Work Text:
*
a hero of his own
*
Boruto's parents kissed each other a lot. Sarada often remarked about it; first with awe, then with envy, and now with wistfulness.
He had known Sarada for nearly all of his life that it was easy to tell what she had been thinking. I want a husband like that for my mother, I want to see her man getting flustered at the sight of her in her most beautiful moment, I want to see her face light up at the sight of him.
I want to see her with a man who isn't, at this moment, practically imaginary.
Sarada thought that Boruto was pretty damn lucky as he was, Boruto knew that she was just looking for the greener grass. Sarada called him an ingrate, Boruto argued that he knew his family at its better place. Sarada said that he was a blessed child, Boruto retorted back because that blessing was actually a burden, did Sarada even know anything or was she just pulling things out of her nostrils because she was jealous and stuff.
It's not just me, everyone says so, Sarada said that one evening before sunset after they finished an outdoor lesson in the forest. Boruto asked her to shut it.
They passed by the hokage monuments and saw two silhouttes on the bridge of Fourth Hokage's nose.
“You can ask me to shut up anytime you want, stupid Boruto. But even you can't argue against that.”
That was the silhoutte they were both seeing, a man and a woman, hooked in an embrace and overlooking the land they would soon be sharing with each other. That was the sight of two people who have achieved a common dream. Two people so in love, so together that they would always be young with each other. The fearless fondness, the undivided attention.
On the day it was announced that his father was going to be Hokage, Boruto saw his parents in their rawest form.
*
Boruto was twelve and half when he was told that it was his mother who fell for his father first, because his father was an incorrigible simpleton who couldn't tell what a love confession was.
It shattered him a little inside; because his version of how his parents came to love each other had always been about how his father probably relentlessly chased his mother. His mother, who was so beautiful that it saddened him how he hardly looked like her. His mother, who was so gentle that he couldn't imagine would love someone like his father. His mother, who was such a dignified woman that he wouldn't believe used to be a shy, shrinking violet.
It was hard to not resent his father a little when he had to grow up seeing that epic love story that produced him slowly ground into dust.
*
On the year Boruto turned fifteen, he was recommended to be a jounin, but his father vetoed him out.
He's too young, too inexperienced, too brash, too impulsive, too wild—said the man who went straight to being a Hokage from a mere genin.
He still needs more training, more missions, because as he is, he couldn't even lead a team—said the man who needed other people to explain how his own jutsus work.
The thing was, who even cared if Boruto did become a jounin. Who would even be surprised?
The thing about Boruto's life was that people oversimplified him into aftermaths: the legacy of a hero, the prince of a noble family, descendant of legends, child of peace.
Always a product of something, never his own person.
Who would care if his father had vetoed him out of a choice he wouldn't have made anyway?
*
He was around sixteen when he realised that he might have—hopefully out of confusion—feelings for Sarada's father.
He had yet to determine what kind of feelings those might be, because it wasn't just simple adoration or admiration. It wasn't like having a father, or a brother, a mentor, nothing like that. It wasn't even as though he wanted his mother to have a man like Sarada's father, unlike what Sarada felt about his father—his father might have been shitty but at least he didn't disappear for more than a decade, he'd readily concede—when they were younger.
It was something like wanting to understand him, to be that person he could show his heterochromatic eyes and that stump that used to be his left arm to. It was something like wanting to know why he had refused to get a replacement arm like his own father did, even though they both apparently lost one of their arms in a fight with each other. It was something like wanting to leave the village and travel with him, see what he was going to see, stay with him in the shadows, and be the person who wouldn't leave him alone.
He could never say this out to Sarada, never out loud, because Sarada, when she was around fifteen and half, told Boruto that she liked him.
*
The year Boruto turned seventeen, he was finally promoted to a jounin. He was the last among his peers to be one.
*
The year Boruto turned eighteen, Sasuke started telling him intimate things about his father.
Before this it was comparisons. He was like you in a lot of ways, you're his son after all, but you aren't him. You're smart when he was dumb; you're responsible when he was reckless. You're cynical when he was stupidly naïve. You're savvy, he was perpetually clueless. You're immediately revered, he had to work hard to prove himself. He didn't know who his father was until he was about your age; you didn't have to wonder if you ever had a father.
Then it was observations, assumptions and pleas. His time with his own father was so short that he probably didn't know how to be one that stays around, so please try to understand him a little? He was shunned by girls when he was a boy, and your mother was too shy to talk to him but he really does love your mother, so please forgive him even if he hasn't been around for her? I made his life miserable during his teenage years; I betrayed him, I tried to kill him, I took him aside and fought until he finally made me bleed with regret. Boruto, don't be too harsh on him.
The more Sasuke talked—you see, Boruto, I did owe your father a lot—and talked, the more he laced his words with a certain type of fondness that was absent even when he was talking about Sarada's mother, his actual wife. The more he sounded as though he was trying to shift Boruto's anger away, the deeper Boruto's heart sank.
Because Sasuke started talking about how his father was like in his weakest moments. How he once, in the moment when he was most protective of Sasuke, nearly fainted from the stress. How he had to defend Sasuke single-handedly from the wrath of all the world leaders, and how he managed to do that with just his words. How he was the only person who could tell his intentions away from his words, how he was sharp enough to tell when Sasuke didn't really mean the words he said yet dumb enough to not be able to tell how he was the only exception to a lot of Sasuke's rules.
I've seen a lot of people who ended up like us, Boruto, would you believe that? Orphaned by war and conflicts, torn by history and politics, but there's not a lot of people like him. In fact, there's no one like him because your father was a very special person. You should be proud.
I was the one who wanted to destroy the establishment but your father bent it to his will. Your father was amazing, Boruto.
Unlike his father, Boruto wasn’t sharp enough to read Sasuke like a book, because he didn't have to. Sasuke hid nothing from him, told him stories about his father that even his mother didn't know. Sasuke didn't have to be interpreted when he was with Boruto; and that was how Boruto was able to tell that his teacher had it bad since the very beginning.
*
The year Boruto turned nineteen, the same age as his father was when he proposed to his mother, he started kissing Sarada.
There was a reason for it. She was upset about Boruto almost electrocuting himself trying to destroy a terrorist organisation's control tower, he had never liked seeing her cry, so he thanked her and she called him dumb over and over again, as she usually did and then went on an incoherent rant about how utterly useless Boruto was that she had to look after him all the time and had they not grow up together, she would have left him to die behind those gates, stupid, stupid Boruto making her worry all the time, she would tell Aunt Hinata every single dumb thing that Boruto had done that day, oh, she would tell her everything—
—only to stop when Boruto's hand reached her face, touched her cheek gently and swept her bangs away from her forehead. She didn't really know it, but at that moment she was such an imprint of her father that he didn't believe it didn't register to him before. He blamed it on his semi-conscious state of mind, the lull of her relieved voice, his memories of Sarada's father's stories and that was why he would take full responsibility for it, for everything that would come out after that.
Everything after he tucked her hair behind her ear and pulled her down so that their lips touch and the blood on their lips mingle. After he said yes to her asking are you kissing me because you like me. After those secret exchanges of glances, discreet words, calculated gestures. After those nights when they ran away from the village's surveillance system and hid in a place to touch each other even more. After she bared himself to him, after waiting for so long, since that day when she was about fifteen and half and told Boruto that she liked him and Boruto didn't answer her because it was really complicated at that time. After those times when he thought he only saw her as a playmate first and a nagging teammate later on. After he had thought that being together would unwind the complications but it didn't—
—and he swore to himself that he would bear the consequences of carrying her feelings, because it was the only thing his father didn't do to that one other person who had loved him so purely, so deeply.
That one person who wasn't his mother.
*
He was going to turn twenty when Himawari broke the news to his parents—typical of Hima, he thought. He didn't mind it, really. Pretty much everybody in the village was expecting it to happen sooner or later, because their fathers were the best of friends and the children continued that friendship. Because the first question that was raised after the announcement was not of curiousity or shock (“What? They are together?”) but of a small sense of victory (“I knew it from the beginning, so when's the wedding?”).
Boruto almost hoped against chance that it would remain a quiet affair, just between the both of them. He who was a prodigy that was almost never living up to the brand his parents built and she who was permanently in search of an identity. Both held too high against the standard they were expected to live up to, both crushing softly against the ground from the pressure, both semi-damaged from failing to be the symbol of peace that many were looking to worship.
It said a lot about the both of them when he felt that the only thing he ever did right from the first attempt was hooking up with her, and even that was a choice made from indecision.
*
Boruto could always tell when Sarada hadn't been eating. When she weighted a little lesser than usual against his chest, when her hands shook when he held them, when a single touch to her neck unsettled her. When he kissed her body and she squirmed, hit by sudden sense of insecurity and uncertainty.
“Do you remember how jealous I was of your parents?” she asked, suddenly aware of the future that this—kisses and holding hands, taking off clothes and joining their bodies, whispers in the nights and promises in the morning—would lead to. “Do you remember how I had to chase up to my father and had him tell me whether he loved my mother?”
Boruto had heard of that story and remembered it pretty well, but he let her continue anyway.
“He said he loved her, and the proof,” tears started gathering in her eyes, “was me. I was very happy, because he told me then that I was born out of the love he had for my mother.”
He held her face to her chest to let her tears fall.
“Hey, Boruto,” her words strangled in her throats, “I think my father never loved my mother. Not the way your father loved your mother. Not the way I loved you—“
—and certainly not in the way your father loved mine, Boruto knew.
“I really love you, I really really do, what if—what if—”
“I love you too, Sarada.”
He held her tight, he told her he loved her over and over again, because she was starting to learn how to deconstruct the constituents of feelings, starting to see through the lies people had fed her in the past, so he had to stop her before she started seeing the little white lies in how the way he loved her was a little different than how she loved him.
They were twenty-one, certified adults, but when it came down to feelings, they were but two children learning to love from those who had loved before them.
*
Boruto was twenty-two when he found out that his beloved teacher was losing his sight. Permanently.
The truth was that he was slated to go blind much earlier, but the extended peace and the skills he had even without an arm granted him prolonged vision. Boruto was furious.
Does Sarada know this? Did you tell her when she started activating her sharingan? Why did you even let her continue to be a ninja when you knew this would happen? You knew it would happen, you knew from the very beginning, so why didn't you tell her? Why didn't you tell her, why didn't you tell Aunt Sakura, why is your family the last to know about this?
Does Sarada know—does she ever get to know—anything about you? You are the reason she has her eyes, you're the reason she wears that symbol on her back, you're the reason she has the colour of her hair, her insecurities, her doubts and worries, her fears, everything.
Sasuke, for the first time since Boruto saw him and asked to be his student some ten years before, couldn't lift his head to look at him in the eyes. There was no trace of that almighty Sasuke who could admonish Boruto for being dumber than his dad, none of that all-knowing Sasuke who knew that Boruto could do anything as long as he put his heart on it, nothing on that Sasuke who could kill with just his eyes alone.
Boruto, for the first time since he saw him some ten years back, braved himself to embrace the man who was once so much taller than him that he seemed impossible to reach, so distant from everyone else that there was only one person in the world whom he could talk about.
“Does my dad know about this?”
Hearing that, Sasuke's body tensed up immediately like lightning current just got shot into his bloodstream; and that was how Boruto realised that their distance had gotten so much closer than before that they were no longer an adult and his apprentice, but two adults struggling with responsibilities they couldn't keep up with.
“My dad, he—” Boruto tried, and then tried some more, pretending to be an authority of his father’s feelings, but in reality, he just never bothered to understand his own father. “I think he needs to know.”
It was like everything Boruto understood about his father as he grew up was in the context of Sasuke's existence. The tragedy that took away his grandparents then the massacre that took away Sasuke's family. The war that made his father a hero and almost turned Sasuke into a villain. The peace that came by and separated them, the love that didn't manage to connect them both, the sustained feelings that made a misery out of both their children's lives, and now this. The ending that wouldn't be able to unite them both.
Boruto felt a dagger to his heart, because at that moment he finally knew what had complicated them, him, Sasuke, Sarada, his dad, his mother, Aunt Sakura, all those years.
Because he, in all his efforts to be a man that his father wasn't, was subconsciously trying his darndest to be him anyway and no matter what he would do from now on, it was never going to be enough.
*
A few months before Sarada's twenty-third birthday, Sasuke lost his vision for good and decided—successfully persuaded, actually—to settle in the village for the remaining of his life.
Boruto watched Sarada embrace her parents from the rooftop two blocks away. He was convinced that to this day, Sarada knew nothing of Sasuke in the context of the Seventh Hokage, how they were tied together and what a great love story they were supposed to be.
Boruto was determined to keep it that way.
*
The year Sarada turned twenty-five, she gave her father the most unusual birthday gift ever: a pair of artificial eyes and an arm, all which she made herself.
Sasuke refused, just like he had refused a replacement arm the year before Boruto's parents got married, just like he had refused to surgically replace his eyes right before light went out of them. Typical of Sasuke, Boruto thought. After all this while, why would he still feel like punishing himself, living with a bandage over his eyes and a sleeve over his stump?
Except Boruto was wrong, Sasuke said.
But if it wasn't some sort of punishment, what, then?
“It's complicated,” Sasuke said when Boruto came to visit after a mission. Sarada was accompanying her mother for a trip to Aunt Ino's gardens to study a rare plant that had just bloomed a few days ago. Even when they were growing up, Sarada wasn't too interested in medicines and was more into travel books (Boruto had assumed that it was to imagine the places where her father could be at). She took up her mother's field of study only a few years back, when Sasuke was starting to see spots in his eyes and she really really wanted to be of some use to him, even if it would have taken far less time if it was her mother making those artificial organs for him, because time had changed and there was no need for Sasuke to be governing the village from the outside.
“She's a really good daughter, you know?” Boruto remarked. It was the most sincere thing he had ever said about Sarada. If there was one certain thing he could be sure of about Sarada, it was the fact that she loved her father with all the pieces of her soul.
Really, Sasuke was lucky that it was Sarada who had been his offspring, instead of, say, Boruto himself.
“Do you still hate your father?” Sasuke asked.
“It's complicated,” Boruto echoed Sasuke's earlier answer, and he wasn't even trying to be cheeky about it. He had grown up, that was for sure. His father had gotten a little older, perhaps also a little wiser, judging from the steady growth of the village economy.
But it had never been the same ever since Boruto found out that there were more to Naruto and Sasuke than folklores could ever tell.
He knelt down in front of the rocking chair Sasuke was sitting on, and held his hand.
“Be honest with me,” and Sasuke tensed up, just like that time when he pulled him into a hug the day he knew about Sasuke's eyes, “if my mother wasn't around, would you have—“
Boruto started stammering—after all this while of coming up with the perfect question, after all these years of rehearsing all the right words, his voice and composure still failed him.
“If my mother wasn't around, would it—,” he took a deep breath and braced himself for the words that would be coming, “have made any difference?”
It really was the right question to ask at the right time, the perfect moment to spare Sasuke from having to express with his eyes, because Sasuke was a man with so little words that a simple glance at his face could have said it all.
He took some time to deliberate and Boruto waited. He would wait forever if he could, because Sasuke had told him so many things he wouldn't tell his own family and the least he could do was to help him get a closure.
Sasuke retracted his hand and reached out for Boruto's face. “Let me see you.”
Boruto took Sasuke's hand and put it on his cheek and let Sasuke explore his face. First he touched his eyebrows. “Your eyes, they were Naruto's.”
Then he traced a finger along his jawline and broke into a tiny, barely visible smile. “The shape is unfamiliar, most likely your mother's.”
Last, he went to Boruto's lips. “This,” he said as his hand stopped, “is your father's.”
“Is that so?”
Then, as though something possessed him, he removed Sasuke's hand and rose to his height and gave him a gentle kiss on the lips. There was nothing about the kiss, even if it could be something, and Boruto made sure of it, but Sasuke was clearly affected, because the bandages were wet and his hand didn't let go.
“I'm not my father,” Boruto apologised. “I'm sorry I'm not him, I couldn't be him, but he meant so much for you, and you—did you know that he kept all the things you sent to him, all the letters, he fed those birds who brought him news about you generously, my father, he—“
All the things bottled up inside, all the emotions he had imprisoned within, all the emotions, all the feelings, all came bursting from the seams.
Sasuke held Boruto's head to his chest as he went on incoherently about everything he thought were lies. How he thought he was brought into this world at the expense of another person's happiness, how he thought he might have wronged Sarada by indirectly forcing her parents to come together, how he thought that his presence in Sasuke's life must had been colossally unwelcomed but he still forced himself in anyway, how he regretted everything. Oh how he regretted it all, his own misplaced mischief, his distrust in his own family, his relationship with Sarada.
He had loved her, definitely. He loved her like the sun loved the moon, like the spring loved the flowers, and like summer loved the sun. He loved her, but she didn't mean the world to him like his father had meant the world for Sasuke.
He was in love with her like how an artist was in love with the winter, because he wanted to stain the brittle whiteness with colours, because he didn't want to feel cold.
Because he, in his efforts to understand his father, became predisposed to want to mimic the closest kind of love that his father had let go.
“I'm sorry,” Boruto said, again and again, in between tears, in between sobs, in between regrets.
*
Later that day, after Boruto knew that everything that had happened to Sasuke was of his own choosing—refusing an arm, refusing those eyes, refusing a home, refusing a family—he made a decision.
He went to his mother, the first woman in his life, the first woman he had ever loved and embraced her tightly. His mother was still beautiful, still graceful, still the most dignified woman in the village who had given him her face. His mother was brave, his mother was loyal, his mother was the greatest thing that had happened to his father's life. His mother's love for his father was the reason why he was here in this world, why he and Hima were the two happiest kids in the village. He loved his mother and everything she stood for. One day he would listen to her story and tell the world that she was one part of the greatest love story there ever was.
He went to Hima, oh lovely little Hima. She wasn't so little now that she had grown up and might have been in love with one of Boruto's friends (please don’t let it be Shikadai, he thought). Hima was his mother in her younger days, only probably much chirpier and happier. Hima, the girl with all the powers of her parents and none of the care in the world, the sweetest girl Boruto had ever known.
Then it was Sarada, his girlfriend, maybe his future wife. The girl he came to like but never managed to properly love. I'll love you right one day, for now please wait for me. I'll grow up, I'll come back a better man, I'll spoil you, I'll treat you well, I'll be your dream man. Thanks for loving the boy that I am, thanks for everything.
Finally, there was his dad. His dear old dad, historically prone to attracting people, chronically inclined to misread situations. Perfect as a fighter but horrible judge of a character, yet was his father nonetheless. The orphan who grew up to be a legendary hero then fell in love with the princess and together, they brought him to life.
Boruto the son was his father and his mother together, and they would stay in love until the day they die together, kiss each other as often as they physically could. Boruto the ninja, however, was his parents along with Sasuke and Sarada, with the teacher who was his father's other great love, and Sarada, who would be the love of his own life.
Boruto was born from love, bred with love, grew up with love—Boruto was the greatest evidence that the people who had loved before him, they did everything right.
He was twenty-five going to be twenty-six when he packed and left his village, because he had to leave the boy behind to find the man he wanted to be.
Like his father did before him, like his teacher did before him, it was a journey he had to take and when he eventually returned, he would be a hero of his own.
*