After a few minutes, he stops drawing. He places his pencil beside him and raises his sketchpad a bit, looking at his work. He tries to imitate that look he has seen people use whenever they feel as if they like what they have done. He tries to smile. He fails. But he likes to think that he was able to do it.
Then again, it isn't as if he has any right to actually be proud of what he has done. It still isn't finished. It most likely never will be.
Sai likes drawing Team 7. He likes trying to make that hideously orange piece of article that Naruto wears look as if it's just alive as its owner, as if it's real. He likes drawing Sakura's figure and trying to get his proportions on her right. He likes putting the shading and life on Kakashi-san's face. He likes trying to make Yamato-san seem as like the original one, not the clone or the experiment.
He hasn't had a lot of difficulties in drawing Yamato-san. The others, however, are different.
Sai can never ever correctly draw their eyes. At least that is what he thinks. To others, it may have looked quite perfect. Sai just thinks that there's something wrong and that he can never ever be able to say that he's finished a portrait of Team 7, his new family or home or whatever it is that they call that.
Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that their eyes are so... bland. So boring. Not at all filled with the life he thinks exude from people like them.
Sai is really filled with presumptions and pretensions when it comes to the mechanics of the human mind and its connection to the person's external look or their surrounding. He has deemed it since the beginning that Naruto may have been a bouncing ball of sunshine because he just looked far too bright and that perhaps Sakura is a sweet girl because her green eyes sparkle so wonderfully.
When he comes to know them better, he begins to think otherwise. There's just something off about them.
But of course, as with all things, he learns the truth soon enough.
It begins with a simple show of gratitude and it seems to have ended with a confession that everything is just on a whim.
("I'll go with you!")
("I'm still living only because of a whim?!")
He learns it with a price though. Nothing is, after all, free in the world. What he earns is a wound here and there. Nothing major really. He's fine. But Sakura seems to be fussier and easily flustered than usual and Naruto more agitated and irritable and just full of energy.
They seem distraught. But they are alive and that's what Sai notices the most. He just has the misfortune of not being able to draw in his sketchpad due to certain circumstances.
He has seen them alive for a few times, but he has never ever been able to draw that state of theirs. It is more than often because either they are rushing or he cannot get out his art supplies. Then again, how could he when the times that they seem to be alive is when they're in battle?
Sai thinks that perhaps it's better that way.
Besides, it looks as if he will never be able to complete their faces. Even he, the one who knows the least about these bonds and ties, knows that the only thing they'll be able to achieve is running in circles.