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they make a home in a little house on the outskirts of konoha. it is small: large for two, perfect for three. it has a nice porch and a backyard. good for planting a garden, he thinks. it has one floor, modern in a way new houses seem to be. there is a kitchen that attaches to the living room that attaches to the dining room. their bed is at the end of the house, with wooden floorboards and large windows to let in streaming light.
they could very easily have a bigger one, in the heart of the village, what with his clan’s worth of fortune and her high hourly rate. perhaps somewhere closer to the districts, closer to the clan compounds. but the clan is a story from a long time and sasuke likes this little house with a stream in the backyard and the windows that let in the light.
they live between the cream of the walls and under the curve of the ceiling, and sasuke, for the first time in a while, has somewhere he can call home.
she comes up behind him as he’s hanging the wet sheets on the stretched out strings. he can sense her chakra, controlled and impossibly light, but he doesn’t turn to greet her.
“i’m home, darling.” she’s taken to calling him that.
he picks up another sheet to hang. “welcome home.”
they make memories. new ones that don’t involve carnage or bloodshed. for a weapon as sharp as he is, he finds he likes quiet domesticity better than anything else. his bones are weary from all the fighting.
sakura has neither the aptitude nor the patience for clan politics. this doesn’t come as a surprise to him - she has about the tolerance of a goldfish - yet it amuses him to some extent.
“husband,” she says, leaving her shoes by the door while he sautés the garlic.
he turns to see her looking at him with her hands on her hips and a tick to her jaw. “what’s wrong.” he asks.
“tell me again why i have to be the one who gets to be clan head?”
he turns the stove on high. “i’m a criminal on parole, sakura.”
“you know, for a criminal on parole, you should at least try to sound remorseful.”
“i am remorseful.” the corner of his lips curl upward.
“look, sasuke,” she’s itching to try the sauce he’s stirring but keeps her place with the practiced pride of the hero of the great shinobi alliance. “is there any way you might be able to go to these meetings yourself?”
“i’m a criminal on parole, sakura.” he repeats.
“that’s just mean.”
“i’m a criminal on parole -”
“hey,” she says.
“hn.”
“you’re annoying, you know that?”
she must have been waiting years to say that line.
later, when they’re in bed and she’s eaten that sauce from heaven he made, “hiashi is a dated misogynist.”
she whacks him the shoulder. “exactly. you want to know what he said today - ”
sakura may be the worst-tempered person he’s ever met. he marries her on a rainy august day with eight witnesses. he’s not much for fanfare and neither is she. afterwards, they walk down the rocky path towards their house, hands joined together under the night sky.
“you’re a househusband.” she declares triumphantly, slamming the back door on her way in.
“you’re getting mud on the floor.” he hates how he’s halfway whining.
“i realized it only two seconds ago but you’re really not leaving any room for doubt now.”
“i am not - ” he hisses. “i have a job.”
“you do not have a job, sasuke. you are a twenty-six year-old genin.”
sakura was never this mean when she was twelve. she was cute back then, on the off chance he found himself looking at her when he wasn’t consumed with thought of itachi and mother and father. sometimes, the urge to tie her to the oak tree outside is too strong. that much didn’t change over the years.
“i don’t mind.” she waves a hand. “stay as long as you like.”
“it’s my house.” he hisses again.
“the lease is in my name.”
“i keep it clean.”
“ there. ”
he walks towards her, energy murderous, making her take five steps out the back the way she came. he closes the door.
she’s pretty, his wife. in all her forms, seasons. she’s pretty in winter, bundled up in coats and jackets trimmed with white fur. she’s pretty in spring, like she is its namesake and not the other way around. she’s pretty in summer, sweat making her hair curl to her forehead. she’s pretty in autumn, when the colors and lights bounce back on her skin. she’s pretty underneath him, writhing and moaning and begging. she’s pretty above him. she’s pretty when they’re side by side, talking into the night, until he yawns and she starts to fall asleep. she’s beautiful. he knows this because she is the last thing he wants to see and the first thing he wants to wake up to.
she’s at the table, reading her medical texts when he comes home from training. she blushes from the curve of her neck to the peak of her forehead. like a schoolgirl.
she blurts, “i have a crush on you.”
he snorts, removing his wire strings from his pocket and laying it on the weapons rack by the door.
“i’m serious,” she says, voice an octave higher. “sasuke-kun.”
the kun has become foreign on her tongue. it reminds him of green afternoons and shaky knees. he couldn’t begin to understand her back then. now they move together in seamless harmony: partners, teammates, husband and wife. she knows what he means to say without him even saying it. he knows her moods - all 531 of them. they’ve come a long way. he looks at her, to the mess she made on the table, to the clock. he shakes his head.
“sasuke-kun,” she splays a hand over her heart. she giggles, moving towards him, “sasuke-kun.”
“hn.” he says, coming up to kiss her. her mouth opens against his, years and years of practice slotting together the pieces until they are but two halves of a whole.
she pulls away, “go take a shower.”
“clean up your mess.”
she pecks him. “i don’t want to, darling.”
“then eat dinner on the floor.”
there is an incongruous difference, he is aware, of the man he is outside their space and the man he is inside it.
when he goes out he is uchiha sasuke. under his command is the whole anbu force. in bingo books, he is an s-class criminal affiliated with orochimaru of the sannin and the akatsuki, though he hasn’t been for a while now. for seventeen years he has been that: power hungry and hateful.
inside, he washes dishes and puts them in the cupboards once they dry. he mops the floor and dusts the bookshelves. he buys detergent when they run out. his tomatoes are perhaps his greatest pride and joy. they’re growing splendidly in their little garden. he is calm, unplagued. his shoulders stand easy and his mind is clear, all questions have been answered, and although unadulterated happiness is a choice he finds hard to make, he makes it all the same. he does grocery lists.
he likes himself better now. sakura has taught him how, slowly, day by day. it’s a process, she once said while she opened the boxes when they were moving in. (it’s been six years since then.) like this one. sometimes you break a couple of plates but that’s alright. you can still make a home with a few chipped china.
"did you know that snakes can't bite food so they swallow it whole?"
"hn."
"is that a yes or a no, sasuke?"
"hn."
"they also smell with their tongue."
she doesn't have to go as far as to phrase it that way. "are you asking me to be a snake?"
“sometimes,” she whispers into his skin. he’s seen the world far and wide but he’s never seen anything the same color of her eyes. “i wonder if this is all a dream.”
“funny,” he whispers back. “i feel the same.”
a part of the uchiha district has been turned into the children’s clinic. his wife runs it, oversees everything, makes sure children don’t end up as lonely as he and naruto had been. that the cycle would be over. it’s only right, he thinks as he stands outside the gates of what once used to be his home, that something good came out of the pain of the past.
he never enters, never walks inside, but he watches. he watches and he sees her easy smiles and gentle hands. as naruto’s pushed him to become stronger, sakura’s pushing him to become better.
“do you think we should have a boy or a girl?”
“a girl.” he answers without missing a beat.
“really? what about the - clan stuff.”
unrefined, ungraceful, blunt. very like his wife. sasuke presses down another knot on her foot. he looks at her dryly. “do i look like hyuuga hiashi?”
“come to think of it - stop! i’m sorry!” she tries to wiggle free from his grasp but her foot’s already securely between his hands.
the nightmares come more infrequently by the year. like they are tombs slowly being lowered to the ground, being put to rest.
but sometimes - he wakes in the night, to the brightness of nothing but the moon outside, to the gentle fluttering of the curtains, and doesn’t go back to sleep. she must sense this (she misses nothing) because she scoots her back closer towards him. she takes his arm and wraps it around her body and mumbles, half-asleep, “i love you, sasuke.”
an anchor to shore.
“i’ve loved you since i was twelve.” he says, putting the cup of sake down the coffee table.
“hmmm,” she hums against his side, her head on his shoulder, cheeks slightly less pink as his own. “i know.”
“you do?”
“why do you think i kept chasing you around?”
he learns a couple of things. not being on active duty, turns out, is a great teacher.
first, never leave shirts in the dryer. he shrank five of his and two of hers. sakura laughed at him for an entire week.
second is that sakura cannot be trusted in the kitchen. he makes a silent note to never make her approach the stove ever again. of all the elements, suiton is still his least practiced.
third - how difficult it is to keep house. sakura can collect her large paychecks all she wants but at the end of the day he is the reason their house isn’t a pigsty yet. she’s clean, sure, but she’s busy and her hospitals are time consuming. the baton ultimately fell to him, a genin whose expertise - that involve the guardian susano’o, the legend of the rinnegan, the black flames of amaterasu - is more suited to world domination than peacetime. he finds a new expertise in his herb garden. basil, he finds, is surprisingly easy to grow.
“if ino wasn’t in the monthly fucking meetings i would’ve destroyed the hokage tower already.”
he flips a page of the newspaper.
“onikuma-san is a condescending little bitch.”
he raises a brow.
“do you have nothing to say? ”
“i’m a criminal on parole -”
“you got reinstated ten years ago!”
sometimes things crash, break the delicately crafted peace he surrounds himself with. maybe it’s someone from the marketplace, or a kid who looks like some of the people he’s killed. that’s when he knows he has to leave again, take his bruises somewhere else.
he takes missions that make him walk to the edge of the world, and when he comes back, he is better. like cough medicine for the cold.
“you have that look in your eyes again,” she says softly. “will you go?”
“yes.”
she only smiles. “i’ll wash your cloak.”
sakura is - she’s large. he can’t explain how or why, all he knows is her sinews and her bones and her muscles all amount to something greater than gods or god incarnates. she is larger than life perhaps, like a purpose guiding strays to sunlight. it’s been years since he’s been trying to put it into words but still he cannot explain it.
her touch seeps through his skin to the very hollow of his bones. he wonders if this is what it feels like to love completely, like she does - has been doing. somehow, he begins to understand.
“i’m pregnant.” she says, hands protectively splayed on her still flat belly.
suddenly his world tilts axis, something bigger crashing down, like a meteor. no - a meteor he can handle. this is new, daunting, terrifying.
he smiles, untethered, and comes to embrace his family.
“put that in there.” she tells him, pointing to the shoe cabinet by the door. sakura could be a one man moving company if she wanted to. boxes are splayed all around them. the house is new, unlived in. its sanctity makes him uneasy. " water.”
“what?”
“i’ve been bossing you around all day. here,” she hands him a glass. (one of the first things they unpacked.) “water.”
“hn.” he takes it.
“a house is a shoe.” she says.
he only stares. she’s a fountain of metaphors. most of them he has trouble understanding.
“you have to break it in so that it can be comfortable.” she says. “only then can it become a home.”