Chapter Text
It started with a little resin cardinal wearing Santa's hat with a chipped pom-pom on its end.
Sarada has been standing a winding cue for the single open register at a downtown pharmacy to purchase a dual pack of daytime/nighttime cold medicine, a sore throat and hacking cough the unexpected leftovers she brought home from ChoCho’s Friendsgiving celebration the previous week. She’d been feeling low, alone and sick in their apartment, and something about the damaged Christmas decoration lying on its side in the 50% off bin spoke to her.
When she finally came face-to-face with the frazzled cashier, Sarada plopped the medicine down on the counter, but kept the bird cupped against her front, flashing the $3.99 price tag that had been unceremoniously pasted over the bar code on its bottom. It must have made for a pathetic picture, a grown woman with a red, raw nose, crusty nostrils, messy bun, and pajama pants beneath her puffy red jacket clinging to a marked-down decoration, but she felt as if she let go of it just then, she might cry.
Two days off from work, lying on the couch with true crime documentaries playing non-stop on her laptop, followed by the weekend, had her in respectable enough shape to return to her university office on Monday morning, but the little red bird that kept her company from the coffee table remained even after the box of tissues and giant water bottle had been returned to their usual locations.
But when she comes home on Wednesday, sipping on a gingerbread latte, Sarada can’t help but imagine that the cardinal’s shiny black eyes are watching her with accusatory loneliness.
How could you go off and leave me all alone in this empty apartment?
She sits down on her couch and picks up the bird, looking it square in the face. No one else is there to mention the color of its eyes match her own, the black painted feathers around its beak mimicking her hair, its wings the same shade of red as her glasses.
It would have been easy enough to pop the bird into her bag and take it to work the next day, but she senses that isn’t what the decoration wants—just as she senses she’s spending far too much time alone if she’s playing psychic to a lump of resin. Cardinal in hand, she gets up and marches down the hallway to the guest bedroom, placing it on the neatly made twin bed, and throwing open the folding doors to the closest, revealing a wall of cardboard boxes of assorted sizes, their contents cataloged on the sides in bold black marker.
She’s about to start digging when her phone buzzes in her hip pocket, its ringer still on silent from work. A brief glimpse at the name on the screen causes her face to brighten like a string of Christmas lights.
A quick swipe of her thumb later, the phone is pressed up to her ear, an involuntary grin pasted on her face. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
Boruto chuckles on the other end, his voice low. “It’s 1 am here, babe. I’m glad you’re not my supervisor.”
“How is he, anyway?”
“Sleeping for once, thanks to the miracle of Ambien. Was he this much of an insomniac when you were a kid?”
Sarada can easily evoke the sound of her father typing away in his office at all hours of the night amid an ocean of printed journal articles spread out on his desk, a lullaby of her childhood. “Worse, if you can believe it. I’m glad to hear he’s not working.”
“Well, tonight he’s not. He popped ten milligrams, and he was out like a light. Hell, I’m in the hotel room on my phone right now, and he’s still snoring. I bet I could start jumping on my bed and he wouldn’t—”
“I get the point!” She laughs, sitting down next to the cardinal on the guest room mattress. It’s so easy, laughing with Boruto. The sound of his voice inflates her like a helium balloon, allowing her to defy the weight of daily life and just float around the ceiling.
“You’re the one who asked about your dad. Why don’t you tell me how my beautiful girlfriend is instead?”
She imagines him lying on a bed in a double in some mid-rate hotel Kumo. His pink t-shirt and his favorite black plaid pajama pants, the slightest light from his phone illuminating his face, turning his warm skin ghost white, his blue eyes pale, his messy blond hair a sickly gold. It’s a sight she’s seen so many times on their own bedroom, him half-sitting up at night to check this article or that work email, Sarada rolling over and begging him—literally begging him—to turn off the phone so she could go back to sleep.
But he wanted to be a physicist like her father, both of them obsessed with defining the building blocks of reality, understanding how the universe works.
There are no secrets , her father liked to say. Just truths yet unknown.
It was the exact type of pithy quip that made Boruto’s eyes glow with adoration when he heard it in a PHYS 101 course sophomore year, an enrollment he made in hopes of annoying his girlfriend by picking a class taught by her dad. In addition to receiving Sarada’s vexation, he found his life’s calling, switching majors to follow in her father’s footsteps the following semester.
That one choice in his class schedule is the reason he’s not home with her right now, seven years later.
Sasuke had been on a years-long waiting list to access a particle accelerator in Kumo and an eight-week opening finally occurred due to international sanctions against scientists from Amegakure. The timeframe ran from the second-to-last week of November to mid-January, straight through the holidays. It was a rare opportunity, and her father and his favorite post-graduate PhD student needed to make the most of every minute spent there.
“I’m fine,” she says, forcing cheer into her voice. “Work keeps me busy.”
“Not too busy, I hope. Did you go to ChoCho’s for Thanksgiving?”
“Friendsgiving,” Sarada corrects him. “The Saturday after Thanksgiving.”
In the pause that follows, she briefly considers telling him about being sick and lonely, missing how he would have made tea for her and filled a hot water bottle and rubbed her feet and bought her some fuzzy novelty socks to make her feel better, but Sarada stops herself.
It’s only the third time he’s gotten to call since he left, and she knows how much friends and the holidays mean to him, how much missing them hurts. She wants to make him feel better, not worse.
Instead, she regales him with a detailed description of their friends’ feast, from the squash fritters with lime aioli to the three-tiered sweet potato cake with toasted marshmallow frosting, and all the casseroles, salads, sides, and main dishes in between. She tells him about Mitsuki trying to carve the turkey with their four-month-old son hanging from his chest in a baby carrier, trying to grab the knife as his daddy worked, and the Apple Cider Muels and Pumpkin Old Fashions Inojin whipped up at breakneck speed, making sure no one held an empty glass for longer than thirty seconds.
As she talks, she can hear him settling down onto the pillows, his mirthful responses to her stories growing quieter and quieter as he grows drowsy.
“Hey, I think I’m about to nod off,” he says when she finishes telling him about Shikadai eating one of the apples from ChoCho’s centerpiece while making the table and being sent out to buy a new one before they were allowed to sit down and eat. “Sorry, babe.”
“It’s okay!” Sarada reassures him, the big grin she’s been wearing fading to a bittersweet smile. “I have stuff to do, too. Get a good night’s sleep and tell Dad I said hi in the morning.”
“Can do,” he mutters sleepily before adding, “Hey, can I ask you something?”
A familiar blush warms her cheeks, knowing what’s coming. It’s the same thing he’s been asking her for years now. When he arrives home after having a few too many beers with colleagues from his department. When he’s stayed on campus into the early hours of the morning and accidentally wakes her up crawling into bed at 3am. When he’s standing next to their front door, bag in hand, about to leave for yet another week-long conference.
“When I ask you to marry me, you’re going to say yes, right?”
The answer she gives him is the same one she’d given him the first time he’d whispered the question to her when they were still undergraduates, sitting side-by-side while studying in their university’s library in front of a big window, the fat snowflakes of a late-February snow falling outside. “You’re going to have to ask to find out.”
“I want to know so I don’t want to embarrass myself when I do.” He chuckles quietly to himself at his usual response. “I love you, Sarada.”
“I love you, too,” she says, pressing a kiss to her phone right before he ends the call.
Then it’s just Sarada, alone in the room with the cardinal beside her, staring at a closet full of boxes.
When Boruto rushed home the first week of November and told her about the unexpected opportunity in Kumo, she assured both herself and him that having him gone for the holidays wouldn’t be a big deal. Her work in the university’s Office of Grants and Contracts was ramping up for the flood of applications that came with the new year. It’d be nice to ease into the busy season without dealing with the hecticness of the holidays, especially with how Boruto celebrated them.
From his mother, he’d inherited a love of cooking and hosting, taking every and any excuse to turn a weekend event into a festive feast as soon as October was over. From his father, he’d learned the value of making those around him feel welcome and warm, wanting to spread holiday cheer and make anyone and everyone into family. And for Boruto himself, the holidays were a distraction from his own low moods, particularly the ones that visited him when the nights grew long. He loved filling their home, whatever home they were currently living in, with bright lights and colorful decorations. Anything to make himself smile, to chase away the darkness for a few more months until spring arrived once again.
Sarada understood all this and knew that it was part of the package deal of being in love with Boruto Uzumaki, but she also found the holiday months with him a bit overwhelming. Too many people. Too much tinsel. Too many social commitments. So, it was a relief—at least she told herself it was a relief—to know that all the festive decorations would stay safely packed away in their closet, no orgy of empty cardboard boxes filling their guest room when he unpacked the Christmas tree, the strings of lights, the red ribbons, the garland, the battery-operated candles. Everything that followed them from apartment to apartment over the years.
No Christmas morning brunch buffet forced on the Uchihas by Boruto who insisted they needed a holiday tradition despite never having had one before his insertion into their small family unit. No three-hour drive outside the city to his parents’ suburban house, the Christmas dinner and gift exchange that had only grown more chaotic in recent years with the addition of nieces and nephews.
She told herself she was looking forward to a lowkey Christmas. Just Sarada at home on the couch. A glass of spiked eggnog. A cozy Christmas mystery. A Yule Log recording streaming on her laptop.
Peaceful. Quiet.
But her cardinal needs a friend. A single friend. Just one to keep it company while Sarada is at work.
Standing, hands on her hips, Sarada walks over to the boxes and starts perusing the labels she’d insisted Boruto add to the boxes, her own enforcement of order onto his holiday chaos. What would be a good companion for her little friend?
Nothing too big, of course. It had to fit on the coffee table. But something a little fun, that looked as though it’d have something interesting to say.
After rejecting a musical angel, a Kagemasa nutcracker, and a reindeer statue made out of wood scraps, Sarada settles on a fluffy snowman with a top hat, a sprig of holly in its band to match her cardinal. She carries the two of them to her coffee table, putting them down side-by-side.
Sarada plops down on her couch in front of the merry pair, and picks up her now lukewarm latte, and takes a sip.