title: the love you're given
summary: home is where your heart is. — SS, one summer early into their marriage.
raw word count: 545
notes: giftfic for the light of my life. happy birthday, Luce ❤
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curled up on the porch, she watches the curve of his back as he tends to the garden: he's barefoot on the damp soil, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat secured with a knot under the chin and old, faded housewear that's too loose at the waist — checking each individual plant with careful hands, an expression of absolute concentration painted across his features. it's such an awfully domestic scene.
something fizzes inside her, champagne-pink and sorbet-mellow.
it's almost August, already.
she splays her fingers over the barely-there bump on her stomach, smiling.
"You alright?" Sasuke asks, quietly. there's a touch of concern in the way his brow knits.
"Yeah. I'm just—hm. Contemplative."
he offers her a tomato, a half-smile tucked in the corners of his mouth. there are marigold petals stuck to his toes like little patches of the setting summer sun, and in that moment she loves him infinitely.
"Talk to me about it."
she shrugs a little, biting into the fruit. "It's only half coherent."
"Still."
"Hm..." she chews slow, deliberate. "Reality feels...thin, somehow."
"Like a dream."
"Or an illusion."
that stings, a little, even if she didn't mean it to. fleetingly, Sasuke's face changes.
"It isn't," he murmurs. gently, he traces the curve of her jaw with his thumb. "I'm real. So is this house."
And so is the notion of 'us'.
she leans into the touch. "I know. Really, I know." the moment stretches, comfortable around them. then: "Go back to gardening," she says, nudging him a little with her knee. "I'll go get dinner started."
he complies, an easy, long shadow.
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the meal is a simple enough affair: pan-grilled fish over rice. the kitchen table skids a little, so she has to shove cardboard under the faulty leg.
"We really need to buy furniture," Sasuke observes from the doorway, pot of tomatoes under his arm. most of the manor is still in the last stages of reconstruction; and as he is adamant about doing most of the work himself, it's a slow process. "At least the immediate necessities."
she shrugs. "It's not really that urgent."
"It will be, when your ankles start to swell."
"Yeah, yeah. Just sit down, you got the point." pause. "Didn't you?"
his lips twitch.
"You're so—ugh!" she huffs. "Incorrigible."
"I know," he says, and presses a kiss to her temple. "Come on. Let's eat."
he washes the tomatoes, and Sakura can't help but watch the way the muscles in his arms ripple with the motion. the scar will never fully fade — that band of discolored ivory coiled around his arm like barbed wire, marking the spot where Tsunade had affixed him a lab-grown limb to replace the one he'd lost in the war.
"You're sad again," he notes once seated. "Why?"
"No, not sad," she says, giving a slow shake of the head. "This is just my thinking face," she jokes, but it falls a little short. "I'm...wistful, I guess."
his eyebrows ply, inquisitive.
"It's just—we've come really far, haven't we?"
"Yeah," he says, taking her hand in his good one; fine movement is still a little awkward with the transplant, the feeling in it permanently quite numb. the kind of vulnerability needed here doesn't leave room for exercised restraint. "Yeah, we have."
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fin.