AN: Hello all! This time the prompt was for Arranged Marriage - and aren't they always just a little bittersweet? That's what I'm aiming for here.
"It's either you marry her, or your brother does," Fugaku explains, his hands heavy on Sasuke's shoulders. "Do you understand?"
Sasuke looks up into his father's fathomless eyes, feels the weight of them, of his touch, of his expectations, of years of familial loyalty bled through him until he doesn't know how to say no, don't do this to me.
"Nii-san-" he tries.
"Your brother," Sasuke's father intones, "has to marry someone of Uchiha blood. For the future. Do you understand?"
Do you? Do you? The words haunt him as his father walks away, the uchiwa in his hand shivering not from the wind but from his own discomfort. The younger son. The disposable one, the existence bred as a precaution, a fix-it-all, a person only in relation to how much he understands what the family needs.
Itachi finds him sitting there long after the cold sun has set.
"Little brother," he starts, then stops. There is nothing young about marrying a woman you don't want. "Sasuke."
"Itachi," Sasuke replies, turning to see the way his brother's worry has etched itself onto his already too-weary face. "I'll do it."
"I'll marry the Senju heir."
He's met the Haruno Sakura a few times before, but never in the formality of a wedding ceremony. She looks exactly like he does: dolled up, trussed out and left to sweat under too many eyes and too heavy a pressure.
"Sasuke-kun," she greets, and it's the first words they've exchanged in several years, since he stole an apple from her while she played in his family's field.
Neither of them play much anymore.
"Sakura," he answers, and just like that, they go to get married.
"What age are you?" she asks afterwards, when they get a moment to change. She peels the first of ten layers off, green eyes blinking at him from across the changing room. "When I saw you last, you were so much shorter than me."
Sasuke almost doesn't reply, but the part of him that his mother loves thinks she is my wife, and so he tells her he's almost twenty.
"When is your birthday?" she prompts further, now down to six layers and thinner for it.
"July."
"Ah," Sakura says, looking happy for the first time all day. "Then I'm older."
He doesn't grace that with a response, but she sees the way he rolls his black eyes and tries to toss her hair; only it's full of ornaments and unstable with it, capricious along with the temper he can see she's trying to hold back.
"We're young, aren't we?" Sakura tries again, and he hears the steady thud thud thud of her kimono layers being discarded on the floor. He has lost count of how many she's shed now, his back to her as he frowns over the unfamiliar buttons of his married man's clothing. "To have so much peace riding on our shoulders."
At that, he turns around, only to find she's taken everything off, everything, and is standing in the dim room with the mercurial caution of a bird about to take wing.
"Put your clothes back on," Sasuke manages. He is not entirely immune, but something about the unwilling bend of her shoulders makes him want to pile the thick silks back onto her almost-confident frame.
"I see," his wife says.
And it's the last thing she says to him all day. And the next. And the next.
They spend three months in her family's estate, and three months in his. She turned twenty surrounded by all the people she loves, but Sasuke can't claim the same.
"Your wife is not pregnant," his father notes, where Sasuke sits with the adult men now instead of the younger clansmen. A few faces turn to stare.
"No," Sasuke agrees.
"Are you a coward between the legs as well as between your ears?"
It's one of the elders, because even Sasuke's father doesn't speak to his son like that. He feels the tempting embrace of the sharingan thread through his vision, but it's his brother's held-back snarl that checks Sasuke's temper.
"We're young," he offers instead of blows, and his eyes that see not-quite-all miss the way his father's expression smoothes into pride when Sasuke stands up and leaves.
He's walking along the outer garden wall when he sees his wife; Sakura has taken up residence under her favourite tree, watching the way the water threads through the nearby stream.
"Sasuke-kun," she greets, and it's not warm, but it's not quite cold either. He's learned that she finds it very hard to hold a grudge.
"Sakura," he says. Some days, it is the extent of their conversation, but tonight he leans down and sits next to her, right on the still-wet grass.
"I really thought I'd marry your brother, you know."
The blossom-haired girl says it conversationally, but Sasuke thinks of course, of course.
"You'd have to be an Uchiha," he explains.
Surprisingly, Sakura smiles. It's not warm, but nor is it cold either; in fact, he likes it not at all.
"Right? That's why I'm glad it didn't happen. Besides, I wouldn't want to be an Uchiha. Your clan all love too much."
Her thoughts imparted, Sasuke watches as his wife stands and walks back to the house with her back straight and his family's emblem displayed boldly under her hair.
"It's too late for that," he whispers, but her ears are no better than his and Sakura walks, walks into the dimness of the house without looking back once.
She's happier when they spend time in the Senju estate. So at the start of their second year of marriage Sasuke turns to Sakura and asks,
"Do you want to stay here all the time?"
His wife blinks, long pink lashes tangled at the corners.
"As opposed to…"
"Going back to the Uchiha land."
"Where will you be?"
The question surprises him, because Sasuke truly didn't think Sakura was invested enough to voice it. Their marriage is a friendly veneer of peace, shallow below the surface and at risk of drying up without rain.
"I-," he pauses to think. Where was there for him to go? "I'll be wherever you are," he finishes. It's the only answer that makes sense to him now.
When Sakura beams at him, it's one of her rarely gifted true smiles, not her fierce fighter grin or her healer's curve; Sasuke has only seen it three times in the whole of their union.
"That's the fourth time you've smiled," he murmurs without thinking.
"When, today?"
There's no response that wouldn't have her frowning, so the Uchiha shrugs his shoulders and turns back to pickling the umeboshi she loves.
"I'll go back to the Uchiha estate when the time comes," Sakura says eventually, breaking the quiet peace of their afternoon. "I like your tomato garden."
He looks up with a hint of a smile of his own. "Last year," he imparts, and Sakura leans in like he's about to share a secret, "I planted an apple tree."
Sakura loves apples; Sasuke remembers that from the easier days of their youth.
"Trees take a while to grow," Sakura murmurs, but she looks thoughtful.
"We've got time," he answers, casual, and misses the way her green gaze bends to his.
"We do," she agrees, and because he's leaning over his work Sasuke doesn't catch her moving before his wife is right next to his face, her hair drifting across his prized vision.
She kisses him on the cheek. It's their first kiss, or maybe their second: Sasuke doesn't know if the secret peck shared when they were six counts.
"I think you and I have all the time in the world," Sakura continues, and Sasuke nods.
They're only young, after all.
AN: I just really love the idea of Sasuke and Sakura taking their time to get to know one another through the early years of their marriage. This is kind of a feudal setting similar to Blade in the Dark: I really feel it fits them. Let me know what you thought!