Chapter Text
“I said you didn’t have to come,” Sarada tells the blond knucklehead standing in the doorway of her parents’ house, bag of fast-food takeout in one hand, phone still pressed to his ear. Behind him, storm clouds swirl overhead, the late summer evening almost black.
“Yeah, but you also said you were scared and alone.” He raises his hand over his head, clicking the button on his key fob. Behind him, the Uzumaki family minivan beeps in the driveway, four-way lights flashing twice as the doors lock.
Sarada hangs up her own phone because there’s no use staying on the call once he’s standing there in front of her. “I didn’t ask my parents if you could come over while they’re away.”
“Great! That means they didn’t say no.”
He pushes his way past her, inviting himself in, mostly to escape the fat raindrops starting to fall outside. Shoving the bag of food into her hands, he slowly spins around in her family’s foyer, eyes on the giant light dangling perilously from the vaulted ceiling.
“Man, you never said your place was cool.”
Cool… That was one way of describing the gothic architecture of cold stone and stained glass adorning the Uchicha ancestral home. Excessively creepy might have been another possible descriptor, which was why Sarada never, ever invited friends to her house. Unfortunately, Boruto had been on her school bus from their first days of kindergarten. There was no way of hiding her residence from him, even if she’d never invited him over before.
She reminds herself that she didn’t invite him over this time, either, but here he was and she felt safer because of it.
He traces a finger over the wrought iron banister of the winding staircase leading to the second floor. “Why did your parents leave you alone during a tornado warning, anyway?”
Sarada knows her parents are never able to miss a meeting of The Legion of Light, but explaining their silly secret society to her longtime friend and maybe-kind-of-sort-of crush seems impossible.
Instead, she turns the question back on him. “Why did your parents let you go out during a tornado warning?”
Boruto shrugs as he heads down the hallway lined with blood red tiles to their kitchen. “Dad said I was being a good friend. Besides, I bet you have a bitching basement to hide in if we actually get a tornado for once.”
“Your dad is an idiot,” Sarada mutters, placing the greasy bag on the wooden butcher block while Boruto pulls up his sleeves, intending to wash his hands and ending up confused. “Uh… Sarada? How do I turn on the sink?”
“Foot pedal,” she says automatically. Sure, she’s lived with the quirks of a house slowly remodeled by seven generations of peculiar Uchihas, but not everyone was used to operating 90-year-old plumbing.
“Oh, cool.” He presses the pedal down, watching water flow from the faucet, then lifts his toes. He does it a second, then a third time until she’s having serious doubts about why she finds him so attractive.
“Can you just wash your hands already?” she practically shouts.
“Right, sorry.” He grabs up a slippery bar of soap made by her mother, hexagon honeycomb pattern still visible on the surface. Suds soon cover his hands and wrists before he rinses, again playing with the foot pedals. She shoves a hand towel beneath his nose just to get him to stop.
He hands the towel back to her once he’s done drying his hands. “So… What do you want to do? Eat first? Watch a show? Do we have time for a movie before your parents get back?”
Sarada sighs, pushing up her glasses while hating her parent’s involvement in the Legion, even if it is a family tradition. “Oh, they’re going to be gone all weekend.”
He cocks his head, closer to her than she realized. His blue eyes sparkle with troublesome mischief. “Does that mean you want me to stay all weekend?”
Her heart skips a beat as he looks down at her. In response to her treacherous emotions, she takes a step back and slaps him across the chest with the slightly damp towel. “I didn’t want you here in the first place.”
“Sooo… You want me to leave now ?” he teases.
“Maybe after the Tornado warning passes.”
They eventually agree on a movie, sitting on opposite ends of her mother’s pink brocade couch, designed far more for aesthetics than cuddling. Opening credits scroll over the television screen, one of the few items in the house made in the most recent decade, when the electric cuts out, followed by a distant roll of thunder.
“Well, that was dramatic,” Boruto says somewhere in the dark. “You don’t happen to have a flashlight, do you? We probably shouldn’t waste our phone batteries if there’s an emergency. I’m at… uh… 15% power.”
Sarada would be willing to waste her phone battery not to be stuck alone in the dark with Boruto, but she had left it somewhere in the kitchen when retrieving their supper.
The fact that her father hated almost all modern conveniences and that the existence of a television, computer, and internet in their house were solely because her mother had interceded on their daughter’s behalf didn’t give her hope that a flashlight was readily available. However, she did have another idea.
“Papa has some candles in his study. I can go get them.”
She stands up, intent on feeling her way through the house when Boruto grabs her cool hand in his warm grip. A little electric touch shoots from her hand to her heart as lightning flashes outside.
“What are you doing?”
“Coming with you,” he says. “And, I don’t know my way around your house.”
Well, there was no use in arguing with a knucklehead, even as his fingers slowly shifted from grasping her hand to intertwining with her own fingers. Her own fingers tighten around his as the wind howls outside.
Huh… So, this is what it feels like to hold hands with Boruto Uzumaki , she thinks as he follows her down the hallway, back into the foyer, then through the pocket door leading to yet another hallway and her dad’s study.
She’d held hands with other boys before, but the same giddy thill never accompanied the act.
How silly, a 17-year-old’s heart beating faster just because his fingers felt so right in hers.
She grasps the glass doorknob and turns. “Now, I’m going to need your phone’s light for just a minute. And, don’t touch anything .”
He unlocks the screen before relinquishing his phone to her, letting go of her hand that had now become used to the warmth of being held.
A sliver of her dad’s study is illuminated in the beam of light: Too many books, his broad mahogany desk, a twisted skull resting beneath a bell jar, a thick tome on a pedestal.
She opens a chest of drawers and is delighted to find dozens of brand new candles, their wicks still pristine white. Sarada gathers a few black ones and a few red ones as well as a book of matches.
She hands Boruto’s phone back to him so she can light one of the candles, which takes a few tries due to the draft from the wind outside forcing its way through the ancient windows. Hand cupped around the precious flame, she turns around and is utterly horrified to see Boruto flipping through her dad’s book.
The book.
“I told you not to touch anything!” she almost screams as he looks up at her.
He chuckles. “Come on, Sarada. I knew your dad was a bit menacing, but I didn’t know he was into such cool stuff.” Boruto had met her father at enough school events that he knew his name and had made his disdain for the blond knucklehead clear.
He flips through the pages, reading out spells. “ A Baleful Hex, To Speak with Crows, To Turn Blood to Gold …” He pauses there, looking up. “That could be useful, but you don’t have any dove entrails, right?”
“Stop it,” she demands, marching over.
“I’m just playing around.” He turns back to the book, suddenly much less concerned about his dwindling battery life. “Huh… Summoning a Malevolent Demon … I bet we have everything to do this one. Salt… Ash… Bread… Oh, hm… Yeah, I guess I have that, too.”
She slams the book shut with a decided thump. “We’re not summoning anything, malevolent or otherwise.”
Angry rain assaults the window panes, wind causing them to rattle in the ancient frames. “Oooo, you’re not afraid, are you?”
Logically, Sarada knows her fathers book with all its spells can do nothing in the hands of Boruto Uzumaki, but her father’s book was like a gun: even if you know it’s not loaded, you never pull the trigger.
Never.
But, his teasing grin irks her to no end.
She’s about to tell him where he can shove it when the grating chirp of the emergency alert system emanates from his phone. One blond head and one dark one lean over the screen on his phone as the emergency weather alert confirms a potential tornado in their general area.
Without hesitation, Sarada grabs his hand again, dragging him out of her father’s study, down the hall, back to the foyer, then into the kitchen. She flings open the wooden door leading down the steps to the cellar, hoping Boruto doesn’t mention the arched brick stairwell, the ancient stone steps, the meat hooks anchored into the ceiling.
“Cool meat hooks,” he says, testing a finger on the rusted edge.
Sarada lights a candle, then another one, then another one until the tight basement is filled with light reflecting off the whitewashed walls. It’s only then that she notices Boruto grabbed the bag of fast food they hadn’t gotten a chance to eat.
Seated together on the cold floor, they eat in silence while tracking the weather on his phone, wondering which will end first: the tornado alert or his battery’s life. Despite the fact that he’s a giant pain in her ass, Sarada is so thankful that she’s not alone in her parents’ sinister cellar.
Or, at least she was, until she notices him piling all the salt from the French fry bag into his hand.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.
“Well, there’s nothing else to do down here. Let’s summon a benevolent demon. Unless you’re afraid.”
“Malevolent demon,” she corrects him.
Well, what could it really hurt to humor him, though?
She watches as he draws the sparest ring of salt she’s ever seen around the floor, while she burns a piece of the paper bag on a candle for ash, and picks up a small crumb of bun out of the burger wrapper for bread.
“Just one more thing,” he says after placing the components inside the circle.
Sarada raises an eyebrow. “Do you need an onion piece? Some ketchup? A pickle seed?”
He smirks, his handsome face in stark shadows as he steps towards her. “Nope.”
There’s something in the way he looks at her that makes her take a step back. “What is it, then?”
“A burning first kiss.”
Sarada doesn’t hesitate to laugh in his face. “Sorry, Boruto. I don’t have that to give to you.”
It was true, too. She’d kissed more than her fair share of boys since her freshman Homecoming Dance, hoping each union of her lips with another’s would elicit the stab of warmth she expected from such an act and always ended up disappointed.
He’s suddenly too close, blue eyes intense. “You may not have it, but I do.”
Oh .
So, the whole little follow her father’s spell game was actually an excuse to get her to kiss him?
Annoying as it was, the thought made her heart jump into her throat.
Would it really be so bad to kiss him? He was tall and funny and handsome and in the process of pulling her into his arms.
She rocks herself up on her toes, her lips meeting his soft ones in a kiss barely longer than a peck.
Despite the blush on his face, he looks over his shoulder at the barely visible ring of salt on the ground. “Huh… Didn’t work.”
“Well, it did say a burning kiss.” Her fingers guide his face back to hers as she kisses him again, longer and deeper as all her unmet expectations for a kiss suddenly sing through her body.
Her fingers tangle in his hair, his hands on her hips, as their bodies draw closer. Both pairs of eyes closed, they don’t notice the smoke pouring from the summoning circle or every candle in the room extinguishing itself at once.
“Why have you summoned me, mortals?”
Still wrapped in one another’s arms, the faces of the two teenagers turn to witness the black haired man with immense crow’s wings rise out of the ground, eyes red and malevolent aura washing the tight space in purple light.
“Papa?”
“Sarada?” The demon’s eyes sweep over her, wave of accompanying heat washing over her body.
“Mr. Uchiha?” Boruto says, his grip on her hips tightening damningly.
“Boruto Uzumaki?”
Black flames appear in her father’s hand.
“Papa, no!”
The swirling vortex of purple light that appeared over the Uchiha residence that evening was attributed to a freak meteorological phenomena on account of the extreme weather rather than a wrathful paternal demon. It took a few months, but by the time Boruto’s singed hair grew back, all parties involved were able to laugh about how Sarada introduced her father to her future boyfriend.