Hi ya'll! This will be an anthology collection for SasuSaku Month 2021. I'm not doing every single prompt, but this is where you'll find them. This collection is also on Ao3, twt, tumblr, et cetera. Each day/prompt will have its own tags and content warnings, where applicable. Let's get started!
Day 1 Prompt: Glances
Title: the horses are coming, so you better run
title lyric from: Dog Days are Over - Florence + the Machine
Tags: AU - Greek Mythology
Their language of silence is legendary, spoken only in glances.
.
.
.
All great reigns come with terror.
Slouching toward compromise at first, as scrappy guerrilla tactics are abandoned in favor of the negotiating dance. Money and mercy are more highly prized while torture and the other sordid campaign details fade into oblivion. Winners rewrite history, and distractions have no place.
Still, she's known as a hard woman the world over: Alluring in the way of exotics from faraway lands, ruthless with a divine strength (whispers like hissing fires saying handed down from the heaven temples; she is no human!) followed by a man with dark hair and sloe eyes, always at her side, always ready to lend the blade of his sword.
Sakura, sprout of spring, rules alone — the only woman.
Men spit, kneel in the sticky blood of innumerable sacrificial rites, and vow to make her the last.
Displays of her strength feel boorish, in her mind, a last resort of those lost to anger. It's easier to say this now, of course, from the zenith of this warm stone where it seems the sun never sets and her loyalists flanking both sides of the ancient rug unfurling up to her throne. Not that she uses it often — that, too, feels vulgar.
Leading is full of contradictions.
"Raising your voice in my room, and to a lady at that." Greenglitter eyes, of which the shade and quality change as one turns over a shard of glass in the sun — sometimes soft, edged deadly in others.
Her companion barely stirs. Uchiha Sasuke, brought into the world in a similar swirl of rumor as the Queen, these mortal halflings touched by the golden power of vengeful, lustful gods who could not keep their hands off human beings.
"Barely," the visiting envoy sneers. In representation of his King, carrying disgust across ocean waves to fling it before her in her own palace. It is nothing new. "We know what you come from, sired by titans, left in a river, bending men to your bidding—"
"No one has been forced to follow my cause. I don't threaten to break legs to raise my banners." She pauses, spring softness pulling back from her eyes and face to carve her features with something feral. "Perhaps some men don't want to be as vicious as they pretend; is it so awful to imagine men who respect their wives and daughters? Who do not feed the poor to gods as livestock, seeking their whimsy blessings?"
And here, the two communicate in that fabled, magical way that defies all understanding, the stories of their bond whispered and passed as gossip talismans. The Queen and her sword-wielding consort-of-sorts: No one's quite sure if they've — but who wouldn't, they sigh, just look at him, abnormally handsome in ways their own men are not, look at her, ferrying spring upon her stride.
No one ever knows what they're saying, but have witnessed the outcomes of their silence. Speaking only with their eyes, Uchiha Sasuke shifts imperceptibly.
The envoy doesn't notice.
"Isn't your King," Sakura booms, and the room can hear the recoil in voicing the title, "the man who recently disgraced his wife publicly, whom bore him four sons and put up with his plundering, his constant sailing? His rape and pillaging?"
When her foot hits the stone stair, it makes no sound. Credence to the rumors she glides, does not touch the ground, inhuman at heart.
"Who had to sit, locked up and spinning the loom as all men seem to want their women, listening to his exploits until it drove her mad?"
Spit, a dirty gob of it, lands at her foot.
"I won't hear filth from the lips of a halfling whore like you!"
Another shared glance — and if you asked the court throng later, even in all that chaos as the people erupted in anger, the tale goes that Uchiha Sasuke and the queen exchanged a smile so sublime that no normal being could quite behold it in full.
Sakura tilts her head to let the earrings catch the afternoon light; the jaunty angle blinds the envoy momentarily, veils light fractals upon his face. He curses,
and it's an easy movement with a sword so divinely sharp, the clean cleaving of his head from his miserable body.
Red spatters like paint, dapples Sakura with spots, but she's snuffed out many men on her own and doesn't flinch.
Her consort turns, bows his aristocratic head in morbid contrast to the one he's dangling by its dead hair. Another undefined question in his dark eyes.
Slim fingers come up to brush a drop away with an ephemeral flicker, almost unseen. And for the next, a splatter bent in oblong shape, garnet and vivid amidst pink hair, light robes, spring eyes, Uchiha Sasuke replaces them with his own, an action only permitted by her gaze of silent permission.
Soldiers clearing the envoy's meatsack away; handmaidens fussing at the blood in her hair; others dry heaving at the entrails on the rug; escorts of the envoy lost for words and now vulnerable. A warning of war, her message a final one — armies, do not dare encroach.
This is how they rule a queendom.
Even for a peaceful reign, violence is needed to keep it so.
Whispers on the lips of subjects devoted,
Their language of silence is legendary, spoken only in glances.