Sarada bats his hands away from her construction paper covered shoe box. "No, stop it. That's all wrong," she says, jabbing her finger at the heart he'd just glued onto her Valentine's Day project. "It looks bad when you do it like that."
Instead of removing the heart, though, Sarada carefully places her hand over it and - with the glue still fresh underneath - begins to tilt it slightly until it's roughly forty-five degrees off center.
Itachi sighs. "That is exactly how I had it, only now it is crooked."
Sarada pokes her glasses up into place with another serious jab. "It looks flat when you do it like that," she corrects. She waves her hand, her lip upturned severely. "There's no depth to it. Nothing to—you know, it needs to look good. Just being neat isn't enough."
She repositions the box in front of her and begins to place sequins and plastic gemstones and tiny paper flowers over top of it with surgical precision.
It had been Itachi's initial understanding that this would be a "fun" project - something that would not be graded but was meant to be an enjoyable craft for students in lieu of more demanding work. In his own childhood, he would have devoted precisely as much time to the project as it was worth. Which is to say, none at all.
Apparently Sarada is not of the same disposition.
She has been absorbed by her modifications all evening, seeking out the angle or flourish that will identify her as a Good Student and Enviable Colleague to her classmates and teachers. Containers of glitter and stickers and tissue paper travel from one end of the table to the kitchen counter, curling around Sarada like a creeping vine.
He allows her several minutes of quiet work before he clears his throat. "Am I to understand that I've been relieved of my duties?"
Sarada blinks up at him owlishly, then blushes. "No." She rubs self-consciously at her pink cheeks as she turns to sort through a tiered chest of crafting materials on the table next to her.
Eventually, she settles on a spool of frilled pink ribbon that she offers to him.
"I want one big one for the top," she orders, pointing to indicate. "And then three or four that are smaller, but don't make them all the same size. I don't want it to look flat." She presses her lips together in a near-pout. "Sumire's looked so nice last year. She made a mailbox with a door that opened and everything." Her shoulders slump. "It wasn't just that it was good - she had a theme."
He hums as if that all made perfect sense to him. "You're putting an awful lot of effort into this, Sarada. That's something to be proud of."
"Effort alone isn't enough." Sarada yanks the lid off of a stick of glitter glue with more force than necessary. "Student council elections for next year are coming up and these are the kinds of things that matter." Again, she can't help but add, "And Sumire's box looked so nice last year."
"I see. That certainly is a good deal of pressure." Pressure that is self-imposed, and that he never personally experienced, but pressure nonetheless.
Sarada doesn't respond, in lieu of slowly spelling out V-A-L-E—in glitter glue with perfectly straight lines.
"Is there… a particular boy you are hoping to ask to be your valentine?" he tries, hoping to inject some levity into their work. Valentine's Day and its trappings have never held any sort of appeal to him, and yet Sarada is not wholly like him. She is sociable, in ways that he has only ever feigned. "That Inojin is rather—" He struggles to think of a trait associated with a child he's only met twice. "—individualistic."
Sarada pauses her crafting, which is how he knows he's entered dangerous territory. She looks up at him with slitted eyes. "So what? Because I'm a little girl, you think I'd rather talk about boys?"
"Well, no, but—" His female students certainly enjoy talking about boys, but seldom in ways he finds endearing. "Some girls do."
"'Some girls.'" Sarada shakes her head. "I'm not some girls. I'm going to be just like you when I'm older—no husband or kids or anything. Just my job."
"Ah—" As if to save him from the great ordeal of having to formulate a response to that, his Blackberry buzzes several times on the table.
Sarada, thankfully, notices it as well. "That sounds like a lot of messages," she remarks, looking at him curiously. Her eyes narrow. "Don't tell me you have a Valentine's date."
"Of course I don't," he says, turning the phone over to look over his notifications. "However, my students seem to believe that I am always available to them."
"Even today?" Sarada leans over the table, trying to get a better look at his phone screen. "What kind of students are texting you on a Friday night?"
He lifts the phone up and out of view just as it buzzes again. "The good ones, Sarada," he says. "The ones who are working on their midterm essays before the week they are due."
It appeals to her better nature. Sarada nods in understanding and settles back down in her chair, turning back to her glitter glue. "That's what I would do too, if I was old enough to have a phone."
His phone buzzes again.
This time, Sarada doesn't even look up. "Do you give your phone number to a lot of students?"
Itachi glances at the screen. "Well, there are a few other texts," he lies. "Your mother would like to know how you are doing, and…" Two lies come easily, but the third is much harder. "And your father's friend Karin has sent me a Snapchat," he says, ultimately unable to think of anything else.
There are, of course, no texts from Sakura or his students, but the Snapchats from Karin are very real. His finger hovers over the icon.
"From Miss Karin?" Again, Sarada is looking at him with a hint of suspicion in her eyes. "When did you start to use Snapchat?"
"Well." Because he had learned, through scrupulous investigation, that Sasuke was in the habit of using it as well. "My students managed to convince me it was necessary."
"I'm sure they did." Sarada rolls her eyes. "You know, Miss Karin was going to babysit tonight," she tells him matter-of-factly. "But Mama said it's that time of year where she goes out of her way to make worse choices than usual."
"Ah… I believe Sasuke mentioned she had plans elsewhere."
"That's what I heard too." Sarada smirks, having finally found a conversation topic that piques her interest. "Bet they don't go so well."
He withholds a sigh. To his young niece, Karin is something akin to a fairy tale creature: reality-bending but carrying the inexplicable power to monopolize her attention.
In her own way, though, Sarada does appear to be fond of her.
Itachi would consider it strange, had he not personally witnessed the cult of students that has grown around an adjunct - Deidara - that apparently exists for the sole purpose of watching the trainwreck of one man's life grow into a mass casualty event.
It is human nature, he supposes, to be drawn to the bizarre and dramatic.
"Miss Karin is always angry because the only guys she dates are losers," Sarada continues, taking on an authoritative tone. "The last one took her to an Olive Garden and asked to split the bill. That's what a loser does."
Itachi is on the verge of agreeing with her when he pauses. "How do you know that?" he asks, because it certainly wasn't something he knew, and he doesn't think it's something Sarada should know either. "Any of what you've just said."
Sarada gives him a mischievous look. "Miss Karin comes over for wine and Hallmark movies when Papa isn't home. Mama always tells her to keep her voice down, but she doesn't do a very good job of it."
"I can imagine that she wouldn't."
Sarada snickers.
Against his own better judgment, Itachi opens one of the Snapchats. Having learned that screenshotting Snapchats is considered impolite - and, more importantly, that doing so notifies the sender of the Snapchat - he quickly picks out as many details as he can before it expires.
Karin herself isn't in the picture, but there's a formal table setting, complete with a lit candle and white tablecloth, an almost empty glass of wine with a red lipstick-stain on the rim, and a glass of water, untouched, though most of the ice in it has melted.
At the bottom, there's a brief message from Karin: Am I going to have to start PAYING men to go on dates with me?
From the general phrasing of the Snapchat, he assumes that it was not something truly meant for him—he has learned that Karin likes to send the same Snapchat en masse when she is looking for attention but does not particularly care who it comes from.
He has no interest in anything not meant specifically for himself, and the thought of maintaining a conversation through the damned app is more of a nuisance than he'd ever entertain.
He skips to the next Snapchat.
Karin seems to have already left the restaurant—it's a picture of a darkened sidewalk, framed by glossy ice, with just the barest hint of a bright red high heeled shoe poking up from the bottom.
And, of course, the caption.
?Fuck this shit I'm out?
When he looks up, Sarada has all but abandoned her crafting in lieu of staring at him. "What?"
"Nothing," she says, pushing her glasses back up into place. "You just seem awfully interested in that."
"The lighting was not very good," he tells her, because it was not. "I had trouble making out the picture, is all." Without waiting for her to ask, he adds, "It appears her date has not gone well."
"Well, I can't say I'm surprised by that." Sarada shakes her head. "Aren't you going to respond to Mama?"
"Ah, of course." Instead, Itachi opens a text and begins to type nonsense. "She'll be glad to know your project is almost finished."
He's about to set his phone back down when it vibrates again.
This time, Sarada doesn't seem to notice it at all. The notification isn't for a Snapchat, but a Twitter alert from one of his department heads, Konan—Consume, but not each other.
A little esoteric for his tastes, but nothing unusual for her.
He has tried to subscribe to Sasuke's tweets in the same way, but his Twitter account has an unfortunate glitch that makes him unfollow Sasuke's Twitter account every few days.
Shisui has tried to explain before that Sasuke is likely "soft blocking" him, but Itachi is almost certain it's technology, doing what technology does best: glitching.
With a sigh, Itachi locks his phone, sets it back on the table, and goes back to making bows.
.
.
.
An hour later, Sarada has finally given her Valentine's Day box her seal of approval.
Or the closest approximation of it, anyway.
"I suppose it'll do," she says. She holds it up to the light to inspect it, turning it around in her hands to examine it from multiple angles. "I'm sure Sumire has figured out something amazing again this year, but it'll at least beat whatever Boruto has probably come up with."
That hierarchy seems to make sense to Sarada, so he nods along with unearned confidence. "That will likely be the case."
Sarada glances over at the clock on the kitchen wall. "It's getting kinda late. Are you spending the night?"
On any other night, he would certainly consider it, but it being Valentine's Day, he could hardly see the suggestion going over well with Sasuke. "Likely not."
"Oh? Is it because you have plans?" One eyebrow jumps. "Like a date?" she asks, dragging out the word much longer than necessary.
"Nothing of the sort, I can assure you," he says, though his hand itches to check his phone again. "I did not want any plans to interfere with our time together."
Sarada rolls her eyes and calls him silly, as all children must, but he sees her half-hidden smile as she carefully carries her box over to the kitchen counter to dry. She looks it over thoughtfully as she opens up her daily planner and begins to make notes in the margins.
He hadn't lied to her, but his truth comes in more and more different shades as he grows older.
Though he does have his own expectations for the night, he had meant it when he said there was nothing he wanted to come between him and the precious time he spends with his niece. He would not quite call what he has plans, because while he does feel fairly confident in how the evening will end, he cannot be entirely certain that he will be invited to be a part of it.
Still, there is no harm in assuming that he will.
With that thought, he pockets his phone and rises from the kitchen table. "If we're done, I believe it's your bedtime."
"Already?" Sarada throws him a pout. "Mama said they weren't going to get back until late because of all the traffic."
"While true, a bedtime is a bedtime, even when your parents are not home."
"Miss Karin lets me stay up and watch Law and Order when she babysits me, you know."
Though he is sorely tempted to explain to her - in great detail - why Karin is a poor benchmark for proper behavior, it is almost certainly a lecture Sarada has heard before. "Unfortunately, my rules and hers are not quite the same."
"Yeah." Sarada sighs and closes her planner. "She still lets me watch Law and Order, though. The snow is really bad tonight, so we can probably make it through at least one episode before they're home."
"Alas."
He checks his notifications again while Sarada skulks away to change, but aside from the two Snapchats Karin had sent earlier, he has no notifications that catch his interest. Almost certain that there will be more later, he pockets his phone and waits patiently for Sarada in her room.
It is not, he can willingly admit, the bedroom of most children her age. He would hardly call himself an expert on what a young girl's room should look like, but he is confident that few would be comparable.
The room itself is immaculately clean, to the point where it more closely resembles a department store bedroom display than the room of a young girl. There are no misplaced toys or clothes, not even a hamper or trash can to even suggest uncleanliness. Sarada has personalized it somewhat with a small collection of potted cacti on her window sill, but her shelves and desk are neat and utilitarian, dressed with thick textbooks and trophies, and several gold-embossed family pictures.
Hanging above her bed is the only piece of furniture that hints towards any bit of childish eccentricity: a rather out of place portrait of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who frowns down at him as if she meant to say, I know you can do better than this.
And maybe he could, but he doesn't particularly want to.
Several minutes later, Sarada shuffles back into the bedroom wearing a knee-length, long-sleeved nightgown that's buttoned up to her throat. It reminds him of a costume he'd been stuffed into once many years ago, when he had been forced to play Scrooge in a performance of A Christmas Carol he and his classmates had done in elementary school.
He is almost certain that it is the sort of observation Sarada would not appreciate, so he keeps it to himself.
"Would you like a bedtime story before I turn out the lights?" he asks. "Bret Harte, perhaps, or Jack London?"
Sarada sets her glasses on the nightstand and squints up at him. "How old do you think I am?" She tries her best to maintain a serious face as she plops down onto her bed. "The only bedtime story I care about is the one with Olivia Benson."
Her remark is more or less incomprehensible to him, but he understands the tenor of it.
He sends her off to bed with a soft pat on the head. "Unfortunately, that will have to wait for another night. Good night, Sarada."
.
.
.
Itachi spends the next hour in silence, waiting on Sasuke's couch while his phone sits idly on the table. He has received at least two more Snapchats from Karin, but he has resolutely decided not to open them.
Later, perhaps, when there are fewer sets of ears around to overhear.
Sakura and Sasuke arrive close to midnight, long after Sarada stops tossing and turning in her bed. Itachi is already standing by the time Sasuke makes it to the front door, the blanket he'd been resting with already re-folded and draped over the back of the couch.
"Quiet," Itachi hears him whisper as he opens the door. "Sarada's probably asleep."
Sasuke has already unbuttoned his dress shirt by the time he shuffles into the living room, his tie similarly tugged most of the way down his chest. He blinks when he sees Itachi, as if he hadn't expected him to still be there.
Sakura fumbles somewhere in the doorway behind him, out of sight. A shoe thuds to the ground, and she giggles before sighing. "Sasuke…"
"Go on ahead," Sasuke calls back, before he sighs and runs a hand through his unruly hair.
Itachi frowns. "Is she…"
"She's fine." Sasuke shakes his head. "Too much wine at dinner."
"Ah."
"Yeah." Sakura's footsteps fade away down the hallway, leaving them alone. "Was Sarada good for you?"
"She was fine, as always."
Sasuke nods. "Good."
There's a muted ding. Sasuke scowls and shoves a hand in his pocket, pulling out his phone. The crease in his brow deepens as he types out something quick. The silence stretches on for several moments until Sasuke looks up again, scowling. "That moron gave himself food poisoning trying to cook dinner for Hinata."
In spite of himself, Itachi cannot help but smile. "I see."
"He's an idiot." Sasuke's eyes drift away. The lamplight is dim, but his cheeks suddenly appear slightly tinged with pink. "So. Thanks for coming out last minute. Really. I hadn't exactly counted on Karin actually finding a date," he adds, with a hint of disdain.
There's a lot Itachi might say to that, but he defaults to the least controversial response. "Think nothing of it. Sarada and I had a very pleasant night."
"We brought you back dessert. Some chocolate fudge cheesecake thing." Sasuke curls his lip in a way Itachi can't help but find endearing. "I think Sakura left it on the kitchen counter."
"That was thoughtful of you."
"Yeah." Sasuke glances back down at his phone, then towards the hallway leading to his bedroom. "Well. Drive safe," he says, which Itachi understands is his cue to leave.
"Have a good night, Sasuke." It's clear that their conversation is over, but Itachi still scrambles for more platitudes that will extend it, even if by seconds. "I will see you…" He trails off, unsure where to leave things. "Soon, hopefully," he finishes, when Sasuke doesn't interject.
"Yeah. Soon."
It sounds promising, though Itachi knows better than to take this for an agreement.
They face each other for a moment, before Sasuke stuffs his hands into his pockets with another brief nod in his direction and walks down the hall, turning off the hallway lights behind him.
Itachi waits for the sound of Sasuke's steps to fade. When he hears the bedroom door open and shut, he quickly slips on his work shoes by the door, after first brushing away the white streaks of salt dried to the sides of them.
There's a wrapped container resting on the kitchen counter, which he can only assume was meant for him. Still, he leaves it where it is, as Sarada may want it.
If not, it may give him an excuse to visit again tomorrow, if only for a short while.
Itachi slips his satchel over his shoulder and steps out onto the porch. His lungs seize momentarily when he faces the cold air, but he presses on—he has the entire drive home to defrost, and potentially the entire night to sit in the warmth of his home.
On nights like this, it is difficult to forget that he has nothing but time, and it doesn't particularly matter how he spends it.
Snow crunches under his shoes as he walks to his car, parked by the curb. The driveway is slippery, and he is almost half-tempted to turn around and go back inside to warn Sasuke that he will likely need to shovel it in the morning or have salt put out.
He doesn't, though, because Sasuke does not need to be told how to maintain his driveway, nor would he want to be.
Itachi assures himself this is true.
He grabs a brush from his backseat and swipes the accumulated powder off his windows and the hood of his car. By the time he is finished, the interior is warm enough for him to feel comfortable, though his fingers prickle uncomfortably when he flexes them in front of the air vents.
He checks his phone one last time, but there is nothing waiting for him aside from more Snapchats from Karin. With no corresponding texts, he can only assume they're of the same nature as her earlier messages: general calls for attention.
Nothing worth troubling himself with just yet, but again—the night has not yet ended.
With that, he begins his short drive home.
The house he rents is only half an hour away. It's far enough not to make Sasuke feel claustrophobic, but close enough that he can immediately be available should Sasuke desire it.
He seldom ever does, but it's still nice that the option is there.
The drive itself is quiet, as it usually is. The roads are surprisingly empty, despite the holiday, though he supposes the weather may be something of a deterrent. Ordinarily he would take this time to dictate lecture plans, but tonight, he would rather be occupied with something mindless.
He turns on the radio and skips immediately through several HOTT and HIT stations until he comes across something like smooth jazz. A woman begins to talk in sultry tones before she hmmms and some breathy slow song begins to play.
He changes the station again.
Being sick of love songs is too much of a cliche for him to indulge in it, and he's got no reason to be sick of them. Instead, he'd only say that he finds them incredibly tacky.
Itachi scrolls through stations until he comes across some innocuous NPR affiliate discussing recent trends in holiday consumerism and continues his drive.
.
.
.
Itachi is halfway home when a call comes in on his phone, rerouted to his car speaker through Bluetooth.
He glances at the caller ID and immediately accepts it. "Karin."
He can hear someone shuffling on the other end before a woman - decidedly not Karin - answers him. "Is this Sasuke's brother?" the woman asks.
"Yes?"
"Tenten, how do they look?" Karin calls, far enough away that Itachi can just barely make out her voice. "Gimme my phone back, I wanna take more pictures!"
The woman on the other end of the line - Tenten, he can only assume - sighs into the receiver. "She's totally trashed. I was gonna call her an Uber, but she has no money in her account," she explains. "And no offense, but I know anything I loan to her isn't coming back."
"It likely will not," he agrees.
"So…"
"Send me the address. I'll head that way immediately."
"Holy shit." Tenten sounds genuinely surprised, despite having initiated the call herself. "She, uh, said you would, I just didn't believe her." There's a pregnant pause. "Uh. So yeah. I'll see you."
The line goes dead.
Itachi sighs, praying that Tenten is not one to gossip, before he pulls off into a nearby fast food restaurant parking lot to wait for her text.
His windshield wipers squeak with each pass, erasing flakes of snow from the window as soon as they land. Several spots over, a man in a suit helps a woman in a black cocktail dress out of his car, his suit jacket wrapped tightly around her shoulders. The woman stumbles, her thin heels finding little purchase on the ice, but the man wraps his arms around her and guides her safely to the front door.
They both laugh, audible even over the radio and the sound of Itachi's windshield wipers and the quarter inch of glass separating them.
He leans forward to fiddle with the heat and the stereo volume until a text from Karin's phone pops up with an address attached.
It's properly punctuated and formatted, which indicates that Tenten likely sent it.
He puts the address into his GPS and pulls out of the parking lot, his tires skidding slightly when he strikes a patch of ice on the road. On any other night like this, there'd be no leaving the house - the snow is unusually heavy, even for this time of year, and the danger of encountering intoxicated drivers is significant.
Still, Karin's incompetency has always been perfectly matched to his own generosity. It's an acuity, he supposes, that she learned from Sasuke.
When they were all much younger - when Sasuke and his friends were still too young to get their licenses, much too young to be drinking - he'd been the first person Sasuke would call when they found themselves in trouble, as they often did. The calls always came after midnight, pulling him away from sleep and books and late-night study sessions for classes he would have aced without effort anyway.
Regardless of the time of year or time of night, he would roll out of bed, shrug on a coat, and make a quick tea with his kettle before shuffling out to his car. The inconvenience was objective, but he'd never felt particularly bothered by it: Sasuke had always been the welcome inconvenience in his untroubled life.
That was college, though, and college had come easy. College had been the amalgamation of everything he had taught himself to do up until that point—how to break down and regurgitate forms, no matter how complex, and he had always excelled at regurgitation above all else.
Graduate school was something different, and it asked for something he could not simply break down and parrot. It was about connections, about face time and networking and name recognition. Things that required a good deal of charisma and luck, regardless of his academic aptitude. Often, in fact, in spite of his academic aptitude.
It left him tired, in a way that no work had ever left him tired before.
He continued to answer Sasuke's late night calls, though he responded slower each time, until it would take several calls before he'd rouse. And one day, he simply decided not to.
It was towards the end of the semester, too early for their final evaluations, but at the point where most discussion was angled towards department vacancies and course catalogs. The calls came through as they usually did—past midnight, persistent.
He heard them, of course. If he hadn't - if he'd merely slept through Sasuke's calls and been unaware of them, if he'd gone through the night unawares - that would have been a different situation entirely.
But he had. He heard each ping and buzz and alert as they came through. Instead of answering them or - at the very least - checking them, he cursed Sasuke, declined his calls, and turned off his phone. And then he'd turned over in bed, unbothered, and went back to sleep, confident that Sasuke and his friends would find a way out of whatever trouble they'd gotten into.
By the time he realized what had happened, Mother and Father had already passed.
It was not too uncommon of a story: a late night drive home, a thunderstorm, an intoxicated driver. A rush to the hospital - some lingering chance of survival. Sasuke, alone in his residence hall, banging on doors until finally, he found someone willing to drive him the hour back to their hometown.
It was not that Itachi had chosen one or the other. Rather, being young, and invincible, and foolish, he simply had concluded that he lived a life so blessed that he would never be forced to choose. That a call so late in the night could only ever be something foolish, something indulgent—something he would never regret missing.
Sasuke's calls stopped abruptly after that.
There were no more nighttime phone calls, no more apologetic mumbling into the receiver on the cusp of dawn—We thought we'd take the bus back but they apparently don't come out here this late…
Now, Itachi only wishes he had lingered longer in those late-night excursions. That he had yielded when Sasuke's friends demanded to be taken through the Taco Bell drive-thru, or that he would have acceded to their demands and driven in circles around the block until they had mumbled their way through all eight minutes of "American Pie."
That he would have taken all of Sasuke's calls, regardless of how late they'd come, if only so he could have come home and waited by their parents' bedside with Sasuke. That he had been there with him at the hospital until the skies outside cleared and the sun rose, if only so that Sasuke would not have had to bear through the night alone.
Now, when Sasuke calls his phone, it only means that Sasuke has somewhere else to be. Even this is a development years in the making, that Sasuke would think to call him at all.
It is gracious, in the sense that he never asked it of Sasuke, and would have never thought to ask it of him.
Years after his own college graduation, after grad school, after the painful, scraping years of adjunct work, Itachi stays up late at night, waiting for calls that have yet to come. He moves cities when Sasuke does, orbiting from the closest distance Sasuke will allow, offering any assistance that Sasuke will accept.
That is the true work of penance: slow and uncertain, slouching towards forgiveness he may never reach.
And that, he supposes, will continue for the rest of his life. He's made his own peace with it. It's not the worst sort of life to live - he is gainfully employed, and well-respected among his colleagues. Each year he comes a little further in mending his fraught relationship with Sasuke, closer to reconciliation.
He should be content with that. It is something he is able to convince himself is true, though the feeling never seems to actualize.
And, occasionally, he feels himself straining for more.
Karin's first call came last June, shortly after her - and shortly before Sasuke's - thirtieth birthday. She'd been drunk, and angry, and had quite a few things she'd apparently wanted to get off of her chest that night.
The likeliest explanation, he thinks, is that she'd dialed his number by accident but was too stubborn to admit it. He hadn't been aware that she'd even had his number, though later he would recall exchanging it in the midst of preparing for one of Sarada's birthday parties.
In all fairness to Karin, though, she seemed just as confused by it as he was.
Well, I meant all of that, she slurred into the receiver after he had finally found an opening to interrupt her and introduce himself. Figured you'd get what I meant.
In a fragmented sense, he probably did, but he did her the courtesy of not thinking too carefully about it. And of course, being the courteous man that he was, he offered to take her home, if she was willing to send him her location.
I'm calling from the bartender's phone, she admitted bashfully. Sasuke blocked my regular number.
He quickly arranged to meet her after that, and did her the favor of driving her back to her apartment from the bar. It was Penance, that he should be given the chance to help right things between Sasuke and his friends. Penance, falling perfectly into his lap in the form of a late night call he absolutely should not have received.
And so he went.
The next time, he understood there was no accident: Karin called him, expecting - or at the very least, hoping - that he would respond, which he did. Which he could not help doing. Then Christmas, and most recently, New Year's Eve, when she called him from a bar ten-minutes shy of midnight two towns over, begging him for a ride anywhere. Just get me the hell out of here.
And, fool that he was, he went. If only because he'd been home when she'd called, and her calling posed no great inconvenience to him. If only because she had been a good friend of Sasuke's for a short time, and was beloved by his beloved niece.
If only because between the two of them, neither had anyone else who they would otherwise be spending their holidays with.
It became increasingly clear that Karin had few other friends and no family to speak of. That her actual relationship with Sasuke himself is tenuous at best, though heavily idealized by her over the years.
At this point, he doesn't think the reasoning matters: Karin calls, and he answers.
It has been nearly half a lifetime since Karin's teenage escapades with Sasuke, and yet he cannot say that she has substantially changed from the girl she was at sixteen, when she sat in the back of his Toyota Camry in her too-short homecoming dress and rubbed her thighs against Sasuke's in the dark.
Students will float to the mark that you set, his teaching manuals say, but Karin is not a student of his, and he cannot say that he would like to see her do better.
It's in his nature, he thinks. The only identity that has ever brought him any sort of pleasure is brother, but Sasuke has long outgrown the need for an older brother.
Sarada, only child that she is, has never particularly wanted one. She's far too much like him, in that she believes she is too independent to need to rely upon others, that she is capable of holding up her entire world on her own. There's no need to discourage her from that just yet, while she is still young, still optimistic.
His universe is small now, and he would like to keep it that way. He has no interest in using his acquaintances to fill the gaps in his past, and no interest in seeking out new comforts. His students - while young, bright, and promising - are not fitting substitutes for what he has lost, and he lacks the need or capacity to invest in them beyond the several months they spend in his lecture hall.
So he lives his quiet life in his quiet home, and he takes as many opportunities to spend time with his brother and his niece as possible.
And when Karin calls, he answers.