.

He wipes a line of drool off his face, flicks on the light next to his bed, and throws off the comforter.

Whoever they are, he’s going to make sure they don’t make the same mistake twice.

He trudges across the room, pulls open the door, and comes face-to-face with Sarada.

More like fist-to-chest than face-to-face because her hand is still raised, mid-knock, but instead of a plane of wood, she’s inches away from the plane of his bare chest. She’s wearing that little red robe again, her hair sticking this way and that as though she’d been tossing around in bed. It takes a moment for her to stop staring and actually look up at him.

“Go the fuck away.”

Like he’d done to her yesterday, Sarada’s arm shoots out, blocking the door jam before he can slam it in her face. “I can’t sleep.”

“I can. ” He takes a step forward, meaning to intimidate her. “It’s not my problem.”

One of her eyebrows raises skeptically. “Every other night, you’ve made it your problem. Why isn’t it now?”

As always, intimidation fails to work on Sarada. It’d be easier to stare down one of the stone Hokage faces than cause her to flinch. “I was awake those other times.”

“You’re not awake?”

“This?” He flicks his fingers between the two of them. “It’s a bad dream. Go away.”

“As captain, It’s your responsibility to make sure I sleep. Isn’t that what my recovery plan outlined?”

From the dark shadows beneath her eyes, Kawaki can assume none of his interventions had actually resulted in more sleep. “And how do I do that?”

It’s that question that finally causes her to falter, the slightest bit of uncertainty seeping it, like she knows what she needs, but she doesn’t really want it. Her hands go to her belt, grasping onto its ends. “I want to ask you some questions… about Boruto.”

Boruto. It’s always fucking Boruto. At the center of his every misery, including getting woken up. Un-fucking-believable. “You think grilling me in the middle of the night will help you sleep?”

Her gaze finally breaks, going to the pink slippers on her feet. “I think so, but you’re right. It can wait.”

Her hand falls away from the door frame. She takes a step back, ready to retreat, not from him but from herself.

Kawaki steps aside before she can scurry off like a scared mouse. “I’m already awake. Come in.”

“In?”

It’s as though the thought hadn’t passed through that little head of hers that demanding a midnight interview might involve stepping foot in his bedroom. “Do you want to go downstairs and risk waking the others?”

She shakes her head, then steps over his threshold.

Kawaki gestures to the chair in his room, free from dirty laundry for once. “Sit there. Give me a minute.”

He had figured that if someone was going to be banging on his door in the middle of the fucking night, it was their own damn fault if he was wearing nothing but boxers. But he can’t stay half-naked after inviting her in.

His walk-in closet is overloaded with clothes, most with the price tags still on. What a fucking waste. He ignores everything on hangars, grabbing a white undershirt and a pair of gray sweats from the laundry basket of clean clothing he’d shoved in there last week. He never had much use for the full-length mirror anchored to the back of the door, but he glances into it while dressing, noting Sarada seated on the chair. Either the chair is bigger than he thought, or she looks small in it, her knees bent to one side, feet tucked under her after having taken off her slippers. Sitting that way, her robe ends at mid-thigh, pale legs bare all the way down to her toes.

When he approaches her, he brings a spare blanket that usually stays folded high on a closet shelf and drops it in her lap. Maybe she’s cold, or maybe she takes the hint. Either way, Sarada shakes out the indigo blanket and wraps herself in it.

Kawaki sits down on the edge of his bed, hands clasped between his knees, leaning forward. “Okay, what do you need to know, little Hokage? More dead-end questions about saving him?”

“Little what ?” Under normal circumstances, her outrage might have come out at an eardrum-piercing pitch, but given that there are others sleeping in the house, it’s more like a spitting kitten.

Little Hokage. That’s how she acted, puffing her chest up and declaring herself to be some kind of cheap reproduction of Lord Seventh, never realizing all the high-minded ideals she clung to would have killed him in the end.

Just like they’d almost killed her once.

“Ask your damn questions.”

Her grip tightens on the blanket around her, eyes on the wooden floor. “I need to know what happened the other times Momoshiki took over.”

“He ran amok—”

Sarada shakes her head, cutting him off. “No, I need to know exactly what happened. Exactly what he did. What you did, too.”

Right. Real kind of her to come upstairs, wake him up, then remind him of his own nightmares. Kawaki sighs, rubbing his eyes.

“I remember the Boro fight. I was there for that. But, with Isshiki, did he help—?”

“ Help? ” Kawaki’s hand drops as he stares at her, incredulous. “No, he didn’t fucking help. He stabbed your father in the fucking eye, then he stabbed me in the back and said he was going to feed me to the ten tails.”

“What did Lord Seventh do?”

Lord Seventh had been lying on his side in the dirt, unconscious for the majority of the fight. But he’d been awake when Boruto had attacked Sasuke, when he’d attacked Kawaki. He should have seen enough. “He didn’t do shit.”

Naruto’s love had been his weakness, his love for his village and his love for Boruto. Time and again, he failed to make logical decisions regarding Boruto, thinking that his strength could save them all. And when that strength was eaten up in the fight with Isshiki, he kept on believing that his love could be enough to save his son.

“But Boruto woke up. He fought back against Momoshiki—”

He can see she’s grasping at straws, trying to find some little bit of hope to cling to.

Kawaki had begged him to wake up, pleading with Boruto to hear him from wherever Momoshsiki had mothballed his consciousness into the recesses of his mind. He’d screamed and yelled and pleaded. And where did that get either of them?

His skin itches when he thinks about it. Not a creepy-crawly itch, but a burning itch, a prickling heat. He could smell himself on fire, his scorching hair, smoldering clothes. The pain was real, the billions of nanomachines buzzing around inside his blood, trying to repair the damage as it was happening.

In spite of the memory, he makes sure his words come out cold. “I lit myself on fire. And forced Momoshiki to absorb it or lose his sacrifice. That’s why Boruto woke up.”

She refuses to look at him when she says it. “I understand.”

Does she? Does she really? Because he thought she’d understand after what happened in the Sand, after Boruto lost control right in front of her and that purple-eyed bastard had revelled in the carnage he wrought. He thought that would be enough for her to understand that Boruto wasn’t Boruto anymore. His body and mind are little more than the casing for a ticking time bomb, destined to go off.

Sarada’s posture has taken on the appearance of a dented soda can, crushed on one side. But it’s not enough for her to simply be crushed. He needs her flattened.

“But you wanted to know what happened the other time, too, didn’t you?”

She looks up, mouth half-open with no words coming out.

The memory of the fire on his skin fades, a coldness seeping out from within him to quench it, a deep numbness that had wormed its way into his bones so many years ago. “You want to know about the time I killed him.”

Chapter Text

Stepping into Kawaki’s room reminded Sarada of what the house felt like the first time she’d entered it. The room was vast yet empty, furniture minimal, design modern. Aside from the dirty clothes stuffed into a hamper beside the door and the closet full of clothing, there was nothing to suggest Kawaki actually lived there. No personal effects, no decorations, no markers of any kind to denote his ownership beyond the rumpled covers on the huge bed. For three years, he’d slept there without ever making it his own.

The chair is big enough that it’s halfway to being a loveseat, the cushions and back still factory stiff as though they’d hardly been used. At first, she’d allowed herself the luxury of spreading out on it, beneath the blanket Kawaki had given her, but the longer he talked, the more he told her, the more Sarada curled in on herself, taking up less and less space.

She’d wanted answers, hadn’t she? And Kawaki had delivered, his words slashing through any pretenses she had like a sharp kunai through bare flesh. She hadn’t expected him to go easy on her, but it felt as though he saw all her defenses and struck each of them in turn, stripping bare her delusions. He even dared to bring her father into it—Sarada had known he lost an eye during the fight against Isshiki, and she knew Boruto claimed it was his fault. But she also knew Boruto, her Boruto , would never have injured his adored Master on purpose, and so she accepted it as an accident, one of those unavoidable misfortunes that takes place when a shinobi enters into battle, and failed to inquire further.

His words had shaken her up like a snowglobe, trying to think clearly was like trying to see through a swirling blur. Her father had been unable to stop him. Lord Seven had been unable to stop him. Even Boruto himself had lacked the power to free himself from Momoshiki’s clutches.

She didn’t hear Kawaki’s first question, the one that had pierced her mental blizzard before its storm could settle. But she hears his next words loud and clear. “You want to know about the time I killed him.”

When he’d first started talking, Kawaki had leaned forward, but the longer he’d talked, the more he’d straightened, putting distance between them without ever getting up to move. Usually, he hides behind bulky shirts and loose pants, a long jacket that could swallow him whole.  But now, he’s sitting tall in front of her in nothing but gray sweats and a sleeveless white shirt, his mass of long, black falling into his face. So often, his eyes are somewhere else, as though they’re lost in a future no one else can see. But there are times such as this one in which his eyes are as cold and sharp as polished steel.

“Well, do you?”

She hadn’t realized he’d been waiting for an answer until he introduced an exit into their conversation, allowing Sarada a means of escape if she wanted it. Her pulse pounds in her neck, a hazy static filling her head. But running wouldn’t make her free; it’d only serve to keep her ignorant.

Sarada nods, unable to make herself say the words to consent to it.

“Did you know I ran away that night?”

No, she hadn’t heard that. It was soon after Isshiki’s invasion when Kawaki and Boruto were under strict surveillance, and Team 7 had been put on hiatus. She’d been mad, not at Boruto, but at the circumstances surrounding them. It had felt like falling behind, unable to take on any missions, her goal of becoming Hokage slipping further out of reach as a result of recent events. Unable to do anything, Sarada had doubled down on training, deciding that the entire team needed to become stronger as well.

Had that been the first time she and Kawaki clashed? When he wanted to train through combat while she wanted to focus on shinobi techniques? Looking back, her anger had gotten the best of her, her authority as team captain being undermined almost as soon as she’d received it. She hadn’t been wrong, but she hadn’t listened, either. Maybe things might have been different if she had been stronger, not letting a philosophical disagreement devolve into yet another clash of brother against brother. Maybe things would have been different if she'd been the one who’d taken Kawaki on.

“No, I didn’t.”

“I thought if I turned myself over to Code, he’d leave Konoha and Lord Seventh alone. I was the one who killed Isshiki after all. He could just kill me and keep everyone else out of it.” She isn’t sure she’s ever heard Kawaki laugh, not in recent years anyway, but he lets out a short, sardonic chuckle, shaking his head. “Boruto came after me, just like I should have known he would.”

That was Boruto, though. He lacked the fundamental ability to leave anyone alone. He’d proven it yet again in the Sand when he appeared out of thin air to save Konohamaru, drawing Jura to them. He wouldn’t be Boruto if he didn’t consistently go out of his way to save those close to him.

“Boruto coming brought Lord Seventh and Shikamaru, but not before he tried to use Momoshiki’s powers with his consciousness suppressed Amado’s pills… Which worked until it didn’t. All the previous times, he ran out of chakra before Momoshiki took over. But that time, it just happened without warning.”

He’d stopped looking at her when he started to talk about the Otsutsuki, staring past her head at the wall. “He fought Code first. Not because he was the enemy, but because he had the Ten Tails, and he saved me, too, not because he wanted me but because he needed my body to grow the Chakra Fruit. That was his only goal until Lord Seventh showed up, which was when he changed sides and targeted him instead.”

Kawaki flexes his hand, the one with the black Karma mark etched into its palm, fingers stretching out before curling inward as though they’re clutching something precious within. “Momoshiki would have killed him if Amado hadn’t put this damn thing back into me. For so long, I wanted it gone, but I couldn’t have saved Lord Seventh without it.”

“That’s when you…?” The final words refuse to come out of her throat, but the question brings Kawaki back to the present, back to the room with Sarada in it.

“No. Momoshiki was able to defend himself. It only happened after…” Kawaki pauses and swallows, the lump of his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. “After Boruto woke up. That’s when I did it.”

“I don’t understand.” If Boruto had been attacking his father, Sarada could imagine how Kawaki might have stepped in and ended his life. But once he was waking up? Hadn’t Lord Seventh been there? Shikamaru, too? Surely one of them would have stopped it.

His voice is steady, eyes clear. Sarada isn’t sure if he knows that he looks like he’s going to be sick. “It was a plan we made, just the two of us. A last resort, if he couldn’t control Momoshiki. He knew he couldn’t ask anyone else to do it; he knew that none of them could see it through.”

There’s a memory Sarada keeps tucked away in the back of her mind, a memory of her father holding a kunai out to her in the late afternoon light, asking her if she would be able to strike down a friend, to kill Boruto if he became someone else. She’d been twelve, the horror of the first time she saw Momoshiki still fresh. But it had been fresher in her father’s head, hadn’t it? Her father, who by then lacked his eye. She’d said yes, but hadn’t that been an answer made of bravado and foolish pride? Because when she found out Boruto had been killed, she never once wondered if someone else had faced the same choice her father had presented to her, if only in theory.

Boruto didn’t trust you , a little voice taunts in the back of her head. And she can’t deny it. Boruto didn’t bestow his request to die upon her. And, if he had? Would she have silently carried that burden, ready to fulfill it when the time came? Or would she have always believed there would be a way to save him?

Who would Sarada be if she’d been able to make that choice, to carry through with Boruto’s wishes and end his life? Who would she have become if she’d killed him?

She can’t help but stare at Kawaki, thinking back to all the times they’d clashed, the unwavering arrogance that emanated from him every time he insisted that Boruto needed to die, that he himself needed to die as well. His certainty was never shaken, defenses already erected to deflect any argument she threw at him. He’d built himself of stone, cold and unchanging, both inside and out.

Sometimes she forgets he’s barely older than she is. But sitting with him across from her on his rumpled bed, wearing a pair of wrinkled pajamas, in a room that’s as vacant of personal expression as his face, it’s something she can’t deny. He’s just another lost kid, too, trying to do what he thinks is right.

His lip curls back in a sneered response to her stare. Taking it the wrong way. Or maybe taking it the right way and hating it. “What? You want to know how I killed him? What hand I did it with?” Without letting her respond, he raises his unmarked hand, the prosthetic one that had replaced the arm he lost to Delta, trying to protect both Naruto and Himawari. “It was this one. I put it straight through him.”

To think, that’s what happened to Boruto, what left the jagged black scar on his chest. Sarada had seen it once before, the guts and the gore that spewed from Garou when Kawaki had impaled him with his scientific ninja tool abilities, the twisted branches dripping red, entering through his front and protruding out his back.

Both of them stare at his arm, an artificial tool hidden beneath human skin.

“But you didn’t kill him,” she says.

“I failed to kill him. All because of the Otsutsuki. I couldn’t protect Naruto, and I couldn’t keep my promise to Boruto. But I swear I’ll do both next time.” Despite the fire in his words, it’s as if Kawaki’s own flame was suddenly sputtering. He slouches over, rubbing his face with the hand he’d been staring at seconds earlier. “Now, are you going to be able to go back to bed?”

He’d done what she asked, but Sarada makes no moves to leave. The warmth beneath the blanket feels like her only safety in a world in which Boruto had asked to be killed, leaving her and everyone else who loved him alone.

But had that been the wrong choice to make?

Was there a right choice?

“Look, if you’re not going to go to sleep, I am.” As though she’s not even sitting there in the room with him, Kawaki flops down onto his bed, grabs his comforter, and turns off the light, leaving Sarada in darkness.

Sarada knows she should go. She knows she should. But getting up, wandering down the dark stairs to her empty room? Just her and the walls and a pin in a box from a boy who couldn’t trust her with his final request? Facing such desolation feels unimaginable.

So she stays in the chair, wrapped in a blanket, watching the numbers on the bedside clock change as the minutes tick by, listening to the sound of Kawaki’s breathing from the bed. As her eyes grow heavy, she finds her breaths matching his, slow, shallow, and steady. When she finally falls asleep, she doesn’t dream.

Chapter Text

In the morning, she’s gone.

That hadn’t been the case when Kawaki woke up sometime around 3am to take a piss, flicking on his light to find Sarada sleeping on the chair across from his bed. She’d been curled up sideways, robe off one shoulder, glasses crooked, face resting against the back cushion, her mouth slightly open.

He could have woken her, told her to go back to her own damn room, but knowing her, she probably wouldn’t have gone back to sleep just to spite him. So, instead, he pulled the blanket up to cover her, used the toilet, and went back to bed, figuring the Sarada situation, unlike so many others, would work itself out by the time he woke up again.

It’s dark in his room on account of the blinds and curtains, dark enough that he needs to blink a few times to assure himself that there’s nothing on the chair other than a folded blanket.

Good.

A more optimistic person might have deluded himself, coming to the conclusion that their conversation from the previous evening might have led Sarada to actually understand the threat Boruto poses, both to the village and Lord Seventh. Kawaki knows her better than that, though. It was probably some part of her ongoing crusade to save him from a fate that has already come to pass, a tragedy not only inflicted upon him but through him—a danger to them all, not just to himself.

Her questions last night? Most likely something that arose from the dumb book she’s been reading, trying to find some little loophole that would allow her to save someone who’s already lost.

Whatever. His concern is making sure Sarada sleeps, not understanding why it happened. And if she’d slept for a few hours, then left? All the better. Hopefully, that was the last duty of Captain Kawaki, and she’d follow her recovery plan from here on out without his intervention.

After getting out of bed and walking downstairs to the lukewarm pot of coffee in the kitchen, Kawaki realizes it’s not just Sarada that’s gone. The entire house is empty. No Eida, no Daemon. No Sumire or Mitsuki for now, either. Just him and whatever shinobi were observing the house from afar.

Kawaki glances out the window to where a few guards are usually stationed at a house nearby, flipping them off whether or not they can see him while pouring himself a cup of coffee.

Sarada stands in front of a full-length mirror with Eida behind her, fluffing out the skirt of the dress she’d just tried on. Its textured white fabric is gauzy, black edging around the neck and at its hem, a pleated black bow tied just below the bust—nothing Sarada would have ever picked out for herself. Unfortunately for her, there’s an entire rolling rack of dresses Eida had selected just for her while circuiting the boutique.

“I don’t know if this will work.” Sarada twists to the side as Eida tightens the ties in the back. In her usual outfit, there’s all manner of pockets on the inside of her jacket to stash ninja tools, and her romper, seemingly impractical to others, had the chief benefit of lacking loose fabric to be used against her while fighting.

Eida tuts, shaking her head. “You’re right. If they had it in an ivory or off white, it’d be better. With as pale as you are, it just washes you out. Let’s try something else.” A black and white plaid dress with a similar silhouette, only pufflier sleeves and a rounded neck, is thrust into her hands next.

“I really don’t have anywhere to wear this kind of thing,” she says as she’s pushed back into the changing room, away from the eyes of the shop attendants who’d gathered near the entryway to gawk at Eida. Daemon sits on a plush chair nearby, one eye on a comic book and the other on the onlookers.

Eida follows Sarada, a sad sigh coming from the crowd outside when she closes the door. “You say that now, but next time Boruto sees you, do you really want to be wearing the same old thing you always do?”

“Um…” If they’re chasing down Claw Grimes (or being chased by a Shinju) she’d probably want to be in her usual clothing. But because it’s Eida, Sarada just shrugs. “I guess not.”

“Excellent.” With that , the older girl tugs the zipper down on her back. “Now, the good thing about this next dress is that you can get it on and off on your own easily.”

Over the years, Sarada has gotten used to being in her underwear in front of Sumire and Eida, though it’s usually the latter girl who usually changes in front of them. The only time the other two ever tried anything on was when an outfit caught Eida’s eye that she thought would suit them. This parade of dresses chosen just for her was an unfamiliar ordeal.

Eida hums to herself as Sarada slips the dress over her head. “Do you want some new underthings, too?”

In her eyes, there’s nothing wrong with the black bandeau and matching boyshorts she’s worn for as long as she’s had the goods to be concerned with such things. They were cute, practical, always matched. “Is there something wrong with them?” she asks, pulling the next dress off the hangar.

“Well, they’re…” Eids presses her lips together, watching Sarada dress. “A little boring. Don’t you think?”

“Maybe?” She’d never found herself wondering if her underwear was interesting before. Who else needed to know what it looks like other than her?

Eida sighs like a put-upon employee who just had another task added to her to-do list. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Sarad pulls on the plaid dress, tugging it into place. The double-layer of skirts edged with black lace makes her feel like some kind of fashion doll marketed to psychopathic children.

“Oh, that’s better. Don’t you think?”

Before Sarada can devise a diplomatic way to say, No, it’s not better. At least not better than my normal clothes, Eida opens the door and pushes her in front of the mirror again, forcing Sarada to look at herself. If Sarada was looking at someone other than herself, she might concede that the dress looked nice. But it doesn’t look like something she’d want to wear. Ever. Even if it was one of the last dresses on earth, she’d probably tear it up for bandages before wearing it.

“I just don’t know if it’s me,” she says diplomatically, smoothing her hands over the fabric.

Behind her, Eida taps a finger to her lips. “It’s not about what you want. It’s about what he would want. But you’re right. If he likes you for you, then you should look like you, right? In that case…” Eida looks over her shoulder at the two dozen dresses she’d picked out. “I think I might need to go back to the drawing board. Why don’t you put your own clothes back on?”

Sarada retreats back to the changing room, thankful to be alone. Or so she thought before getting undressed once again.

Hey, Sarada. Got a minute?

Even though she logically knows Inojin isn’t in the room with her, she instinctively wraps her arms around her body, hiding her (boring) underwear. Do you need something?

Tell me something you didn’t know yesterday.

Is this for the mission or purely for your own gratification? 

A little bit of each. Just keeping tabs on things in the most entertaining way possible.

Sarada shakes her head, picking up her folded romper. Well, I don’t know anything specific. But Kawaki and I had a talk last night…

He was wearing more than his boxers this time, right?

Sarada blinks. When she woke up that morning, all she’d been able to think about was what Kawaki had told her about the things Momoshiki had done within Boruto’s body, how Boruto responded to the threat of the homicidal alien inside of himself. Instead of solutions, Sarada had only found more complications with direr consequences than she previously imagined, both for Boruto and for everyone else as well.

Getting abruptly dragged away from the breakfast table to an all-out shopping excursion had done wonders to stop the spiraling thoughts going through her head, their velocity increasing as their volume grew, threatening to suck her up and not let her go. So, of course, it wasn’t until Inojin specifically asked that Sarada remembers Kawaki had indeed opened his door last night wearing nothing but a pair of violet boxer briefs and tousled hair, more naked than she’d ever seen her own father, much less any other man.

No, no boxers this time. And I don’t know anything specific, either. But I think Shikamaru is right. Lord Seventh is alive. And whatever Kawaki did, it was to protect him. That’s what happened when he killed Boruto, but Lord Hokage should know that better than anyone else. He was there, apparently.

Who else knew that Kawaki had killed Boruto and hadn’t told her? Lord Seventh, Shikamaru, Boruto himself. Probably some of the scientific ninja tool team. Though her father wasn’t there that night, it seems impossible that he didn’t find out about it later. And yet, he failed to tell her what happened, his silence bolstering the lie that Code had done it.

The more Sarada learns, the more ignorant she realizes she had been, both due to her own closed eyes and the things others kept from her. How could her father have let her go on believing that someone else had killed Boruto instead of their own team member? Why hadn’t he warned her back when she might have still been able to do something? When she frees him—and she will free him—there will be some questions that Sasuke is going to have to answer.

Gotcha , Inojin says, the pause suggesting he might have relayed this information to Shikamaru. Anything else?

No, not… Sarada finishes buckling her belt and looks around the changing room, the half-dozen dresses hanging on a hook to go back on the rack, the new dresses Eida is now hunting down for her. Actually, if you could do something for me…?

Name it.

Is there anything I can do to get out of shopping with Eida? Something Lord Hokage could ask me to do? Anything at all, he just needs to order me to do it.

Inojin thinks for a moment. If you’re offering to help him get through some paperwork, I doubt he’s going to say no. I can have him contact you through the official channels.

I owe you one , she tells him, grabbing her leggings.

And you better bet that one day, I’m going to collect, he replies, chuckling.

Chapter Text

“I shouldn’t keep you for too long while you’re still recovering,” Shikamaru had told her (after keeping Sarada for a solid eight hours of seal stamping and filing without so much as a coffee break). She suspects his reason was not so much that he actually wanted to let her go, given the backlog of officework that had accumulated in Konohamaru’s absence, than that the string of unanswered calls he’d been sending straight to voicemail came from his boss, a wife who sorely wanted to know if her husband would be coming home for supper.

Lampposts light up the darkness in the plaza outside Hokage Tower, the nightlife already abuzz. In the stories her mother used to tell, the village had once been just a village rather than a vibrant metropolis, but in the same way that Sarada and her generation had grown, Konoha had grown with them as well.

It’s late enough that Daemon and Eida should have already ordered supper without her, which is a bit of a relief. Rather than engage in the nightly negotiations of what restaurant they should pick from, Sarada slips into a konbini, grabbing two discounted onigiri and a can of iced milk tea. She eats as she strolls down the brick-lined walkway, letting the light breeze clear the reek of cigarettes off her clothes, savoring the warm evening and the brief breath of freedom she has, away from the big house on the hill and everyone in it.

When she was young, Sarada could never fathom how her father spent so much time away from the village and his family. However, since Omnipotence had gone and turned the world upside down, everyone she once knew seemingly on the other side, Sarada has come to understand the oppression of staying within Konoha’s walls, a place where someone you loved had become a monster in the eyes of others.

Sumire had been her only companion who saw the world the same way, or so she had thought until her friend had let loose, informing Sarada that even if their realities aligned, their perceptions of how to act in said reality conflicted. Again, Sarada’s thoughts return to her long-ago clash with Kawaki over how they should have trained to prepare for Code, wondering if her schism with Sumire was a similar situation, a time when Sarada should have been able to see what was in front of her rather than focusing on the convictions within her.

What had it cost her when she hadn’t taken Kawaki’s frustrations seriously? Boruto’s death? Naruto’s presence? Life before Omnipotence? What might it cost her now that it had happened again with Sumire? At the very least, it seems as though she’d paid the price of losing a friend.

And what did she have to show for it? With either Kawaki or Sumire? Where had her principles gotten her?

Sarada slows, turning to look out across the bright lights and glowing signs of Konoha, so many villagers, so many non-shinobi going about their business, adjusting to a new existence containing hungry monsters and walking trees. Sarada wanted the job of protecting each and every one of them, making Konoha a place where love and families could thrive in peace, but she rarely thought of them individually, these regular people, who just seem to be carrying on amid the changing conditions in their village and their world. Just moving forward. Because they have no other choice.

Does she really have a choice?

“Hey, Sarada!”

She spins around, shocked, not just by the sound of her own name but by the bubbly voice that had called it out. “Hima?”

Boruto’s little sister beams, looking so much like him, like her father, except for the tendrils of long, black hair framing her face. “I recognized your jacket the moment I saw it!”

“It’s so late. What are you doing—?” She notices the trio of grocery bags the younger girl is carrying, two in one hand, one in the other, reminding Sarada when she’d go shopping while Sakura worked. At the time, helping manage the household had felt like a badge of maturity, but the further she’s gotten from those years, the more she wondered if she really should have had to do so much alone.

“Here, let me help you.” Sarada scoops one of the bags, heavy with leeks, potatoes, and turnips, out of Himawari’s grip.

“You don’t need to!” Hima is quick to reassure her that everything is fine while making no moves to take the bag of groceries back as they begin walking side-by-side. “I’m used to taking care of things on my own!”

“That doesn’t mean you should have to,” Sarada says as they head down the street, toward the residential districts and the Uzumaki home.

The porchlight is on, the flowers on the steps leading up to the house thriving beyond the confines of their pots. Sarada hadn’t been back to Naruto’s house since everything happened. In fact, the last time she remembers standing in that yard was the day they’d been assigned to the cohabitation mission.

“Are you coming?” Hima asks, fumbling to get the key out of the pocket of her jeans.

Sarada wasn’t aware she’d stopped in the stone pathway outside the house, staring up at the red roof.

“I mean, you don’t have to come in,” Hima adds, always eager to sweep away any awkwardness. “But you’re welcome in, if you’d like to.”

She’d been in the house so many times, as far back as her memory goes. Why should it be weird now? Bag in hand, she hurries up the stairs behind Himawari, watching as the door opens to reveal the familiar entryway.

“I’m back,” Hima says quietly, pausing as if to wait for an answer. When none comes, she puts down her bags to take off her shoes. Sarada watches in silence as she places them next to a large pair of black sandals and a pair of strappy high-heels—her parents’ shoes still sitting, as if their owners were somewhere inside the house.

Sarada follows suit before coming in, eyes taking stock of her surroundings. The floors are perfectly polished, not a mote of dust on the woodwork or banister. In front of her, Hima flicks the lights on in the kitchen, placing her bags on the counter and indicating that Sarada should do likewise.

Nothing has changed since the last time Sarada stepped foot into the Uzumaki household. From the furniture to the lighting to the crisp scent of the cleaners Hinata used.

While Himawari loads the groceries into the refrigerator—more than Sarada would have thought one girl alone could eat—she wanders through the main living area, noting the cracked vase on the table, filled with fresh sunflowers, one of Boruto’s handheld video game devices plugged in next to a comfy green chair, a row of family pictures setting on the side board, all of them depicting the four-person family, their eldest son a grinning blonde child with whiskered cheeks. There’s even one picture frame with the glass broken out containing an image of Boruto as a toddler and Himawari as an infant.

Physical evidence never meant anything to those affected by Omnipotence. Even Himawari, dwelling amid all the artifacts left behind by a family now torn apart, failed to question the consensus that Kawaki was her biological brother and Boruto was the outsider who’d run away. Cautiously, Sarada picks up the picture, looking at wide-eyed Naruto, a man who was not yet Hokage, seemingly out of his league while trying to contain the energetic blond bundle in his lap.

“It’s weird, I know.” At some point, Himawari had come up behind her, looking over Sarada’s shoulder. “I should probably fix it, but I’ve been trying to keep everything just as it was when they left.”

Sarada lets her take the picture out of her hands, watching as Hima precisely places it back where it had been. She’d been vaguely aware of the disagreements that had gone on about Himawari’s living arrangements in the weeks after her parents’ disappearance, after the funerals and political appointments had been settled. Hanabi wanted her niece to come live with them at the Hyuga compound, Kakashi had offered her a room in his small home, even Sarada’s own mother had suggested getting a bigger apartment to welcome a new member into their household. All options had been presented to the ten-year-old girl, but Hima had been as stubborn and intractable as any Uzumaki that had come before her, insisting she was going to stay in her house and keep it a home.

In the end Shikamaru conceded, earning him his first black mark with the members of the council of elders within his first month as Hokage. Himawari could stay in the Uzumaki’s home with the Nara clan paying for its upkeep, taxes, and utilities. Naruto—or more likely his advisors, her mother opined—had planned for the possibility of his demise protecting the village, leaving a sizable trust for his family’s keep, should the worst come to pass. With the Nara’s maintaining the property, Hima experienced no financial hardship while living on her own, even without becoming an official shinobi and earning mission pay.

For the first few months, the first year, a procession of people came and went from the household, always checking up on Hima, both for her wellbeing and their own consciencenesses. But as time went on, she’d been left more and more alone. Perhaps because she’d proven she’s fine, or perhaps because the house itself, the objects and pictures contained within, told a tale of a different reality, pushing back against Omnipotence in ways that resulted in an eerie and unsettling sensation for those affected. It was from Himawari’s former Academy classmates that she’d heard the rumor that the Hokage’s former home was haunted.

Sarada had stayed away, something she’s now ashamed of, in retrospect. But it had hurt too much, contemplating the Uzumaki’s house without Boruto in it. Though, she’d made time to take Himawari out for desserts now and then, as her mission living with Eida allowed.

“You’re okay, being here alone?” It’s a question Sarada should have asked sooner, much sooner, but she was always focused on bringing back Boruto rather than seeing what was in front of her.

“Oh, I’m not alone as I used to be,” Hima chuckles. “In fact, I was never really alone at all. This one has been with me all the time.”

From the way she squishes up her face, it appears that there’s a bit of a debate going on inside her own body, after which she grins, leaning over to Sarada to conspiratorily whisper, “He says I shouldn’t be talking about him like a pet.”

“That’s still not like living with other people,” she says, unsure how to feel about the fact that there are now two individuals living inside of Hima’s body—not unlike Boruto’s situation, but somehow friendlier.

“He’s like family,” Hima argues, walking back to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. “Plus, it’s a lot easier to manage the housework on my own. If big brother was here…”

Sarada hadn’t meant it like that, a condemnation of Kawaki. There were others in the village who’d been appalled that Kawaki had just continued on his mission with Eida rather than fighting to stay with his little sister. And Sarada might have felt similarly, had she not known the truth. The big brother she knew would never have accepted leaving Himawari alone…

Except he was ready to die and do just that , a little voice in her head reminds her.

Himawari continues on, oblivious to Sarada’s wandering thoughts. “He does stop by sometimes, you know. But he never comes inside.”

“He changed,” Sarada says, not wanting Boruto to be blamed for Kawaki’s actions.

Himawari finishes her water, putting the glass into the sink. “We all change. It’s hard for him, coming back here. All his memories. Being here brings me comfort, but I think it hurts him.”

“But it doesn’t hurt you when he’s not here?”

The younger girl shrugs, somehow wiser than her years. “When he’s ready to come back, I’m going to make sure this is still going to be his home. That’s true for my parents as well. And Boruto.”

Himawari had never expressed these sentiments directly to Sarada, but they’d arrived via the village gossip train, Himawari’s belief that both Naruto and Hinata were still alive, as well as her faith in Boruto, not her big brother, but the outsider who supposedly killed them. From the moment Hima had come back to her home after her parents’ disappearance, she’d insisted that there was no proof her parents were dead, and even if they were, there was no way her adopted brother had done it.

And now, it seems her faith in Kawaki had proven true, even if he is determined to push back on it, wanting her to hate him.

“You’re a good little sister,” Sarada says.

Hima winks. “I know. Hey, on the subject of which, I was tidying his room the other day and got to thinking that maybe he’d like some of his pictures or posters in his new room? Since you’re kind of, you know, living with him now, maybe you want to go up there and see what you can find?”

“Go into Boruto’s room?”

Sarada realizes her error as soon as the words are out of her mouth, before Hima’s head even cocks to the side, confused. “Boruto never had a room of his own. He slept in Dad’s—”

“I meant Kawaki.” Sarada smiles. Wide. A little too wide, if she’s being honest. She’d been too eager to snatch up the opportunity, but how could she let it pass her by? “Sorry, it’s late.”

“And you’re still recovering,” Hima says, immediately understanding. “After what happened the other day while you were watching us spar, I’m surprised you’re even up right now. Maybe it can wait until another time…”

“No, no. I don’t mind doing it now. Really.”

“Okay. You know where it is. I’ll go look for a box, in case you find anything you want to take with you.”

While Hima roots around in a downstairs closet, Sarada heads up the stairs, her hand dragging on the wooden banister. Boruto’s bedroom is the first one at the top of the stairs, the door on the right. She’d only been inside of it a few times, but those few times were enough for her to have memorized it. Hand on the knob, the door swings open.

The computer on his desk is a few years out of date. Posters of comic book heroes hang on the walls, pictures of the Uzumaki family and Team 7 on the bookcase. Her eyes immediately go to the team portrait that was taken of them together on their first day, Sarada in the middle with Mitsuki and Boruto on either side, Konohamau’s hands resting on their hair.

Sarada makes a note to take that picture with her for Boruto, the real Boruto, if she ever gets to see him.

Carefully, Sarada sits down on the bed, his bed, her eyes sweeping over the room. It’s as though she’d stepped into a museum, a perfectly preserved piece of a past that existed before Boruto had lost everything. Before she’d lost him, too. The carefree innocence of Kagemasa comic books and video game cartridges punches her in the gut.

This is who he’d been.

Who he still might be.

If Omnipotence hadn’t happened.

But before she can blame a wish that had changed the world, Sarada’s eyes land on a glass vial of pills high up on a shelf, little, dense, black, and round, reminding her that even if Eida and her god-like powers had never entered the village, Boruto was still damned. No one had been able to devise a solution to save him—other than the one that Boruto and Kawaki had agreed upon themselves.

Sarada’s nose itches and she sniffles, unsure what irritated it. She rubs it just as her eyes start to burn, blinking back tears she hadn’t expected until they start to fall. She’s sure she can reign it in, get a hold of herself before it goes too far, but it’s not long until whimpers dissolve into an unending succession of sobs. Giving in, Sarada grabs the pillow from Boruto’s bed, burying her face in it to muffle her weeping.

Chapter Text

No good deed goes unpunished, or at least that’s how Kawaki feels when he finds himself standing outside the Uzumaki house with a string-tied bakery box, staring at the plethora of lights coming from within.

A string of seemingly innocuous choices had led him here, each made on their own without a hint of their potential consequences or the indecision he’s now facing.

With everyone else gone from the house when he woke, Kawaki had decided he deserved a day of rest—a day without other people, at the very least. He’d blown off the appointment he was supposed to have with Amado, spending the early afternoon flipping through channels, still in the pajamas he’d put on the previous night.  When was the last time he’d had a few hours all to himself without some sensory ninja popping into his head, telling him there was a Claw Grime sighting or that Shikamaru needed to talk to him?

But even when he tried to lounge there, letting his lazy ass do nothing for once, his brain felt itchy, like a colony of ants was relocating into his skull. Not that any shows would have interested him anyway, but Kawaki couldn’t even focus enough to decide that they were boring. Maybe it was the on-edge anticipation of being rudely interrupted by some shinobi bullshit or the hangover after Sarada had barged into his room the previous evening, demanding he recount events he’d long ago categorized as evidence to support his convictions rather than things that he’d actually lived through.

Going back to sleep seemed like the best option available, but even with all his blinds closed and curtains pulled, the sweet peace of unconsciousness taunted him, just out of reach. Forty-five minutes of tossing and turning was all he could take before he needed to get out of the house, preferably before any of its other residents returned home.

Outside, it was one of those impossibly perfect late afternoons in late summer when Konoha seemed to exist beneath a dome of tranquility. Without really thinking about it Kawaki ended up at Hokage Rock, sitting cross-legged atop Naruto’s head, staring out at the green trees and busy people going home, keeping vigil as the day turned to night.

This was the Konoha Lord Seventh believed in, a sanctuary for those who belonged inside its walls.

But that had always been an illusion, hadn’t it?

At one time, Kawaki felt as though the wrongness was just a matter of his own presence, an outsider shattering the village’s calm. But it was more than that, wasn’t it? For as long as Lord Seventh had been watching over the village as Hokage, there had always been Otsutsuki lurking somewhere, waiting to destroy both its protector and his home.

Kawaki hadn’t wanted Boruto’s life. He hadn’t wanted to be the Hokage’s brat or the village’s young lord. The whole swap would have been ridiculous, save for the fact that as soon as the world no longer perceived Boruto as Naruto’s son, they instantly came to understand the threat of the Otsutsuki, the evil that lurked inside them both. It was only Sarada who gave him shit because she was immune to Omnipotence. Otherwise, she’d be as joyful as anyone else to see the outsider dead. Maybe she’d even have offered to do it herself, saving him the trouble.

He didn’t abandon his post until he was so hungry that it felt as though his stomach was digesting its own lining. The offerings of Konoha’s nightlife were plentiful: ramen and yakitori and tonkatsu, but what caught his eye that evening was some golden red bean buns topped with sesame seeds, glimmering in a baker’s window. He ordered a half dozen and was about to pay when something else caught his eye: a basket filled with fat cinnamon rolls, layers of swirled dough twisted together in an upwards spiral that managed to somehow look like a seashell topped with cream cheese frosting.

Before he knew it, he was walking away with his red bean buns in a bag for convenient snacking and two cinnamon rolls in a box, heading in the direction of the Uzumaki residence.

It had been Himawari who told him of her mother’s secret weakness was cinnamon rolls, the one thing she’d buy from a bakery rather than making from scratch. And while Himawari herself might have preferred a piece of layered chocolate cake strictly on taste, nothing could beat the nostalgia of peeling apart the many layers, something her mother had loved to do. Dropping the bakery box off on her porch to be found in the morning wasn’t supposed to become an ordeal.

What he hadn’t expected was arriving to the house lit up like a goddamned Christmas tree, as though she’d turned every single light on instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour.

Everything’s fine.

That’s what he tells himself, walking up to the front door, determined to place the box of cinnamon rolls on the top step and dash before he’s caught. If she’d been mature enough to live alone at ten years old, he shouldn’t be worrying about her now that she’s thirteen.

Then again…

Kawaki never had experienced anything like a typical adolescence, but movies and passing gossip had provided him with a vague awareness of the kinds of trouble teenagers can get into. Could a thirteen year old be making worse choices than she might have three years ago?

It’s possible.

It’s also not his business, he tells himself. Unless it is, because he was the one who sealed her parents away, the adults who should have been watching over her shoulder, sending her to bed, and shooing any unsavory associations away from their daughter.

Checking in is the least he can do, just to remind her (and anyone else) that if they’re going to fuck with her, they’re also fucking with him.

Disgruntled by his own conscience, Kawaki walks up to the door and knocks. It isn’t long until he hears the lock click open, and Himawari appears, fully dressed in her usual daytime attire.

“Big bro—”

“Don’t call me that.” It’s like nails on a chalkboard anytime she calls him by the same name she used for Boruto. Best she forgets she ever had a brother. It’d be easier for her that way, when both of them were gone. “You’re up late.”

“I know.” She beams up at him, foolishly happy to see his face. “The day got away from me. I was visiting Inojin, and Aunt Ino insisted I stay for supper. But I still hadn’t gone grocery shopping, so…” Hima shrugs her shoulders, letting him fill in the rest.

Seems innocent enough…

“I got you something.” He thrusts the box in her direction as though it’s both an explanation and an apology for being there.

“Oh, thank you! Would you like to come in?” For years now, they’d performed the same little dance of Kawaki stopping by every few weeks unannounced, Himawari asking him to come in, and his consistent rejection of the offer. Still, she opens the door a little wider after taking the cinnamon rolls from him, the warm light of the only house that had ever felt like a home inviting him in.

His lips are already forming the word “no” when he decides to glance down, just to double check that Himawari is indeed alone, and he isn’t some dumbass chump, about to turn heel and leave while she’s hosting a wild party for all of her former academy classmates without the auspices of parental supervision.

His eyes land on Naruto’s and Hinata’s shoes neatly lined up beside one another, never gathering dust or mildew in a way that suggests Himawari cleaned the shoes on a regular basis. It was the sight of those shoes the first time he visited after the Omnipotence swap that stopped him from crossing the threshold, a reminder of what he’d taken from her—and what he plans to give back to her one day, once the world is a safe place for Lord Seventh once more.

Next to them are Himawari’s shoes, and next to them….

Kawaki’s eyes narrow as he looks at the pair of chunky black heels, the red soled shoes belonging to only one person who he and Himawari both know. The girl looks over her shoulders, then back at him the small smile she had growing bigger. “Sarada’s here, by the way. She’s up in your room.”

He doesn’t want to be there, standing in the entryway of the Uzumaki house, the sights and smells so much like the first time he’d been brought home by Lord Seventh that it gives him the creeps. But even less than that, he doesn’t want Sarada there. Who knows what she’s filling Himawari’s head with, particularly after she’d bitched him out about what he’d said during their training session. The last thing Himawari needs—the last thing he needs—is her getting it into Hima’s head that she needs to help Boruto instead of staying in Konoha where she’s safe.

That’s what gets him through the door, kicking off his sandals, and striding into the house, ignoring Himawari’s giggle as he heads directly for the stairs. Why would she be in Boruto’s room, of all places? What could she possibly want in there?

The door is unlatched. He unceremoniously shoves it open, expecting to find her going through the drawers or trying on the jackets in his closet. Instead, he’s treated to the sight of Sarada on Boruto’s bed, glasses on the blanket beside her, sobbing into his pillow.

When she lifts her head to stare at him, her usually pitch-black eyes are the color of blood.

It’s too late to stop crying when she hears Himawari coming, her feet pounding loudly up the stairs. But what else is there to do than come up with some excuse for her sorry state that the girl would understand? Her head pounds as she tries to think through her tears, making the process of devising a ready explanation near impossible. Something about the house, what they all lost, a past they could never return to—but that last thought causes her to sob all the harder.

The door swings open, banging against the wall. When she looks over, she expects to see Himawari arriving with the box she’d promised. Instead, it’s Kawaki standing there in his torn white jacket, baggy pants, and oversized shirt, frowning down at her. Any question she might have as to why he, of all people, is standing there comes out as another whimper.

Kawaki shuts the door behind him and locks it. “Pull yourself together.”

Easier said than done, isn’t it?

“Go away,” she manages, shoving her face back in the pillow, hoping he’ll either leave or she’ll smother herself—whichever happens first.

“You’re going to fuck up your eyes.” He walks past her, yanking open a drawer in Boruto’s desk and rooting around in it. “Here, look.”

When Sarada opens her eyes, she’s met with her own reflection in a small, square mirror held in Kawaki’s hand. Amid her splotchy skin and puffy cheeks, her twin Sharingan glow bright red.

Had she one flaw in battle, it’s that she doesn’t utilize her doujutsu enough, activating them only when needed and never for too long. She’d trained herself to use them that way, wanting neither to rely on them nor overuse them. Seeing them now catches her mid-sob. How many times had she ever looked at those eyes in her own face, seeing her father in her face, all his strength and all his pain?

“Deep breaths. Get yourself under control.”

She’s still crying, shoulder shaking, every exhale ragged.

Business-like, he leaves the mirror with her and fetches a box of tissues from the shelf, just below the useless black pills Amado had given Boruto.

The handle of the door jiggles, testing the latch. An inquiring knock follows. “Is everything okay in there? Is there anything you need?”

“Give us a minute,” Kawaki calls over his shoulder, shaking the tissue box at Sarada, urging her to take it. “We’re not staying long. You’re up too late already.”

“Whatever, big bro.”

If Sarada had been in control of her voice, she might have been able to tack some excuse on the end. I’m helping him pick out a few things to take with us. Or, We’re going through some old shinobi tools he left behind . But it takes all her energy to stop bawling long enough to hear Himawari’s footsteps retreating down the hall.

Kawaki turns back to her, the stiffness in his spine softening into a tired slouch as he looks her over. “They’re back to normal. Good. Does your head hurt?”

Sarada puts her hand to her right temple. She’d thought the source of her pain had been her tears, but now that she’s calmed down enough, it’s clear the pressure is radiating from behind her eye. “A bit.”

He kicks the office chair in front of Boruto’s computer out, plopping down into it, crossing his arms over his chest as he examines her. “Come on, clean yourself up. She doesn’t need to see you’re like this.”

Sniffling, Sarada wipes her eyes, blows her nose, and blots the moisture off her cheeks before putting her glasses back on.

“You still look like shit,” Kawaki informs her when she’s finished. “But I think I can get us out of here without too many questions. Give me a minute.”

He takes the mirror, putting it back in the drawer, as well as the box of tissues, replacing them on the shelf while leaving Sarada with one in case she needs it. She balls it up in her hand, staring at the picture of Team 7 as genin across from her while Kawaki talks to Himawari in the hallway.

He’s back moments later, opening the door to direct her out, hurrying her down the stairs as Himawari, now in a pair of bright yellow pajamas, watches them go. “I hope your headache feels better soon!” she calls after them.

They only pause to put their shoes on before Kawaki pushes her out the door. The moment they’re outside, he sucks in a deep breath of night air as though he’d been suffocating inside. Then, he turns around to watch the lights go off in the house one by one until the only window illuminated is Himawari’s.

Sarada can’t shake the feeling that she’s forgetting something, staring at the round house with its red roof.

Kawaki starts walking on ahead, turning around when Sarada isn’t following him. “Come on. You should be asleep now, too. Or do I have to carry you back again?"

“No, I’m fine,” she says, wanting to avoid ever having to hang onto his back while flying again. They walk back to the house in silence, just the sound of their shoes on the pavement without a single word passing between them.

Chapter Text

The next day is as brilliant and beautiful a summer day as Konoha has ever seen. A bright sun in the sky manages to warm her skin rather than roasting it, the scent of verdant foliage saturates the breeze. As if carried on that same breeze, Sarada floats down the sidewalk toward the Uzumaki household, having remembered what she forgot the previous evening—The Team 7 picture for Boruto.

That’s right, she’d meant to take it with her to give to him the next time they saw each other. A little reminder of the life they once had, a life Sarada has promised herself she’d one day restore.

A bounce in her step, she bounds down the sidewalk, admiring all of Hinata’s flowers in full bloom, a painter’s palette of pinks, purples, blues, and all colors in between. She skips up the steps, rapping her knuckles on the brown wooden door.

Hopefully, Himawari is home.

Sarada waits, staring up at the dark porch light and the swarm of moths flap around it even though it’s day. One breaks off from the rest, gliding down to her finger. Its wings and body are an ethereal white, feathered antennae protruding from either side of its head like bent horns. A dreadful tickle works its way through Sarada’s skin when it lands, each of its six little legs latching onto her. It flexes its wings, open and shut, black pin-prick eyes on Sarada. Then, it flutters, taking off, flying high over her head and away.

“Sarada.”

The voice comes from behind her, calling her name. She’d heard him say it thousands of times, but it’s deeper now, rougher than it used to be. Heart in her throat, Sarada turns to see Boruto standing at the end of the sidewalk, waiting for her, his single blue eye bright. His skin is warm and tan like unfiltered honey, his blond hair streaked with threads of near-white after so many days spent beneath the sun. His cape is open, as is his jacket and his shirt, revealing the black scar left on his chest after Kawaki tried, and failed, to kill him.

Just as she’d done once before, Sarada runs to him, her heels beating against the stone pavement as she leaps into his waiting arms. He pulls her against his body without hesitation, her hands snaking beneath his cape to encircle him. She squeezes, and he squeezes back, tucking his nose against the crown of her head.

“Please kill me,” he whispers into her hair.

“Boruto, what?” She tries to pull back, but his arms tighten against her, his embrace turning into a restraint.

“You heard him, little Hokage.” It’s not Boruto’s voice that replies, adopting the belittling moniker Kawaki had hung about her neck the other night. His tone is that of singsong sadism, taunting her. “Oh, but he couldn’t ask that of you, could he? His beloved friend. His beloved teammate. His beloved Sarada. You were far too precious for him to do that to you, and you were too weak to ever see it through.”

“Let go of me!” Fighting against him is like trying to free herself from being smothered in a blanket. The more she struggles, the tighter it gets.

The sound of a door opening.

“Big brother? Sarada?”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Her mind chants its plea on repeat, begging Hima to run away, to go back into the house, to get as far away as fast as she can.

Fingers find Sarada’s chin, tipping her head back to look into Momoshiki’s lavender eye, the light of the boy she loved extinguished by this monster. “You’re going to watch this time. We can’t have you looking away again.”

Hima screams, a blood-curdling scream, the type of scream that would peel paint and shatter glass.

“Please,” she whispers to Momoshiki, staring at the blue lines coloring Boruto’s face, the broken horn extending from his head. “Just let her go.”

“But you don’t want to miss the show, do you?”

He twists her around without letting her go, forcing Sarada to face the sight of Himawari standing on the front step of the Uzumaki household, still wearing the cute floral pajama set she’d had on the previous night. Just like Code, both hands are pressed to her stomach, tears of pain streaming from her eyes. Uzuhiko works its way through her, turning her innard to slush. Kurama’s chakra leaks from her, out of her eyes, her mouth, her nose, the tips of her fingers and the ends of her hair, enveloping her, trying to keep her together as the motion of the planet tears her apart.

But even the nine-tailed fox demon’s efforts are useless. He could destroy an entire village, but seems unable to save one little girl. Her body warps, going from flesh and bone to a living rag doll, held together by a bubbling orange glow. It’s as though she’s melting from the inside outward, crumpling as the structure of her body collapses in on itself like a burning house.

Her eyes are gone, hollow sockets oozing red. She falls forward, mouth still moving without words as she swells, the liquefaction inside of her continuing to spin, taking up more space as it increases in velocity. Her last living act is to reach a hand out, imploring her brother to save her.

Just like before, it ends with a sickening pop, a guts-filled water balloon hitting the sidewalk. Bits of bone and blood and clots and chunks explode outward, spattering the front of the Uzumaki house and Hinata’s myriad of flowers.

Momoshiki’s grip on her tightens, pulling Sarada flush against him. His breath is wet in her ear. “Who do you think we should pay a visit to next, my dear?”

Sarada screams, or she tries to, but her throat is full of bile.

Suddenly wide awake, choking and sweating, Sarada fights to get out of the blankets she’d wrapped herself in after Kawaki brought her home. She ends up on the floor, kicking away her bedding as she struggles to her feet, one hand pressed against her mouth. It’s a miracle that she’s able to get out the door and to the toilet down the hall before falling to her knees and throwing up.

Kawaki leans on the railing of the balcony, the orange tip of a cigarette lighting up the night.

He hates smoking. The smell. The taste. The sandpaper feeling of his tongue and the buzzy carbonation tickling his bloodstream. But he knows why he does it, too. Why it feels good while still feeling bad. It’s a little reminder to himself that he doesn’t plan on living long, each puff a promise that he’ll die soon, so why bother keeping his lungs pink?

Most seventeen-year olds have a lot to live for. But Kawaki? He has a lot to die for.

His first pack, he’d swiped from Amado a few years back, a little fuck you to the man who was always fucking with his body. He hadn’t intended to smoke it until he did. His second pack was already half-empty, and came to him courtesy of Shikamaru’s desk. A little experimentation taught him that both their tastes in cigarettes were shit, and that the konbini down the block from Hokage Tower carried a smoother brand that came in a metal box and had a lax policy when it came to checking the IDs of young shinobi, flush with mission pay.

Still, it isn’t something he does a lot, indulging once or twice a month on those rare occasions when sleep illudes him, his tiny bit of peace stolen from him for some reason or another. It’s then that he sneaks out after everyone else has gone to bed and whatever shinobi are supposed to be guarding them had probably either started drinking or fallen asleep themselves.

The night air feels good against his bare skin. The smoke he sucks in grates against the back of his throat. He holds it in his lungs for a moment, hoping for stillness, for nothingness, for a fraction of a second of silent oblivion. Instead, he gets a fit of coughing, all of the thoughts he’d hoped to burn away still alive and well, circling around his head like a cloud of gnats.

“Fuck me,” he mutters, leaning forward to rest his forehead on is forearms.

He hears the door sliding in its tracks, holding his breath for a moment of worthless hope that whoever the fuck is coming can intuit that he’d like to be left alone in his misery. But of course, the girl who steps out into the glow of the single outdoor light might be the only person in Konoha who has a shittier read of people than he does.

Sarada walks up to the edge of the balcony to stand next to him, staring out at the twinkling lights of Konoha in the distance. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

His thumb flicks the filter, sending a dusting of gray ash down to the ground. “I don’t.”

She hadn’t even bothered to put on her red robe, coming outside in a little black tube top (or whatever it was called) and matching shorts. Not that he was one to talk, wearing nothing but a pair of striped pajama pants.

He takes another pull of his cigarette, exhaling slowly, watching the smoke disappear into the night. Beside him, Sarada watches, too.

“Can I?” she asks, extending one hand as easily as she would have after asking for a bite of taiyaki.

Kawaki wrinkles his nose up, switching the cigarette to the hand that’s farther away from her. “No.”

Sarada wanting to smoke? Ridiculous. Unlike him, she has things to live for, things he needs her to live for. He’s not going to let her fuck that up for either of them just because he’s doing it. Not only that, but does she really want her soft skin to look like a leather couch by the time she’s 35? Hadn’t glaring into Shikamaru’s ugly mug all those times taught her anything?

Her sigh of annoyance is petulant and, oddly, age appropriate. “I guess you’re going to tell me to go back to bed next.”

“If you know what you’re supposed to be doing, maybe you should go do it.”

“Yeah.” Without those two-inch heels she’s always wearing, she’s so tiny, the top of her head ending somewhere in the middle of his chest. Her dejected response makes her seem even smaller, like she’s shrinking in on herself.

“Dreams?” he asks, and this time, she simply nods, darkness shifting across her face.

“The same ones?”

Her fingers wrap around the railing, squeezing tight. “Not exactly.”

He wants to feel bad for her, but the most he can muster is pity. Anything nearing compassion or empathy would open him up to feeling, and that’s something he can’t afford. Not now. Not ever again. “I told you, they can’t hurt you. Just go back to bed.”

She scoffs at him as though he’d asked the impossible. “Do you think I don’t want to sleep? That I’m up in the middle of the night just to spite you?”

Yeah, kinda. He knows better than to actually say it, but maybe his face does that for him.

She turns her head to look at him, the glare that had been on her glasses gone. “You think you’re the only miserable person in the world, don’t you?”

And you think you’re the only person in the village who loved him.

The taunt is right there. A few weeks ago, he might have grabbed her by the back of her head and rubbed her face in it. But what was the point now? It’s just another fight that neither of them will win, another argument in which neither of them will be right.

He takes one last drag off his cigarette, burning up every fleck of tobacco and a bit of the filter, too, before snuffing it out. “Whatever you want to tell yourself that helps you sleep at night.”

He’d meant it as a joke and is relieved when she takes it as one, giving him a little almost laugh as she shakes her head. “I don’t think there’s anything that would do that.”

“You didn’t even wake up when I got up to piss last night. Is my chair that much more comfortable than your bed?”

“I don’t think that was it.” She taps her fingers contemplatively on the railing. “You know, there’s something ChoCho once read in one of her magazines, that people sleep better when they don’t sleep alone. They said it lowers stress levels and promotes feelings of safety, hearing another person breath, being near their heartbeat. You don’t feel as alone when you’re sleeping with someone else. They said it eases anxiety and heals depression… Sounds like bullshit, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” he agrees quickly, trying not to think back to the time when Naruto slept on a bed in his office and Kawaki took the couch. It had been weird at first, a grown-ass man sleeping near him, snoring and tossing and turning and sometimes mumbling in his dreams. But, eventually, Kawaki had grown used to the sounds, to the strange warmth of having someone else in the room with him, knowing that even in his sleep, he was never alone. Always protected. Always watched over.

“I was probably just that exhausted,” she says, looking down at her hands.

Kawaki flicks his cigarette butt off the balcony, letting it fall into the grass below. Then, he grabs Sarada by her wrist, pulling her back into the house. “Come on, let’s get you to sleep.”

This hadn’t been her idea, coming into Kawaki’s room—he’d half-dragged her there, not letting go of her until the door was closed behind them—so she can’t understand why he’s talking as though it had been.

“There’s just two rules you need to follow if this is going to work.” He grabs one of the pillows from his bed, tossing it onto the chair where the blanket she’d used the previous night is still folded. “One, don’t ever wake me up. Ever. If you have a bad dream, that’s your problem. Not mine. If I’m asleep, let me sleep. I don’t care if it’s one in the afternoon, I don’t care if the house is on fire, I don’t care if I’m on fire. Don’t wake me up. Do you understand?”

Sarada nods, watching as he goes to the closet to grab a shirt, as though it’s just now, in the light of his bedroom, that he realizes he hasn’t been wearing one this whole time.

“Two,” he says, grabbing a white t-shirt and pulling it over his head. “I don’t want Eida to know about this. Not if we can avoid it. If you’re in my room, she’s going to think she can be in my room, too… And I don’t want that.”

Somehow, Sarada had just learned that she ranks above Eida on the list of people Kawaki can tolerate being alone with.

He runs a hand through his hair, messing it up again after putting on the shirt had flattened it. Then he glances over at her and pauses, gaze skimming over her.

She’d had guys look at her before, really look at her, you know. The way their eyes would run up and down her skin, gobbling up all the parts they found most interesting, then leering at her as though she should have enjoyed it. As though it was a complement to be ogled. A silent “you’re welcome” to a thank you never said.

That’s not what Kawaki does. Rather, it’s almost like he’s sizing up an opponent before a battle, taking stock of their weaponry and vulnerabilities, deciding how to deflect each of them. Then, he turns back to his closet.

“Three,” he says, not having informed her that there was going to be a three. “Put this on.”

A shirt is tossed her way, royal blue with a loose neckline and oversized, even for him. When she holds it up, the hem almost hits her knees. Part of her wants to protest, to argue that what she’s wearing is fine. It’s just pajamas, for fuck’s sake, the same type of pajamas that she’s been wearing since she was a little kid. But in defending them, she realizes she’d have to talk about what parts they covered and what parts they didn’t, and having that conversation with Kawaki, a conversation about her body, was undesirable to say the least. So, she puts on the shirt without further complaint, adjusting it so it hangs off one shoulder.

Kawaki sighs as she does it, like he has some complaints of his own, but they both manage to hold their peace long enough for Sarada to ball herself up on the chair, pulling the blanket up to her chin and leaning her head against the pillow, her glasses folded on the table beside her. As soon as she’s settled, Kawaki lies down in his own bed, turning off the light.

If she’s expecting a “good night,” she doesn’t get one. But the blanket is warm, the room is dark, and she isn’t alone. It’s not long until Kawaki starts snoring quietly, and soon after that, she drifts off to sleep as well.

Chapter Text

Within three days, they’d settled into a routine of sorts. Sarada would slip in sometime after Eida and Daemon went to bed—twice he was awake, one time when he wasn’t. Silent as the ninja she is, she’d creep into the room, put on the shirt she insisted on leaving there every night, and curl up sideways on the chair, eventually dozing off. No pleasantries passed between them, no acknowledgements. And in the morning, she was always gone long before he woke, taking care of breakfast for the others while he remained facedown on his mattress, oblivious to her departure.

It could have been a hell of a lot worse.

He could name more than a few brats who would probably have whined about someone invading their bedroom in the middle of the night, but privacy was something Kawaki had never really known in life and, thus, the intrusion was just another in a string of many, and one of the more benign ones at that.

He’d slept on the stone floor in front of the fire in his childhood home, his father’s drunken snores coming from the pallet bed on the other side of their one-room shack. For all the promises of gifts and grandeur when he’d been bought by Jigen, the Kara hideout was little more than a hidden jail and the room where he slept a cell.

Privacy? No, there had been none of that, Jigen showing up whenever he wished, dragging him out for brutal training at any hour of the day. Amado came too, guiding him through the damp halls to his lab and putting him to sleep so he could do all manner of things to his body. No one ever asked if he wanted his blood populated with machines, turning his soft body tissue into tools instead of flesh and muscle. He was expected to swallow what he was given, to stay still while being examined, to ask no questions as the only answers he received came in the form of pain.

Being beaten and neglected had been hard, but his father had been a human monster—unlike the inners of Kara who were monsters pretending to be human.

Compared to that, the Uzumaki household had been an upgrade. Was he ever allowed to leave Lord Seventh’s side? Not at first, the 24-hour-a-day monitoring meant to both protect the village from him and him from Kara. He could get a few minutes to himself now and then by going to the shitter and staying longer than was necessary to complete whatever biological needs had taken him there in the first place. Even when Lord Seventh slept in the room with him, Kurama was still watching Kawaki from inside of the Hokage, forbidding him from stepping a single foot outside of the room without a chaperone.

Boruto had pitched a shit fit when a squad of sensory shinobi had been directly assigned to the both of them, oblivious as always to the level of privilege he received—actually being allowed to go out and about according to his whims instead of shackled to his father’s side as Kawaki had been. He’d been like Sarada in that way, always running his mouth about how things affected him rather than considering what was going on with anyone else, even those who were forced to hear his whining.

Considering his reaction to that, it was surprising how well Boruto took the revelation that there was a hot sixteen-year old who had the ability to watch everything happening in the present as well as the past, going back to a time before either he or Kawaki had been born. Maybe he’d been naive, immature, or just too damn boneheaded to put two and two together, comprehending that she could see them anytime, anywhere, and always.

What was worse? A team of trained shinobi or a rogue cyborg with god-like powers and a poor understanding of boundaries?

More likely, though, Boruto’s lack of giving a fuck came from having the luck of being too ugly and too young to attract her affections, leaving Kawaki as the object of her lovesick fantasies. It’s not as though he’d been the one who’d woken with his face in her lap, her fingers in his hair, after both of them got their asses kicked into unconsciousness by her little brother.

His piece-of-shit dad shared a single room with him, Jigen and Amado had fetched him whenever they wanted something, Naruto was ever-present when watching over him, the sensory nin never bothered to hide themselves.

All of that had been better than Eida, who kept him guessing. When was she watching? What would she go back to see? Was there ever a time he’d been truly alone, or were his fleeting moments of privacy in the past all hers now, any second he thought he had been alone no longer his?

Had he been as simple-minded as Boruto, it might not have bothered him. He could have blithely gone about his days with nothing between his ears but air. Kawaki was used to being violated, he was used to being surveilled. Getting a bedroom in a swank house away from all the adults, a room to call his own where he could shut the door and close the blinds and lie on his bed alone, should have been an improvement. And it would have been if he could have taken a piss without looking down at the dick in his hand and wondering if someone else was seeing it, too.

Once it became clear that his stay in the house was a permanent arrangement, Kawaki developed a few coping mechanisms, rituals that made him seem like an obsessive-compulsive freak to anyone who didn’t understand why he did them.

After Eida let slip that she couldn’t track him when he was shrunken down while using Sukunahikona, Kawaki realized she couldn’t watch what she couldn’t see. So, he blacked out his windows and got changed in the dark, used the bathroom with the lights off, took showers with his boxers on. It had all been stupid and pointless, considering she could look back in time and see his junk whenever there wasn’t anything good on tv, but hanging on to the smallest shred of privacy had felt like control in those early days after he and Boruto had switched places. 

It took a few months to become numb to his new circumstances, as equally numb as he’d eventually become to every other violation he’d faced. Why did he think himself deserving of modesty when he was little more than a walking weapon in a human’s body with a single purpose and a single goal. If she wanted to watch him, let her. Whatever she thought she was seeing wasn’t truly what he was. After all, who could want a weapon to love them? He’d almost forgotten those feelings of violation until Sarada started sleeping in the room with him

The first night, it’d happened by accident rather than by invitation, and in the morning, he fully suspected Eida to confront them, her big blue eyes wide and hurt. She wouldn’t have said it directly, that wasn’t Eida’s way, but a volley of indirect questions would be shot at them, which all amounted to her trying to discern why it was Sarada who’d been given permission to get so close to him rather than her. That day, he’d managed to avoid her by some miracle, but when it didn’t happen the next day or the one after that, Kawaki started to get the sense that Eida wasn’t watching him constantly. Sure, faster than a snap of the fingers, she could go back and see what had happened in the past, but she wasn’t doing it now. Just knowing that felt like something approximating freedom, like someone had cracked a window in a stuffy room and he could finally breathe.

He hadn’t felt that way for a while.

There’d been a brief period of time after he’d lost his karma, but before the threat of Code loomed too large, when there had been some chatter from the adults in the Uzumaki household that sooner or later, he’d get a room of his own. Other than a passing comment around the dinner table one night, not much was said to him about the matter, but he was stuck in the house enough, even when Himawari and Boruto were out, that he’d hear conversations between husband and wife from time to time, even though he pretended he didn't. 

  A young man needs his space and don’t you think he deserves some privacy ?

Sure, they acted like they were concerned for him, but it hadn’t been hard for Kawaki to read between the lines and understand that it was as much about their own discomfort as his wellbeing. There are things we all know teenage boys do, and wouldn’t it be better if he had his own room to do it in?

Growing up in Kara, he’d been simultaneously isolated from the outside world and exposed to far too much. When he arrived in Konoha, he was forced to reckon that there had been a lot he didn’t know about the lives that others lived, the regular experiences that regular people got to have without realizing that others never had them (such as the time he’d gotten side-eye from Sarada for never having had an after-breakfast snack). But he wasn’t so ignorant that he didn’t know what Lord Seventh and his wife were talking around.

Yeah, it’s something he’d been doing from time to time, even then, though always in the rare moments when he was alone. It’s something he still does now, when he gets to the point that he can’t not do it. But it wasn’t like the kids in Kara (mostly Code, to be honest) talked about, a lurid compulsion for an explosion of pleasure, a constant, unavoidable draw to be doing it rather than anything else. For Kawaki, its utility was more like scratching an itch or massaging a cramp, a biological necessity due to the unfortunate fact of being alive in a body that was outwardly human.

He’d flipped through enough of Amado’s medical texts when the old bastard was away to understand the fundamentals of reproduction from colored diagrams and scientific terms, and the more he learned, the less he liked it.

Ejaculation. Fertilization. Gestation. The transfer of genomes to pass on genetic inheritance. The act of putting one’s self inside another and leaving a tiny piece of you there to divide exponentially, growing and unfolding, taking up more and more space in the service of continued life.

It felt familiar in a fucked up way that made him sick if he thought about it too long. And so he chose not to think about it, either in how it related to his feelings about Karma or the things men and women did when they were alone.

It was probably a blessing for everyone, himself included, that he’d never been particularly interested in girls. Sure, he liked their bodies, he liked their parts, and he thought about them as much as was necessary to get done what was needed. But those imagined parts came without people attached to them, curves and softness and roundness without specific faces or individual personalities. They were things, just as he was a thing, and served a temporary purpose in his fantasies, discarded when his doings were done.

On some level, he recognizes that it’s something the shrinks in the hospital would have had a field day with if he’d ever accepted any of the offers of therapy that had been extended to him by Sarada’s pink-haired mother in the years since Naruto’s disappearance.

“We all need to talk to someone sometimes,” she’d say when concluding the annual checkups he needed to remain an active shinobi, but he’d also concluded it’s better this way. In addition to Eida, the village had ample girls who’d thrown themselves his way over the years, trying to get closer to the brooding Hokage’s son, tragically orphaned by his parents’ murder. They’d giggle and whisper and swoon and wink, so many trying to win his romantic attention, an attention he had no intent of giving because he failed to feel it himself.

The fact that he wants none of it is good, both for them and for him, and it’s also why he thinks nothing of having Sarada in his room.

Chapter Text

Had the ever-present kink in her neck been the only thing bothering her after spending the past several nights sleeping on a chair in Kawaki’s room, Sarada might not have been so preoccupied. However, she’s fully aware that it’s a little more than fucked up that the best sleep she’s been getting since returning home is taking place in a room with a man who had once tried to cleave her head in half horizontally.

Arguments like a pingpong ball bounce back and forth in her mind between opponents of equal skill, one that warns she’s putting herself in danger, the other that reminds her she feels safe when she’s with him, safer than she feels when she tries to sleep alone, and that should count for something. What she truly needs is a friend to step in, join a side, and end the match with a decisive hit, showing her where the boundaries lie. But friends are something Sarada is sorely lacking these days. Would she be sleeping across from Kawaki if there was anyone else in Konoha who could understand what she’d been through?

Of course, that doesn’t mean she has no one to talk to.

Hey, Inojin. She reaches out with her thoughts, just as she’d been told to.

Yeah, hold on. Give me a minute.

Sarada turns down a side street to buy herself some extra time on the way to pick up eggs after she’d used the last of them during breakfast. Sure, she could have waited until their weekly delivery of groceries arrived in two days, but it also had been a readily-available excuse to get out of the house after Eida had pulled out a measuring tape, applied it to her bust, waist, and hips, then declared they could start looking at some color swatches, if Sarada didn’t have anything better to do.

Sarada passes by shopfronts, stores, and restaurants while she waits. The village had grown exponentially under the tenure of Lord Sixth and Lord Seventh, businesses booming and massive economic investments. That had changed after Naruto’s disappearance—his death, as most villagers thought of it. Konoha didn’t shrink, but it had ceased expanding. The uncertainty that came with the loss of the two most powerful shinobi in the world and the ongoing threats from Code had sucker punched the business sector.

An outsider wouldn’t notice the constant turnover as old businesses decided to take their profits and run, new startups coming and going in a matter of months as new entrepreneurs tried and failed, learning the hard way that the residents of Konoha weren’t as eager to part with their money as they once had been. Walking down the street, she’s able to see the telltale signs of a district undergoing economic upheaval: discount advertisements marking store closings, grand opening signs and banners declaring new beginnings, and far too many “For Rent” signs in the windows.

A sick worry squirmed around in her stomach, wondering what kind of village would be there to lead, should she ever achieve her dreams.

Are you still there? Inojin asks.

Yeah, I’m here.

Great. She can feel his chuckle inside her head rather than hearing it. Thanks for getting me out of physical therapy. I had to fake a leg cramp for a break. I swear, the exercises that woman puts me through would make her a better torturer than a therapist. What’s up?

Is Lord Hokage available?

Lemme check . She takes the moment of silence to sit down on a bench in the shade of a tree. After a few minutes, Inojin pops back in. Only if it’s really important. He’s in the middle of a meeting about the next Chunin exams. Do you want me to put you through? Otherwise, I can deliver a message.

No, that’s fine. I just had a question.

Oh. Wanna ask me? 

Sarada’s more than a little doubtful that Inojin knows the answer, but what’s the harm in trying? If Shikamaru believes that Kawaki is the one responsible for Lord Seventh’s disappearance, why does he rely on him so much? It seems as though he treats him like he always has. It hadn’t escaped her notice that he reports to Hokage Tower on an almost-daily basis with Shikamaru treating him almost as though he’s serving in an advisory role instead of being a genin like her.

Oh, that’s easy. Do you think there’s anyone else he should be relying on?

Well, there’s Boruto... That is, if Shikamaru didn’t have doubts about the swap that happened because of Omnipotence. But all the proof she’d gotten recently left little doubt that the Hokage believed Boruto to be innocent.

And is he in the village every day? No. Kawaki is, and he’s defended Konoha since Lord Seventh disappeared. It’d be stupid for Shikamaru not to use him to protect the village.

Sarada sighs, slumping over. But isn’t that risky? If we know he’s dangerous…

You’re aware that you can open up a series of black holes over Konoha any time you want to, right? Insurance companies are going to have to write entirely new policies that cover disasters caused by non-impactive astronomical objects now. You’re dangerous. Lord Seventh was dangerous. Your father? He was dangerous, too.

She’s about to argue that Lord Seventh would never be a danger to the village, much less her father. But before she begins to respond, she remembers that picture her mother used to have of her papa wearing a black cloak with red clouds. What might her father have done to the village without Lord Seventh’s friendship?

You don’t like that I’m right, do you? Inojin adds when she remains silent. Shikamaru would probably give you some line about using every piece he has available on the board to counter the enemy, but if that was the answer you wanted, you wouldn’t have asked, right?

“Is that really Sarada?” 

Hearing the voice of another member of Team 10 while Inojin is still in her head is unexpected. Sarada leans her head on the back of the bench only to find ChoCho looking directly down at her, golden eyes wide. A patch of gauze is taped to her left cheek, bruising ringing the bottom of her eye.

“I told you it was!” Himawari chirps beside her, a pair of bright blue eyes coming into view.

I have to go , she informs Inojin, knowing she can’t manage one conversation in her mind and another one in her mouth at the same time.

My torturer will be back any minute now anyway. Send me a status update later today, okay? 

“Hey, Sarada. It’s been a while!” ChoCho says, her eyes creasing.

It’s been a while—that might have been the friendship understatement of the decade. They’d once been friends who’d spent most of their free time between missions together—visiting sweets shops, going on walks, reading teen magazines in the Akimichi compound. But as with so many other things, life had upended that.

The worst part was that ChoCho had tried to be supportive of Sarada, however it was through the parameters of how she perceived the world. Boruto became that no-good hottie who’d shown up in Konoha and betrayed their friendship, leading to tragedy.

But it wasn’t all bad, right? That’s what ChoCho would say whenever Sarada had to excuse herself to return to the cohabitation mission. She got to stay with Eida, the most beautiful and brilliant fashionista in all of Konoha (despite the fact that ChoCho had never seen her up close to make any substantive judgement). Plus, she was living the high life in a posh pad with none other than Kawaki, her childhood friend. Or “friend,” as ChoCho would say it, giving her a wink.

Of Sarada’s father ChoCho said nothing, other than some sympathetic words—what could be said when a former traitor had chosen a current traitor over his village or avenging the death of his best friend… Unless that friendship had been one-sided all along, and Sasuke relished in the disappearance of his weakened rival (a speculation that more than one person made in the village, always behind Sarada’s back, but not always out of earshot).

Through no fault of her own, ChoCho’s words hurt Sarada. But perhaps ChoCho was equally hurt to hear Sarada advocating for Boruto while spending so much of her time with Sumire. Shouldn’t Sarada, of all people, have understood that speaking up for a Hokage killer was inexcusable? It had been Lord Seventh who’d been killed, her idol who treated the entire village like family. How could she stand up for Boruto when he had tried to kill Kawaki not once, but twice, and took a swipe at Sarada as well, if rumors were true? How could Sarada contradict the word of Eida, the all-seeing queen, declaring Boruto’s innocence?

It was understandable that Sarada and ChoCho’s relationship had waned in recent years, Sarada sticking with Sumire who saw the world as she did, and ChoCho pulled toward other peers who were affected by Omnipotence. Their occasional hellos were friendly enough, but Sarada was fairly certain that her former friend saw her as the rest of the village does—a tragic Uchiha who’d cracked after her father’s betrayal and her mentor’s death, a girl so deep in denial that she twisted Naruto’s legacy of love and acceptance to the point that she believed it extended to his murderer as well. Someone to be both pitied and avoided.

However, it doesn’t exactly seem like ChoCho is avoiding her now, holding Sarada’s gaze with her own, strands of orange hair curtaining her face.

“Oh, hi,” Sarada sits up and turns to look at both of them.

Hima tucks her hands behind herself, rocking back and forth from heel-to-toe, unable to contain her energy—not all that dissimilar from Boruto when he was her age. “Is your head feeling better yet?”

Sarada touches her right temple. It’d been giving her some trouble since she’d accidentally activated her Sharingan in the Uzumaki household a few nights ago, but nothing some anti-inflammatory pain relievers hadn’t been able to take care of. “Yeah, it is. Thanks for asking. What are you two up to?”

ChoCho hooks her elbow around Hima’s arm. “I owe this girl some pancakes,” she says, beaming proudly. “My first order of business after getting back to the village. I told Shikadai he can handle the stuffy debriefing stuff. Moi? I got more important stuff to do.”

An embarrassed flush colors Himawari’s cheeks. “It’s a long story,” is her explanation for the urgent pancake date.

“And you haven’t given me all the details yet. I’m going to need you to dish big time, both about the fight and what’s been going on with Inojin. Come on.” She tugs Hima’s arm, pulling her in the direction of a new pancake restaurant that had appeared since the last time Sarada was on this street.

However, Hima doesn’t move from her spot, looking back at Sarada. “Do you want to join us? That’d be okay, wouldn’t it, ChoCho?”

And there she sees it, the little bit of hesitation in ChoCho’s eyes, the apprehension to sit down across from a table with her former friend.

“No need!” She answers quickly, wanting to free them all from any awkwardness. “I already had breakfast.”

ChoCho takes a deep breath as though centering herself, closing her eyes. “Sarada…” she says. “There’s always room for pancakes.”

Chapter Text

They find a booth inside of the restaurant, so new that it smells of construction materials in addition to hot butter and just a hint of vanilla. The floor is pale wood, lighting bright. Aqua and pink accents decorate the walls and sign, a color pairing that had been in style since Eida’s arrival in the village.

Sarada sits next to Hima, ChoCho across from them with one side of the table to herself to accommodate the size of her pancake order: one boba cheese flavor, one taro crispy rice flavor, one taro crumble flavor, a crunchy cookie topped tiramisu flavor, and a chocolate banana flavor, with a coffee float to drink. Hima’s double order of chocolate cake flavor and Sarada’s single strawberry black sesame would fit just fine on their side.

Despite the volume of food she ate delivered from local eateries, Sarada can’t remember the last time she’d actually sat down in a restaurant. Going out? Fun little trips with friends? Catching up on rumors and news? It’s something she hadn’t done in ages. And with ChoCho at the table, their food had hardly been ordered before the subject turns to gossip.

“You gotta give me the skinny on Inojin,” ChoCho says, one hand propped under her chin, her laser-focused gaze turned onto Himawari. “How’s he doing?”

“I’m surprised you didn’t visit him before coming to see me.” Hima skillfully dodges the question, turning it back onto her friend.

“To be honest, I tried to call him last night, but Aunt Ino said he was asleep. And I stopped by this morning, but he was at some doctor’s appointment.”

“Physical therapy appointment,” Sarada says, correcting her friend without really thinking about it.

Suddenly, a pair of blue eyes and a pair of golden eyes are on her. “ You’ve been visiting Inojin? I thought he was refusing to see anyone other than Hima. I didn’t even know you two were like that anymore.”

“He didn’t mention anything about it to me,” the younger girl is quick to add, less melodramatic than ChoCho had been, but equally curious.

“Oh, no… no…” A ribbon of words spiral out of her mouth, hoping to tie up her flub into a neat bow. “It’s just my mom said something. When we were talking about the chakra injuries and Konohamaru, you know. He’s in physical therapy now. I just assumed…”

“Hm…” Sarada swears that ChoCho is as dangerous as any sensory shinobi when it comes to her ability to sniff out scandal. “Are you sure?”

What would she have done if Himawari hadn’t come to her rescue? “That’s right. He has PT every morning now. That’s why I visit in the afternoons. But, if you’re asking your mom about him, maybe you should try to stop by sometime. I know he’s lonely. Maybe he’d be willing to see someone other than me if it’s not…”

Her eyes dart briefly over to ChoCho, letting Sarada fill in the rest. It’s not that he’s avoiding everyone, but he hadn’t let his team see him, not since the accident. It’s just like Inojin to act all nonchalant when they communicated, like nothing in the world bothered him, while hiding from the other members of Team 10.

“Yeah, I’d like that. It wouldn’t hurt to try, right?” She smiles at the idea, not letting anyone else at the table know that they’d been talking not twenty minutes earlier.

ChoCho turns her attention back to Himawari. “Let loose. What’s up with him?”

“Well…” Hima taps her fingers on the table. “I’m not really sure that I should be discussing his personal medical information without his permission, but… He’s adjusting. Things are getting better. In fact, the Advanced Technology Research Institute is working on some implants that might help manage his chakra flow issues.”

ChoCho lowers her voice, reaching across the table to put a hand on Hima’s nervous fingers. “And he’s okay? Like, really okay? Not just the physical stuff, you know?”

“He’s been working on his art a lot recently. Trying to perfect his style. And he’s been putting a lot of time into his sensory techniques, probably more so than ever before. He says he wants to be good at what he can do.”

“I’m not sure if that sounds like my Inojin,” ChoCho says, letting her hand go. “But at least he has you, right? And you have him. Aunt Ino said you’re over there almost every night.”

Himawari shrugs. “We’re friends.”

“Friends?” ChoCho leans back in the booth, crossing her arms over her chest. “That man ran at a demon tree to save you. He crawled across the ground and wrapped his hand around its gross monster foot for you. He took a meter of wood straight through the chest for you. That’s more than friends.”

“Good friends, then.” Hima gives an assured nod, confident in her response. “We like spending time together.”

“Ah, to be young and in denial.” ChoCho sighs, batting her eyes.

“It’s not like that. You can care about someone a lot and not… You know… Be girlfriend and boyfriend or anything like that.”

“Well, you can’t be if you don’t try. Right, Sarada?”

Sarada shrugs, knowing better than to pick a side in an argument between a thirteen-year old with a demon fox inside of her and ChoCho when she’s on the subject of romance.

ChoCho taps a finger to her chin, eyes looking up at the ceiling as she thinks. “Sarada, do you remember that article we read a few years back in one of my Tiger Teen magazines? What was the title?” ChoCho lights up, the same finger popping into the air. “That’s right. To Find the Right Boy, You Sometimes Need to Kiss the Wrong Boy .”

Sarada rolls her eyes, remembering that exact article and the epic argument that followed between her and ChoCho, the latter arguing that you should kiss as many boys as possible to find your true love while Sarada insisted that romance was unnecessary and distracting… And even if it wasn’t, you should try to kiss the right boy the first time instead of making all manner of mistakes with an errant mouth.

“I remember.”

“Love is life,” ChoCho says, a little too worldly for someone who hadn’t kissed any boys yet, at least as far as Sarada knows. “And to live your life, you need to live your love. Which means doing things. Even if you take a risk and it doesn’t work out, you learned something about yourself and the guy who you kissed.”

“I don’t want to kiss Inojin,” Himawari insists, arms crossed over her chest.

“That’s the point!” ChoCho says, throwing her hands up in the air and alarming the table behind them with her exclamation. “You won’t want to unless you try it. That’s how you find out what you want.”

If it was possible for a little storm cloud, complete with lightning bolts and claps of thunder, to appear over someone’s head, Sarada’s fairly sure Himawari would have manifested one already. “Neither of us feels that way about the other.”

Could Sarada really afford not to step in, saving both of them from one another? As someone who wanted to be Hokage, to bring people together rather than watch them get torn apart. “It sounds like she’s serious, ChoCho. Accept that they’re just friends.”

ChoCho turns to her, mouth agape. “Sarada Uchiha. How can you dash all my dreams and say such a thing? She’s in his bedroom. Every. Day.”

Himawari sulks as their drinks arrive, ChoCho’s coffee float and a pair of grilled marshmallow lattes for the rest of the table. “Why’s that such a big deal?” she asks after the waitress departs. “We’re drawing! With the door open, like Aunt Ino wants. Not like Sarada and Kawaki in his childhood bedroom the other night.”

Sarada can practically see the words pinging back and forth inside ChoCho’d head like the little metal ball inside of a pinball machine. “She what?”

She raises her hands defensively as though a small but terrifying toy poodle is heading her way, ready to latch onto her ankles. “I just had a headache.”

Hima’s a little too eager to make her escape from ChoCho’s line of questioning, even if that involves throwing Sarada under the train. “Why did he lock the door for a headache?”

“ Locked door? ” Again, the patrons behind them turn, glaring at the girl who’d just screeched.

“He didn’t want us to be disturbed—”

“ DO NOT DISTURB???”

“It wasn’t like that—” Sarada looks past ChoCho at the table behind her, who are all now staring at them as well. “It wasn’t like that,” she tells them, too.

“No, no, no. You’re not getting away that easily.” Her friend waggles a finger at her while taking a sip of her confection-like drink. “You and that boy have been playing will-they-or-won’t-they since the Academy. I’m not going to be robbed of this. You’ve always acted cold to him, but we’ve all known you were going to thaw eventually.”

“I’m not thawing!”

She looks at Himawari for support, hoping the girl who pushed her over might be willing to offer her a hand up. “They were in there for a while.”

Traitor .

“Moi heart. I know true love when I see it, Sarada. Like when we used the Thorn Bulb to free Shinki, and he fell into my arms.”

ChoCho sighs dramatically, so lost in her own thoughts that she doesn’t hear Hima mutter under her breath, “Well, why didn’t you kiss him then?”

“We weren’t doing anything!” Sarada glances back and forth between them, hoping either would believe her.

“It’s the first time Kawaki’s actually come into the house in years ,” Hima adds, throwing an entire can of diesel fuel on the flames. “All because she was there.”

If she doesn’t do something and fast, the wildfire that is ChoCho’s gossip is going to spread throughout Konoha until everyone from the old man who runs the ramen shop to the woman who hands out mission scrolls will hear that there’s something going on between Kawaki and Sarada.

“I was crying,” Sarada says. Flatly. Bluntly. The truth dropped onto the table like a fifty-pound leg weight. “That’s what was happening. I saw all his old stuff, from back when…” She clears her throat, vanquishing the burning feeling before it starts. The last thing she needs now is to start crying over Boruto’s bedroom again. “I just got nostalgic. Then, I got a headache. Kawaki is supposed to be monitoring my recovery, so when he saw my shoes, he came in and made me go to bed. That’s it. Are you happy now?”

“Oh, sweetie,” ChoCho says quietly as Himawari places a hand on Sarada’s upper arm.

The pancakes arrive, saving them from additional awkwardness. Surveying the five plates laid out before her, Sarada takes ChoCho’s distraction as an opportunity to wrestle conversational topics away from her old friend, steering them in a much safer direction.

“So, what’s with this promised pancake date, anyway?”

ChoCho pauses, a wedge fluffy purple sprinkled with colorful candies halfway to her mouth. “I told Himawari that she needed to survive against Jura so we could eat here one day.”

“Surviving was all I did,” the younger girl says with a laugh.

“Nope, you’re not allowed to denigrate yourself in front of me. Sarada, you should have seen it. Epic. That’s the only word. The way Himawari busted out of that tree and went at him? I couldn’t be prouder of my little student.”

“I didn’t win,” Hima says around a mouthful of chocolate frosting and pancake.

ChoCho shakes her head. “No one can beat those baddies. We almost got taken out before we could get to Shinki’s tree. One of them showed up and started questioning us like we were criminals, and he was the police. All sorts of stuff about the village and its history and clans. Boring stuff they didn’t even cover in school. Or maybe it’s because I didn’t listen. It’s lucky I just got away with this.” ChoCho touches the bandage on her cheek, the bruising under her eye. “That hunk of tree man could have killed us.”

“Actually, I think Sarada might have killed—”

She’s staring down at her stack of untouched pancakes, the coating of black dust enveloping the surface, the strawberries arranged on its top in a blood-colored starburst.

“Which one?” Sarada asks.

“Hm?” ChoCho cocks her head while chewing a mouthful of pancake.

“Tell me. Which Shinju was it?”

Chapter Text

Standing on the opposite side of the desk is like looking into a cursed mirror, his own likeness 20 years hence reflected back at him. Except Shikadai never harbored any grand dreams of one day becoming Hokage—though he knows his father hadn’t either. The old man’s shoulders sag beneath the weight of the white cape edged with flames, the same one that was given to him on his first day in office, the day after Naruto died. It’d been a rush job. No tailoring, no personalization, no writing on the back. It’s as much a placeholder as he is, a symbolic stand-in for a person worthy of sitting in that chair.

His father—Lord Hokage—just finished his third cigarette since Shikadai walked into the office less than an hour ago after a semi-clean bill of health had been given to him in the hospital that morning. The check up was something his mother insisted on after bringing fresh towels to him in the bath the previous evening and seeing the extensive bruising on his left side as he was taking his shirt off.

You get kicked by a talking tree in need of familial guidance, and see how good you look three days later , was what he thought, but what he said was, “Yes, mother.”

Sakura healed his cracked ribs, wrapped his torso in bandages, gave him three aspirin tablets, and informed him it would have been better if his first stop had been the clinic rather than home. Easy for her to say when she didn’t have sand, iron or otherwise, embedded in every pore and crevice from her ears to down between her toes. And, as team captain, he had a mission report to write, too. The very report his father was rereading yet again, trying to look busy while they waited.

ChoCho had begged out, saying there was an important date she couldn’t miss. Knowing his orange-haired teammate, that could mean anything from training with her father to an all-day marathon of soap operas she’d recorded while on their mission. And Kohan, Inojin’s temporary replacement, had a six-week-old son at home that he was dying to see, especially after what had happened on the mission. Shikadai figured it was his job to face the consequences for the team’s fuck up.

His father’s nicotine-stained fingers reach for the ever-present pack of cigarettes on his desk.

“He’s sure taking his sweet time, isn’t he?”

The question interrupts his father’s search for an additional distraction. Dark eyes with dark circles beneath them look up at his son. “He’s always like this.”

That’s Kawaki for you, unpredictable from the start. Going back to their earliest childhood years, he’d been the most reliable and unreliable person Shikadai had ever known.

Moody. Loyal. Disgruntled. Courageous.

There are those in the village who said he’d changed after his parents died, but Shikadai doesn’t see it like that. It’s true that he cut his friends off, pushed everyone away, stopped laughing and stopped smiling—stopped being all those things that Kawaki once had defined himself by. But to Shikadai, his friend had always been on a forked path, and he’d finally been forced to choose his direction.

Real life had snuck up upon him and slapped him in the face, harder than many others had ever been hit. First Karma, then Momoshiki, Boruto’s betrayal, his parents’ death. Kawaki couldn’t afford to be the aimless boy who once rode on the roof of the Thunder Train with Shikadai. He had to cut away everything that held him down. Otherwise, he’d just be stuck in place with everyone in the village expecting him to be something he wasn’t. How could he pursue his goals of vengeance if everyone saw him only as Naruto’s son?

Looking back, maybe Shikadai hadn’t been the best friend to Kawaki. He chided him for his failings, pushed him to become more serious. He didn’t understand who Kawaki had once been, the son of a war hero, the son of the Hokage. But he understands better than he ever could have imagined now, doesn’t he?

Being the Hokage’s son afforded one many privileges, but it also came with a price.

It isn’t just that his father rarely comes home before dark, sometimes not coming home at all. Or the stress lines on his old man’s face, aging him a decade in three year’s time. Being the Hokage’s son meant you were his reflection trapped in a mirror, able to be seen without any agency of your own. To some villagers, that meant they looked up to him, always obsequious to the point that he’s no longer sure if anyone other than his teammates would tell him if he had toilet paper stuck to the bottom of his shoe. For others, especially business men, it meant cozying up to him, viewing him as a pawn they could play to get closure to the king.

It was perpetually tiring, being perceived as someone else rather than himself, his father’s shadow, attached while insubstantial. But luckily for Shikadai, those from the Nara family know how to thrive in shadows.

Kawaki? His big gray eyes once wide with wonder? Nah, that kid never stood a chance with Naruto looming large in front of him. It’s no wonder he’d become—

The person Kawaki had become pushes open the door with an arm half-covered by a shredded sleeve. His hair is both flat and mussed, thick strands hanging into his face. Knowing his recent habits, the summons to Hokage Tower had probably woken him.

His father finally puts the report down, placing it in front of him.“Nice of you to finally join us,” he says dryly.

Kawaki grunts a greeting as he walks up to the desk to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Shikadai.

Shikamaru folds his hands in front of him, staring Kawaki in the eye. Ever since Naruto died, ever since his master Sasuke left with the boy who murdered his parents, that’s how he interacted with Kawaki, as someone closer to a peer than a subordinate, as though loss was the entryway to adulthood. Somehow, it’s even true when he shows up 12 minutes late to a meeting. “Team 10 just returned from the Sand. Their mission to revive Shinki and save Gaara was successful…”

Kawaki’s reaction to this news is virtually nonexistent. Almost as though he couldn’t give a shit less if every single person in a tree remained trapped for eternity.

“... however, it wasn’t without its complications. When they arrived in the underground cavern, a Shinju was waiting for them—”

“Cut the shit,” Kawaki says, his dark eyebrows drawing down. “Which one was it?”

Anyone other shinobi telling the Hokage to cut the shit might have gotten ejected from his office and assigned D-rank missions until their attitude improved. Instead, Shikamaru sighs, gesturing at Shikadai to pick up where he’d left off.

In none of his memories had Kawaki ever been intimidating. But in his memories, Kawaki hadn’t had a stare that was as sharp and cold as a knifeblade. Back when they’d been friends, he’d been full of bluster—bluster and softness and warmth and light. Now, meeting his gaze felt like getting shoved face-first into a frozen lake.

“It was Hidari. He was guarding the entrance when we approached it.”

He . It still feels weird to give trees genders, to ascribe human characteristics for arboreal beings. As team captain, Shikadai had been the only one in his team to receive all the intel on the Shinju in their mission brief, including their names, origin individuals, and their targets. It wasn’t the sort of information the Hokage’s office wanted spreading through the village just yet.

“We thought he was there to stop us from reviving Shinki, but instead he was holding him hostage, telling us we would only be allowed to pass if we shared intel with him about Konoha. He was more interested in one subject than others.”

Shikadai pauses, glancing at his father for permission to continue on. Shikamaru nods.

“The history of the Uchiha clan,” he says, then swallows. “And Sarada.”

He doesn’t exactly recall which of their Academy peers was the first one to point out that Sarada and Kawaki shared a bond beyond that of normal classmates—probably Mitsuki, as he’d been an outsider, walking into the interpersonal workings of the youth of Konoha with a fresh set of eyes, putting words to dynamics others had watched for so long, they eventually passed as unremarkable.

Three years ago, Kawaki would have puffed up in a defensive huff over someone targeting his teammate. Now, he simply crosses his hands over his chest, a slight flare of the nostrils the only sign that he’d been affected at all. “And what did you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him anything. And neither did ChoCho. But—” And both of them had the bruises to show for it. Kohan had been a different matter, though. Squeezed by his neck after both his teammates had gotten the shit kicked out of them? His toes kicking helplessly off the ground? His vision darkening, life slipping away, probably thinking only of the baby he had waiting at home?

“A sensory ninja who’d been assigned to Team 10 told Hidari everything he knows. As for the Uchiha clan? It wasn’t much. There’s a lot that’s still classified. And he doesn’t know Sarada, either.”

“But he’s a sensory ninja,” Kawaki says, filling in what Shikamaru hadn’t. “He’s probably been assigned to the house a few times. So he knows where she lives. Her behavioral patterns. Where she sleeps—”

“We have no reason to assume he’s going to come after her if he hasn’t already,” Shikamaru says, before Kawaki can get much further. “He’s even been in Konoha since then—”

“At the Uchiha Shrine.”

“We know Jura values Konoha, and he wouldn’t look kindly on his subordinate destroying it, even in the name of consuming his target. He’s left Himawari alone after all. It could be that Hidari has decided to settle for simply learning as much as he can about Sasuke’s past for now.” Shikadai’s father shakes his head, finally giving in to the need for a fourth cigarette. He lights it and inhales as though it’s a breath of fresh air. “But if that means he’s going to be hanging around the village, then we have another problem.”

“Sarada,” Kawaki says.

“What a drag.” Shikamaru sighs, rubbing his forehead. “She can’t find out that he’s around. I don’t know if he’ll be able to resist trying to consume her if they cross paths. And, knowing Sarada, she’d be more than eager for the fight. So far, she’s the best counter we have against the Shinju threat, but not in her current condition. Shikadai?”

“Yes, sir,” he replies, standing a little taller, knowing he was about to receive an order from his commander, not his father.

“I need you to contact all your teammates, and let them know to keep their mouths shut. It’s pretty unlikely one has already run into her this morning and blabbed, but let’s keep it that way. Kawaki, you’re already under orders to oversee her recovery, but now I need you to do more. Don’t let her out of your sight. I’ll work with the hospital to make up an excuse for you to be her escort.”

Kawaki sticks his hands into his pockets, shaking his head. “I don’t think she’s going to like that.”

Few people were able to read his father the way Shikadai could, but hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing Shogi had taught him a few things. Among them was that when his father was bullshitting anyone and knew it, his right eyebrow would arch up. Now, Shikamaru knew this, too, and thus feigned the reaction during a game. But here, in the office, he has no reason to bluff.

“I’ll make sure she listens,” he says.

The eyebrow twitch Shikadai expects fails to come.

Chapter Text

ChoCho had choked—not on her pancakes but on her words.

One moment, she’d been prattling on like the sentient trees were just another piece of village gossip. Then, she looked up at Sarada, mouth still slightly open for a fraction of a second before abruptly slamming it shut, turning the lock, and throwing away the key.

Sarada tried to pry information out of her—something, anything—but every answer her old friend gave was about as enlightening as a blown lightbulb.

His name? Was she supposed to ask for his name?

What he looked like? “A big one,” was all Sarada got.

What did he want to know? She’d been too busy defending her team to pay attention to the details.

It didn’t help that as soon as she began asking questions, ChoCho started shoving forkfuls into her mouth lightning fast so her responses were muffled by pancakes, forcing Sarada to ask her to repeat what she had said multiple times. The less ChoCho gave her, the harder Sarada pushed, a war between fiery will and an immovable object. Meanwhile, Himawari just sat back, eating her meal and watching the back-and-forth as though she was sitting on the bleachers at a football game.

ChoCho left with Himawari the moment their plates were clean, paying for the three of them without informing Sarada that’s what she had done. It was off to the training grounds with the two of them, time to test what Hima had learned in her absence and showcase her new abilities. Sorry, no time for idle chatter!

Sarada hardly had a chance to say goodbye to either of them.

 The interaction is still bothering her now as she walks back from the grocery store, two dozen eggs and some sweet red bean jam in her bag. Was ChoCho being evasive, or had Sarada’s questions been invasive, treating her like a friend when they hadn’t been close for so long? After learning that she’d hurt Sumire, Sarada can’t help dissecting another interaction that feels as though she had missed something, a conversation that had started off fine before veering so far off track. Is this Sarada’s lot in life now, clumsily stomping through conversations with people she cares about, crushing whatever is in the way of her goal?

She frowns, noticing a yellow and black butterfly eating nectar from a potted flowerbush on the sidewalk.

Sarada, can you be free in the next 30 seconds? Inojin asks abruptly, much more business-like than any of their other interactions.

I’m free.

Great. I’m patching Lord Hokage in. Be ready.

Ugh, had Inojin shared her concerns about Kawaki with Shikamaru? After their conversation earlier that day, and Inojin’s rational explanation, bringing it up again seemed silly.

Sarada, you’re there? It’s Shikamaru, his psychic voice lacking the gravely tone of a chronic cigarette smoker. We need to talk.

Sarada leans against the planter, startling the butterfly, who flaps its wings, taking to the sky. Go ahead.

Inojin and I were reviewing the intel you’ve shared so far and, to be honest, it’s nothing we didn’t already know or suspect. I was hoping you would have gotten more out of him by now.

Sarada’s grip tightens on the bag of groceries. Despite the fact that she’s been at odds with the man behind the desk in the Hokage’s Office for the past several years, it still stings to hear that she’s not performing well in her mission. I’m sorry.

Don’t apologize. It isn’t easy to get close to Kawaki. I know what I’m asking for might not be possible. But I’m going to need you to try. I realize now that I didn’t set you up for success, but that ends tomorrow.

The truth is that she has been getting closer to Kawaki, at least in terms of proximity. But sleeping in the same room as him didn’t do much to help her gather intelligence. How could she, when both of them were sleeping most of the time? But it’s Shikamaru’s final word that draws her attention. Tomorrow?

Yes, I’m working with some insiders we have in the hospital. When you go for your check up tomorrow, we’re going to change the terms of your recovery plan to specify that you’re to be under observation while you’re on the mend. You understand where this is going, right?

You’re going to assign Kawaki to be my escort. Sarada swallows. She’d been prepared to investigate Kawaki, to follow him and gather intelligence. But being with him all the time was a different matter, one she didn’t particularly look forward to. But no matter the objections she has, there’s one person who is probably going to like it even less. I don’t think he’s going to like that.

Let me worry about it, Shikamaru responds. Your job is to focus on the mission.

“Let’s get this over with.”

The moment Kawaki pushes his way into Amado’s lab, the old man whips around. His eyes go wide, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from his lips.

It’d been like this since Kawaki had pinned him up against the wall with his scientific ninja tool arm, a weapon Amado had created turned against him. The old man is a coward, but he isn’t enough of a fool to turn his back on Kawaki. Not anymore. Sure, his shutdown code is still in place, but Kawaki could snap the geezer’s neck like a dry twig before its first syllable gets out of his mouth. It’s something they both know, the foundation of the uneasy truce between them. Kawaki needs Amado for power; Amado needs Kawaki to revive his daughter.

Amado adjusts his thick-framed glasses, scrambling to regain his the authoritative edge he’d lost by almost pissing his pants. “You were supposed to check in yesterday.”

“I was busy.”

Just because Kawaki has to tolerate Amado doesn’t mean he’s willing to take any shit from the old bastard. Without waiting for him to get up, Kawaki leaves Amado behind, letting himself into the exam room.

Ever since he’d revealed her to Kawaki, the tank containing the empty body of Akebi, Amado’s daughter, has remained visible. She looks like Delta’s identical twin: a round face, soft features, a mass of shoulder-length blond hair poofing out around her head. She doesn’t look dead exactly. It’s more as though she’s vacant, empty, waiting for Kawaki to put life inside of her through karma. He promised Amado he’d do it in exchange for his upgraded power, just as soon as the Shinju, Code, and Boruto are dead—insurance that the man who’d proved himself a traitor more than once wouldn’t turn on Kawaki as well.

Delta had been one of his tormentors within Kara, a salty bitch with a sassy mouth and a sadistic side, a miserable wretch who thrived on others being miserable as well. Kawaki cared fuck all about Delta. Or he had until Amado brought her to Konoha, rebuilding her piece by piece, rewiring her brain, robbing her of independence and will. Her tongue is still as sharp as ever, but she does whatever she’s told by anyone in Konoha, including the boy she once ordered around.

It made him uncomfortable, watching her going from being one of his enslavers in Kara to being a slave in Konoha. It’s not that she didn’t deserve it—if anyone did, it was Delta. But knowing that her memories and motivations were simply pencil scratch on paper, easily erased and rewritten according to Amado’s whims, left a sour taste in his mouth. 

It’s not his fucking business what happens after Amado revives his daughter. As long as she’s not an Otsutsuki, he’ll be too dead to care.

But Kawaki knows how pissed he’d be if he finally managed to taste the sweet embrace of peaceful death, then some asshole went and dragged him back to the living. And that’s not taking into account how Akebi might feel when she learned that her dad made a clone of her body, dressed her up like a doll, a pretty ninja weapon in a skin tight dress with a plunging neckline and thigh-high boots, and erased her will with the same ease as deleting a computer file. It’s fucked up in a freudian way, just like it’s fucked up that there’s nothing but a thin fabric tube covering her naked body behind the glass.

Kawaki puts his back to her, throwing his coat over a chair before lying down on the exam table.

“I told you these check-ins are important,” Amado grumbles, wheeling a tray of supplies into the room, letting a cart do the work Sumire once had. 

“Then shut up and do it.”

Kawaki stares at the ceiling as Amado finds a vein in his arm, filling test tube after test tube with deep red blood, blood that looks human enough despite being 85% Otsutsuki and teaming with microscopic machines. Each test tube gets placed in a rack, half a dozen vials filled by the time he’s done.

“Seeing that you’re so busy that you couldn’t attend our scheduled appointment,” Amado says. “I’ll analyze these now and contact you with the results once I have them. You’re free to go.”

Kawaki sits up, swinging his legs off the table. “I’m going to stay.”

That’s how Kawaki ends up back in Amado’s main office, one arm thrown back over Sumire’s old chair, his legs spread wide, bored as fuck watching Amado chainsmoke an entire pack and a half to calm his nerves while he bounces back and forth between a microscope and the computer screen.

God, what Kawaki wouldn’t give to steal one of those smokes right now.

“So, what’s going on?” he finally asks once Amado sits down, tapping away at his keyboard with two fingers like a fat-footed chicken doing an awkward little dance.

Amado spins his chair around to face Kawaki, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth. “You’re recovering as expected. Modifying your settings to focus on recovery is helping the nanomachines propagate on their own. In a week or two, I can return your settings to boost your power again, just as I told you before.”

“I need you to make it go faster.”

The old man shakes his head, tutting like a disapproving grandfather. “I can’t do that, and you know it. If I’d taken more equipment from my lab in Kara, I would have been able to create more artificially, but I never expected a mass dieoff like this to happen. Even if I had the funds to rebuild another machine, your body is going to regenerate them faster than I can make it.”

“And what if I use my powers anyway?” he demands.

“Your ability to heal is reduced due to the lack of nanomachines. If you divert them to modifying your soft tissues in battle, it’s going to leave you even more vulnerable. And while you still have your Karma, it’s the scientific ninja tools inside of you that assist your body in handling the stress of its use.”

“So, I can use them. There are just consequences.”

Amado takes a drag of his cigarette, staring at Kawaki as though he’s a medical mystery in need of solving. “This doesn’t have anything to do with your recent association with the Uchiha girl, does it? You want to protect her.”

“You leave Sarada out of this, you shithead.” The very fact that Amado is even aware that he’s been spending more time with Sarada is sickening. The old bastard manages to get his nose into everything despite never leaving his stupid lab, but knowing too much about Kawaki is one thing. Amado had already fucked his life up beyond repair, that’s in the past. But for him to be digging into Sarada is something else entirely. 

 “I didn’t expect this kind of emotional reaction from you, Kawaki.” Amado exhales, a cloud of smoke ringing his head. “It’s out of character.”

It’s not emotional, his need for Sarada. It’s pure practicality. The only way he’ll be able to die easily is knowing that she will live. Kawaki stands, grabbing his coat. “Stay the fuck way from her, or I’ll kill you.”

“Understood.” Knowing not to push his luck, Amado turns back to his screen. “But just so you know, if you push yourself beyond your limits now, you won’t be able to protect either her or Lord Seventh. Remember that when the time comes.”

Chapter Text

Shikamaru’s plan had been for Kawaki to arrive at the clinic to meet Sarada as soon as her exam was over to take up his fabricated escort duties. But who’d have expected that fucking girl to go to the hospital at eight-thirty in the goddamn morning, giving Kawaki the pleasure of waking up to Inojin’s whiny voice telling him to get his ass out of bed.

The pasty kid had been brought on as a sensory shinobi after his injury, probably a pity hire after Jura’s attack fucked him up so bad that he couldn’t stand for any useful length of time. At least that’s what Kawaki figured after having Inojin intrude into his head on occasion with orders from Shikamaru.

Ah, good old fashioned Konoha nepotism at its best.

He might resent it more if Inojin hadn’t been the only thing that stopped Himawari from becoming tree fertilizer for Jura. Kawaki would offer up all the arms and legs of every member of Team 10 if it meant keeping Lord Seventh’s daughter safe.

He fights to get into his clothes from the day before while getting briefed on her medical status.

So, Shikamaru did sent orders over to alter her recovery plan to include an escort, but it turns out that there’s still some optic neuritis visible upon examination—

What the fuck is that? Kawaki asks, pulling his shirt over his head in the still-dark room.

Do I sound like a medical professional? I think it’s swelling of her optic nerve, but I’m not entirely sure. They expected it to decrease by now with her not using her Sharingan. It’s a bad sign that it hasn’t.

Not using her Sharingan.

Right. Like she hadn’t used it the day she’d tailed him to the training session with Himawari. Like it hadn’t activated again when she’d stupidly gone to Boruto’s bedroom, getting herself worked up for no reason over some old pictures and a bed that he’d be too fucking tall to sleep in now.

Anyway, Inojin continues, Aunt Sakura was debating putting her on steroids, but there’s no good data on how they’ll affect a doujutsu user when the source of inflammation is chakra. When Sakura noticed the updates Lord Hokage had inserted into her medical record, suggesting Sarada have an escort to monitor her Sharingan use, she decided it was worth a try before embarking on an untested treatment. You’ll have to bring her back in two days for another exam to see how it’s progressing.

So, the fake excuse he had for following her around to protect her from Hidari had turned into an actual issue once a doctor had gotten a look at her? It’s too fucking much for him to digest when it’s this early and he’s turning his pants right side out, the tight pain in his hand reminding him of his knuckles, still battered and busted from the day before. Kawaki sighs. What do I actually have to do?

Showing up on time would have been a good start, but you’re late, and she’s pissed that she’s been ordered to wait for you. Apparently, there’s something Eida wanted to do today, and you being late is making her late.

She’d be pissed anyway.

Inojin gives him a thoughtful hum. You know, she didn’t argue as much as she might have, but you’ve definitely started off on the wrong foot now. Guess that’s what happens when you can’t get out of bed at a decent hour. You’re just lucky the tests took so long.

Nine-thirty in the morning isn’t a decent hour. That’s the whole problem. He shakes the wrinkles out of his coat before shrugging it on. Anything else I need to know?

That’s it. Just keep her away from Hidari, and stop her from using her Sharingan. If you have any problems, Lord Hokage wants to hear about them.

“Are you sure you don’t want to do something about your knuckles? We can go back to the clinic to have them healed. I’m sure it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

Two minutes ago, she’d been ready to bite his head off because waiting for him was making her late, but it had only taken her noticing his swollen hands to derail one nuisance and replace it with another. 

Sarada cranes her head to the side while they walk, trying to get a better look at his hands. It’s possible that he preferred her when all she gave him was laser-like glares and harsh words and the sound of her sandals stomping away. The Sarada that had come back from the Sand was changed, like the blinders had been taken off her eyes, and she is finally able to see more around her, much to his annoyance. “Let it go. And stop fucking staring. It’s weird.”

She turns her head forward, but not before he catches her rolling her eyes. “Whatever. Maybe be a little more careful when training. They look painful,” she mutters, making sure he can’t have the last word.

Training. That’s what he told her.

He looks down at his swollen knuckles, each of them a puffy pink bump twice their usual size, purple-blue bruises mottling the backs of his hands, stretching all the way to his wrist.

They are painful, but Kawaki isn’t about to bother healing something stupid that was his fault alone, not thinking about his delayed healing when he’d done it.

Yesterday’s conversation with Amado had gotten him good and pissed off. But he couldn’t beat the old man to a pulp, being that he needed him for power and Dr. Katasuke would be sure to raise a stink with the Hokage if his favorite scientific genius ended up in traction. But Kawaki couldn’t do nothing either, not when Amado fucked with his head like that, making him feel like a trapped rat in a cage, delivering to him a series of little treats and electric shocks, monitoring his every reaction to figure out what would make him squirm the most. Even worse, Kawaki did squirm when the old fuck brought up Sarada, giving the bastard one more data point to use against him and bringing her under closer scrutiny.

So, he’d done the thing he hated to do, gone to the place he hated to be, the only place where he could be truly alone, even if he loathed it. When he first discovered Daikokuten, it had felt as though the dimension had answered his every wish: a place away from all others, a hidden space in which no one could ever find him, something that belonged to Kawaki and Kawaki alone, something that could never be taken from him.

But as soon as he started spending time there, he realized his new-found place of refuge was its own special hell. Sleep let him live without living, progressing his days forward with as little awareness as possible of the hours that went by. Daikokuten was the opposite of that, a place where time stood still while Kawaki was in it, a place he’d enter into and emerge, the world outside being just as fucked up and rotten as ever without even a second passing for the hours he spent there.

He hated it.

And even if he made sure to check in on Lord Seventh and his wife every day, he spends as little time there as possible. Except those rare occasions when he needed to be truly and utterly alone, where no one could see him. No one.

Yesterday had been one of those times when he didn’t want anyone asking questions as to why he felt the need to start punching and not stop until his knuckles were bloody and raw. There was just the sound of his harsh breaths, the thwack of his fists against one of Isshiki’s blocks, the pain that started sharp and spread, turning into a numbing hurt that extended from his knuckles, up his hands, into his arms. But he didn’t stop until his whole body felt the same way, his mind, too. Exhausted, tired, bleeding, aching, and feeling nothing but a hot, raw physical pain that beat back the threat of feeling anything else at all.

It’s not the first time he’s done it, but it’s the first time his knuckles looked like uncooked hamburger steak when he was finished, the first time evidence remained the next day.

Ugh, does he really want someone other than Sarada noticing them? Someone who they’re on their way to meet? Someone with long blue hair and all-seeing eyes who might look back and mention her inability to see when and how he’d hurt himself?

“Don’t you know how to use medical ninjutsu?”

Sarada scoffs, brushing the bangs out of her eyes as they continue walking. “I suck at it.”

“Which means you can.” He stops her by putting his arm out, the back of his hand facing her. “Do it.”

She stops abruptly, glaring at his hand, then at his face. “I told you I’m not good at it.”

“I don’t care. Just do it.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Do it,” he says, firmer this time. Not that firm works with Sarada, but in his experience, nothing else does, either. “I don’t give a shit if it hurts as long as they look normal, so busybodies like you will mind their own fucking business.”

“I meant that I can’t do it here .” Sarada huffs, looking around. They’d just entered the shopping district, glass storefronts and colorful advertisements all around. By midmorning, a few dozen people are walking between shops or running late for work, enough that they’d be in the way if they just stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Her eyes finally land on a seating area outside a little bistro, a sign in their window indicating that the establishment is still closed. “Come on.”

It’s not long until he’s seated across from her, a tiny metal table between them. It takes a bit of adjusting to make sure their knees aren’t touching beneath it.

Sarada pushes her glasses farther up her nose and takes a steadying breath. “Okay, one at a time.” She holds out her hand palm-up, waiting for his. Kawaki accepts her offer, her delicate fingers and fine bones swallowed up by his much larger hand like an ogre eating a princess. The blue-green glow of medical ninjutsu appears in her opposite hand. Soon, he finds his bruised knuckles sandwiched between her warm skin, one hand below and one atop.

Sarada closes her eyes, her face scrunched up in concentration. The cooling tingle of medical ninjutsu penetrates his flesh, somehow not taking anything away from the warmth of her hands on his.

“Were you punching a rock or something stupid like that?” she asks, exploring the extent of the damage, making sure his bones are all intact.

“Shut your mouth and focus on what you’re doing.”

It’s not often that he gets to be this close to Sarada without her yelling in his face. When he first met her, she was so dorky and earnest, running around in a pair of thick-framed glasses and a dumb little scarf around her neck like she was the lone member of a Future Hokages of Konoha club. Somehow, that was better than whatever is going on with her now, the stupid jacket that looked like Boruto’s coat, the chunky earrings, the gross little dog collar that she probably thought was edgy or something, not realizing that the only reason to wear one was if you thought someone was going to lead you around or force you down on all fours and make you bark. His eyes stop just short of her shoulders, sticking determinedly to her face.

Whether she’s good at medical ninjutsu or not, he can feel it working even if he can’t see it, the tightness beneath his skin diminishing. “Stop it.” One dark eye opens to glare at him when he tries to flex his fingers. “I’m almost done with this one.”

When she’s done, they start on his second hand, Sarada once again closing her eyes. “I guess this isn’t your dominant hand,” she says, exploring the extent of the damage. “When you train, you should focus on using them equally in battle.”

“I don’t recall you being in charge of me.” He rests his chin on his now-healed hand, bored as she works on the other.

“Just because you’re my captain doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take some advice—Huh, that’s interesting.” Her facial muscles, previously tense, soften.

He waits a few seconds for an explanation, then demands one. “What?”

“I can see the nanomachines in your blood,” she says, curiosity washing away her concentration. “I saw them on the other hand, too. They swarming the area that I was healing before, and they’re doing it again. It’s like they’re attracted to the chakra or something.”

Maybe Amado designed them to work in tandem with medical ninjutsu, or maybe he’d ripped off some shinobi research when developing them. “I don’t know anything about them.”

“They’re in your body. Maybe you should.”

He hates that snooty edge she gets to her voice when she thinks that she knows better, as though life was fair and all things could be easily explained or rectified by writing a letter to the correct official.

“Look, I didn’t ask for them to be put there. I didn’t ask for any of my shit to be done to my body. I don’t know why the fuck it was done. Maybe it was to make me a stronger vessel for Jigen. Or to help me protect myself so I survived. Or maybe he wanted to inherit a body with integrated scientific ninja tools. But none of it belongs to me. It’s not like I signed up for it and was handed a goddamned user manual.”

“Sorry,” Sarada mumbles, but it lacks sarcasm. A sincere apology. The only other time he’d gotten one out of her in recent memory was when she dumped scalding coffee on his crotch.

“It’s fine.”

A few more minutes and she pulls away, taking the coolness of her chakra and the warmth of her skin with her, leaving his hand cold and empty. She opens her eyes, blinking at the light. “That’s it.”

Kawaki stretches and closes his fingers, feeling nothing out of the ordinary. His skin is back to its normal shade, his knuckles their usual size. As always, she’d been full of shit when she said she’s bad at something. “Thank you.”

Sarada gets up, chuckling to herself as though there’s a secret joke he’s not in on.

“What?”

“Nothing!” she says as she starts walking again.

It takes a moment for Kawaki to stand and catch up with her “What is it?”

Sarada shakes her head, trying to fight back a guilty smile. “You’re not going to thank me when you find out what we’re doing next.”

Chapter Text

Kawaki isn’t sure what he hates the most.

The bop of girly techno pop music pouring out from the speakers in the ceiling, as tasteless and tacky as chewed bubble gum?

The faceless female mannequins all around, their uniform bodies pale and white, their gothic-chic outfits black, like an army of Claw Grime cover girls dressed up to go clubbing?

The boutique attendants with stars in their eyes, dashing in and out of the changing room on Eida’s orders, or the gawks of girls with their faces pressed up against the big front window to get a look at the deceased Hokage’s son?

The forest green walls, the candy pink couch he’s seated on, or the tri-fold floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the other side of the room, lined with round light bulbs?

Kawaki had done a lot of bad things in his life, mostly out of necessity. And he still had more trespasses to commit before dying for his transgressions.  But he can’t imagine what grievous wrong he’d done to deserve this .

Daemon must have heard his beleaguered sigh. The green-haired kid glances up from his comic book, his green-gold eyes narrowing in annoyance. “You made her late, numbnuts. How do you think I feel?”

If someone would have asked him yesterday if he thought he’d ever feel sympathy for Daemon, this answer would have been a flat-out, unequivocal, no, are you fucking stupid? but Kawaki supposes there’s a first time for everything. If this is what the poor kid had to do every time Eida got it into her head to drag the other girls out on a shopping trip, then he’s made of stronger stuff than Kawaki.

Either that or Daemon is as devoted to his sister as he is to Lord Seventh.

Both guardians had come to the same conclusion: if they wanted to keep an eye on the entryway to the changing rooms and the front door, they had to occupy the one couch that provided a line of sight to both locations, and, thus, had been stuck sitting side-by-side for the past half hour. As much as Kawaki hates reading, he’s starting to get a little jealous of Daemon for having brought something to distract himself.

A flutter of attendants burst out of the hall leading to the changing rooms, each of them squeaking and squawking praise at Eida. As worked up as they are by her, Eida had been equally flustered when Kawaki had arrived with Sarada, her cheeks turning fiery pink to see him willingly entering a space with her outside of the house they shared. When he flopped down on the couch, one arm thrown over the back and knees spread wide, accepting his fate as part of his mission to protect Sarada, Eida had stuttered something incoherent before hiding her face behind her hands and disappearing into the back.

Had it taken that long to try something on or had some of that time been spent getting herself under control?

Now that Kawaki looks at Eida again, whatever she’s wearing isn’t particularly different than what she’d had on when he walked in. If he’d paid more attention, he might think that she hadn’t bothered to change her clothing at all. But what’s the point of a shopping trip if you’re going to buy clothes that are identical to what you already have on?

Whatever. Not his problem.

He glances over to the door, the window still packed with girls, just double checking to make sure none of them are Hidari. At this point, he almost might welcome an unannounced visit from one of the Shinju if it means getting his ass out of there.

No such luck, unfortunately. 

Kawaki groans, turning back to the parade of young women in black pants and black vests chattering at Eida as she strides over to the mirror. When one of the taller girls steps to the side, he finally sees Sarada folded into the crowd, wearing what he can only describe as a striped tube sock with sleeves. It’s gray and black, the collar folded down like  giant cuff to reveal her bare shoulders, slim neck, that stupid fucking dog collar. Her usual legwarmers are gone, in their place a pair of tall black stockings.

Eida grabs Sarada’s shoulders, placing her in front of the mirror. Like a life-sized doll, Eida poses her, one hand on her hip, the other hanging casually at her side. “What the hell,” Kawaki mutters.

“Don’t say anything,” Daemon mutters back, his mouth hidden behind his comic book. “Big sis worked really hard to pick out stuff she thought Sarada would like. She spent days looking at different styles, colors, calling shops all around town to see what they had in stock. If you ruin this for her, I’ll ruin yer face.”

Sarada likes looking like a sock?

Directed by Eida’s hands, she turns this way and that in front of the mirror, checking her outfit at different angles. When Sarada is usually with Eida, she has a tense, nervous grimace that she thinks the other girl will mistake for a natural smile. It’s only because Eida is blind (rather than due to acting abilities) that she hadn’t discovered that Sarada and Sumire were able to escape her captivation somehow. But there’s a small, natural smile on her face now as Eida points out the thumb-holes in the too-long sleeves.

“That looks impractical,” he whispers under his breath. Her usual little black romper was bad enough, but at least it had shorts. How is she supposed to kick a Claw Grime in the face while wearing a dress that’s short enough that he’d look away if she dropped a kunai and had to bend over to pick it up?

“Not everything has to be practical,” says the boy wearing a hoodie with long, floppy rabbit ears.

Kawaki crosses his arms, sinking deeper into the couch as Eida ushers Sarada back to the changing room, the boutique’s employees flocking after her. “I don’t like it.”

“Good thing it’s not for you,” Daemon bites back.

Eida follows after the crowd, but lingers for a moment in the doorway, glancing back over her shoulder to look at Kawaki, running a hand through her long blue hair while staring into his eyes.

Kawaki turns his head back to the glass windows again, making sure she knows he’s ignoring her. He doesn’t know how long it takes her to get the message, but when he looks back, she’s gone.

“Would it kill ya not to be an asshole?” the little shit by his side asks. “You know she’s crazy about you.”

More like just plain crazy , he thinks, but he keeps it to himself. Better not to antagonize Daemon in a public place where the Hokage’s office would have to pay for damages if a smartass remark turned into a brawl.

Kawaki studies the textured ceiling, the recessed lighting, the sparse rows of clothing hanging from gold racks, each detail leaving him more bored than he had been a moment earlier, but anything to pass the time is better than just sitting there.

Maybe he should take up smoking for real. Then, he’d have an excuse to step outside.

The thought hardly passes into his head when the loud clamour of excited girls spills forth once more.

“It’s one of our exclusive designs!” an attendant says to Eida as they walk forward, Sarada following behind in what looks like a baggy gray potato sack from the rear.

Kawaki glances over at Daemon skeptically.

“Just wait,” the kid says without looking up.

The reflection of Sarada’s face in the mirror is a mix of confusion and befuddlement, head cocked to the side as she gets her first glimpse of the outfit.

But in a flash, Eida turns her away from her reflection. She tightens the laces of the twin ties on either side of her torso, adjusting the neckline so it hangs off one shoulder in the same manner as her jacket, reminding Kawaki of how she looks in his oversized shirt when she’s asleep. She takes off Sarada’s necklace, too, plucks off her earrings, rolls one of her stockings down to give her lower half a matching asymmetrical look. A little more preening and posing, then she turns Sarada back to the mirror, letting both her and Kawaki have a second look at the dress.

It’s longer than the one she tried on before, but a series of strategically torn holes in the skirt provide flashes of her upper thighs above where her stockings end. The neckline similarly distressed with little rips. He’s used to seeing her in just black or red, but there’s something about the familiar gray color softens and suits her.

His eyes glide up her sides, noticing that the laces had been tightened in such a way to create curves on Sarada’s usually unremarkable body. Maybe it’s just the fabric and how it falls, the swell at the top, the smooth plane of her torso, the flare of the skirts when it hits her hips. For a second, his eyes go from Sarada’s reflection to her actual body, what she looks like from behind. He starts at the nape of her neck, following its length to her bare shoulder, skimming over her back, her visible shoulder blade, to where the dress begins, down and further down still, wishing he could return the dress to a potato-sack by the time he gets to its hem, wishing he would have never looked at all, wishing he didn’t like the shape of it on her.

Daemon clears his throat. Loudly.

Kawaki looks over at him, briefly thankful for the distraction until the slightest jerk of the kid’s head directs him to where Eida stands off to the side, watching him watch Sarada. If there had been a look of hurt in her eyes, it’s fading fast to something cold and hard.

“I like it,” Sarada says, beaming at the attendant who’d told them about the dress.

Eida grabs Sarada by the wrist, hauling her in the direction of the changing rooms. “I have something better that you’ll really love. Come.”

Once they’re alone, Daemon closes his comic book. “Well, you screwed that up, you big moron. Don’t you know how to check out a girl without anyone noticing?”

Kawaki leans his head back to stare up at the ceiling “I was just looking at the dumb dress. What’s the point, anyway? It’s not like she has any reason to wear something like that.”

“I already told you it ain’t about you,” the kid snaps.

“Girls are stupid and like to look pretty for no reason, I guess.”

A moment later, a rolled up comic books smacks Kawaki right across the nose. “Your elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor, does it?

Kawaki puts his hand up, blocking a second strike while also trying to calm his mind, lest he think about impaling Daemon and gets stabbed through his gut instead. “What the hell are you talking about?”

At some point, Daemon had stood up on the couch beside him and is now glaring down at Kawaki. “Do you think big sis would go to all this trouble for nothing? You don’t get her at all!”

He doesn’t want to understand her. But with the comic book in hand and Daemon’s position, he’s sure to get smacked across the face again if he says it. “What’s the point, then?”

Daemon leans forward, getting into Kawaki’s face. “It’s for Boruto, idiot. Eida wants to make sure Sarada looks her best next time they see each other. Because she loves him, ya know? She’s gonna have to tell him sooner or later. And she should be real pretty when she does it, don’t you think?”

Yet again, it’s Boruto. It’s always fucking Boruto. He’s stuck spending his day watching girls try on dresses, getting himself in trouble, because Boruto exists. “Why does Eida give a shit about that?”

Daemon brandishes the rolled-up comic book in Kawaki’s face. “For one thing, it’s because she can’t do it for you , you lunk head. She’s been spending literal years longing for you to so much as invite her out for a coffee, but you can’t pull your head out of your ass long enough to take her out—”

Kawaki maneuvers out of the way before he gets hit again. “That’s not something that’s ever going to happen.”

Daemon rolls his eyes, hands on his hips. “Sarada actually has a chance to get a guy to like her back, and Eida wants to watch her do it. She’s taking notes, ya know? But that starts with setting her girl up for success.”

“So, she’s dressing her up for Boruto?”

“Your brain and a turtle have a lot in common. Slow and shelled, but you’ll get to the finish line in the end. Now, don’t you dare upset her again, or we’ll have a real problem.” With that, Daemon plops back down, smoothes out the edges of his comic book, and flips through to find the page he’d been on.

Fine, if looking was what got him into trouble, he just won’t look this time. Problem solved, issue eliminated.

Assuming Daemon has the changing rooms covered, Kawaki turns his face toward the front door, resting his chin on his hand. When the gaggle of girls comes pouring out yet again, followed by an audible cloud of chittering and chattering, his eyes stay glued on the windows where an entirely different crowd of village girls are watching him like a caged animal in a fancy zoo. He refuses to turn his head when he hears Sarada’s surprised gasp, followed by an “ooooooo.” Whatever it is, it ain’t his business to know.

“Does this have pockets?” Sarada gasps at yet another discovery.

“Hold on, let’s swap that belt out for yours! And your earrings, too. Do you have any scarves?” There’s a bit more commotion as one of the attendants rushes to the back, retrieving the requested items, then more gushing and gabbing once she gets them on.

Good. The sooner the girls find something they like, the sooner he can get out of here.

“Hey, Kawaki.”

Fuuuuuuck, no. He doesn’t care if it is Sarada. His eyes have been put on notice. “What?” he mutters at the window.

“Doesn’t this look kinda familiar?” she asks, the sound of her shoes against the floor bringing her closer.

There’s no getting out of it, is there?

Without moving his head, he glances over.

So that’s what she means.

The dress itself is a bit sporty, the whisper of a sleeve covering her shoulders, notched collar around her neck. There’s two pockets he can see on the front, probably more near her waist. It’s short, but not as short as the first one. Despite wearing her usual red belt, the likeness between this dress and the one she wore as a genin is inescapable, though fitted to her current figure. Black instead of red, a higher neckline that wouldn’t need another layer worn beneath. Eida had even found a red and white striped scarf somewhere in the boutique and tied it around her neck, a perfect accessory to match her earrings. He couldn’t imagine anything that would appeal to Boruto more.

At least the dog collar is gone.

He’s about to mumble a noncommittal it’s fine just to get the ordeal over with when he notices that the pull on her zipper is also a circle, just like the one on the choker she usually wears. And the zipper itself… Well, it goes straight from the collar to the hem, like one cleverly hooked finger from an eager blonde could catch it and pull, going from top to bottom in a flash, stripping her bare in one smooth motion.

He looks up at Sarada’s face eagerly awaiting an answer, over at Eida who is waiting as well, her arms crossed, one irritated finger tapping on her arm as she watches them. Kawaki’s eyes return to the safety of the window, his lips remaining shut.

Chapter Text

Wherever Sarada goes, he has to follow.

That’s how Kawaki finds himself lounging beneath a tree in the late afternoon, watching her toss shuriken after shuriken at a wooden target. How many had she thrown in her lifetime? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Seems pointless, the same thing done over and over, perfecting a skill that is already perfect. Why waste time training with stupid ninja tools when all the power she needs resides within her eyes?

Not that he’s complaining.

The sun is warm, the grass soft. If he’d just lean back and close his eyes, he’s sure he could fall asleep to the thunk of metal striking wood and the accompanying little grunts every time she lets one fly. If only he could just stop watching Sarada’s back, the fan-shaped Uchiha crest embroidered onto her red dress, her black fingerless gloves, the flashes of steel in her hands.

This serenity, it’s Lord Seventh’s Konoha, a place where even someone like him could be perfectly at peace.

Is there something so wrong with wanting peace?

Kawaki closes his eyes, leaning his head back against the trunk of the leafless sickly gray tree behind him.

What if he could just let everything go? His stupid mission from Shikamaru? His need to ensure Sarada’s survival? The conviction that he needs to kill his brother? All of his fear, all of his hate, all of his love?

What if it could just be gone, and he could sleep forever?

A primal scream rips him away from his delusions, a scream of outrage, of vengeance, of bloodthirst, of love. A scream that resonates with the scratched-open scabs on his own heart.

Kawaki’s eyes shoot open, and the first thing he sees is what’s directly above him: the slack face of Lord Seventh protruding from the tree, his closed eyes, expressionless features, looking just as he does in daikokuten but encased in bark.

A second scream reminds him of Sarada, and he forgets all about Lord Seventh.

She’s still standing where he’d last seen her, a single kunai raised between her and Hidari’s approach. Black claw marks riddle the ground around them. The Shinju bearing her father’s face approaches in slow, lumbering steps, and Sarada fails to move, no different from when she’d stood between him and Boruto, ready to die for her ideals rather than live in spite of them.

Instinctively, he wants to put himself between Sarada and the threat he’d been ordered to protect her from. But the moment he gets off the ground, he’s thwarted by the gnarled roots that had grown out of the soil, twisting around his legs, growing up and around his body like coiling snakes, hugging him against the tree. When he opens his mouth to yell, yet another root stuffs itself into his mouth like a wooden gag.

How can she not be moving? Either running away or fighting back or doing anything other than holding her ground, teeth gritted, blade in hand. It’d be comical if he didn’t give a shit what happens to her, this little girl in high heels and a yellow scarf glaring at a monster as though looks alone could kill it.

Of course, they can’t.

Hidari stops in front of her, staring down with expressionless features and hypnotic purple eyes, and all Sarada does is raise her kunai, oblivious to the wooden protrusions branching off the monster’s arms, disappearing into the claw marks beneath him. They emerge behind Sarada, thick bark with jagged edges, grabbing onto her legs, spreading up her body, like a tree growing around her with Sarada at its core.

Kawaki fights against the roots holding him back, straining and struggling, his screams trapped inside his mouth. But all he can do is watch as the bark rises up around her, devouring Sarada, swallowing her whole like a giant mouth sent straight from hell. The last he sees of her is a flash of red from her glasses before she’s gone, the barren canopy of a tree spreading out above where she had once stood. A single black leaf emerges from a low branch…

No, not a leaf.

A fruit, dark and bulbous. It grows exponentially, widening at the bottom, plumping up like a fat fig, growing larger still, lobes forming as it expands, spikes protruding from its bottom. Only when it’s fully formed does the single eye-like rinnegan at the bottom of the Thorn Bulb blink open.

Hidari grabs it, his fingers digging into its soft flesh as he squeezes it, testing its ripeness. With a twist, he rips it from its stem and raises it to his open mouth. The juice that leaks out when he bites into it is the color of blood and just as thick. It runs down his pale chin as he devours her. Kawaki is forced to watch the Shinju feast on all the life that was in Sarada, chewing and swallowing, destroying the bulb between his teeth, the one thing that might have saved her, that might have gotten her out alive.

And Kawaki is powerless to stop him. He goes slack, watching Hidari lick the last traces of Sarada from his thumb with a tongue the color of wood ash.

It might have been nice if he’d woken up then, but mercy is reserved for those more deserving.

Even before Hidari is done smacking his lips, his body starts to change, the loose clothes surrounding him unfurling like studded banners, then spiraling around him, wrapping him up like a cocoon until there’s nothing to see but a humanoid body covered in black. The newly-formed pod bulges, its insides metamorphizing, rippling, expanding, contracting, pulsing. Kawaki watches as Hidari is broken down and reformed, evolution destroying and reshaping him into something even more deadly, even more dangerous.

When the person-sized pod stops rippling, one long studded belt appears, running from top to bottom like a zipper, and through it, a new Shinju emerges.

He hadn’t realized he’d been dreaming of twelve-year-old Sarada until her Shinju steps out, as tall as she is now and just as grown. The black clothes hanging from her body remind him of the last dress she’d tried on earlier that day, the one he imagined Boruto peeling off of her. She looks like a flower whose petals are just starting to open, a bare-shouldered Shinju Sarada at its center like a pistil waiting for pollen.

She walks towards him, her feet like cloven hooves with tiny stiletto heels made of pinky fingers, one long leg crossing in front of the other, bringing her closer and closer until she’s standing right in front of him, staring with ringed purple eyes that need no glasses.

A smile spreads on her soft features, sick and sadistic, just like the times Momoshiki had stolen Boruto’s face. Her tongue emerges, licking her lips slowly, deliberately, hungrily. 

“Otsutsuki,” she purrs.

She’d woken up the first time he screamed, fighting and kicking against the comforter as though it was holding him down. The only light in the room came from the clock beside his bed, a red glow letting her know it’s just after 3am. In pitch black, she’d heard him hyperventilating, struggling, sobbing, fighting against something unseen like it was the end of the world.

But Kawaki had told Sarada not to wake him. Never to wake him. It was one of the few things he’d asked of her before letting her stay in his room. And, so, all she was able to do was listen until he shot up in bed, gasping for air, a desperate hand shooting out to the table next to him, accidentally knocking down the clock in a mad quest to turn on the bedside lamp.

Even though it’s not that bright, the light stings her eyes when he manages to turn it on. Sarada had put on her glasses when she first awoke, unsure what she was hearing and prepared for anything.

Or so she’d thought until she realizes what she’s facing is Kawaki, sitting straight up in bed, a white tank top clinging to his sweat-soaked skin, his hands fisted in the comforter. She’d seen him like this once before, years ago in the Yamanaka flower shop, sweat beaded on his face, breath coming in short pants, his usually cold eyes wide with terror.

She hadn’t known that was an emotion he was capable of feeling these days.

Lord Seventh had been able to calm him then with assuring words and a protective embrace, but all Sarada can do in that moment is clutch the blanket around her a little tighter and ask, “Are you okay?”

The way he jumps, it’s as though he’d forgotten she’d been staying in his room at night. Kawaki stares at Sarada, his mouth half-open, almost as though he doesn’t believe she’s actually there. It takes a deep breath for him to get ahold of himself, to wrestle back in whatever emotion had managed to leak out, but after a moment, his stoic facade rebuilds itself. “It was just a stupid dream.”

“Do you… do you want to talk about it?” she asks as he swings his legs out of bed, groaning while running a hand over his face.

“Fuck, no.” Kawaki stands, pushing the limp, damp hair out of his face.

“It might help.” Naruto had been able to soothe Kawaki before. It’s something she’d like to be able to do now, too, even if it’s a little too late.

He shakes his head, walking over to the table on the opposite side of his bed and pulling open the drawer, retrieving his black tin of cigarettes. “It won’t.”

Sarada can’t help but feel useless as he pockets the cigarette and lighter before grabbing a towel and a change of clothes, tucking them under his arm for what she assumes is going to be a post-smoke shower. She starts to push back the blanket, determined to come with him. Even if he doesn’t want to talk about it, he shouldn’t be alone, but Kawaki stops her.

“If you wanna do something for me, stay right where you are,” he says, not really looking at her. Not directly, at least. “Go back to sleep.”

Before she can argue, he switches off the light and leaves Sarada alone in the dark.

Chapter Text

“Hey, wake up.”

The sound of Kawaki’s voice telling anyone else to wake up is so hypocritical that Sarada decides it has to be a dream. She pulls the blanket tighter around herself, burying her face in the back of the chair to block out the light.

“Get. Up.”

“Go away.”

It couldn’t have been more than an hour ago that she finally fell back to sleep, though the details of why she’d been awake in the middle of the night are still a bit fuzzy. Her cramped little nest is cozy, and the moment she stands up and straightens, her neck is going to raise hell about her awkward sleeping position yet again.

Sarada gasps when her warmth is ripped away, the chilly air in the room a rude awakening. The blurry shape of Kawaki throws the balled-up blanket onto the floor. He’s glaring down at her, fully dressed in a baggy shirt and sagging pants, his ripped white jacket hanging over his arm.

Kawaki? Awake?

If she overslept and Eida is already waiting for breakfast…

She scrambles for her glasses, sticking them on her nose to get a look at the clock on the other side of the room next to the lamp.

5:31? In the morning?

She looks back at Kawaki, open-mouthed, but he’s already shrugging into his jacket, heading for the door. “We leave in ten minutes. Get dressed.”

Ten minutes turned out to be not enough time.

In her opinion, getting downstairs and into her mission gear in five minutes should have earned her a gold medal, even if she left her usual earrings and choker behind. But she has to stop and pee, all the while coordinating with the Sensory Unit to have a delivery of bacon egg and cheese pastries arriving from Eida’s favorite bakery at 8am, plus drinks from a trendy coffee place. Sure, Eida and Daemon should be able to fend for themselves, but Sarada needs to constantly maintain the illusion that the enchantress is the most important person in her life, no matter what else is going on.

Kawaki is downing a second can of iced coffee by the time she gets to the door, then doubles back to the kitchen to grab two aspirin tablets from their shared medicine supply. By the time she’s putting on her shoes, it’s 5:43.

She’s expecting some chastisement from Kawaki when they leave the house. Instead, he asks, “Are your eyes bothering you again?”

“My eyes?”

“The medicine.”

“Oh, no. It’s my neck.” She gestures to the muscle connected to her shoulder in explanation. “It’s stiff. From… You know. Sleeping.”

They don’t really talk about their current arrangements, and she doesn't want to start a conversation about it now. Thankfully, he seems in agreement. Instead of taking to the skies as he usually does for long-range travel, Kawaki bounds up into the trees behind the house, heading north. Sarada has no choice but to follow.

It takes a few strides for her to catch up with him, for their pace to fall into a similar rhythm of leaping and landing through the leaf-filled trees. “So, where are we going?”

#

Kawaki had been tossing and turning, trying to fall back to sleep when the exhausted voice of Shikamaru popped into his head, uninvited and unwelcomed.

Are you awake? We have a bit of a situation.

Awake was the opposite of what he wanted to be, but his usually soft bed had turned into some sort of cushy torture device ever since he laid back down after his shower, determined to make his body as comfortable as possible while dangling sleep just out of reach.

Still, he thought about ignoring Shikamaru’s summons as a matter of principle lest they get the idea that he’s usually up at some ungodly hour. But between the Claw Grimes and Hidari and Boruto and Jura…

What is it?

Shikamaru sounded as tired as he felt, probably still in bed himself and dealing with the same bullshit he’s about to foist off on Kawaki. Team Mirai was supposed to leave on a mission this morning, but only one member of her genin team arrived. The other two boys are missing .

In their defense, Kawaki wouldn’t be caught dead awake at this hour either, much less leaving for a mission. If Shikamaru had it in his mind to give him an assignment meant for a bunch of snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, Kawaki has two single syllable words in mind to share with him: fuck you.

Why is that my problem?

It didn’t take much for Mirai to get the remaining one to spill the beans. Apparently, the team heard about the plans for the next Chunin Exams because they’ve been challenging one another and sparring all week. The two boys got it into their head to go to Training Ground 44 last night after their usual meetup, but the girl said her parents were expecting her home—

Training Ground 44? That’s one Kawaki has yet to encounter, not that he took the traditional path to becoming a Genin and knows anything about that shit.

The Forest of Death… and, yes, it’s called that for a reason. Anyway, the boys never showed up this morning. We haven’t been able to locate their chakra signatures either. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re in there, but we want to narrow down the possibilities. You and Sarada are the closest shinobi to their location, and I trust neither of you will get killed. Well, not unless you’re stupider than I think you are.

Why the hell would he take her with him when she’s at half-capacity and was safer sleeping than traipsing through the forest when Hidari was lurking around? I can go alone.

No one should go in there without a partner. She’s been to Training Ground 44 in the past and knows what you’re up against. Don’t engage with any enemies if it can be avoided. Just survey the area for any evidence that they’ve been there. We’ll send backup as soon as possible.

He shares Shikamaru’s instructions with Sarada, reiterating that despite the nature of their assignment, she’s still under orders not to use her Sharingan. As her captain, it’s his responsibility to see that she follows her treatment plan, mission or no mission. A few days ago, she might have balked at a command like that coming from him. He’s ready for her to mouth off at him, something along the lines of I know that, dumbass or You don’t need to tell me what to do , but she stays silent, her only reaction coming as a displeased little frown.

Which almost feels… bitchier?

When she snaps, he snaps back. That’s how it’s supposed to be. He’s used to keeping everything inside, letting it all build up, only venting the pressure when someone pushes the release valve—usually, that person is Sarada. Keeping her mouth shut forces his to remain shut as well, making him speculate as to what exactly pissed her off in the first place.

A few more jumps, a few more leaps. Her gaze remains fixed forward on the forest ahead, wind rippling her dark hair back, her frowning mouth remaining shut.

“Whatever you want to fucking say, just say it.”

“It’s nothing.”

The next branch they hit, Sarada leaps forward, but Kawaki stays behind, arms crossed. She notices immediately, stopping one tree ahead, then turning around, aiming a glare as deadly as a kunai directly at his face. “Come on. There are kids—”

“Just tell me what stick you’ve got up your ass this time.” This mission is going to be one big, fat failure if she’s not willing to communicate with him, even if that communication comes in the form of yelling.

“It doesn’t matter!”

Kawaki crosses his arms over his chest, as immovable as stone.

“Fine!” In response, Sarada parks her hands on her hips, glaring across the expanse at him. “I was just thinking about how it took until this morning for anyone to notice the kids are gone. They should have had parents waiting at home for them.”

That’s what’s bothering her? Not some pissy complaint about him being in charge of her? He’s surprised one moment, then annoyed the next. It’s always the same bullshit with her, with all of the Konoha brats. They just don’t get it.

“Not everyone has parents, Sarada . And some have parents that don’t give a shit about them. The world isn’t full of perfect little families like yours.” He’d meant it to come off as a factual statement, but the more words that come out of his mouth, the bitterer they sound. It’s fine with him.

Wake up time, Little Hokage. Here’s your daily dose of reality.

“I know that, asshole,” she shoots back, not the least bit chastened by his little speech. “But it shouldn’t be that way, not in Konoha. Not anymore. Even if they don’t have parents, even if their parents don’t care, there should be someone looking out for these kids. That’s what’s bothering me, okay?”

A better man might have apologized, but better isn’t something Kawaki aspires to be.

Answer received, he takes off, landing on a branch just above her, then continues on without another word.

Of course, Sarada is better at this whole jumping-though-trees thing than he is—she’s better at everything other than not getting herself killed—and quickly catches up with him.

“You know my family isn’t that perfect.” Her quiet grumble is almost stolen by the wind rushing past their ears.

“Could have fooled me.” A mother that’s the head of the Konoha Medical Department? A dad that was second only to Lord Seventh? Both of them present in her life and, as far as he’d ever witnessed, actually caring about her? Sounds pretty perfect to him.

Early dawn fights its way through the canopy overhead and fails for the most part, keeping both of them buried deep in shadows. “My dad, he wasn’t around for a long time when I was little, so long that he didn’t even remember what I looked like when we finally met again. And my mom, she wasn’t good at explaining things, so I didn’t know where he had gone or why. With how much she worked, I spent a lot of time on my own.”

Long ago, Kawaki had stopped thinking about his family as something bad that had happened to him, a mother who he logically knew existed but couldn’t remember, a father who only valued his son for as much booze money as he could earn—or be worth when a stranger showed up with a suitcase of money, giving no reason as to why a grown monk would want to buy a child from his only parent. If he did, he might have thrown all Sarada’s luck back in her face. But his childhood wasn’t a misfortune or accident. It was what he earned for having nothing inside of him, for being empty. And that emptiness made him strong. Strong enough for karma. Strong enough to reclaim it after it was lost. Strong enough to protect Lord Seventh. So, what did he have to complain about if all he remembers of his father is the feeling of the back of his palm connecting with his smooth cheek over and over… and his own desire to protect his father’s reputation no matter how many times he was hit?

“What’s your point?” he asks, seeing no reason to share anything about his own childhood.

“I guess I could have been one of those kids who never came home and no one noticed, but I never was. I never would have been. It felt as though the whole village was always looking out for me, like we were one big family. Even if I got lost, I knew someone would come find me.”

She doesn’t say the rest of it; she doesn’t have to. It was Lord Seventh who treated the village like his family, and without his presence, all of the community and compassion he’d worked so hard to cultivate in Konoha was falling apart. No one looked up to Shikamaru the way they had looked up to Naruto, and even if they did, what kind of message would they receive? He isn’t strong enough to protect the village on his own, manipulating people into place to do the work for him. He works in shadows and smoke, and when the village looks to him for leadership, murkiness is all they see rather than Lord Seventh’s radiant light.

When Kawaki has his way, he’ll cut the clouds out of the sky to bring Lord Seventh back. Of course, he’ll need someone else to make sure they never return again once he's gone.

Out of the corner of his eye, he looks at her, this girl dressed all in black and red, her family’s crest on her back while she claims to have Naruto’s will in her heart.

Is it foolish for him to think that she’ll be the one who can do it?

Chapter Text

A half-dozen signs greet them on one of the many padlocked gates, both iconography and text warning trespassers to go the fuck home. This includes a bright yellow placard with black lettering that bluntly states, “You will die.” Kawaki looks up at the three-and-a-half meter tall chain link fence surrounding the dense forest, barely high enough to deter some daring academy brats, much less two dumbass genin with more guts than sense, from climbing it.

Ah, Konoha ingenuity at its finest.

Sarada lands in a crouch beside him. Her clompy shoes hit the ground silently, proof that when she stomps around Hokage Tower, it’s because she wants to be heard.

“What are we facing here?”

From what he’s seen, the village allowed Sumire to keep an uncontrollable interdimensional beast inside her hand, Boruto to walk freely despite his head being a mobile home for Momoshiki, and, most recently, opened up its gates to be a sight-seeing destination for a sentient tree who is planning to destroy the planet as soon as he runs out of questions in need of answers. It’s hard to imagine what type of horrors Konoha would actually hide.

Sarada sticks her hands into her pockets, staring at the trees on the opposite side. “Well, there’s spiders and bears, snakes and a centipede.”

“A centipede?”

“A really big one,” she assures him as though a bug of any size might be concerning to either of them.

If this conversation goes on any longer, his brain cells are going to react by heading for the nearest cliff and jumping to their death like thousands of little lemmings until he’s as stupid as everyone else around him.

Now that he’s no longer worried about Sarada keeping up with him, Kawaki lets his Otsutsuki abilities lift him into the air until he’s hovering high above the trees, giving him a bird’s eye view in the early light. There’s a hint of an open lake nearby, some rocky outcroppings, and what he suspects to be a single building far off in the distance, but everything else that he can see is leaves. So many leaves. An entire ocean of leaves. The kids, if they are there, are sunken somewhere beneath the green depths.

He lowers himself to the ground beside Sarada, who’d managed to make her way to the other side of the fence despite neither of them having a key to unlock the gate.

“Did you see anything?”

Kawaki shakes his head. “Nothing. Just trees.”

If he’d learned anything in the past three years since he’d mastered the ability to fly, it was that flying and trees do not mix. Going above the trees was no problem, but if you flew through them, your time and attention would be spent trying not to get a face full of bark rather than seeing what’s around you, which meant this expedition would have to take place on foot.

He lets Sarada take the lead as they head into the forest. It takes a few minutes for his eyes to fully adjust to the dark and take in the strange new world around them. Despite growing up in the wooded mountains, Kawaki hasn’t ever seen trees this big before. Trunks with nearly the same diameter as Lord Seventh’s house rise up around them, gnarled roots emerging from the ground to form twisted archways and passages. Tendrils of moss hang from every surface like sad, damp party decorations left out in the rain. It’s both awe-inspiring and terrifying, similar to how Kawaki felt the first time he saw the ocean.

“Here,” Sarada says, her hand extended. He’d been so busy gawking that he hadn’t noticed her rooting around in the pack behind her back as they walked. He accepts the small black communication device from her, watching as she hooks its twin over her ear.

“In case we get separated,” she explains, reminding him of why she was Team 7’s captain so many years ago. Unlike him, she’s actually good at it. “You know, we could cover more ground if we split up.”

“No, absolutely not.” With both of them still recovering from the battle in Suna—Sarada unable to use her Sharingan and his scientific ninja tool abilities limited by Amado, not to mention the Claw Grimes and Hidari—he isn’t about to let her out of his sight.

“Figured you’d say that,” she mutters, examining their surroundings. “Still, we should spread out while still staying in each other’s line of sight. We’ll be more efficient that way.”

They settle on traveling twenty meters apart, each of them sticking to the lowest branches of the trees all around. This ninja bullshit, it’s really Sarada’s specialty. Despite his experience on a few missions with Team 7 before he and Boruto swapped places and working closely with Shikamaru since then, Kawaki is more than willing to admit to himself that he’s more of a weapon to protect the village than a skilled shinobi. Traveling? Tracking? Surveying his surroundings? Not really his thing. If something needs to be blasted, smashed, or sliced, that’s his specialty. When it comes to all this other stuff, he’s probably on a similar level to the genin they’re tracking than Sarada—a fact that he’s reminded of when he ends up upside down in a spider web the size of a small house and they have to pause for her to cut him out of it. He manages to get away from the giant snake coiled around a massive tree limb on his own, and the less that’s said about the protective mother bear, the better.

All that occurs in the first hour, after which he finally feels as though he’s starting to get his bearings as the sun rises higher in the sky, a spattering of light working its way through the canopy. That’s when he starts to notice the trail of disturbed leaf litter below, dirt overturned and underbrush flattened. It seems like a pretty big mess for two little kids to leave, especially ones who’d been trained at the Academy, but Sarada seems to be following the same clues, or at least heading in the same direction.

He’s the one who spots the hole first, the gaping maw leading deep into the earth, tendrils of fine roots adorning the opening. Kawaki drops down in front of it as Sarada continues on, finally feeling a little more confident in his tracking abilities. The kids aren’t that dumb, either, finding a safe little spot to hide for the night.

He cups his hands around his mouth and shouts. “Hey, Team Mirai! Can you hear me?” When an answer doesn’t come immediately, he tries a second, then a third time. Finally, his calls are answered by the distant sound of scraping deep inside the hole. But before he can raise his hand to his earpiece and connect with Sarada, telling her he’d found them, the dirt beneath his feet starts shaking, the scraping noise quickly increasing in volume to that of an underground train barreling out of a tunnel.

It’s possible he screamed like a little girl when a cherry red centipede taller than Hokage Tower bursts out of the ground in front of him, its dozens of segmented legs ending in sharp points clicking together over its yellow belly. The monster—a real, fucking bonafide monster, rears up, then hooks forward, the black pinchers around it’s mouth opening and closing like a terrifying moustache.

Amado had told him to take it easy, that overusing his abilities—scientific ninja or karma—would have consequences. But getting eaten by a giant fucking bug would have consequences, too. He stretches out his arm in front of him, grabbing his wrist with his other hand to help absorb the shockwave from the blast building up inside his body much slower than it normally does. The centipede plunges downward toward him, mouth open, pinchers dripping clear poison.

A whiz of metal sings through the air. The explosion that drives the centipede’s head off track doesn’t come from him, but from the trio of paper bombs tied to the three kunai, each exploding as they came into contact with the monster’s face. Before he can deploy his attack, Kawaki is swept off his feet—quite literally—by Sarada. Her arm catches him in the gut as she sails past, a rope looped around her opposite hand. It feels weird as fuck to be picked up by a girl that’s two-thirds his heighth and likely half his weight. The sensation of being suddenly weightless as they swing through the air sends his stomach up into his throat, a wave of nausea not unlike sea sickness distracting him from trying to decide if he feels ashamed or reassured to be rescued by her.

“What the fuck was that?” he demands when they land on a thick branch.

Without warning Sarada drops him like a bag of rotten potatoes. It’s a miracle that his ass manages to land on the branch rather than tumbling off of it.

“Stop sitting! Let’s go!” She turns away from where the giant centipede is now straightening up, entire body twisting this way and that to find its lost prey.

“Let’s go back to kill it, right?” His arm still feels hot from the blast he never released. His hand is aching to get pressed against that monster’s abdomen and feel its warm guts spatter everywhere.

“Uh… no?” With that, she leaps away, forcing Kawaki to follow or get left behind.

He scrambles up, following after the Uchiha crest fluttering on her black jacket. “Why not? You saw that thing.”

She glares at him over her shoulder, dark eyes annoyed. “You bothered it , not the other way around. This is its home.”

“This isn’t a fucking nature preserve, Sarada.” The whole “Forest of Death” thing kind of implied there is shit to kill in it.

“It kinda is,” she grumbles. “Besides, I don’t want to lose the trail.”

“That was the trail,” Kawaki shouts at her, realizing they’d been following that monster back to its burrow the entire time.

Sarada skids to a halt, turning around so quickly, he nearly crashes into her. “What are you talking about?”

“That was the—”

“ This is the trail we’re following,” she says, eager to interrupt him as always. Her finger points to a small scrape in the moss hanging off the branch, no bigger than a pinky finger.

Then, she jumps to the next branch, waiting for him to follow. “ This …” she points to a tiny crushed leaf below. “...is the trail we’re following.”

Two more jumps and she stops again, pointing high up into the tree. A shuriken half-embedded into a branch far above. “ This is the…”

“Would you shut up already? You made your damn point.” It’s times like this Kawaki is glad he never had a mother. He can hardly deal with this shit from Sarada, and at least she’s nice to look at when she’s bitching at him.

“I don’t think I have,” Sarada shoots back. “Because if you’d stopped arguing and started paying attention, you’d already have noticed that that’s what we’re looking for.”

She points towards a gnarled knot of roots a few meters away, hidden beneath a veil of moss. In the shade, Kawaki can barely make out the faint shape of a cold campfire.

Chapter Text

Thank you, Sarada .

That’s what Boruto would have said if she’d saved his ass from a giant centipede. He’d said it so many times over so many years that it plays on loop inside her head in a voice that’s both sincere and grateful, a voice that built her up rather than pushed her down, words that inspired her to try harder for their future rather than motivating her through spite.

But spite proves to be a pretty good motivator for her as well.

What the fuck was that?

That’s all the thanks she got from Kawaki. Typical. When has Kawaki ever been grateful for anything ? Anything at all? He treated the entire world as though life itself was the worst inconvenience that had ever been placed upon anyone in the history of humankind. Even the few things he liked, he failed to savor, wanting to gobble them up until they were gone, then getting pissed off at their absence.

She shouldn’t have expected anything more from him than the reaction he had, even if part of her wanted more. Her world had changed since Suna, since she witnessed the horror of Momoshiki murdering Code with Boruto’s body, since she resolved to open her eyes and face the reality that’s in front of her. None of that had altered her perception of Kawaki, though.

He had done that by offering her empathy—half-assed though it was—when no one else could, by offering her a place to sleep that was free of nightmares, by opening up about his past, even if it was just a tiny explanation of the scientific ninja tools in his blood stream. She thought that she was finally seeing a different side of him, learning more about him, maybe even starting to understand him—but it was all part of his mission to supervise her recovery. It’s her fault if she hoped Kawaki might be capable of being anyone other than… well, Kawaki.

The genin’s campsite doesn’t hold much hope, either. If she was in charge of the mission, she’d ask Kawaki what he sees, another teaching moment after her impromptu (and apparently unwelcome) lesson in tracking. But it’s not as if he cares to hear the story that the cold fire tells, a fire that had been built and burnt out on its own. Maybe the boys on Mirai’s team were stupidly brave, but no student ever graduated from the Academy without learning to douse and rake the coals of a campfire before abandoning it. There’s a sizable pile of wood stacked in the corner, enough to have fed it through the night if they’d have stayed that long. Kawaki is still outside the shelter looking at the grass. It’s beaten down, far more than just a bent blade here or a snapped stem there. At least he can see that .

It’s almost shameful for someone who was given a Konoha headband to have so much power and so little actual training. Surely, Lord Seventh hadn’t meant for it to be this way.

When Kawaki looks her way, she first takes notice of the dark circles beneath his gray eyes, a reminder that while she had gone back to sleep after his nightmare, he apparently had not. Otherwise, it’s highly unlikely either of them would be here. That realization doesn’t get much sympathy from her when she remembers the two cans of coffee he’d gotten to have while she was getting ready, a double dose of caffeine while she’s now suffering from a lack of it. A layer of dark stubble darkens his sharp chin. She’d never stopped to consider what color his facial hair might be—black or blond. She’d hadn’t really thought of his facial hair at all. But there’s the answer, whether she had been looking for it or not.

“I think we might want to go that way,” he finally says after she’d been looking at him for far too long without saying anything, jerking his thumb westward. It’s refreshing that he’s actually saying something to her rather than pretending he knows enough to order her around.

Sarada steps out and immediately sees the path leading toward a shimmering lake. The pair of genin could have fled in that direction, but they would have needed to visit it in order to supply themselves with water. Either way, it’s their best clue as to where the kids might be.

“Good catch,” she says with a nod.

“Fuck you,” he mutters under his breath as she steps past him.

He may be a miserable asshole, but he doesn’t object to her taking the lead. There aren’t signs of a struggle. If they were chased, they simply ran like hell without trying to fight back. The muddy shore surrounding the lake is riddled with all manner of foot and paw prints belonging to mammals and birds alike, but there’s no sign of any human activity. Wordlessly, Kawaki and Sarada split up, one traveling east and one traveling west along the edge of the water.

The mud tells a tale of a thriving ecosystem. Sarada lists the animals in her head as she passes the marks their feet and bodies left behind. Giant slithering snakes sliding into the water alongside imprints made by normal-sized goose feet, the massive tracks of a mammoth catbear, the markings left by little newts. The first print she can’t identify appears next to a ticket of thorns. It came from a large three-toed beast, its foot as long as one belonging to a large human male with huge digits spread wide. It could be some kind of bird or reptile, but she’d expect each toe to end in a sharp point rather than being bulbous and round. Perhaps an amphibian, then. A giant one. But as she takes another step forward, she notices the mark left by a much smaller dewclaw near the back. Sure, some bird and reptile species have dewclaws, but amphibians? Sarada squints at a long smear in the mud, perhaps made by a long tail.

“Sarada!”

Years of missions with Boruto had trained her that hearing her name shouted out could mean anything from “the enemy is about to attack” to “look at this cool footprint I found,” which is exactly what she would be doing to him if he had been there. But Kawaki’s voice screaming her name is something she’s not sure she’s ever heard before.

She straightens up, staring across the lake to its opposite side, but he’s no longer where she last saw him. She looks up into the sky, catching sight of a flash of white fabric and dark hair speeding toward her.

That’s when she gets grabbed from behind, the sensation of human-like fingers wrapping around her arms, hot breath on her neck. She’s not thinking of the consequences when she activates her Sharingan, every cell of her body focused on getting the Claw Grime’s mouth as far away from her as possible. Somewhere behind her, she hears the familiar sucking sound of claw marks being shrunken down to microscopic size. Her arms go behind her, grabbing onto her attacker and flinging it over her head, into the lake. She realizes too late that a second hand had emerged from the black spot on the monster’s chest and wrapped its hand around her belt.

The momentum of her throw flings the three of them—or two and a half, Sarada, the Claw Grime, and the third one, still half in, half out of its companion, into the lake together with a resounding splash.

Water. Sarada hates fighting under water. Her fire jutsu is hardly effective when she’s six feet below the surface and sinking, thanks to the dead weight of the claw grime still attached to her. Lightning can be super effective, but only if she’s not under the water with her enemy. The first Claw Grime hits the bottom of the lake first, kicking up a storm of sediment that clouds the water, turning everything around her brown. Sarada grabs her kunai from the holster on her hip with one hand, securing her glasses with the opposite hand, and kicks as hard as possible, trying to dislodge the monster behind her.

What would happen if one of them bit into her down here? Would her roots grow into the lakebed, anchoring her beneath the surface? Would she even be able to survive inside a tree, her nose and mouth underwater or would she simply drown?

At least if she drowned, she’d take at least one Claw Grime out with her.

A gurgle of bubbles comes out of her mouth as she fights the Claw Grim behind her, stabbing blindly with her kunai, kicking with her blunt heels. One of her strikes solidly lands, its grip on her loosening… But no sooner is she almost free of one of them than the other wraps its hand around her ankle. Luckily, Sarada has one more ace up her sleeve, a last ditch tactic that she’s not supposed to use, but who can blame her when it’s a matter of life or death. She looks deep inside herself, concentrating on the fullness in her heart, the love and longing, drawing it out of her and into her chakra.

The exact second she makes the decision to activate her Mangekyo Sharingan, the water around her is rocked by the impact of a boulder thrown into a puddle. All she can see is the white of Kawaki’s coat as he shoots past her and the bright glow of his activated arm. Whatever happens happens fast, the Claw Grime behind her knocked away, his one arm hooking beneath her armpit. Then, everything explodes in a red-orange light as he releases the blast directed at the pair of Claw Grimes.

The backfire sends the two of them rocketing upwards, out the lake and into the sky above. For a moment, the water parts, exposing the dismembered Claw Grimes, the lakebed below, and a single giant clam innocently caught in the crossfire. For a brief second, the pair of them are suspended in the air before gravity takes over, sending them crashing down into the choppy waters. The impact breaks them apart, Sarada carried in one direction and Kawaki in the other. Her feet kick, arms spread wide, face tilted back to keep her mouth and nose above the water. All she has to do is wait for the waters to calm a bit, then she’ll be able to climb onto to surface and run for the shore.

Or that’s what she thinks until she notices Kawaki frantically fighting against the waves, slipping beneath the murky depths, fighting his way back up, then disappearing again. Years of water drills immediately kick in as she switches her position from upright to lying on her belly. She kicks like hell, for the first time regretting her stupidly clunky shoes. Her arms cut through the water, cupped hands reaching out and pushing back, propelling her forward until she finally makes it to him.

It’s all thanks to his white coat, one bright color in a mud-colored sea, that she finds him, grabbing onto his collar and hauling him up until she can slip both her arms beneath his shoulders and leaning back until she’s floating beneath him, holding his head above the water.

His gasp of fresh air is music to her ears. She has no idea how long it’d take her to get him to shore, surely too late to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation if he would have needed it. But as soon as she finally thinks they’re stabilized, he begins kicking and struggling again, sure to drag them both under if she doesn’t let him go.

“Stop it!” she screams, using up what little air she’s managed to get into her lungs between the near-drowning, the swimming, the rescuing.

“I-I-I… can’t… I can’t… swim!” he chokes out, coughing as water fills his mouth.

“Then fly, you idiot!” she shouts into his ear.

His panicked thrashing stops, his body hanging limply in her grasp. Then, the two of them start rising. Sarada quickly adjusts her hold from beneath his shoulders to over top of them, clinging to his back as they rise above the lake. He’s shaking from adrenaline… she’s shaking too, the fear of what had just occurred finally catching up with her as the breeze chills her soaked body to its core.

She can feel him take in a deep lungful of air, steadying himself.

“Sorry,” he mutters. Maybe for not saving her from the Claw Grimes in time. Maybe for almost drowning the both of them.

Sarada looks down at the lake beneath them, the white chunks of Claw Grime finally floating to the surface. “Thanks for coming in after me.”

His response is a non-committal grunt as they rise higher into the air, water dripping off both of them as though they’re the smallest, most pathetic rain cloud. From their vantage point, Sarada can now see that a series of islands of mismatched sizes stretch along the far shore. Some of them are big enough to host their own miniature forests, others are little more than rocks with a spattering of moss and weeds. The farther up they go, the more she can see, but soon a sight appears that makes her wish they would have drowned instead of surviving.

“Kawaki…” She leans forward, resting her chin on her shoulder to make sure he can her her shaky voice. “Look over there.”

Backup eventually arrives in the form of two jounin who relay their findings to Hokage Tower. Then those two shinobi become four, four becomes eight, eight becomes more than she can count, including both Mirai with Lord Hokage by her side. Someone, probably a medic ninja, urged them to strip down to their underwear before wrapping them in white hospital blankets. Under other circumstances, taking off her clothes in front of any of her teammates would have triggered unthinkable mortification, but all Sarada feels now is numb. Someone else appears soon after with a thermos of hot tea, pouring each of them a cup. Steam wafts off the untouched drinks as they stare at the two children, their eyes closed, faces slack, hands linked together, holding on to each other despite being encased in separate leafless trees with bark the color of bloodless flesh.

Chapter Text

Sarada lays on her bed in a pair of gray sweats and red tank top after having taken what felt like the most necessary shower of her life. The final step of lather, rinse, repeat had to be performed over and over to rid her scalp of all the silt. Even now, she doesn’t feel completely clean, as though she might have missed one of the many leeches she discovered attached to her skin, but she’s too tired to care. All she wants to do is focus on her book rather than thinking about those two poor boys…

She hasn’t even found her place on the page when someone raps on her door, followed by, “Are you sure you don’t want to eat anything?”

“I’m fine,” she calls back, finger scanning down the text, trying to remember what she last read.

“What about a cup of coffee? Don’t you want to go make a cup of coffee—”

“I’m fine .”

“Maybe just a glass of water? You don’t want to get dehydrated. You should go drink something.”

“Go away,” she shouts.

“I can’t go away,” is the whiny answer. “I’m supposed to be watching you!”

Sarada groans, slamming her book shut and shoving it away.

At first she’d been thankful when Delta arrived at Training Ground 44 with dry clothes for both her and Kawaki, saving Sarada from delivering a mission report to Shikamaru while wearing little more than a thin blanket. Though she wouldn’t admit it, she was also glad when Delta offered her a ride back to the house after Kawaki had disappeared with several squads of shinobi assigned to searching the surrounding forest for additional claw marks and neutralizing them, but then the cyborg had tried to follow her into the bathroom, then back to her room, all because Kawaki had commanded her to take over his escort duties in his absence, that idiot. Delta had reluctantly accepted that Sarada should be allowed to shower alone, but a brief argument ensued when she said she wanted to go to her room and lie down.

It’d be so much easier if the only thing motivating her was Kawaki’s orders, but Sarada (as well as most of Konoha) is familiar with Delta’s obsessive crush on Eida. If Sarada is alone in her room, that means Delta has to remain stationed outside while the object of her significant affections is in the kitchen, finishing up a late lunch. If Sarada decided to eat as well, then she’d have an excuse to fawn and flatter the blue-haired beauty.

The worst part is that Sarada is hungry. All she’s had today is a cup of tea and a protein bar, both given to her during the aftermath of the Claw Grime’s attack. She’d kill for a bowl of brothy noodles or miso soup, something warm and sustaining to chase away the lingering memory of cold water surrounding her. Unfortunately, the moment she and Delta had landed on the second-floor balcony of the house, Eida, who’d been sunning herself on a beach towel while reading a glossy fashion magazine, took one look at Sarada, gathered up her things, and stomped away, leaving Daemon to scurry after her.

The entire interaction left Sarada feeling uneasy, even if she should have anticipated Eida’s disgust at seeing her caked with mud and covered in leeches—and bits of half-decayed leaves that looked like leeches. Maybe the breakfast she had delivered for Eida hadn’t been satisfactory or her coffee order had been wrong. Under other circumstances, Sarada would have investigated Eida’s reaction, begging, scraping, blushing, doing anything to prove herself thoroughly charmed. But right now, she can’t bring herself to do it. Especially not with Delta around, her real infatuation with Eida making Sarada’s act pale in comparison.

Stupid cyborgs with their stupid crushes. The entire thing is ridiculous. How could you claim to be in love with someone who never returned your affection, who never opened up to let you in, who never showed the faintest bit of interest in you? It was just a vapid, hollow, artificial obsession. Nothing more.

Delta knocks again, louder this time. “Do you want to watch some television?”

Apparently, Eida had finished eating and was now embarking on her afternoon soap opera binge.

“What I want is to read in peace!” Sarada shouts, despite having discarded her book a few seconds earlier. She shoots the door a dirty look, noticing that the black dress she purchased yesterday at Eida’s urging is still on a hanger hooked onto it. Her eyes go from the dress to the book in front of her, An Unabridged History of Sealing Jutsu .

Maybe she’s a little bit ridiculous, too.

The dress hadn’t been her idea—that was all Eida. But trying all them on had made her feel almost like a normal teen planning an outfit for a big first date, checking herself from every angle, trying to pick the dress that was most appealing to a boy while still being her .

How is it possible to feel so much for someone who’s hardly spoken to her in the past three years? For someone who apparently hadn’t even trusted her enough to talk to her about his plans to end his own life back when they did spend time together? Nothing can happen between them, not with things as they are right now.

The quivering excitement she feels in her chest just by thinking his name is irrational, as irrational as Delta’s devotion to Eida or Eida’s fixation on Kawaki. It’s not as though her own mother chose her father and remained his ardent supporter because a husband who was gone from the village more than he was home was the rational pick for a spouse. And yet her mother remained thoroughly and completely smitten with him. 

Perhaps love is a feeling, but loving someone is an act—and being loved is when those feelings and acts are returned.

What she feels for Boruto is love, of that she had no doubt. It doesn’t matter to her heart whether it makes sense or not. Saving him is an act of love, something she must do because standing by while he suffers is unimaginable. No cute dress could make him love her back—and that’s not even something she’s asking for now. Not until she frees him from the monster inside of him and undoes Omnipotence. For so long, she’d been only thinking about his ostracism from the village, unable to see the bigger picture, the threat that Momoshiki poses both to him and to them all. Now that she does, she knows what she must do first.

Sarada sighs, grabs the book in front of her, and opens it.

Hours later, she’s still lying on her bed, both her book and a notebook in front of her, the latter filled with diagrams and notes, both copied text and her own thoughts. As so often happens when learning more about a subject she was only passingly acquainted with, Sarada finds herself even more confused than she had been at the start. There’s just so much to know about possible sealing jutsu, their different configurations and different use cases—and none of those use cases were evil aliens. Maybe when Konohamaru-sensei is back at the Sarutobi compound, she can pay him a visit and ask for his insight.

Sarada pushes her glasses up into her hair, rubbing her tired eyes. She can’t remember the last time she’d spent so long doing nothing but reading, disturbed only by Inojin’s brief check-in (“I heard you two were busy this morning—anything new?” and Delta’s interruptions, the last of which was the arrival of supper an hour or two earlier.

Her stomach gurgles, accompanied by a hollow ache informing her she really should find out what they ordered for her. There’s only so long she can go without seeing Eida when the two of them live under the same roof. She stands, stretches, then winces at the pesky stiff muscle in her neck, still sore from sleeping awkwardly followed by hours of reading.

Sarada throws on her robe, puts on her slippers, then opens her door to find… nothing. She looks up and down the hallway, checking for Delta. Maybe she’d gone to the bathroom… if someone with more cybernetic enhancements than human biology needed to use the bathroom. Looking back, she’s not sure if she’s ever seen Delta eat or drink anything. She creeps out into the main living area, empty, as is the dining room and the kitchen.

Apparently, she did have some luck now and then. Or at least that’s what she thinks until she opens the fridge and pulls out the takeout bag with a giant S written on it in black marker. Something sloshes promisingly inside. She sets it on the counter, first pulling out the top container of chilled buckwheat noodles followed by another full of tomatoes swimming in a pale, cold broth.

Tomatoes.

Sarada hates tomatoes.

Yes, she’s eaten them more times than she cares to recall, but only because her father likes them so much. It was an act of love, eating tomatoes. She’d never willingly do it, and every single person in the house knows that, including Eida who’d ordered the food.

With a sigh, Sarada shoves everything back in the fridge and grabs a cup of instant ramen out of the cabinet. At least it’d be warm, soupy and fast. She’s standing in the middle of the kitchen, in the process of shoveling said noodles into her mouth, when Delta comes clomping down the stairs. She stops at the bottom and stares at Sarada, her lips twisted up in a bitchy sneer.

She parks her hands on her hips, her pink eyes filled with unbridled disdain. “ Now you decide to come out.”

Sarada finishes slurping up the noodles on her chopsticks. “So?”

Delta flips a coil of curling blonde hair over her shoulder. “Just when Kawaki got back, and now I have to leave. Did you plan this so I don’t get to spend any time with Eida dear?”

“No?” It’s such an absurd question that her own response comes out as a query as well. “If you want to stay for a while, then stay. I don’t care.”

The cyborg huffs. “No, I’ve been ordered to go back to the lab by Eida dear. She wants some time alone with Kawaki, robbing me of her presence… All thanks to you .” With that, she sniffs, brushes her cape back, and stomps out the door.

Is that how Sarada and Sumire were supposed to have been acting when vying for Eida’s attention? She couldn’t imagine that constant level of drama while living together just because they were attracted to the same person.

Then again…

Sarada pokes at the noodles remaining in the cup with her chopsticks.

She and Sumire actually are attracted to the same person, except that person is Boruto and not Eida. With the sole exception of that one blow up, they’d never clashed over their feelings, and when they had, it was over Sarada’s behavior, not Boruto. But Sarada couldn’t see what she had been doing wrong, not until she’d already done it. She’d stupidly hurt a friend because she was so obsessed with her own desires, she couldn’t see beyond herself.

There’s so much she needs to do, so much she needs to change, before she’s be worthy of being Hokage.

She finishes her food not because she really wants to, but because her body demands it. Eida comes down the stairs as she’s about to throw it in the trash can, Daemon hopping after her. If the look Delta gave her was filled with red-hot hatred, Delta’s blue gaze is equally frigid when she catches sight of Sarada.

Sarada puts on her best bright smile despite her heart pounding a terrified rhythm in her chest. “Hello! Good evening! Thank you so much for ordering the soba for me.”

Eida’s eyes go to the empty ramen cup in her hand.

“I…” Sarada smiles. Harder . “I wasn’t too hungry, so I thought I’d save it for tomorrow. I wanted to really take the opportunity to enjoy it. Since you went to the work of ordering it for me.”

“I look forward to seeing you have it for breakfast then,” Eida says, each word needle-sharp. Her heels click against the floor as she disappears into the bedroom. Daemon turns to Sarada, pulling his bottom eyelid low while sticking out his tongue at her. Then, he rushes after his sister and slams the door shut, giving her one more thing to worry about.

Chapter Text

Kawaki glares at the empty chair across from his bed.

It’s almost midnight, and she still hasn’t shown up.

He’s not waiting for her because he actually wants her to be there, but he’s convinced himself that the moment his head hits the pillow, she’s going to come slinking through the door and wake him up. Not that she ever has before, but it’s all he can think about when he tries to close his eyes. He needs this sleep. He needs it bad. The day had been awful. The water all around him, filling his mouth, his ears, his eyes, bringing back memories from his time in one of Amado’s labs, memories he couldn’t forget, but fought hard never to think about.

Then, there had been those two little kids, their hands gripping one another, their skin cold, bodies slack, eyes closed, looking as good as dead despite what all the medic nins said. All he could think about was the possibility that sooner or later, some fucking tree was going to show up with their faces, and he’d have to blast the little bastards to pieces. Just like him, they’d be turned into monsters.

But he pulled his shit together. Just like he always does. Because he has to, not because he wants to. If he had done what he wanted, he’d have been back at the house and beneath the spray of a hot shower before Sarada finished delivering their mission report to Shikamaru, then curled up in his bed with the blinds closed, unconscious and numb, letting another day of life drain out of him.

Instead, he had to play Hokage brat for the day, Konoha’s protector, flying between squads of shinobi to neutralize the more than three dozen claw marks they’d found all over the training ground. He’s sure there’s more. There had to be more. So many fucking trees and caves and rocks and holes, there’s no way they searched them all. But he’d done his duty, shrinking each of those motherfuckers down to the size of a strand of hair, still there but useless.

He flops onto his side, trying not to think. Not about anything. Not about the water. Not about Amado’s lab, watching as all the other kids around him died in their little liquid-filled sacks while he was unlucky enough to survive. Not about how stupid and useless every fucking shinobi idea was: the stupid chunin exams, the stupid training ground forest filled with deadly monsters, stupid plan to combat Code with only defensive measures, leading to how bad everying is now. The Shinju, the Claw Grimes.

And he really tries hard not to think about Sarada, the chill he’d felt when he looked down in the mud and saw that mutant three-toed footprint. By the time he’d managed to yell her name, there was already one coming up behind her, mouth open, teeth glistening, ready to chomp down and make her into a tree. It’d been hard to tell what he was seeing, the flash of white bodies as a second Claw Grime appeared out of the other’s chest, all three of them, Sarada and the two monsters, crashing into the lake with a loud splash and sinking far below the surface.

He felt like he was drowning before he’d even dove from the sky into the water. The one bright spot of hope in his miserable existence, the one thing he needs for his future, had just disappeared beneath the water with two fucking monsters trying to eat it. Just one bite and everything was ruined.

Saving her had been the same thing as saving himself.

He glances over at the chair again with its folded up blanket and pillow, knowing if he had been serious about going to sleep, he’d have turned off the light before laying down.

Kawaki sighs, sits up, brushes the still-damp hair back from his face, and goes to find Sarada.

It’s not hard. He doesn’t even have to go downstairs. The moment he flicks the lightswitch in the hallway, he can see her sitting on one of the couches in the dark, clutching a cup of tea in both hands. She jumps when the light goes on, twisting around to look at him, squinting at the sudden brightness.

What a fucking weirdo.

“What are you doing?” he demands, his voice quiet but his annoyance loud.

Sarada’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out—a middle-of-the-night miracle, Sarada not running her mouth for once.

“Whatever. I’m going to bed. If you’re coming up, you better do it now.”

He doesn’t like saying more than he needs to. He likes listening to others talk even less. So he leaves it at that, turning off the light and returning to his room. He’s not even back in bed when she appears, her footsteps silent as always.

She brings with her both her teacup and a warm compress pressed against the side of her neck. “I didn’t know you were waiting for me,” she says softly.

“I wasn’t. I just didn’t want you to wake me up when you came in.”

Sarada tilts her head, looking at him. “I didn’t know I woke you up before.”

“You didn’t. Now, could you go the fuck to sleep?”

She’s wearing a pair of black sweats and a tank top, not the black tube top and shorts he’d just discovered were slightly larger versions of her actual underwear. Not that he’d been looking when they’d gotten undressed. He hadn’t. Truly. It’s just that he could see the shape of them beneath the white blanket and was kind of confused as to why she’d wear her pajamas under her mission gear until he’d figured it out.

She places her tea down and slips on the shirt he’d asked her to wear—which is absurd, considering she’s wearing actual clothes for once. It’s like she truly doesn’t understand why she shouldn’t be hanging out in his room, showing more skin than not. But he doesn’t know how to explain it to her, and she sure as hell wouldn’t want to hear it.

Another minute more and she’s wrapped up in the blanket, her pillow freshly fluffed, her knees tucked sideways, head tiled at an angle, the compress resting against the juncture of her neck and shoulder. She takes one final sip of her tea, then takes off her glasses.

That should be the end of it, right?

Kawaki reaches over to turn off the light.

“Did everything go well out there today?” she says before he gets to it. He looks back at the girl who’d asked the question, staring at the wall rather than at him.

“No.” He tries to make it the sort of “no” that sounds like a door being slammed shut. Instead, she turns her head towards him.

“Thank you. For saving me today. I… I didn’t know you couldn’t swim.” Her eyes are big and dark, insisting on staring at him even though he knows she can’t really see him all that well.

Fuck, Kawaki hates feeling seen. He flops down, making himself as flat as possible. “I needed to.”

“For the mission,” she says.

The mission.

He hadn’t even been thinking of the damn mission at the time. Not about the idiots in Hokage Tower or the orders they gave. He’d just been thinking of Sarada and her eyes, the ones that he could see glowing red even under the water. Hopefully, she hadn’t fucked them up too bad. Guess they’ll find out at her checkup tomorrow.

“For the mission,” he agrees, his arm shooting to turn off the light, hoping it’d extinguish this conversation as well.

He hears her sigh and shift, trying to find a comfortable position on the chair. It’s not his fault she decided to sleep there, nor is it his fault that she has a stiff neck every fucking morning. He closes his eyes, sinking down into his pillow.

“Are you okay?”

He opens them again, starting at the clock. Exactly midnight. No way she’s getting her required hours of sleep before she has to wake up to attend to Eida. Just another thing that pisses him off, both Sarada’s lack of sleep and this little charade that Shikamaru demanded she put on for the past three years, as though she didn’t have anything better to do than pretend to be Eida’s best girl.

It’s not fitting for a future Hokage.

She takes his silence as consent to keep talking, which it definitely was not. “You seemed scared when you were in the water. If you want to talk about it...”

“I don’t get scared,” he says, pulling the comforter up over his head, blocking out the lights on the clock and Sarada as well. “Now, shut up or get out.”

It starts just as it had the previous night with the sound of Kawaki’s gasping breaths, his clenched-teeth grunts, a pained whine with every exhale. Sarada opens her eyes as soon as she hears the now-familiar sound of his nightmares.

He can claim not to be scared when he’s awake, but all that bravado is stripped bare the moment he falls asleep. For someone who demands to sleep without interruption, it seems to be filled with horrors for him as well. She can hear him shivering, shaking, and struggling, and it sounds fucking miserable.

He’d made her promise not to wake him—one of the three things he’d asked of her, the other two being that they don’t let Eida know he’s allowing her into his room and that she wears the big, baggy shirt she is slowly growing fond of. She never thought she’d violate that request, but it also seems cruel not to wake him.

She can’t help but feel as though she’d failed him last night when he’d woken with a start, breathless and sweaty and scared out of his skin, rushing from the room for a smoke and a shower, isolating himself as he always does when he experiences the slightest vulnerability where others can see it. Lord Seventh wouldn’t have let him suffer like that, Sarada is sure of it. So, why had she been able to sit there, doing nothing but listening?

What would Lord Seventh have done?

She puts her warm compress (a room-temperature compress at this point) to the side and pushes the blankets back, padding across the room to Kawaki’s bed. He’s hyperventilating, breath coming out in little huffs. Even in the dark, she can make out his shape, knees pulled up to one side, head thrown back on his pillow, fists clenching the bedding. She can even see the black geometric patterns that had appeared on his left hand and arm, black lines and shapes marring his pale skin.

She should wake him, right?

Sarada puts her hand on his shoulder, ready to gently shake him. Through her palm, she can feel his heartbeat racing away in his chest, a cold sweat dampening his shirt.

What had Kawaki told her about her own nightmares?

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.

If that’s truly how he feels, then waking him up would be just as bad as letting him sleep, pulling him back into a world that’s a real nightmare rather than an imaginary one.

But she has to be able to do something, anything. Lord Seventh wouldn’t have just looked away. Lord Seventh would have…

That’s when Sarada remembers.

She couldn’t actually do what Naruto had done. Not with Kawaki lying down and being taller than she is by a measure of head and shoulders.

Still…

Slowly, as not to startle or wake him, she lowers herself down, letting the weight of her upper body settle against his chest, her ear to his heart.

“Relax, Kawaki,” she whispers. “You’re safe now.”

She feels his hand on her back and braces herself to be tossed to the floor—she’d deserve it for what she was doing, touching him in his sleep without his permission. But instead of grabbing her or pushing her or throwing her, it just settles there, Sarada resting her head against his chest, Kawaki resting his hand on her back.

His body stills almost immediately, his breaths deepening, the interval between them growing longer. She can feel him relax beneath her, his muscles unclenching, his legs stretching out, his body sinking back into the mattress. It takes longer for his heartbeat to calm, its rapid pace eventually slowing until it's almost normal.

That’s all she needed to do. Good.

When she pushes herself back up to look at him again before returning to her chair, Kawaki’s hand limply slides off her back, falling to his side with a thud. She would have sworn he was asleep if his eyes had closed half a second sooner.

Chapter Text

The spray of blood hit his face, warm and wet. Just one swing. That’s all it had taken. His bladed arm cut through Sarada’s skull as easily as an axe splitting dry wood, the squishy bits inside her head putting up no resistance.

She didn’t collapse all at once. The kunai she’d been holding fell to the ground. Her hands flew up, grabbing her face, fingers digging into the deep slash that had carved out her eyes and a portion of brain behind them. Her mouth opened, but no scream emerged. Just a sigh, a whispered oh, as though it suddenly occurred to her that she was dying.

She fell to her knees, neck craned up as if she was staring at him. A river of red ran down her chin and cheeks, crimson tears dripping off her face. Kawaki looked around, searching for the brother he’d vowed to kill before Sarada had dared to get in his way.

That’s when he realized they were not on Hokage Rock, and the Sarada dying in front of him was the one who had been sleeping in his bedroom at night, seemingly wearing nothing other than his oversized blue shirt. They’re in a field of golden flowers, a swirl of petals on the breeze twisting around them. Just Kawaki, with Sarada kneeling at his feet.

Where was Boruto, that useless idiot? He was supposed to save her, wasn’t he? The blade that had grown out of his flesh softened and morphed, moulding itself back into his arm again.

Sarada’s next breath came out as a rattle right before her body went as boneless as a ragdoll. Kawaki reached out, grabbing for her, trying to keep her upright, but she crumpled down, a mat of flowers cushioning her fall.

His lips felt dry, but when he licked them he tasted the coppery tang of Sarada’s blood still fresh on his face.

Momoshiki had saved Boruto, that bastard. Where was a similar miracle when it’s Sarada lying lifeless on the ground? Kawaki got down and rolled her over, cushioning her head with his lap as he’d once seen Sarada’s father do for Lord Seventh.

Stupid Hokage. Stupid Lord Seventh and stupid Sarada. Stupid shinobi putting themselves in the way of harm for their stupid ideals.

Her black hair was soft against her fingers, her skin waxen gray. Kawaki reached down, grabbing the collar of the shirt that had slipped off her shoulder and pulling it up, covering her properly.

That’s when Sarada’s mouth opened like a goldfish out of water. She sucked in jagged breath. Kawaki stared as her chest rose and fell. How was she still alive with bits of her brain ripped out, shards of her skull visible through the gash, her eyes cut out of her head?

She took another shuddering breath.

What the hell should he do? Blast her to bits as a mercy killing or try to get her to a medic? Without her eyes, she’s useless to him.

And yet…

Hands beneath her shoulders, Kawaki pulled her across his lap, her head on his chest and bent knees over his opposite arm, heaving her up as he stood. There’s nothing but flowers as far as he could see. A vast ocean of yellow and green stretched off to the horizon on every side. No indication of how far they were from Konoha, how long it’d take for him to bring her back. Maybe west? Or north? How could he even decide when the sun never seemed as though it was in the same location twice?

He didn’t notice her moving until her arms looped around his neck, Sarada hugging him, burying her ruined face into his chest

“Relax, Kawaki. You’re safe now,” she whispered against him.

It’s easier to get out of bed some days than others, but it had been a while since Kawaki had a morning this bad.

He has some damn good excuses as to why he doesn’t want to crawl out from beneath his warm comforter and face the cold brightness of morning—the nightmares haunting his dreams, the two nights running that he’d woken up in the middle of the damn night, an exhausting previous day of shinobi bullshit that had started before he’d ever willingly wake up and stretched until dark, his fucked up nanomachine body forcing him to live like a base-model human for the first time in years.

All that could explain away why he’s still lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, the occasional clanking of pans and the clinking of plates telling him Sarada is almost done with breakfast.

Then, there’s the truth—everything is shit, and he doesn’t want to get up.

It’s one of those days when the not-so-bad things feel worse than the terrible things. The terrible things… Well, they’re reality, plain and simple. But the not-so-bad things are just lies. He’d deluded himself into believing them once upon a time, back before he sealed Lord Seventh away, when the older man whose clothes smelled like someone who loved him laundered them had pulled him against his chest and held him there, whispering that he was safe. It had almost felt possible, probably because Lord Seventh’s faith in himself was like a disease that spread to everyone around, and Kawaki had not yet been immune.

Would have been nice if his power was as strong as his convictions in the end.

He flops over onto his side, pulling the comforter along with him, forming a half-finished sushi roll with Kawaki in its center. Downstairs, Daemon is yammering on about something, giving him yet another reason to not get up.

He should have been outraged to hear those washed-up words repeated by Sarada. It’s laughable that they’d made him feel safe and seen when Lord Seventh had said them, considering that the moment he started trying to build a different path for himself, the same old bastards showed up to rip it away, doing what they always did no matter that the Hokage had promised to stand between them and him.

Unfortunately it had felt good, waking up from a nightmare to hear her voice, to feel the weight of her holding him in place when he would have usually bolted up, to feel her warm and alive against his chest, even if he needed to put his hand on her back to assure himself that she was breathing. To feel her lungs expanding and contracting. To slow his breaths until he was breathing along with her.

It’d be so much better if he hadn’t woken up.

Now, he’s stuck with that in his head, the knowledge that it felt good to be hugged by her, or whatever the hell it had been—leaned on, laid on, some shit like that. Even if he’d gotten turned on by it, that desire could have been explained and dismissed. But instead of something explainable, she had made him feel warm and safe in a world where both warmth and safety had always been a lie. He didn’t know anything could make him feel like that anymore, especially a dumbass girl whose chief talents are not shutting up and almost getting killed.

And the worst part is he doesn’t think she knows that he knows that she did it, so he can’t tell her not to do it again.

He rolls over again, grabbing the pillow and shoving it over his head, muffling Daemon's shouting from downstairs. He’s going to have to get up eventually to take Sarada to the medical clinic for a follow-up exam, but he’s not getting out of bed a minute before he absolutely has to. Kawaki closes his eyes, hoping that if he tries hard enough, he’ll be able to fall back to sleep and forget about Sarada for a few more hours.

He doesn’t realize Daemon has come up the stairs until the little shit kicks his door open, sending the latch ripping through the doorframe, flecks of wood shooting out. In a flash, he’s on Kawaki’s back, digging his little hands into Kawaki’s hair and pulling his face off his pillow.

“Yo, big ugly! Quit sleeping!”

The intrusion is so abrupt, so loud, that Kawaki hadn’t had time to prepare himself and pays the price. The brief flash of violent anger he feels manifests on his own flesh, a hot, sharp pain ripping across his neck like a cat’s claw.

“Get off!” Kawaki roars, thrashing to free himself from his uninvited rider.

Daemon’s hands tighten in his hair, holding on. “Sis says we ain’t eating unless you’re eating with us, and my breakfast is getting cold. Get up or I’ll kick your loser butt all the way down the stairs.”

Eida has never demanded Kawaki’s presence at the breakfast table before—she’d never demanded much from him at all, taking an approach of luring him in with honey rather than vinegar, not understanding that Kawaki is more suspicious of sweet approaches than sour ones. But about now, he’ll agree to just about anything to get the little goblin off his back.

“Ugh, fine. Gimme a few minutes.”

Daemon hops off him, dusting his hands. “A few minutes is all you get. If you’re not down soon, I’m coming back up, and next time, I won’t be so nice.”

The kid tries to slam his door shut, but it just bounces back open in the broken frame, the morning light from the hallway pouring into Kawaki’s room. He pushes himself up and opens his eyes to be greeted by the sight of bright red droplets spotting his white bed sheet. His hand goes to his neck and comes away wet with blood weeping from the gash spanning the length of his throat.

Chapter Text

Pancakes stuffed with chocolate hazelnut spread, soft boiled eggs, thick fluffy slices of toasted milk bread topped with red bean jam, strawberries cut into the shape of flowers, grilled eel, a wilted spinach salad sprinkled with sesame seeds, coffee and milk. The breakfast spread laid out on their dining room table is fit for a king… No, not a king—a queen, Kawaki realizes as he pulls out a stool to sit down, noting that every single serving dish on the table contains foods favored by Eida, particularly during the days of the month when she felt bad and would demand that one of the other girls serve her breakfast in bed.

Did Sarada even go back to sleep after she slipped off his bed and went back to her chair? Or did she just sit there, waiting for him to fall asleep again before tiptoeing down to the kitchen?

He chances an accusing glance towards the kitchen from which Sarada, still wearing her red apron, is emerging with a shaker of powdered sugar to put the finishing touches on the pancakes. She stops in her tracks as soon as she sees him, eyes going wide behind her glasses and mouth dropping open.

Figures.

Sarada has as bad of a poker face as Lord Seventh, broadcasting every emotion on her face the moment she feels it whether she knows it or not. Of course she wouldn’t be able to act normal after hugging him in the middle of the night like some creepy weirdo, which is good because if she regretted it, she’d be less likely to do it again. Though her response to him brings up a secondary concern, that Eida might notice her reaction and…

Kawaki looks to the other end of the table to find Eida staring at him as well, a hand clapped over her mouth. Daemon is gawking, too, but unlike the aghast girls, a wide grin is spreading over his face, stretching his cheeks apart until he breaks.

The little gremlin slams his hands down on the table, cackling. “Did you really think of killing me?”

Kawaki rubs at the patchwork of gauze, tape, and bandages around his neck, hastily done with the mishmash of supplies that he found in the upstairs medicine cabinet.

“It’s just a scratch,” he mutters despite feeling a damp spot where he must have bled through his pisspoor attempt at first aid.

“What an idiot. Right, sis?”

Kawaki looks right into Eida’s majestic blue eyes, ignoring the obnoxious little monster next to her. “You wanted me downstairs, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.” Despite her stern voice, a faint blush appears on her cheeks due to his eye contact alone. Absolutely pathetic. “I thought we should eat together this morning.”

“It’s a lovely idea,” Sarada adds meekly, avoiding Kawaki eyes as she dusts the pancakes with powdered sugar.

“I’m glad you think so.” Eida’s response manages to be both diplomatic and cold, like a regent addressing her least favorite subject. “I know you’ll enjoy your breakfast.”

Sarada flashes Eida one of her fake smiles before hurrying off to the kitchen. She returns without her apron, carrying a large bowl to her place at the table next to Kawaki. No sooner does her butt hit the stool than Daemon descends on the food like a starving vulture who’d been circling a battlefield. Heaps get piled onto his plate before Kawaki can even pour himself a cup of coffee. Unlike usual, there’s no passing dishes. It’s more of an every-man-for-himself affair as Eida is simply sitting back with her arms crossed. Not until he manages to snag two of the pancakes and some toast with red bean jam for himself does he notice that Sarada is abstaining from the meal as well, or at least the meal she’d put so much care into preparing. In her bowl is an island of cold soba noodles in an ocean of broth, studded with large chunks of tomatoes.

He could have sworn Sarada didn’t like tomatoes.

There was a time early in their cohabitation mission where everyone had listed their least favorite foods on a piece of paper on the fridge, an attempt at creating housemate harmony when they ordered out. Eida wasn’t fond of peanut butter or french fries, both of which she said made her break out. Daemon had just scrawled down VEGETABLES in capital letters. Mitsuki specified that he didn’t like fish, but noted that he didn’t need to eat, so they shouldn’t concern themselves with his preferences. Sumire was like Kawaki, saying she’d eat anything at all, though some processed meat, like bacon or ham, gave her headaches.

And Sarada didn’t like tomatoes, the very same vegetable she’s now fishing out of the broth with a large soup spoon and shoveling into her mouth.

Kawaki picks up the bowl of strawberries, dumps a few onto his plate, and sets them down next to her.

“I’m fine,” she mutters under her breath.

“Sarada-chan is enjoying her breakfast,” Eida declares from her seat at the table between nibbles on a granola bar she’d pulled out of her pocket, the wrapper crumbled into a ball on her empty plate. “Now, what shall we do today? I was thinking we should have a girls’ movie marathon. Usually, it’d be you and me and Kakei-san, but now that you’ve gone and chased her off, perhaps I should invite Delta instead?”

Beside him, Sarada swallows audibly. “That’d be… lovely.”

“As long as they’re not girlie movies—”

“Hush.” Eida glares at Daemon. “I’ve actually curated a selection of ten of the best romance movies of all time. We can use them to help Sarada with her Boruto problem.”

Sarada’s spoon clatters against the side of her bowl. “My what?”

Eida takes a delicate bite of her granola bar. “Your Boruto problem. You know, the boy you’re in love with. The one that’s tall and dashing despite only having one eye. Maybe we’ll be able to inspire a confession out of you. You should plan on taking notes.”

“Come on, sis. I don’t want to watch…” Daemon sticks his finger down his throat, making fake gagging noises.

“Then don’t.” Eida says simply. “Delta can guard me for the day. You can go to the village and buy some more of those comic books you like and read them in our room. Then, we can have an all-girls’ day. Wouldn’t that be nice? Unless Kawaki wants to join us, too?”

His day would have been so much better if he’d just thought a little harder about killing Daemon. “I’d rather be dead,” he says, not lying one bit.

Eida tuts to herself. “Well, we can’t have that,” she declares, loud enough that she misses Sarada’s defeated sigh.

Sorry, he isn’t going to be fucking miserable, spending the day watching a bunch of too-beautiful people pretending to fall in love, backed by corny melodramatic music. That’s Sarada’s job, not his. But maybe he can at least spare her from her misery for a little bit. Especially because he’s pretty damn sure Eida’s pissy attitude has more to do with him than anything Sarada had done.

Kawaki pushes away his plate, leaving half an uneaten pancake still on it. “I need to take her to the medical clinic first. They wanted to do a follow-up exam this morning, and the later we go, the longer it’s going to take for her to be seen. Sarada, go get your jacket.”

“Um…” Her eyes run the length of the table, the mess of plates with unfinished food still on them. “I really should clean up first.”

“Eida and Daemon can deal with the dishes. And the cleaners usually come today, so they’ll take care of the kitchen.”

Eida straightens up, glaring at Sarada even though he was the one who’d assigned her kitchen duties, probably for the first time in her life. “Excuse me.”

“Really, I can—”

Kawaki stands up before she can finish. “Do I need to remind you that I’m your captain? I want you outside in five minutes. That's an order.”

Sarada is a nauseous knot of anxiety as she drags her feet down the paved path leading to the village, the massive mansions on the outskirts of Konoha giving way to smaller, slightly less impressive houses surrounded by small yards or gardens. Due to the distance, their excursions to the village were usually made by running, or, in the case of Kawaki and Eida, flying, which is why it’s incomprehensible that he’d started walking the moment they’d left the big house as though they had all the time in the world for a leisurely morning stroll.

Without Sumire’s shrewd assistance, her mission to pretend to be affected by Omnipotence was falling flat as a pancake, and not even a spread of all of Eida’s favorite foods had improved things. In fact, judging by the glared daggers aimed at her back as she departed, what happened over breakfast that morning had hurt more than helped. Though, it’s not entirely her fault. At least some of the blame should fall on the man beside her, his hands jammed into his pockets.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she mutters under her breath.

Kawaki’s scoff indicates that he knows exactly what she’s talking about. “I should have figured I wasn’t going to get a thank you out of you.”

“I’m serious!”

“If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be sitting at that stupid table, trying to choke down tomatoes. Is that what you wanted?”

“It’s not about what I want; it’s about what Eida dear wants.”

It had been an unspoken rule between Sumire and Sarada that they never spoke about their immunity to Eida’s charm to avoid detection. Occasionally, they’d mention it in mind-to-mind communications during meetings with Shikamaru, but for the most part they’d formed their own coded language surrounding Eida so that she’d never be able to look back on a conversation between them and discover their secret. She thought Kawaki might have noticed the way they talked over the past three years of living with them, but as soon as he opens his mouth, Sarada discovers that she was sorely mistaken.

“Come on. It’s not like you actually—”

Sarada had been to enough action movies with Boruto that she’d seen the slow-motion scenes in which a hero jumps on top of a bomb that’s about to explode. In her mind’s eye, that’s what happens now as she shoves Kawaki into a low garden wall. The back of his knees meet with the stones, giving him the choice of either tumbling over it or sitting down. He chooses the latter, ending up on eye level with her. Or almost eye level because the moment she steps towards him, his gaze drops to his lap.

“Let me take a look at your neck.” She had been planning on letting someone at the hospital heal him as a way of getting him out of her hair during her examination, but it’s a damn good excuse to make him sit down and shut up. “I’m going to take off the wrapping.”

She doesn’t wait for him to give his consent, wrapping her arms around his neck and feeling around for the end of it. Kawaki stiffens when she moves closer, stepping between his open knees, putting her mouth inches away from his ear.

“Don’t get in my way of doing what Eida wants again,” she whispers.

“Sarada—” The syllables of her name come out as a warm breath against her exposed shoulder. She can tell there’s something more he wants to say, but she can’t take that risk.

“I mean it,” she hisses. “Promise that you’ll stay out of it from now on. Whatever it is, I can handle it.”

She’s close enough that she can feel the rise and fall of his sigh. “Fine, whatever you want.”

“Good.” She untucks the end of the bandage he’d sloppily wrapped over on itself and begins to unwind it. Kawaki sits with his hands on his knees, perfectly still as she pulls the loops over his head. He’d bled through at one spot, but she hadn’t realized how deep the cut was until she peels off the first gauze square held in place by tape.

“You should have asked me to heal this back at the house,” she tells him, pulling off the next one, soaked with fresh red blood in the middle and dark dried blood at the edges and placing it down on the wall along with the bandage.

“You seemed to be dealing with enough,” he mutters.

What she wouldn’t give to be bickering with Boruto rather than Kawaki. With Boruto, she always seemed to know what to say. Or perhaps he had a way of taking her words and turning them into something that ended up being useful to both of them. Or at least that’s how it had been once upon a time. They hadn’t really had the opportunity to have that kind of interaction for the past three years, and she had no idea if he’d react the same way now if they did. The problem in front of her is Kawaki, which she deals with by moving on rather than informing him that if this kind of injury occurred on the battlefield without a medic nin present, he would have needed stitches.

“I need you to look up,” she says, reaching for the next square of gauze and finding it tucked beneath his chin.

Kawaki responds by looking up—too far up, casting his gaze up to the branches of the drooping pine above them, a motion that stretches open his would, exposing the bright red flesh inside of it.

“Ugh, no. Don’t do that.”

“Damn it, then what do you want me to—”

Sarada puts a hand on his head, pushing it down until he’s looking at her. “Like that. Keep it just like that.”

She’s always thought of his eyes as the color of metal and ash, things that were cold and lifeless, but she catches just a hint of shining silver in them before he redirects his gaze to the house on the other side of the path.

“Just go ahead and rip them off,” he says when she starts on the next square of gauze, but Sarada doesn’t listen, trying not to open the wound in the process of undressing it. Soon, there’s a neat little pile of blood-soaked squares next to them, the gash running across his throat from his left ear to his right one looking like a bloody smile. Does he even understand how close he had come to actually killing himself? If it was just a little deeper…

“You really need to stop thinking about hurting Daemon. If you want some help, the meditation practices we use to—”

“Why don’t you tell the little shit that he needs to learn to knock? I wasn’t fully awake. Now, could you cut the little lectures and fix it already?”

Sarada retrieves a little bottle of antiseptic from her pouch and uses it to clean her hands before touching Kawaki. Those more skilled in medical ninjutsu than she is can usually heal an injury without touching it, but Sarada had found that it helped to touch the wound directly. He flinches the moment she makes contact with his neck.

“Sorry, my hands are probably cold.”

“No, it’s not…” She can feel it when he swallows, his larynx bobbing against her hand. His eyes flick over to her for a second, but that’s enough time for her to see the unease in them, the discomfort. If he was anyone else, she might have considered it to be anxiety or panic, but Kawaki was good at keeping everything inside. At least when he was awake. “Just get it over with.”

She knows Kawaki has been through shit she can’t imagine ever having experienced, but her brain is quick to supply a few suggestions as to why a man who acted as though he was afraid of nothing would recoil at the feeling of a hand wrapping around his neck.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she says, the blue green light of her healing jutsu appearing around her hand.

“You couldn’t even if you tried,” he says, his voice tight.

Sarada shakes her head at his bravado, closing her eyes and turning her focus inward as she starts to bring the edges of his skin together, reuniting flesh with flesh. Like the last time she healed him, the nanomachines inside his blood begin flocking his neck like moths to a flame. They start out as tiny little blobs of gray with dozens of little tentacle arms floating behind them, but as they get closer to Sarada’s ninjutsu, they begin to take on her light, turning from microscopic robots into something ethereal, like dark ocean waters filled with millions of glowing jellyfish. They’re simultaneously otherworldly yet wonderous—something Sarada would tell Kawaki if she thought he’d remotely appreciate being told that something inside him was beautiful.

Her reluctant patient shifts uncomfortably as she finishes knitting the last of his skin together, the itching sensation of rapid healing getting to him. “Are you done yet?”

“Almost.” Sarada opens her eyes to find him looking at her, frowning as usual. There are times when she almost understands why the other girls in the village find him handsome, but Sarada has enough frowns herself. She needs someone who can smile for her. “I just want to get rid of the scar.”

“Just leave it,” Kawaki says, grabbing her wrist to pull it away.

Sarada shakes her head. “No. If I don’t fix this right, every time I look at you, I’m going to see that I half-assed something. Stay still for a little longer. Please.”

Kawaki doesn’t move, but he doesn’t let go of her wrist either. Sarada begins the process of minimizing the fibroblasts so they don’t form collagen, then replacing the granulation tissue that had formed with real skin. This time, Sarada watches her work, double checking it as the bright pink line that had been left on his neck fades back to his usual skin color.

“Is it hard to remove scars?”

“It’s easiest when they’re fresh and shallow,” she says. “I’m sure you’ve seen enough shinobi to know that there’s only so much we can do for bad injuries.”

“Could you remove a tattoo?” he asks after a moment.

Her eyes go to the little black IX etched right beneath his cheekbone. She’d always thought that it marked him as a Kara inner, which was strange as the other members of their secret society treated him as an object rather than an actual person, much less an equal member. Not only that, but Amado didn’t have any marking on him like the others. “I’m not sure. In theory, I think we could treat it the same way we treat poisons and draw the ink out of your body, but I’m not sure. We can ask my mom, if you’re interested.”

“Don’t bother.”

“I can see why you would want to,” she says softly.

Kawaki shakes his head, a lock of too-long black hair falling into his face, hiding his eyes from her. “Nah, it doesn’t matter. Let it go.”

Chapter Text

Kawaki hates the disinfectant stink of the hospital and the way the too-white fluorescent lights reflect on the waxed floors. Too many times, he’d woken up on an exam table in Amado’s lab, reeking of isopropyl alcohol, squinting at the bright light above his head, with no idea of how he’d gotten there or what had been done to him.

The bench in the waiting area squeaks when Sarada repositions herself next to him in a feeble attempt to keep the back of her thighs from sticking to the vinyl. Machines beep. Gurney wheels squeal. Nurses and doctors confer with one another, speaking in medical terms and abbreviations that might as well have been a different language to him. Too many people slow when they pass them on the bench, giving them a nod of recognition despite him having no fucking clue who any of them are.

Once again, Kawaki finds himself thinking that he should take up smoking as a serious habit, an excuse to get out of narrow hallways and stuffy rooms.

“Ah, there you are! I finally found an empty room for us.” Sarada’s pink-haired mother appears from around a corner, a thick medical chart tucked under her arm. Even in her loose white labcoat, Kawaki can tell why some of the teenage shinobi referred to Konoha’s hospital as MILF Central. He might have agreed with them if he was into mothers, fucking, or liking anything at all.

When Sarada stands up to follow, Kawaki notices that she’s slightly taller than her mother. Either that or her heels are slightly bigger, which is possible. Side-by-side, the two of them manage to look strangely alike while also looking completely different, one colorful and light, the other monochrome and dark, but still somehow the same.

Sakura starts to walk away, then looks over her shoulder at him, her voice cheery. “Come along. There’s room for you, too.”

Maybe she doesn’t notice the way her daughter’s step falters when she issues the invitation. Or perhaps she thinks mothers know best. Either way, she continues to look at Kawaki expectantly, a smile on her face, and doesn’t start moving again until he joins them.

She leads them to a small examination room at the end of the hall. Sarada sits on the table, he leans against the wall beside the door, Sakura pulls a rolling stool out from beneath a cabinet and crosses her legs, opening the chart and skimming over the previous entry in it. “Let’s see… Last time you were here, Shizune said that you weren’t experiencing any eye pressure or headaches. Is that right?”

Sarada nods. “Yes,” she says, a little too brightly.

Sakura clicks the end of her pen without taking notes. “And you’ve been sleeping well—”

“Perfectly. Eight to ten hours a night. Just like you ordered.”

“And you haven’t used your Sharingan at all?”

“No, I—”

She’s lying through her teeth. Sarada knows it. Kawaki knows it. And from the look Sakura is giving her daughter, she knows it, too.

“Sweetie, I read the report from your encounter in the Forest of Death yesterday with those Claw Grimes, and I had a conversation with Shikamaru in which I told him what I thought of him assigning you that kind of mission while you’re still recovering, both as your doctor and as your mother. So, if you used it—”

“I didn’t. Kawaki saved me before I could.”

It’s a damn funny thing for her to be saying because he remembers the red glow of her eyes beneath the water. Not to mention the other two times that she’d activated her Sharingan, both on the training grounds with Hima and in Boruto’s bedroom.

Sakura’s gaze flick in his direction before returning to her daughter. “I need you to be honest with me to determine the best course of treatment. If you’re not getting better because you’re using your Sharingan, that’s different than not getting better without using it.”

“I understand,” Sarada says.

“I’m not sure that you do.” With a sign, Sakura returns to the chart, flipping through the pages. “Are you experiencing any new symptoms? Blurred vision? Sensitivity to light? Unexplained pain?”

“She’s been complaining about a stiff neck,” Kawaki mutters.

If Sarada’s neck was bothering her at that moment, it’s not apparent due to how quickly she turns her head to glare at him.

“Oh.” With a click, Sakura deploys the nib of her pen and aims it at the paper.

“Don’t write that down.”

“A symptom is a symptom.”

“It’s just because I’ve been sleeping in a weird position. It has nothing to do with my eyes. I’m already treating it with warm compresses before bed.”

Sakura looks to Kawaki for confirmation. He nods, earning him another glare from Sarada.

“Okay… Have you tried sleeping in a normal position?”

“Sure, I can try that,” Sarada says, sounding more like a sarcastic teenage daughter than a patient.

Sakura makes a note in the chart over her daughter’s objections. “I’ll put a referral in for you to see one of the massage therapists in case it doesn’t resolve on its own. But I only want you to be getting massages from professionals, okay? No backrubs from any pretty boys you live with.”

Sarada slaps a hand over her face, barely hiding a mortified blush. “Mama!” 

Sakura chuckles to herself while retrieving a tray of ophthalmologist tools from the cabinet. She easily transitions from teasing mother to medical professional as she examines Sarada’s eyes, issuing directions as she holds up various magnifiers and a pen light. “Look up, to the left. Try not to blink.”

The examination takes longer than Kawaki thinks it should with Sakura taking copious notes every time she switches between tools. He’s sure it’s going to be bad news (when’s the last time he’d gotten news that wasn’t bad?) until Sakura finally lays down her pen. “It looks like you’re finally recovering!”

If Sarada wanted her mother to believe she hadn’t been lying earlier, she should have tried not looking surprised now. “Really?!”

Sakura nods, her pink bob swaying as she does. “Yes! Now, you’re not fully recovered, but the swelling is decreasing. I’m going to keep you on the same recovery plan for at least another week as we continue to monitor your progress. Don’t think this means you can go chasing after Claw Grimes or overdo it on the training grounds—”

Sarada grins at her mother, big, bright, and authentic, the same grin Sakura has as well.

When the hell was the last time he saw her smiling like that? When she won her chunin exam and was promoted to captain? During Himawari’s school festival when she’d been competing against Boruto in carnival games? He’d forgotten she has the ability to glow like a sun when she was truly happy.

Or maybe he’d never had a reason to notice it until now.

“Alright, I want you to go to the lab down the hall and get some blood drawn. You know where it is. And while you do that, I’ll finish up the paperwork so you can get out of here!”

Sarada throws her arms around her mother’s neck, giving her a quick hug, then hurries out of the room, her shoes clomping against the tiles. With a sigh, Kawaki pushes himself off the wall to follow her yet again, however he’s barely gotten through the door when a firm hand grabs the collar of his jacket, yanking him back into the room.

“I’m not giving her any backrubs,” Kawaki says as Sakura shuts the door.

“And I trust that my daughter could handle herself if you tried to.” Sakura leans against the counter, hugging Sarada’s medical chart against her chest. “I just wanted to thank you for looking out for her.”

“It’s my mission.”

Sakura shakes her head. “Yesterday, when I read the report… If anything had happened to her… After what happened to Sasuke… If those Claw Grimes had… I don’t know what I would have done… I can’t… I can’t lose her, too.”

Kawaki looks away from the tears gathering in the doctor’s lashes at the closed door, wondering how bad it would be if he just walked out. This emotional female shit isn’t his thing. He’s more comfortable standing over a dying enemy than next to a crying woman.

“It’s nothing,” he says, fighting back the memory of the wave of dread he’d experienced yesterday when he thought Sarada was a goner. He can’t let his panic connect with hers—he can’t let himself connect with anyone.

“It isn’t nothing.” Sakura reaches out, her hand skimming against his upper arm. His skin crawls beneath his jacket from the contact. Every nerve in his skin is screaming at him to pull away. “I know you’ve been keeping an eye on her ever since she came back from the Sand. Ever since you visited her in the hospital when she was unconscious. Even before Shikamaru ordered you to do it. And I need you to know that I appreciate it. Sasuke would be thankful, too, knowing that his favorite student is still looking out for his daughter.”

Kawaki takes a step back. In the tiny room, a single step is all he can take. There’s a sick feeling deep down in his gut. Not nausea, not the feeling that he’d eaten something rotten and needed to puke it up. It’s more the feeling of being rotten deep down inside of himself and knowing there’s no way to purge that kind of badness from his body.

“Sorry.” Sakura apologizes, seeing his obvious discomfort, which is even worse. It’s not her fault he’s like this. There’s a hell of a lot of people he can blame, but Sarada’s mom isn’t one of them.

He reaches for the door, needing to get the hell out of that stupid small room with its narrow walls that seemed to be closing in on them.

“I know my daughter isn’t being fully honest with me,” Sakura says before he can grab the handle.

Kawaki balls his hand into a fist, dropping it by his side. “I’m not going to snitch on her.”

Sakura blots the tears from her eyes with the cuff of her lab coat, straightening up. “I’m not asking you to do that, either. I don’t expect you to. You’re her teammate. But because you’re her teammate, because you’re looking out for her, I need you to understand what she’s going to lose by using her Mangekyo Sharingan.”

The tiles on the wall of the hospital bathroom are cold against his forehead.

He had felt like he needed to throw up, his belly churning, his throat tight, his face sweating, his vision going fuzzy black around the edges, that out-of-body feeling of pure instinct that your insides are trying to escape. But when he’d managed to get away from Sarada’s mom and into the restroom across the hall from the waiting area, he found that his stomach wasn’t the problem. It was his head, which is why he’s now leaning against the wall, trying to pull his shit together before someone walks in needing to take a piss and finds the dead Hokage’s son losing it in the bathroom.

Losing it.

That’s what had happened, what he was feeling. He’d lost something.

Kawaki never had much of anything, so little that he can remember each time he lost something he valued: the goldfish Jigen had killed, the brother that he’d tried to kill, and Lord Seventh, when he’d sealed him away, deciding that the Hokage’s continued existence in the world was more important than his existence in Kawaki’s life.

And now Sarada.

Not Sarada. Not as a person. He’d almost murdered her once and if he ever needed to, he’d do it again. Or at least that’s what he tells himself now, knowing it’s the only way he can justify having tried to kill her in the first place.

What he’d lost was the shining speck of hope that there’d be someone strong enough to defend the village once he was gone, once Boruto was gone as well. That they could die and the village could live on in peace with someone stronger than Naruto to lead it, someone less precious than Himawari to defend it. He could die in peace, and Sarada could have what she always wanted by becoming Hokage, watching over everyone with her Mangekyo Sharingan.

But he’d just learned that he’d been right all along, his assertions that shinobi are weak and useless proven yet again when that pink-haired problem had decided to drop the bomb on him that actually using her fucking over-powered eyes would ultimately lead to Sarada going blind. Oh, she told him so that he could “protect” her more, to “keep an eye on her” because “I know you care.”

Fuck, the only thing he really cared about was bringing Naruto back to a safe world before blasting himself to bits. Or flying so high up into the sky that he choked on the lack of oxygen or froze from the lack of atmosphere. Or maybe he’d fill a bathtub up with steaming water and sink below the surface, never coming up for air again. It didn’t really matter how he did it as long as the scientific ninja tools inside of him couldn’t repair his brain or body.

But now that hope is gone. He’s back to square one, knowing that someone as strong as he is will have to live on for Konoha to be safe.

He takes a deep breath and goes over to the sink, splashing cold water on his face before blotting it away with too many paper towels ripped from the dispenser.

Sarada is waiting by the reception desk for him with Sakura. She waves when she sees him approaching. Kawaki wonders if he should have forced himself to throw up so he’d feel less sick now, an acid taste of chocolate-filled pancakes bubbling up in the back of his throat when he stands by her side.

“There’s stuff I promised to do back at the house. Otherwise, we’d love to have lunch with you.”

“I understand. Shikamaru keeps you so busy with that mission.” Sakura looks back and forth between them, smiling. It’s a wistful smile he’s seen too many times over the past three years from too many people, someone looking at him and remembering him to have been someone he never was. She puts a hand on each of their shoulders, giving them an affectionate squeeze. “I’m so glad you two are getting along again. It’s been too long. You have no idea how happy it makes me to see you together.”

Sarada glances uneasily at Kawaki. “I’m glad you’re happy, Mama,” she says.

“Just another week or so and Mitsuki will be with you, too!” Sakura adds, letting them go. “I spoke to Orochimaru the other day. He’s doing well. Then, the new Team 7 will be back together again! Just like the old days.”

“Just like the old days,” Sarada repeats. Then, she gives her mother one more brief hug before departing.

It’s almost noon when they get outside. Everything is too bright and too green. There’s too many people walking around, acting like there’s nothing wrong with their stupid village and their stupid ninja world.

They walk for a few blocks without acknowledging one another, Sarada’s hands jammed in her pockets, her eyes facing forward. “Sorry about that,” she says, breaking the silence after they pass a large crowd lined up at a train stop to get on the Thunder Rail. “It must be weird as hell when people treat you like Boruto.”

“It must be weird as hell when people act as though you don’t hate me.”

Sarada emits an amused snort, shaking her head. “I don’t hate you.”

“You should. I’m going to kill Boruto.”

The train runs past them, temporarily giving him a reprieve from her response. The brakes shriek as it slows down for its stop, the engine emitting a steady chugging sound, the wheels clack on the rails. The wind from its passing tousles Sarada’s hair.

“I hate some of the things you’ve done,” she says once the train has passed and everything is quiet again. “I hate some of the things you want to do. But I don’t hate you.”

As a professional Kawaki hater, he can’t understand her distinction between who he is and what he’s done, what he plans to do. “What’s the difference?”

Sarada pushes the stray hairs back from her face, tucking them behind her ears as they continue walking. “I want to believe the village is a place where everybody can belong, just like Lord Seventh said. That means it’s the place where Boruto belongs. But it’s also a place where you could belong. I don’t know how after all that’s happened, but that’s what I believe.”

“That’s stupid,” he says.

Stupid words from a stupid girl who will never be able to protect the village, who will never be capable of doing anything other than going blind and dying. And stupid him for wishing it wasn’t so.

Chapter Text

Kawaki throws his jacket down on the dining room table when he passes it, ignoring the spread of appetizers and snacks laid out for their little movie marathon. He abandons Sarada with Delta, Eida, and an over-sized bowl of buttered popcorn, shirking his escort duties. If Hidari pops out of the television mid-kiss scene, he’s sure he’ll hear their girly shrieks from upstairs. 

And, if he doesn’t, would it really matter?

He slams the now-fixed door to his bedroom shut and falls facedown into the fresh sheets that the cleaners had put on his bed, the old ones disappearing for their weekly washing without mention of the blood stains that had been on them. Both pillows are back where they belong, the shirt Sarada wears at night dropped into his hamper, the blanket she wraps herself in whisked away with the rest of the dirty bedding.

Whatever.

Operation Save Sarada’s Eyes was a bust. There wasn’t a point to him caring anymore. He’s free to treat Shikamaru’s little mission to babysit her like he treats every other mission—a fucking joke not worth his attention or effort. Time to send her back to her own goddamned bedroom where she can stay up as late as she wants, reading worthless books and pining over a worthless blonde, allowing him to fart whenever he needs to and jack off whenever he wants to.

He grabs the pillow she’d been using, stacking it on top of his own, wrapping his arms around them, and smashing his face into their softness.

He hadn’t really lost anything. That’s what he’d decided on the walk home. Just like when he’d first arrived in Konoha and Lord Seventh had promised him safety, the hope he’d felt with Sarada was nothing more than a delusion he was dumb enough to believe. It had never been real, it had never been possible, so he couldn't lose something he never had in the first place.

He inhales the scent of freshly laundered pillow cases, an odor that couldn’t be described as anything other than clean. He hadn’t really known that clean had a smell beyond something chemical and cold before he moved into the Uzumaki household. The day the cleaners came to the big house was his least-hated day of the week solely because of the new sheet smell that reminded him of blankets that had dried on Hinata’s clothesline beneath the Konoha sun, the smell of laundry detergent and leaves that got ruined the moment he slept beneath them.

It doesn’t take long for his eyelids to grow heavy. Too many interrupted nights since Sarada started staying with him, not enough naps during the day when he was watching her. But there’s no point in staying awake now, is there? There’s no reason to stay awake at all.

He slept for six hours and probably could have slept for six more if it hadn’t been for the glass-shattering shriek that had him out of bed and on his feet before he knew that he’s awake and running. The tip of his bladed arm left a scratch in the drywall the entire length of the hallway. Panicked while still half-asleep, he skids to a halt at the top of the stairs, almost tumbling down them. Catching himself on the banister, he stares down at the scene before him: on the big-screen television, a tall, dark asshole has an actress pinned against the wall, his one hand splayed wide on the doorframe behind her. The actress’s mouth opens in mock surprise as her co-star bends his elbow, closing the distance between their faces. The fingers of his free hand catch her under the chin, forcing her to look at him. “Do you even know what you do to me?” he growls onto her trembling lips.

This time, the shriek is muffled by Eida’s fist jammed into her mouth, her cheeks five-alarm fire red, wide blue eyes transfixed on the screen. At her feet, Delta has paused in painting her girl-crush’s toenails cotton candy pink, head cocked to the side as the actress lets out a shaky sigh. On the far-end of the couch, Sarada is hugging a throw pillow to her chest, a single bead of sweat running down her cheek. In front of her on the coffee table, an open notebook and pen lie forgotten.

Kawaki groans, rubbing his face with both hands. This is what gets girls going? Jerks with sloppy hair cuts slamming them up against walls? He figures that must qualify him as a goddamned casanova after all the practice he’s gotten throwing Amado around, though he’s not sure if he could reproduce that steamy, seductive frown or make his eyes look at though they wanted to devour a girl like she’s a still-warm chunky red bean taiyaki.

This is the shit he’d gotten out of bed to save them from?

He turns around, about to go back to his room, when the electronic ding-dong of the doorbell blasts out of the speaker right next to his ear.

The girls don’t react. How could they be expected to when the actress who’d just creamed her jeans is melting her way down the wall, her on-screen crush stalking away? He sure as fuck isn’t answering it. Luckily for the hapless delivery man, Daemon comes scurrying out of the bedroom with the same energy of a little dog when it hears its master filling the food dish. There’s some shouting (there’s always shouting when Daemon is involved), a slammed door, then an awful lot of stomping for a short little fucker who can’t weigh more than an average eleven-year-old.

“Yo! Big ugly! Our grub is—” The kid cuts his hollering off mid-sentence when he actually takes a second to look up the stairs and sees Kawaki standing there. The kid raises a paper bag, shaking it at him. “Yours is in the kitchen! Better get it while it’s still hot!” He then scurries back into his room with the energy of an ill-mannered tanuki returning to its den, but not before all of the girls turn around to stare at Kawaki loitering above them.

Kawaki indulges for a moment, thinking about wringing Daemon’s narrow little neck while he’s not in physical contact with anyone else, then trudges down the stairs to the kitchen. He dumps the contents of the greasy takeout bag on the counter and stares at it, eye twitching.

Motherfucking Thunder Burger. A triple cheeseburger, to be exact, along with a monster-sized energy cola and a double order of fries. Because Eida didn’t like fries, Kawaki never had to mention his aversion to Thunder Burger before, not that Daemon would have done anything different if he had.

The signature smell of griddle-cooked beef patties rises up through the wrapping, fighting its way past the reek of mid-week fryer oil to get to Kawaki’s nose. It’s not the burger itself that makes him sweep all the food back in the bag and jam it deep into the trash can before slamming the lid shut. He didn’t mind a greasy burger and fries—as long as they came from any other place in Konoha.

How many fucking times had someone dropped a bag of Thunder Burger in his lap the first year after Omnipotence happened, as if a goddamned burger was capable of making someone smile after their father and mother had been killed? Boruto wasn’t there to be offended by it, so Kawaki decided to be offended for him.

Oh, sorry your parents got murdered. Here’s a ground-up dead cow patty and a soda in a paper cup with your deceased dad’s name on it.

It didn’t matter that he knew Hinata and Lord Seventh were still alive. What mattered is they didn’t know that.

Shikadai had done it. Mitsuki had done it. ChoCho had done it. Inojin hadn’t, but that’s because he didn’t give a shit like his other team members, which earned him a few points in Kawaki’s book. Then, there were Boruto’s other academy classmates as well, too fucking many of them, who thought inviting him out to sit next to them in a tiny plastic booth would make a difference in his miserable life.

He told them to go fuck themselves, each and every one of them. And after enough times, they finally stopped asking. They stopped trying to drop by the big house to see him. They stopped yapping at him when they saw him on the street. They stopped making eye contact if he passed any of them in Hokage Tower. But he couldn’t stop the phantom smell of Thunder Burger from materializing any time they were around.

At least he has other options.

Kawaki snags a plate from the cabinet and wanders over to the girls’ snack collection, which looked pretty much the same as it had a few hours earlier. Someone had dipped a chip in the dip, taken a handful of pretzels. One meat skewer was missing from an entire tray of them. A dumpling had been cut in half to expose its stuffing.

Did Eida order all this food just to make it feel like she was hosting a big, lavish party for just the three of them?

His intention is to serve himself, then retreat upstairs to the balcony, eating alone in the dark. But as soon as he starts stacking things on his plate, he realizes that several return trips would be necessary before he’s full, meaning he’d have to walk up and down the stairs again and again, drawing Eida’s attention each time.

Fuck that.

Instead, he plops himself down on one of the stools and begins to eat, treating their spread like a personal buffet. From where he’s sitting, he can see Sarada's profile, the flickering light from the movie reflected in her glasses. Eida sits beside her, Delta now on her opposite side now, painting her fingernails to match her toes. On the screen, the leading man chases the girl down a dark sidewalk lined with streetlights, yelling her name over the sound of pouring rain hitting the pavement.

Kawaki picks up a bamboo skewer and bites into a hunk of cold chicken.

How is being wet and yelled at romantic? He imagines Sarada taking notes: Check weather forecast. Wait for rainy day. Put on a tight white shirt, a short skirt, and run away from Boruto, ignoring his pleas for you to slow down.

His brain’s color commentary skids to a halt when the actress turns around in her soaked shirt, his eyebrows rising at the sight of a pair of clearly defined nipples straining against the see-through fabric. He grabs the soda Daemon had ordered for him, the only thing that had been spared from the trash can, and takes a long pull from the straw.

He doesn’t have the opportunity to see much tits and ass. The fragments lodged in his imagination were borrowed from a handful of movie scenes he’d seen over the years, a few magazine covers he’d caught glimpses of behind the checkout counter where he bought his cigarettes, and a Shinobi Illustrated Swimsuit edition Code had snuck into the Kara hideout. It’s not like he could snag a girlie mag and bring it back to his bedroom, not when the cleaners rearranged his things on a weekly basis and Daemon was always sniffing around to see what kind of trouble he could get into. He had to make-do with what was in his own mind, so he couldn’t let the opportunity slip away to add to his limited rotation of fantasy fodder.

The barely-concealed tits on the screen are heaving right now as the actress sobs, screaming at the dude. He ignores her tear-and-rain soaked face and anything going on above her chin, focusing on the exquisitely-outlined B-cups. To Kawaki, any tits were fine. He hadn’t really seen enough of them to develop a preference for size or positioning or shape. Tits were tits. Any time he got to see them was good enough.

The on-screen exchange goes on for less than a minute before the guy grabs her hand, dragging her through the rain towards an apartment building.

Bastard.

Thirty seconds of almost tits are better than zero seconds of no tits. That’s what he’s thinking as he picks up one of the dumplings with his fingers and pops it into his mouth. The couple exchange a glance as they wait for an elevator, the electronic bar above it counting down the floors for dramatic tension. 3… 2… 1… G.

She’s on him the moment the doors shut, barely letting him push the button for his floor before shoving him against the back wall, grabbing his tie, jerking his mouth down to hers. They’re a mess of desperation, too much need and too much tongue. The camera zooms in on the minutiae of their intimacy. Her leg hooked around his hip. His mouth on her neck. Her needy sigh. His hand pushing up beneath her skirt.

Kawaki glances over at Sarada to see how she’s handling the hot-and-heavy makeout scene. All he manages to notice is that she’s squeezing the pillow so tight, it’s a miracle she’s not sitting amid an explosion of stuffing. Then, he catches Eida watching him watch Sarada and immediately turns his attention back to the television.

The elevator dings as they hit their floor. The doors open and through a cinematic miracle, they stumble into his darkened apartment. The actor peels off her shirt, giving the audience a flash of silhouetted side boob. Her hands grab his belt, the buckle clinks, and a cut later, she’s on top of him on the couch, completely naked, bouncing away. There’s a five-second clip of her bare ass that Kawaki immediately files away for a later date—right now, he’s still too depressed to make good use of it anyway. Then, all he sees is the couple from the waist up, her arms around his neck, his hand on her hips, moaning and groaning above the sound of slapping flesh.

If Kawaki invited a couple of bros over to watch soft core pornography while living with Eida and Sarada, he’s damn sure that he’d end up in the Hokage’s office the following morning with a metric shit ton of explaining to do, but the girls end up getting away with it because it's “romantic.”

What bullshit acting.

His open-mouth pants, his rhythmic grunts, his lust-laced gaze sweeping up and down her body like he can’t actually believe she’s on top of him. But even that’s more believable than the girl’s vocalizations, her high-pitched moans, her head thrown back, face contorted in faux ecstasy.

Kawaki can’t imagine sex feeling that good—particularly for her.

Eida would probably be the type to make those fake-ass noises, to pretend that she liked it, to put on a show to encourage a guy to do it to her a second time. But he couldn’t imagine Sarada undergoing that kind of whole-body euphoria, either as an act or in real life.

Real or not, the graphic sex seems to have finally gotten to her. The lower half of her face is hiding behind the pillow, the top half the same color as the tomatoes she hates so much. Her knees are pulled up as though she’s trying to make herself as small as possible so she can disappear into the couch cushions.

The actress on screen digs her nails into her co-star's back and bites her bottom lip, failing to contain one last earth-shattering moan as she grinds her hips into his.

And that’s when Eida snatches up the remote and pauses the movie mid-cinematic orgasm. She shifts her gaze away from Kawaki, turning to Sarada as crosses her legs at the knee and folds her hands in her lap. A sickly sweet smile spreads across her pink painted lips.

“So,” she asks. “What have you learned about kissing Boruto?”

Chapter Text

By the fourth movie, Sarada is sensing a theme in Eida’s selection for their marathon: Pure-hearted girl meets tragically-hot-but-emotionally-unavailable guy, patiently enduring his coldness until he finally falls in love with her.

She’s unsure whether this is a dynamic Eida had chosen to apply to Sarada’s “Boruto problem” or if it was reflective of her own situation with Kawaki, but it played out again and again on the big-screen television—first, in a romantic comedy in which a cut-throat business executive is trying to buy a woman’s family flower shop and greenhouse to tear them down and construct a corporate warehouse. Then, a jaded detective slowly falls for the woman who hired him to find her missing brother. In the last one, a hardened shinobi guards a privileged princess, getting closer and closer to her as she reveals that her life of luxury is nothing more than a gilded cage.

When Eida hands Delta another movie to put into their player, Sarada tosses her notebook and pen down on the table, bored by the entire exercise. She’d taken copious notes, ones that she thinks will please Eida if she decides to review them: Wear soft, natural makeup; be patient when he’s mad; always accept an apology when one is offered; believe in second chances; stare at his lips to make him kiss you; glance back at him before leaving a room. Though she didn’t dare to write it down, the actual message she’d been getting from the movies is that every strong woman needs a stronger man by her side—a sentiment she finds ridiculous and offensive. What kind of Hokage would she be if she always found herself relying on someone else? The future that she’d envisioned with Boruto was one of partnership, personal as well as professional, of mutual support and mutual respect, not the dependent fantasy the films had been peddling.

As the opening credits roll, she decides to take a break from notetaking this time and just watch the movie, giving herself the opportunity to fall asleep if it turns out to be as much of a snoozefest as the last one. But as soon as the first scene begins, Sarada finds herself sucked into the story of a woman who moves away from her hometown for a new job in the big city only to run into her childhood friend who had been adopted into the Samurai Yakuza clan after his parents’ tragic death. The boy she once knew is now nearly unrecognizable, a cold, tattooed gangster with a curved katana and the inability to fully button his shirt. She wants to save him from his life of darkness; he wants to spare her from the harsh realities of the criminal underworld, never letting her discover that the career of which she’s so proud is nothing more than a money laundering scheme for a rival clan.

The only time she’s able to tear her eyes away from the screen is when Daemon is yelling at Kawaki to come downstairs for supper, an interruption that is quickly forgotten as the plot unfolds and the sexual tension that had been simmering between the two characters finally boils over in a heated elevator make-out scene.

She’s expecting it to end there, for the camera to fade to black, the pair of lovers waking up entangled in his bedsheets in the morning, similar to the previous movies they’d watched.

That’s… not what happens.

Most of shinobi society considers Sarada an unruly rebel, an Uchiha who is proud she’s an Uchiha, who’d never stop defending the boy everyone else saw as a traitor, who wasn’t afraid to shout directly into the Hokage’s face—and all of that was true. What they failed to see was that Sarada was still Sarada, the girl who wanted to walk in Lord Seventh’s footsteps, to uphold the ways of the ninja world, and to make her father proud. She’d never stolen so much as a paperclip or defaced a monument with graffiti. She always recycled and couldn’t bring herself to ignore a “Do Not Walk On The Grass” sign. As such, she’s never seen a movie rated any higher than PG12, which is why she’s entirely unprepared for the graphic R18 sex that’s suddenly unfolding before her eyes. She’s stuck between wanting to hide her face until it’s done and demanding that they rewind the scene and watch it over and over.

His hands are splayed on her hips, fingers digging into her soft flesh. The muscles beneath his tattooed skin bulge as he guides her up and down. Sweat glistens on his forehead and drips down his chiseled chest. But the most intriguing thing of all is the way he looks at her, this girl he’s been secretly pining for since they were little kids, like he wants to memorize the shape of her body and the look on her face as his thrusting forces moans from her that sound as though Eida rented the movie from a video store’s back room.

Everything in his eyes says that he wants her—and not just in the raw physical way he’s taking her now. He wants to gobble down the love she’s been offering him that he’s unable to accept, latch onto her promise to take him back to their little rural town and never let it go, he wants to hold onto her hips every night, never sleeping with her body more than an arm's length away.  And he puts all those feelings into making love to her, knowing tonight is the only time he’ll ever be able to feel like this. She thinks this night is the start of something; he knows that it’s the end.

Her fingernails cut into his flesh, this girl who’d  never be capable of harming anyone. Her teeth commit violence against her bottom lip. The pain she’d been feeling becomes pain she inflicts as she nears her euphoric peak—

The screen freezes, catching the actress’s face in an unflattering contortion of faux passion, the loud sounds of sex cut off suddenly, plunging the room into awkward silence. Sarada glances over at Delta, hoping she’ll get up and give the video player a slap to get it working again. What she sees instead is Eida staring at her, remote in hand.

“So,” she asks, settling back on the couch while pinning Sarada with a stare so sharp, it could have drawn blood. “What have you learned about kissing Boruto?”

Kissing…?

Sarada’s eyes flick back to the screen, wondering if they had even been watching the same scene.

Nope, that’s definitely not kissing. That’s something… far, far, far beyond kissing. And far beyond anything Sarada had ever considered doing with anyone at this point in her life.

Though, she’s starting to see the appeal of getting there eventually.

Eida clears her throat, waiting for an answer.

Sarada scrambles for her notebook, flipping desperately through the pages as she looks for any words beginning with the letter “k.” Stupid, stupid her for not bringing some highlighters to help organize what now seems like little more than a scribbled mess.

“Uh… Look at his lips to make him kiss you!” She blurts out the first thing she finds, followed by the second and third, her thoughts coming out in a nonsensical order just for the sake of saying something. “Eye contact! You’ll almost kiss a few times before you actually kiss! Breath mints!”

That last bit hadn’t been something that occurred in any of the movies, but a stray thought Sarada jotted down on the side when the business executive kissed his green-thumbed love interest for the first time after a dinner featuring an entire basket of garlic bread.

“Put down the notebook,” Eida says, then pats the cushion directly beside her. “Come here.”

Cautiously, she scoots farther down the couch until she’s only a few inches away from Eida, ignoring the way Delta is glaring at her as though she wants to burn Sarada into a tiny pile of ash with her laser eyes.

“What did you learn about kissing Boruto?” Eida emphasizes his name to inform her no generalizations are allowed. “You want to kiss him, right?”

“I… um…” Sarada had thought about kissing Boruto. You can’t get away with being in love with your childhood friend and former teammate without thinking about a possible future in which he stares deeply into your eyes, his breath tickling your lips, then leans in for a tender smooch. But she’d thought a lot more about how to save him, to bring him back home, to create the future in which she could spend a lot more time daydreaming about his lips and a lot less time worrying about him dying. “Of course.”

Eida leans down, rifling around in the bag of beauty supplies she’d brought out so that Delta could do her nails, and pulls out a tube of lipstick and a compact. “When the moment arises, will you be ready?” she asks while looking into the mirror and applying a fresh coat of pink.

She can’t imagine any time in the near future when she’d be able to kiss Boruto, not when he’s hardly able to appear in Konoha without a squad of shinobi hunting him down or Kawaki trying to kill him. But she knows the realities of their situation aren’t what Eida wants to hear. “I think I am now. Thanks to you.”

Eida hums skeptically while smacking her lips together, checking to make sure the color is evenly distributed. “Thanks to me? If I’m going to get credit for your kiss, we need to make sure you’re good at it first.”

“I don’t underst—”

Eida tilts her compact to the side, eyes following the small, round mirror as if she’s spying on something that’s just over her shoulder before snapping it shut.

“I want you to kiss me,” Eida says before Sarada can turn around to see what she was looking at.

Sarada raises her hands defensively, not needing to fake the nervousness she usually pretends to have when acting as though she's under Eida’s charm. “Oh, no. No, no. No. I couldn’t dream of… I wouldn’t dare… That’s something I could never—”

Abruptly, Eida turns to the other side, coming face-to-face with Delta. The blood lust surrounding the blonde cyborg that had been directed at Sarada morphs into a dozen red hearts floating around her head when Eida looks at her.

“Kiss me,” Eida demands.

Delta squeals, balling up her fists and bouncing up and down on the couch. “You mean it? Truly? Can I? Really?”

Eida leans forward. Delta leans forward, too, her pink eyes fluttering shut, her lips parting. Their mouths are nearly touching when one pink-tipped finger intercedes between them. Eida pushes Delta back before they can connect, making Sarada think that this entire kiss scenario might be an elaborate scheme to get her murdered by the clone of Amado’s dead daughter.

“No, not really,” Eida says, putting on a fake pout before turning around again. “I just wanted to show our little Sarada how hard it is for those whose hearts I’ve stolen to deny my desires.”

“I want to kiss you!” Sarada blurts out, needing an excuse, any excuse, to get out of this mess. “I do! But… But I know that you don’t want to… You shouldn’t want to… Do that with me. Not when there’s someone else you want to kiss. Someone else you want to kiss a lot more. It’d be unkind to take advantage of—”

Eida grabs onto her chin, forcing Sarada to stare directly into her galactic eyes. “Kiss me. Do it now. And make it good.”

The waxy vanilla scent of lipstick fills Sarada’s nose. Eida’s fingers hold her head in place so that she can’t pull away by accident. There’s nowhere to go other than forward that doesn’t lead to disaster, discovery, and potential death.

Sarada closes her eyes and pushes her mouth against Eida’s, an awkward collision of facial parts. It’s warm. It’s weird. It’s brief. It’s Sarada’s first kiss. But when she tries to pull away, she finds that she doesn’t make it more than a few inches before getting dragged back.

“I said I wanted it to be good,” Eida says, her other hand grabbing onto Sarada’s knee. “Let me show you.”

Their lips connect again with Eida in the driver’s seat. She forces her mouth over Sarada’s, her fresh lipstick smearing like sticky mud. Seconds move like centuries as the kiss stretches on, lips moving against lips, the pressure and pull. Sarada tries to forget what it feels like as it’s happening, to erase the memory even before it has a chance to become one, but it sticks to her brain, each swipe and nip, remaining like the sick sensation of wetness that lingers on her mouth even when Eida finally releases her.

“Now, that’s how you ki—”

The unmistakable sound of a shattering plate interrupts Eida’s breathy whisper. In unison, all three girls turn their heads to see Kawaki standing in the doorway between the dining room, shards of white porcelain surrounding his bare feet.