Sometimes, even in a place like Fire Country, things can run smoothly for people for a time. Or perhaps it was because everything was so tightly controlled that things could run like a well oiled machine each cog well placed and doing its job.

Although things were still difficult there were times when life could become easier for a few moments. And it was in one of those times, as the citizens of Konoha began to settle down, no longer watching Sakura so carefully they began to move on with their lives although Sakura could still see them all trying to avoid contact with her after what had become known in the minds of most people as 'The Incident'.

It was a strange thing for Sakura to experience. She had always been outgoing and now all the people she had known since the day she was born, the friends she had grown up with, no longer smiled or even dared to make eye contact with her. It had become as if they believed that her presence in Konoha was a poison on the rest of then and that any further association would automatically label them with the same criminality Sakura had been interrogated for.

Sakura could see it sometimes, the fear of what she could bring to their village. People quite rightly thought that if ANBU had come for her once and for some mysterious reason let her go they wondered if there was a deeper meaning, a more serious agenda going on that they weren't privy to but it seemed to be surrounding Sakura. Whether she had turned informant to save her own life or since Naruto had seemingly been taken and then ANBU had come for Sakura without even having to ask they could deduce that something strange was going on and they wanted no part of it. By keeping their heads down and waiting for it would pass them by they hoped that they could survive this.

However, at times Sakura could also see the guilt in their eyes when they stole glances at her. They knew that Sakura had gone through so much and none of them had made a move to help her, or comfort her in the aftermath. The only people Sakura was able to hold conversations with now were her parents, Tsunade and Shizune and it felt lonelier than she thought she could be after losing Naruto.

Sakura recovered from her wounds quickly with the help of all Tsunade's salves and herbs, and although she had to tell Tsunade and Shizune some of what happened the night she was attacked she kept it to a bare minimum and tried to avoid any other conversations about it. It felt strange talking about it and now she remembered that night with an almost surreal quality to it. She found herself lying and feigning confusion, when Shizune broached the subject that she had first claimed that someone had saved her, and surprisingly that was something that wasn't that hard for her to do.

She felt worse for lying to them but it was something she couldn't explain herself and her memories of her maybe rescuer were hazy and hard for Sakura to believe herself. Maybe it was wishful thinking and blood loss that had conjured up a mysterious rescuer but that still left many things unexplained, even if the ROOT agents had left instead of being systematically slaughtered and their bodies vanishing, because really how could he have moved them that quickly. It still raised the important question of why Sakura had been left alive. Whether they had somehow got from her what they wanted. And neither solution offered the answer to why Sakura had been considered a viable target in the first place.

Things had become more complicated than ever for Sakura. And although she insisted to her parents that she was fine and, as with everything else, the incident was swept under the table and never spoke off again after a few days. It didn't mean it was forgotten, there were more hushed conversations and glances in Sakura's direction. Her parents hated letting her out of their sight and now if it was dark when she had finished studying under Tsunade Sakura had to stay the night instead of going home. All in all it seemed to Sakura that she should be glad she wasn't given an escort to the patients she had been allowed to look after on her own. As usual in Konoha it was the small things people had to be thankful for.

Sasuke and Gaara were even more fortunate, if that was the word for it. They had left Konoha, striking out in any direction just to get away from the village and after two weeks they came across an ANBU patrol. There were seven agents and the group had apparently escaped a surprisingly effective attack from the Resistance which had killed their leader Mizuki and they were in a shambolic state after that.

They spent their evening listening to the remaining members cursing the Resistance and the group had never thought twice about the two fellow ANBU agents joining them. After all they had the right identification papers and any extra help they could get would be useful if their ambushers had tried to follow them. No one expected betrayal to happen within the ranks of ANBU. It was practically unheard of. Sure people had cracked from time to time, it was seen as a stressful position and not everyone could put up with it for long but then those people were portrayed as weaker minded and the ANBU training did not breed the potential for betrayal.

The situation was perfect and they never saw it coming. After Sasuke and Gaara destroyed the bodies and left their own identification including the few personal items they carried with them, this time they would go anonymously and completely by the book, they staged it to look like the patrol had been fleeing the Resistance only to be caught up and killed themselves. By leaving their own identification papers Sasuke and Gaara hoped that they would also be included in the body count especially as unfortunately they had messed up the bodies so it would be difficult to do a body count. It was something that the Resistance probably wouldn't be capable of but as Gaara had pointed out it was better for them to be looking for an enemy they already knew existed than a fictitious one. And it wasn't like Danzo needed anymore reasons to persecute the Resistance anyway, so what was one more excuse.

And so things became more settled for a time. Sasuke and Gaara did their best to vanish. They were used to travelling for long periods of time with just the other person but somehow knowing they couldn't easily walk away from each other made things awkward and they lashed out at each other. Even if it was more out of frustration than annoyance, they were used to travelling with some goal in mind but now it felt like they were just aimlessly wandering the country and that was what got to them the most.

They moved silently and slowly across the country and after they got used to the lack of urgency they used to travel with on their missions and eventually it became almost peaceful. But that was only for a moment before it became boring and they realised that neither of them would be happy with just running and doing nothing. Even if people weren't sent out to find them, and they had successfully fooled ANBU and its leaders, they were so used to doing something and fighting against something that to do nothing felt almost unnatural.

Gaara especially hated doing nothing and although he couldn't really resent Sasuke for it as he had been given plenty of opportunities not to join his former ANBU partner he still used it as a reason to lash out from time to time, and it was something Sasuke never argued back about so he felt some small satisfaction in winning.

Sometimes, Gaara teased Sasuke about whether he was going to go round rescuing more people from ANBU and that in itself showed just how far they'd come that Gaara would actually tease him about something now. Although that passing comment stuck with Sasuke and he began to wonder what it was he actually believed in enough to fight for. What it had been that made him intervene on behalf of the girl. She had brought out those long put aside memories of before ANBU, memories that had faded until Sasuke could barely remember them and he had never wanted to try to before. But maybe now it was the time to take them out, brush off the cobwebs and really think about things.

After all, they had all the time they needed for such things now.

Meanwhile, Sakura found herself growing used to lying to her friends and family. She insisted she was fine, that there was nothing to worry about, and that she wasn't having nightmares or any other dreams about that night. She was fine with the few scars that Tsunade hadn't been able to completely heal, she said, and that she hadn't given anymore thought to the person she had first thought had appeared and intervened on her behalf. Sakura said she must have been confused, mixed up, and after everything they surmised had happened and the blood loss no one questioned on it especially as she said she wanted to put it all behind her and not think about that night again.

They weren't all complete lies. Sakura liked to believe she was fine, and she really didn't want to be still dwelling on what had happened anymore than she had to, but there were nightmares and try as she might Sakura could never quite push everything from her mind. She kept thinking about the person who they said left to meet with the Resistance. Naruto. It had to be Naruto as no one else had gone from Konoha and that filled her with a strange sense of pride and relief that Naruto might be safe somehow.

It had helped Sakura to make sense of Naruto's behaviour, his constant following her and chatter in the past weeks before he vanished and when he asked her trusting people and whether he should do it must have been around the time he had met the Resistance. Which of course meant that they had been here in Konoha, and that they were in fact real. She felt relieved and happy that Naruto had obviously come to a decision about his life and she could almost forgive him for not telling her. Apparently he had made the leap to trust them but not her and that stung a little.

She also kept thinking about the man who saved her. She knew he had been real. The encounter had been far too strange, too brutal, to be anything that her mind could come up with.

Sakura thought about him more than she probably should to the point where at times her savour came to rescue her was almost romanticised in her head. Other times she remembered it more realistically when a stranger who managed to easily best two trained ANBU agents, who had tortured her so casually, before he had turned to her, blood visible on his clothes, and as she could hope for was that he would not turn on her as she'd not stand a chance against him.

Was he part of the Resistance? The whispers she had heard about them cast them as heroic figures but maybe the real group were just as bad as ANBU. Especially as he had callously snapped both of the man's arms before turning round to kill both of them it made her wonder if they were just as bad as the people they were supposedly liberating them from. But she couldn't say for sure as everything had happened so quickly.

Despite all her previous fears for Naruto, that was the first time Sakura was truly scared. Standing there until all she could feel or hear was the ANBU team and man in front of her and the pounding of blood in her ears. She felt that there was something so much bigger than her out there and that there was nothing she could do that could make a difference in that world. She used to like to think that she could make a small different to people by healing and even on Tsunade's insistence they made regular checkups on some people even if it was just to chat and keep them company in they were laid up for a while and unable to go anywhere.

But now Sakura just felt a bit helpless, as if in the grand scheme of things she could make no difference to anyone or anything. She knew Tsunade believed in making small differences to people's lives. That even the tiniest act of kindness could make a world of difference to the person given it but now Sakura had seen how ruthless ANBU were she wasn't so sure. Even her rescuer seemed to have some agenda and she wasn't sure what else he would have asked her if Shizune hadn't come running up.

And that was another thing, why would a man, who had so capably dealt with not one but two ANBU agents, flee when he had heard Shizune come running round the corner. The entire thing got stranger the more she thought about it and she wasn't sure what she wanted to do about it, smiling and shrugging the whole thing of seemed impossible but that was what everyone, her parents, Tsunade and Shizune, wanted her to do, just like she had been expected to do with Naruto's disappearance.

Sakura felt frustrated and it seemed as if the only person who would be able to have answers for her was either dead, as those two ROOT members believed something about her that caused some of this, or missing, and would she ever see that man again, or even recognise him if she did as it had been dark and as everyone said she was probably in shock and making parts of it up to help make sense of it.

Her parents thought that her attackers had luckily ran off when Shizune and Tsunade approached and who could say they were wrong. Sakura had no way of proving someone else had been there and even helped her. He had vanished just as quickly as he had appeared and although there had been extra blood on the ground it could easily be written off as hers and the bodies of the two ANBU had vanished along with her rescuer.

Weeks passed and Sasuke and Gaara found that now they were hurrying from place to place, blinkered by their missions, they saw a lot more of the country and they found that that wasn't necessarily a good thing. It was the first time they both really saw the desperation in people that they usually were able to avoid seeing.

Gaara followed Sasuke through the different streets and dirt paths as they moved through towns and country and after weeks and weeks of walking and being faced with the reality of how bad things were he often found that he had an odd prickling in his stomach and it took Gaara a little while longer to identify that with feeling uncomfortable by what he saw.

He looked at Sasuke's impassive expression but by then he knew not to judge his friend's, still a strange word to him, his friend's feelings by what was displayed on his face. Like him, Sasuke had learnt to keep a mask up and hide any doubts or ill feelings he may have had to keep going for their duties and responsibilities to ANBU.

But without that, without ANBU, maybe it was acceptable to feel something about all this. To form an opinion. It was just that Gaara wasn't quite sure how to go about doing that. He had always gone along with what he was told, never thinking about what it meant for anyone or what he even thought about it himself. Gaara just followed what he was told without question and it was only now that he began to wonder about the repercussions of what he had done.

Now after he had been faced with Kurenai who had been directly impacted by ANBU's actions he had felt the first stirring of something in the pit of his stomach, something he was able to later identify as guilt and he didn't like feeling it. There was a part of Gaara that wondered if this was how Sasuke usually felt and another part that didn't want to know because if this was what Sasuke usually went through then it wasn't how Gaara wanted to do things from now on and he wasn't sure he wanted to broach this conversation with Sasuke.

As it happened he didn't have to. Sasuke started it himself.

"Are you alright?" Sasuke asked one day as they aimlessly walked to, well anywhere really, neither of them had any particular direction in mind or were using any map.

"Why wouldn't I?" Gaara asked woodenly. Sasuke gave him a sharp look.

"You're being quiet."

"We've never been ones for talking much"

"Well something's bothering you anyway I can tell that much" Sasuke said, sounding exasperated. Gaara was quiet for a moment as he thought about what he wanted to say.

"What did you used to think when we were sent on missions?" He asked eventually.

"What?" Sasuke sounded startled.

"Well, you're not like me, and there must be something that being in ANBU never got as you've never wanted to kill people and recently you've even been saving them. So whenever we were sent on assassinations or to bring people into prison you must have been thinking something."

Sasuke sighed.

"It's hard to explain."

"Try." Gaara said and Sasuke stopped walking and looked Gaara dead in the eye.

"Okay" He said slowly. "It was mostly about the people that we'd leave behind."

"Like Kurenai." Gaara said and Sasuke nodded slightly.

"More like the people who are left with no idea what happened to them, the people that never get any answers and will spend the rest of their life wondering what happened." He gave Gaara a long look as if he was weighing him up. "I might as well tell you now, it's not like either of us can walk away from this anymore," he said finally jamming his hands in his pockets. ""My entire family disappeared one night."

Gaara frowned, this was nothing new he had known that Sasuke had been taken into ANBU as a child with his brother after his family had been taken away for questioning, the two brothers being seen as uncorrupted by revolutionary influences yet.

"I came home one night after playing out too late with some friends, I can remember my main worry being that my mother would be so mad at me but I saw them getting dragged off in the distance. My father was struggling, and my mother wasn't moving and she was probably already-" Sasuke broke off and looked away, unable to hold Gaara's gaze anymore before adding flatly. "I overheard the ANBU officer commending Itachi on his swift action in reporting the threat of the Resistance taking root. He's seen so favourably by ANBU and Akatsuki for turning his own parents in."

Gaara stared.

"I didn't know what was going on until much later and after the missions started it was hard not to see my parents in these people and all the children we left behind was just, I don't know, after a while even after all we were taught about doing this for the greater good to help Fire Country it just didn't feel like we were doing anything good at all."

"And Konoha was what?" Gaara asked slowly, "some reminder of home?" Sasuke gave him an odd smile.

"It was home."