not really a snippet or anything visual, but just in case it inspires something-
circadian rhythms
i wrote the first paragraph ages ago, op, and i think it was supposed to go somewhere different. but i hope this was adequately soft and enjoyable anyways!
All creatures have their habits, circadian rhythms set to the turning of the Earth or the journey of the seasons, and Sasuke does too, but his circadian rhythm is tuned to Sakura.
He wakes reliably at five every morning, so he has enough time to run through his kata and to make breakfast before Sakura falls out of bed, usually in a panic and probably already running a little behind. While she hastily eats, always making time to ask him about his plans for the day, Sasuke will prepare a small bento (because he knows she prefers a light lunch) that he hands to her as she dashes out the door.
He tends to the garden and starts dinner about an hour before she usually comes home, and during the days where she has to stay late at the hospital he will reliably bring a (much larger) bento to her. They eat together in her office, Sakura sometimes chattering about her day and sometimes content to just eat in appreciative silence, their thighs always touching as they sit side by side. It’s a priority to Sasuke, that they have dinner together.
A rhythm, that Naruto relentlessly mocks (you’ve become boring, bastard). A rhythm that Sasuke likes to set his life to, because it means that every day Sakura will come home, that every day they will get to eat together, and go to bed together, and that she will be the first thing he sees in the morning.
//summary: She doesn’t see that all along, what he wanted was her. Her, not a perfect wife. Just Sakura. — SasuSaku, AU.
// previous - masterpost
In the aftermath, what is there to say?
She keeps seeing his face--the way the pain had twisted the familiar features into something weathered and unrecognizable. There is no metaphor about beauty and sadness to be had, just his grief, laid uncomfortably bare at her feet.
Sakura leans back against the hard examination table, still wearing her smoke stained clothes. The doctor had just left, but she knows there are probably no less than three agents outside her door. Swallowing, she draws her knees up to her chest, pressing her face hard against the torn fabric of her pants. There’s an absence of relief, of any sense of safety or escape. The kidnapping had felt like a dream, the Akatsuki’s insistence that the lack of Sasuke’s signature on the divorce documents was proof of his care absurd.
She’d walked away, but Sakura has known Sasuke since she’d been a child, has loved him for far longer than she’d been in love with him, and she can’t pretend she hadn’t seen him; she can’t pretend that—
“Haruno-san? Hatake-sama is waiting for you.”
Ignoring the way every single muscle of her is screaming in protest, Sakura refuses the officer’s extended hand and hops off the table. Well, she thinks, from the fire to the frying pan.
summary: She doesn’t see that all along, what he wanted was her. Her, not a perfect wife. Just Sakura. — SasuSaku, AU.
// previous - masterpost
Uchiha Mikoto, when she died, had been on her way to pay respects to an elderly aunt. She had not just had another argument with her husband, brutal in its quiet finality. She had not been driving away with no intention of coming back, of going to Wakasu Park and perhaps flinging her marital ring into the ocean.
Uchiha Mikoto, when she died, had died a devoted, loving wife.
//
“She wouldn’t have left,” Sasuke says, the whites of his eyes a little too prominent, the clench of his hands to the left of too tight.
Itachi shakes his head at his little brother (always little—no matter that his ototou has surpassed him just slightly in height), wondering if he had meant their mother, or if he had meant his wife.
“She wasn’t leaving you,” the intonation slight but there, just enough for the white knuckled hands to loosen a little.
“If we hadn’t been grown, she would have found us first,” Itachi moves past Sasuke to stand before the sea, his hand drifting casually across his brother’s shoulder. The younger man nearly jerks, and Itachi takes his time looking at the waves breaking against the pier. He does not think his mother would have jumped; he had not lied when he said Mikoto would have never willingly left her sons.
(Whispered once: Itachi-kun, family is the most important thing, but don’t forget that you get to choose who they are.)
I LOVEEE YOUR SASUSAKU FICS!!! a prompt maybeee 'please don't hurt me like this' or 'what's this between us' or 'i'm trying but its just too hard'. You can pick anything thay you like and make it as ANGSTY AS POSSIBLE UNTIL MY HEART BLEEDS UGHHHHH I NEED A GOOD CRY! Thank youuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!
thank you so much! this is inexcusably late, i know.
//
“Do you know what I find to be the most frustrating thing in the world?”
Her question comes after more than a half hour of silence, and Sasuke would startle if he hadn’t already been looking at her, the vibrant colors of her hair and clothing blurring as he’d stared.
He figures it’s rhetorical, and there’s only a brief pause before she turns to face him, “The wasted potential. We could have helped you. We would have listened. Naruto would have torn them apart for you, but...”
Sakura spreads her arms, a well here we are that’s nonchalant and easy and holds nothing of the girl that’d held his hand and his arms and then a kunai to his back. There is pity in her too-green eyes, vague and impersonal and infuriating. He would have lunged at her then, if he could.
“You would have never understood, you still don’t understand—”
Sakura shakes her head, and he prefers condescension, he would have preferred betrayal and horror and condemnation, but the quiet pity—the disappointment—reminds him of his mother, of Itachi’s imperceptible pursing of the lips when he hadn’t been able to master Katon quickly enough.
“I would have never been able to understand, Sasuke, but that wouldn’t have mattered. We loved you,” his eyes trace the movement of her throat as Sakura swallows, “What was between the three of us, we would have moved mountains.”
And there’s nothing Sasuke can say to that, because he knows it’s the truth.
Her hand reaches out, and hovers over the rubbed-raw skin of his shackled wrists; a soft green glow, and then the skin is soft and new again. The warmth of Sakura’s chakra is a shock in the pervasive chill of the subterranean room, and for a moment, Sasuke closes his eyes and lets himself imagine what it would have been like to have had that warmth with him always; to have the two steady bodies of a team that he could have (would have) trusted with his back and his life and his grief. To have had Sakura sit across from him at a dinner table and next to him for hanami and for her hand to hold his, easily and casually and frequently, every single day.
The door to the interrogation cell scrapes open with a screech, and the dream ends.
summary: She doesn’t see that all along, what he wanted was her. Her, not a perfect wife. Just Sakura. — SasuSaku, AU.
// previous - masterpost
“Akatsuki has long been split into two factions, and Danzo was angry at Fugaku. He thought striking at our mother was the right choice. He thought our father would care,” the day was cloudy, and twilight had made even the shallow waters murky and dark.“No one knew how deeply unhappy she was—”
“What does any of this have to do with Sakura?” Sasuke snarls, the cardstock crumpled in his hands.”Our mother is dead, it’s been years—”
“Our father has never stopped meddling.”
Behind them, there are the occasional shouts of children, of anxious parents calling after them; in a very different time, long ago, his brother had been among them, loud and nearly idiotically fearless.
The children, Itachi thinks, coupled with the public nature of the park, should curb the chances of surveillance or violent engagement.
Sasuke himself had always been a fidgety child, scolded often by Fugaku for his failure to maintain the requisite Uchiha stillness. Gods, his father reminded them, do not fidget. He is still now, every line and angle drawn taut with tension; Itachi mentally applauds his brother.
“Haruno Sakura is still alive, they wouldn’t kill her without demanding something of you or Fugaku first.”
(Itachi had delivered the divorce papers, after all.)
There are no more words from his otouto, he is already halfway across the green before Itachi finishes saying their father’s name.
He follows.
//
There is no sound for a very long time.
Correction, there is no sound except for her breathing, loud and labored and trapped in the humid burlap sack. Sakura is absurdly pleased that she’d bothered to brush her teeth in the hospital locker room before she’d been—kidnapped? Snatched? Taken?
She flexes her bound hands as best she could, wiggling each finger and toe carefully; it still takes her far too little time.
Sakura takes a deep breath through her nose: in, out.
In. Her hands are bound behind her, tied behind a chair.
Out. Her legs are bound at the ankles, and it’s not so tight that she can’t move them at all.
In. She has been here for at least several hours, and she has been alone the entire time.
Out. There is a non-zero chance that this has to do with Sasuke.
(How does Sakura feel about that? How does she feel about any of this, beyond the panic and the terror that she is trying to pretend isn’t hiding behind a very thin layer of slow, even breathing?
Has she told anyone that she loves them lately? Did she finish her paperwork?
Will he care? Would it hurt him; would that hurt stain?)
There is a dull roar close by, and for a second there are giants hovering overhead, ghosts clad in the armor of dead samurai, eyes red as the moon—
He wakes in darkness, to the dull roar of the surf.
There is nothing else.
It takes him four days to leave the dark, damp cave.The coastline is steep and spare, and for a while he sits in a weak stupor.
Freshwater drips from the rocky ceiling; he forces himself to drink. Small crabs scuttle across the floor; he forces himself to eat.
The sun rises on day four. He forces himself to leave. He forces himself to survive.
He regains his strength by the sea, but with an absence of weakness he finds that he has no other focus. No memories, no context, not even a name.
The thought slots neatly into place, and he—
He panics.
He runs. He finds that he is fast, that he is strong. He runs and the world blurs and he does not know where he is going. He doesn’t stop until something inside of him snaps, leaving him empty and exhausted on a forest floor.
What else is there?
He opens his eyes in the misty morning light, his face wet with dew. Above him, trees tower towards the sky, the branches mostly bare. The clouds have parted for the first time since he woke. Early spring.
He realizes that this is the first he will remember.
He spends his mornings like this:
Despite missing an arm, he is geared towards survival. He’d known he was strong, but he finds that he is also good at traveling, at being alone. His body knows how to find shelter, how to pick what is good to eat from what is not.
When he first ventures into a small village, looking to exchange labor for clean clothing, for some food, the people shrink from him, and that too is—is familiar.
He doesn’t—he doesn’t prod at that. He tries not to wonder who he’d been, because:
He’d woken up in that cave alone, and he’d stayed there for far too long, hoping that someone would come by, that someone would know him, that someone would help fill the void of his memories. He’d stayed until he’d become disgusted with himself, and he’d chosen to survive instead.
The facts are:
He is missing an arm. People see him and they are immediately afraid. No one had come for him.
He thinks he will rebuild himself anew.
The wind takes him eastward.
He takes odd jobs to earn coin, and tries to see if he’d had any place to call home. He discovers his preferences—his habits, his likes and dislikes—all over again.
He spends his mornings like this:
Wake before the sunrise, before the morning mist has time to clear; stretch slowly, and then a run to escape the restlessness of the night before. He breaks his fast with a small meal, and always a cup of tea if he happens to be in a village with a teahouse or an inn. He takes it hot, with a small sprig of some of the mint that he takes to carrying with him.
Every day brings a new, tiny revelation, but nothing consequential, nothing that amounts to even a scrap of memory.
He still can’t bear to give himself a name.
He eventually finds himself at the capital. The daimyo’s palace is surrounded by a grove of cherry trees, and as the nobles observe hanami within the gates, the common folk celebrate in their own way, with rest and food-laden mats spread haphazardly over the grass as they enjoyed the fleeting beauty of the blossoms.
He looks up at the canopy of pink and, unbidden, thinks: Sakura.
Wind shakes the trees and petals fall in a soft rain. He holds still, and lets himself be covered.
That night, he jolts awake—frantic, panting, hand searching for something next to him. A name. A name. Not the name of the blossoms but the name of a person.
Not his name, but the only one he has.
Sakura.
Sakura.
She comes back to him slowly.
First: her name, and the color of her hair.
Sakura. Pink. Eastward.
Then in a market: the scent of apples.
He remembers white on red cloth. He remembers a trembling hand holding his steady. He remembers green eyes.
He would hate this woman if he could. He hates that he can recall with clarity the purse of her lips and the arch of her brow when he can’t even remember himself.
He would hate her, except above all he remembers her love.
Do you know of any women with pink hair and green eyes?
Has a woman with pink hair gone through here?
I don’t recall her family name but her first name would have been Sakura.
When he asks the shopkeeper about the woman with pink hair, he doesn’t encounter the lack of recognition that he’s used to; instead, the man nods.
Why yes! She passed through here a while ago. Funnily enough she was looking for someone too. A dark-hair man missing an arm, the man pauses and openly goggles at his pinned sleeve. Seems like she was looking for you.
He’d stopped breathing when he’d heard yes, and now his heart feels like it’ll give out as well.
Someone had tried.
She’d looked for him.
She’d followed his footsteps, when he’d still had a name and a purpose and a past, and now he follows hers.
Some of the people he encounters remember him, and one day he rediscovers his name because once he’d thought to give it to an old woman at a fruit stand.
You said your name was Sasuke-san.
There is no rush of recognition, no sudden onslaught of memories. The name doesn’t feel familiar; it doesn’t feel right or wrong or like it’d been his.
Only—
Sasuke-kun.
Sasuke-kun!
Sasuke-kun, please don’t hurt them.
Sasuke-kun...take me with you!
Sasuke-kun, we’re bringing you back with us!
It’s dark when he finds the place where he’d died.
Clouds blot moonlight from the sky, and this is just a place. That is just a cave. The sun will rise.
But.
This is where he’d died, and even though it has been a time, a part of him is afraid that if he walks inside—
He forces himself to stop. To take a breath and concentrate on the sound of the sea.
Someone had recently been here: the mouth of the cave must have collapsed at some point, but there are fresh tracks in the sand where rubble had been dug out to create clear passage.
He thinks that he will find her inside. For her, he knows he is willing to walk back into the darkness.
She’d been asleep, body curled inwards and turned away from him, but the moment he steps inside the cave, her shoulders tense and he knows she’s awake.
He can just make out the pale halo of her hair, but he knows the slope of her shoulders and the length of her arms.
Sakura.
All he has is his name. He has his name, and he has Sakura.
She doesn’t move—she’s so perfectly still and so perfectly far.
He’d woken in darkness, almost two years ago, and he sees that she’s led him—
“Sakura.”
Distance shrinks, and she is—
He’d thought he’d remembered her perfectly, but his scant memories could not conjure in perfect detail the warmth, the shade of her eyes in the night.
Sasuke has his name, and he has Sakura. Everything else he knows she’ll help him find later.
but I'm afraid that if I were to hold you would wither away.
“do you consider this compassion? that seeing you like this would count as–as getting even?”
sasuke doesn’t look at her. sasuke never does. look at me, sakura thinks. just once, look at me.
he doesn’t, of course, but he also doesn’t leave. she doesn’t think he could, she doesn’t think he wants to; she thinks he wants her to be the one to push him, to lash out and to storm off, to weep angry tears and call him ugly names. then he could finish crossing the threshold of the flea infested shack that he’d been staying in for the past week, and after he’d stared at the moon stoically for an appropriate amount of time, he would move on to the next no-name backwater country on his personal pity party tour.
for the first time since the war, sakura wants to hurt him. not with physical pain or the kind of cruelty that sasuke has learned and savored and now craved like some fucked up form of penance, but–
“i’m not playing this game anymore, sasuke. you can’t drive me away. i’m here. i’m staying here. i’m not leaving until–”
the dip of his head is almost imperceptible, but she notices, because she’s sakura.
so she takes a step forward, lays a hand on his shoulder, and sasuke…sasuke trembles underneath her fingers. he looks at her.
“sasuke-kun.”
in the morning, they leave together.
--
note: hi anon, i’ve had this in my inbox for weeks and i wasn’t sure how to respond, or how you’d like me to respond, so i sort of left it alone until apparently some flash fic inspiration struck.
do you have any NaruSaku fics on ffnet that you would recommend? i’ve read all of the ones you’ve posted and you made me fall in love with the ship ❤️
ahhh yes you’ve come to the right place. i know there are narusaku rec blogs on tumblr, but all of my favorites are old school fics from ffn:
All of Narf-for-the-Garthoc’s fics are well-written, IC, and just make you feel good
Changing, by kitsune13. WAFF with a dash of angst
Blue Jean’s Firsts, and Bringing Back Sasuke; the latter is more T7 focused with a heavy side of Sasuke-introspection
sharingank’s Broken Wings and assorted other narusaku fics (most recently they have some nice sasusaku fics as well, if that’s up your alley)
Any of Aubreywitch’s narusaku fics (idk if it matters to you but they’re mostly rated m)
Heaven Unexpected, by Folle; one of the few times where I can stand one of the tropes that I dislike the most because of another that I love
Any of Miss Soupy’s ns fics; their fics remind me of the way I used to feel when the manga was at its height and I’d write thousands of words a night because I loved it so much
peanutbutter126′s fics and drabble collection
The Best Dates are the Cheap Ones, by Shivakashi
Colors of a Heart by cutecrazyice; not only because it’s v sweet and well written but because I’m still v proud of inducting Christine into the pairing
i hope you enjoy! if these aren’t enough to tide you over for a while, i’d recommend checking out the archives on heaven and earth.
