AN: Hello! This time the prompt was requested by isananna over on tumblr. She has a wonderful SasuSaku story called Fealty and Fidelity over on A03, which I recommend you check out.
Prompt was: Neighbour AU + Everybody Knows / Mistaken for Couple, so I had to base it in a Japanese University setting. It's a little based on my naive husband, bless him.
It's purely for convenience. Or so Sasuke tells himself, as he watches his neighbour close her door and turn to him with a smile just short of blinding.
"Thanks for waiting, Sasuke-kun," she chirps, and he nods his head in lieu of answering something ridiculous like anytime or I'd wait anywhere for you.
The bathhouse isn't far from their shabby apartments: it's one of the reasons why he'd chosen the place, but it's certainly far enough for Sakura to walk to on her own, especially as she insists on bathing late at night. And like most student housing, it's not in the nicest part of Konoha. They meet three times a week - four in summer - and walk each other to and from the baths, waiting for the other outside with a hot drink or an ice cream depending on the season.
It's the extent of their relationship as they're in different courses, but it suits them just fine.
"How is studying going?" Sakura asks, her steps eager to reach the promise of hot water.
"Hn…" he considers, watching as she skips along the side of the road. It's easy to mistake her for younger than her twenty years; his neighbour has a cheerful, lighthearted air and appearance that speaks of highschool naivete. "I'm struggling with Chemistry."
She looks over her shoulder at him, bathing bag swinging with the wideness of her movement. "Oh, you're taking Chemistry? That's unusual."
It is: he's studying Law, and she's studying Medicine, but his brother recommended the subject as a precursor to Forensics and so he'd jumped on the chance. Only; he hadn't anticipated just how much his skills for science had slipped in the year since leaving high school.
"I can help you with it, if you like?" she continues, and Sasuke agrees before he's processed what she said.
Oh. It's the first overture of friendship beyond their trips to the bathhouse and he's halfway to changing his mind when her smile dials up a notch and she starts humming under her breath. Clearly, she wants to help him study, and Sasuke's not selfless enough to turn down something like that.
"Thanks," he says instead, and spends the whole soak in the bath thinking about the way the curve of her cheeks looked as she gave him a glimpse of her dimples.
He beats her out of the bath; it's fifty-fifty who wins, a silly game they've played for almost a year now, and Sasuke mutters under his breath as he buys their ice cream from the bathhouse worker while he waits for her to finish up.
"Your girlfriend is a beauty, bro," the man behind the counter remarks, and Sasuke vaguely recognises him as going to their university. He looks roguish, with tousled brown hair and pointed teeth and tanned skin, so Sasuke doesn't bother correcting him, simply nodding in response and collecting his change.
At least, that's one of the reasons he doesn't correct the worker; Sakura would likely be charmed by his smile, and he definitely looks like the kind of guy who kisses and tells. Sasuke's almost convinced himself it's for honorable reasons by the time she meets him outside, hair sparkling with water and skin flushed from her bathing.
"Your hair's wet," he comments, lifting her towel from around her neck and scrubbing her hair. The exchange is normally the other way round; he feels redness steal across his cheeks at the realisation he's just initiated contact with her for the first time. Because he's focused on drying her hair, he misses the way her cheeks light up, too.
"What flavours did you get?" Sakura asks from under her towel, and he stops messing up her hair to reach into his bag and pull out the choices.
Predictably, she goes for strawberry - just as reliably as he opts for the coffee flavour - and they walk back to their apartment in companionable silence, waving to the neighbourhood wives who smile indulgently at them as they pass.
As they reach the scrubby garden in front of their six-tatami rooms, the red-haired landlady greets them with a pleasant smile on her face, but it's the look of a meddling housewife and Sasuke goes to take the steps two at a time. Uzumaki Kushina's conversation can be worryingly pointed, and the comment from earlier already has him in a state of alert.
"Good night, you two!" Kushina calls, and winks at Sasuke. He's noticed increasingly that he and Sakura are paired up in people's conversations; the local housewives gossip at young love, their landlady makes as many references to them together as she can, and now the bathhouse staff - Kiba, he remembers suddenly - puts it into blunt terms.
Glancing back at Sakura as he walks down the corridor to their rooms, she gives him a smile that's slightly marred by strawberry icecream, causing all manner of inappropriate thoughts to flicker across the student's mind. His door comes up first, and as he's opening his mouth to say goodnight, Sakura beats him to it.
"Shall I grab my textbooks, or do you have enough materials to get started?"
The question throws him, and his confusion must show on his face because she clarifies,
"For Chemistry help."
"Ah." Sasuke feels a little stupid; Sakura's standing with an expectant look on her face, outside his half-open door with her bathing stuff still tucked under her arm. "You mean, tonight?"
Sakura smiles encouragingly, shifting her burden to her other side.
He clears his throat, hedging delicately about the time of night, but Sakura dismisses it with a wave of her hand.
"It's not late for me; I study for another hour or so after we go to the bathhouse." She fixes him with a look and follows him as he crosses his threshold in somewhat of a daze. "And I can hear you studying too, so it's fine. Right?"
It's not fine, he wants to tell her, because it's pretty late at night and they're just out of the bath and she smells good and she's following a young man into his room-
His thoughts are halted when Sakura slips off her trainers and looks around his modest room, taking in the simple decor and touches of personality he's acquired over his tenancy. The sight of Sakura standing innocently in his room makes Sasuke want to cough violently. He puts the table between them, and the textbooks, opening the page and erecting it as a kind of barrier instead of doing something crazy like pushing her down on the unrolled futon in the corner.
Sasuke misses the way Sakura's green eyes dart towards it before turning to teach him with her easygoing smile. And misses the way that she edges around the table while they're going over his work, until they're an hour and a half in and he feels a small hand rest on the curve of his bare elbow.
"Sasuke-kun," she whispers, and he starts out of his studying reverie to feel her sitting very, very close. "It's getting late."
Her hand on his arm is warm; he feels the heat of his neighbour as she sits next to him, making him swallow with a throat suddenly dry.
"Ah," he manages, "if you want to go…"
Sakura shakes her head, now-dry pink hair curling around her cheeks. "I don't," she murmurs, and sits a touch closer. "I came over to yours late at night…"
He gets it. Haruno Sakura wasn't naive, but he might be, Sasuke thinks, looking back on months of bathhouse trips and subtle smiles and comments from just about everyone who saw them together. And he wants to ask her how long they've been almost-dating, but she leans in, questioningly, and it's with the smell of their shared shampoo in his senses that Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura finally seal the deal.
AN: Naive!Sauce is just... too cute. Let me know what you thought!