Day 1
The wheels of the chair squeak and Sumire starts, twisting in her seat just in time to see Amado slipping on his jacket and pulling a fresh pack of cigarettes out of its pocket.
“Wh–Where are you going?” she asks, eyes darting between the old scientist and examination table.
“I’m done for the night,” he says, peeling the cellophane wrapping off the pack. “And you should be done, too, Kakei.”
“Yes, but…” She glances at the clock: 12:10am.
“My mind’s not sharp enough to keep working,” he tells her, pulling out a cigarette and sticking it between his crinkly lips. “So, I can’t imagine that yours is functioning at all. Finish what you’re doing in the morning.”
It’s not the in-progress spreadsheet swallowing up her computer screen that’s bothering her, though.
“But what about…?”
She looks over shoulder at the boy in a sleeveless shirt lying still as a corpse on the exam table.
The flame of Amado’s lighter reflects off his glasses. He exhales a stream of smoke before speaking. “Kawaki? The updates to his limiters are still being installed. It’ll take several hours until his internal operating system updates. In the meantime, he’s not going anywhere. Throw a blanket over him if it bothers you, and make sure to lock the door panel on your way out.”
Then he’s gone, the automatic doors sliding shut behind him.
Sumire turns back to her computer, her mouse pointer drifting aimlessly over the cells laden with numbers.
What had she been doing?
With an irritated sigh, she saves her work and locks her station, hoping that a short break will reset her brain.
Kawaki is in the same position he’s been in for hours, the same mortuary pose. Logically, she knows that he’s still alive—Amado’s coding ensures that his essential biological functions remain active even when his consciousness is offline—but she can’t help but think about the long night she and her father spent sitting with her mother’s body before her funeral the following morning.
Still arms at his sides. Eyes closed. Features slack.
Almost as though she’s afraid to wake him, Sumire tiptoes up to his side, staring down.
It’d been a little over a year since Eida swapped Boruto and Kawaki’s places in the world, time measured by Kawaki’s hair growing far beyond his browline, clumpy strands twisting at the nape of his neck. Remembering the tender way her mother used to handle her hair, gentle hands parting and separating and combing, Sumire reaches down to sweep the long bangs from his eyes, pulling away the moment her fingertips make contact with the greasy strands.
Unlike Sarada who had made it her mission to loudly and proudly defend Boruto at every chance, putting herself at odds with those under the effect of Omnipotence, Sumire had remained relatively silent, silent enough that she doesn’t know if Kawaki is aware that she is immune as well. But every time she sees him, she can’t help but think about Boruto, wondering what he’s doing, if he’s well, and hoping that wherever he is, he’s at least taking better care of himself than Kawaki has been.
His unwashed hair is only part of the problem. Eida had bought him new clothes to accommodate the three inches he’d put on since Boruto fled Konoha with a hoard of former friends at his back, but no matter how many shirts and pairs of pants she bought him, Kawaki wore the same ones over and over until the neckline tore out, the hems of his pants frayed, as assortment of stains spotting the fabric.
The outfit he’d been sporting for the past few months is a green sleeveless tank and black pants kept from slipping off his hips by a too-long belt. Even if those items had been laundered every so often, the long blue jacket he’d been wearing had seemingly escaped the washing machine thus far. It’s balled up on a chair where he left it before Amado triggered his shutdown code, the scent of wet dog and teenage boy wafting off it in waves, a smell that Amado’s stale cigarette smoke couldn’t even hide. Sumire picks it up to shake out the wrinkles, then stops.
Surely, it wouldn’t bother him if…
Sumire slams the front of the washing machine shut, a gush of water sloshing against the glass as it fills. The konbini where she gets most of her suppers is still across the street from the laundromat, its bright sign lighting up the night. There’s lots of evenings when she stays in Amado’s lab until midnight, knowing that that’s when the previous day’s onigiri are marked down by 50%. Armed with her buy-five-get-one-free coffee punch card, Sumire strolls in to survey the selection of discount rice balls.
Tuna mayo. Umboshi. Salted salmon. Shrimp salad.
She leaves the mayo-based ones behind for someone braver than her. Her coffee punch card is valid for every size of cup. As always, she opts for the biggest, knowing she can reserve half of it in the lab’s fridge for the following morning. She’s waiting to check out while the taciturn clerk finishes restocking the ramen cups when the clear bins of travel-sized toiletries catch her eye. Almost automatically, her eyes dart between the volume of the bottles and the price labeled on the shelf. What a waste: one-eighth of shampoo for half the price of a full-sized bottle.
The scanner dings and she jumps, not having noticed the clerk returning to the counter to ring up her purchases: two rice balls, a bucket-sized cup of coffee topped-off with a generous pour of half-and-half and three packets of sugar.
“Nothing else you need?” says the clerk who usually says nothing at all.
Sumire blinks at him, eyes wide. “Hmmm?”
He jerks his chin at the shampoo she’d been eyeing. “You were looking.”
“Oh!” She toys with the edges of her coin purse nervously. “I was just wondering who’d bother to buy them.”
He shrugs, placing the onigiri into a plastic bag. “Lots of shinobi come through here when they’re leaving for missions or on their way back home.”
It’s true. Sumire always decanted her own toiletries back in her active-duty days, but she could imagine a person who didn’t have the same dedication to thrift that she does opting for the easier option. “I guess,” she replies, counting out her change to pay him.
“Y’know,” he says as she deposits her payment into his waiting hand. “There’s nothing like being clean to make you feel human again. It’s hard to have hope when your scalp is itchy and you haven’t had a good shower in days.”
Her fingers falter on her last coin, keeping it pinched between her fingers.
“Miss?” he asks, waiting to complete the transaction.
Sumire holds up a finger. “Just one moment, please!”
She tests the basin of warm water on the inside of her wrist—not too hot—before placing it on the cart she’d wheeled over next to the examination table.
Long ago, Sumire told herself she was done doing things that felt wrong, that following her heart was the most important thing of all. But staring down at Kawaki, unconscious beneath her, she can’t decide if she’s about to do something kind or horrifically wrong.
She certainly didn’t have his permission to do it.
But if she hoped someone out there was looking out for Boruto, maybe she needed to make sure someone in Konoha was looking out for Kawaki. And over the past year, he’d made darn sure that there were few people willing to do it.
It’s hard to know how she feels about him, she thinks while placing a rolled-up towel beneath his neck and easing the basin beneath his head.
He’d caused something terrible through Omnipotence, a spell that ensnared the entire world—and she’d once tried to destroy the entire village and everyone in it.
He’d pushed away everyone who loved Boruto, family and friend alive—and she’d once pretended to be someone she wasn’t, winning her classmate’s approval by being meek and demure while planning their deaths.
He planned to kill Boruto before ending his own life—and she’d once offered up the very last of her chakra to Nue in hopes that it could fulfill his father’s wish and destroy Konoha, even at the cost of her life.
Given all that, perhaps the difference between them is that she was saved while he still has yet to be.
She scoops warm water onto his hair, letting it saturated his unkempt locks. The heat makes the smell of grease and dander all the stronger. Shampoo in hand, she works her way around his hairline, fingers rubbing his scalp in circular motions, the crown of his head, the nape of his neck, behind his ears.
Murky water drips out, so much that she decides to wash it a second time.
She remembers sitting in her family’s main room in a wooden tub before the fire, knees to her chest and her eyes tightly closed as her mother lathered her long hair from root to tip. At some point in his life, someone had to have done that for Kawaki, but she has no idea who that might have been—and perhaps he doesn’t either.
The conditioner comes next, a purchase she hesitated before making, but if she was going to do this, she decided it should be done right. She works it into her hair, taking the time to pick out every knot and snare until her fingers glide right through it.
He has nice hair; it’s a shame he doesn’t know it.
When she’s done rinsing—a third rinse—she wraps his head in a towel, scrunching out as much moisture as possible.
His eyes are still closed, face blank. He looks exactly the same as before, only damper.
After the final battery of tests have been run the next day, Amado wakes him up. Sumire keeps her eyes glued to her computer screen, afraid he’ll look her way if she turns around.
But he doesn’t say anything, not about his hair and not about the freshly washed and folded jacket she left for him to find.
It’s never mentioned. Not that time. Not the next time she does it. Or any time after that, either.