Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

"You know," Sarada said dryly, her dark eyes both amused and annoyed, "Your parents and my mum are all perfectly aware that you're hiding out here to sulk again."

Boruto, who had indeed gone there to cool off – he did not sulk, it was too childish – after another argument with his father, cast his best friend and honorary cousin a baleful glance. "What, planning to kick me off?"

"Nah," she shrugged, and joined him in lying along the slanted roof of her house. "You'll just dodge, or land on your feet anyway, so the action would be quite pointless in achieving the goal of planting you in the ground."

Boruto snorted. "Are you saying you'd kick me if I wasn't ninja-trained?"

"I don't know if an Academy student really counts as being ninja-trained, but you were an ordinary civilian and I kicked you there'd be an actual risk of causing injury. As aggravating as you can be sometimes –" He raised his eyebrows at her. " – most times, I can't have such a thing upon my conscience."

Boruto rolled his eyes. "You always think too much. Some people kick for the satisfaction of doing it, you know… Like how your mum whacks my old man on the head when he's being ridiculous, even though it does no real damage. I would certainly like to kick his ass."

"Oh, I'm sure she could if she wanted to, but you definitely couldn't," Sarada retorted without any real malice. "Although I still don't get why she chose to be a medic when she can easily punch through mountains."

Boruto winced slightly. Aunt Sakura's super strength widely respected, just as her skill as a healer was widely admired.

"But anyway," Sarada went on, "She's probably just trying to set a good example by holding back."

"A good example? For who?"

"Whom," she automatically corrected, and Boruto stuck his tongue out at her. She swatted at him on principle, and he parried it lazily. With their parents such good friends, they'd naturally grown up as playmates and had been playfighting long before they even entered the Ninja Academy. "For me, genius."

"Don't call me that," was the sharp response, and his blue eyes darkened. "Not even as a joke."

She flashed a small, apologetic smile at him for having touched on a sensitive topic, to which he responded with a wry half-grin.

"Anyway," Boruto said briskly. "What did my old man do to set off your mum again?"

"Oh, I wasn't supposed to tell you," she said with a lofty air, glad to move on to more cheerful topics, "But I think I will anyway. He had some ridiculous idea for your birthday celebration."

"But it's months before my birthday," he said, affecting an air of incredulous exasperation to hide that he was secretly pleased. Then he paused, and eyed his friend warily. "…How ridiculous?"

Her grin was positively evil. "I think he wanted to take a page out of your book, and paint birthday wishes across the Hokage monument."

"Y-you're kidding." He stared at her in abject horror, and she cackled.

"Not in the least," she assured him, patting his shoulder with much schadenfreude. "And do you want to know what else I heard?"

"Why are you always conveniently hearing things?" he groaned at the evening sky, wondering if she was going to embarrass him again.

Sarada raised her head and pushed up her red-framed glasses to give him a haughty stare. "Because unlike some people, I can make myself inconspicuous when I want to. You learn so much more this way than from endlessly pestering the grown-ups to tell you stuff."

Boruto crossed his arms. "It's hardly my fault I look just like the most famous ninja on the planet," he groused.

"Yes, the resemblance is quite strong," she agreed, smiling. "Your eyes are a shade lighter than his, though."

"Back to what I was saying," she went on hurriedly as he blinked at her, "Apparently the Hokage wasn't taking a leaf out of your book, but his own. I heard my mum reminiscing – I swear that's all everyone's parents ever do nowadays – that he used to graffiti the monument of his predecessors loads of times when he was in the Academy, and only one of the teachers could ever catch him afterwards."

"Seriously?!" Boruto sprang up and stared at his friend with wide eyes. "But I – he – that's…" He stopped, sat down, and stared at his hands. "Why has my mum never mentioned anything like that? She always makes it sound like my old man could never do any wrong, even when he was a kid…"

Sarada winced. So much for cheering him up, she thought wryly.

"Well… I mean…" she began delicately. "Since your dad and my parents used to be part of the same three-man cell, they'd know a lot more about the stuff they did when they were kids, I guess?"

He seemed unconvinced, and she attempted a distraction. "Why is it called a three-man cell, anyway? The teams are formed of four people, and it seems weird not to include the sensei. You know, I bet the Rokudaime knows a bunch of funny stories about our parents, especially your dad whom he taught the most stuff to. You could ask him – "

Boruto shook his head, stubbornly sticking to the topic that had captured his attention. "But she must know. Didn't everyone's parents attend the Academy at the same time?"

"I assume by 'everyone' you actually mean 'most of our friends'," Sarada sighed, giving it up as a lost cause. "And… not really? Your uncle's team was from the previous batch, Shikadai's mum and Chouchou's mum came from other villages so that's obviously a no as well, and Inojin's dad has some kind of mysterious past only the grown-ups seem to know. As for Mitsuki…"

They both shuddered at the thought of their friend's incredibly disturbing 'parent'. Neither could understand his blasé attitude towards the circumstances of his origin, and how blandly he had informed them that he was a synthetic human created by his mad scientist of a 'father', Orochimaru.

"But still," Boruto insisted after a pause. "I know for sure that my parents and your parents were all in the same class together. There's no way my mother would forget what my dad got up to back then, especially when she says she'd had a crush on him ever since they were kids."

"My mum says the same thing about my dad," Sarada mused quietly, her own thoughts taking a gloomy turn as she thought of the father she barely knew. "I don't know how they could be so sure of who they were going to marry, back when they were all kids younger than us."

"Do you ever feel like your parents' relationship isn't quite… right?" Boruto asked abruptly.

Sarada froze. "What are you talking about?"

"I mean – I feel that – it's just, I've never seen my parents argue, or overheard them disagree about anything. There's something that's not quite… natural, about how they act around each other, not like my dad and your mum, or my mum and her old teammates." He ran his hands through his hair distractedly, making the bright blond locks stick up in every direction. "That's not normal, is it?"

Sarada grit her teeth, then replied evenly, "My mum and your dad have always considered each other siblings, and I'm sure your mum and her teammates are like that too. It's normal for siblings to be different from couples, right? And anyway – doesn't everyone say your parents are the perfect match? You can't possibly want your parents to quarrel."

"It's not just that," Boruto shook his head. "There's just… something wrong about the whole thing. It's not normal for two people to live together and never have a difference of opinion. Call me crazy, but I really think my parents use their abilities to check if I'm anywhere nearby, so I can never see or hear them argue about anything. Why would anyone do that if they didn't have anything to hide?"

Sarada was silent. She did not trust herself to speak without completely losing her composure.

"Mum always packs a bento for him and sends it over even when she knows full well that he's got some diplomatic lunch or whatever to attend, and he always tells her she doesn't have to if she doesn't want to, but he never tells her that he doesn't want her to do it." He got up again and began to pace along the ridge, struggling to put his jumbled thoughts into words because he knew she did not understand.

"When he has to stay late at the office again she always looks sad, but never tells him she wants him to come back earlier. When he's home early for once and eats dinner with us, both of them always act like they're happy and talk a lot but they never actually tell each other anything." His eyes burned, and he pressed his hands over them so he would not cry.

"When they're talking to other people they never talk about what's actually happening at home. They think I don't notice but I know something is wrong, I can feel it, because the only times they seem like they're actually happy to see each other are when he comes back from a really long mission, when she's glad that he's safe and he's glad that nothing happened to us while he was gone."

"In fact," he had to pause for a moment, to take in a deep breath and will away the lump in his throat. "In fact, I wish they only saw each other once a year so at least they'd be happier when they are together, like a normal family – "

"Normal?" Sarada hissed, standing stiffly before him with her hands clenched into fists. "What do you mean, normal? Get over yourself. Are you really so self-centred that you think you're the only person in the universe who has an abnormal home life?"

He opened his mouth to speak, shocked by the outburst, but she barrelled on.

"Shikadai's mum and Chouchou's mum spend almost half their time away from here because they have duties in their own villages. Mitsuki was created in a lab by a war criminal. Nobody knows who Metal's mother is, or if she's even alive! And I – " Her eyes burned with tears, and Boruto saw a flash of red as she rubbed them furiously beneath her glasses. "I don't know my own father's face outside of the few photographs we have, because he left for a long-term mission before I could even remember!"

"Sarada, I – "

But she was already gone.

Boruto slowly slid off the roof of his former best friend's house and walked away, hardly knowing where he was going, or what he was going to do.

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Opening quote by Oscar Wilde.

I thought the epilogue was kinda screwed up, so here's the prologue to a fix-it.