Day 3

I have had a terrible headache all day, making progress on continuing yesterday's drabble drag. Never fear, though. I have something else delightful to share, an unfinished October drabble from the BSA Drabble drabble days that I was thinking of dusting off as part of this challenge. Enjoy part one!

Tags: BoruSara, Magic AU, Mage the Ascension AU, Demonology, Magic School, I Miss Team 7 (crying emoji), Incels, Investigations

Rating: T

“Fox Uzumaki Naruto Kurama, bani Flambeau, Scion of The Flying God of Thunder, Inheritor of the Prime Vortex, Sage of the Mount Myoboku Toads, Defender of the Chantry Hidden in the Leaves, Master of Wind—”

At the back of a grand hall lined plush velvet curtains, beneath the arching ceiling of dark wooden beams, a young mage stifles a yawn with his fist only to receive a sharp elbow to his ribs for his display of boredom. Thankfully, none of the many elders filling the room in front of them react to his pained oof.

Amid her lightning fast assault, Sarada’s eyes never leave the front of the room where Master Nara is holding a trailing scroll, reading out the full Shadow Name of the Chantry’s leader. Beside him stands Deacon Uzumaki, garbed in full dress regalia over his business attire. The arch mage, wearing a forced diplomatic smile, faces the Madoka delegation who’d arrived to review the Chantry’s artifact handling procedures after some irregularities had appeared in the official Order of Hermes records.

Rubbing his side, Boruto glares at Sarada. Her long black hair is pulled up in a no-nonsense bun, round gold glasses perched on her nose. Like him, she’s dressed in semi-formal attire: a white cashmere cardigan over her dusty rose halter-top dress, just a few shades away from matching the tie he’s wearing. Not that they had planned their outfits together or anything like that. Despite dressing like office employees, both of them look like the teenagers they are, no longer children but still a few years away from official adulthood.

His glare softens to one of interest as his gaze slips lower, her nylon-clad legs appearing longer than usual thanks to the help from the two-inch high brown heels she’s wearing.

Behind the lenses of her glasses, her dark eyes look large due to the skillful application of cosmetics. They flick slightly in his direction, her lipstick-pinkened mouth barely moving as she hisses at him through her teeth. “You were being disrespectful.”

 He scowls back at her. “I’m tired.”

On Boruto’s other side, Mitsuki tries not to smile, his suppressed chuckle coming out as an amused exhale. “You’ve both been having late nights recently.”

Sarada cranes her neck past him to glare at their other covenmate, looking relaxed in a tan suit and teal tie, eyes also facing the front of the room. “Right! That’s how I know he’s being an—”

In front of them, Master Inuzuka’s massive white dog familiar cocks a scruffy ear, listening in on their conversation. Sarada eyes widen, mortified that one of the chantry’s elders noticed her outburst. She squeezes her lips shut, turning to the front of the room once more in time to see Master Nara switch scrolls, preparing to introduce Master Kobu, the bureaucratic mage leading the audit.

As the formalities drone on, Sarada swallows a yawn of her own. Mortal sleeper servants employed by the chantry begin to wheel in carts of hors d’oeuvres, transferring them onto the tables draped with crisp white linens behind them: crab-stuffed mushrooms, cheese puffs, fried olives, caviar-topped blinis. But it’s the smell of the still-warm squares of herbed focaccia that causes her mouth to water.

She chances a glance over her shoulder at the delectable spread, immediately stiffening when she notices a dark gaze upon them.

“What?” Boruto murmurs, their previous disagreement forgotten when he senses the shift in her posture.

“Don’t look behind us,” she whispers back, standing so straight a grimoire could remain balanced atop her head.

The blond idiot looks behind them, Mitsuki immediately following suit. Sarada’s father, and Boruto’s Pater, the elder mage overseeing his magical development, quirks a beckoning finger in his direction.

Boruto swallows hard. Never a warm man to begin with, his association with the arch mage, perhaps the most powerful member of the Order aside from his own father, had cooled significantly in recent months, his apprenticeship feeling more like a trial than an education.

“I think he wants to talk to me,” Boruto whispers.

Mitsuki shakes his head. “He wants to talk to all of us,” he says, then heads toward the arch mage, leaving Sarada and Boruto no choice but to trail after him.

Master Uchiha is dressed similarly to Naruto except his regalia is as black as his disheveled raven hair. He looks down his long nose at them, single eye sweeping over the three young mages like a cold chill in a haunted room. Then he turns, walking straight to the back of the hall to a line where two of the overlapping curtains meet and disappearing as though he’d walked through an open door no one else could see.

The covenmates share an uneasy glance and follow, feeling the tickle of velvet against their face as they push through the curtains to a secret anteroom. There are many such hidden chambers within the chantry house lost to all except those who know where to look. Sasuke is waiting for them on the other side, a glowing ball of white light hovering in his extended hand, illuminating the entire room but somehow not bright enough to burn their eyes.

“Is the ceremony boring you?”

Sarada accompanies a shake of her head with a nervous laugh before Boruto can speak. “No, Papa.”

Her covenmates nod in agreement, wanting to escape any admonishment he has planned.

Sasuke raises a skeptical eyebrow at the trio. “Funny, because I’m bored. There’s a dozen things I should be doing other than sitting through this ridiculous farce over the Chains of Asmodeus, but I’m stuck here due to my position in the chantry. You three don’t have to be.”

Sarada frowns. “But Master Hatake said—”

Her father cuts her off with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I know Kakashi said your coven had to be in attendance due to the positions of your families within the Order, but you were the ones gullible enough to follow his directive.”

Boruto’s once-loud mouth should have been tempered after many months of his Pater’s dark mood, but he still blurts out, “Do you mean that we don’t have to be here?”

Sasuke turns to his student, voice going from stern to downright annoyed. “You should be in attendance, but you should be astute enough to get out of attending as well. How many times have I told you you’ll never survive in the Order if you don’t learn to read the hidden meanings within hidden meanings.”

“Oh.” Ashamed to have once again disappointed the man he most admires in the world, Boruto’s blue gaze falls to his shined dress shoes, his lips pressed together to keep any more embarrassing statements from slipping out.

Sasuke continues on, paying no mind to his student’s mortification.

“As you have proven yourselves to be incompetent children yet again, I must come to your aid, seeing that you’d have no choice but to obey a direct order from one of your betters. So, what shall I have you do?” He toys with the orb of light above his hand, thinking. “My snakes need to be fed, of course, which would require you to obtain three large stags for their dinner. Code probably needs some assistance reorganizing the artifacts room after the Madoka fools ransack it. Oh, yes, and my lovely wife has recently obtained a nosferatu corpus she’s planning to catalog, if you don’t mind the smell.”

Mitsuki opens his mouth, eager to volunteer to spend the afternoon helping his Mater dissect a rotting vampire, when Sarada speaks up, hoping to save both herself and Boruto from losing their lunches—not that catching deer or being stuck in the Chantry’s basement with Code would be much better. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you’d like us to do?”

“Tch, well.” He pauses, unsure if he really wants to continue. “There is this one small issue that should be dealt with in the city.”

Boruto’s head jerks up, unable to keep the hopeful gleam out of his blue eyes. “The city?”

Within the chantry, the three covenmates were apprentices within the Order of Hermes, each of them descended from venerated bloodlines. Since they learned their first words, the youths had been expected to behave as occult scholars, learning as much as they could to awaken and hone their magical abilities. All three had done just that, becoming mages within the Order as they slowly grew in power. But on the few occasions when they had been allowed outside the chantry house, they had the rare opportunity to act like normal teenagers to blend in with the sleepers’ perception of reality.

Sasuke frowns at his student’s enthusiasm. “I warn you, there are consequences to this task. But it’s an urgent matter, one that probably shouldn’t wait until I’m available to handle it.”

Boruto straightens, seeing not only a chance to get out from beneath the noses of their elders, but to prove himself to his Pater. “Whatever it is, Master Uchiha, you can count on us to handle it.”

“We get to go to the city,” Boruto chants in a sing-song voice as they climb the winding spiral staircase leading up to the apprentice’s quarters.

Behind him, Sarada rolls her eyes. “Only you would be excited to go investigate a murder.”

“Three murders,” Mitsuki says, bringing up the rear. “And I’m eager as well. It’s not every day, I get to read an official coroner’s report.”

Sarada pulls off her cardigan, folding it over her arm as they continue up the steps, passing the fifth floor on their way to the sixth. Maybe she, too, is a bit excited to have such an important task from her father, a man who usually ignored her in favor of his duties to the chantry and Order, but she isn’t about to admit it. He’d said the killings were a sensitive matter, best dealt with by mages before the police force started putting ideas together and causing a panic, but beyond the victim’s names, addresses, and the coroner’s reports, he’d given them no other details.

Boruto turns around, walking backward up the stairs. “Come on, you know this is going to be fun. We never get to—oof.” Boruto stumbles forward as a red-haired body hurtles down the stairs, colliding with him.

“Yo, watch where you’re going,” he shouts, grabbing on the banister to keep his balance rather than falling into Sarada.

“Where I’m going? It’s you nepo babies who should mind your manners.”

“What did you just say?” Boruto wheels around, coming nose-to-nose with Code, an apprentice a few years older than the three of them. He’d been trying, and failing, to awaken his magic for several years now and had recently been added as an assistant to the artifact staff under the assumption his talents would never fully manifest.

“Oh, is the cold, hard truth too harsh for the sensitive little ears of the Deacon’s son?” he asks, a sneer on his otherwise pretty face.

Sarada puts a steadying hand on Boruto’s shoulder. “Knock it off, Code.”

Code’s green eyes ooze down her body like a bucket of slime, making sure to coat every inch of her from the top of her head to the tips of her shoes. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the ceremony?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but we were.”

He cocks a thin eyebrow at her response. “Then why are you dressed like a harlot with a face full of clown makeup?”

“You sonofabitch,” Boruto growls, slipping out of Sarada’s grasp to lunge up the stairs. Code’s eyes widen, realizing he might have gone too far for once, right before Mitsuki manages to grab the collar of Boruto’s suit coat, pulling him back.

“If we get caught fighting, we won’t be allowed outside the chantry house for at least three months,” Mitsuki says, holding him in place.

The sneer returns to Code’s face as he looks down at them. “That’s right. You better listen to your little boyfriend there. You don’t want Daddy finding out that you’ve been bad, do you?

Boruto growls as Code passes them on the stairs, giving the angry blond mage a wide berth. “One day, I’m going to—”

Sarada lays a hand on Boruto’s chest, pushing him back toward Mitsuki. “He’s not worth it, okay?”

Boruto’s eyes go from Code’s back to Sarada’s face, the fight draining out of him. “Okay,” he says, not fully committed to the idea of letting it go but willing to do it for her.

Once Code is out of sight, Sarada releases him. The three covenmates proceed up the stairs to their suite, one large main room with a couch, chairs, study table, and shelves of books and scrolls, then the doors to their three bedrooms and the shared bathroom.

The blood is still throbbing in Sarada’s temples from their confrontation with Code as she closes the door behind her, but she takes a deep breath, calming herself down to focus on the matter at hand—their mission from Sasuke.