Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by drowsyivy.
"The night is darkening around me
The wild winds coldly blow
But a tyrant spell has bound me
I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me
Wastes beyond wastes below
But nothing, dear, can move me
I will not, cannot go."
— Emily Bronte
She sits down across from him and folds her hands together, setting them on the table, and wonders what it is exactly that has been haunting him so since last night, and if she is capable of piecing together the difference without shattering everything they have built altogether.
"About..., last night…" His words are slow, slow enough that she wants to reach across the table to hold his hands, but she does not. She waits, because this is a heavy truth to him, and it is cleaner to let him talk than it is to comfort him with the idea that she does not truly mind or care if he does not tell her. "It wasn't a nightmare. It's a memory."
She does not need to know, because she doesn't know if any truth will sway her heart from what it has already decided. She'd promised him her lifetime, had promised his parents anything that she could give to ensure his happiness.
So she gives this, her silence, so that he may speak instead.
This means much to him. And if telling her will cleanse whatever wound this is so it no longer festers, better to hear it.
So much has festered, but poisoned wounds can only be cleansed after the poison is drawn out of the flesh, and sometimes that means cutting open those wounds once more.
So it was when she was twelve, opening the veins of a misfortune comrade and drawing the mercury out of his blood, so it is now when she is eighteen, holding the hands of this man who has been too scarred by war to remember life without it. He does not know a life without it, for war was never a choice to him, so even now, years into peace time, he is haunted by its ghosts.
"A memory?" She comes around the table, takes one of his hands in hers. His hand is cold to the touch. "Tell me about it?"
"I am…what they say about me is true." They say plenty about him, even now, in whispers they do not think she hears, where even behind her glamor she is sure her seething shows.
What right did they have to gossip about him when they hid their sins and sorrows behind declarations of self righteous deeds? Of justice, of honor, a hundred ways to twist bad deeds into good ones, and her husband had never questioned that what they did was the same, just dressed up in pretty lies to make them sweet.
Whatever he has done and feels guilty for, there are a hundred, a thousand men who have done the same and felt nothing of it. But he is a different sort of man, the kind that feels and weeps with the feeling of it, so she does not begrudge him this.
Not truly.
If he were someone who could commit murder without blinking and sleep easily at night she would not trust him so.
"That's a lie." She tilts his head up so that they are eye to eye, the table digging into her back. "They say one of these days, you shall rip out my eyes because they are so very pretty."
She remembers how the women in the tea shop had joked, how the vendors in the market had whispered as she passed them by, how the last time they'd been out together there'd been the weight of so many eyes.
She remembers and knows well that it's not true. He would never, could never, if only because his heart bleeds, frail underneath her hands. He has not the heart for it.
"They were innocent," he tells her. "More so than you."
Innocence.
She is not sure that she can be called that, and her heart breaks with the thought of it.
Her hands are not clean and her innocence is uncertain, but she does not know how to tell him.
Not when he is so full of grief, and the riptide current tugs at him with the hands of ghosts.
This conversation is a confession, and it is not her confession, so she gives it her silence, gives her hands to stem the tide in her throat.
Would you ever trust me again if you knew?
"I killed them, even so."
It is death then, that has pulled him so far from the coast of sanity tonight, but whose death, she cannot ascertain.
If it is kin, if it is guest...can she break with the laws of her people and forgive him? And even if it was, can her crying heart afford not to? She loves him so, suspects she will always love him so, even if he has broken the laws of her people.
"Who did you kill that makes you fear telling me so?" Ah, there is a tide in her throat, and it surges ever higher. She does not often lose control of her tongue, but she has waited so long to tell him. She cannot wait any longer. "Do you think I will cease to love you because your hands are bloody with those who did not deserve to die?"
In the silence that follows, she wonders if he is too far gone to hear her, the corners of his mouth turned down, the heavy fatigue darkening rings under his eyes, the slump of his shoulders, the way his hands are folded in his lap, but how his soul has already detached from his body until it does not seem to inhabit it at all.
Is this what her grandmother meant when she said that his flame burns weak? She sees the weight of the water tug at him with a thousand hands, and she does not know how only her hands alone may pull him back. They are so small and frail in that way.
It has been a long time, but she has never thought her hands were frail before.
How does she help him? How can she help him? She does not want him to die. She loves him too much to mourn him so soon.
"Children." The word is heavy, but not so heavy that she cannot bear its weight. She has still loved people despite this. She calls them father, calls them brother, calls them friend, why wouldn't she also call one lover? "Would you like a list?"
He trembles, like a leaf in a gale, like a ship lost in a storm. If she cannot guide him back then she is doomed to see him fall, perhaps not in battle, but soon in the future. No man can live long the way he is right now.
"Of course not." She pulls him close, a hand in his hair, a hand against his jaw. His shaking makes her shake as well. "Dara-sama? You're shaking."
"You stayed." She feels his hands come up, palms flat against her shoulder blades. The touch is a gentle one, a lover's caress despite what he's just confessed.
These bloody bloody hands, but so too are her hands bloody.
She can live with this.
"Of course I did." I cannot go. She smooths his hair away from his face, and wishes it were just as easy to smooth the guilt from his temples, the sorrow from his soul. She has seen the sun in him come out from behind the clouds, so perhaps one day it will burn the clouds away. "I will not leave you. Not over this."
They stay like that for a time, as she rubs his back, braced against the kitchen table, and he breathes and breathes and keeps on breathing and that is what lets her be content.
"How do you let me touch you with these hands?" he asks, so soft it might not even be a question.
Suddenly reminded of what had started this whole affair, her thoughts turn sad once more.
Sad, and sadder still.
She is no innocent. "How do you let me touch you with mine?" She is Uzumaki Kanae, and she has worn many faces before she met him. Thief of hearts with a youkai glamor, if she is supposed to be innocent then there is no innocence at all in the world. "If your hands are bloody, so too are mine. Shouldn't you fear me?"
You can dress a storm up with skin and call it a girl, but it will not be a girl.
You can give a shinobi a peaceful home, but the blood that sleeps in others sings in her, and she is a shinobi, and a peaceful home has not changed that about her.
"I…" He sighs, the sound soft.
The silence between them lingers.
Lingers and lingers still.
"I trust you." Ah, but now she worries that he does not know what he is trusting. She knows him, and has known him well because he does not hide from her.
Never for long, words spilling from him as though they were a tide.
She has not thought to share much of her own past, if only because when she left Uzu she thought it would never define her again. The Red Viper is gone, but Kanae remains, but Kanae is merely the Viper's other face, neither one without the other, neither one less or more than the other.
Both true, both real, not to be separated as she has separated them for all these many months.
If she could not give him her heart, she would give him her life instead. Instead of love she would give him time, give him years, give him the work of these hands and hope that he cannot tell the difference.
But that has changed now, hasn't it, for she would give him both.
Her life, her heart, given away before she noticed that he didn't know what he was accepting.
She should not have, but she has. She has and that may yet frighten her.
"Mmm." How can she explain? "Can I tell you a story, Madara-sama?"
He makes no response, so she continues onwards. The sorrows of a house, the sorrows of a person, they are one and the same. Her father had learned peace the hard way, as most in Uzu do. She, herself, has yet to learn peace.
"Once long ago, in the years of my father's youth, Uzu marched to war." As Uzu did, so often back then. Only when her father took the throne did Uzu stop marching to war. The war of his youth had been Uzu's last war, and would stay that way for as long as her father ruled in Uzu. "My grandfather died on these shores long before you were even born. I don't know if you've heard this story."
Her father had been the younger son, younger by some five years to the true prince.
There is reason why no one has ever called her grandmother a queen, no matter how old, no matter how wise, no matter that she is mother of a king.
She had not been the late king's wife, merely a lover he had picked up on one of the outer islands, a woman with a face to topple kingdoms.
And under her green eyed gaze, the long blood red of her red hair, the seductive pull of her siren's song like the blood tide, Uzu had nearly toppled.
And yet it was her son who now sat on the Seastone Chair, the Queen's son gone, buried 'neath the waves.
"I don't know it well, no," he admits, tired and washed out by the tide that has shaken him and left him wounded.
"My grandfather wasn't a young man by then." His younger son had been twenty years old, and he'd been drawn and worn from mourning a son. Even to this day, her uncle, Crown Prince Kirishima's body has not been recovered despite the best efforts of seal masters then and since. It is a forlorn hope. Sometimes, the sea does not give up her dead, especially if she has loved them too much. "And he lost his life in battle to a clan that no longer exists."
"I fail to make the connection." Ah, he is tired.
He is tired so she will have to explain to him what had happened then.
"The Aguda Clan no longer exists because my father ordered them drown in their beds." She feels no regret saying this. The Aguda meant nothing to her except heartache, except guilt in her father's eyes and Naosu-jisan's tutting, the body of a young man — a prince, a man, he would've been a great king — never found, and she does not care that they are dead. "Every man, woman, and child died when Uzu's armies marched through their settlement. Even now, the fields in that part of the mainland are barren." So fell Uzu's foes who took both a king and a prince from her. "My own father gave the order. How many children do you think he's killed?"
They call her father a summer king, and he is a kind man, but not a weak one. The Kings of Uzu wore their vengeance like armor, out for the world to see.
He is silent, so she continues. "If I can still love my father, if I can still love Niisama, if I can still love my friends, if I can still love myself, why can I not love you still despite your bloody hands?" Why would I go? Why would I leave you? "Why should I fear your darkness when you do not fear mine?"
He catches one of her hands in his, and looks at it even as he leans into her. "And how many innocents have you killed, Kanae?"
Her breath catches in her throat, a moment, no more.
No more.
"Would you like a list?" She turns the question back at him. "I am not half so kind nor so good as you think." I am no innocent, husband.
Please know that.
He breathes out, long and slow, and it is as if he has come back from wherever he has gone. "But you are good to me."
She is glad for it, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. "As you are to me," she agrees. "And it is enough."
"And your sister?" he asks. "What will you tell her?"
Ah, yes, there is still the kettle of fish to sort with Neesan, who has never much liked Madara-sama and now has more reason to dislike him.
When she finds out who has told Neesan of the contract, she shall be careful to skin them slowly, perhaps with extract of pufferfish on her blade so that they remain completely lucid after paralysis for several hours so that she may read them their list of crimes.
"Only the truth if she cares to ask me for it," she does not want to tell her sister why she has come here. How to say 'we were starving, we were starving and I chose to love my people rather than stand above them' when it has now become so much more? "I don't know why she went to accuse you before she came to ask me."
Her sister has not acted in her best interests, had not acted with trust or tried to find the truth, and that stings more on top of the shaking man she is still holding.
Not that, and this she agrees on, with a wry and rueful grace, that she has acted completely with honesty and integrity towards her sister either. But that is the way of things between them, her offering protection, and her sister seeking to offer her the same.
"She loves you." His voice is somewhat muffled as he is speaking to her stomach, but the words are clear enough all the same. "She loves you, and she fears for your safety."
So it is. So it is. She is lucky that Neesan has always loved her, even if she rather thinks that she should be the one fearing for Neesan's safety instead of the other way around. The inside of her sister's heart is soft, and Uzumaki Mito has always lived with a gentler grace than the rest of them.
"And I love her and would defend her." She does, she very much does, having felt her sister's pain and fear after her return from the mainland to teach the Senju Medics, and has felt protective of her older sister ever since. "But I love you and would defend you. I do not know why she cannot believe that."
Ultimately however, they must live separate lives as adults. She may not like the path that Neesan has chosen for her life, but ultimately, she does not protest it, had not protested it. Neesan had been happy, so she had let her sister go, to the mainland, to the moon if need be.
Neesan has not extended her that courtesy, having doubted the heart she offered so easily to Uchiha Madara, and Neesan who understands the measure of a heart should not have sought to doubt.
He breathes out, breath warm against the skin of her bare arm. "And I you."
And those three words make her heart sing.
The snow that piles on thick and fast that night does not stop her sister, but then, she did not expect it to.
What had actually stopped Neesan last night was probably how cheerful she'd been and how quickly she'd left. But in the light of the morning, she'd likely reconsidered and come anyway, despite Hashirama probably not wishing her to.
So when Neesan knocks on her front door at mid-morning, Kanae is not surprised.
"You expected me." Neesan observes her for a moment, then her gaze drifting away to the painted screens and the still steaming tea she had poured right before Neesan knocked on the door. "Uchiha-sama told you?"
"I did ask my husband what had shaken him so." Her words are perhaps, a little bit too tart. She'd always had a biting tongue, bladed on both sides when she wished to wield it and at the moment she is rather more irate than she knows exactly what to do with.
Neesan flinches. "This? Something that shakes him?"
"He is no heartless man. Why would the accusation of buying a wife not shake him?" She is angry that this had been how Neesan had chosen to describe it, as if she herself is a chess piece, to be bought and sold at the whim and leisure of men more powerful. "That is not the accurate description of the contract I signed."
Uzumaki Kanae has never been bought, and she could not be sold for no man or youkai or even kami could afford her price.
"Do you even know what it says?" Neesan paces the room, back and forth, footsteps soft on the floorboards, but no less heavy a weight to bear. "You will never be able to leave do you understand?"
"Well, of course, I do." She sighs, the sound also soft, but she's sure, no less heavy because of its softness. "I wrote it."
Neesan pauses in her pacing, looks at her with open mouthed shock. "You?" A moment later, she resumes her pacing. "You fool, little sister." Back and forth. "Fool," Neesan says with a breaking voice. "You would offer what Kanae offered Ishiro, and you will find that just like her he does not understand."
From this day until my end of days. For now and for eternity. May what binds husband and wife together always bind us. May the kami never part our souls in death.
"Then that is my choice to make." She lifts her chin. "The laws of our people are old, Neesan." Yes, written by Ishiro himself, old as their house has ruled a bleak, barren land where few could afford to live and less could afford to grow. "They don't bend and can't be broken."
No, the contract would see to that.
The laws of kings don't bend and can't be broken — not if the people knew what is good for them.
"Which is why you are a fool." Neesan looks as though she wants to grab Kanae by the shoulders and shake her. "You would bind yourself to this? This that which cannot love you and never has?"
Those words would have bothered her more a day or so ago, but last night she had felt his every breath, had heard each word in his silence that he could not yet bear to say.
She is done with that fear.
"Is he made of stone?" If Neesan forces the connection between her husband and the first king, then she will force the connection to the end. "Not even the harshest of the winter kings was made of stone."
Ishiro had loved his wife, to the point of madness, to the point of despair. And when his own brother had taken her from him, when she'd been laid to rest, a burial at sea as she had deserved, the Peacemaker shattered to as many pieces as the stars, and only the Warmonger remained.
A bleak man ruling a bleak land.
No one had ever been able to put back together all the weeping pieces of his heart.
And that had been the tragedy, not whatever Ishiro could not understand about the wind and the water, the waves and the tide and the woman he had married who both came from and returned to the sea.
It was not a misunderstanding that had torn them apart, and so she does not believe the mirroring of fate and fortune.
Not even if…
She, too, is a girl from a water kingdom come to shore to marry a black haired man in the name of peace.
She rises to her feet, though Neesan has always been, and remains taller than she is. "Did you read what I had written?"
Because it does not seem as though Neesan understood.
Did you know why I wrote what I did?
"Do you know how many people died last winter?" Do you know that never again will a shortage of rice cost us lives? "Even if I had to live a life where there is no love for the rest of my days, I would consider it worthwhile. But that is not the life I live."
The umbrella handle in Neesan's hands creaks. "I see," she says, standing there for another moment, heavy in the stillness. "It seems that I've overstepped, Kanae-chan. I'm sorry."
"I'm not the one you owe the apology to, Neesan."
She is tired. She is tired, and she is more than a little bit sad, but Madara-sama and Neesan come back inside together, the air clearer than it has been in a long time, and she takes comfort in that instead rather than stories of a youkai woman and the proud man who had beggared himself to love her.
Taiko arrives at her house with thunder clouds in his expression, eyebrows firmly drawn together. "Kanae-hime," he says, tugging at her sleeve as she fiddles with the heating seal that she'd drawn on the kitchen table.
She wants her hotpot back, but she'd never been very good at readapting seals to serve new functions, even if heating seals are easy. Or well, they're easy for anyone who has the patience to deal with seals and the way that they are finicky. Which is why she has been at this all morning now, fiddling with different aspects of the design.
She knows what she wants it to do: offer several different heating levels so that she could simply plunk a pot onto the table and adjust between boiling and simmering. The heating requirements of a wood stove are so fussy, and she rather dislikes the smell of soot in her kitchen and shoveling ash out of the bottom on a semi-regular basis.
However, her hotpot requires several smaller arrays offshooting from the main spiral of the heating array, each one interacting with the main spiral slightly differently and accounting for a different function, and such things, for her at least, are finicky enough that it shall take most of the rest of the morning.
But if she can get it to work, then dinner will be so worth it.
"Hmmm?" She adjusts another parameter, feeds it a bit of chakra, and checks the feel of the heat coming off of her table. "What happened?"
This would be easier if this table were made of stone instead of wood. Then I would not be fiddling so much with what I want it to do.
However, wood is very flammable and stone is not. Hence, the need for another array to prevent the table from overheating.
Sometimes, we must live with what we are given.
"Kanae-hime, there is someone here to see you."
The way that Taiko says someone does not fill her with much confidence. "I assume that this is not someone you want me to see?"
She has met most of the clan already, in their various forms and ways, the men largely through her time at the harvest last year and through visiting their wives and sisters and children, and every child in this clan old enough to walk has passed through her doorway in some form or fashion, most often taken aback by how foreign and yet familiar she happens to be.
Like their sisters, their mothers, their aunts, their cousins and daughters, she is a woman, and shares the connections that all of humanity shares.
They know that her door is open, no matter how late or trivial, so whoever Taiko doesn't want to come in is likely not an Uchiha.
He frowns harder, scuffing the toe of his boot against his other shoe. "How do you know?"
She laughs, ruffling his hair with a hand, and sets her brush down on the table. "It is in the way you frown, Tai-kun." The seal still isn't perfect, but better see who is here to visit her first and then get back to it.
It shouldn't take long, seeing as she hasn't planned for a long visit with anyone today.
Her dreams of a hotpot will keep; whoever's out there making Taiko so uncomfortable probably won't.
She really doesn't expect the woman standing outside in the courtyard, shaded only by the tiny willow sapling planted in one corner, but clearly, there is a reason, Hyuga-sama's wife is here to visit her, no?
What that reason might be she'll have to learn over the course of the conversation.
"Oh, come in." She's well aware of how she looks, hair pinned up messily, dressed in an old handed down wool kimono from Neesan, and ink stains on her hands from where she'd fiddled with the brush. "Taiko-kun said you were here to see me."
The Hyuga Matriarch is in her thirties, well dressed, but with a face colder than the temperature of the bay at this time of year, the ice a foot thick before you could possibly hit water.
Whatever she wants from the house of Uchiha Madara, she really doesn't want to be here to discuss it.
Briefly, Kanae wonders if she could persuade this woman to finally cough up the numbers for the census that her husband was so irritated by, but perhaps that would be too hopeful of her.
After all, they are already starting out on the wrong foot.
She steps aside to let the Hyuga Matriarch in — she has heard of Hyuga Hiroka before mostly through the gossip in Fire Court when she'd visited, but she has not met the woman per se, even though they have now lived within the same village walls for nearly a year now.
"Would you like a pastry?" It is only right to welcome guests with bread and salt, and technically whilst a dessert, the pastry has both. It is both flour and salt, while still retaining the outward signs of innocence and charm and therefore serves her purpose well.
She is both naivety and ancient blood vows boiling under the surface. What is coiled within her knows only ancient laws, and no matter how carefully she paints her face to cover it up, a thing of the sea remains a thing of the sea, despite a change of name, despite the human face she wears.
She offers the plate on the counter to Hiroka-san, who, despite looking like she'd rather be somewhere else, plucks a pastry from the plate and holds it awkwardly.
She picks up her brush again. "Have a seat, Hyuga-san."
It really is quite difficult to have a conversation with someone who refused to speak verbally. Though, of course, Hiroka-san's physical posture says that she has somehow come into a snake lair and feels very uncomfortable about it.
Not that she is doing much to reassure her guest.
A polite host would, but today she is rather cross at being disturbed, especially for a guest who can't be bothered to be entirely polite either.
"You're...Uzumaki Kanae?"
She considers it — Uzumaki Kanae-hime. Uzumaki-atawa no Kanae. Habiki-sama, king of his sea, had called her 'Lovely Girl'.
She tilts her head to look at Hyuga Hiroka-san. "Uzumaki-atawa no Kanae-hime, The Red Viper from the House of the King."
It is her irritation which makes her more likely to nitpick the details than normal.
Because yes, normally, Uzumaki Kanae will do.
Hiroka-san recovers herself, smiles, though the mask is an imperfect one. "It must be lonely to live here, without company."
She adds another tendril to her hotpot seal. "Then it is good that I have plenty of company when I wish for it."
She is quite irate, and to that end, her tongue is bladed on both sides, wry wit meant for damage but not murder.
Hiroka-san takes a bite of her pastry before responding, her tone much more conciliatory than before. "It was a lack of manners on my part that I didn't visit you before, Kanae-hime."
And she is still no closer to figuring out what it is that Hiroka-san wants.
Well, that will come with time.
She smiles, drawing on the slightest hint of glamor. "And yet you are here now, so all should be forgiven, no?"
Should be forgiven, but she does rather suspect there will be other reasons before long, reasons to not forgive and record grievances instead.
But still, gently the time passes, conversation stilted and unusual as they pick at each other in cross purposes.
And if by the time Madara-sama returns home from the Tower, there is a pot of tofu, pork and mushrooms on the table gently simmering, it is because she has worked out all the details in spite of, instead of being aided by, an unexpected guest.
That night, her husband takes down her hair, pausing after every one to watch as a coil of her hair falls loose and free over her shoulders.
She wipes the purple lip paint and white powder from her face and neck, the bright red mascara from around her eyes, and watches his expression through the mirror.
It is fond, with some amount of wonder, even if she is taking off the face that makes her pretty, and he is watching her do so.
"If you had a child, would you want to be a mother like your mother?"
Her mother, Chigusa Naokano.
The Queen — beautiful, gracious, kind. Chigusa Naokano, who had once been betrothed to Uzumaki Kirishima since the year she turned five years old, who had, in the end, married his younger brother and been a queen anyway.
No, she rather thinks she is already not much like her mother.
"Mmm." She considers the last time she saw her mother, nearly a year ago now, the way her mother's face has not aged in her memory, in any way except those soft, earth brown eyes. "I don't think so."
"Why?" His hands come to rest on her shoulders. In the mirror, there is a question in his eyes, and a fondness too, something inside him that aches.
And she knows it is because there is still much he has to learn about her.
"Well, I rather think that we are not very much like my parents at all." She reaches up, holds his hand in hers. "And I don't think I would want much to be them."
No, there are ghosts there, occupying the space her parents leave between them, and while it had been no one's fault that they existed — a youkai woman who would never give up her lifestyle, a prince the sea has claimed — they are present nonetheless, and she would not like to live that way.
"My parents are friends." She says softly. "Their love died a long time ago." If there had ever been any love at all between them that was not the love of friends who had grown up side by side.
"And you do not want our love to die." It is the first time he has said something even remotely of that nature, a pensive, quieter expression in his downcast eyes, hands on her shoulders, a stray tendril of her hair across his fingers.
"Of course not." It is new. It is uncertain. But she would give him the world if that is what he wanted, regardless.
"Of course not." He laughs, pressing a kiss to her temple. "Pretend I did not say that. It was badly put."
"I shall have to be very cross at you for it." Something has settled between them, self assured, and stable.
"Ah, but if you are cross with me…"
She turns away, trying not to laugh. "I shall have to revise my statement." And yet, what exactly to revise it to? "Make that, I am certain we are not much like my parents, for my husband is great and terrible and shall not be crossed."
He buries his face in the crook of her neck, laughing. "I shall have to remind you not to cross me."
A far cry from the first time she'd told him this. Back then, he'd only looked confused.
"O great and terrible husband." She tries and fails to contain her laughter. Joy is a simple thing, and ought not be contained. "How shall I be reminded?"
"Well, I think..." He cups her face with a hand, a softer fondness that she now knows is love — love, a sweet thing, something she could never tire of — in his eyes. "You owe me a kiss for such terrible slander, wife."
She kisses him, laughing. "So great a crime," the look in his eyes makes her breath catch for a moment, "and yet forgiveness ransomed so easily with a kiss."
He presses his forehead to hers, a half smile tugging at his lips. "There's no need to kiss me to ransom any forgiveness from me." A moment of quiet, as she thinks it over before he says something else. "You'll always have it, with or without doing anything."
She thinks this over, the intersection between what he says and what he means and what she knows to be true about him.
There are things he cannot forgive, this she knows.
And yet, what he has told her is not meant to be a lie.
She turns her eyes up to his, a hand against his chest. "I appreciate the thought, 'dara-sama."
And she does, even knowing that what they mean by those words are not the same.
"I had a visitor today," she says after a moment, thinking it over. "Hyuga Hidetaka-san's wife."
He frowns. "Did she say anything untoward?"
She laughs before leaning up to kiss him again. "Nothing that could bother me."
A.N. This chapter took longer than expected! But I hope it's a fun read nonetheless. I'm about a week from going back to school under a much modified schedule, and also hoping to start updating Bloodless again! Much love and appreciation to everyone, your well wishes are always appreciated.
~Tav