Uchiha Sasuke had severed his bonds long ago.
There was no debating the subject. The bonds had been keeping him tied down, and he had to cut himself loose in order to rise above and beyond what he would otherwise be capable of. Achieving his ultimate goal – defeating his brother – would take every ounce of strength, endurance and dumb luck he could ever hope to attain. And for this equation to come right, there could be no room for things such as friendship and love, which in said equation easily translated to weakness and vulnerability.
Sasuke had done what he had to do, and though he had been bothered with what that implied, he did not regret.
Nor did he cry when he witnessed one of the sound-nin subordinates who had chosen to follow him since the fall of Orochimaru slice a kunai across the neck of the pink-haired girl with the vibrant green eyes he had once known when she, true to tradition, came gallivanting after him with hopes of reunion and shouts of 'Sasuke-kun!'. Sakura was her name, and he would never forget that, because that the bond had once existed could not be undone, even if the link could be terminated. No, he did not cry, and his heart did not clench in anguish when she fell to the ground where she soon after lay splayed in a growing puddle of her own blood.
But he soon decided that the subordinate was of no further use to him and should thus be removed from his vicinity. And he found, much later, that he regretted not finishing the girl off himself. She deserved better than having a nameless, faceless killer slice her throat like he had done hundreds of others. While the easy death that had been given her might have matched her abilities, it did not match the person he knew her to be. In retrospect, a fully powered chidori would have been a more befitting end.
These musings, however, was all Sasuke could afford to grant the dead kunoichi. A shame, was his last thought on the subject, before he returned to ponder his next step in reaching his brother, emotionless and calculating as ever.
A/N: English is not my first language. If you find any mistakes, feel free to point and laugh. For example, the first sentence of the fourth paragraph (ithink) looks horrible in my opinion because of the lack of commas. But I just couldn't figure where to put them without totally ruining the whole thing. So 'ugh' on that account.
I tried to make Sasuke somewhat canon. Did it work?