Disclaimer: Naruto, old and borrowed and not mine.

On bedmates and drinking partners

(clean version)

Dormant Muses challenge / community activity
Dear Santa: The December Anonymous Writing Challenge
request reads as follows:
drabble, one-shot, snippet, whatsoever
Pairing and Series: From Naruto, Sasusaku
Prompt: knitted fabric
Genre: Romance.
(AND I COMPEL YOU TO WRITE.)

Despair was a poor drinking companion. It rendered each libation an unceremonious dunking into the brackish water of oblivious Lethe, but only for a few fleeting moments. It was like drowning in an abysmal well, but with lungs that never quite fill up with water. It was to have one's eyes coated with an inky translucence through which one could still make out silhouettes. It was stopping one's ears with one's fingers, which wouldn't really stop whatever hateful sounds one had wanted to elude in the first place.

Uchiha Sasuke thus rarely lingered over wine cups. He took alcohol for formalities and ceremonies, a toast for each newborn child, for example, each Konoha nin returned alive. Whatever sorrows he would own to, he drowned with strong black tea. (He was also known to drown anger with blood--an ally's or an enemy's, he was supposedly indiscriminate, making him a sinister, controversial choice for chief of the recently revived military police---he had never deigned to address such accusations.) For the most part, however, he didn't seem to have much need of any sort of panacea. He had enough of the simple contentment to balance with the innate ambition that had always been his driving force in life. Homey routines boxed his vision into a narrow set of tracks: there wasn't an unending road to look at, to wonder what lay beyond the rest of it swallowed by the horizon. There wasn't a monster of a mountain to gaze up to, to dream of climbing and conquering. It was just every day living, each day not quite the same, but each one bearing an echo of another before it.

A whirl of faces, places. A pattern on cloth, repetitive, minimally variable. A fabric knitted by hand, unfinished, in progress. . . Such was his life.

Despair was no good either, as a bed mate. It subtracted rest from sleep; sometimes, there's none of even the latter left. It distorted time, such that an hour was an eternity, a heartbeat was the lifetime of a galaxy. It reduced the world to a dense, impenetrable box and one's sluggish brain, with one not knowing which was imprisoned within which.

Sasuke thrived on toil, be it physical labor or an exercise of the mind. He threw himself to his work relentlessly. In this way, he had little time left to ponder on his station in life, on what had been and what should have been, on what he had done and not done. Not that he didn't ponder at all. He simply didn't do it enough to allow the myriad of conflicting thoughts to nudge his hands. It was how he remained grounded, calm, steady. Yet, Sasuke didn't slept by himself. (Nights were most dangerous, see. One could get lost in its shadowed convolutions. To explore without the aid of sunlight, be it a mundane foreign territory for a reconnaissance mission or a brooding internal monologue, one ran the risk of getting irredeemably lost.) He kept himself occupied in bed, be it by simply holding her in his arms or by indulging in something more involved, more pleasurable.

(By "her," he did not mean Despair, though sometimes, he couldn't help but project it on her, couldn't help but qualify his despair through hers---she despaired, too, of course she did. Her light eyes, the shadow underneath them, gave it away, no matter how she tried to hide it. )

It was late at night when he arrived home, but for once he didn't stink of the usual hunt. There was a gathering in one of the great shinobi houses of Konohagakure no Sato, another celebration for another birth. Sasuke felt he had lost count of his peers' offspring long ago. At times, he felt like he had to wade through toddlers and infants before being able to speak to a comrade about a mission or something similar. There's a certain shifting of loyalties now, vague minuscule differences in what was important and what wasn't so.

There was a little less demand for explanations, too---only a little bit. And when none could be given, most friends were a tad more willing to take an answer on sheer faith, a tad more apt to simply establish a plan B, a safety net. (They wove this by hand, too. Daily. Slowly.) They were all older, but not always as wise as they were supposed to be. But they were wary.

They were all wary.

She had gone home several hours earlier than he did. She wasn't tired (not more so than most of them) nor did she dislike the company, but she also had one of those infants and toddlers afoot. She was wary, too, and in her case, she worried about the draft and the agents of decay that rode on crackling airships of orange and brown, settling by piles on the hardening earth. She worried about upper respiratory infections, bronchitis, and pneumonia, croup and whooping cough, and a whole basket of medical phrases that were meaningless to him. He listened to her, and briefly worried as well, even though he secretly maintained the belief that she could cure anything and everything, especially little childhood diseases that had nothing at all on extensive bodily damage from some elite blood limit jutsu, things even rival ninja villages would come begging for her interventions.

His son was already asleep when he arrived home. Shun was lying on his side, a fist bunched up near a puckered mouth, as if he only was barely resisting suckling on that thumb. He was clothed warmly with the colors of the house, midnight blues and slivers of whites and reds. The bonnet that covered the head-full of dark hair was an incongruous pink, however, a handmade little thing created by his mother before he was born. (For the first three months, Sakura was firmly convinced that she was definitely getting a girl. Later, she reasoned that pink was a masculine color in some cultures and continued to knit minuscule clothing that matched the tint of her hair, a hobby he found exasperating some nights.) Sasuke stood before the crib for uncounted minutes, riveted by the steady rise and fall of the infant's abdomen. It was like knitting, like living. A set group of actions, a pattern, repetitive and minimally variable. He ran a finger along an arm, across the forehead, very lightly, very gently, then detached himself and headed for the bathroom.

His hair lay limply about his head, when he came out later. The heat from his shower emanated deliciously from his body, though he himself felt the glib touch of cold air rushing quick to cool him down. He ignored this, as he tended to do with weather on a whole, and stood by the bed for more uncounted minutes, wearing only a pair of midnight blue pajama bottoms, the top piece of which was slung on a door knob somewhere. She was lying on her side in the middle of the bed, wrapped in sheets, bone white under moonlight. The comforter was bunched up about her knees, tossed aside, perhaps, at some point during the night. Abandoned beside her were three wool balls, skewered by knitting needles, and the beginnings of another project. Sasuke could make out a pattern on it, the beginnings of a paper fan, he supposed, and he moved them to the bedside table, instead of the tempting option of chucking everything out the window.

She stirred when he finally settled on his side of the bed, a glint of emerald through a grayish mop, accompanied by his murmured name. He inched nearer her and pulled up the comforter to cover them both. He stopped midway and yanked out the sheets to be able to wiggle into its folds. It peeled open to reveal a creamy shoulder and the beguiling hint of her neck. He pressed his windburned lips on her shoulder and then on the tender flesh just over her pulse point. She shifted slightly and now lay supine, then she pulled him down to her and kissed him briefly.

"Wet your lips," was the sleepy command that followed.

He took this as an invitation for something more, and busied his hands even as he leaned down once again and imperiously made her moisten his lips herself. She seemed a little more awake that second time, leaning her body against his touch, a short hitching moan escaping from her throat as he delved deeper with his tongue. One of his hands found purchase on one of her breasts when her fingers began twining about his damp hair, her strong hands lightly massaging his temples. With some difficulty, she pushed him away after a few moments, a barely detectable furrow between her brows as she scrutinized his expressionless face under the low ambient nightlight.

"What's wrong, Sasuke?" she asked. Any break from his usual patterns made her a tad apprehensive. Spontaneity, he supposed, wasn't something he usually went for.

"Nothing," he said and relocated his hands to safer parts of her anatomy.

He broke free to reposition himself, to remove the full brunt of his weight from her body. A spattering of kisses he distributed about her face as he did so, tangling his hand with hers, tracing her waist with the other. It was a little too warm, he realized, so he knocked away the comforter he had earlier pulled about them. He resumed scattering his kisses, beginning from the tip of her chin, up her jawline, and unto an ear; then, open-mouthed, he went down her neck, to her clavicle, and back to the shoulder with which he started.

"I thought you said we'd wait," she said suddenly.

"I don't care. Can you really plan these things?"

She leaned her head to his direction, an oddly petulant pose that profiled her face against the moon. He obliged and again their lips met, timidly on her part, lazily on his. After a final, more zealous, nip at his bottom lip, she pulled away, breathless.

"I don't mind," she murmured, pulling their joined hands to her chest. "But if Shun wakes up. . ."

"The first one to finish will go."

"But only if you last, Sasuke-kun," she quipped.

--

Floating away in a river of bliss would be a way to say it, but no notion could have been more furtively or swiftly kicked aside. Uchiha Sasuke had been retrieved from depths of sleep by the piercing cry he had come to know the past four months, only awake enough to reject the saccharine thought that came to him with consciouness. He remained motionless, eyes closed, but his senses were alert, probing.

His wife of three years stirred beside him.

"First one to finish, you said."

He didn't answer.

"Playing possum on a mednin?" she continued drowsily. "Really, Sasuke-kun."

He stood up and silently padded to the adjoining room, where his son bawled in the sturdy crib Sakura built herself. Sasuke picked up the child from the crib; Shun quieted almost immediately. He looked up at his father, unsmiling, but with eyes bright with interest, as he always did. Sakura had been concerned about this peculiar behavior of the baby, but she was assuaged by the fact that Shun giggled and babbled at her, usually smiling when other people played with him. But not so with Sasuke. Shun did watch his father intently, often holding out his tiny hands before him to grab at a nose, or an ear, or a stray lock of hair. He matched his father's silences, however, and it was oddly this silence that pacified him when distressed. Sakura once laughingly observed that her two boys seemed to have similar effects on each other. Sasuke had told her to shut up, embarrassed that the wonder he thought only lurking in his heart was somehow transparent to her. She didn't seem to take offense (she rarely did) and had merely hidden her smile amicably.

"I think this is one of the reasons you gave when we said we'd wait before making Shun brothers and sisters," her voice broke into his reverie.

He didn't feel her coming. (Usually, he didn't miss anything. At the back of his mind, this alarmed him slightly. The foothold he had allowed her years and years ago was now nonexistent. Hell. She practically ruled the entire territory.) He looked up at her as she glided towards him, fixing the same quiet stare on her. She had on the nightgown he had divested earlier. Judging from the spattering of water on her face and arms, she had evidently made a side-trip to the bathroom.

"This is one of the reasons we shouldn't wait," he corrected.

She blinked in surprise at this pronouncement, but pleasure speedily suffused her visage. "I don't know," she said, green eyes sparkling in the low light. "I sort of remember you complaining about lack of sleep and such."

The infant began to whimper once more, and Sasuke was spared from having to think of an appropriate comeback. Shun stretched his arms towards his mother, who had sidled up his father to smile tiredly down at him. Again the baby wailed piteously, so Sasuke gave him up to his wife.

"Hungry, I think," Sakura murmured, as she sat down and bared a breast. "It's time, anyway."

Sasuke watched wordlessly, standing over them like a sentinel, naked but for his boxers. Eventually, he noticed Sakura watching him back.

"Aren't you cold?"

"No."

The lapsed back to silence. They remained in the statuesque tableau until Shun finished feeding, was burped, and eventually fell asleep. His mother, scattered lavish kisses about the top of his head, and placed him back in his crib, his blankets judiciously arranged.

"You'll be changing his diaper later, right, Sasuke-kun?" Sakura suddenly said, as they were going back to bed.

Sasuke grunted in assent.

"You know, that sleep thing. . . You should be careful with making those grand sweeping pronouncements. Next time, stick with a more reasonable bet."

He shrugged vaguely. "Next time, I'll simply make sure I don't lose."

Sakura laughed gamely, as she snuggled against him, her head heavy on his chest. "Well, we'll see about that," she said. "But not tonight, Sasuke-kun. As wonderful as it was, no more tonight, ne?"

There was no place for despair in this house.

12:29:23 AM 2008-01-11

Cleaned this up because FFnet prohibits NC-17 stuff. Link for that version on profile page for those who wants to (and can, mind you) read it.