Chapter 107 - Yellow Rattle
Sasuke was hospitalized, after the war was over. A lot of people were, but Sasuke was kept particularly long for a few reasons.
The first and most obvious reason was his injuries.
But the second and more important reason was the risk that he posed to the general public.
He was too broken, physically and emotionally, to be kept in the prisons. When his injuries finally healed, nobody knew how long it would be before he was mentally healthy enough to return to society, as it were. So he was kept, to his discontent, for months.
For better or for worse, he received very few visitors.
Of course, Naruto visited him, and often. And Kakashi would stop by on occasion, mostly to monitor his mental state.
Sakura rarely stopped by, truthfully. She usually only visited in the company of Naruto, to make things easier.
(No matter how many evaluations they performed on him, she could never forget that he had nearly killed her, without remorse or hesitation.)
(That, and the healing, scarred remains of the heart she had once kept for him, ripped away by his actions.)
Nobody else really wanted to spend visiting hours with a war criminal and a psychopath.
Well, except for one person.
"I'm just so happy Sasuke-kun's back!" Ino chirped, one afternoon, while she and Sakura were out together. "He's healing so well, I'm so glad."
Sakura stared back, incredulously.
Ino, in the wake of the war, had bounced back with astonishing speed. And with that return to normalcy came the restoration of her Number One Crush.
(Truthfully, Ino almost missed Sasuke more than Sakura did, during his absence, if only for one reason: she hadn't seen how much he had changed.)
(While Sakura's trust and adoration had slowly been chipped away by each subsequent meeting between her and Sasuke, the Uchiha had remained utterly perfect in Ino's memory.)
(Before the war, when he had been declared a Missing Nin, she had cried because she couldn't imagine any good reason why they would do such a thing, when Sasuke was otherwise a good ninja and a decent person. Misguided, yes, but not that bad…)
When she wasn't busy with missions and assisting in her father's shop, Ino spent her time visiting Sasuke. She brought fresh flowers for him with every visit, and later she peeled apples and packed snacks for him to eat.
Sasuke was, initially, sullen and silent about the whole business.
But, one afternoon, as Ino was leaving, he said, "Thank you."
Ino gushed about it to Sakura, of course. "Can you believe it, Sakura? Oh, I'm so happy." She clutched her arms to her chest, wiggling a little. "I wonder if he'll be open to dating once he gets out of the hospital…"
Sakura looked vaguely appalled. "Ino, how can you be thinking of… romance with him after what he's done?" she said. "Sasuke doesn't care about that stuff, not any more…"
But Ino just scoffed dismissively. "You're just jealous that he actually talks to me," she replied.
And Sakura paused, stung, because what Ino said was true.
So she changed the subject.
Eventually, Sasuke was recovered enough for release—after many appeals to the elders by Naruto and Kakashi and mostly Naruto. It was a warm spring day, when he was set loose, and Naruto couldn't have been more excited.
He'd gotten Sasuke an apartment in the same building as him—they'd be neighbors, finally!—because his old home had been demolished in the Day of Pain, and nobody had bothered to rebuild anything on the Uchiha property.
(Though the land itself remained empty, almost respectfully, almost fearfully.)
And he was going to spend the rest of the afternoon helping him move in, and then he'd take Sasuke out to dinner, and it would be just great.
Sasuke, however, surprised him.
"I think I'd like to go take a walk with Ino," he said. "I'll meet up with you later. Don't worry, dumbass, my apartment's not going anywhere…"
Ino, standing almost shyly behind Naruto, turned bright red. She was holding a loud bouquet, filled with yellow and pink flowers, and thin red blossoms that shivered and waved like fireworks.
"Oh, sure… You guys have fun, y'know!" Naruto replied, grinning, his confusion masked with his smile.
Sasuke and Ino didn't hold hands as they went along, but Sasuke walked close to her, closer to her than she'd ever remembered.
And he actually started a conversation, if only once: "Are those for me?"
"Huh, what?"
"Those flowers."
"Oh! Oh, yes, of course, they're for your new apartment…" Ino said, holding the flowers closer to her face. "I filled it with all sorts of things for good luck. And, um, these, because they reminded me of you…"
"Which ones?"
"These." Ino freed a hand to touch one of the thin, firecracker blossoms; the petals shrunk back and into tight buds as her fingers brushed it. "They're called sensitive plants; they're very pretty, but you have to be careful with them to see their true beauty."
"And that reminded you of me?" Sasuke said.
"Yes, somewhat," Ino said, her face growing redder.
"That's nice," Sasuke said, and that was about it for conversation, for the rest of the walk.
But for Ino, it was absolutely more than enough.
Sasuke took the bouquet from her as they parted ways, and set it in a milk bottle on the window above his sink, because he didn't have any vases yet. Naruto spent way too much time poking the sensitive plants instead of moving furniture around like he was supposed to, so Sasuke had to almost drag him to dinner at Ichiraku.
Sasuke presented Ino with a fistful of wild violets upon their next meeting. "They're purple and they reminded me of you, I guess. Since you wear purple all the time."
Ino took the flowers with a difficult smile.
(Violets reminded her of her mother.)
"Thank you, Sasuke-kun. Where do you want to go today?" she said.
"Wherever," Sasuke replied (which, Ino learned in time, was his default response for these things).
Ino tucked the violets into the waist of her skirt, and she walked with Sasuke for a while.
"So Ino and I are dating, I guess," Sasuke announced, during one of his many shared meals at Naruto's apartment, a short while later. "I dunno how these things work."
"Huh, okay," Naruto replied, with a mouthful of ramen.
Word, naturally, got around quickly.
Nobody expected it to last. At all.
After all, this was Sasuke. Even though he was supposedly "better now," he was still stuffy and insensitive, and an absolute diva when it came to missions. Kakashi refused to let him take part in anything higher than C-rank for the time being, which made him very grumpy indeed. He also refused to work with anyone but Naruto, if at all, and barely talked to anyone besides him.
However, Ino seemed to be making an exception of herself. The gossip was thunderous the first time she was seen out with him—her arm linked in his.
Uchiha Sasuke, willingly walking arm-in-arm with someone? Unthinkable!
But their linked-arm walks evolved into restaurant dates, and Ino very-publically giving him bento lunches and kisses on the cheek when she ran into him at the Hokage Manor, between their respective missions.
Yes, kisses. Though Sasuke never kissed her back, nor hugged her, he received them without complaint. Which was more than one could say about how Sasuke received hugs of friendship from Naruto—usually with a cat-like tensing of the shoulders—and other intimate gestures.
And the relationship that nobody thought was going to last, well, lasted. For three years.
Of course, there were reasons for this happening.
The first reason was the lack of competition. Sakura had long since given up on him—she'd recovered to the point where she could talk to him, however uncomfortably, but she hadn't made much more progress beyond that. Most other girls were either in similar mindsets—(pardoned) war criminal, (cured) psychopath, et cetera—or were discouraged because of reason number two: Ino.
Ino was very affectionate, and very open about it. And she was definitely the type of girl that would hunt down and personally ruin any woman that would dare come between her and her man.
There was also the fact that Sasuke seemed flat-out disinterested in any other women, but people just chalked that up to his personality and general lack of warmth. Since he seemed to like Ino enough.
(Though there were people—a lot of people—that assumed this lack of interest was due to a preference for men, and the uber-feminine Ino was being strung along as his cover story.)
(Though Sasuke's equal disinterest in the same sex—his putting up with Naruto aside—kept this from gaining much credibility.)
But the third reason—and possibly most important reason—was babies.
What thoughts and ambitions Sasuke had for the future were almost entirely concerned with the business of restoring his clan. And that involved acquiring a wife with which to have the children that would make up the new generation.
And Sasuke wasn't terribly picky. Ino had stayed with him and showed no sign of leaving, so his choice was obvious.
In Konoha, the legal age for marriage, and just about everything else, was twenty. This was a holdover from old laws that sought to reduce the number of orphans in the world: if you could stay alive long enough, you were obviously competent enough to settle down and start having kids.
So on a September evening, on Ino's twentieth birthday, Sasuke proposed while sitting across from her in his apartment, alone, holding her hands in his.
"Would you help me in rebuilding my clan, by joining me as my wife?"
Ino had thought this was utterly romantic, at the time.
And, of course, she had accepted, with a big squealing mass of yes and many unreturned hugs.
Sasuke didn't want to wait. "We should have it done next month. We've been together long enough, anyways, so it would be silly to delay it at all."
But Ino resisted. "No, no, we have to plan this out! We have guests to invite, and I have to get a dress…"
"There aren't many people I want to invite," Sasuke said.
"Oh, we'll only invite Naruto and Sakura… and Kakashi-san, for sure, and Shikamaru and Chouji, and maybe their families too…"
"Just a few people. Please," Sasuke said.
The whole thing ended up a lot larger than Sasuke was comfortable with, once Ino's family had caught wind of the proposal. There was the whole issue of the clan's designated heir marrying an outsider, and the fact that Sasuke hadn't come to Ino's father, the head of the clan, to ask for her hand before proposing, as was proper.
"I'm not… sure how these things are supposed to work, really," Sasuke replied, after he had been called for a small audience with Inoichi. "So I'll state here and now: I want to marry your daughter. Will you let me?"
"Sure, though that was a bit unnecessary, Uchiha-kun," Inoichi replied, which caused Sasuke to grumble at himself.
As for the issue of inheritance, Ino brought up a solution: "Well… Sasuke and I want to have a lot of kids, so why don't we just name one of them an Uchiha heir and another a Yamanaka heir?" she said. "That takes care of things, right?"
Inoichi had to suppose that was a solution. Though he was more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of his little girl, barely out of her teens, talking about becoming a mother.
Sasuke managed to talk them out of a big ceremony. Normally, it would have been a huge, glitzy affair, with the entirety of the Yamanaka, Nara, Akimichi and Sarutobi clans in attendance, plus or minus other influential clan representatives and guests.
But in the end, only close friends were invited: Sasuke and Ino's teammates, of course, and their dates and plus-ones.
The wedding plans struck the rest of the Yamanaka clan as a bit standoffish, definitely odd, and possibly rude. Public opinion of Sasuke over the passing years had improved to the point where most people didn't despise him that much any more, and the fact that he was getting married was something to be happy about for many. That he would reject guests and well-wishes was disappointing but, at the same time, to be expected.
(This didn't stop Naruto from trying to throw Sasuke a bachelor party. This involved kidnapping him and taking him to a club by force. Sasuke was not amused.)
They were married in December, in a small ceremony at the Yamanaka compound. Cups of sake were exchanged, and vows were made, and tears were shed.
They were to spend their honeymoon in their new house.
Sasuke, to put it simply, was extraordinarily well-off. Being the last Uchiha in existence, and being the son of the head of the clan before its demise, he had quite a bit of money waiting for him, once all the legal snags were worked through. And he used that money to have a house built on a far corner of the Uchiha grounds, in the time between his proposal and the actual ceremony. He didn't feel like waiting.
"This actually works out quite well," he said to Ino, as he was showing it to her near the end of construction. "I'd have had you stay at my apartment if we'd gotten married right away, which hardly seems proper, doesn't it."
"Oh, yes, of course, absolutely," Ino replied, breathlessly, too caught up in her rapidly-materializing fantasy of being a housewife with an enormous kitchen and everything. Spending their first few months of marriage in a two-room apartment, next-door to Naruto? Heavens, no, that was unthinkable now!
The house was quite spacious, indeed, with a second floor that was more of an attic than anything, lacking any sort of rooms, beyond a bathroom walled off in the corner.
"We can partition it off once we start having kids," Sasuke explained. "And if we have too many for the second floor we'll just expand on the first."
"That's so smart," Ino replied, and she tugged him on the arm in a sideways-hug. "You think of everything, Sasuke."
Sasuke just smiled slightly, and brought her downstairs to show her the beginnings of the garden and courtyard in the back.
The place was fully-furnished and operational, and both of them insisted on spending their first night there, rather than the Yamanaka compound.
"We'd like our privacy, thanks," Sasuke said, and Ino tittered in reply.
Oh yes, they would need their privacy.
Ino had literally been dreaming about her wedding night for months, if not years. It was the subject of many a, ahem, private fantasy since she was a teenager. And once the engagement ring was on her finger, she figured that gave her a free license to start actively planning it. And that involved talking at Sakura. Extensively.
"What sort of underwear should I wear? Do you think he'd like red? But red makes me look like I've got a rash…"
"You could always… ask him?" Sakura replied. "I don't really think it matters much, since... well, it'll be off eventually."
"Sakura!"
Sakura shrugged. "Honestly, Ino, I have no idea why you're asking me what you think Sasuke would like to see."
Ino just continued. "Black might be nice, that's classic…"
Sakura sighed.
(She almost wanted to ask if Ino and Sasuke had actually done it with each other before, but something burrowing and uncomfortable in her chest kept her from saying anything.)
Ino, eventually, decided on purple, with black lace. Because Sasuke seemed to gravitate towards those colors, in whatever gifts he gave her. And she put the lingerie on with care, after the wedding, since she felt it would be a little weird wearing stuff like that underneath her wedding kimono. She and Sasuke were both changed out of their formal clothes, once the necessary post-ceremony celebrations were over, since Sasuke didn't want to walk all the way back to their house in five layers of clothing, and Ino didn't either.
Their entrance into their house as Mr. and Mrs. Uchiha was fairly understated. Sasuke turned the lights on in the kitchen after they both took off their coats; he scratched his scalp, and went to go use the bathroom.
Ino took the opportunity to get ready. "Sasuke, dear?"
"Mm?" She heard his voice from down the hallway.
"Come to bed, please?"
"Mm."
She was standing by the bed, in front of the door, when he returned. The lights were lowered; her legs were crossed at the ankle, and she had her hands on her hips. Her hair was undone, and falling in flaxen waves to her thighs.
Sasuke, however, didn't seem to notice. He went to the closet, where Ino had already lovingly folded most of his clothes into separate drawers for him and her, and exchanged his pants for pajama bottoms, keeping his long-sleeved shirt on.
"Sasuke?"
"Mm?"
"You're… going to bed already?" Her smile was strained.
"Yeah, I'm tired."
"But, um… Sasuke, this is our wedding night…" Her confident pose began to crumple. "Don't you think we should celebrate?"
"Celebrate?" Sasuke paused, his eyes flicking to the ceiling. "…oh. Right…" He began taking off his pants, folded them, and tossed them on the floor by the left side of the bed.
Ino watched, and waited, trying not to feel… underwhelmed. Sure, watching Sasuke—her husband now, she reminded herself, as if to further the excitement—strip was wonderful in so many different ways, but he was slow and almost sleepy as he did it, which impeded some of the sensuality of the act. He got on the bed, still in his boxer shorts, and lay against the pillows, on top of the sheets.
"Well, come on," he said, after a while. And Ino wanted to smack herself—of course he was waiting for her.
She got on the bed as well, and crawled on her hands and knees over him until she was straddled on his hips. She kissed him on the mouth, first—which shocked her, in some corner of her mind, since she'd never kissed him anywhere but the cheek before then—but this was her wedding night, and she was going to go all-out.
It took her several kisses for him to kiss back, she found. And no matter what she tried after that, his reactions to her touch seemed sluggish, delayed.
"Sasuke, are you okay?" she asked him, near his shoulder. "Are you too tired?"
"No, let's keep going," he replied, so quietly she could barely hear him. His cheeks were incredibly red. "It's okay."
So she kept going.
To Ino's bafflement and frustration, it took a very long time for Sasuke to get aroused. But once he was, they turned over and dispensed with the underwear and started going at it.
Ino tried to enjoy it.
But the entire time, all she could focus on was Sasuke's face, his heavy, strained breathing, his hands clutching the pillow behind her for dear life.
Everything seemed to indicate that he was in serious pain.
After a torturously long time, he climaxed. She didn't.
And Sasuke got off the bed, and picked his boxer shorts up where they'd been thrown aside, and put on the folded pajama pants, the discarded shirt. He returned to bed with a sour expression, and he flinched when Ino out her hand on his shoulder.
"Sasuke…?" she said, softly. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," he said. "Just tired. You should put your pajamas back on. That… underwear didn't look comfortable…"
"Ah, of course, I shouldn't sleep in them…" She got off the bed herself, and picked up her panties—the bra hadn't come off, but she removed it by the closet and dropped it in the hamper. She returned to bed in softer clothes to find Sasuke already curled up under the blankets in the fetal position; he'd turned off the light on his bedside table.
She crawled in beside him, and rested her head on his raised shoulder.
She felt him twitch, slightly, at her touch, as if he weren't expecting her.
"Goodnight, dear," she said. "I love you."
"Goodnight," Sasuke replied, and said nothing else for the rest of the night.
Ino was awake for a long time, utterly tortured.
Was it… supposed to have gone like that? Since she'd had experience with herself, certainly, and she knew what it was like to be satisfied.
That hadn't been satisfying. And it couldn't have been for Sasuke, either, not with that reaction.
What had she done wrong?
She chalked it up to inexperience. This was her first time with a man, after all, and… well, she had to suppose that it was Sasuke's as well, since she couldn't see where he'd have had many opportunities to practice, before their marriage, either with Ino or with other women.
(Ino had, haltingly, brought up the possibility of them being more intimate during one of their later dates. Sasuke said that he didn't feel comfortable "committing like that" before they were of age, and that he didn't know if he was responsible enough for it besides. Which Ino found endearing at the time, though it seemed more unusual and awkward as time went on.)
Well, practice, that was it. They would both get better with practice.
It wouldn't take long for them to get to a point where Sasuke didn't look like he was being… well, murdered when he was with her.
Relieved and far more at peace with this reasoning, Ino laid back and finally got some sleep.
She woke up the next morning and threw herself without hesitation into her new role as Mrs. Uchiha, devoted wife of Sasuke.
Sasuke went to get the rest of his clothes and furniture from out of his apartment in the morning, so Ino took the time to cook him lunch, for his return. And Sasuke seemed to appreciate the toasted cheese-and-tomato sandwiches she'd put together, which cheered her up significantly. She spent the rest of the day with him deciding where to put the remainder of the furniture, and preparing dinner.
Sasuke went immediately to bed, that first night, without much of a word about it. But the next night, as Ino was changing into her pajamas, he said, "So, should we… try again tonight?"
"Oh! Oh, of course, are you not tired?" Ino replied.
"Yeah," Sasuke said.
Things weren't much better; Ino's nervous, laced-up idea of intimacy had been replaced by anxiety over performance.
And, as always, there was Sasuke's face.
At least it seemed to go by faster, that time. They were still practicing.
The next night, Sasuke refused, again. But the night after, he asked, again. And things didn't improve much, again.
This continued from pattern into routine. Ino would wake early to make matching lunches, for the both of them; they would go out for missions or shopping or outings with friends, usually separately. And they would reunite for dinner, which Ino would cook. And every other night, they would have sex.
Ino began to worry when, after being with him one night, she felt him get out of bed, some time after they'd said goodnight to each other. He left the room and, a short while later, she heard the hiss of the shower. Sasuke returned after a very long time with wet hair.
Things weren't going well, clearly.
She began to scour magazines for solutions to her problem. She cooked dinners with shellfish and herbs that were supposed to be aphrodisiacs, but if they were working, she sure didn't feel it, much less Sasuke. She brought home a bottle of red wine, and offered a glass to Sasuke to loosen him up, but he refused—he wasn't much of a drinker, she remembered, after the fact. She offered to give him massages immediately beforehand, to stimulate his blood and chakra, but that only seemed to make him even more tense. And when she offered to try new positions with him, so things might be more comfortable or pleasurable, she received a hasty, groaning, "No, no, no, don't."
The best she could do was to at least sound like she was enjoying herself, so Sasuke wouldn't feel bad.
Luckily, her problems were solved, at least momentarily, when her health took a turn for the uncomfortable sometime in February. Exhaustion and nausea kept her confined to bed for entire afternoons, and not recreationally.
Of course, after a while, she wondered if she was pregnant. And her initial denial—it was far too early, she and Sasuke had barely been married for two months!—was smashed into oblivion by the simple facts of the matter: they had been having sex literally every other night, without protection. It was bound to happen.
When she missed her period, she decided to take the leap and buy a pregnancy test.
It came back positive. The second one did, too, and the blood test at a local clinic confirmed it. (She avoided the hospital because she didn't want anyone she knew—i.e. Sakura—finding out just yet, if it were really true.)
She had to tell Sasuke.
And she told him while they were on the bed together, after the rest of their evening rituals.
"Are you feeling better tonight?" Sasuke said.
"Oh, yes, much better," she replied.
"Mm. Good. I was thinking we could give it another try tonight."
"I… don't see why that would be necessary, actually," Ino replied, and she could feel her cheeks warming.
"Why?" He sounded almost hurt.
"Well… Sasuke, just from the amount of sex we're having right now," she said, with quick comfort, "we're obviously… trying for a baby, aren't we?"
"…I suppose, there's no other reason," Sasuke replied, stiffly. "I don't really want to wait…"
"Well." Ino propped herself up a little. "I went to the doctor today, and they said that… I'm pregnant already."
Sasuke's mouth fell open slightly. "Are you… serious?"
Ino nodded. "Yes. Mind, it's really, very early, but I suppose it's happened!" she said.
Sasuke's face remained blank, unreadable.
"…Sasuke, is this too soon?" she added, softly, leaning over to him. "Because if you're not ready yet then-"
But he shook his head, and something like a smile appeared. "No, no, this is… wonderful news," he replied. "The sooner we begin the better. When will it be born?"
"Mm… sometime in September? Really, Sasuke, it's very early-"
"Then we'll have to get ready," he said. "Get its room prepared."
"Well—Sasuke, there's always the chance that… something might happen, before that," Ino said, softly.
"It won't. Nothing will happen," Sasuke said. His eyes began to wander, his smile growing. "A child by September. This is… wonderful, absolutely wonderful…"
Ino rested back against the pillows, sighing, drinking in Sasuke's understated joy.
"No more… sex, then, I don't want anything to happen because… of you overexerting yourself," he said, when he finally came back down to earth. "You need your rest, too."
"Oh! Oh, that's… fine," Ino replied, smiling back. "I'll be all right, Sasuke, I promise, I'll take care of myself."
"Both of you," Sasuke said, and he nodded. "Come on, let's get some sleep, all of us."
"All right, all right," Ino said, almost laughing. "Goodnight. I love you."
"Goodnight," Sasuke replied, as he always did.
They decided not to tell anyone until Ino got through the first trimester. "Since that means we're out of the woods," she replied. "It'll be safe."
"Yes, all right," Sasuke replied, impatiently. He was practically bouncing during every conversation they had together, since he'd found out about the baby. He seemed to find opportunities for preparation at every instance, which Ino gently waved off, telling him to wait a little longer.
Ino quietly ceased with her more strenuous missions, otherwise, manning the flower shop instead. And she delighted—to her amusement—in each pound she began to gain, in the small rise of flesh beneath her navel that began to strain at the waistband of her dresses.
Sakura was the first person that Ino told, after she made it to April without incident. She planned to break the news to her over a cup of tea, since the air was growing warm and all the local cafes were setting out their outdoor tables again.
However, Sakura's news far outshone Ino's.