The Uchiha Restoration
How could he ask her something like that? Well, Sakura knew how he could; the answer was quite simple. Uchiha Sasuke was an insensitive jackass. She must have asked him to go out with her dozens upon dozens of times and every time he said no. She loved him until her heart couldn't take it anymore and broke. She was young, she bounced back. Everyone knew the pain of first love and the strength you feel when you've moved on. In Sasuke, she found a friend, who underneath it all, had a lot of need. She promised to do all she could to help him.
But, this, this was cruel. Now that he had some want of her, no love, or even attraction, just to make little Uchihas, he twisted his words and the situation so that she couldn't say no. He already had her word that she'd do it.
Minutes had passed since the proposal, if it could be called that and Sakura still hadn't said anything. She half wanted to rail at him, scream and curse and hate him. But what sort of terrible person would hate a friend because he wanted a family? The other half wanted to hug him and tell him it was all right, but her arms felt like lead and her throat was still dry.
Sasuke's triumphant smirk was waning a bit. She still hadn't said anything. She couldn't betray him. She promised, she swore. Sakura nodded, it was all she could do. Sasuke gripped her shoulders and thanked her again.
Her knees buckled sometime after he had left, off going who-knows-where for who-knows-what reason. He could have been a little affectionate, Sakura thought irritably as she sat in the packed dirt of the unpaved trail on which they had been walking. He could have at least pretended. She sighed and tried to let the anger drain out of her. It didn't work.
Sakura fell back, lying on the path, not much caring if anyone was staring at her. Around her, people were going about their normal day. Coming home from or embarking on a new mission. Buying produce in the open air market. So what if someone stared at the crazy pink-haired ninja-teacher with a big forehead, getting dust all over the back of her dress? Uchiha Sasuke just asked her to be a baby factory for him and as far as she was concerned, Sakura could do whatever the hell she wanted.
Ugh. She wanted to take a bath. She also wanted to think, so it was a damn shame her apartment didn't have bathing facilities. Sakura had never minded going to the bathhouse before, but listening to the chattering of any number of girls in the village and spreading gossip just didn't appeal at the moment. She did suspect she had a good idea who the next juiciest bit would be about though.
As Sakura trudged toward the public bath, she wondered if her parents would mind if she stopped by to use the bathroom for a bit. That way, her mother could wash her clothes while she was at it. Of course, if she did that, she'd probably wind up telling her parents that she was engaged. Her father, especially, would have a fit, and Sakura doubted her mother would be none too pleased, given her age. The age of consent in all of Fire Country, including Konoha, was eighteen, but few were married at that age. Nineteen wasn't much better. The utter lack of any sort of romantic entanglement between them didn't help either. What made Sasuke think it could even work out between them? He might not even care if it couldn't work. Being completely miserable with someone's company wasn't new to him.
Sakura sighed again, and this time it made her feel a little bit better. At least her parents didn't have any sort of outward dislike of Sasuke and they certainly liked him better than Naruto. Ugh, she was going to have to tell Naruto, and Ino, and Lee and everyone. Maybe she could get Sasuke to do that. Probably not. He wouldn't think it was any of their business. Hmm, maybe Naruto.
She was going to have to talk to Sasuke. Decide when to get married, make preparations for the ceremony. Maybe figure out if this wasn't all some big joke. Maybe find out if Sasuke had ever made a joke in his life. She was going to have to talk to him soon, Sakura realized as she trudged toward the bathhouse. It wasn't as if she could agree to something like this and then ignore him until next Thursday's Ichiraku meeting.
The women's public bath was nice as far as they went. The title was clean, none of the sinks were chipped, and the furo was kept just cool enough so that the heat wasn't unbearable. For a little bit extra, you could buy soaps and shampoo, which Sakura needed to make use of, since she hadn't stopped by her apartment to get her bathing supplies. A few of the boys in the village peeked now and then on dares, but there wasn't a woman in the village who couldn't deal with a bratty kid or two.
As was the custom, she scrubbed her skin clean and washed her hair at a stool, rinsing herself every so often with cold water before joining the women in the heated tub. A few of them she knew as teacher of their children and they shared polite How Are You's and Nice to See You's. Sakura listened to the chatter of people having conversations until she couldn't take it anymore and got out, dressing in her dirty clothing. It didn't feel like there was much of a point to taking a bath anymore, but Sakura figured she'd go home, change her clothes and blow dry her hair.
The plans were put on hold when she saw Naruto heading in the opposite direction. Even though her clothes were dirty and her hair wet, she ran to meet him.
"Hey, Sakura-chan!" he greeted brightly.
"Naruto, um, have you seen Sasuke-kun?" she asked.
"Why? Do you know what's wrong with him?"
"Mmm…I think he's just lonely." She hadn't really thought about it, but now that it had come out, Sakura realized that made a lot of sense. All that about restoring his clan… what was that other than just wanting to have a family again?
"He never acts lonely," Naruto said, his eyes screwed up in his 'thoughtful' expression.
"You never do, either…" Sakura said softly.
"Sakura-chan…"
"I know," she apologized, "that was a low blow. But maybe Sasuke-kun acts lonely in his own way. His own leave-me-alone sort of way."
"Anything's possible. Does he know he's being an idiot?"
"I'll ask him the next time I see him," Sakura muttered darkly.
Whether Naruto noticed the change in Sakura's attitude and thought it best to change the subject or if it was just his short attention span acting up or maybe even that he didn't want to encourage Sakura to think too much about Sasuke, he changed the subject and it was probably better for them both that he did.
"You won't believe the grunt work they had me doing today…"
The conversation turned to stories about the day. Nothing important or shocking, just the small things of mild interest, like Naruto's B-rank mission of harvesting medicinal plants from a few of the fenced-in training areas or which of Sakura's students acted up that morning. By the time they had reached Sakura's building, the conversation had turned to a usual topic for the two of them lately. In a few months, her first class would be up for graduation. Sakura thought it would be great if he took a cell of students for genin survival training, but if they passed, he would have to go back to D-rank missions and on top of that, just supervising. No action, just sitting around watching like their teacher had. He didn't even think he could get any joy out of being terminally late like Kakashi had.
"What was his problem, anyway?"
"He was just teaching us patience," Sakura said confidently, unlocking her door.
"Eh, maybe." Naruto fingered a paperweight, speaking over the sound of Sakura's blow-dryer. He just assumed she could hear him. "The guy's Hokage for crying out loud and he's still late all the time. Any day now he's going to assign me to work on his face in the monument, I just know. Just for kicks."
"Would that be so bad?" She could hear him.
"Yeah! I need A-Rank missions, not carving some stuffy statue of the stinky old pervert."
"He doesn't smell…" Sakura yanked knots out her hair, the dryer turned off.
"Yeah, that's right, defend him. He likes assigning me grunt work. You didn't see him today. He was making that face the whole time."
"How can you tell? You can only see his one eye."
"You can tell," Naruto said with such brevity that Sakura cracked up. She felt a lot of tension leave her in that laugh and it didn't go unnoticed by Naruto. "Don't tell me something's wrong with you too."
She spun around, modeling her filthy clothing. "Bad day. I'm gonna change."
Weird. Naruto was sure she hadn't mentioned anything about having a bad day. She'd seemed pretty much normal to him when he saw her on her way home form the bath house, if a little pre-occupied with Sasuke, which was normal in itself.
"Okay.." he said.
"It's no big deal," Sakura lied. Naruto caught that. "I'm thinking of going to my parents' house later." He didn't catch that.
~*~*~
For the past few years, the fact that she knew where he lived was a source of mild embarrassment for her. She never went to his house, it was just a hold over bit of information from years ago, when she desperately tried to know everything about him before his other legions of fans knew. It wasn't a difficult thing to find out. He had a whole area of the town to himself. How utterly depressing. His own personal ghost town.
It didn't occur to Sakura that she had no idea if Sasuke was home or not until she was standing on his stoop. She knocked on the door, once, twice. No answer. She didn't doubt this was where he lived. The other houses had been boarded up for years. It was the only place he could live. He wasn't there now, apparently. Well, where ever he was, Sakura was determined to talk to him, so she sat down on the stoop, elbows on her knees and chin cupped in her hands and settled in to wait.
Sakura was there maybe half an hour when she saw Sasuke coming up the road, holding a plastic bag, the kind market shoppers receive at a few of the more well-to-do stands. She stood up in greeting, to let him know she was there. His pace didn't alter at all.
"Hi," she said nervously as Sasuke came up the steps. She hadn't said anything to him since… What was she going to say now? What was he going to say?
As it turned out, he wasn't going to say anything. Just nod to her and open the front door. When he didn't close it behind himself, Sakura followed him in. He didn't protest. She closed the door.
Sasuke was taking his purchases out of the bag, a sack of rice, a fresh package of dried seaweed sheets and three plump tomatoes.
"So, um, what have you done today?" Sakura asked. When did trying to force conversation out of him become so awkward?
"Training, mostly," he replied. "I was assigned to an escort mission that's set to leave in two days. A representative of a Water Country daimyo arrived to make peace negotiations, as our countries have never been allied. It's meant to be some sort of act of good faith that Leaf Ninjas are escorting him home."
"It would be more good faith for the daimyo to come himself."
Sasuke snorted. "They don't intend to ally their selves with us. The Hokage suspects the representative is an elite shinobi himself. He absolutely refused to have a Leaf jounin on his guard." As he spoke, Sasuke moved about the kitchen methodically, measuring water, pouring it in the rice cooker, adding the rice. Sakura just watched him and decided there was something very strange about seeing him cook, but he must have been making his own food for longer than she'd known him. She also had more than just an inkling that she knew what he was making.
"Don't you ever get tired of rice balls?"
"No."
"What are the tomatoes for?" Sakura didn't see what they were for; no rice ball filling she knew of contained just fresh tomato.
"I like them."
A small giggle escaped Sakura's lips and Sasuke looked at her oddly. "It's just kind of silly." He didn't understand how she found that funny, but didn't press the matter. Instead, he just dropped it. "When Kakashi asked us what we liked and didn't like, you said you didn't like much of anything. Wouldn't it have been funny if you said you liked tomatoes?"
"…No.. It wouldn't have been."
Sakura sobered. She didn't say another thing and neither did Sasuke. She twitched. All right, she told herself, he has ten minutes to say something. After that, I'm leaving. She glanced at the clock. And, GO!
Nine minutes into the vow, the Ting! of the rice cooker broke the silence. Methodically, Sasuke curled a sheet of seaweed into a cupped shape and filled it with rice. It wasn't so much of a recipe as a quick way of throwing the ingredients together. While it wasn't what he would do when preparing a packed lunch or even his dinner in advance, it worked for now.
Without a word, he held the first rice ball out to Sakura. She blushed, very slightly and took it. Mentally, she turned off the timer. Actions did speak louder than words, after all.
Also, he had very clean fingernails. Imagine that.
"How long will you been on your mission?" Sakura asked. She supposed, if they really were going to go through with the wedding, it would make the most sense to begin planning after he returned.
"It's been projected at three days length, though it more than likely will take a week."
"Wow. Master Kakashi isn't giving the client any credit, is he?"
"We'll see if the client deserves any," Sasuke replied, picking up stray grains of rice with a finger. He made himself another makeshift rice ball and tore into the seaweed with his teeth. It had the consistency of paper and a strong smell of salt water, which added contrast and flavor to the sticky steamed rice.
Sakura nodded and nibbled at her own rice. "What will you do if he is a shinobi and attacks? Or worse, if he has a team of jounin waiting?"
"We're prepared for such eventualities."
"How can you prepare if a client is setting you up? You definitely can't fight someone you've been assigned to protect," Sakura pointed out. How many times had Master Kakashi held Naruto back from attacking Tazuna? Inwardly, Sakura smiled.
"It's all very simple, Sakura," Sasuke said, unfolding his legs from beneath his kitchen table and standing up. She looked up at him. "They assigned me." His lips curled up in that triumphant smile again. He began to walk to the front door, beckoning her to follow with a few flaps of his hand.
"No shortage of ego here," Sakura said good-naturedly. She was feeling a good deal better about everything. Even though she and Sasuke hadn't spoken of …it, they were still able to get along with it hanging in the air. Each other's company wasn't anymore awkward than usual. Just as tactless, though, Sakura though, as Sasuke ushered her out the door.
But, when the door closed, he was still standing by her side. He ambled down the steps, again, beckoning Sakura to follow.
"Where are we going?"
He looked back her, eyebrows raised high enough that she couldn't see them beneath his leaf head protector.
"We're getting married."
