Rain
It's all gray in here, but he's got torrents of color cursed behind a dam.
I don't know; I haven't seen many Sai!fics and this idea sort of came through a soaked rainbow and splashed on my hair and stained my brains. So I sort of have to write it out.
He smears the gray paint across a blank sheet of purity, relishing in the way his monotone stroke of emptiness taints and stains the paper. The single line is perfect in his essence; just a line, and no more. It's more beautiful than that colorless rose he saw yesterday, simpler than the lonely, lost petal on the ground, and purer than the innocent cherry blossoms that were born to die.
But this world; this world was never meant to be beautiful. Never meant to be simple and pure and anything like that little gray stroke of emptiness that just, at least according to this (his) world, must sprout to something more deadly than beautiful, something more intricate than simple, and something more bloody than pure.
Root has taken its toll on his mind, his development, his life. The gray stroke of emptiness retains its barren state, but it barely stays a single (beautifulsimpleandpure) stroke for fleeting breeze before its brothers and sisters curl themselves in and form that tiger that he saw kill his enemy yesterday, or that mouse that earned Root important information on the infiltration mission last week, or that giant ink bird that had soared the skies before raining down in drops of monotone.
Shin has silver hair, (empty) black eyes, and a kind (true) smile. From his tanto rains unwanted blood, from his mouth rains loud words, and from his soul rains passion.
And then from his body rains death.
And so Sai loses his first life, the colored one with blue sadness, indigo memories, and yellow happiness.
And then starts the shades of gray.
The seal on his tongue, on his brain, his soul. Torrents of black, inky dreams dammed behind a curse, leaving only an efficient steel machine in place of a heart.
Black hair, black eyes, black soul, gray heart.
Gray heart, because a heart can't be black forever when that bit of white dabs in. Like countless others, one Uzumaki Naruto brings the word friendship into a whole other light to the Hopeless.
(He knows he'll never mean what the legendary Uchiha was to Naruto, Sakura, and Kakashi; but he'll try his best to replace the glaringly empty hole in Team Seven's original dynamic. There was a comfortable hollow carved out in life on Kakashi's team, and Sai was content to remain there for as long as he could.)
And slowly, slowly but surely, monotone dissolves in the face of life and though he has his incurable flaws, the imperfections and new-built characters are what make him what he is, again.
Sai.
Thanks for reading!