Traveling with Sakura has left Sasuke with an alarming lack of concern over grievous injuries and dangerous medical conditions. It was hard to worry when the woman beside you had the power of invulnerability, could re-grow limbs, and could perform surgery with nothing but her bare hands on a battleground. Still, the experience of witnessing Sakura handle herself and everyone around her in a medical setting always brought him some sense of awe.
Thus, when they were only married for a few months, he watched his wife calmly rattle off the necessary ingredients for an antidote to befuddled med nins in a village in Rain Country. The poison hadn't even been identifiable at the time and isolation of its components had been slow work for them, at best. To say that the appearance of the most renowned medical expert in the Five Great Shinobi Nations was heralded with a worship-like joy among the people there (who were in the midst of being ravaged by a rogue nin who specialized in poison) was probably underselling it.
It was possible that he could be accused of bias, but Sasuke considered himself a highly logical person. If even he, who had been worried over her for the last few weeks—she had been unusually lethargic and under the weather lately—could feel no sense of concern when she walked through the clinic doors and dove into the nearest critical case as to whether she would succeed in saving the whole damn village, then there should be no doubt as to Sakura's proficiency.
"It wasn't entirely unknown, Sasuke-kun," Sakura had sighed afterward, visibly exhausted not by the work itself, but by the overwhelming praise and fawning she'd received when all was said and done. "The village is just so small. And the antidote required a substitution because one of the plants isn't common to the area…"
Her encyclopedic knowledge of basically everything was of no surprise to him—the application of it with confident expertise was still new. She was the best at what she did… and not through any gift bestowed upon her at birth (her prodigious chakra control could have been put to use in many different ways), she had worked and gritted for what she had, to the benefit of countless people.
To the benefit of him.
Yes, coming to the war and seeing such a rapid showcase of her abilities was hard to keep up with. What she had become in his absence was still a mystery that he was unraveling.
Her demurring from such adulation however, was entirely the old genin teammate he knew.
Her eyelids drooped with fatigue, pink hair splayed against his one shoulder as she began to drift off against him, such easy affection and so her that he smirked fondly. He dipped his head to her ear. "Whatever you say, Uchiha-sama..."
His teasing mutter had her growling and shoving away from him moodily, even with her exhaustion. She had been addressed like that all day, despite many requests for "call me Sakura, please." He chuffed a laugh at her, because she was especially easy to rile of late, and it amused him to no end when she got annoyed with him.
He could almost hear Naruto's snort of disbelief and that loud, obnoxious voice: "Sakura-chan finally starts getting pissed at you, teme, and you think it's FUNNY?! I've been afraid for my life for YEARS! This is so unfair!"
Sakura was no more amused than Naruto, having fully expected all of the men in her life to take her displeasure very seriously. If Kakashi-sensei, who was the adult in this outfit, fled at the sight of her flushed brow, then Sasuke had no business getting such enjoyment out of it. What his wife never realized was that he didn't love making her mad, he loved how comfortable she was with him when she was mad.
"I'm telling you the truth, Sasuke-kun!" she said, exasperated. One of her hands tapped lightly on his chest and he captured it in the hopes that it would slow her down, to no avail. "There's a difference between 'unidentified' and 'unknown to the general region'—"
"You're such a little nerd," he told her, and anyone who didn't know him well would have said that he delivered the statement in monotone. But she knew enough to hear the affection in it. "Never too tired to lecture me."
"Never too tired to tease me," she groused, soft pink bangs falling out of her ponytail with her brisk movement. "What happened to those inarticulate grunts I never thought I'd miss?"
With a straight face, Sasuke pushed those wandering strands from her eyes, looking very significantly at her. "Hn."
She refused to even crack a smile at him, but he could tell that it was done with effort. But after a minute of trying hopelessly to out-stare him (she couldn't stand long pauses in conversation and he was a professional at it), her gaze softened and she appeared to make a decision about something. She really had been all over the place lately... "And to think," she said slowly, "if the day hadn't run away from us like that… I had something I was meaning to tell you."
He leaned up on his one arm and pinned her with a stare, suddenly quite aware of the way she had turned away from him—even that play-smug tone not masking the blush he could glimpse on the curve of her cheek and the way her hands were suddenly worrying the blanket. She was nervous.
His brow furrowed when she left the bait there and didn't continue. "Sakura."
"I know," she laughed, but it sounded a bit shaky. "I'm sorry, I'm getting to it. I just wasn't going to say anything after the day we just had and we're both so tired, but now I'm thinking that we're both awake and there's really no reason that I shouldn't, and I don't want you to think that I was keeping it from—"
"I don't care about that," Sasuke interrupted her rambling. "Just tell me."
He really didn't care if she had kept something from him, as long as she told him right now. His mind went back to the last few weeks and that this was the first time they had come to any place with medical services. Was something wrong? Her smug tone from before had completely escaped from his memory, because now she was rambling like she did when she was nervous, and he was so used to losing people.
"I…" she started, but stopped again. She either didn't notice or didn't care that she was driving him insane, so he reached around her shoulder and tapped her forehead, right over her seal. "Hey," he murmured. His tone was coaxing, knowing that "gentle" (or his version of such) was the way to get her to spit it out, but his terror was mounting. He didn't say any more than that, because he refused to let on that his mind was jumping to the worst possible conclusions at her silence. Logically, they could fix whatever it was… there were few things that couldn't be fixed, between the two of them.
His intimate gesture did snap her out of it enough for her to realize the torture she was putting him through and she shifted toward him, emerald eyes attached to his own. The words were spilling out immediately after, because she could never bear to cause him pain if she could help it.
"I'm pregnant, anata…"
Those simple words were allowed to settle in the room and seep into him and the first thought he had was relief that Sakura didn't have some awful, incurable disease or had come to her senses and was asking him for a divorce (because he already knew he was far too selfish to let her go and be with someone who was good enough for her). It was just that she was pregnant.
Sakura was pregnant. With his child.
His brain then decided to stutter to a halt.
How…? That was the first question on his mind, and it must have shown on his face because Sakura was looking at him in the long silence the rare way she did when he was awkward and she was suppressing the urge to laugh at him.
"Sakura…" he breathed.
She laughed lightly, flushed with happiness. "Sasuke-kun, your sharingan…"
He was staring intently at her stomach, looking as if he could see underneath her skin. His child… Sakura's and his child was burrowed deep inside of her, safe, already there.
"How long?" he asked her.
She was beaming at him, and then he realized that he was smiling too, wider than his mouth was used to. He reached automatically for her wrist and tugged, which she took as permission to crawl right onto him, his hand finding the place where he supposed their child was curled up and forming. She looked down at the connection, their foreheads resting together for a moment. He closed his eyes and breathed. "Just less than two months," she responded, barely getting it out as he took her lips and caught the words. "Sasuke," she held his face, giggled as he bowed her back against the mat, brushing her hair out of her face so he could look at her sparkling and glowing like nothing he had ever seen before. "Are you happy?"
"Aa," he muttered, because the question was completely unnecessary and he wanted to mold himself to her more than ever before. He laid light kisses against her neck, his hand drifting to her breast before wrapping around her back and pressing her so hard against him that she gasped. She was still laughing as he started pulling at her shirt, returning his ministrations in kind. He didn't ask unnecessary questions, but she gave him an answer anyway.
"I'm so happy."
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
They are camping outside for the night (something that his pregnant, medically-certified wife insisted was perfectly fine for now in her best "trust me, I'm a doctor" voice) when Sasuke, returning from refilling their water, catches her with a familiar look on her face. It's her frown of concentration, the one she has when she has a hypothesis that's almost surely correct, but doesn't yet have the evidence. But it's her gaze fixedly on her stomach, one hand moving across her abdomen, experimentally pressing down, that has his heart skipping a beat.
He almost drops the water just watching her, dread filling him.
"Don't look like that, Sasuke-kun," she says, without even glancing up at him. She's become far too accustomed to his worrying. "Everything's fine. I just have to consult Shizune about something."
"What?" he asks impatiently, flash-stepping to her side.
"Everything's fine," she insists. Her looks into her green eyes carefully, for any detection of nervousness or doubt, but there isn't any. She has been so patient with him, seeming to know his worries without him ever giving them voice, and she reassures him even when he doesn't ask outright. Still, it hasn't been enough. In the darkest pit of him, that little boy who has seen every person he loved slain was cowering, waiting for the next body.
She leans toward him, so he'll put an arm around her and feel her with him, more than alive—blooming, growing a little person that is both him and her. His jaw brushes tenderly against her temple, closing his eyes at her warmth as she continues.
"It's… it might actually be a good thing," she confesses, careful what she's telling him, to his great frustration. "But I need a second opinion before I tell you what I'm thinking, okay?"
"Hn." He knows that she's going to keep it to herself even if he's not okay with it, because this was medicine intersecting with their personal life, and she kept to her code. He didn't know how he was going to wait for her second opinion.
"Thank you," she whispers, reaching up on tiptoe to kiss the corner of his pouting mouth. "Please, anata, try not to drive me crazy until then?" He can hear the laughter behind her tone and it relaxes him a bit. If something was truly wrong, she wouldn't be able to poke fun at him.
"Aa," he mutters, knowing that there's no way he can actually succeed in that, gripping her more tightly to him. "So annoying."
This time, she does laugh out loud as he goes to summon his hawk for her, wasting no time. "Start writing, Sakura."
"Hai!" she says obediently, but her amusement follows him from the clearing.
It is three weeks before she receives a return letter, and he watches with anxiety as she reads, her mouth never curving upward or downward to give him the slightest hint of the contents. She pauses, putting down the letter before she finishes, and closes her eyes. He can feel her chakra move, examining something, probably on instruction from Shizune, before her eyes snapped open and she took up the letter again.
"It is," she says under her breath, and he tenses, waiting for her to just finish the damn letter already!
When she does put it down again, she stares blankly at the ground for a moment, and he's confused as her expression slowly transform… is it wonder?
"Anata…" she calls his attention and she's grinning broadly. "We're having two."
"Two what?" he replies, his mouth suddenly dry. Dumb question, but she doesn't seem to mind. Her expression is actually incandescent with joy.
"I had already done the examination, but Shizune concurred, so I did it again, just to be sure. We're having two babies, twins!"
His one and a half arms were suddenly full of his wife, who is prattling on to him about everything she could think of that was different now, with two babies instead of one. But his ears suddenly feel clogged, and her voice sounds muffled and far away. Two of them… his family is going from two to four in one heartbeat and the thought fills him with inexpressible happiness, because this is all he has ever wanted with Sakura…
But there's something else, like a cloud has come to cover the sun, there's some darkness that threatens to shade that happiness. He doesn't know what it is. He doesn't even want to know, because he shouldn't feel anything but the dreams he had being fulfilled.
But Itachi's voice is the quietest thing in his mind at this moment, and somehow easier to hear than even Sakura.
"Foolish little brother, if you want to kill me, despise me, hate me. Run, run… cling to live in an unsightly way. Then someday, when you have these eyes, come to me."
Sakura is still talking, he buries his face in her hair and tries hard to listen.
A/N: One-shot? I'm not sure, I could probably continue this. I've never written for Naruto before, but it was on my mind and I find it an interesting cop-out in Boruto that they aren't having Sakura and Sasuke have more than one child, because it eliminates a lot of potential angst for Sasuke and his messed-up childhood coming to roost in his marriage/family life. Yes, he has mostly come to terms with his feelings toward Itachi, but the fact remains that what happened when he was young was really brutal and people don't just get over something like that. Anyway, hope you enjoyed. If you think this constitutes a continuation, let me know!
