#psalloacappella:SSM21

[psalloacappella]

SSM21 Day 3. Nighttime

Pairing: SasuSaku Prompt: Nighttime Title:  this city’s burning, it’s not my burden Tags:  AU - War; Combat Medic Sakura; Soldier Sasuke; CW: War Imagery and Injury In these dim and flickering emergency lights, he says,

"Marry me."

Ao3 | twt | full series link | @ssskmonth

Nighttime can be many things:  Sunset sinking under the horizon line. A signal to gather the flock and circle them up, press the love in tight to keep out everything else. Dinner and drinks, books and cards, friends and trysts.

Sakura remembers these average evenings while she shivers, a bag of click-clacking bones, every tendon pulled tight, murmuring silent thanks to the tetchy-tuned radio and the sound of an explosive shell missing her tent.

Here, a stone’s throw from the combat zone, the terrifying, strident buzz of planes wind up as the sun goes down.

Day belongs to cleaning and wailing, turning over dog tags, and fitful sleep. Night belongs to the enemy. Night belongs to war.

Men from the front line haul him in, bringing with them the barbed, pinched tang of iron and smoke. Earth clinging to worn boots; faces smeared with blood. Uzumaki (best friend of her lover and now hers too, these three young draftees intertwined as ivy, organically-grown trauma) mouths words she can’t hear. Not against the new whistling of a shell sparing her frail medic tent yet again. Not against her heartbeat, currently slamming out a rhythm underneath her ribcage that threatens to burst through.

Accepts his hand on her shoulder, pats it with her own. Scored with antiseptic, rough to touch. Now they file out, dipping their heads with respect. Each set of eyes catches her for a moment then slips over, frictionless, torn from one tragedy to the next. They’ll bring more casualties in time, like a promise.

When they’re gone, it escapes. The low moan of a wounded animal, and it’s coming from her. She quells it, dipping two fingers into the hollow of his neck to seek a pulse. Taps against her skin, weak but alive. Places her head on his chest, seeing what she can hear, and her hand moves to his forehead.

“Sasuke,” she says sharply, patting his cheek. Lifts an eyelid, taps him a little harder than she should. Some stoic medic she is — each name recorded from tags hanging on the dead reminds her of her weakness. “Sasuke! Move your fingers if you can hear me.”

The immediate flutter of his hand brings her more relief than she’d like to allow. She wants to embrace him right here, but there’s a nagging in her gut, something not quite right.

He opens his eyes, stares into the pitch of the tent and beyond. Unfocused.

Sasuke’s torn up hand, mercifully with all digits intact, comes up to touch her hair. But not the way it should:  It meanders, clutches at her arm, walks along her shoulder to find it as if he —

“Sakura,” he croaks, succumbs to coughs. They hurt and he writhes from the recoil. Yanks her close by the hair, straining to speak around the blood and grit in his throat. “I can’t—”

Covering his hand with her own, she gropes for her penlight and finally shines it into his dark eyes,

(and beautiful, they were, for a time; she’d seen them up close on the floor of her flimsy tent, charcoal and smoldering but loving, comforting like the low-burning idle of a hearth)

“No,” she hisses. Watches the way his pupils stay resolutely wide and blank. “No, no no —”

And with a cry, she sweeps her arm across the small metal table, scattering the pathetic few tools she has left to the dirt.

Taking his face in her hands, she leans over him, whispering against his cheek: “Breathing?”

“Ribs hurt,” he growls.

“You can feel your legs?”

He nods in her grip, staring into nothing.

Choking back that noise again, piteous and fragile, she presses her forehead against his, tasting the salt of her own tears.

“Just tell me.”

“Concussion-induced blindness. As to how long—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says simply.

She withdraws and whirls around, wishing she had something to break.

“I’ll mow them down.”

The strangled way she says this leaves him silent. “Sakura—”

“No,” she interrupts, “I will. I stitch up my friends, send their tags home in coffins, hunker in the tent waiting to be blown apart. And all I get to do is cower here, night after night, wondering if when I’m finally hit I'll be terrified — or relieved.”

The radio crackles, and the stay-in-place! order moves through her as the lingering smog of decay. Her anger sparks, her words spit:

“I want a gun in my hands.”

“I’ll be shipped out.” Sasuke’s voice is steady, assuaging. “Come home with me.”

Sakura snorts, turning around to see him still lying there, pensive. Calm in the face of, or perhaps shellshocked by, this new tragedy.

“And just how would I do that?”

As if the possibility occurred to him in this single moment, in these dim and flickering emergency lights, he says,

“Marry me."

A casual tone, a moment of total absurdity as mortars continue to fall.

“You’re ridiculous.” Voice cracking in a delicate way, as fine china. “And concussed. Literally.”

He pauses, concedes the point in the haughty silence in a way only he can.

“Watch over me, then. Tonight, at least.”

She sighs, but doesn’t pause to consider it much at all, pulling up a chair and muttering. At least this vigil is for the living, not the dead.

Lacing her calloused fingers through his, they hang on tightly

(and the sky and all the shells are falling and they’re clutching close and she whispers I do, I do,)

— enduring such ancient fear rattling them to the bone, counting the minutes until dawn burns away this endless night.

[psalloacappella]

SSM21 Day 2. Festival

Pairing:  SasuSaku  Prompt: Festival  Title:  sparks will fly, they ignite our bones Tags:  AU - Modern Setting; First Dates; Wooing Lips burning against his, mouthing soft words in the detonation din.

(In which Sakura has the better aim.)

Ao3 | twt | full series link | @ssskmonth

“It’sa real date this time.” Each word’s punctuated by Naruto’s fist punching his opposite palm, driving home the importance of this. This being:  Street stall smells rich and piquant, a smoky-savory blend; lights flickering in kaleidoscopic, neurotic brilliance; children wild as free foals escaping their parents, weaving in and out of adults’ legs clutching cheap prizes and sparklers —

and him, Sasuke, on an actual fucking date with a woman with cotton-candy-colored locks who has been besting him every game and measure of skill imaginable, and his dumb plus-one buffer, the best friend, now droning on about how he needs to win her something.

“Anything!” Naruto throws his arms up, dramatic and exasperated, the only gearsetting he seems to have. “Teddy bear, ugly fish, keychain — literally any shitty prize to show her yer not a complete waste of time.”

“Sasuke!” Both men snap to, pretending to have been watching the whole time as Sakura jumps up and down, pumping a fist in the air. “I won again!”

With shiny, wide eyes, she places both her palms out in giddy anticipation to receive a stuffed bear donning a baseball cap of the local (terrible) team from a surly booth operator with a permanent frown.

“She’s comin’ this way!”

“I can see that,” Sasuke hisses. “You useless idiot.”

“Did I hear ‘charming wingman?’ ‘Kay, I’m gonna find some food. Give you two some time—”

“Don’t say it—”

“Alone.” Some strange tone aiming for sensual manifests as choking pigeon, and Naruto skips away as Sakura bounds up to Sasuke, smiling so wide he can see every perfect tooth.

“Did you see?” So proud of herself, arms laden with prizes. Some she’s already given away to cute children passing by, perhaps the sole supplier of noisemakers and soft bears. For a doctor in pediatrics, the urge to make smiles comes second nature. “Where’s he going?”

“Food, or something,” Sasuke murmurs, trying not to look as constipated and irritated as he had ten minutes prior — another gem from Naruto’s unasked-for criticism. “He’s left us alone.”

“Finally.” Definitely slipped out by accident, and Sakura grumbles over her mistake, red prickling her cheeks and chest. “Not that I dislike him, of course—”

“I do,” Sasuke says, absolutely deadpan. It takes her a moment.

“Uchiha Sasuke, did you just make your first joke?”

Ears burning in the cool night air, it’s his turn to smother his embarrassment. In lieu of further slip ups, he awkwardly gathers the items in her arms, a mishmash of unidentified thingamajigs and whatnots that you only find in curio shops or carnivals, and gallantly takes on their burden.

“Walk with me?”

So sure his voicebox just sustained a hairline crack; he hates himself for being nervous.

Eyes, hers, brighter than all the psychedelic frenzy swirling around them both, caught up in the haze; she has the uncanny ability to fade the rest to black, toss the entirety of the world’s existence aside.

Seeking to link her arm with his amid the mess of wares won, she succeeds and presses closer.

“I thought I’d die waiting,” she whispers into his sleeve. “I’ve been wanting you to notice me properly all night.”

Meandering, conjoined, down the main road; carved out for the celebration, buffeted by snack scents and other couples, groups of friends, and plenty of pairs pretending they’re still just and only that. Along the way she unloads her many winnings, surreptitious, in part kindly trying to relieve his burden but also calculating the space in her single occupancy apartment.

She watches people and lights, and he watches her.

Sakura’s gaze snags on a particular booth, more specifically a particular prize. Of the stuffed variety.

“Did . . .  something catch your eye?” he asks. Immediately thinks he sounds like an idiot. You know how to woo ‘em, and why does his inner voice sound like Naruto’s on this date, goddamn it —

Burying her cheek into his shoulder, she giggles and it threads beautiful, stringed tension in his throat and spine, symphonic, testing its own flex to see if she can orchestrate the rest of him. He wishes he could spin her around, lift her high in some filmesque climax, kiss her in the closing credits.

“Don’t laugh,” she says, “but I love slugs. Adore them, really. Gross, I know!” She raises her free hand and points directly at a giant stuffed slug on a high shelf behind the booth’s counter. “And honestly, I’d likely keep it in my office; the kids would love it.”

Sasuke knows, from what she’s disclosed, that these are sick kids, too. This ancient, gendered mating ritual is unavoidable and he’ll have to rise to the challenge. He must provide. Stupid, because she outstrips his earnings and likely will the rest of their life.

Says it like a throwaway, like no big deal:  “I’ll have to win it for you, then.”

The game? Aim. Darts. Doable if he’s sober and with equally (un)talented friends; ranging from Shino the sharpshooter to drunk and stumbling Suigetsu, he’s decidedly somewhere in the middle, but it should be enough raw talent to beat a festival game.

Sakura’s eyes are on him, excited. She dances a little from foot to foot, ready to cheer him on.

Dropping the rest of the prizes on the ground and shoving a fistful of coins at the booth operator, he smirks. Born ready, all those forced childhood sports camps and instrument lessons finessing his hand-eye coordination finally stepping up to the plate.

Imagine failing miserably three rounds in a row, the last one bouncing off the dartboard so violently it narrowly misses the sleepy booth operator. Sasuke grinds his teeth, jaw tight, wishing it’d met its mark.

To Sakura’s credit, she’s completely unperturbed. Almost makes it worse.

She pecks him on the cheek, scoring him through hot and fevered where her lips touch.

“Performance anxiety,” she quips, but her smile isn’t unkind. “Let me give it a try.”

Each dart that lands in the board does so with gusto, embeds itself deep into the sisal cork. As each one hits, Sasuke reflects they might as well be piercing him. The most painful blow is watching her indicate the bluebacked slug, winning it outright without his help, and squeezing it half to death in her arms.

They’re walking again, sans the rest of her prizes — left them for the booth operator, and whatever kids wander his way wanting toys with which to annoy their parents.

“You’ve been so quiet,” she says, shifting her slug under one arm and linking up with him again.  Sasuke shrugs against her. “I’m not sure what’s next with us.”

 He stops, figures it’s better to rip that bandaid off now, give her an out so he can save some face. Of course they’ve stopped on some coquettishly romantic bridge, arched over the still summer pond, a popular viewing spot for the night’s end fireworks.

She watches him expectantly, searching him with her sharp green eyes.

“What do you mean?” Her question is slow, puzzled.

What he means to say is something gentile. Instead he says, “You’re great at darts.”

She seems to sway, a physical manifestation of being caught off guard. Laughs. “Surprised me too! But you gave my arms a rest, so they were ready to win.” Curls her arm to indicate muscle, grinning.

Steps closer, melting through an unseen veil of personal space. Cherry scent; smoke.

“Could be all the shots you administer.”

“I guess we can call jabbing kids with needles a calling.” Mirroring him, she steps in too, and there’s not so much space between them anymore. “Good practice. You could come around sometime, see my work.”

Another tiny shuffle.

It’s time to break this. Sasuke inhales deeply, letting it out in measured beats. “Sakura—”

“If you’re mad you couldn’t win this for me,” she interrupts, “you’re being silly. I don’t care about that, you know.”

He tilts his head, and in spite of himself his hand wanders, brushing a stray strand of pink out of her face. “Hm?”

“I don’t,” she repeats, and sets her slug down on the wooden bridge. Breathes deeply before saying in a low, threaded voice, “What I care about is all the waiting.”

Sasuke feels it all fall into place. Oh. Oh.

“So come on, Sasuke.”

And before she’s even finished saying his name he’s kissing her, the last vibrations of his name caught on their lips, locked, and though the timing is perfect and picturesque, film archetype material as the fireworks charge the air around them, each one set off drawing ripple designs in the water beneath them, this thrill is unmatched, the way she wraps her arm around his neck to taste him deeper, the way he lifts her up to rest him on his hips and there’s nothing, has never been anything, quite like this.

Real fireworks pale in comparison.

Lips burning against his, mouthing soft words in the detonation din.

“The perfect end,” she whispers, “to a festival.”

[psalloacappella]

SSM21 Day 20 - Summons

Pairing: SasuSaku Prompt: Summons Title:  we’re in danger, sleeping with a friend Tags: Sasuke & Katsuyu talk; T7+Kakashi; Blank Period; One night stands; the kids are all dumb, but Sakura’s the least dumb; laundry headcanon returns

Ao3 | twt | full series link | @ssskmonth

In the library, being lectured by a slug, plagued by a kinked neck.

In which Katsuyu speaks out of turn and Sasuke sulks.

Excerpt: 

“What’s the point of all this?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This,” Sasuke says with a shrug of the shoulder she’s perched on. “What exactly are you doing here?”

Hmph! If expressions could kill. Feeling her affront, he ignores the unusual reveal of frustration from Katsuyu, smirking a little at her irritation. From what he knows, she’s the most respectful of them all and enjoys a buoyancy and affinity with her summoners many others don’t.

“Since Sasuke-san asked,” she begins, words poised but pinched, “I’m here at Sakura-san’s behest to monitor your vital signs, assess your levels of pain over a defined period of time, ascertain insights, note new symptoms.”

“In short, all the things that I’d be dealing with if I was a patient.”

“You are a patient. Albeit a mobile one.”

Sasuke channels annoyance in the flick! of the thin pages.

“May I ask after your mental and emotional state?”

“You may not,” he snaps.

“This was not a rhetorical question. I’ll continue. Please let me know how you’ve been managing the following:  Dreams and nightmares; perception of self-worth; physical prowess during spar sessions with Naruto-san; sexual health.”

Somewhere, a book hits the floor.

[psalloacappella]

SSM21 Day 5. Jutsu

Pairing: SasuSaku Prompt: Jutsu Title: I’m lost, so lost, I’m lost at sea you see Tags: Blank Period; Canon Divergence; Bittersweet; Fuck the shinobi state

The sun's setting - it may never rise again.

Ao3 | twt | Full series link | @ssskmonth

The only part of her returned to him are the earrings.

His handmade supplication and silent ardor he’d never had the easy ability to express, and she’d never taken them off since. In an ornate box in a small silk satchel set in a plush compartment they rest, an unnecessary labyrinth of layers for any widower to navigate.

Gleaming, the final remnants of his faithful wife. Like the Sharingan and fresh blood, not such different shades of calamity in the end, the glittered edges of them skewer his soul straight through, churning bile in his throat at the sight:

The ruby and the rust.

Knowing already they’d been torn from her flesh without ceremony, as a thief gropes for gold. He feels sick, chokes down dry heaves at the violence of it — all the ‘what if’s’ between the lines of the detached, clinical summary.

Ino had been the one to slip Sasuke the coroner’s report as Naruto sent back food and any emotional entreaties at a dizzying pace, barricaded in his Hokage office and unseen for the 48 hours since.

The photo is almost too much.

You deserve to know, she’d whispered, casting red-rimmed eyes at the closed door. In the face of her best friend’s death — and the wilting and withdrawing of a man who Sasuke suspects was more to her than just a friend, more than he might have guessed — each breath coming is a ghostly rattle, the human shell through which untenable grief passes. She was . . .

And in an uncharacteristic breaching of his physical boundaries, Ino’s face crumples and she falls into his chest, tears taking their worn fjord paths again, endless and unhealing.

She’s clutching, he’s still as stone. If he ever possessed the ability to comfort to begin with, how could he articulate that he was gutted, hollowed and scraped — had nothing left?

She was yours.

❦

A funeral turnout more beautiful and admiratory than expected. Arrangements of flowers in all sundry varieties, proper rites and rituals, tears and anecdotes from every corner, all the tiny pockets in which his wife existed to keep a hegemony well-oiled, well-healed, well-loved.

The sun’s setting — it may never rise again, and Sasuke leans into the shadowed corners of Naruto’s office as a broken, huddling animal while his best friend drinks in a way he never used to, longing for the desperate peace a substance never brings.

In between empties he tells him all of it.

“Was her idea,” Naruto croaks. “I begged her not to, Sasuke. B-believe me!”

Silence.

“Our intelligence team . . . knew the day after she left. The syndicate . . . they’d marked her. I’m sorry.”

Into his shaking hands, muffled, Sasuke speaks in a voice bland and dead. “Then why did you let her go?”

“Because she was right.” Naruto sniffles, wiping his nose with the heel of his hand. Like a child, a genin again. Both feeling useless and stymied. He laughs weakly. “She always is.”

When Naruto tells him the last bit of the mission — this plan so convoluted and shrouded in lies and kept off paper, officially unofficial, Sasuke’s insides and soul twist in protest and he thinks again of labyrinths, noiseless sinister tunnels of all the worst-kept village secrets. Wishing he were lost in them, deaf, dumb, and blind.

Naruto’s men lingering at their posts hear the end of it:  Raised voices shot through with crackling pain, papers skittering, and when Sasuke kicks open the door he tucks his bruised knuckles into his cloak, gripping his secured, temporary discharge orders in his hand.

❦

Arriving after two weeks of listless travel, it doesn’t take Sasuke long to tease out the location based on a handful of conversations with some of the port city’s more loquacious characters. Worries him, but as he approaches a dilapidated beach cottage carrying a scent of neglect on the salty breeze, he begs forces unknown for a last flickering flame of faith.

Nothing in the filthy windows, no sounds coming from within. But it’s here, the lingering scent of familiar soft skin and now he’s on the back step, staring into a dank and empty den, old furniture laden with dust. He raises his fingers as if to tap gently at a door between him and this void, and now he’s feeling the skip of his heartbeat and he brushes his fingers against the air, again, some melancholy heartsick action, desperate for the sign that he can peel this illusion back.

And he falls through.

In her arms, into an embrace, and he’s letting out a burst of air against her hair and for a moment his chest caves in, shuddering with disbelief, that wounded and breathless sound of stolen speech, lost and found again.

“Sasuke-kun,” she sighs.

Taking in this cottage with gleaming wood floors, void of dirt, curtains thrown open to let the sunlight ring with impunity. In defiance of dwelling and hiding, the small resistance cloaked by the jutsu’s delusion to anyone lurking outside. Sasuke closes his eyes tightly, shuts them against this relief as if it’ll disappear the moment he lets go. She’s here. She’s real.

His hand travels down her spine, fingers memorizing each chine with the intensity of a blind man seeking purchase in lost memory.

“You’re—”

“You made it,” she says, sniffling. Prelude to tears. “I was wondering if I’d have to get on the boat myself.”

Lips in the crook of her neck, in her hair, holding her with the grip of a man clinging to life and still wondering if this is the most devastating dream, if he’s died himself.

“You’re real.” A catch in his throat. A gentle, brittle fracture in the exhaled shell of her name:  

“Sakura.”

A moment, another. Then —

“We don’t have long,” she says, pulling back to look him in the eyes, dabbing away endless tears. “I’m so sorry, Sasuke-kun. For everything you had to go through, for the things you had to pantomime, pretending to grieve.”

He doesn’t tell her how the plan had been fucked up, that wires and signals crossed in the chaos of the penultimate piece of intelligence; that they’d already set in motion the plan, her plan, of faking her death to the syndicate as a feint for a larger stratagem, a byzantine game of chess; that only when Naruto had drunkenly and haphazardly explained the mess they’d found themselves in, Sakura with a price on her head and convincing them she could carry the illusion with the knowledge that they’d let her husband know, and in a timely fashion.

Sasuke doesn’t think he can process it yet, much less explain it to her now.

She’d never forgive herself.

“The ANBU’s jutsu did well,” she explains, swallowing hard, “but it won’t last. I’ve packed everything, I have the route. Disguises.” Thumbing his cheek, brushing away what might be an actual tear his buzzing skin can’t feel, she adds, “I need you with me, darling.”

Pretty words have never been her beloved’s forte. Instead he brings her hand to his mouth, pressing each finger against it one by one in quiet endearment — just as he remembers, the hum of her strength and adoration just beneath the skin.

The art of jutsu, at its roots; some form and blend of technique and magic, a pliable spectrum from love to disaster.

This unlucky fate, he supposes, is its own dark spell.

[psalloacappella]

SSM21 Day 21 - Flower

Pairing: SasuSaku Prompt: Flower Title:  and I came here to make you dance tonight Tags: Blank Period; Canon Divergence; Jealous Sasuke; Drinking; Gossip; Wall Sex; these kids are messy

Ao3 | twt | full series link | @ssskmonth

In the language of flowers, he’s so very sure Sakura is telling him to fuck right off.

Excerpt: 

An hour turns over somewhere in this tavern without visible clocks, the shift from pleasant evening to rowdy shinobi off mission dispatch. From here the din always climbs louder, the music soars warbling and vibrato and gives an ulcer to anyone over thirty. Spills end up on the floor more than in mouths, failing to slake any thirst since by this time people begin to find it in drunk strangers or friends waiting in the wings.

Such is the way in this watering hole, off the beaten track, a first choice if you’re wanting to hide your poor and drunk ones.

Sakura’s eyes deepen in shade at the advent of the first note. Doesn’t matter what it is, and as she accepts another drink with reluctance Sasuke asks rudely, again, “What is that?”

“Don’t you like it?” Showing him her cheek to better flash the ruddy yellow flower perched behind her ear, the colors in discord; he tastes sour hate on his tongue, and it’s not the drink. “Ino dressed me tonight.”

To this he only snorts, meaning obviously. Knowing Ino tends to be behind most bright and terrible ideas that involve his . . . teammate.

“Good thing,” Sakura says tartly, “I don’t care what you think.”

“That much is obvious.”

[psalloacappella]

SSM21 Day(s) 10 & 11

Pairing: SasuSaku Prompts:  Day 10 (Distant) & Day 11 (Safe and Sound) Title: but I think I’m a believer, I believe in something new Tags: Space AU/Space opera; Rebellion; Drama; Romance

Ao3 | twts 1 & 2  | full series link | @ssskmonth

"By the time this finds you, beloved, I'll be a fragment of a star."

Excerpt:

It’s getting harder to breathe, in this thin and fraying air.

There’s a sharp, honed scent; it burns and withers the tip of her nose. Another ship system is failing. These emergency podships weren’t meant to last.

Sakura’s laugh cantillates as gentle chimes, a facsimile of breeze where there is none. Tears keep slipping, undulating, and she hopes this all reaches him.

“Ah, what else can I say?” she murmurs, tilting her head. “I’m remembering the whole of my life now, as you do when you sense the end. The mind knows, rips you through a thousand memories in fractions of seconds. I see my graduation as I remember earth’s soil, our first meeting as I remember killing my first man, and all they do is fall on top of one another until the context disappears.”

Lights on the command panel flicker and snuff themselves out one by one, beginning as a single bulb here and there, as raindrops swallow dry dust in the desert by way of pinpoints until it all becomes a sweep.

“But never forget,” she says quietly, swallowing around the sob in her throat, “that we caught fire and changed the world, and I’ve never wanted to do that with anyone but you.”

[psalloacappella]

SSM21 Day 6. Undercover

Pairing:  SasuSaku Prompt: Undercover Title:  watch the world explode, from underneath your glow Tags:  AU - Assassins and Hitmen; Explicit Sexual Content; Closet sex, Shower sex, and Cunni; they’re sort of terrible agents  Ao3 | twt | full series link | @ssskmonth Sasuke snorts, glancing up briefly at the barrel pressed to his pretty temple. “Is this your way of courting me? Seems aggressive.”

“I’m not going to kill if you say no.”

Excerpt:

Tang and zest brush the tip of her tongue, luring her mouth to water. She knows he knows, and hates him for it.

“Not wet enough for you?” Says it with the force of a steel trap, but her bite is softened by his easy grace, his tender exploration of her tumescent bottom lip.

“A humble offering,” he says, voice low and threaded through with a breezy note. Could be teasing. Could be sin. “You should know you taste phenomenal.”

[psalloacappella]

SSM21 Day 1. Glances

Pairing:  SasuSaku Prompt: Glances Title: the horses are coming, so you better run Tags:  AU - Greek Mythology Their language of silence is legendary, spoken only in glances. Ao3 | twt | full series link | @ssskmonth

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.

[psalloacappella]

SSM Day 18 - Enemies

Pairing: SasuSaku Prompt: Enemies Title: give me a long kiss goodnight, & everything will be all right Tags: Shippuden - Canon Divergence; Canon-typical violence; Tragic Romance; Implied Stalking

Ao3 | twt | full series link | @ssskmonth

Copper tang between them, blood and sweat and salt. Both loathing the way they want each other, entangled, love and hate and the will of the state all in one divine knot.

Excerpt:

A hissing sound distracting him now, faint but present, and though she still keeps her eyes squeezed shut, trembling in his grasp, he remembers the clincher, the thing he’d found out on recent reconnaissance and in his mess — it had reduced him to silence, set his mind on infinite snaking paths and made his team wary at the way he’d left them without another word. He’d been explosive lately, unhinged the word lingering in the air but never vocalized. The haunting becoming more frequent bordering on obsession which left the redhead seething and the men unsettled, eschewing logical positions for the endless detail and glimpse of an enemy from the other side.

If they knew his nightmares. If they knew his tenuous grip on reality.

If they knew that she was the only thing he’d ever touched himself to — they might have intervened.

He means to reach into her chest, pull out her soul, but instead fingers the shallow and crimson split traversing her breastbone with frightening disquiet, and throughout it all she still manages not to open her eyes.

“So this is . . .” 

By his tone, she knows he knows. 

“You’ve been watching.” Her voice is hushed, terrified. “And you say you hate us.”