Bound
Remorse

"Did you know anyone named Ume?"

Sakura looks up from her mirror where she is carefully braiding her hair and turns to regard Sasuke. His actions all night have been puzzling her. First she woke to find their bed cold, to find him gone. It had been the first time since…

Sakura pauses in mid thought as she realizes that there has not been a single time when she has not woken up with his arms wrapped securely around her. This morning was the first.

She can only stare at him, blinking dumbly at the suddenness of this realization. The part of her that still fears her role as 'Lady Uchiha' flails and panics at the possibility that he might be tired of her so soon. The other part of her, the part that is still slowly gaining strength but is not strong enough to overcome her weakness can only ponder as to why her husband is acting so…odd.

She doesn't understand the almost violent reaction he had to Pansuke or the way that his eyes had bled red. Maybe he is wary of something that she doesn't quite know about. If that is the case then she will keep her silence, but even that doesn't quite explain the way he refused to look at her. It doesn't explain the way he looks too pale, even now.

The strength and courage that he is starting to give her lets her appreciate the way the wet spikes of his hair stick to the back of his neck as he makes his way towards her.

"Sakura."

She studies him for a moment. He is still having difficulties holding her gaze, and the feminine Haruno in her worries if this is the beginning of the end.

"I had a twin by that name, yes."

"A twin?"

There is something in his voice that sounds so stricken that it has her abandoning her hair as she moves toward him. She can feel some of her old anguish pricking in her belly when he takes a step back as she reaches out to touch him. Less than a month ago she might have clung to the anguish. Even now she can feel the tears pricking at the corners of her eyes and the desire to flee the room nearly has her choking on a sob.

Then she remembers the way he held her after he learned the truth. Sakura grits her teeth and steps forward until she is cupping his cheek. She is left with the rather sudden impression that if Sasuke had been any less then who he was, he would have backed away against the wall.

"Sasuke?" Instinct has her keeping her voice soft. "What's wrong?"

His hand reaches up and grasps the one that she is pressing to cheek. The room is so very still before he finally speaks. "Were you close?"

Sakura remembers Ume with her sharp tongue and haughty demeanor and gives a small smile. She does not know what has brought this on or why he even knows her sister's name, and she knows that she will probably never want to know. So for his sake, Sakura ignores the brittle look on his face and tells him the truth. It is a rather fortunate thing, she thinks, that the truth is what he wants to hear.

"There was only one member of my family that I was ever close to, Sasuke, and it was none of my siblings."

She leads him to their bed like he has done for her so many times. Her family has always been a taboo, and Sakura is surprised when she feels none of that cold horror like she did when she told Sasuke what her uncle had done. He eases onto the bed, his head resting against the pillow, and she curls next to his warmth. It is only when his arm settles over her waist that she threads her fingers through his and rests her head against his chest so that she can hear the steady thudding of his heart.

"I want to say I was happy and content there but I don't think it is possible anymore." She wants to tell him that love is not something that existed for her until she came here, but it is not the time. She knows that he cares for her, but she is not certain that love is a word that he will ever utter. So Sakura leaves it unsaid as she tries to find the right words to explain what her family meant to her. What Ume had been. She doesn't tell him how there are things that she has here that she would never had if she had stayed home.

"Things were pleasant, but I don't think any of us felt a particular feeling of family. Not like your family does." She closes her eyes when Sasuke starts to undo her half bound hair. "Ume…she—"

"She was the sister I liked least."

He pulls the blanket over their form and curls locks of her hair around his fingers. Something about the way he is acting reminds her of a child and if she wasn't so warm and content to just have his arms wrapping around her it would concern her. Sakura does not think about this, and it does not occur to her that maybe, just maybe, there are times when Sasuke might want to curl and hide away from the rest of the world.

Instead she concentrates on telling him what it was like growing with a twin like Ume. She tells him how she was always being called the pretty one and always wishing that she had the back bone to be more like her younger sister. Her little twin who always had a talent for dancing. Ume was never very feminine, she tells him, and she never liked dresses, but she had the slender limbs of a world class dancer. Ume had the chance to do what no woman in the royal family had ever done, to live a life free of the influence of men and their tempers, and she had discarded it.

Sakura tells him how Ume had taken up the blade, determined to be more useful to their father than other women in their family had ever been. Her voice goes quiet as she admits something that she has never really told anyone. She admits that the younger of the two of them did end up being the most useful to Ryuichi Haruno, the most favored.

She knows that she shouldn't feel so awful at the memory on that day when Ume was accepted into the covert operations squadron. She had been there, when Ume had showed their father a blade that Sakura supposed was magnificent. Ryuichi had turned such a critical eye to her then and told her that she was lucky that she looked nothing like Ume and that she was pretty. He had told her that it was really the only use she could offer.

Sakura tries to pull herself from those horrible memories and concentrate on her husband and why he is acting so strange. She tries to remind herself that she no longer needs to worry about that place and how things were never as perfect as she liked to believe. She has people who care about her here, genuinely. The arms wrapped around her tighten and she is reminded of the oddly possessive way Sasuke was acting earlier. She opens her mouth to ask him what brought on this sudden question, why he wasn't there this morning, why he pulled her away from his cousin like that—

Her words are swallowed with a kiss. There is an almost desperate edge to it that she knows should scare her. She wonders at the way he kisses her so thoroughly, causing her heart to pound in her chest, his fingers brushing against her bare arms. There are no playful nips against her lower lip and before she can even look up to him, Sasuke is pulling her up, pillowing his head on her breasts and clinging to her.

"Don't hate me."

The words are little more than a whisper, and she isn't quite sure she heard them. Sakura can only look down at her husband, the man who is still helping her heal, and be horribly confused at this sudden change.

On an impulse, she threads her fingers through his hair. Tears prick her eyes—why is he acting this way?—when he tucks his head firmly under her chin and whimpers.

She doesn't quite know what to say when, the next morning, he acts as if nothing happened.

OMG! Another update so soon.

I am going to attempt to keep up the update schedule from this past week but I can't make any promises. This is actually an attempt to keep more focused on my novel so we shall see.