Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto

A/N: Please review! It helps me write

CHAPTER 6

That night, Sakura didn't get off her shift at the hospital until midnight. It was pretty common for her – in fact, she thought that she actually got off rather early for her. She was used to all-nighters at the hospital.

Before she left, she paid Naruto another visit, but he was fast asleep. She smiled at the snoring blonde – he was healing a bit better than Sasuke was, and would hopefully be out of the hospital in a week or so.

Sakura sat next to Naruto's bed for a while, just watching the boy sleep. She wasn't ready to go home yet – truth be told, she rather hated going to her apartment at night because she knew she had no one to go home to. She would usually slip into one of her teammate's apartments after her shifts and sleep on their couches. Her team had grown accustomed to this practice, and she had a key to all of their apartments, except for Kakashi's, who never bothered to lock his door anyway. She supposed even burglars avoided looting his apartment – not that he had anything to loot anyway. The silver-haired jonin was a minimalist in all of his habits, save for his excessive fondness for literature, if you could call it that.

Thinking of Kakashi made her realize that she hadn't seen him all day. Not that they saw each other every day, but she had figured that he would've wanted to find out how her meeting with Ibiki went.

Kakashi's sleeping habits were pretty unpredictable, so she had no idea whether he was still up for not, but she decided to go to his apartment anyway. To her dismay, she found his windows dark when she approached her teacher's dwelling, meaning that he was probably already sleeping, but she continued on her way anyway.

She slipped into his apartment quietly – but she knew he would wake up regardless of how quiet she was. Kakashi had lived too long as a ninja to be a heavy sleeper. Even so, it was with light footsteps that she approached his room, the door of which was open.

Kakashi was sprawled on one side of his bed. He had his usual sleeping outfit on – his mask and black jonin undershirt and a pair of loose, cotton pants.

Sometimes, Sakura forgot how tall Kakashi really was because of his terrible, slouchy posture. But seeing him laying on his bed, she was suddenly struck with how long his legs were.

"I'm sorry, Kakashi-sensei. Go back to sleep – I'll be out of here early morning."

Kakashi looked up at her from the bed. He was relaxed, but still had an alertness about him. She could never catch the Copy Nin drowsy. He frowned when he saw her face.

"You look like you need more than 4 hours of sleep, Sakura." He admonished.

Huh, was it already 1 a.m.? Sakura sighed. She was tired, and she knew she looked it.

"I've had less." Sakura attempted a feeble smile.

Kakashi's frown only deepened. He knew that she had had less – she usually ran on about 3-4 hours of sleep, so really, by her standards, tonight was almost a good night's sleep in comparison. He had never liked that Sakura almost never got to sleep anymore – Kakashi didn't, either, for that matter, but he had never been a sleeper, really. His body was so used to not sleeping that he automatically got up after a couple of hours of sleep. He was an early riser by nature. But he knew that Sakura had never been, nor will ever be, the type to forego sleep – he always saw that she was almost even more tired after her meager few hours of sleep on the nights that she crashed on his couch.

Still with the feeble smile, Sakura bid her sensei a good night, and slipped out into his living room. She settled down on his familiar couch, and breathed a sigh of tiredness as she instantly fell into a dreamless sleep.

Kakashi didn't fall back asleep, however. He laid on his bed for a few minutes and listened to his student's breathing become even in her sleep. He then got up and approached the couch where Sakura slept. He bent down and picked her up, and moved her to his bed, where he had laid only a few seconds ago. Even in her sleep, Sakura immediately responded to the warmth on the sheets from Kakashi's body, and she snuggled comfortably on the bed.

Kakashi took a seat at the corner of his room on a chair, and simply watched Sakura sleep. He often moved her to his bed from the couch when she slept. She would yell at him for it in the morning, of course. He knew that she didn't like him to give her the bed, because, as she put it, "it's your bed, you should be the one sleeping in it!"

But he could bear the shouting if it meant that Sakura would sleep a bit more comfortably for the few hours that she had to sleep. It was one of the few things he could do for her these days.

Kakashi knew that if it weren't for Team 7, Sakura wouldn't have had to grow up so quickly. She had been the only one with a very good chance at a normal, decent, and – dare he say it – happy life. More than once, he was sorry that it was she who had been placed in his team all those years ago. Any chance she had at being a normal teenager, even "normal" for a shinobi, had been destroyed the moment Sarutobi assigned her to be on the same team as three of the most complicated and broken people in the village.

When daylight broke out around half past four, Kakashi silently and swiftly got ready and, with a very gentle pat on Sakura's head, left through the window. His days always started with a visit to his Obito, Rin, and Minato, and he didn't want to be around when Sakura woke up – after all, she could wait to yell at him about letting her take the bed later in the day.

When Sakura woke up, it was half past 6 a.m. Kakashi was nowhere to be found, and she was in his bed. She often wondered if it wasn't a bad sign that Kakashi could move her without waking her up – after all, a shinobi is never supposed to be caught off guard. But then she always consoled herself by saying that the First himself probably couldn't have detected Kakashi coming.

She was late; she had wanted to be at the hospital by 5 a.m. She definitely didn't have the time to go back to her apartment to shower, so she settled on showering in Kakashi's shower. She had a spare change of clothing in his apartment – she had a spare in all of her boys' homes, actually. Kakashi, Naruto, and even Sai's apartments all had some of her essentials in them, as she crashed their apartments often.

She managed to get to the hospital by 7 a.m., and got to work immediately. She was by no means refreshed by her few hours of sleep, but she had no choice but to push through it. Sakura went over her administrative duties first, and by the time she was through with the more boring parts of her job, it was about 11 a.m. She decided that it was time to check up on Naruto, if only to brighten up her morning.

"Sakura-chan!" came Naruto's usual, loud greeting as she entered his room. "Sakura-chan, when can I leave the hospital? I can't wait too long to have ramen, I'm already going through withdrawals! Hospital food really sucks," he complained.

She gave him a stern look. "Naruto, I will kick your ass to freaking Mist if you so much as get out of this wing. You need to stay here for at least a week."

Naruto gave a dramatic sigh. "You're too strict, Sakura-chan. Have you seen Sasuke today yet? I bet that teme's itching to get out of here, too."

Sakura paused. "No, I haven't… Naruto?"

Naruto's big, blue eyes focused on her as he realized that her expression had gotten serious. "What?"

"Do you think Sasuke will really be alright here?"

Naruto's expression grew uncharacteristically thoughtful for him. "I think…" he faltered, then started once more, this time resolutely. "I think he will be. He's been alone for so long, Sakura-chan… and I think he's sick of it. He'll never come out and say it, 'cause he's Sasuke, but I think he wants to come out of the darkness. But we're gonna have to help him, okay? We can't give up on him now! He needs us more than ever!"

Naruto grinned his childish grin at Sakura – and something about his words and his grin together made Sakura hopeful. Hopeful that they could really provide Sasuke with much-needed light.

It was nighttime. A strangely orange-tinted crescent moon shone brightly outside of Sasuke's window. He had been watching the moon for quite some time now; he couldn't sleep. He rarely could.

"Still in ANBU?" Sasuke asked quietly into the darkness outside.

Hatake Kakashi stepped out of the shadows and stood on the roof, facing Sasuke through the window. "It's not really a job you retire from," replied the jonin.

Sasuke wondered if Kakashi had volunteered to be his ANBU watch or if he had been ordered. It didn't really matter, he decided. He didn't really care either way.

He eyed his former sensei. Kakashi seemed… unsettlingly same. He must have been, what, 33 now? He still looked the same as he did on the day Sasuke met him for the first time on the bridge with Naruto and Sakura.

The two men – Sasuke was now a man, after all – fell into silence as they regarded each other.

"I could let you go right now," came unexpected words from Kakashi.

Sasuke's expression didn't change, but inwardly, the raven-haired nin was taken aback.

"I'm the only one watching you right now. I could let you leave – you passed the worst of your injuries. You won't have any problems getting out of Konoha." Kakashi continued. His expression was as unreadable as Sasuke's.

Silence ensued once more. The two stared into each other's eyes.

"My shift ends at 6 a.m. You have three more hours." With those words, Kakashi lifted two fingers in fare-well. Then he was gone with a pop of smoke.

Kakashi hadn't expected Sakura at his apartment tonight. He had told her that he wouldn't be there, that he had a brief mission to complete until the morning.

He hadn't, however, told her what the mission actually was.

He supposed she had been tired, and he didn't blame her. The girl was being run ragged by the hospital. Kakashi's apartment was the closer to the hospital than those of Naruto's and Sai's (and her own, for that matter) and he supposed that she must have been too tired to make it anywhere but to his apartment.

Since he had told her that he wouldn't be in tonight, Sakura had taken the liberty of taking over his bed. Kakashi didn't really mind – the couch would do alright for him. It wasn't as if he ever really slept, anyway.

Before retiring to the couch, he paused briefly by his bed and looked down upon Sakura.

Would Sasuke leave again tonight? Kakashi had no idea. If he did leave, Kakashi wondered what Sakura would say if he told her that Kakashi himself was the one who had given Sasuke the opportunity to leave.

She could hate him. The thought of Sakura hating him left Kakashi a bad taste in his mouth.

But he had to do it.

He had to make sure that Sasuke was staying because he wanted to. He had to make sure that Sasuke hadn't changed his mind. Kakashi wasn't sure what Sasuke had imagined when he came back to Konoha, but the silver-haired man knew that Sasuke had been here long enough to tell that things would be different – that the people he knew were different. But Kakashi had to make sure that Sasuke would still want to stay, even with all of the changes.

Because he couldn't bear to see it if Naruto and Sakura got used to the idea of having Sasuke around, only to find him gone one morning. Because he couldn't bear to see his students fall apart again.

Because he wasn't sure that they could pick themselves up again if they had to fall a second time.