They waited until Harry was safely back in the building. The castle's thick stone walls and odd sense of space where it shouldn't be made it hard to judge how far in he was once he was out of sight, but Sasuke and Naruto stayed still long enough for him to have reached the stairs and moved into the tower the Gryffindor common room was in. Sasuke was silent in the way only he could be. Normally Naruto would have struggled to have held it in for that long. To have remained still for all that time. But he felt like the ground had grown up around his feet, holding him in place as firmly as one of Shikamaru's shadows.

He was pretty sure he didn't understand everything that had just happened.

He was pretty sure Sakura would have been able to explain it to him. Hell, he was confident that if Sakura had been there things never would've gotten so messed up. And maybe Sasuke had a better grip on the nuances of family life, but Naruto had a feeling in this instance, Sasuke was just as blind as he was.

If not worse.

…maybe they shouldn't've let the argument get that out of hand. Maybe one of them should've called for a timeout. A step back. Regrouping. Remembering that they were all on the same side on this one, even if Naruto agreed with how ridiculous it was for Harry to withhold information like this from them. It tasted too much like deception. Like sneaking around behind their back. Like betrayal. But even if it was all of those things, it wouldn't've stopped them from wanting to protect Harry. From pushing to get what they needed to make sure he was safe.

But maybe they'd crossed a line somewhere.

Harry's friend clearly thought they had. And not in the you're-annoying-go-away type, or the don't-mess-with-my-missions way, but almost like it was the gave-information-to-the-enemy type or left-a-comrade-behind level of messed up. They'd crossed a line somewhere, and Naruto wasn't one hundred percent sure where exactly it had been but it was clear they had been too rough with Harry.

"He is going to go again," Sasuke finally said. He hadn't moved, his body still partially hunched over in that deceptive, ready to spring kind of way he had. "He refused to divulge even what he had been doing, much less get it through his thick skull that it cannot happen again!"

Naruto hummed, his face scrunched up as he tried to work through what they had done wrong. Because clearly they'd done something wrong. Harry's friends might be civilians and a little excitable, but the girl looked like she'd been ready to stab their eyes out and he kind of believed she'd try. After all the times Harry had harped on about violence not being the only solution to things, it seemed a little odd that his friend would be so stab happy. Unless there was a reason.

"That man cannot be trusted," Sasuke added. And it was like they were having two different conversations.

"What man?"

"The Headmaster!" Sasuke snapped, temper flaring just because Naruto wasn't reading his mind.

"Well, yeah?" Naruto had guessed that. If it'd been Tsunade or Kakashi-sensei guarding a group of civilian children from some kind of super-powered missing nin, they'd probably do the same thing. You made use of what you had at hand, even if it meant maybe endangering it. Naruto was pretty sure Kakashi-sensei had done exactly that on more than one occasion when they'd been younger. "I thought you already knew that?" Because, really, for a genius, Sasuke could really be slow sometimes.

Sasuke's scowl grew even more epic, but he finally dropped down into a squatting crouch that was as close to relaxed as Sasuke got in the field. He fisted his hands in the grass beneath him and yanked out great big tufts. "I should not have let him leave."

Naruto rolled his shoulders, trying to work out the uncomfortable tension there that didn't have anything to do with sore muscles but probably a lot to do with feeling like a jackass. "I think maybe we shouldn't have done a lot of things?" he tried, testing the idea out and hoping Sasuke had some clue.

Going by the look on his face, he was even more in the dark than Naruto was. "What? Don't be ridiculous. He was cracking. He would have told us the truth if I had had a moment more with him."

Which was probably true. But there was also something intrinsically wrong with that. "Harry-kun's not an enemy nin," Naruto pointed out. "We probably aren't supposed to be 'cracking' him."

Sasuke scowled. "How else am I supposed to get him to tell us the truth?"

Naruto shrugged uncomfortably. "I guess not like that? His friend sure seemed to think we had hurt him."

"What does she know." Sasuke muttered.

But Naruto hadn't gotten to be such a good nin by ignoring things like this. "Well, for starters she knows Harry a lot better than we do." Sasuke scowled even more at that – what someone ungenerously might even call a pout – and Naruto rolled his eyes at him. "Um, she totally does. They're practically a genin team and they were freaked out convinced we had done somethin' to him."

"I was just trying to get him to talk!"

"Yeah," Naruto agreed, because he did. They needed to know what was happening and they needed to get Harry to stop hiding it from them before someone ended up dead. It was totally, one hundred percent, understandable and justifiable. But maybe still a bit fucked up.

Naruto flopped on the ground and groaned. "Well, shit."

"What?" Sasuke demanded. He stopped trying to mutilate the grass and stared at him intently like he expected Naruto to be the one to make sense of this shit storm they had created.

"I think we just became the bad guys in this."

Sasuke's face scrunched up but he didn't argue with what was clearly Naruto's superior understanding of the situation.

Naruto scratched the back of his head. He wasn't sure about it, because what the hell did he know about families, and everybody knew that the Uchiha clan wasn't exactly the shining example of a balanced healthy home life. "Maybe we should ask Sakura-chan? She'd probably know better than us." Which was convenient, because now that Naruto thought about it, probably very few of their friends actually fell into the category of normal healthy households and they just happened to be fortunate to have one of them on their team. Naruto started to babble nervously, the more he thought about it, the worse he felt. "I mean, imagine if Sakura's dad or mom or someone was hurting her to get information out of her that'd-"

"I would kill them," Sasuke declared, calm and confident and not the least bit of hesitation.

Naruto suddenly felt very sick to his stomach and he was watching Sasuke's face and saw the moment it went from pissed off calm certainty to freaked out.

"Right. Okay," Naruto said quietly. "Seriously fucked this one up."

"I-" Sasuke stuttered. And damn if he didn't look fucked up by that revelation. "I didn't hurt him," he hesitated before actually asking Naruto. "Did I?"

And Naruto never wanted more in his life than to lie right then. "I think we did?" Because if they had, it had certainly been the both of them. Because Naruto was supposed to be the one who kept Sasuke from being constipated about his feelings and help Harry figure out how to talk to the teme, and instead he'd stood there and done nothin' when Sasuke had pushed Harry so hard he'd fallen down and hit him and they were nin they weren't allowed to hit civilians much less family members and that was one of those things that Tsunade had absolutely no leniency on when it happened in the village and here they were supposed to be protecting Harry and they'd fucked up bad.

Sasuke snarled a curse and jerked away until his back was to Naruto. And that kind of hurt, that even after all this time, Sasuke couldn't stand the thought of them seeing him upset. Naruto waited, like a useless lump, for Sasuke to do something. Except there wasn't anything to hit (not now) or set on fire or stab. Just an empty field, the dark sky above, and the looming, hunkering mass of the castle behind them, so foreign and disconcerting and impossible to understand.

For a moment, Naruto expected to see a great bloom of fire come from Sasuke, like some kind of angry storybook dragon raging against mankind and splitting the night with a burst of burning rage so bright that it could be seen for miles around. Sasuke was capable of that kind of jutsu. Had a tendency to fall back on the katon and all its related forms the way other nin liked to fling kunai about to make a point. Just like how Naruto had a tendency to throw himself at things (or people) and beat his head against them and sit on them until the situation resolved itself.

What the hell had he been thinkin' assuming he knew any better than Sasuke how to do this shit. Clearly they were both horribly unprepared and incompetent.

Sasuke kept his back turned and didn't rage against the world, didn't even ball up his fists at his side. And with each passing silent moment, Naruto felt like more of a giant ass for not knowing what to say and for not having said something earlier when it was clear Sasuke had needed someone to talk some sense into him before he hurt someone. Naruto was never not the one to say something. But Sasuke was his friend and teammate and he'd been trying to do what he thought was best for Harry and none of that was a good enough excuse.

"I'm sorry," Naruto finally muttered. Because he was and Sasuke needed to know he wasn't alone in this.

Sasuke nodded once. "We focus on the mission."

"But-"

Sasuke jerked around and stalked his way up the drive and to the front stairs. "Harry is still at risk. We focus on the mission. Anything else is...personal. There is no room for personal."

Yeah. Because that was going to work out brilliantly.