Work Text:
Sasuke never had a good relationship with sleep. Dreaming mimics genjutsus, a blink and you’re under the spell. To him, they’re all nightmares.
He learned early that training helps, and exhaustion won’t bring dreams. When that doesn’t work, he would lie in bed and wait for sunshine to claim his lids. And when the bed could no longer contain his ghosts and anger, he fled.
Sasuke manages to steal hours and minutes under different foliages. Here, where wilderness and uncertainty pervades, he finally rests. Into the earth like a worm burrowing under decaying leaves. Against hard trunks. In the ribcage of tree roots. His feet just inches before the marsh pool.
This is reality, this is no illusion.
And like how nature's circadian rhythms go, he wastes no time waking up.
Years later and a month after his case dismissal, Sasuke contents himself with watching Sakura sleep. Too many bottles in a team dinner, and he sees how Tsunade trained her to a tee.
This is a nice change of pace , he thinks as he adjusts in his futon. But still, it is a room and it's foreign.
"Why do you have a stiff neck?" she asks the following morning.
"Slept on the wrong side," he lies as he traces in his mind the remnants of sleep on her cheek.
It's stupid how frequently he makes excuses to stay in her apartment. She lets him—“My week’s full of graveyard shifts. Make the most out of my rent, Sasuke-kun!” The smell of antiseptic mingling with her jasmine, the olive of her sheets, and pink hair strands on the floor make the four walls seem more lived in .
Sasuke dares one time to touch the fingers peeking out of her blanket. No more than a graze, but she clasps back, fully aware of his touch in the dark.
"Come to bed, Sasuke."
He settles tentatively on the space she leaves for him as she moves further toward the wall. She assumes he’ll be second guessing by the time he is on the bed, but he presses a hand to her waist, stopping her from moving farther away from him. Sakura sinks into the heat of his palm which travels against threads and layers of cloth and into her pores.
So this is what it feels like. To be touched. To be anchored.
He memorizes the map of her skin in the dark, and he allows himself to leave marks. For a long time, he wanted to be remembered in anger—as the son who avenged his family—but now he wanted it to be for this.
This tender, soothing conflagration.
The next time he opens his eyes, it’s already morning, and fully dressed Sakura is halfway out the door. Sheets spilling on his naked waist, he tries to shake off the drowse, “I’ll go.”
“Silly.” There’s a smile in her voice. “You have the whole day. No need to get up yet.”
At her reassurance, his eyes turn heavy and he drifts back to the abyss. Uchiha Sasuke, survivor of the Great Ninja War, finally learns how to sleep again.
He remembers this feeling even when he eventually leaves the village gates for a journey he must take alone. The forest, while a comfortable companion, seems unable to match the peace in Haruno’s clutter. But when she leaves with him the second time around, Sasuke finds it’s not her things that activate the sleep hormones in his mind.
It is simply her.
When she lays her head on his shoulder, and the afternoon passes in a blink. Her back pressed against his chest in an unnamed inn with winter howling, but warm are his dreams. His mouth kissing the crown of her hair as they struggle inside one sleeping bag in the summer.
Sasuke remembers this feeling when Sakura’s the first to wake, and he hugs her closer to whisper an overused plea in her ear, “Tell Shizune you’re on sick leave.”
“I did that last week already. A doctor cannot be sick all the time,” she complains, but she is frozen in place, only brought to life by a kiss on her nape. “Okay fine, five minutes more.”
He remembers this feeling when he hears the door shut, and the little bundle beside him stirs from the noise.
“Let’s sleep a little more,” he murmurs softly to his daughter. Sarada responds by burrowing further against his chest, filling his heart with still frames of her and the hundred unintelligible words that toddlers use as expressions of love.
There are still nightmares, but Sasuke gets to wake up knowing what he has in his embrace is better than the best dreams.