Chapter Text
waiting hurts, and may take more than a season
Occasionally, Chouchou says things like, “Ugh, why do you even want a father, they’re so embarrassing!” This usually happens when Akimichi-san is standing on a public sidewalk, eating a flavor of potato chip that Chouchou finds deathly offensive. And this usually is also followed by a more thoughtful, “Well, I guess it’s different for you, huh? Your dad is a total hunk.”
“Eh?” says Sarada, flustered and red. “What? Ew.”
“Are you blind?” asks Chouchou heatedly. “He’s totally prime steak! Appreciate a good thing when you see it! God, I bet your dad would never eat seaweed flavored potato chips in public.”
Sarada tries to imagine her father eating potato chips at all. She cannot. The man in the photograph, with his dark-eyed hauteur and grimness of manner -- he does not seem like he could have ever eaten a potato chip in his life.
And yet: would he not have taken her mother on dates? Sat in a dark theater and shared a bucket of popcorn, getting grease on his fingertips, watching the sort of formulaic crime-thriller her mother loves. Gone for walks in the park, feeding ducks in the lake, sitting on benches to share a lunch bento. Talked in street corner coffee shops, lingering over pastry choices, adding cream to her mother’s coffee but no sugar. How did he take his coffee? What did they talk about? Did they hold hands on the walk back, and did he pause when they reached her mother’s front door, and did he think of nonsensical things to say, so as to put off the moment of departure, so as to stay another moment? How did they fall in love, her parents: the finest shinobi of their generation -- how did they fall in love? Slowly and softly, that they did not know until they were in the middle; or in a flash, thunderous, the ground trembling under their feet, that they realized it must have been love?
(What changed, when Sarada was born?
When he left, was it slowly and softly, that they did not know until it was only his shadow that lingered; or in a flash, thunderous, the door slamming shut behind him?
How do people fall out of love?)
It isn’t as if Sarada is unaware of how unutterably strange the man in the hawk mask is: in the first place, what kind of a person keeps meeting with a prepubescent girl in some abandoned field? In the second, how strong he must be, to cast a genjutsu that never wavers and never pricks at Sarada’s eyes -- even Tsunade-baachan’s youthful transformation sometimes makes Sarada’s eyes itch, as if with spring pollen.
Sarada is somewhat suspicious by nature -- a trait probably not inherited from her mother. Strong as Konoha shinobi are, the man in the hawk mask would have no difficulty slipping past the wall guards: he could be a spy, or an assassin, or a madman, with free access to the bustling heart of the village. Sarada has no delusions that she could stop him by force -- but at the very least, as a loyal citizen, she should ask, “Who are you?” and “Where are you from?” and “What are you doing in Konoha?”
Sarada does not ask these questions.
Instead, she asks, “How do birds rotate their pinion feathers?” and “How should I approximate the square root of 10.5?” and “Do you think these hickory nuts are edible?”
Perhaps in turn, the man in the hawk mask never asks Sarada about the floor plan of the Hokage tower or guard schedule of the walls or the address of the Hokage’s private residence.
Instead, he asks, “Are you hurt?” and “Do you have homework?” and “Is it almost dinnertime?”, as if gently chiding her to go home.
“Are you hungry?” replies Sarada.
“I am well,” says the man in the hawk mask: and perhaps this is why Sarada, suspicious though she is, never asks the proper questions -- how familiar his voice sounds sometimes, like some old memory just beyond her grasp; like the smell of winter, like shadows at dusk, like coming home from outside the walls. It’s all right, she thinks.
(There now. It’s all right.)
One time: “How did your parents fall in love?” Sarada asks Chouchou.
“Yuck,” says Chouchou, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t want to think about that. How did mom fall in love with dad? God knows.”
Another time: “How did your parents fall in love?” Sarada asks Boruto.
“Gross,” says Boruto. He thinks for a moment, and says darkly, “My old man probably only loves his charts and requisition forms and tax reports. He’s going to die with them in his office, and be buried with them, and mom will -- mom will be better off. I’ll take better care of her. We’ll open an udon shop. Fuck him.”
“Wow,” says Sarada.
“You drop by whenever, Sarada,” Boruto tells her. “It’ll be on the house for you, always. I don’t forget my important people.”
Sarada pats him on the shoulder, meager comfort though it is. They have different friend groups at school, and don’t hang out as much as they used -- but Boruto is her earliest friend. They had run around in diapers together. Sarada is wistful for her father sometimes, but she wonders if it’s preferable to the bitter anger Boruto keeps like a burning coal in his heart. But that’s not fair: unhappiness cannot be compared. It can only sympathized.
The man in the hawk mask is not always at the hickory tree. Sometimes, he is gone for months and months and months. Then, it is just Sarada and the tree and the family of sparrowhawks. Sarada wonders sometimes that the birds return to nest in the same tree year after year -- but they and the man in the hawk mask seem like friends, so perhaps there is nothing to wonder at.
When she was ten, after the man in the hawk mask returned from a particularly long absence, Sarada exclaimed on finding him in the tree branches, “You’re back! When did you get back?”
“Yes,” agreed the man in the hawk mask. He paused, and then said, carefully, “Just now.”
Her mother said that, when returning from the hospital: just now, just now, tada ima, I’ve just now come home. It was habit, more than anything else, to smile and tell him, “Welcome home.”
It was habit; and, having said it, Sarada thought it was probably true, anyway. He helped her with her homework, and listened quietly when she complained, and let her pet his hawks, and reminded her when it time to go home. Welcome home, she had said.
She meant it.