Sai stood in his bare and utilitarian quarters, and looked at his surroundings in a manner that suggested he had never really seen them before.

This was not a room for living, it was a room for existing. There was a little cot for sleeping, hard and unyielding because tools didn't need comfort. There was a little desk for keeping things, but of course he didn't really own anything. There was a bit of space for his gear and his art and…

And he wanted to tear off the pages, to nail them on the walls, just so he could carve some sign of his existence in this space that was, ostensibly, his own.

Sai felt like the world had pulled a carpet from under his feet. That sort of thing would have upset anyone, let alone a person who was used to a dull sort of background noise where there should have been an aria of emotions. What Sai had had were shadows of annoyance when complications arose during a mission, hints of satisfaction after successful ones, and a vague sense of purpose.

The entire mission he had thought things would go back to normal once he returned, had clung to that idea in the middle of the bewildering storm of laughter, friendliness and the kind of bending of rules that, in Root, would have gotten them all stamped with the label 'insubordination' before the ink on the report had time to dry.

'One cannot cross a river twice', he'd once read in a book. He hadn't understood the meaning, back then.

This had all seemed so normal once. The black and white and blood red things that passed for morals around here, in the deepest darkness of Konoha. The strict discipline, where you were nothing but a tool that just happened to be expected to keep itself sharp.

And never asking any questions, ever.

Now, Root was as alien to him as Naruto and Shikako. He could no longer see the sense his life had once made, could no longer believe in the rhetoric of killing one's emotions and serving the village in the shadows.

It was all empty, and fake.

Ironically, the thought hurt. The conditioning was unravelling, slowly but steadily, and one of the first things he felt was to mourn its loss. Sai was changing.

Even that, 'Sai', was just a codename given to him for the mission, surely. And yet... In the darkness behind his eyes, he had begun to consider it his own. A label to the unique person that was him.

Sai, who liked art, and had had a brother, and liked to eat momen tofu. It wasn't much, but it was more than he'd had in years.

You cannot cross a river twice, he thought, because it is no longer the same river.

He could never return, so where would he go?

Author's notes:

I don't think it's much of a spoiler that Sai survives the mission. And it's also clear he's already asking questions. I was originally going to wait until the next chapter of DoS, but eh. Not sure I can bring you guys anything before Christmas. Happy holidays to you all!