Word count: 600.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
The secret to the success of Fugaku and Mikoto's marriage was their lack of communication.
In the mornings, Itachi and Sasuke would come to the kitchen for breakfast. Sasuke would have his cereal, Itachi his onigiri.
All four of them would sit around the low table. Mikoto would question each of her sons, Sasuke as to what he would be going over in school that day, and Itachi what he was doing that day. Both answered with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Fugaku read the paper.
During the day, the house would grow too silent. Without Itachi and Sasuke in the home, Mikoto grew restive and wanted out. She usually went into the village for the day, sometimes shopping, sometimes spending the day with friends, sometimes just going down to the river and lowering her bare feet into the cool water and thinking. Sometimes she wished she could be allowed to take missions again on a regular basis. She never told Fugaku where she was going, never asked for his permission, and he was content with that. He knew that she had the ability to leave them, and simply trusted in her devotion in her children to keep her from exercising that right.
They barely knew each other at all, and preferred to keep it that way. They didn't talk, and thus their more violent arguments tended to come when they were forced to be in each other's company for extended periods of time. When those arguments came, they glared, shouted, sometimes hit; Mikoto never claimed the role of battered wife because her pride wouldn't allow it and because she was more than capable of giving as good as she got, and that knowledge usually made Fugaku think twice; he would only ever hit someone capable and willing to hit back. During those times, Mikoto would look back and wonder how she could have ever married that man, until she remembered that she hadn't had a choice.
On better days, they preferred to ignore each other. Fugaku would occasionally ask Mikoto's opinion on a matter concerning his work, since though they barely knew each other Fugaku knew well enough that Mikoto was an intelligent woman and that he could trust her opinion. Apart from that, they had no conversation. It was a marriage put on ice, neither thriving nor failing; stuck in time, frozen in place.
Of course, the children were never allowed to see any of this, though somehow Itachi knew anyway, and undoubtedly sided with his mother.
When Itachi and Sasuke came home in the evening, Mikoto would make supper. All four would sit around the table. Mikoto would enquire about their day, and they would answer with varying enthusiasm. Sometimes Fugaku broke in to the conversation, more often to question Itachi than to talk to Sasuke. Mikoto and Fugaku barely seemed to comprehend each other's presence.
To an outsider looking in with a barely superficial knowledge of the family, this would have seemed the picture of domestic bliss, albeit a little more absent on the parent's parts. Those on the inside knew differently.
Itachi in particular (and Sasuke was beginning to suspect that something wasn't right), knew that his parent's marriage wasn't one of affection; it was one of apathy. It saddened him, but he knew there was nothing he could do about it.
Mikoto devoted her life to her children (since she wasn't allowed to do otherwise), and Fugaku to his work. They were strangers living in the same house.
They didn't talk, and for the sake of their marriage, they preferred to keep it that way.
