Had some moments so got the next bit out faster than normal. Enjoying the ride, myself. Glad others are as well. Already in questionable T territory so I upped the rating to be safe. Real reason for upping it to come later.

Disclaimer: see part 1

After days of travel Sakura should have been too tired to awaken this alert, but she had already been up twice in the night to fetch a drink of water or to look out of the warped glass window in her small room. Judging by the female sighs during the water she fetched, and the masculine moans as she squinted through the window the duke was having a busy night. Doubtless he was trying to get his trysting done in a single evening, if possible. He did so hate having to feign passion for an extended duration.

Sakura's duties didn't begin until approximately when the duke slept, which was often around three or four in the morning when they were visiting the capitol and he was on court hours. Adjusting her mail shirt and pulling on her red doublet to hide it, she was grateful the duke didn't force her to dress as a lady when she stood guard even if it was a requirement for her waking hours off duty.

His room was mere steps from hers and she gave the customary knock and entered to find him relaxing in a bath, face neutral and eyes closed. Still as the grave. Anyone else might have thought him dead, but Sakura knew better as she looked for the faintest of tells such as the rise and fall of his chest in the water. He didn't bother to crack an eye until she closed the distance between them.

"My lord, if I had known you were to bathe the chambermaids should have known to summon me." The expectation was that it was the vulnerable moments in which he needed a guard—bathing, sleep, and occasionally meetings that required concentration that might otherwise compromise his senses.

"Calm yourself, Sakura, I told them not to disturb you. My activities were not so distracting that I felt incapable of defending myself." He slid a stiletto knife from the water and dropped it on the ground with a clatter, where Sakura fetched it and dried it before setting it under his pillow as was his practice.

Whatever men or women Sasori had slept with this night, Sakura wondered if they understood the price they were really paying for the pleasure of a hole filled by this dangerous man. Probably not, as Sasori's looks seemed to blind people to the actual cost. There would be favors needing repayment, sometimes blackmail, and that's if they were lucky. Any nobleman or woman foolish enough to love the duke would be drained of usefulness and abandoned as ruthlessly as the corpses they had passed on the way out of fortress a week ago.

"Vespers tourney is the day after tomorrow. As per usual you will be released from your nighttime duties tomorrow to rest before your matches. I hear Count Kisame suggested changing up the order to force you to face Haku but the banners and criers had announced the line up a week ago and the crown prince declined the request."

Sakura shifted on her feet, eager to prove herself yet again in the tourney but well aware the fact that she was always declined entry to the actual tournament and being forced to joust the squires was probably her lot in the order of things. She would always be the joke, the oddity, a pet the infamous Sasori of the Red Sands kept to amuse himself.

"No comments about the unfairness of the world? The pigheadedness of the men of the court? Have you come to accept your lot?" Sasori knew how to bait her, and she resisted the urge to spin around and argue. Of course inside of herself she raged at their inability to acknowledge her growing prowess, but she also knew there were more men like Zabuza slavering for a chance to knock her down should she be invited to enter their world. "Good girl, you're learning at last the futility of throwing emotion at an inflexible problem."

The snort she gave escaped before she could stop it, and she assumed it was because she was tired.

"… or you're getting better at hiding your displeasure." She counted herself lucky that tonight he was amused by her emotions instead of irritated. Perhaps all the fucking he had forced himself to participate in had been quicker or less messy than past sessions. His skin hadn't looked red or raw from the inevitable scrubbing he gave himself after such activities from the brief glance she had gotten of him in his bath. She hadn't looked very long.

Not that she hadn't seen every inch of him in detail over and over again from the first month of their association and beyond. He delighted in forcing her to watch him bathe to test the bounds of her maidenly discomfort at first, and while she no longer experienced any embarrassment over his nakedness, she still faced away as simply staring at him for minutes on end was otherwise awkward. What could she meditate on while amber eyes weighed her soul?

"I've wagered a small sum on you to be sporting with Kankuro, but given your performance last year he almost wouldn't take the bet. I'd tell you to throw your match if I thought you would obey me, but you use those emotions of yours to fight and I doubt you'd remember in the moment." She could hear water shifting and supposed he was gesturing.

"As you say, your grace." Sakura agreed, proud of her past showings even if it was just against squires. Absently, she wondered if he had come during sex at all or simply faked it. If anyone could fake something like that, it was her duke. She knew he wasn't totally sex averse, entirely. There had been one particularly memorable incident a year ago when she had accidentally walked in on him masturbating but instead of telling her to leave until he finished he simply stopped. He had answered her question, which she had asked in halting sentences, as he sat in his desk with his erect member out of his clothing. Then he had simply stuffed it away and went back to presumably writing correspondence or making battle plans or whatever he had been doing before he touched himself. She never could remember what she had asked him, or even his answer to her if she was going to be honest.

It wasn't even in the top five of strange interactions Sakura had had with him, but surely it was in the top twenty.

"Drying cloth." Sasori said simply and Sakura turned around at last to fetch a cloth from the stack neatly piled on a chair near to him. He stood out of the cloudy scented water and Sakura dispassionately was treated to a full-frontal view of the man as water sluiced down his body and back into the bath. A few moles here or there, a fine scar or two, but largely he was all lean muscle and smooth skin. He didn't look like a warrior, but then that exposed how deadly he actually was because a less competent killer would have more scars to tell the story of past battles.

Unexpectedly, their hands touched as he accepted the cloth, and Sakura flinched.

"We've been over this, lady knight…"

Sakura cursed herself in all the languages she knew in her own mind. He would be asleep in less than twenty minutes and then all she would have had to do was ensure he stayed asleep and undisturbed for the scant five or so hours he allowed his body to rest. Then she would have had a whole glorious day off before her tourney—Sasori free.

Dripping, clad only in a cloth knotted around his middle, Sasori pushed her solar plexus with a water puckered finger until she stumbled backwards onto the bed. She felt his damp hand slide under the layers of her doublet, chain, and undershirt to leave a clammy trail up her tight stomach.

"Your weakness reflects on me, even in private. Every mistake will be repaid," She knew he wouldn't rape her. The power games he played were mental not physical, but even so there was a creeping feeling in the back of her mind that three years ago he would have simply forced her to recite poetry as his slapped her until she could get through without a stumble or angry glance and this hand on her bare skin was new. "Until you learn perfection as easily as if it were breathing."

It felt like swarms of ants where his fingers brushed her, "As you will it, your grace," Her stomach muscle were leaping, but by the gods please let him think it was reflex and not a continued panicked reaction to the intimacy of their situation. This was a man who had to bathe thoroughly to get the stink and fluids of others flushed from him after sex. And here he was, tracing the skin around her bellybutton and watching her expression closely. To see if she'd stop him.

Then, like a ghost, the hand was gone as if it had never been there with only a dry throat and a few droplets of water to let her know it had been real. Sasori was already across the room and pulling on a nightshirt while talking of small matters he wanted her to see to on the morrow. Sakura tried to hold on to the words, but they were slipping through her fingers as if she were trying to catch fish in the stream at her childhood home.

Home. That was a sobering thought. She stood at up immediately from the bed and focused on her lord.

It was going to be a long night with only her thoughts and the dim outline of the devil in the canopied bed.

As Sakura lounged on a twee bit of furniture that groaned under the weight of all her mail and muscle she listened in amusement to the argument taking place mere feet away beyond the door.

"… you featherbrained ninny! Waking me in a panic like that, I ought to have an ear sliced from your head! I told you, quite clearly, about the Lady Haruno and given she's the only person in court with pink hair I'd think her reputation would have preceded her even in whatever rural inbred bit of nowhere you're from…"

There were low murmurs which Sakura assumed were groveling apologies, but she knew from the beginning she was headed for amusement when the Ino's new lady's maid spotted her in the sitting room of the suite and had a panic. An unannounced male! Scandal! The doorman knew Sakura these past years and had simply let her in with a bow.

Sakura was examining some of Ino's embroidery in the late morning sun when the lady herself made a grumpy entrance. Her mass of pale blond hair had been quickly tied behind her instead of in some intricate new in-fashion capitol style so clearly Ino had been lazing around in bed.

"You did that on purpose!" Ino plopped down nearby, careful to avoid the shaft of sunlight that Sakura was partially standing in. "Tea and snacks will come presently, which is why I think you're really here because I'm sure you jailer doesn't give you any treats."

"Shhh, dammit Ino could you say that so the whole neighborhood doesn't hear?"

With a wide smile Ino adjusted her skirts and wiped some sleep from the corner of her eye. "I don't say anything the whole court doesn't already think. You do a good impression of a dog for the duke. Bark when he says bark, heel when he says heel…"

Sakura wished sometimes Ino was a man so she could at least rough her up a little. A good punch now and then gave perspective on boundaries. "The duke is my liege lord, not my husband. It isn't like you and, who is it now?"

"You know his name—Sai—you just keep pretending to forget it because he's a merchant's son and not a knight like you. Titles aren't everything. Money talks, too, Sakura."

Food finally appeared, perking Sakura up. Unlike the dull nutritious fare she got with Sasori there were empty calories galore on Ino's tray. Pastries! An actual bowl of sugar for the tea! Porcelain cups with flower designs! A rose in a vase in the middle!

Ino snorted at Sakura's longing expression as she picked up a thick cup with cherry blossoms painted on the side. "You knew I was coming today," Sakura said as she drained the sweet tea in one gulp and admired the craftsmanship even as the rare refined sugar coated her tongue in an unfamiliar way.

"I expected you later, but who says we can't have afternoon tea for breakfast?"

"Is that a new thing in the capitol? A whole new meal between lunch and supper that's nothing but sweets?" Sakura pointedly glanced at Ino's slim waist. "All the ladies will get fat, and then what?"

Ino's feathers were clearly ruffled by the implication she was letting herself go. "It can't all be embroidery and music classes and accounting. I hear it's very popular in Mist, already. Father's shipments of flowers there have exploded as it's expected to have a nice arrangement to help aid digestion." Ino saw Sakura's expression and testily set her cup down with a clatter. "What?!"

"Your life is just so different from mine, I can't believe we live in the same world let alone the same country."

Ino waved her hand, dismissing Sakura's melancholy. "Life moves fast in the city, I'm sure the duke is aware of current fashions. He just curates his own experience in his home."

"Hm, I suppose." Sakura thought about how cold the fortress was, perched where constant winds blew, and of the barren landscape his troops patrolled. Ino had heard of the bodies staked around Sasori's outpost but it was easy to avoid the grim reality of it when it was no more than a story. She'd never watched carrion birds eat out a man's eyeballs over the course of an afternoon from her bedroom window. Her fancy blown glass window shutters overlooked a small urban garden, and opening them was probably an actually pleasant experience. "After the tourney, which you had better come to and cheer for me even if it's just in your mind, I'll need some of that skin cream you gave me last summer."

Groaning, Ino waggled a finger. "What use softening all that brown skin? You spend too much time in the sun and the heat."

"I live in a desert, Ino!"

"A lady wouldn't use that as an excuse! Besides, you said most of that sun exposure is from training. You spend the majority of your actual work time watching the duke sleep."

Only Ino could reduce Sakura's existence to a sentence and not earn some sort of injury from it. Besides, she was right. Sasori himself had unusually pale skin, but then he kept himself wrapped from head to toe when he went out with patrols on the border. The enveloping black cloak and face mask were practical desert wear but he must do something else to keep his skin soft, and the thought that he used skin cream like Ino did was weirdly humanizing. A monster with a skin care routine that wasn't bathing in the blood of his enemies.

"I see that embroidery is coming along," Sakura replied instead of commenting on her barren life. "What is it? Some sort of sunset scene?"

"It's a rose, and you know it, you bitch," Ino laughed, taking the sting away from the insult. "You know I'm a better household manager than an artist. I don't see you making any tapestries in your spare time."

Sakura grimaced, "I've gotten pretty skilled at repairing clothing just the same. No seamstress will come within ten miles of Sasori's home." It had slipped out, his proper name. Sakura had to exert real effort not to clap her hand over her mouth, but the blush spread over her cheeks just the same. It was the lack of sleep, she told herself, and the liberties of his discipline before he slept.

Ino politely ignored Sakura's mistake, but raised blond eyebrows and smiled quietly to herself. Reasonably sure her friend was not so fair weather to spread rumors about her and the duke, Sakura tried to regain her footing with a more pressing topic.

"Did you bet on me again like last year?"

Ino nodded, "And I expect you to triple my monthly allowance tomorrow. Don't disappoint me."

Sakura wondered why she had avoided having female friends for as long as she had during childhood. Maybe if someone like Ino had been in her life she wouldn't have felt it necessary to be a son to her father instead of a daughter. Someone has to defend the property from raiders when you lived on a border, he had said, and so it was imperative to make a good marriage to a strong knight or lord. Unless Sakura wanted to be that defender, he had laughed. But to her young mind it had sounded like she had had a choice, and marriage sounded like a trap.

Ino, for all she had been forcibly betrothed a year ago, didn't seem upset about it. If anything, she talked of it as if looking forward to building a household that was her own. Building a life sounded more noble than taking one from Sakura's side of the divide. But then she thought of how Sasori had praised her the first time she had killed a would-be assassin, practically wrist deep in the man's guts while the duke had emerged from his bed to quietly watch the end of their quick battle. Sakura remembered the relief that she was alive and the other man was dead, and the shame that followed for taking pleasure in any part of the killing.

That's when he had starting commissioning her red doublets with his scorpion symbol above her heart. Sakura glanced down at the symbol he had branded her with, barely seeing it any longer.

She didn't fight for him, she fought for her family he 'guarded' at the border between Suna and Leaf. Her father assured her that Sasori's troops behaved appropriately and didn't act like jailors. But Sakura wondered if he would be honest about that in letters that Sasori no doubt read before they reached her. He had promised her she would be able to visit them someday, perhaps that day would come sooner than later.

Time off for good behavior, her inner voice mocked.