In these eyes
Summary:
Where Sarada revels in the ordinariness of loving Papa.

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"It's okay to be scared, but you have to get out there, open up, love, make mistakes, learn to be stronger, and start all over again." –Word Porn

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The first thing Sarada realized when living as a family was, that Papa was an oddball. He wasn't any of the things she had always imagined. In fact, he was quite the opposite. Where Sarada used to imagine a father with blinding smiles and unfathomable affections, her Papa was a man of…delicate sensibilities, she thought with a smile. He had a quiet demeanor, eyes that were perpetually worried—and occasionally, when Mama had her bouts of fury—harried. But Sarada was her Mama's daughter, and in that, she was obstinate and willful and had a heart too big for her own good—and she'd found that she loved Papa with all of it.

Papa sat on the couch, looking at her video game collection with a frown so deep one might think it was the end of the world. Sarada supposed he was fraught with imagined dooms of his little girl all grown up. So she skipped up to the couch and threw herself at him. He caught her easily, that frown leaving his forehead but never his lips.

"Would you play with me, Papa?" she said, nodding at the game in his hand.

Papa shifted with a habitual sort of fidget of the technologically doomed, and opened his mouth to deny.

"I'll teach you," she said quickly, before he could get a word in, because she knew if he would've denied, a part her heart would've shriveled up and died.

Papa must have sensed her desperation, because she felt him steeling himself before he nodded reluctantly. "Aa," he said, and the smile that bloomed on Sarada's face could've lit up the universe. Even Papa, with his belligerent attitude couldn't help but return it.

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fin