Twisted

Fever

The reason that Boruto had gone rather silent for their walk wasn't because he was embarrassed about his fear of bugs, although that certainly was a factor. The real reason was because his chest ached like someone had injected venom into his bloodstream, just around his heart. It really hurt. And it all started after he held her in his arms and then let her fall from that tree.

He walked away thinking that surely she wouldn't try and get down by herself. He was waiting for a casual, Kya, Prince Boruto, help me, that any other girl would have given him. But instead he was met with the thud of her painful descent.

He wanted to pause and look her over to make sure she wasn't injured, but that probably would've made her even angrier, considering it involved him facing her. He didn't hear any limping in her footsteps. Her speech sounded fine. It wasn't that big of a fall. And yet he couldn't stop himself from fidgeting as he walked in front of her, his mind running in circles about how to handle his inherent slip up.

He tried to play it off with his usual sarcasm, but she didn't pick up on it, and it made him seem like even more of a prick. But after promising to protect her, he went and let her get hurt. She had every right to call him an idiot.

He tried to doze off and forget about it, sitting upright against the cave wall. He knew he'd drifted off to the land of the unconscious for at least a few minutes because he twitched awake when he heard the scraping of fabric against wood. His eyes fluttered open briefly to see Sarada taking her change of clothes out of the basket and wandering off. And then he was back to dreaming about his moms homemade cinnamon apple pie.

What felt like hours later, he opened them to darkness. The crickets were just as loud as the frogs, and potentially cicadas too. As his eyes searched for the mouth of the cave, he noticed something very crucial. The basket was there. But Sarada was not.

Pulling himself into a standing position and rocking back and forth to drain the numbness in his bum, he grumbled something about not wanting to be awake at these late hours of the night and set out to find her.  He highly doubted she'd gone back to her tower on her own, but that didn't mean someone like her could handle herself alone in the woods at night.

He felt his instincts tugging on him again. The same familiar tug that let him to her in the first place. He didn't want to admit it, but there was definitely something about her. The way he thought to catch her before his mind even understood she was falling. The way he easily pulled her against his chest and held her there for a while because he wanted to, despite the blush coating his face.

He wasn't sure why, or how it even came to happen. But with certainly, her sudden disappearance made the shooting pain in his chest three times worse.

So when he made his way to the pond and found her curled up by the shore, her previous dress wet from washing and hanging over a low branch, he let out a sigh of relief.

Sarada was lying contentedly in the grass, her pale skin almost glowing in the dark. She really was quite pretty, 90-60-90 or not. And it wasn't just her figure that Boruto came to admire. There was something about her intelligence, her actions, her life up until now that made her more intriguing than any girl he'd met. Not that he wanted to marry her. That wasn't it at all. There was just. Something.

Just as he was thinking about how much of a pain it would be to have a walking dictionary that teased him endlessly with every tiny ant she found in his castle, he noticed. Sprouting all around Sarada were moonflowers; the same flower he'd picked to put in her hair.

Originally, he thought it was because the flower suited her. There seemed to be a lot by her tower, but he didn't think there'd been this many in the forest. All he ever saw were day lilies. Then again, he was hardly ever awake when the moon was this high in the sky, and these particular flowers only bloomed at night.