A/N: I own everyone that you will see in this fanfic. : So far.

Sometimes, the world is fair.

Sometimes, it is not.

Sometimes good people are rewarded for doing good things.

Sometimes bad people are punished for their deeds.

Sometimes good people suffer for no reason at all.

Sometimes bad people win in the end.

Sometimes people who you are trying to protect die.

And sometimes, you who are trying to protect them pay the price for letting them die, even if there was nothing you could do.

I learned this a long time ago. When I was still a child I knew that the world was not fair. I knew I had done nothing to be born weak and sickly. I knew that my sister should have been punished far more severely for leeching at my strength, but I still loved her. She was my sister; my twin. What else could I have done? I could have killed her, I know, and that would have saved me so much grief and trouble, but I didn't. Because I still believed that there was some good left in her rotten core.

How wrong I was.

The AnBu returned late that evening, giving their reports to their Kage and then setting off across the rooftops for the bath-house. It didn't matter to them that the owner of the bath-house sniffed disapprovingly and shunted them off to a tiled room off of the main baths. It was lined with chest-high stalls against one side where spouts protruded from the wall.

It didn't matter that gore was spattered over the armor that they shucked. They stripped off their uniforms and took off their masks, making sure their weapons were out of the way of the water. Scars littered their flesh, though not a one of them was older than twenty-one.

It didn't matter to them that they were men and women all together. No man looked over at his team-mate, though her luxurious form was bare. And no woman chanced a giggle at her naked colleague. Instead, they wordlessly turned on the spouts and let the hot water spill over them, washing the blood from their scarred hides.

With all the water running, there was a small rose-tinged pool around the drain. Blood stained the white tiles pink; a nightmare to clean for the staff later on. They would be by in the morning, not wanting to run into any of the elite shinobi.

In the morning, the owner of the bath-house would carp to the Raikage about all the hot water the AnBu had used and then demand compensation. The Raikage would then say that all the "compensation" the owner needed was that the AnBu were removing incredibly dangerous enemies so that everyone might sleep well at night… except for the AnBu. They hardly ever slept; and when they did, they always had nightmares about what they had done.

It was a good hour before the first spout was turned off, soon followed by silence as all of the water ceased to run. The six of them reached for towels and proceeded to dry off. One winced and looked over her shoulder when her towel had a fresh red streak on it.

"Tora-san, you're hurt." The woman twisted to see the jagged slash above the base of her spine.

"I never noticed," the woman said. Her team-mate laid a glowing hand over the injury, healing it in a breath.

"You're going to bleed out one day if you don't take stock of your wounds before you head for the baths," another one of her colleagues said, pulling on a clean shirt over his still-damp chest.

"I know, Mori." The woman who had been injured did up the front of her shirt. "I just get so… in the heat of battle…. I just forget." She didn't need to explain. The others understood all to well. That was why they cleaned up together; just for that silent understanding while they relaxed their minds to assimilate back into normal life until their next mission.

Dressed once again and with their filthy old clothes and armor slung over shoulders or under arms, they departed for the homes they occupied when not working.

Two of them, Mori and Tora, traveled the same dark street in the first hour of the morning. They walked in silence without exchanging words. They might as well have been in different universes for all that they acknowledged each others' presence. But that was how it was. They needed to concentrate on forgetting what they had done not even six hours ago. There was a reason that most AnBu quit or killed themselves within the first three years of service. The woman walking on that road had served seven years, the man five. They were among the best, and they had paid dearly for that position.

After a while, the man nodded to the woman and headed off down a side-street. He would be welcomed by his sister and brother-in-law, bursting with news of the antics of their toddler son. The woman as well would be welcomed and plied with stories of her cousin's firstborn baby. Her mother would hug her and ask if she was hungry. She would reply that she wasn't and just wished to go to bed. Her mother would watch her somewhat nervously as she strolled off down the hall to her room. It was the same thing every time.

But this time was different. A buxom woman sat outside on the porch of the ancestral home of the Torakiba Clan, situated on a good-sized piece of land. She gazed up at the stars through a rarely-clear sky. "Ja, Kurai," she said, getting up.

"Sensei," the AnBu smiled slightly in greeting, going up to meet her aunt.

"I'm not your sensei anymore. Didn't we go over this? I haven't been your sensei for seven years," the elder woman said sternly, but her tone was playful and soft. She looked her niece over, reddish-brown eyes unreadable.

"You took a hit." Kurai shrugged off her aunt's worried tone.

"It was just a slash and Shizuka took care of it, anyway. What are you doing here?"

"I came to see how you were doing." With anyone else, Kurai would probably have knocked them over and yelled at them for pretending to care. But this was Inazuma. She'd been an AnBu. She knew what it was about. Now as the Raikage, she'd been making rounds and having chats with other members of the Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai.

"You… know how it is…" Kurai said slowly. "It's hard to talk about. Impossible, really. I'm fine."

"No, you're not," Inazuma said sternly. "Look, you missed some blood on your cheek." Kurai flinched, hand jumping to her face but it came away clean. "If you were fine you wouldn't be twitching." Kurai glared at her aunt.

"I would just like to get some sleep, thank you," she growled, brushing past and disappearing into the house.

"You're a bad liar, Kurai!" Inazuma called after her. "I know that AnBu don't sleep!" Under her breath, she added, "They can't."

Kurai tried to sleep, she really did. She would try every few months are so, just to see if she could. She would wake up ten minutes later after nightmares with her throat sore from screaming. Then someone would come in to see if she was all right. There would be apologies and promises that it was only a dream and peace would be restored. She sat in the large window, staring up at the moon and savoring the chill night air against her skin.

She held out her hand, flexing her fingers and watching the claws shoot out. Her own AnBu gloves lacked finger-tips so that she didn't ruin them when her claws went through the tough fabric. I had no idea my skin was so pale, she ruminated. Her bare arms practically glowed in the moonlight, so often hidden beneath blood and the cover of night.

She ran her fingers through her thick back hair, wondering absently if she should cut it, as it went past her waist. Plenty of women have long hair in the AnBu, she decided. If I just keep braiding it, it should present no problem. She chose to ignore how just that day something had grabbed onto her ponytail and slashed her across the back. It wouldn't happen again.

When the sun was in the sky and just barely visible as a glow through the clouds, the inhabitants of Kumogakure went about their daily business. Kurai hadn't slept a wink, instead preferring to meditate and work on the skill of Forgetting. She dressed herself in her usual black shorts and short black dress trimmed in white: the Torakiba Clan colors with the yin-yang symbol emblazoned on the back of a sleeveless black coat she donned. She hated the flashiness, but couldn't find the energy to go out and buy different apparel as she spent so much time in her AnBu uniform.

Up, or down? She wondered, staring into the mirror after whisking the curtain off of it. She usually kept it covered as sometimes she just couldn't bear to look at herself.Maybe… down? Her reflection offered no help, instead revealing a slightly depressed-looking woman who was hardly more than a girl at just barely twenty-one. Her birthday had been the previous day and she had completely forgotten. Down. She decided, blowing irritably at her bangs that fell over her right eye.

With hardly a word to anyone and only a quick pat on the head to the two-year-old Yasutora, she was out the front door and striding off into the center of town. She knew where the others would be. They would hate to be alone with themselves for more than six hours and need confirmation that there were others just like them.

She found three of them in their usual place at the curry house, going over the events in the newspaper over bowls of the spiciest curry that the restaurant had to offer. "Oi! Tora!" Mori, the man from the night before, waved her over to sit with them. It was him, Getsu the blonde weapon's specialist of their squad, and the pale and quiet medical ninja Shizuka.

"You know it's 'Kurai' when we're off-duty, right?" she pulled out a chair at their table and signaled to a waiter that she wanted what her team-mates were eating.

"You are strangely formal, yeah," Shizuka observed, chin resting on her laced fingers. She chose to only have one eye visible, a curtain of ink-black hair obscuring the other one. Her evident eye was a vivid violent than contrasted strongly with her hair and white skin. She wore the sleeveless turtleneck that was part of their uniform with shorts underneath an off-both-shoulders deep red dress that covered her wrists and had a slit to her waist on one side. "Weren't you cell-mates?"

"Aww, but you're forgetting that Karai Kurai was a loser back then," Mori, Katsuo Fukamori, said, grinning patronizingly at Kurai. She hit him with her spoon as her food came. The waiter scuttled off in alarm at their violence. In places like that, the four could almost forget what they did for a living and lose themselves in laughter at the slightest things. Getsu cracked up when Katsuo caught the spoon and used it to steal some of Kurai's curry.

"Ha, you want it back?" he taunted, pointing at his full mouth and teasing her. Kurai turned red and kicked him savagely under the table, making him yelp in pain.

"You're disgusting, yeah," Shizuka said, eyebrows raised in amusement. That was the strange thing about her, the others had decided. She couldn't smile even if she were faking. When things had settled back down again and they chatted aimlessly, a little boy shrieked, "Katsu-ji!"

Something small with a shock of red hair bounced out of the street and latched onto Katsuo's leg. "Hey, there, squirt!" Katsuo set the three-year-old on his knee. "What're you doing here?"

"Mama's shoppin'!" the little boy said, green eyes big in his small face.

"And Mama doesn't like Yuuki running off when Mama's shopping," a woman stomped over, bearing the same stone-colored hair and eyes as her brother. "Yuuki, what've I told you about running off?" Yuuki, still on his uncle's knee, gave his mother an identically clueless look to the one that Katsuo was giving her.

Getsu and Kurai stifled chuckles behind the napkin dispenser. Shizuka's eyebrow were at different altitudes in the way that she expressed laughter. "Listen to your ma," Katsuo told Yuuki seriously. "She knows best, okay?" Yuuki bobbed his head, thumb in his mouth.

"Oooooh, kettle calling the cauldron black, Katsuo?" Kurai asked wickedly. The man acted offended.

"I assure I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Weren't you just saying the other day-" Getsu began slyly, but Katsuo clapped his hands over his ears and said loudly, "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU CAN YOU SEE THAT I'M NOT LISTENING?"

"You're all a bunch of children," Katsuo's elder sister, Haruka, said crossly, hands on her hips. "A bunch of overgrown children making a scene."

"Nee-chan…" Katsuo whined.

"Not another word! You're corrupting my poor baby. Yuuki, let's go!" she plucked the child from Katsuo's knee and balanced him on her hip, going on about "overgrown children with swords".

There was a space of silence. Suddenly, it was broken by Shizuka going, "Overgrown children with swords, un? That's a new one, yeah." And they all broke into laughter, save for Shizuka, of course.

"You should've seen the look on your face!" Getsu howled, holding her sides while her face went red. "You looked like a toad trapped in a bathtub!" Kurai nodded in agreement and struggled to breathe around her merriment.

"The nerve of you two!" Katsuo crossed his arms over his chest, head sinking into the collar of his gray quilted jacket. "You're with me, aren't you, Shizuka?" The one-eyed woman answered, quite frankly, "I'm certainly not with so I must be against you, yeah."

Getsu fell out of her chair and Kurai had to help her back up before someone tripped over her.

"Heh… kids." Kurai chuckled. "Can you imaginehaving one of your own?" Getsu groaned and covered her eyes.

"Please don't talk about that. Children are a pain in the ass."

"I dunno. Sometimes they're awful cute," Katsuo said, waggling his eyebrows at the women at his table. Shizuka kicked him.

"Just more stress, yeah," the quiet woman said. "But, still… are we going to be doing this forever, un?"

"Still in the ANBU when we're thirty, you mean?" Kurai asked darkly. "Quite frankly, I'm surprised I'm still alive after seven years of this."

"Same here," Katsuo sighed. "But I always thought that someday, if I'm still going, I'd retire and settle down and stuff."

"I would like that as well," Shizuka put in her two cents. "Family life is nice and peaceful, sometimes."

"Thatdoes sound like a nice plan," Kurai admitted, Getsu nodding in agreement. They lapsed into silence, lost in thought.

"So, anyway," Katsuo said airily, attempting to change the subject. "Shizuka, why do you talk like that, anyway?"

"Like what, un?" Shizuka blinked at him, non-plussed.

"Likethat. With your 'yeah's and 'un's? Is it a dialect or something? Certainly from no region I've ever heard of."

"Etto…" Shizuka said, trailing off. That stopped the laughter as they all watched Shizuka intently. No one knew much about the kunoichi. She possessed amazing poison abilities and claimed she was from a tiny non-shinobi country on the northern border of Earth Country and had been home-taught. She'd been taken on, of course, as there was no proof against her but none for her. She'd past the chuunin exams and the jounin exam in the same month, making it to ANBU within four years of being in Kumogakure.

She unlaced her fingers and laid her hands in her lap, staring down at them. "Ano… Aniki talked like this, yeah," she said softly. "I respected Aniki and I wanted to be like him. I had no idea I'd mimicked his speech-patterns, un."

"Hey, don't worry about it, okay?" Getsu said, patting the other woman's shoulder and shooting Katsuo a dirty look. "If anyone tries to make a henge like you, we'll know they're a fake, then."

"Mm-hm. So, what have the rest of you planned for today?" Shizuka changed the subject awkwardly, but no one mentioned it.

"I'm going to see if I can sleep," Kurai said.

"You're still trying?" Getsu looked horrified. The Torakiba shrugged her slim shoulders.

"It'd be nice. It's just… the dreams, you know?"

"Stay away from sleep," Katsuo warned. "It's bad for you."

"Actually, sleep is essential for maintaining physical and mental health," Shizuka corrected.

"But we're not exactly mentally healthy, now, are we?" Getsu breathed.

"Please don't say it like that," Kurai begged, voice suddenly hoarse. "It's just a fancy of mine that we can go back to being normal and sleeping, okay?"

"I'd like that to happen, too," Katsuo's comforting hand completely covered hers. She looked up at him, seeing her same hunted look in his eyes and in the eyes of Shizuka and Getsu.

"Anyway-" Shizuka stood up abruptly, almost knocking over her chair. What she lacked in tact she made up for in being a fearsome shinobi. "I've got laundry to do." No one questioned her. Her own clothes were specially treated in various poisonous compounds so that they didn't melt off of her person when she used her abilities.

"Grocery shopping," Getsu said apologetically, collecting her bag and scuttling out of there right after Shizuka. In the end, it was just Katsuo and Kurai left with the bill.

"So… wanna hang out?" It was later, the both of them managing to skip out without paying. They were making their way down the main avenue, the sky a dreary gray and a chill wind blowing, but most of Kumogakure's inhabitants were out and striking deals.

"Like we're just regular shinobi on our day off?" Kurai asked. Katsuo shrugged.

"Heard there was a new movie out."

"Wait a second…" Kurai looked up at Katsuo, appalled. "Are youhitting on me?"

"Maaaaaybeeeee…"

"You're very bad at it."

"Thank you."

"Itwasn't a compliment. You're not going to pick up any girls if you go about it like that."

"I'm not trying to pick up 'chicks'. I'm trying to pick up you."

Kurai laughed, Katsuo raising his eyebrows in an unspoken question. "With you? I have trouble thinking of you as anything but the kid in my genin team that I beat the shit out of." It was Katsuo's turn to be appalled.

"WHAT? That was eight years ago, Karai Kurai! How can you still be on about that? How do you know that I don't still think of you as the scrawny little brat that got sick every time she took a bath?"

"Becauseyou are asking me out, fool!" Kurai couldn't stop laughing. "Ahahaha... anyway, I'm going to go and try to sleep. You can try your luck on some passing flirt. Ja, matane!" she called over her shoulder.

Katsuo stood where she had left him. He sighed. "Oh, why kami, why?" he asked the sky dramatically. "Why must she scorn me so?"

"Because you're a fool!" an ethereal voice said. He spotted Kurai a little way down the street, hands cupped over her mouth.

"Hey! That was just mean!" Katsuo cried but Kurai just ran off, cackling like a mad hen.

Katsuo smiled crookedly as she was lost to sight amidst the townspeople. He ran a hand through his stone-colored hair and adjusted his Kumogakure hitai-ate. "I'm no fool," he said, even though he was sure that time that she couldn't hear him. "I'm no fool because I'm not giving up on you."

A/N: Holy crap. And I started this about two days after finishing The Blood of Children. I LOVE KURAI AND KATSUO FLUFF!!! And Shizuka… you know who "Aniki" is, right? –wink- check out my dA page. She's in my gallery. BUT SHE'S NOT THE SHIZUKA OF MY OTHER FANFIC ON DA: Shizuka no Doku. No. She's my DeidaraxOC character. Getsu I just made up on the spot. I'm starting to really like her. And I think that I may be able to finish this fanfic as well. KURAI IS MAGIC. SHE LET'S ME FINISH HER STORIES. Except for her original one, Cloud Country… I can never get up the snuff to write for her. Maybe I'm destined to write her as an adult…? I'M SORRY I JUST HAD TO PUT IN YUUKI. We all know how this ends if you've read my other fic, The Blood of Children. Just toodle on over there right now, okay? There's a good dear. And some translation notes:

Aniki: Honored Elder Brother

Karai Kurai: this is a play on words. "Kurai" is her name, while "Karai" means hot or spicy in reference to food. XD

Ja, matane: "So, I'll see you around".

Katsu-ji: Uncle Katsu

Bye!