Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Can you please just go to the doctor on Monday? It’s starting to freak me out a little.”

Sarada dumped the last shards of what had still been a plate a minute ago into the bin beneath the sink. A dull clank sounded through their little kitchen as the porcelain hit the plastic container.

The stubborn pout on Boruto’s face strengthened a bit. “I’m sure it’s nothing. I probably just overdid it in the gym,” he mumbled quietly, still massaging his right palm in hopes to get the weird tingle away. No matter how deeply he dug his thumb into the itch though, and no matter how often he stretched and balled his fingers, the numbing sensation somehow stayed.

It was a tiny bit unsettling, but he wasn’t ready to admit that yet.

“It’s the second time we’re having to clean up broken dishes this week because your hand seems to be glitching.” His girlfriend glared at him through red-rimmed glasses, but he could very well sense the worry that was hidden beneath the façade of annoyance. “I don’t want to do it a third time. That stuff is ridiculously expensive.”

That made him even almost snort a laugh. They had both picked their jaws off the floor after setting out to buy their very first set of tableware, but that was apparently a normal problem of moving out of student housing and into a normal adult home, judging from the tiredly amused reaction of their parents. “I know. I’m sorry, Sarada.”

“I know you are.” A contrite pout joined the frown on her face as she crossed her arms. “I’m just worried.”

He sighed. “I’ll call up your mom on Monday morning, OK?” He reached for her hand and gently tugged her towards his seat at the kitchen table. “No need to worry anyone over the weekend.”

The gaze narrowed behind her lenses. “Promise?”

“Promise.” He underlined that statement with his best puppy-eyed smile. Usually it was his best weapon against his girlfriend’s concerns.

And as expected, she blew out a sigh but didn’t argue. “OK,” she merely muttered, clearly not happy but at least a tiny bit appeased that he relented.

“You go back to your book; I’ll take care of the rest here.” He nodded towards the last remains of their late Friday night supper left on the small table. Freeing her from the remaining chores was the least he could do after all the headaches he had given her tonight – or rather this week. 

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” He stood up and gently nudged her towards the door. “Put your feet up. I’ll deal with this.”

It cost him a few more back-and-forths of her half-anxious reassurances and his comforting replies, but she eventually caved in and let him maneuver her out of the room. The door stayed open though.

It was a little touching how she worried, even though she definitely worried too much.

The latter part was a standard phrase in his repertoire, one he loved to tease her with and one he kept repeating to himself to keep believing it as well. Because if he was being honest, she did worry a lot, but maybe he also was one to worry about a lot of the time.

Give and take. She made no secret of the many headaches he’d presumably caused her, always selling her solicitude beneath the disguise of annoyance, but he knew that he was just as guilty for fussing over her. Years of catching her poring over books and laptops way past midnight had proven that, a reoccurring habit that had started long before they had crossed the line from friendship into an official relationship.

That game would probably continue until they grew old and frail, and even further.

One last time, he peered through the hallway into the part of the flat they had dubbed their living room even though it simply harbored everything that didn’t fit into the kitchen, the bathroom, or the tiny closet serving as bedroom. As the reading light above Sarada’s desk flickered on, he deemed his girlfriend occupied enough to take care of the remaining dishes scattered across the kitchen. 

That’s when it happened again. But stronger than ever before.

Just when he had picked up the cutlery, the electricity-like sensation erupted from his right hand once more. It shot up his arm, just as it had before, only that this time it felt as if he had not only grazed the high voltage fence but grasped it with all his strength. His muscles seized, the knives and forks clattered to the floor tiles, and it threw him backwards against the kitchen counter.

Another surge of whatever the heck it was rolled up his arm and through the rest of his body, thrumming through every single fiber of his being with an intensity that might just rip him apart, and forced him to his knees. His eardrums hummed under the noise coming from everywhere and nowhere at once with frequencies he couldn’t even decipher, and he felt panic slithering up his spine.

Fuck everything he had said before, this was definitely not normal. And it seemed as if it was going to conquer him.

He heard someone calling his name, and a pair of hands pushed his shoulders back against the cupboard behind him.

Sarada.

Her face popped into his view as he involuntarily straightened up, meeting dark eyes wide with fear now. Her voice hardly made it through the hum of voltage in his head.

He didn’t fully understand what she said over the chaos in his mind, but it sounded a lot like, “Boruto! What’s wrong?!”

Her gaze searched his, but his eyes didn’t seem to listen. With every throb they unfocused, fraying around the edges of his vision, blurring in intervals of seconds.

“My hand,” he heard himself groan, just before another shockwave raced outwards from his hand. It didn’t feel like pain though; it was more like… force?

A force that his body couldn’t handle.

Sarada’s grasp wrapped around his wrist and pulled the limb towards her. Dark brows furrowed as she inspected it.

Then an emotion that looked way too close to shock for his taste flickered across her face.

“What the heck is that?!” she shouted, loud enough to pierce through the thrumming in his head, and turned his hand back for him to see.

And indeed. Right in the middle of his palm, exactly in the epicenter of the earthquake that was currently rattling through his body, sat a small rhombus shape, jet-black as if someone had just tattooed it there with the darkest ink they could find.

That was, until it glowed. Bright, glistening blue.

Now the panic definitely got to him.

“What the fuck?!” He jerked back, head hitting the cupboard, and flung his own hand as far away from him as possible. His feet skittered over the floor in hopes to push him further away, not caring how absolutely illogical that was, but all it got him was the cupboard’s doorknob digging deep into his shoulder.

The pulsing just got worse.

Every throb seemed to push an energy through his system that was far too strong for him to withstand lest even control, threatening to burst his eardrums, to make his heart explode and his eyes pop out of his skull. It nearly pulled his consciousness under, and it was only Sarada’s horrified shouts of words he couldn’t understand anymore that kept him tethered to the surface.

And then, as if all that wasn’t absolutely batshit crazy enough, the next throb seemed to extend past his fingertips. He watched in horror as thick black matter started to ooze out of his very own palm, hovering mid air like some weightless alien gotten lost right in his kitchen.

Sarada’s shouts evolved into screams of full-on panic, and she hauled him up onto his feet with a strength that would have surprised even him if he hadn’t been so busy with freaking out himself.

Soon the black matter had swallowed nearly the whole kitchen, its darkness so deep that it seemed to simply devour the light around it. He frantically tried to press both Sarada and himself as far back into the kitchen counter as physically possible in order to bring just a sliver of distance between them and whatever the fuck this thing was that drifted through the air in front of them, blocking any way of escape.

It grew and grew, fed by an unceasing flow of more black matter or antimatter or substanceless alien goo billowing out of his palm, until it stretched past the door into the hallway and god knew how far. He was already seeing his life flickering by in superspeed – when it vanished.

Like a vortex, the matter started spinning and swirling as if someone had pulled its plug, and in a matter of seconds it disappeared into thin air again. The pulsing in his hand stopped, the thrumming in his veins ceased, and his head turned stock-still again–

And a man stood in the middle of their kitchen.

Right in the middle of where the black sea had hovered before.

Boruto’s brain needed a few moments to recap what exactly he had witnessed within the last thirty seconds, maybe a minute. 

Then another few moments to register that the man in the middle of his kitchen was actually not a fata morgana but a real living being.

And then another few moments to summon the panic that was adequate in the face of strangers appearing out of thick black matter in one’s very own four walls.

“Who are you?!” he bellowed over the sound of his own heartbeat shooting straight to his ears, his right hand still stuck as far out as possible, the other protectively held out in front of Sarada next to him – as if she wasn’t the one armed with a pan and a large kitchen knife.

She had apparently used the seconds his mind had needed to catch up a lot more wisely.

Nothing could have prepared him for what followed though.

The stranger spun around, seemingly startled by his words – and Boruto felt as if someone had spun his world around like a top.

A blue eye, the color exactly like his own.

Straw blond hair, exactly like his own.

Cheekbones, nose, mouth, chin, jawline – all exactly shaped like his own.

Except for the nasty scar marring the stranger’s right eye socket, it was as if he stared at himself in the mirror.

Or more like a twin that had been dragged through dirt and mud, given the dust and stains all over the other person’s face and clothes.

The other Boruto’s face and clothes.

He was staring at himself.

It felt like falling even though both his feet were still planted on the kitchen floor tiles.

His doppelganger seemed to be just as startled by the encounter. “Who are you?!” he asked in return, and Boruto’s stomach plunged.

That was his voice.

That was his own voice coming from a stranger’s mouth.

“I’m Boruto!” he answered without thinking, as if he had to justify why he was standing in his very own kitchen. Somehow staring at a spitting image of himself, but also not himself, had overshadowed each and every caution about spilling sensitive information to intruders appearing through weird black portals in the middle of the night. 

His doppelganger’s face first scrunched up in confusion. Blond brows bunched together as his gaze flitted over first Boruto and then Sarada and then eventually landed on his right hand that he had still held out as far away from himself as possible.

Then his face fell in realization.

“Oh shit,” he mumbled, and his posture straightened up from what had looked very much like a defensive stance, as if he had been prepared for a physical attack (given that Sarada next to him was armed and probably ready to go, maybe not the most stupid thing). Now he looked more akin to a zookeeper trying to appease an angry wild animal with his palm turned up towards them.

And in the middle of it sat a tiny rhombus shape. Just like the one that had appeared on Boruto’s own palm just a minute ago.

Boruto swallowed.

“OK, this might sound really weird,” his doppelganger started carefully, “but I am you from another dimension.”

Boruto’s brain simply stopped braining.

“What?!”, Sarada squeaked next to him, and with that pretty much summed up everything he was feeling in that very moment.

The stranger who was apparently him sighed. “Listen, I don’t have time to explain that right now, but I need to get back. We need—“ Then he paused, and did another slow take through the room. “Where is Sarada?” he then asked.

Needless to say, the Sarada next to him was not in any way comforted by that question. The sound she made in return lay somewhere between confusion and outright horror.

The other Boruto seemed to realize his mistake. “My Sarada,” he quickly clarified, as if that was in any way a solid and calming explanation. “Sorry.”

Boruto felt his girlfriend readjusting her stance, apparently willing to make use of both pan and knife if the situation got any weirder, but whatever sharp-tongued reply had readied behind her lips was preempted by a rumbling noise coming from their bedroom.

There was a second in which all three of them held their breaths, the air tense like the seconds before a lighting strike.

Then the other world’s Boruto dashed out of the kitchen and towards the noise, leaving him and Sarada scrambling after him.

And he was fast.

So fast.

They had barely stepped out into the kitchen when his alternate-dimension-double already ripped their bedroom door open – and promptly parried something hurled at him with a fucking sword.

A metallic clang sounded through the flat.

“Is that a fucking sword?!” Sarada gasped next to him as they took the last few steps through their tiny hallway. Boruto would have answered her if he hadn’t been just as concerned about the little ninja star that had clattered to his doppelganger’s feet.

Someone was throwing ninja weapons from inside of their bedroom.

He was definitely losing his mind.

“Sarada! It’s me!” his other self shouted into the bedroom and promptly darted in.

Boruto reached the door and peered into the sparsely lit room – and instinctively took a step back again.

Because in the room stood… Sarada.

Or at least someone who looked like Sarada.

An incredibly scary and very intimidating version of Sarada – and she could already be fucking scary even in their own world.

The other Boruto however seemed not at all intimidated by the nearly feral expression on her face, or by the number of knives and more ninja stars readied between her fingers, or by the large peanut-shaped fan with a few too many dark red spots strapped across her back, or her glowing red irises!

Boruto’s stomach fell three additional stories, but his other self reached straight for the other Sarada’s face.

“It’s me. I’m here, it’s alright”, he said softly, more as if he was trying to console than taming someone who looked about ready to burn this building to the ground with everyone in it.

“Is that blood leaking from her eyes?” Sarada whispered next to him while they observed the other Boruto fussing over his companion. A churning sea of nausea settled in his stomach as he indeed identified the red streaks beneath the other Sarada’s eyes as blood.

What the actual heck was this person?! Was she even human?!

But again, he wasn’t granted time to process any of the things that were going down in his flat. The scary Sarada seemed to realize the two people lingering at the door were not just two random people but two people who looked an awful lot like her and her partner.

It would have been reassuring that at least this fact seemed to be just as unsettling to her as it had been for them, had her reaction not consisted of readying and aiming her weapons again – and Boruto’s stomach plummeted even further at the sight of a throwing knife pointed right at his throat. 

For some reason, he knew that her throw would exactly hit its target. There was no chance for error.

The real Sarada next to him however did not seem that unsettled by this threat. She did not move an inch. She just gaped. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

A glance into her direction confirmed her expression looked a lot more like awe than terror, which did not do anything to calm his nerves. At all. More like the opposite, actually.

His other self however seemed to acknowledge the danger radiating off of his companion in that very moment and quickly put himself between the weapons and the people at the door. “Nonono, wait, they’re not dangerous,” he interjected. “They’re... us. From another dimension. From this dimension.”

Now Boruto strongly believed that his Sarada at least would have given him all hell there was if she had received an explanation like that, in that state of mind above all things. And the version in their bedroom also didn’t exactly look like she was in the mood for jokes – more like someone had picked her straight out of a Bruce Lee movie.

But instead of using all the sharp edges in her hand for a bloody reprimand, the other Sarada eyed them, then her Boruto, then them again, and then let her hands sink with an exasperated sigh.

“What did you get us into again, idiot?”, she asked instead – and she sounded exactly like Sarada.

Chapter Text

Her head hurt.

It had already been slightly throbbing before, but it was definitely hurting now.

Herself from another dimension.

Another version of Boruto, also from that dimension, manifesting out of a portal that had magically appeared out of her Boruto’s hand.

No one would ever believe her. She’d be sent straight to the psych ward probably.

Actually, she herself was not really believing this either, but here she stood, staring at an equally intimidating and also quite impressive warrior-version of herself and someone who looked like a version of her boyfriend that had met a few too many horrors of the world. And they seemed to be just as confused about the situation as she was.

“I didn’t have time to pin a location; I just jumped us to the first familiarity I could sense,” the other Boruto argued, seemingly in need of justification under his girlfriend’s stare. “Interdimensional travel is not exactly an easy feat, y’know,” he added almost stubbornly, and that did sound an unsettling lot like her own boyfriend.

The fact that he talked about interdimensional travel like she would talk about maneuvering a truck through Konoha’s alleyways was even more unsettling though.

“I get that,” her other-dimensional self pressed through her teeth, obviously not amused. “But can you get us back?”

Sarada watched with rapt attention at how her alter ego stored her array of weaponry away in a little pouch on her hip without taking her eyes off of her companion. It was a movement with such naturalness and routine, so smooth and trivial, it had her staring in awe – and similarly wondering what kind of life their otherworldly versions were living.

The ease around weaponry that she only knew from martial arts movies, the familiarity with which they trod around the topic of other dimensions, the lack of concern regarding the obvious signs of a skirmish on both of them… As strong and – to use her boyfriend’s terms – “badass” her alter ego looked, she couldn’t help but wonder what she had seen. What she had lived through. Maybe survived, even.

Suddenly, she felt like a sheltered little kid accidentally stepping off the train at the bad side of town for the first time – being shown the privileges of her normal, in comparison boring life with brutal and accusing honesty.

The otherworldly Boruto turned his attention to her and her own Boruto.

“Can you control chakra?” he asked as if they should know what that was.

“What is chakura?” her Boruto promptly asked back, and for once she was a little glad for that loose tongue of his.

His alter ego turned back to the other Sarada. “OK, nevermind. I’m running low.”

She sighed and ran a hand over her face. The red streaks beneath her eyes turned into alarming red smudges that somehow alarmed neither of them. “Me too.”

“Well... I could-”

“No.”

Whatever idea the other Boruto had been about to launch, her alter ego seemed to know it already. And she did not like it.

The look in her eyes turned even darker.

Was that what she looked like when she got angry?

Good lord, that was intimidating.

“But it would-”

“No!” It sounded so resolute and final that even Sarada winced a little. So that was what her voice sounded like when she was angry because of worry. “It doesn’t help if you pass out straight when we get back to the battlefield and he takes over.”

“Battlefield,” Boruto mumbled next to her.

The rough idea of the world their doppelgangers had just escaped from seemed to also dawn on him now.

Nevertheless, the other pair seemed to want to get back there. As many questions as she had, Sarada figured that all she could currently do in this situation was to offer help.

She steeled her nerves, tightened her grip on the pan and knife in her hands in hopes it would make her feel more in control of the situation, and straightened up. “OK, so how do we recharge your… chakras?” she asked, ignoring all the other question marks whirring around in her brain for now.

The face that looked so much like her own but also very different turned to her. “Effectively... resting,” her other self admitted, and she could see the discontented restlessness churning behind those round glasses.

Funny. They looked exactly like the model on her own nose.

She understood that expression all too well though. She herself wasn’t the most patient person, and being forced to wait and do nothing when time wasn’t on one’s side was one of the worst feelings ever.

It seemed like she and her alter ego shared that character trait.

This was not the time to ponder differences and similarities though. If she found herself stranded in another dimension, she figured she would appreciate support and efficiency over selfish curiosity. “OK... Well, there's still some of your mom’s stew in the freezer,” she said as she turned to her boyfriend. “We could heat that up. And we can pull out the couch. There should be enough spare blankets for a night.”

“We don’t want to cause any troubles, really.” Her carbon copy stepped forward with her hands folded in front of her chest. “We really appreciate it, but we can just head out and find a camping spot.”

“In those outfits?” As usual, Boruto did not beat about the bush. “I don’t think so.”

His other-dimension-version however seemed to take that slightly personally. “What is wrong with our outfits?” he asked, and had she not seen his mouth forming the words she would have thought that subtly stubborn question came from the person next to her.

They sounded exactly the same.

This situation was too absurd to be scary at this point.

Nonetheless, she had to admit that her boyfriend was right. Even if his doppelganger’s appearance had her making a mental note to buy Boruto more white dress shirts with deep necklines that probably looked slutty on anyone else but somehow worked on him.

Or maybe she was just biased.

But it did look a bit hot, if she was being honest.

"You guys will stand out like pink elephants at someone’s funeral. No one dresses like that in our world," Boruto promptly countered with a nod to his doppelganger’s cape. “Not to mention the stains of I-don’t-even-wanna-know-what all over both of you. So, no. You both need a shower, some food, and rest. I can see the bags under your eyes from here.” He turned to her. “She looks like she needs to take care of a few scratches. Can you do that?”

Her other-dimensional self didn’t let that comment slide. “I am completely fine. I can-”

“You’re not,” both Boruto’s interrupted in unison, followed by exchanging a glance that spoke of both surprise and agreement.

Apparently, some character traits transcended dimensional boundaries.

“Alright, then that’s settled. You guys stay the night.” Boruto pointed at his doppelganger. “You and I take care of the food while you two take care of the wounds, and then we can chat through everything else over dinner. That OK for everyone?”

The other pair exchanged a few looks in silence but eventually seemed to come to the conclusion that there wasn’t much else in their range of options. At least the little shrug of the other Boruto’s shoulders told her as much.

Her boyfriend didn’t even wait for a verbal cue for that decision. “OK, perfect. Then let’s go.” He motioned for his other self to follow him and was already halfway through the door when his doppelganger opened his mouth again.

“Wait,” he said slowly. “Whose place actually is this?”

Her Boruto stopped and turned back around, a confused frown painted onto his face. “It’s our place,” he answered, loosely gesturing at himself and her, even though technically it was their landlord's place. But well, she guessed that explanation would not have been of any help.

Something about his answer however summoned a slight shift towards discomfort in the other pair though. At least the other Sarada’s face shifted from concentration to something closer to stunned, and the other Boruto seemed to freeze in place.

That was when it started to dawn on Sarada.

There seemed to be one very significant difference between them and the pair from another dimension.

“As in... flatmates or...?” The other Boruto’s gaze searched for an answer between them while also pointedly not looking at his companion, as if his remaining eye would be gouged right out the second it would land on her.

They had apparently not tackled that topic yet.

Her ears grew warm as the uncomfortable silence spread in the suddenly stuffy room.

“No, as in sharing-a-flat-because-we're-a-couple,” her boyfriend eventually argued next to her, and she could practically see the red blotches creeping further up her other-dimension self’s neck with every syllable.

Neither of the other pair moved, and yet the distance between them seemed to increase as they both pretended to be totally indifferent to the revelation of their alternate selves actually being not friends but lovers.

God, it was ridiculous seeing it from the outside now, but she would lie to say that she did not know how being confronted with denied feelings felt. The second-hand embarrassment was almost physically painful to witness.

“Oh," was all the other Boruto had to say to that while the other Sarada seemed more focused on praying for the floor to open up.

Well, the best she could do right now was relieving all of them from this rather awkward situation. “We should get going then. The bathroom is this way,” she said to her self from another dimension, and the other Sarada seemed more than glad to take her up on that.

Chapter Text

After the initial shock of meeting a version of himself from another dimension had worn off, curiosity was quick to take the floor.

Questions over questions scrambled for pole position in Boruto’s head as soon as he left both Saradas in the bedroom and returned to the kitchen with his own doppelganger in tow. He was barely able to hold them in until his mother’s pot was placed onto the stove.

“Is that a real sword?” he then blurted out, spinning around to the other person standing in the middle of the room, obviously not really knowing what else to do with himself.

A moment of surprise flashed over the other Boruto’s face before he looked down at the sleek long weapon sheathed at his hip. “It’s a Katana,” he then said.

The wave of juvenile fascination got the best of him. “That is so damn cool! Can I hold it?”

The other man seemed to ponder his answer for a short moment, but eventually he shrugged and pulled the blade out of its hold. “OK. But be careful; it’s sharp.”

The katana turned out to be a lot heavier than he had imagined. The weight pulled him down as he closed his hand around the hilt, and it made him wonder how his alter ego was able to wield it with such ease. He didn’t look that much fitter.

Nonetheless, there was a boyish excitement gushing through his veins as he slowly wove the sword through the kitchen air, as if engaging in a super-slow-motion sword fight. Or at least he thought those were the moves one needed in a sword fight.  “Wow, this is so cool! I never held one!”

“It belonged to my sensei. Sarada’s father.”

“Old man Sasuke is your sensei?!” Boruto’s jaw nearly hit the floor for yet another time that night. “He taught you to wield this thing?”

The other Boruto nodded from where he still stood in the middle of the kitchen, following the sword movements with close attention and crossed arms. “Yup.”

Boruto couldn’t believe it. “Wow. That’s so badass. I bet he’s hella strong!” Sarada’s father was already a really cool character in their world in his opinion (way cooler than his own old man), and to hear that he seemed to be a mighty swordsman in another universe truly exceeded anything he had ever dared to imagine. Then another question pushed itself into the forefront of his brain. “So are you a Samurai or what?”

It was answered with a short shake of head. “No. We’re shinobi.”

Boruto’s fascination about the other world grew with every answer he got from his alternate self. “For real?!” he nearly squeaked. To believe that he was a freakin’ shinobi with a badass sword in another world and only a law firm trainee in this one definitely blew his mind.

Mr Sasuke’s law firm at least, but still just a law firm nonetheless.

How many more versions were there? Was there an adventurous pirate version of him somewhere? Or maybe a mighty knight? Or a daring cowboy? Or an untouchable spy? Or a courageous firefighter? Or a keen detective?

And why did he seem to be stuck in a goddamn office AU?!

His shinobi-self just nodded again.

“Woah. That’s so cool.” He shook his head in disbelief, still grappling with everything he learned within the last ten minutes. “What about our Dad? Is he even remotely as strong as uncle Sasuke?” he then asked with a snicker, struggling to imagine his clumsy father doing anything even slightly successful ninja-esque. The man was probably made for talking rather than fighting in any universe.

The answer took a few seconds. When it came however, it sounded a lot more somber than he had anticipated.

"Yeah. He was the strongest of them all,” his other self answered quietly.

Boruto’s wannabe-sword fight moves halted. “Was?” he repeated as the sword sunk down, and his stomach right along with it.

The implication that this little word brought with it added a whole new perspective to this other dimension, and suddenly his excitement from a minute ago felt a bit macabre.

The other Boruto seemed to realize the impact of his words. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you,” he added with a quick fleeting smile, but Boruto could see through that expression like a freshly wiped windshield.

The disadvantage of talking to himself was that he could read the expressions on that face like on his own. Because they were his. He had plastered them onto his own face a hundred times and more.

"Is he... dead?” he asked with his heartbeat suddenly up in his throat. He sure did love to crack a few jokes at his dad’s expense, but by no means would he ever wish death on the man. Not even during his most rebellious teenage years would he ever have ever said something like that.

The other Boruto shook his head. “No, he’s just... I don’t know where he is, and that’s the problem. Him and his w—” He stopped himself, seemingly stumbling over whatever he had wanted to say, and started anew. “Him and mom are trapped somewhere, and I can’t find them.”

Boruto’s heart sank. To imagine having both his parents taken from him… He couldn’t.

He just couldn’t.

“When did that happen?” he asked, now more subdued than eager.

"Ten years ago.” There was a heaviness to the words that nearly pushed him off his balance.

"Ten years! Holy shit, I’m... I’m so sorry,” he said, lacking any better apology even though he knew that technically he had nothing to apologize for, but to think that he still had his parents when his other self didn’t just seemed… unfair.

Ten years. That meant he had to have been just twelve years old when his parents got taken away – and Hima only ten.

That added another pang of hurt to his chest. To even just imagine Hima having to cope with the loss of both parents hurled an unbearable wave of rage and helplessness at him, and he wasn’t even the one to experience it firsthand.

That had to be a cruel end of childhood.

“Don’t be.” His self from the other dimension offered a lopsided smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You couldn’t know.”

And still one thought followed the other in Boruto’s mind. His gaze wandered to the sword still clasped in his grasp, its tip now pointing towards his kitchen tiles. “What about Sarada’s parents?”, he asked, not finding the courage to look his alter ego in the eye. “Are they around or...”

His other self took a long, deep breath that already made his heart plunge. “Her mom is. Her dad… Not really. It’s complicated.”

He swallowed.

Hearing of those significant losses scared him way too much to ask about other people in their common but yet so different lives. How many fates had they witnessed ending? How much loss and death and suffering had they experienced?

What about their grandparents? Their aunts and uncles?

What about their friends?

What about Kawaki?

What about Hima?

Just the thought of losing his little sister made him feel as if a leaden fist closed right around his chest and squeezed everything out of it that had ever found a place within it. He tore his mind out of and away from that rabbit hole as quickly as he could.

Against his initial judgment, the life of a shinobi now seemed the exact opposite of cool and exciting. He wordlessly handed the sword back to its rightful owner, ashamed that he had been gushing so naively about it just a minute ago.

How many times had this blade been cleaned? How much blood had been wiped off its edge?

He probably didn’t want to know.

Heavy silence fell on the room as the silver steel disappeared back into its sheath, only the quiet hum of the induction stove continuing its task like a never tiring bumblebee. Stirring the slowly warming contents of the pot was a welcome diversion from the gloomy atmosphere he himself had created.

Probably a good minute passed until his companion cleared his throat. “So, uhm... you and Sarada are...”

The sentence ended there, leaving the implication hanging in the already thick air. When Boruto turned just in time to see his alternate self motion vaguely at the flat around them though, he determined that he found awkward discussions about relationship statuses a lot more pleasant than inquiries about potentially dead relatives.

He smiled at his other self. “Yeah,” he confirmed, allowing the warmth that came with this topic to shoo away the heaviness resting on his chest.

The other Boruto nodded slowly. “Cool,” he said, looking away as if he was just holding insignificant smalltalk, but the slightly pinkish hue on his face gave him away. “That’s... cool.”

Was that how he looked when he danced around embarrassing topics?

Seeing that expression from the outside unfortunately didn’t make it any less embarrassing. Not even on the face of a battle-hardened shinobi.

He gladly took the opportunity for a change of topic though – not least because he dared to say that he knew a bit too well what his other self was feeling at this very moment. “You like her, don’t you?” he more or less stated, knowing that he knew the answer to the question already anyway.

And as expected, the sheepish expression on his other self’s face intensified. “Well, it’s complicated,” he eventually mumbled with one hand scratching a spot on the back of his head.

Boruto recognized the motion all too well, and for a second a phantom itch knocked on the back of his own head. It was incredibly weird to see all his own ticks and habits showcased, as if someone was calling him out on them with a spotlight and a pointer.

Anyways, this conversation called for some loosening up.

One quick reach into the fridge retrieved two bottles of beer, the caps popped a second later.

“Why? Are you ‘just friends’?” he asked as he handed one of the beverages to his company, not holding back on the irony on the last two words.

The other Boruto sighed. “I don’t even know what we are. There was just never a right moment to... figure that out, y’know? There was always something else that got in the way. Some big catastrophe, people dying, the almost end of the fucking world, this...” He motioned at his surroundings, then took a gulp from the bottle. “Sometimes I feel like it’s just not meant to be,” he finished quietly, but as glum as that sounded, Boruto had the feeling that his alter ego also appreciated this topic over the previous one. Albeit for potentially slightly different reasons.

He leaned back against the counter, careful to still have an eye on the pot. “That all sounds horrible, but also as if you two are actually just scared of risking it,” he concluded firmly.

Confusion claimed his company’s face. “Huh?”

That had been expected though. He had also not wanted to hear anything of it before Shikadai had chewed him out on it. And since he knew that straight words worked best on him in these situations, he decided to be blunt with his alter ego – just like his best friend had been with him.

“OK, listen, I have no clue what the actual fuck is happening in your world, and I most definitely can’t help with any of those problems,” he started, “but what I can tell you is that taking the step from life-long friendship to a relationship is scary in any world. It was for me – for us – and I bet it’ll be for you. But... I can also tell you that you’ll regret it if you never do.”

He had already waited way too long. That his other version had waited even longer, or actually was still waiting, was barely even imaginable to him.

Years of yearning for something that he himself hadn’t even been able to discern had taken moments and experiences from them that they could never recover. And the months in which he had eventually figured out what he actually wanted but been too scared to act on it had nearly eaten him alive. To know that his alternate-dimension self was still trapped in that stage made him feel even more sorry for the guy.

He sighed. “Life’s short, man. You’re already in love with her. Act on it. And be persistent, because if she’s just a shred like my Sarada, then she will tell you to fuck off with her words but make you stay with every other form of communication she has.”

His alter ego huffed a quiet chuckle. “That does sound like her.”

A smile claimed his face at that. As different as their worlds and lives were, there seemed to be a few consistencies across interdimensional boundaries. “Well, good luck with that then.” He toasted to the other version of him. “It was a tough one.”

His other version smiled a bit more now. “You two look happy though.”

Now it was his turn to smile sheepishly. “It’s awesome,” he admitted, a bit sorry for rubbing his happy love life in his not-so-happy-yet companion’s face, but everything he had witnessed and learned within the last twenty minutes made him appreciate everything he had quite drastically. And that included Sarada – his Sarada. “I’m gonna ask her to marry me, y’know.”

The other Boruto coughed into his bottle of beer. “Holy shit, for real?”, he asked after wiping a stray drop off his chin, the one healthy eye wide with wonder.

Boruto felt his chest swell with both pride and anticipation. “Yup,” he confirmed with a nod, struggling to keep his grin at bay like a child wrestling with a secret. “I can’t wait to see how she calls me an idiot for even just asking, but I want to. Not exactly sure when and how, but I know I will.”

“That is really cool, man.” Both surprise and amusement lightened his other self’s expression. “Congrats.”

He was nearly brimming with excitement around the topic. Good that Sarada didn’t have even the slightest clue, because he would not be able to keep it from her should she ever suspect anything and use her interrogation tactics on him. “Thanks! I hadn’t really thought about it, but then Granny Shina gave me her engagement ring last Christmas after Gramps Minato passed. I’m gonna ask her with that.”

“You... you know our Dad’s parents?”

And just like that, the warmth of the situation took a blow again.

His smile crumbled a little. “Yeah. You don't?” he asked hesitantly, more than acutely aware that they had bumped a soft spot again.

Only after he asked that he realized what a stupid thing to ask that was. The preceding question itself had answered it more than enough already.

As expected, his other self shook his head. “No,” he said quietly. “They died the day Dad was born.”

Boruto’s heart sank again. Had his family from another dimension not suffered enough already? Why did that universe also have to ruin his Dad’s childhood on top of it all, as if abruptly destroying that of his children had not been enough?

What was it with the shinobi-verse and destroyed families?!

“Oh shit, I’m so sorry” he said, once more feeling inexplicably guilty for having an alive and intact family. But then an idea popped into his head. “Do you want to see pictures?”

And his other self’s eyes lit up again. “Yeah,” he said, “I’d love that actually.”

Chapter Text

She had handed her kitchen weaponry to Boruto, then led her other-dimensional self the three steps through their tiny hallway into their equally tiny bathroom. There she had dug the first aid kit out of their tiny, and thus completely overstuffed, bathroom cabinet and placed it on the closed lid of the toilet seat in lack of another big enough surface. Then she had shortly panicked at the possibility of having to help stitching an actual wound with real flesh and real blood and real needles in her own bathroom (in that case she might have just ordered her mother to come around, no matter the time of day and no matter the consequences), but to her luck the alternate-dimension-Sarada had confidently reached for some gauze bandage, butterfly plasters, and alcohol disinfectant, and gone to work herself.

Thank God her mother had gifted them this high-end first aid kid as a housewarming gift. As so often, having a doctor in the family came in handy in all sorts of ways.

The black jacket and top were discarded onto the floor, and Sarada watched her alternate self clean her wounds with nothing more than a twitch in her eyes whereas she would have probably loudly cursed every time the alcohol touched raw red flesh. As similar as they seemed to be in other things, their pain tolerances were worlds apart.

To her relief though, none of the injuries on her other self seemed to be too serious. Most of them were just barely scrapes and a few cuts, and only a few of them were actually in need of butterfly plasters. It so happened that she observed her other self working away with well-practiced precision while handing her the things she needed.

Some scissors to cut the gauze. Some cotton pads. Some q-tips.

Like a kid watching their father work on the old clunker in the garage, but with medical supplies. It made her feel a tiny bit useless, if she was being honest. Her other self seemed so experienced around injury treatment, insinuating that she had probably seen a lot worse than this, and she had to fight the nausea at the sight of bloody streaks below someone’s eyes.

It all happened in tense silence.

A thousand questions screamed in Sarada’s head to be asked, about the hows and the whys and the ifs, but in the light of her companion’s (albeit light) injuries somehow none of them felt appropriate.

It was actually the other Sarada who apparently couldn’t bear the silence anymore at some point.

“So... what do you do for a living?” she eventually asked, and Sarada nearly laughed a nervous giggle in the face of her own awkwardness.

Luckily both of them seemed to suck at small talk. That was a relief.

“I am currently working at Dad’s law firm,” she managed to say instead though, fairly calm even.

That summoned a raised eyebrow on her doppelganger’s face. “He has a law firm?” she asked, a bit astounded.

“Yeah. Is that... weird?”

Her other self returned her gaze to the cut on her thigh. “No, it’s, uhm... just not what I had expected.”

After all, curiosity won. “What had you expected?” she asked back, equally interested in and frightened of the answer.

But her other self just shrugged. “I- I don’t really know myself to be honest,” she then said with an awkward little chuckle. “Just... nothing that has to do with... the law.”

Something about that statement led Sarada to believe that maybe her father was someone who had lived in the gray zones of life in more than one universe.

“OK... So, what do you do for a living?” she asked instead, opting to not pry on her father’s questionable pasts in other dimensions and rather give in to her own inquisitiveness.

The other Sarada tied a knot into the bandage around her leg and moved on to a scratch on her shin. “I’m a shinobi,” she answered completely nonchalantly as she lifted her foot onto the rim of the bathtub to reach the small wound a little more easily.

Sarada inhaled sharply.

That explained the weapons and the composure around injuries. But all the things she had read about shinobis only fed into her worries.

“How are you holding up?” she asked, and she wasn’t referring to the little scratches on her companion.

The question seemed to take the other Sarada by surprise. She stilled, seemingly mulling over her answer before screwing the bottle of disinfectant closed and straightening up. “To be honest, there were simpler times,” she said with a short laugh that did not sound very amused.

Something tugged on Sarada’s heart. “Is stuff like this... normal for you guys? Did you already meet other versions of yourself? Of us?”

Her interdimensional twin shook her head, short strands of black hair swinging with the motion. “No. This is also a first for us. I didn’t even think that was possible until today.”

“But you travel between dimensions regularly or...”

“Well, not frequently, but... sometimes. If the situation calls for it.”

That tightlipped smile was a clear sign that her other self was trying to be as diplomatically positive around the topic as possible. Like explaining the concept of death to a kid – trying to convey the impact and consequences, but without scaring them off.

“Is that something one can just do as a shinobi?”

Again, her other self shook her head. “No. It’s only a very few people. And Boruto is one of them.”

“Huh.” Why did that not surprise her at all? “He can truly achieve great things if he just puts his mind to it, right?” She allowed herself a little smile in hopes to lighten up the atmosphere.

Boruto might come off as a bit of a troublemaker sometimes, but he was smart. Once he had determined his goal, there was no chance of keeping him from reaching it. That signature trait seemed to transcend into other universes as well.

Her other self mirrored the smile, even though it did not fully reach her eyes. “Yeah,” she just said quietly, and for a moment Sarada thought she had seen a flicker of pain in that gaze.

It urged her to ask about how Boruto had gotten to that ability, but her other self was probably stressed out about the situation enough already. Prying about her painful memories would surely not help in this situation.

And so she clapped her hands together, like her mother when she wanted to get going, and said: “OK, uhm… are you done with the medical kit? Are you feeling alright?”

Her shinobi-self nodded.

“Are your eyes OK?” Most of the red smudges had been cleaned off, but they were still heavily bloodshot and red. To be honest, it still looked incredibly unhealthy and slightly intimidating.

“Oh! Yeah.” The other Sarada stepped in front of the mirror and took a long glance at herself, inspecting her eyes closely in her reflection. “They sometimes do that.”

“They do what?!” She had already wondered why the other Boruto had been not too concerned about this obvious medical anomaly, but that her other self was this relaxed around it was truly disturbing.

But she just shrugged and started to pick her discarded clothes off the floor. “It happens when I overuse them,” came the explanation a second later, but that only summoned even more questions in Sarada’s head.

“You.... see too much?” she eventually dared to ask, confusion and worry pushing her voice towards the high notes.

Was it comparable to her staring at a screen for too long?

Did her shinobi-self get bloody eyes from following fight scenes where she only got a headache after a long workday?!

That seemed just mildly out of proportion in her opinion.

But the other Sarada shook her head – again. As so often in the past five minutes. “No, my eyes have this... ability. Kind of like... special visual powers.” Her hands were wringing for words mid-air, apparently grappling with explanations suitable for someone who hadn’t even known shinobis still existed somewhere half an hour ago. “And when I strain those, my eyes start bleeding.”

Sarada could feel the confusion spreading on her face. “Like eagle vision?”

“More like a photographic memory and some foresight ability, amongst other things.”

Sarada’s jaw nearly kissed the bathroom tiles. “You can see the future?!”

But before she could even fantasize about the things possible when being able to peek into the future, her wandering mind was being grounded again.

“Not exactly,” her other self jumped in with a light chuckle, “but I can see my opponent’s moves and trajectories shortly before they happen.”

With even more respect than before, Sarada watched her other self put her top back on and sling her jacket across her shoulders. As tragic as her life probably had been up until now, and as much as Sarada absolutely did not want to swap places with her alter ego, she couldn’t help but be amazed by the feats apparently completely within the normal range of the shinobi world.

Interdimensional travel.

Supernatural eye powers.

What else was possible in that other universe?

At this point, it wouldn’t even surprise her if shinobi could wield the elements, like in the Avatar series.

God, she hoped she was a fire bender.

“Damn. That sounds like you’re impossible to beat!” she heard herself say, admittedly with a little more enthusiasm than she had actually wanted to exude about such a rather brutal topic.

It was answered with a dry laugh from her company. “Not quite. Every jutsu has a weakness; you just have to know it,” her other self explained with a lopsided smile.

Sarada nodded slowly. That they had apparently needed to flee from a fight should have actually been evidence for that already. That in turn made her wonder what else was actually out there.

She opted to not spend too much thought on that, lest she might never sleep peacefully again. “Makes sense,” she merely replied and determined that she should probably not ask any more questions that only brought her answers equally fascinating and disturbing. “I guess you’ll need some fresh clothes,” she said instead.

“No, it’s fine.” Her other self waived her off. “Please don’t worry about it.”

But she could be just as stubborn as Boruto. “At least for the night, for bed. Please. I swear it’s no trouble.”

And lo and behold, after a few seconds of contemplating, her other self actually agreed. For a second time that night, Sarada guided her twin from another dimension across the tiny hallway back into the room they had first met in. A tap on the light switch provided an actual overview of the room this time around though, with more to see than just shapes of furniture illuminated by light spilling in from the hallway or the street window.

“Pyjama shirts are in the drawer over there. Since we should be the same size you can probably just pick any of them. I’ll get you some pants.”

She marched straight to the other end of the dresser towards the drawer that miraculously managed to hold both her and Boruto’s sweatpants – arguably with the application of some slightly forceful putting-away techniques, but limited space called for desperate measures. After pulling a pair of pants out of her side of the drawer without causing a textile explosion proved to be successful, she turned back around to find her companion standing in front of the narrow arrangement of picture frames squeezed in between the door and the armoire.

The shirt she had picked hung between the hands folded in front of her chest, seemingly sidelined by what her eyes had found on the wall.

It took only one step closer to figure out which of the pictures she was looking at.

A little smile lifted the corner of Sarada’s mouth. “That was at Konoha’s Grand Theatre. Himawari’s first show with the big crew, and Boruto insisted that we dress up accordingly.” There were only a few occasions she had seen Boruto put on a suit, and even less when he had done so voluntarily, but no effort would ever be too big for his little sister.

And Sarada could understand. She had grown fond of the little girl almost from minute one, and by now she considered her one of her best friends. Had she not been busy with keeping Boruto from hollering cheers from their box seats during the final applause moment, she might have definitely shed a few tears after the play.

The picture had been taken before the play though, in the foyer of the theatre, by proud mom Hinata happily taking as many shots as she could get of their sons in suits. She had nearly held a whole photoshoot: Boruto with Kawaki, Boruto with Sarada, both of them with Sarada, Boruto and Kawaki with Naruto (also in a suit, of course), all of them together, herself with Sarada, herself with the boys, herself with Naruto – all the combinations possible without Himawari. Needless to say, even more pictures had been taken after the play, when Hima had been able to join them.

For the limited space on their bedroom wall however, Sarada had simply chosen the picture of her and Boruto. Just them two in front of the poster wall of the play, his arm around her waist, a sunshine smile on his face, and an especially good hair day for her.

Her other-dimensional self however flinched at her words, as if they had torn her out of a daze. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to look through your personal stuff,” she just muttered as she took a step back, eyes suddenly glued to the shirt in her hand as if they had seen something not meant for them.

“No, it’s fine!” Sarada offered her other self an encouraging smile. “You can look at them.”

A red hue crept up her carbon copy’s neck. “That’s, uhm… That is a very pretty dress,” she eventually said, and Sarada couldn’t quite decipher whether that was the actual reason for her sudden shyness, or whether the other person in the picture frame had conjured that awkwardness in her company’s behavior.

Apparently there were instances when she couldn’t even read herself. She should probably value Boruto’s ability to read her like an open book a bit more highly.

Whatever it was, she opted to follow her other self’s angle. “Thank you. ChouChou picked it out for me.”

That in turn summoned a little smile onto the other Sarada’s face. “Of course she did,” she muttered with a quiet laugh, and Sarada’s chest lightened a little at the revelation that their ChouChous didn’t seem to be all too different either.

Every girl needed a best friend to support them in bold fashion choices, right?

Her other self took a hesitant step towards the small picture wall again, careful as if she was both curious and frightened of what she might discover next. The shirt in her hands was downgraded to a stress relief for her nervous fingers again.

Dark eyes wandered over the frames and the faces in them, slowly to study every picture of their friends and families with reverence, and Sarada found herself wondering what those pictures might reveal to her self from another dimension.

Were all of these people still alive in her world?

Had the violence of her reality perhaps driven a wedge into some of the depicted relationships?

Did these photographs make her happy or were they painful to look at?

It was a change in posture that indicated her other self had found something before she even opened her mouth.

When she did, her voice was hollow. “Who... Who is that?”

Sarada had to step closer once more to follow her line of sight to a photo of her six- or seven-year-old self on the shoulders of a tall man, two strands of his dark long hair grasped in her chubby little hands like reins, her smile loud and wide whereas his was calm and peaceful.

Back then his hair had still looked almost as dark as hers. Nowadays the gray had nearly taken over the mane.

“That’s my uncle Itachi,” she answered.

There was a heavy beat of silence before her other self asked with a slightly hoarse voice, “Do you have more pictures of your Dad’s side of the family?”

Something in the way she had asked told Sarada that her father’s side of the family was a touchy subject. Not that it wasn’t an entirely drama-free part in her life too, but the drama from a world in which violence and physical fights seemed to be much more ingrained into daily life probably had a different weight than family dramas in her reality.

Nonetheless, her other self had asked for more pictures, and the least she could do was help with that.

“Absolutely,” she said as she reached into the cupboard behind her. “I have the whole family album!”

A minute later, Sarada watched her wide-eyed self turn page after page through the heavy leather-bound book her parents had gifted her for her eighteenth birthday. Her fingers traced the edges of the photographs and the lines of her mother’s handwriting beneath them, as if she had to convince herself of their existence, and every few pages a whispered “oh” left her lips.

It provided for many more questions in Sarada’s head that she was actually too afraid to ask.

Did her other self know her relatives? Or rather, how many of them did she not know?

“Those are my dad’s parents,” she explained at a family picture of her, her parents, and grandparents even though the other Sarada hadn’t asked, but she felt the need to say something. “It was Granny Mito’s birthday I believe.”

“Granny Mito?” For the first time in minutes, her other self’s gaze left the Uchiha family album and settled on her face.

“Yeah. I apparently couldn’t properly say ‘Mikoto’ as a toddler, and then it stuck. Y’know, how probably all grandparents’ names come into being.” A nervous chuckle followed the sentence, but at least it summoned an upwards twitch on the other Sarada’s mouth as well.

“I see.” She smiled, even though there was a tinge of melancholy in it. Then she asked, “Why are all the photos from your uncle separate?”

And with that they had arrived at the Uchiha family drama.

Now it was Sarada’s turn to nervously wring her hands. “He doesn’t really talk to the rest of the family anymore,” she started, trying to not sound too glum around the topic. “I don’t exactly know what happened back in the day, but apparently there was a pretty nasty family feud when he was a teen and Dad still a child. Caused a pretty big rift in the family, and til this day, my Dad is the only one who has really reconciled with him. That always makes for really awkward situations at my birthday or whatever big family gathering, so be glad that did not happen in your world,” she eventually finished with an awkward laugh, even though that actually wasn’t anything to laugh about.

Her other self seemed to share that opinion. “Haha. Yeah.” A tight-lipped smile flashed across her face before she turned back to the picture collection in her hands. Her finger once again followed the edges of a family picture taken in her grandparents’ yard.  “These are all really beautiful,” she then added, but this time quieter, and a shine in her eyes that led Sarada to believe she was getting a bit sentimental.

And because she didn’t know what to do with compliments and was generally a bit overwhelmed by the situation, she just stuttered a hesitant “Thanks, I guess?”

Her other self breathed a quiet laugh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be weird. It’s just... they are all not around in my world anymore, and I just know so little about them, and to see them here alive and smiling...” Her voice trailed off, and her hand quickly shifted her glasses up to wipe her eyes. “I’m sorry. I just think Dad would be really happy if he could see all this.”

And there it was again, the lump in her throat.

She didn’t know any of them?

That meant there was no one of that family side left but her father?

A slight gust of nausea crawled up her spine at the implications of what her father in another dimension had to have gone through. Now the Uchiha family feud actually didn’t seem all that bad, given that it had been fought with words and money and not blood and weapons.

But she had said her father would love to see this version of his family. And so the least she could do was make that come true.

“You know, I could copy a few of these for you,” she suggested around the ache in her throat.

The other set of her own eyes widened. “You would do that?”

The pure elation in those words put a smile onto her face, despite the weight resting on her chest. “Sure. Then you can take them with you and show him.”

The look on her other self’s face turned a bit mournful, but the smile still stayed. “Yeah, I’ll show him,” the Sarada from the other dimension said, and even if she had the feeling that there was a lot more to unpack in that answer, Sarada chose to leave it at that.

Chapter Text

Sarada had seen a lot of things in her life which other people would probably sort straight into the ‘batshit crazy' category. Even by shinobi standards.

She couldn’t even begin to imagine what their visit from another dimension looked like to someone who hadn’t even heard of the basic principles of chakra an hour ago. It had definitely turned her understanding of how the universe worked upside down and forced some bittersweet learnings down her throat.

It had almost hurt to see how similar and yet totally different the lives of their alternate versions turned out to be. As if someone had taken all the conflicts of the shinobi world and watered them down until they became mere quarrels. It almost made her wonder whether her and Boruto’s lives had only been doomed the day they had decided against the civilian career, or whether the simple event of their births in their world had been enough to determine the path they currently found themselves on.

If they had just not followed their parents’ footsteps careerwise, would the Otsutsuki then never have visited their planet? Or had their dimension always been destined to fall into chaos, and they had just happened to stumble into the middle of it?

Her heart had nearly stopped at the sight of an unscathed Boruto, no scar on his eye, the only indication of hardship being the display of shock on his face at that very moment. A wave of hot-white guilt had rolled through her once she had understood the situation, because the other Sarada had seemingly managed to avoid putting her version of Boruto in a situation where he had to choose between the loss of an eye and the loss of a friend.

Partner.

Lover.

Another thing that had kicked off an onslaught of emotions she had definitely not been prepared to face today, but when did those things ever happen at the right time?

Exactly. Never.

Boruto and her seemed to have a habit of never finding the right time for anything in that regard.

Looking through her other self’s family pictures had then been the last drop to make the glass overflow, resulting in a short emotional hiccup that had thrown her a bit off the rails.

All those faces that she didn’t know but that were so near and dear to her self from the other dimension. All the pain that none of them had to experience. All the memories her other self had made with them that she would never know.

She had imagined her father’s reaction to these pictures. He probably would have stared at them for minutes without moving just an inch, face unmoving with the usual stoic expression, and the only thing giving him away would have been the little sheen of water pooling in his good eye.

They had to turn him back. This was just an additional reason on the list of why they had to succeed.

When she followed her civilian self into the kitchen, wondering whether it was just a bad hair day or whether her haircut looked like that from the back all the time, she found both Borutos at the kitchen table, surrounded by various photo albums, loose photographs, picture frames, and a laptop.

Her dimension’s Boruto was practically glowing with the boyish excitement that appeared so rarely on his face these days, and he could’ve as well delivered a clean blow to her chest when he waved her over. “Look, almost everyone is alive here!” he pointed out, and Sarada couldn’t help but notice how happy that statement sounded, whereas the implication was actually rather sad. “There are pictures of Uncle Neiji even, and my Dad’s parents! And look!” He turned back towards the array of pictures sprawled out over the table, his hand hovering above them for a few moments until he seemed to have found the one he had been looking for. He held it up for her to see. “Your grandparents! Both pairs, in one picture, together!”

Something about this situation made her want to smile and cry at the same time.

“I know.” She sat down on the chair next to him and slid over the copies of the photographs she had chosen from the Uchiha family album. “We also had a photo session,” she added with a small smile of gratitude to her double.

Her companion was already engrossed in the new pack of pictures. “Woah, is that your Dad?” he asked, voice full of wonder. “That’s some long hair, even for his standards...”

“No, that’s... that’s my uncle. Itachi.”

Boruto’s brows shot up on his forehead. “That’s him?!” He lifted the picture closer to his face, nearly squinting as if taking a closer look would tell him more about the person in the picture. “But he looks so… friendly. Not like someone who would mu-“

She quickly snatched the picture out of his grasp again. “Because he is a nice person here!”, she just countered quickly, hoping to tell him with a sharp look that maybe that was not something they should bring up with their doppelgangers around. There was no need to destroy yet another version of the Uchiha family.

“Ooh.” Boruto nodded slowly, seemingly catching the hint. “Right.”

Before she could start to worry about any further slips of her companion’s tongue, two bowls of steaming hot stew were placed in front of her and Boruto. His doppelganger plopped back down onto the seat across from them.

“So what is the plan from here on out? What do we need to do to get you guys back into your world?” he asked, two expectant blue eyes going back and forth between their faces in search of an answer.

There was the little hollow feeling settling in her stomach again at the sight of those two functioning bright eyes, and she opted to stare at her stew instead.

“Well, you guys can’t really do anything,” Boruto started next to her with a shrug she could see out of the corner of her eyes. “We just need to recharge our chakra reserves, and then I can teleport us back. A few hours of sleep should be enough, so we’ll just head out early tomorrow morning.”

The feet of the fourth chair scraped over the tiles as her own doppelganger sat down in the last remaining spot across from her. “Can we do anything to help?” she asked. “Do you need any supplies or provisions?”

She heard Boruto blowing on the first spoonful of stew, so she decided to take that answer instead. Looking at herself was weird, but not as guilt-laden as looking at Boruto’s alter ego. “We are all good,” she offered with a smile, not deeming it any useful to tell her civilian self that they were both running low on shuriken and smoke bombs. “You’re already doing enough by letting us crash here for a night. We’re sorry for all the trouble we’ve caused.”

“It’s no trouble!” the other Boruto was quick to reply. “It’s been a nerve-racking surprise for sure, but pulling out the couch and reheating some stew is really not a big deal. I’m sure you would’ve done the same for us,” he finished with a smile that caused an uproar of the leaden butterflies in her stomach, but that smile waivered already a second later. “Is something wrong with the food?”

She followed his line of sight to her Boruto staring at the bowl in front of him. The empty spoon hovered over the soup, and the expression on Boruto’s face hung somewhere between shock and sadness.

She knew what he was going to say before he even opened his mouth. Her hand reached out for his free one beneath the table and gave it a firm squeeze.

“It tastes just like Mom’s,” he whispered.

Almost an hour later, Sarada quietly pulled the living room door closed behind her, the heap of her own grimy clothes compressed into a tiny ball against her chest. The smell of fresh moringa soap was enveloping her now, much in contrast to the stench of singed cotton and sweat wafting up from the ball of fabric in her hands, and even if she told herself that disgusting smells were definitely their smallest problem currently, she was definitely relieved that they had stumbled into this dimension, and not somewhere else where they had to camp out in their worn clothes once more.

Amongst all the downhill developments in her life currently, she had to appreciate the positives, no matter how small and insignificant.

Boruto looked up from the stack of pictures she’d caught him staring at every quiet minute in the last hour, dressed in his doppelganger’s clothes for the night just like her. He offered her one of those easygoing smiles that made her appreciate this little lucky encounter a little more even. “Ready for bed?”

She nodded, folded her clothes into a neat little stack next to Boruto’s haphazard pile on the floor, and tapped the light switch.

The room went dark for a short moment until her eyes had adjusted to the sparse light of the street lamps falling through the window. The sleep sofa groaned a bit as Boruto’s silhouette shifted his feet onto the mattress.

It was a small space for two people, but they had slept in places much more cramped than this. Most of that had admittedly happened during their early genin days, but still.

Yet, her mind didn’t think of anything helpful, focusing instead on how their other-dimensional selves were probably settling into each other’s arms in that king-size bed just a wall away. And while she normally wouldn’t have any concerns about sleeping next to her best friend of over twenty years, she was now lying on her back and staring at the ceiling, stiff like a stick figure, physically drained but too restless in her mind to sleep.

“Are you OK?”

He was whispering, as if turning off the lights had taken away their permission to talk at normal volumes.

She swallowed. “Yeah. It was just… a lot today.”

A silent chuckle blew through his nose. “Yeah. I agree with that.”

And then they were both lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling.

At least that was what she thought he did. The view out of the corner of her eyes didn’t give anything more away.

There were moments in which she thought a byakugan would come in handy more than a sharingan. This was one of them.

Her fingers started fiddling beneath the blanket. “I saw a picture of you in a tuxedo,” she eventually said, equally toneless because she didn’t really know where she was actually going with that.

Maybe she had even hoped he wouldn’t hear it, but of course that was a stupid thing to think.

His amusement still shined through despite the lack of volume. “Did I look cute?”

Well, what had she expected? Her annoyance was more directed at herself than him. “Tsk.” She rolled her eyes for no one to see, not willing to admit that the corner of her mouth had twitched into a smile for the fraction of a second.

Stupid Boruto. Stupid emotions. Stupid alternate dimension showing them what could have been if they had not been… themselves.

And there it was again, that lump in her throat. “Their lives are so different,” she merely whispered around it.

He sighed. “I know.” She heard the pillow rustle under the movements of his head. Her heartbeat took it up a notch as she figured he had probably turned his head to look at her. “I can get myself a tux if you want.”

She let out a dry giggle for the sake of keeping the flutter in her chest in check. “For what occasion would you possibly need one?” she asked, not even trying to make it sound like an actual question.

There were no occasions for fancy dresses in their current lives. And even if there were… he probably would not be invited anyway. Neither of them, actually. They knew that all too well by now.

But he just shrugged. “I’ll find one.” His pillowcase rustled again under a motion that she determined as looking back up towards the ceiling, but just when she thought herself safe, he added even quieter: “Maybe a date. With you.”

A sharp breath rushed into her lungs. “Boruto...”

There was nothing she could follow it up with.

Now her heart was beating so loudly in her ears that he had to hear it. She was sure of it.

What did one even say when their closest friend came up with such a proposal?

Where could they even go for a date?! Surely not Konoha or the lands around it.

It wasn’t as if they had never danced around the topic before. There had been conversations with subtext between the lines, but it was the first time it came in such blunt words.

To her surprise though, he actually didn’t say anything further about the idea of a date.

Instead, he said something that made her eyes nearly bulge out of her skull and her perspiratory glands charge the hose lines.

“He’s going to ask her to marry him, y’know? He told me.”

The heat of unjustified panic rolled up her throat, but of course he sensed it before she even got herself to speak.

Not that she would have had anything to say to that anyway.

He snickered a quiet laugh. “Hold your horses. I’m not asking you to marry me yet,” he quickly appeased, and she was too busy regaining control of her cardiovascular system to lose it a second time over that tiny word at the ending of his sentence. “I’m just saying... Maybe we could give us a try? Y’know, as in you and me, together?”

Not that she had ever thought there would come a point in time she would feel prepared for this kind of conversation, but now that it was here it became blatantly obvious that she was even less prepared than anticipated.

Her skin was thrumming in rhythm with her pulse, all the while she was staring at the ceiling as if it was the only thing keeping her grounded.

“What if it changes things?” she eventually allowed herself to ask quietly. Her voice made an embarrassing squeak at the end of that sentence.

“What if it changes things for the better?” he returned the question without missing a beat, undoubtedly aware of what she had been wanting to say before she had even opened her mouth.

The mattress dipped as he turned, and she eventually gave in and looked at him.

She’d seen that face thousands of times, and yet her heart descended into another mild panic as their eyes met. There was no use in hoping that it would stop happening one day – she’d prayed for that more than enough, and yet the conflict of emotions was just raging stronger and stronger from year to year.

There was a shiver in her voice when she finally found the courage to speak again. “We don’t even know whether or not we’re going to make it home tomorrow, Boruto, let alone live to see the sun set,” she said with the futile attempt of a laugh at the end. Somehow that just made it sound even more depressing though.

“Isn’t that even more reason to go for it?” There was the hint of a smile playing around his mouth. “I know I said I’m OK with dying, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have dreams for living.”

Why did her usually so sharp tongue always leave her in situations like these? She had argued with Kages and Daimyos and gangster bosses and aliens about stakes that reached far beyond her own mortality, and still she found herself tongue-tied in a banal conversation about love.

The tips of his fingers gently poked the spot right above her eyes with a soft smile on his lips, mirroring the gesture she had given him so often throughout the years. “Don’t overthink it. Go to sleep.”

A frustrated huff left her nose. “How can you just expect me to sleep after all this,” she muttered with contempt more for herself than him as she pulled the blanket up to her chin and robbed across the mattress. Warmth enveloped her as she nuzzled her face into the crook of his neck, the faint stubble on his chin that she'd grown so used to over the past years tickling her forehead, his arm wrapping around her waist as the comforting safeguard that made her feel home no matter where she was.

It was a weird mix of known and unknown smells that filled her nose, of strange detergent and new soap, but the hug felt the same nonetheless. And so she closed her eyes and mumbled one last thing into the night:

“So annoying, my stupid idiot.”

Chapter Text

“So... this is it then, I guess?”

Boruto watched his other self scratch the back of his head, eyes still heavy with sleep and hair sticking out in all directions. He had known that his unruly hair sometimes made for quite expressive bedheads, but he had not been aware that it could get this bad.

On the other hand though, whenever it was that bad, he was probably also just too tired to care. Like his alter ego right now.

He tightened his grip on the jute bag slung over his shoulder, stuffed with sandwiches and other provisions that the Sarada of this dimension had not let herself be talked out of to prepare for them. Stubbornness seemed to be a trait that all four of them were not stingy with. “I guess this is it indeed,” he answered his doppelganger’s question, no doubt a tiny bit wistfully.

Not that he didn’t want to return to their own dimension – he did. Badly. There were so many things that still needed to be taken care of, so many loved ones he needed to right things with, and time wasn’t on their side.

But... this accidental visit, as badly timed as it might have been from their perspective, had definitely come with a few perks.

First and foremost food and shelter and a clean bath, of course. But far more important than the advantages of those materialistic things was the knowledge he’d gained – about himself, about his family, and about Sarada.

An absentminded hand ran over the pocket of his cargo pants once more, the rims of photo carton clearly traceable through the fabric. He’d done that an uncountable amount of times in the last ten minutes, somehow unreasonably worried the gifted pictures might miraculously vanish if he didn’t verify their presence every few seconds.

On most days, he was fairly successful at compartmentalizing the situation around the whereabouts of his parents, knowing that wallowing in grief and yearning would not bring him any closer to saving them and everyone else. But during moments like last night, confronted with all the evidence of what their life could have looked like in a happy world, he had not been able to resist. He had let himself be swept up in the river of emotions and allowed his mind to wander down a path of joyful memories that weren’t and would never be his.

And whereas usually the thought of seeing his parents again conjured up a mix of excitement and fear, he was for once able to banish the paralyzing anxiety into the back of his head over the joy those photographs brought.

He knew that his mother would be overjoyed over a picture of her late cousin with her children. He knew that his father would cherish a photograph of his parents with his kids.

And he hoped that Kawaki would also see the good in a picture of all of them together, as one big family.

If he was even willing to listen.

“Will you guys be OK?” The other Sarada wrung her hands, seemingly more than a little bit worried about letting them go back into a world that had to look overly violent to her.

It nearly made him smile, how worrying too much also seemed a common trait between her and the Sarada from his dimension. A future Hokage’s conscientiousness apparently also didn’t end at interdimensional boundaries.

“We will be,” he reassured once more, giving his best smile to make it seem believable. Then he turned to his companion. “Ready?”

Her posture and her outfit looked the part, but her face still looked a bit hesitant. With her cheek sucked between her teeth the Sarada he’d known for all of his life ruminated about whatever thought hovered behind her forehead, and he wondered whether there had been an exact point in his life at which his mind had decided the woman standing next to him was going to be more than his best friend to him.

He had tried to determine that a thousand times and yet kept arriving at the same answer: No.

It had been a sneakily gradual process. Somehow he had always known and never known at the same time, until it had become so goddamn clear that the only person worth denying it to had been Sarada herself because she was even more stubborn than him in that regard. Nonetheless, talking about the mess of his feelings so freely last night had been an unexpected relief. It had not really told him anything new about him and his Sarada, and yet everything he had learned about their alternate selves had changed things – or helped him dare to try to change things.

Helped him dare to cut the denial out once and for all, despite the nearly nauseating whirlwind of butterflies in his gut.

It nearly resurged as his thoughts strayed back to the conversation they had held last night, but by now it turned out to be more of a buzzing warmth than a riot of winged insects. It almost made him smile like a foolish idiot in love, but for this brief moment before the serious side of life needed him, he figured he was allowed that bit of softness.

Before he could ask the woman responsible for both his sanity and the lack of it what was on her mind, she spoke up herself. “One thing,” she quickly muttered into his direction.

Then Sarada took a step towards their hosts, spread her arms out, and enveloped her alternate-dimension self into one of those firm hugs that ran in the Uchiha family. “Thank you,” he heard her say, “for everything.”

It was definitely an unusual picture, seeing Sarada hug someone that could as well be her shadow clone clad in slightly more casual clothes, but it was also a happy one. There was surely a smile crawling into his face at the sight of it, and even more so when his alter ego also opened his arms towards him.

“Bring it in then,” the other man said with a grin, and Boruto did.

He first hugged his own alternate self goodbye and then Sarada’s double. “Thanks for helping her get patched up,” he said as he let go of her again.

The telltale reddish hue of embarrassment around compliments that crept up her neck made her look even more like the Sarada he knew. “I just handed her stuff,” she replied with a nervous chuckle.

“Still.” Sometimes, when she was especially stubborn, Sarada refused to accept his help in taking care of her wounds, but he always worried more when she did so alone. Not because he didn’t think she could do it, no, that wasn’t it. More because he knew she would downplay her own injuries, sometimes to a dangerous extent. But to have basically herself watching her, not lest a version who probably had a very different understanding of severity when it came to wounds, had been enough to put him at ease for once.

His thanks given towards her other-dimensional self had therefore been completely honest.

“I wish you guys all the best.” He gave her shoulder one last squeeze and stepped back next to his Sarada. “Ready?” he asked once again, and this time she nodded.

The widening gazes of their other selves rested on him as he summoned his chakra with a few simple hand signs, the familiar force thrumming through his veins like the very blood that flowed within them. He felt the karma pattern reach out, its touch pulling at his skin like duct tape, down his side and up his neck until it laid over his right eye.

Somebody gasped as he opened it.

The strange force that wasn’t his but had lived within him for so long started simmering beneath his skin, the deceptive hymn of praise for strength luring him to give in to a power that would eradicate him if he did. But he had listened to that song for years now. It was almost easy to ignore it and bend the force to his will instead, sending his consciousness out to search for resonances far beyond the earthly planes until he found the right one.

Like a glimmer in the dark it appeared in front of him for no one else to see, a pull like a magnet telling him where he had to go, and so he focused his mind on connecting the two points in space and time. He pulled on the mental threads between the two dimensions, drawing them closer and closer to each other until they touched and the portal opened.

The black vortex stretched through the kitchen, growing in height and width until it was large enough to swallow both Sarada and him whole. More out of reflex he reached for her hand, making sure that this time he wouldn’t have to look for her after they had crossed over.

“Thanks again for everything. Stay safe!” he shouted over the hum of chakra in the room, and then Sarada and him stepped through the portal.

Dirt crunched under his shoes as he stepped out on the other side, the stench of burnt soil and greenery hitting him straight in the face like a warning before the painting of destruction appeared in front of their eyes a second later. Dawn lit up the sky above their heads, even though its beautiful blue was barely visible through the thick gray smoke stretching over the planes around them.

His chest tightened. As did Sarada’s grasp on his hand.

It was even worse than they had anticipated.

The forest that had been there when they had left was not existent anymore. The only evidence that it ever had been was a few roots sticking out of the ploughed-up earth around them. And in the middle of it all, in the center of destruction, stood a familiar figure.

Boruto felt his face harden and Sarada reach for her weaponry. 

“I felt you returning,” Kawaki said, grey eyes cold like the morning itself. “Didn’t think you’d run and hide in the first place though.”

Boruto opted to ignore the verbal jab. “How come you’re alone this time?” he asked instead, trying to keep his stance relaxed but his hand close to the hilt of his katana.

He didn’t want to fight. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have to.

They’d had this conversation a bunch of times before, and by now Boruto almost dared to say he knew how it would go. These encounters rarely took a different turn, like a dirt road that had the wagons’ furrows deeply ingrained from years of use leading its travelers through all the same potholes.

But on a rare occasion, the wagon’s wheel would get caught on an odd stone and the whole vehicle would veer off the known track.

The first sign that something was off was the change of expression on Kawaki’s face. The mask of determination flipped to surprise when his eyes moved to something behind Boruto, and then anger.

“Who’s that?” he asked, unease biting through his voice. “What game are you trying to play?!”

Completely neglecting to keep an eye on his potential opponent, Boruto spun around to see what the hell would throw Kawaki that much off his game – only to be met with his very own face.

Almost his very own face. A little less scarred. A bit more frightened.

And his heart plummeted a few stories down.

His twin from the other dimension met his his stare with something close to a panic in his eyes. “Uhm… Where the fuck are we?!” he asked.