It was springtime and he was drawing. He would always draw, but it was only in spring when he felt taken to find a street corner and draw the things happening around him, as opposed to the lines and shapes of his mind. He would draw kissing couples in the tree shade, and busy shinobi drenched in dirt and blood, and manual village workers who held screaming babies in their arms and flapped their lips busily to the companions who walked with them.
But most of all, he would draw the leaves. He would sit against a tree in a shaded yard by the street, look over the big white fence of the Hyuga or the Akimichi clan complex, and draw the leaves on the trees. He trained his eyes to watch the way they whistled in the wind. His hand moved in slow, respectful strokes as he took in the sound and the movement. They had no mind or heart. They did what the wind told them to do. They were like water, moving smoothly and slowly in the river as the breeze and the rocks commanded it. He stared down at his paper and his brush looped up and up and around while he drew little swirls for the wind.
"That's pretty."
His head shot up and there was a girl a few inches in front of him, his size and his age. Her hair was sickly pink and tied with a too-big ribbon. Once she knew he was looking at her she pushed her bangs in toward each other and folded her hands behind her back.
He blinked at her. "Pretty?"
"I like how the leaves look all soft and stuff." She pointed to her subject on his paper, and he drew his knees in instinctively to hide his sketchbook. She pouted toughly and crossed her arms.
"Don't be sad. Your drawings are good."
His lips curled out unpleasantly and something strange twisted in his stomach. He did not know what "sad" meant and he was for some reason too frightened to ask. He unfurled his legs a bit and leaned his sketchpad out to allow her a better look. She walked forward until she nearly collided with him and leaned down to examine the page, her eyes scurrying over all of it. He felt naked and embarrassed.
"What's that thing supposed to be?" Her pointer finger fell over a tiny flower at the bottom corner of the page, loosely pressed and folded into form like an origami swan. Narrow, wispy stalks poked out of the stamen.
"It's a sakura," he whispered, his hands clutching his brush. Stray blotches of ink began to etch against his palms. He had seen the flower poking through a hole in the compound fence, just under the leaves.
"Hey, that's my name!" she shouted, standing straight up and now pointing to herself. She giggled and tilted her head to the right. "My mama said it's 'cause I'm as pretty as the sakura flowers. I forgot about that!"
He looked up now and carefully examined her, as he would the trees. Her eyes glittered of green and her skin was a plain dull white. Her ruffled red dress draped the short, stubby body of a child. Her hair curtained a big and ugly forehead.
But her hair. Her hair was, indeed, like the little flower, delicate pink poking shyly through her ribbon. His brush quivered in his hand.
"What's your name?" she asked, unaware of the way he was sizing her up. Her smile grew modest and gentle, and when he saw it, he copied it on his own face without thinking. He clutched one of the weapons at his belt.
"I am Sai."
The sky was blanketed in a strange dark rosemary, a color that only came in the dead heat of summer. As the boy walked through the streets of the village he stared at it, arms hanging at his sides but fingers twitching restlessly. People passed and shoved and bumped into him as he walked, but his diminutive height and white ANBU tiger mask made him invisible in the bustling crowd.
He felt thick dark blood trickling down his stomach, and when he glanced down he saw it had bled through the mesh and made a faint running stain on his shirt. He tapped two fingers to it and held them up near his nose. He contemplated the deathly iron smell of the blood and stared at the sky again. It seemed peaceful, like sleep, as his legs weakened and he dragged himself aimlessly through the street.
Minute after minute passed and his eyes grew weaker, until the whole village seemed to be covered by a smoky haze, and a never-ending hum of white noise gushed through his ears. Human-shaped colors of red and blue and green and black pressed against him incessantly as he pulled himself along the street. The noise of every single step he took reverberated through his bones.
It was here that he stopped dead, tired of the sound, and looked lopsidedly towards the left to see a great glowing yellow mass, fizzling with the shapes of people. He flung himself messily through another pack of moving bodies until his body slammed up against a big brown column. He blinked wildly and re-focused his eyes. It was an open ramen stand. Big yellow lanterns hung off the edge of the awning and illuminated the great line of colorful people hunched over the bar. He took in a deep breath of the thick, thick smell of miso. If he had a brush with which to paint the scent in the air, it would be a good place to die.
"Oh my God!"
He fluttered his eyes into focus again to see a pair of forms planted in front of him. Red and orange. Red and orange. The two smudged colors swam around his mind incessantly.
"Whoa! You alright, pal?" The orange stomped up to him and sluggishly waved a hand in front of his face. He blinked beneath the mask.
"You need to go to the hospital!" the red gasped from further away. When it approached, it transformed into cool sweet pink, and that was when he smiled her smile.
Somehow he had opened the window, and now he stood in front of it being hugged by the autumn wind. He watched little groups and trios and duos of children run around on the ground below, rushing out of the Academy to parts unknown. He watched a lone, small, black-haired boy traipsing around aimlessly near a plank swing, and he felt something in his chest. He shut his eyes. It felt like Shin.
"Um..." He whirled around in surprise at the voice, which came from the pink-haired girl. Half of her had entered the room and half of her was still concealed by the door. She stood uncertainly in this state of flux, watching him with curious eyes.
"Am I interrupting anything?" He paused for a second before shaking his head, after which she slid awkwardly into the room, closing the door. He wandered back to his bed out of courtesy, as he imagined it was where most visitors at a hospital would expect a patient to be. The walls were plain wood and the floors were cold white tile, and the boy found the place comforting and frustrating at the same time. He did not know why. He had not known frustration in quite a long time.
"Well, it looks like you're finally feeling better." He looked at her again as he settled down under the covers, and she was smiling at him. He didn't know why she did it, and he clenched his teeth in thought over it. She had her hands clasped at her lap, and a small white tote bag was slung over her right shoulder.
His eyes were blank and focused completely on her, and she seemed to shrink beneath his gaze. "You were not supposed to see my face."
She opened her mouth dumbly on hearing this, and her eyes told of a rather slow-acting shock. "I... what do you mean?"
"I am ANBU," he answered, as if that declared the final word on everything. She shut and pursed her lips, and her bangs shifted slightly around her face. She understood, and now she thought of the potential consequences. It was then that he noticed a forehead protector had replaced her giant bow. He narrowed his eyes.
"You are a genin?" he asked her expectantly, and after taking another few seconds to process his plain, listless question, she nodded. He tilted his head in the middle of a pause. "I am surprised."
She rose her eyebrows. "Why is that?"
He shrugged and put on her smile. "You did not seem like the shinobi type to me."
Audibly scoffing and splitting her hands apart, she planted her hands dramatically on her hips, and her face twisted into... anger? He blinked in confusion. It was a look he had only seen on enemy ninja during missions.
"Are you trying to say I look weak?" He opened his mouth, but her tongue proved both sharp and quick. "I don't really think it's your place to judge whether or not someone looks worthy to be a shinobi or not. Is it because I'm a woman? Huh?! Jerk!"
She stormed off furiously towards the door, her fists clenched and swinging stiffly at her sides. He watched her and, both internally and externally, found himself completely lost for words. He felt as if the thin little string connecting them had now been severed, and in his heart he felt Shin touching his shoulder.
The door was thrown open at her hand, but once the hall came into her view, she stopped in her tracks and released her fists back into meek, simple hands. She struck his eyes in that moment and he examined her, as he would the trees, for the second time. Her red battle dress was hand-sewn from dyed fabrics, and it covered a body hardened by training. It slit at the knees and he could see firm young sinews formed in her lower legs. Her skin had stretched with time but seemed somehow softer to the touch than before, curving gently onto elbows and knees. And her hair still bloomed out pink and shy from the back of her head. Frayed single hairs stuck like out like dandelions. His eyes seemed to brighten at the sight.
She turned around, slow and unsure. Her face was too muddled with emotions for him to understand it. "Do you really remember me?"
He nodded without hesitation. "I do not forget. You said you were as pretty as the sakuras."
Her face took on a thin shade of red, and her hand brushed the side of the door, wrestling with something in her mind. He took on her smile again. He thought perhaps it would spark her memory, or even comfort her. He did not know many things about people, but he knew it was nice to have peace.
She fished around quickly in her bag and gingerly removed a thin blue pad of paper. His eyes widened at the sight of the thing, and she scuttled hurriedly to the foot of his bed and held it out to him.
"...I... um... the nurse at the desk said that someone left this for you." He took it from her as gently as she had offered it, and once they both nodded to confirm the exchange, she ran out of the room without another word, as if she were escaping from an unseen danger. He looked after her, questions hopping through his brain, and flipped open the pad to find a blank sketchbook. A fountain pen was taped to the first page.
Snow dripped clumsily through the leaves to announce the winter. The boy sat at one of the many village corners and watched the couples and families and filthy ninja trudge through it, though now he could only sketch them in vague, shuffling scribbles. An ink umbrella hung over him to protect his paper, and occasionally he would swish the tip of his pen through the roof of it to refill the nib. People would shoot accusing looks at him and the product of his jutsu, but he would so plainly ignore them that soon he became just another part of the street's scenery, even to those he had yet to reject.
He sat his pen down on a page of messy, casual work and sighed. Of course he had been released from his position once the village council learned of his failed mission, and of course Danzo had cast him out of Root as a whole once he had heard the same. The injury from his failure in the Mist was deep and abiding and he had spent many weeks in the hospital half-asleep, unconcerned about the outcome of these things. He paid the price now with many winter mornings of careless drawings and unfinished contemplation.
He picked up the pen again as his eyes fell upon a little boy, clasping a parent's hand on either side, tearing through a stream of new snow, tongue stretched out and mouth shouting a war cry of play. His eyes shot around between the boy's watering blue eyes, his rustling fluffy coat, his mother's careful worrisome pace and then the pen etching, scratching, pushing instinctively into the page. Just as the little family turned the corner in their surge through the streets, he looked upon his finished work and saw nothing but a pile of black curves. It constructed a mathematical image of a boy-like figure on a two-axis plane in a numeral world. He drew his knees up to his chest and tossed his pen into a nearby snowbank.
"You didn't draw any flowers."
He peered up and saw a pink-haired girl he did not want to see. Now she wore a green wool coat, which was as comically big as her ribbon had been in their childhood. Her smile poked out of the top of the thing like an afterthought.
He shrugged and ran a hand through his hair, suddenly self-conscious. "The snow took them all away."
She looked down at him pitifully and rose her eyebrows as he had seen her do once before. Her hands slipped elegantly out of the pockets of her coat. "They say that a great artist should have imagination."
He returned her look and did not say anything at all, but merely breathed and sighed and bit his lip in varying times and speeds. He was truly drained of the energy necessary to answer or even think over this question, and in the increasingly intense whipping of the snow she looked like a ghost, hair wet and painted off-white.
Soon she stooped down and slipped herself around to sit with him under the umbrella. The moment was completely free of discomfort, and he naturally slid to the side to grant her room. They huddled under the umbrella, now facing each other, and her smile faded into a girlish blush.
"I... brought you a flower," she whispered, now embarrassed and doubtful, and pulled it out of the mysterious confines of her coat. He took it in his right hand and twirled it about, feeling the light-green plastic stem and felt pink petals. He plucked them off one-by-one and, the stamen falling off after them on its own, discovered a modest little paintbrush.
"Sai," she breathed, vulnerable, like an infant spring. "Is that really your name?"
He smiled a smile of his own, weak and new and trembling, and brushed the snow out of her hair. "I'll be Sai if you'll be Sakura."