Betrayal was something that Sasuke considered trivial. Abusing the trust that others had in him in order to achieve his goals was a daily activity for the Uchiha. Faith was always too weak, bonds were constantly being severed and people changed. Betrayal was nothing to make a big deal out of.

However, family was an exception. Betraying a family member, that was a sin. The reasons didn't matter - whether blood or found, family, clans, they were irreplaceable. When Sasuke had gone against his brother, a part of him had died, and the rest had resolved to never forgive himself. It sounded awfully cheesy, like something Naruto would say - but, he had decided to work for a better world. To, with everything he had, prevent such acts from ever materialising around him again.

Taking in the two fugitives he had brought back earlier, Sasuke didn't find it hard to convince himself that actions did speak louder than words.

What was he supposed to do, with his teammate hooked to a terrifying amount of wires in the hospital, and the two culprits, whom she loved very much despite their repeated wrongdoings, lying defenceless on a cell floor, at his mercy?

The restless shinobi almost chuckled at his own wording. Yeah, Sakura had undeniable superhuman strength, both physical and mental; the Uchiha was practically sure she could withstand a lot more than she already had. But her heart was incredibly soft. Why was she always sweet with criminals?

He had often seen it as burdensome, a sign of weakness. Now, Sasuke conceded that this gift left him speechless. Had the medic not kept a place for him in her heart and mended his, the traitor wouldn't have survived his own demise.

Sakura's parents however seemed to be taking her indulgence for granted, and that, more than their betrayal, was setting the Uchiha on fire. His fingers were twitching in anticipation, electricity flooding his veins and threatening to impair his judgement.

That forgiving heart of hers wasn't all love and acceptance. It was causing her pain, killing her slowly by its uniqueness. If she ceaselessly embraced others and forgave their sins at her own expense, who would be there to hold her hand when she broke apart?

"I've been wondering…"

A raspy voice broke Sasuke out of his trance and his grip tightened around the hilt of his sword, features contorting into a full-bodied sneer. She was awake.

"I've been wondering," Mebuki slowly, excruciatingly, picked herself up from the dirty floor, wincing as blood rushed through her bruised limbs and as the sensation of weight returned to her weak body, indifferently brushing off the murderous contempt directed at her, "why you weren't there."

She was sitting, hunched forward in a miserable position, her laborious breathing indicating that she would not be able to hold it for long. Nonetheless, she never wavered under Sasuke's cold hard stare. "You're always there. Always. But not this time. I was surprised. This guy wasn't, but I was surprised." She lackadaisically motioned towards her unconscious husband, the movement throwing her off balance. Once she managed to stabilise her upper body again, Mebuki peeked at the silent shinobi under her sweat-drenched bangs, seemingly hesitating.

"… It's annoying."

In a flash, Sasuke was at her throat-

Until he wasn't.

All he could do was gasp. Never. Sasuke had never felt like this before- not even against Naruto- overpowered- overwhelmed- this wasn't normal. He had never felt like that.

He couldn't move.

The chained, barely standing, underfed civilian had him paralysed.

His sword had slipped from his fingers, gone completely slack. He was towering over her, in both height and muscle, but it was all irrelevant in this moment. Because she was powerful. She was menacing. Faster than him. Stronger than him. Even the Sharingan was useless- she was avoiding his eyes. But he could see.

He could see the toothy grin spread across her lips. The maniacal, deranging display of delight, clashing with her worn-out state. Mebuki was reeking of power.

She strengthened her deathly grasp around his neck.

Fuck.

He hadn't registered that.

Because for the first time in so long-

For the first time since his parents had died, Sasuke felt petrified.

No way.

Naruto squinted at the hasty scrawl on the torn piece of paper in his hand, then at the colourful sign adorning the entrance of the building. Then he glared at them.

Throwing both arms in the air, the Jinchuriki groaned loudly. "Granny… IS THIS A PUNISHMENT?!"

As soon as they had come back from their mission near the Rogue Village, the Hogake had assigned him a new one, a "special" mission, as she had put it. He was meant to do… What had she said? Some spying? Info gathering?

Eager, Naruto had immediately accepted, and rushed to the location indicated in the instructions.

Now that he was here, he felt cheated.

Looking at the sign once again in hopes of reading something else, Naruto let a self-derisive laugh escape his lips.

'Konoha Archives'.

Yeah, he was an idiot.

His eye twitched as he considered the possibility of backing out. He could tell Tsunade that he encountered dangerous enemies- had to take them down without hesitation-

But no. He sighed.

Sakura was counting on him. What good of a Hogake would he be if he couldn't even do such a simple task?

If it meant saving her, Naruto could certainly glance through a couple of scrolls.

Two hours later, this thought was the only thing keeping him going, muttered under his breath like a mantra.

He could feel the panicked laugher bubbling in his throat again. Yep. He was definitely an idiot.

What was he even looking for?

Tsunade had said "anything meaningful."

What was meaningful? What kind of mystery game was she playing?!

Naruto had gone through fifty-seven scrolls, and nothing had stood out as even remotely meaningful to him. Was Hashirama's first birthday party as a Hogake meaningful? Or the first time the Chuunin Exams were hosted by Konoha? Or the records of every person who went through the village gates down the the minute?

Oh, wait. The blond pressed his index to his forehead, and as he massaged his sore face, he tried to focus on what exactly Granny had said aside from "anything meaningful."

Something about documents… damn, he had been thinking about ramen at the time… right, documents keeping track of something…

"Try to find the exact date of Haruno Mebuki and Haruno Kizashi's last departure, or anything meaningful related to their movements outside of the village."

Naruto slammed his head on the table full of useless scrolls. He was such an idiot.

Ignoring the concerned looks of the few - crazy, why would they come here?! - people around him, the blond knocked his stool back as he frantically rummaged through the messy piles of documents. He had read it a while ago, and tossed it fairly quickly to the side… which side again? It should be around here…

Precious scrolls were being flung around, important documents trampled on, but they weren't the ones he was looking for, so Naruto didn't care. Finally, his eyes locked on a list of names and dates.

"FOUND IT!" He yelled as he snatched the paper, holding it triumphantly above his head. An uncomfortable silence followed suit. Sheepishly grinning, Naruto bowed in a rush and proceeded to do something Sakura would certainly smack him for.

He cleared the table of all the remaining scrolls in one smooth, particularly loud sweep of his arm.

He couldn't wait to tell her about it.

In order to do that, he had to go through this heavy document again - and possibly the ones that came after. But it was fine. After all, there was no mission Uzumaki Naruto couldn't complete.

When Kakashi approached the cell holding the Haruno couple captive, he was surprised to discover the Uchiha heir leaning against the wall facing the door, arms crossed.

To anyone who didn't know how to look or what to look for, Sasuke was just Sasuke: brooding, cold and perpetually in control. But his former sensei could see the slight clench of his jaw, the unnecessary tightness of his crossed arms, the rigidity in his back, the rare drop of sweat cruelly running down his neck. And the look in his eyes. Normally, Sasuke's eyes were either extremely focused or extremely distant, with no in-between. Now, they were, in a way, both; not quite here but also overly alert.

And by the way his gaze snapped up and assessed him when he approached Sasuke, Kakashi knew that something had happened, and that it was better left unmentioned. At least for now.

"How are they?" He jutted his chin towards the iron door, leaving enough distance between him and his former student to avoid worsening the tension in his entire body.

"In too good a state," the Uchiha grumbled. He warily glanced at the door, an invisible shudder running through him at the sight. Kakashi raised an eyebrow but remained silent. "I've got her under control."

'Her'? He hadn't specified. Was Mebuki awake then? Kakashi'd only had a talk with her husband - if it could be qualified as a talk at all.

"Nice little chat?" He probed despite his earlier resolve.

As soon as the words left his mouth, Sasuke's chakra flared, dominant, dangerous, but he quickly got hold of it in a matter of seconds. Sasuke acted as if nothing had happened, but Kakashi had noticed. He had felt, deep in his bones, the tinge of something else, something new in his teammate's usual chakra signature.

He couldn't quite place it yet, and he knew Sasuke didn't want him to. But judging from the constant flicker of the Uchiha's eyes towards the cell door, added to his earlier comment about having her under control, Kakashi could safely assume that Mebuki was the cause of this shift.

The Copy ninja shuffled towards the door before him, hand grabbing the doorknob. He paused briefly as a sharp intake of breath resonated behind him, and turned the handle with more caution than he meant to have. The light from the corridor pooled in through the unlocked door (Sasuke was the unbreachable lock), illuminating two unconscious heaps of bones and bruises on the far end, all four limbs chained to the floor. They seemed harmless, in this state. Far from a threat. In fact, aside from the troubling scene that unfolded only seconds before, Kakashi had no reason to believe that they were threats.

He had made some discoveries at the Rogue Village, a connection without concrete proof he was sure to have figured out, but his interrogatory with Kizashi had proved him wrong. The man had denied his whole theory, not by his answers, but by his surprise. He truly had no clue about what Kakashi was asking, even seemed to think it was ridiculous. The silver-haired man had halfheartedly allowed Sasuke to conduct his own questioning afterwards, in a frail hope that Kizashi was just really good at lying and that his mask would not resist the Uchiha's glower, but no. Rather, the results were unsettling. The husband was clearly innocent, but the wife had left quite an impression on Sasuke. His theory had appeared so plausible at the time, the answer to everything, but now it was just sending him into a spiral of more questioning.

What had he just stepped into?

Naruto's index was flying across the lengthy paper, stopping briefly on familiar names and dates, his other hand jutting down bits of information on another scroll.

The floor had been transformed into a swarming ocean of paper - scrolls, documents, records, contracts - keeping curious people at bay.

Well, not all curious people. Hinata was seated on the opposite side of the table, holding a scroll in each hand, blushing occasionally when her stare met Naruto's hardworking frown.

She had happened to overhear - coincidentally, of course - Neji commenting on quite a spectacular sight involving the blond he had witnessed during his daily trip to the Archives, which Hinata had not be able to resist checking out (she hadn't tried to).

And now she was reading gate-activity recordings because a certain fox boy had asked her to. She had no idea about what she was doing, but it helped Naruto, so it made her happy. Although, part of her did worry about who he could be so intently stalking like that. She suddenly gasped. Did Naruto-kun have a secret lover?!

Apparently, her gasp must have been rather loud, for the blond in front of her whined, his reading streak interrupted. "Hinata-chaaaan…" Her fierce blush became a full flame - she was fairly sure that her face could provide the entire village with permanent heating. "Did you find anything?" Fighting the urge to faint, Hinata opted for a small smile instead. Naruto never held grudges. At some point, she realised that she had been staring again - the object of all her torments was waiting for her to reply, and she'd just sat there, smiling like a creep. Good one, Hinata. She inwardly slapped herself.

"U-Um, there's not a-a lot… I'm… I'm not sure…"

Great, now she was dying of embarrassment.

"Don't worry, Hinata-chan!" He beamed at her, a warm, pure smile.

Despite the way her stomach was sent twisting in hundreds of knots at the way he pronounced her name, Hinata found herself reciprocating his smile, and felt her blush slowly ease into a cool pink dust. Naruto always found a way to make her feel comfortable.

"We have the entire night before us!"

She fainted.

After sending Gamakichi to find Neji and tell him to come pick his cousin up, Naruto resumed his reading. He had set up three neat piles on the table, one for the scrolls he hadn't read yet, one for the ones he was done with, and one for the ones with important information he would come back to.

So far, he had scribbled on every available corner of two whole scrolls, notes about departures, arrivals, the Haruno name recurring often, and was halfway through a third one when he glanced at his 'to be read' pile.

He was done.

Stretching, Naruto was still under the quiet spell of the surprisingly cozy Archives, so he remained quiet as he moved to clean the mess he had made. As he bent forward, he caught a glimpse of a window, and was taken aback by the pitch-black image of the outside it offered him. Scanning his surroundings, the blond realised that he was the only visitor left, which hadn't been the case the last time he had checked. Searching for a clock, Naruto let out a startled gasp when he spotted the time, time which had flown without his permission.

It was three in the morning.

Suddenly, it hit him that places like these usually closed during the night. Unsure of what he was supposed to do, Naruto was moving into a crouching position to continue his cleaning when slow footsteps approached him.

"No no no, don't you fret!" A high-pitched, shaking voice preceded frail hands grabbing his sleeve. Naruto stiffened, but sensing no threat, he relaxed soon after. He looked around him for the person who had spoken, finding the room still empty.

"Down there, idiot!" A smack on his head - with a scroll, he was pretty well-versed in scroll texture by now - made him look down at a tiny scowling old lady, hands on her hips. Her frown softened into a knowing smile when he didn't protest.

"You're an admirable friend, young man. Don't worry about cleaning this- I've seen worse in my lifetime. Go bring that pile of notes you took over there to whoever needs them. Complete your mission, and I'll complete mine." She winked at him, a remarkable accomplishment given the thinness of her slanted eyes.

Naruto was beyond confused, but somehow he understood. So when she started to shoo him away, the blond scrambled to his feet and grabbed his notes and a few scrolls in a haste, turning to thank the smiling Archives holder who had left the building open until 3 AM for him.

"Go, child. And please, do all of us a favour and save our dear Sakura-chan."

"So what you're saying is, they never left?"

Naruto was in Tsunade's office, along with the standing members of Team 7. His notes and the two scrolls he had taken (stolen? He hadn't exactly asked for permission) from the Archives were sprawled across the desk, the irrelevant objects discarded on the floor, Naruto-style. After the creepy but kind old lady had ushered him out, Naruto had wasted no time in barging into the Hogake Tower, asking for an urgent meeting in the middle of the night that he was sure would wake none of the required participants up.

He had been right - Sasuke had refused to leave his post in front of the cell door until the blond's intervention and Kakashi had been checking up on Sakura.

"Well, at least not officially."

The numbers were overwhelming. The side notes were criminal. For civilians with a restaurant, the Haruno couple sure travelled a lot. At first, the dates appeared to be normal. A holiday here, a vacation there. But as weeks passed, they increasingly became more frequent, less structured, and comments were added in the margins of the return times.

'Very big package - didn't have when left'

'Refused to open backpack for inspection'

"See how the pattern gets weird here?" Naruto was pointing at two months' worth of records, handwritten by the gate guards themselves. "In two months, missions aside, they're the only ones who left the village. Multiple times. According to the data, they left on seventeen 'trips'." Naruto mimicked air quotes as he spoke, using the recurring terminology he could read in the unusual side notes.

When he glanced around and no one responded, he settled for a shrug and raised a single eyebrow, finishing his own thought for dramatic effect. "Who takes seventeen vacations in two months?"

Sasuke grunted, and Kakashi was relieved that some form of normalcy had returned to him - he had been out of it even since the Copy Ninja had found him in front of the cell.

"Exactly." Naruto pointed an appraising index at the Uchiha, as if his noncommittal noise had just proven the point of the blond's existence. "Nobody does. Not even the people who get paid to travel! So why are people with a job like theirs leaving the village so often?" The overly eager shinobi pressed both palms to the desk and leaned forward, gaze jumping between his interlocutors conspicuously. "Do they…"

His voice trailed into a near whisper, and Sasuke couldn't help but think that the Dobe would make a pathetic detective.

"…have a secret child?!"

Tsunade's low growl effectively shut the idiot up, but his words, while not very thoughtful, had to be given the credit of being valuable. The Harunos had something secret, though highly unlikely to be a child.

"Wait, wait, that's not the end of it-" the effect of Tsunade's warning having worn off, Naruto's mind was racing again. He shuffled through the documents, skipping parts only to come back to them a second later, obviously searching for a specific piece of information. Kakashi observed him curiously. A strange feeling in his gut was telling him that Naruto had picked up something huge and that he was not ready to let go. And then, just in time to reinforce this growing feeling, his student's fist shot up in the air, proudly brandishing a tiny, innocent-looking section of a scroll, the gesture punctuated with a shaky exclamation of relief.

As he set it down, the Copy Ninja had no trouble identifying the detail that made this particular section so important. Neither did Tsunade, who let out a dry, humourless laugh, disbelief transpiring through along with a hint of frustration. She gripped the edges of the desk tightly, glaring a hole into her whitening knuckles. While it was the guards' duty to report any issue with the records, ultimately it was the Hokage's responsibility to check the scrolls and verify the accuracy of the data. And there, right before her eyes, laid the clear and irrefutable proof of her failure, black ink on yellowish parchment. She had missed it. She had missed something as simple and obvious as that, and it had almost cost her a life.

Tsunade wasn't speaking, yet Kakashi could make out the tumult raging on inside her mind - manifesting itself physically, threatening to engulf her completely and eat away at her sanity - because he had felt it too. He still did. Guilt. Remorse. Guilt. Hatred. Guilt.

But he also knew how to resist it- at least when he wasn't alone in his house, staring back at a mirror, at the empty space in his living room, at the framed pictures of two teams he had brought to the brink of destruction.

He knew how to resist barrelling down the thorny path of regret. He grounded himself in the present, in the Hokage's office, focusing on Naruto's grim expression, Sasuke's entirely closed off presence, and finally Tsunade's contorted face, her wrinkles showing and her brows furrowed so deep Kakashi wondered if they would not get permanently stuck.

He reached for her hand, placing his palm on top of her strained grip, hoping to ground her, too. One day, he would be able to teach her how to handle herself. But that would mean bringing up parts of his life, past and present, that he wasn't ready to bring up yet- or that he still had not finished processing. But one day, he would.

Casting his concerns aside like he often had to, Kakashi settled his attention back to the document at hand. Another record-keeping scroll. A date, date he remembered well, for it was a night during which Sakura, inconsolable, had found her way to his door and sobbed in his arms. A night they had never mentioned again, a night she had definitely not forgotten either. It was the night her parents had picked for their departure. The date of their official leave of Konohagakure.

The date was empty.

According to the document, only Shikamaru had left the village for a diplomatic mission that night.

Tsunade couldn't breathe. Their first act of treason, clear as day. She had missed it.

"Sakura's parents had put down this date in the paperwork, right?" Naruto asked, just in case. Just in case he was wrong, just in case the guards had been sloppy, just in case they were all mistaken and her parents were perfectly innocent. Just in case. But Tsunade nodded.

"They registered a permanent leave on account of world travelling, and picked this very night, at 8, as their departure. I remember the document." Her absent gaze was wavering between the handwritten numbers, focused somewhere deep down into her memory. Her voice was barely a whisper. "They never crossed the gate as they were supposed to." They had lied right to her face. They had lied right to Sakura's face. Still to this day, they lied to their only daughter, and she suffered the consequences. They committed high treason and she let them. They committed high treason and Sakura paid the price. Right under the Hokage's nose, her pupil's parents were slowly betraying the government.

Tsunade straightened into her Hokage posture. She had this in control. She had the entire village in control. This could be fixed, and as the Hokage she would fix it. They were two civilians, traitors, yes, smart and cunning, but nevertheless civilians. She had dealt with worse before.

She cleared her throat and rooted her eyes on the criminal records.

A pleading child.

A feral mother.

A sleeping father.

A person to save.

Gut-wrenching fear.

No.

His head was swimming.

Drowning.

Could Sasuke save them all?