Chapter 25, Part 3: Ghosts of the Same Shadow
The embers of the campfire crackled softly, a lonely sound in the deep silence that had fallen over the group. Naruto was a motionless silhouette on his high branch, a silent guardian or a waiting predator, no one was sure which. Sakura sat by the fire, her knees drawn to her chest, her mind replaying Naruto's cutting words and the flash of raw, genuine pain she had seen in Sai's eyes before his mask had snapped back into place.
Sai himself was gone.
After Naruto's verbal evisceration, he had stood rigidly for a moment, clutching his sketchbook, before turning and walking into the darkness at the edge of the camp, vanishing into the trees.
"I'll go," Yamato said quietly, his voice a low rumble. He stood up, his gaze fixed on the spot where Sai had disappeared.
"Wait," Kakashi said, closing his Icha Icha book and marking his page. He rose to his feet, his single visible eye carrying a heavy, weary weight. "I'll come with you."
The two of them moved silently, their shinobi training making them little more than whispers in the night. They found Sai a short distance away, sitting on the bank of a small, moonlit stream. He wasn't drawing. He was just staring at his own reflection in the dark water, the sketchbook lying closed beside him. His face was a perfect, emotionless blank, but his posture was rigid, his shoulders drawn tight.
They didn't try to sneak up on him. Kakashi deliberately crunched a dry leaf under his sandal, and Sai's head snapped up, his hand immediately going to the tanto on his back. He relaxed slightly when he saw who it was, but his guard remained up.
"The perimeter is secure," Kakashi said, his voice casual, as he and Yamato came to a stop a few feet away. "Just making the rounds."
Sai didn't respond. He just turned his gaze back to the water.
Yamato was the first to speak directly to him, his voice calm and even. "Naruto's words were... harsh. But not without truth."
Sai's fake smile flickered back into place, a ghastly thing in the pale moonlight. "He is an unstable Jinchuriki. His emotional outbursts are to be expected. They are of no consequence." The words were rehearsed, a line straight from a Root training manual.
"Is that what you call it?" Yamato's voice was quiet, but it cut through Sai's programmed response. "An 'emotional outburst'? Or was it someone seeing the one thing you're not supposed to have—a bond—and calling it by its name?"
Sai flinched, a barely perceptible tightening of his jaw.
Kakashi leaned against a tree, his arms crossed. "Root teaches you that emotions are a flaw," he said, his voice a low, gravelly murmur. "That they compromise the mission. That they make you weak. Danzo is very convincing on that point."
Sai's head whipped around, his eyes wide with genuine shock. He had expected lectures, perhaps pity. He had not expected the Jonin Commander of this team to speak Danzo's name with such cold, bitter familiarity.
"You... know of Root?" Sai asked, his voice losing its artificial flatness.
"I wore the mask," Kakashi said simply, his gaze distant, lost in a memory of a darker time. "For a while. I listened to the philosophy. I thought... I thought it offered a kind of strength, a clarity that the Hokage's way did not. A way to cut away the pain of loss and leave only the mission."
Yamato's gaze softened. "Kakashi-senpai..."
"Danzo is a master of using your pain against you," Kakashi continued, his eye now fixed on Sai. "He finds the cracks in your soul and fills them with his own poison. He tells you that your grief is a weakness, that your loyalty is a liability, that your very identity is a burden. He offers to take it all away, and in return, all you have to do is become an empty, useful tool."
He pushed himself off the tree, taking a step closer. "I was lucky. I had a reason to leave. I saw a truth that he was trying to bury." He glanced meaningfully at Yamato. "But I remember what it felt like. The emptiness. The silence. The belief that having no heart was the same as being strong."
Yamato then knelt down, bringing himself to eye level with the seated Sai. "My name was Kinoe," he said softly. "Before it was Tenzo. Before it was Yamato. I was raised in that darkness, just like you. I believed in it, just like you." He paused. "But I learned that a root that never grows towards the light will eventually rot. Danzo offers a foundation, but it is a foundation built in a grave. There is another way to be strong. A way to serve the village... to serve the Hokage... and still keep the things that make you human."
He gestured back towards the distant campfire. "Sakura's anger is born from her desire to protect a bond. Naruto's rage is born from the pain of having his bonds betrayed. The very emotions Danzo calls 'flaws' are the source of their power. You saw it yourself today. Naruto's strength isn't from the beast inside him. It's from the heart that refused to be empty."
Sai stared at the two men before him—the legendary Copy Ninja and the stoic Wood Style user. They weren't just his superiors. They were ghosts from the same shadow he inhabited. They had walked the same path, listened to the same lies, and had somehow, impossibly, found their way out.
He looked down at his sketchbook, his fingers tracing the outline of his brother's smiling face. For the first time, a genuine emotion surfaced, a flicker of profound confusion and a deep, aching loneliness.
"How?" Sai whispered, the single word a crack in his perfect, emotionless armor. "How do you leave?"
Kakashi's expression was somber. "You don't," he said, his voice heavy with the weight of experience. "You just... choose to walk in a different direction. Every single day."
Tbc