Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

The Past: Alone

The sun had traveled across the sky and was finally beginning to retire for the day. Sakura paid it no mind as stayed looking out towards the main village gates.

Gone.

They were all gone.

Her teammates: Sasuke, Naruto, and Kakashi-sensei. They had left her behind, each walking their own path separately.

Sasuke had defected—a traitor.

Naruto had left to train with a Sannin.

Kakashi-sensei had told her that he had been put back on his old schedule—before team seven.

She stared blankly ahead, blind to the world around her. Her mind replayed every moment leading up until now. What the hell had she been doing? A chill went down her body despite it being the middle of summer in Konoha.

Suddenly, she was faced with her own shortcomings and insignificance as a person and a ninja. Half of her life had revolved around a boy who had never liked her—found her repulsive, actually. While he had ignored her, she had watched him—obsessively so. She knew his daily routine by heart, knew his favorite food, knew his fighting style, and his every tic. She had thought they had at least been friends. She had spent so much of her precious time observing him, hoping that one day he would take notice of her. Yet, despite all of the rejection and humiliation directed at her, she had revered him as something akin to a god. She had ignored her own training. She had ignored the reality of the profession that she had chosen. And when she slowly started to see how helpless she truly was, she had taken her attention away from him and had missed serious signs. She should have noticed sooner. She should have alerted someone. But, she didn't, and she woke up on a cold bench, alone. He had left behind his team and had never once hesitated. That meant that he was worse than scum.

She wouldn't say that she had ever regarded Naruto as scum or trash, but she had regarded him as obnoxious in his quests for attention. Her parents had told her not to like him. The village had told her not to like him. Like the stupid girl that she was, never one to question a higher authority, she had listened. After all, he was a trouble maker and liked to wreak his own childish mayhem on the villagers. He made it easy to have negative biases against him.

Yet Naruto, who had always annoyed her, became her lifesaver after Sasuke left. He was always around checking up on her, and training with her. He helped her improve her trapping skills, and it was during this time that she had comprehended that her teammate had taken Sasuke's betrayal quite painfully, as well.

Naruto and Sasuke, she realized, had a bond that ran deeper than all the fights and rivalry, which meant Naruto would never give up on his lost teammate. In the last week before Naruto left her, they spent a lot of time together outside of training, and she saw what a wonderfully bright person he was. She had been blinded by others and her own ignorance. They hated him because they feared what they did not understand. The whole village treated him like scum, and her heart cracked at how they did not understand.

He was an idiot, but his heart was always in the right place. He had an unwavering will to always rise above adversity, and although, this could also be translated into stubbornness, so be it. He always knew how to cheer her up with his antics, where before they had been infuriating, slowly they became endearing. Even if sometimes his actions seemed poorly thought out, everything he did came from a place of love. Not romantic love, no. Naruto's love was pure, akin to a child's love, untainted, and unrestrained.

She understood why he had left. Truly, she did. He and Sasuke were like sunshine and moonlight, but they belonged to the same sky. In their loneliness, they were one and they knew it. Naruto could never hate Sasuke because he understood the 'why' that she, and everyone else, missed. Sasuke for all the venom he spewed could likewise never hate Naruto because he understood him, and maybe in another world where he had his family, strive to be like him (the unrelenting and just side of Naruto, that is). That is why he couldn't kill him, but it was also why Naruto could not give up on Sasuke. His bond with Sasuke invigorated him, and it was stronger than any other friendship he had. He believed if he couldn't save his friend then he did not deserve to be a Leaf shinobi, much less Hokage.

Sakura knew that Naruto would be doomed to chase after Sasuke until he experienced a paradigm shift in his philosophy. His only option now was to get stronger to bring back their rogue teammate.

Acid thoughts ran through her mind.

He left to become stronger, and he couldn't do that with her holding him back.

She tried to not let the ugliness of resentment taint her image of him, but she knew that self-loathing held nothing sacred.

Instead, she let her resentment come crawling up to meet the memory of Kakashi-sensei. Her 'teacher'. She would laugh if she wasn't so angry. He let her be a liability. She acknowledged with burning shame that she did not see the folly of her ways, nor did she take initiative—only at the beginning, though. Slowly the reality of a shinobi's life started to trickle into her scope of understanding—she was sure she had only gotten a small dose of it, but it was enough to sober her up from her childish stupidity. She remembered Zabuza's sharp sword, bigger than her body, with a width close to it. She remembered the fear of not being certain to live to see another day. She remembered the starving, half-dead people of Wave, and the carnage at the bridge. She remembered the chunin exams . . . The deaths.

When he could no longer claim them to be too innocent, he left them still to their own devices, sitting ducks waiting for slaughter. Well, only in her case. Sasuke, the last Uchiha, and Naruto, the Kyubi container—as he had confided to her—couldn't die for they were far too important to the village and strong enough not to die a casual pointless death.

They had left, though.

Kakashi-sensei hadn't even wanted to stick around . . .

"What do I do now?" she whispered helplessly to herself.

She felt a gentle hand over her shoulder. She startled, and quickly turned to see who had sought her out.

It was a man, a fellow shinobi. Her eyes drifted to a blue bandana weighing down brown hair that covered one of his eyes. She recognized the man as one of the guards that she frequently saw posted around Konoha. In fact, he had been at the chunin exams scaring away contestants with another shinobi that sported spikey hair and a bandage that ran across his face.

"Kid, are you okay?" He asked her.

She stared blankly at him, still lost in self-deprecating thoughts, but also, she didn't understand his concern. He gave her a curious look before placing his hand on her forehead. His expression morphed to a contemplative one.

"Seems, fine," he murmured to himself.

Finally, the situation caught up to her, and she shifted away from him.

"I'm fine," she said dazedly.

"You've been standing here for about three to four hours. You did better standing guard than the ones they send down from the genin corps."

She saw that he found that amusing, but she only felt numb. " I . . . It's just that they're all gone."

"Who are?"

"My team."

A pitying look came across his face, and she quickly corrected any misunderstandings, "They're not dead! They're . . . All of them just left me behind."

He nodded in understanding. "Team 7, right?"

"Yes. How . . ."

"Heard it through the grapevine. The last Uchiha and the Uzumaki kid tend to come up here and there, especially since one is now a traitor and the other is being trained by the legendary Toad Sannin."

A bitter taste filled her mouth, but she swallowed it down, not quite understanding what she felt.

"I should probably head home," she told him.

"That's probably a good idea, kid."

As she began her journey back she heard him call out, "Hey, kid?"

She turned to look at him, "Yes?"

"My genin teammates all went their own ways, too. One of them became a baker, I think. We'll all talk now and then, but we lead completely separate lives. It's nothing like your situation. What I mean to say is that there are teams that grow apart and break up. I like working with others, though, and after my genin team fell apart, I found someone that I trust to watch my back, and that trusts me to do the same for them."

They stood together for a moment longer before he nodded a farewell, and then leaped onto one of the closest rooftops. She watched him jump away before she turned to walk home.

Later, as she lay in her bed in the dark with only the glow of the moon slipping in through her curtains, she thought back to what the man had said. She contemplated, as she stared up in the direction of the ceiling. She saw figures that were not there, dancing around in her vision, and she told them a secret.

"I want that, too," she confided to the night. There was more in her heart that she wanted, but she was not ready to voice it out loud, not even to the non-judgemental shadows of the dark.