It’s a familiar scene—the same too-old house, the same too-tight feeling at the uchiwa carved into the door. She remembers the times when it once felt like a home, pictures of her mother and herself eclipsing those of her oft-absent father… but hers had never been like other fathers, and Sarada had never quite thought of herself as his daughter.
Because fathers were meant to take their children out for lunch, like Chocho’s father did for her. They played games, even if they were as long and tedious as Shikadai’s shoji games with his father, but they also passed on their techniques like Inojin’s father did for him. Even Boruto’s father, forever occupied with his duties as the Seventh Hokage before he’d been publicly shamed and exiled, had been around enough for Boruto to remember his face.
If it hadn’t been for the photos of the cold, slightly aloof man who bore a passing resemblance to her scattered around the house…
Would Sarada be able to tell her father apart from a complete stranger?
They’re gone now, of course, nothing more than ash in the backyard after Sarada’s mother had taken a Great Fireball to those. Her father’s letters are probably among them too, all the ones that hadn’t be among the scrolls her mother had shoved into her father’s hands when he’d last visited, but it’s not as though they’re a big loss.
It’s the other things, the intangible things Sarada had always felt missing from her life, that she feels even more keenly now. It’s the Academy students whose hands are slotted in their parents’, laughing and chattering away while Sarada makes her own lonely way home. It’s the meals she has by herself, when her mother’s shift runs late and aunt Hinata doesn’t drop in with Boruto or Hiwa-chan. It’s the empty spaces on the mantelpiece and walls, the master bedroom with its door firmly shut—
Sarada’s father had never called this house a home, not when his home had been a person that wasn’t her mother, and when Sarada’s I’m home echoes emptily in the house…
It’s a familiar scene—neat sandals by the entryway, a small bag tucked against the wall, and a girl curled up on her bed while sobs wrack her body.
(but it shouldn’t be this way—she’d never deserved something like this—and her eyes are dry when her mother finally comes home)
Her mother’s just washing the last of the dishes when Sarada slips into the kitchen, hands wringing her tunic and eyes downcast behind her glasses. She clears her throat, a soft noise that gets lost in the clinking porcelain, but then she breathes through her nose and exhales in a long, steady stream. We can’t continue like this, she tells herself again, we deserve better than this.
And when her mother turns at the sound of her louder cough, Sarada opens her mouth and says, “We should move out, mom.”
Through the slow blink her blunt statement affords her, Sarada peers at her mother’s face—a little slack, a little disbelieving—and adds, “You filed the divorce forms, didn’t you? We’re technically not Uchiha anymore so we technically don’t need to live in the Uchiha district—”
Segregated from everyone else, Sarada very determinedly doesn’t say. Like pariahs of the village, all because of crimes we never committed.
“—and there’s really cheap apartments closer to the village center,” Sarada rambles on, when her mother neither moves nor speaks. “I searched around a few days ago and took a look at some of the ones with open inspections—and sure, maybe there isn’t as much room as we have here, but—”
“Sarada,” her mother says then, so quietly that Sarada almost doesn’t hear her. It’s only when she looks into her eyes—a leaf-green mirror to her own, brighter than usual beneath the glare of the kitchen light but still her mother’s all the same—that her mother adds, “Is that what you really want?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be suggesting it if I wasn’t serious,” Sarada huffs.
She’s almost scared she’s said something wrong, when her mother’s eyes tear up—but then she’s saying, “Of course not,” in a voice that quavers only slightly, and…
A finger pressed affectionately against her forehead, a soft brush of a hand through her hair, and Sarada feels arms wrap around her as her mother murmurs, “Let’s make sure we pick out a nice apartment we both want to live in, okay?”
And when Sarada murmurs her okay right back, face pressed into her mother’s shoulder and glasses digging uncomfortably against her cheekbone—the feeling that wells up isn’t jagged and empty in the middle.
It’s only later that night, snugly tucked into bed and drifting off to the sound of her mother’s quiet singing, that Sarada allows herself to smile at the warmth within her.
“Hey, mom.”
“Mm?”
“After you’ve signed the deed—I was thinking, why don’t we go clothes-shopping?”
“…Well, we do need new wardrobes without all these uchiwas, don’t we?”
“You’d better not change your mind later, then! Not even if the hospital has an emergency!!”