Chapter Text
but when the cold stays, how violent is the urge to say
to the snow, you are frozen as the gate of my soul
Maybe, like this: academy records are a matter of public record, and Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura graduated at the top of their genin class. It’s not difficult to imagine what they had been like -- a nerd couple, for whom academic rivalry became mutual admiration became romantic interest; study dates in libraries; late nights spent revising for exams; laughing at obscure chakra puns. Love could grow from such things. Her father wore thick round glasses, and her mother wore her hair in unfashionable braids, and neither of them were good looking or popular, but they spoke well together and --
Bullshit, admits Sarada. It couldn’t have gone like that. Her mother’s maybe the most gorgeous woman in Konoha. Top five, at least. Sarada might be biased, but even Kaka-jiji says so, and he’s something of a subject matter expert.
(At home, there is a picture of her father: young, tall, impossibly handsome. A man who looks like that could not have been unpopular. A man with such self-assured confidence, who carried himself so straight and held his head so high -- a man like that would not have peaked at twelve, would not have found himself a perpetual chuunin or resigned himself to a life of B-rank missions and steady paychecks, never wandering more than fifty kilometers beyond the village walls.
Sarada sometimes daydreams about having such a father: how embarrassing it must be. Exactly the type to tell terrible dad jokes too, all the time, all the time, greeting her every afternoon when she came home from school with some obscure chakra pun, calling her “Sa-chan” as if she were still five-years-old. How embarrassing it must be, surely...
No. No, instead, Sarada has an old photograph behind cold glass, of a dark-eyed young man who looks like he could eat the world entire, bleeding and raw.)
Chouchou has the most god-awful sense of direction, it almost verges on amazing.
“Fuck you, Uchiha,” says Chouchou. Still, she always pairs up with Sarada when they have training outside the walls. Sarada’s spatial visualization is so good that, really, she should become a cartographer instead of a shinobi.
“You never got lost?” says Chouchou skeptically.
“Not since I was two,” says Sarada.
“Is that right?” says Chouchou sarcastically. “And that was just temporary, wasn’t it? You found your way again eventually. Something in your nose just sniffs out north.”
“No,” says Sarada. “There’s nothing in my nose.”
Chouchou punches Sarada in the arm, more affectionate than anything. She’s smiling when she says, “That doesn’t make it better, you freak.”
“Oh. Well, I didn’t find my way back, either,” says Sarada. “It was outside the walls. It got dark and I couldn’t find gramps. I sat there and bawled my eyes out.”
Chouchou slings an arm around Sarada’s shoulder. “You’re a real girl, after all,” she says, sounding proud. “Congrats. Anmitsu’s my treat today.”
Sarada doesn’t remember how she got lost: only how cold that night had been, and how white her mother’s face was, and how, when Sarada opened their front door, her mother cried, “Sa-chan!” like her heart was breaking.
Someone had brought Sarada home -- certainly she had not found her own way. Gramps, probably (-– but the smell was different: sharper somehow, like cold winter mornings; and the voice had been different too, telling her, “There now. It’s all right,” quiet and dark, like the settling dusk).