Chapter Text
Sai tipped his head at the little ink mice scurrying away from his scroll.
He was not frowning, but the state of mild confusion in his mind was nearly causing an unwarranted downward tug at his lips. He decided to blame it on this mission.
A familiar signature suddenly pulsed above and behind him and Sai glanced up briefly, swiftly slipping out his ink scroll and unrolling it to face the sky with a practiced hand. An ink hawk speedily plummeted straight down, seemingly splattering onto the paper and gracefully separating into distinct curves and lines of a returned message by the Hokage.
Sai skimmed the message with dark eyes, eying the name bolded on the paper. It left him with a rather apprehensive feeling budding within his chest.
It seemed that… well, it was stated that one Naruto Uzumaki would be rendezvousing with his Anbu team within the next day or so to aid them on their inspections and reconnaissance of land activities.
Well.
He did enjoy the blond’s company and presence; that was entirely undebatable and it has been long since Sai attempted to dissect his own reasoning for his loyalty for his friend. But in such a given situation as this, even Sai did not need to consult chapters from his self-help books to suspect that his former teammate was being sent out by the Hokage for Kakashi-san to simply rid the boy from his hair.
In another sobering thought, perhaps Naruto was actually partially the cause of Sai’s former captain’s ever grey hair.
Now wouldn’t that be a phenomenon for the books.
Either way, the mission on hand would be completed by the end of the week. If nothing were to happen, of course. But with the way things had been going almost too smoothly, Sai did not want to think of the things that could go wrong with the luck of having been someone on the infamous Team 7. Adding Naruto would simply multiply that luck by leaps and bounds.
The forest was the same as always, he could tell, but something about this reconnaissance mission was off. Sai had left the village plenty of times to scour surrounding areas on both public and unlisted missions to gather information, but this particular one made him feel… wary. Yes, wary.
The group had left the village not several days ago out East towards the border and reached a clearing where traces of condensed chakra were left lining the grounds and long-decomposed structures that had been identified as wooden buildings. The Anbu team had then scattered, searching for nearby traps or any sign of tampering on the grounds but none of his team members came back with anything of the sort.
There had been absolutely no traceable suspicious activities worth noting despite the concerning levels of chakra quite literally hovering in the air around them in the small overgrown clearing they had come across, surrounding a long deserted outpost a bit more south than where Sai’s team was currently scattered.
This mission was simple in statement, as his team had been ordered to evaluate several points on the map in the surrounding forests that were rather close to the border. These locations had previously been inspected due to “suspicious activity” and labeled as “grey-locations”, since the inspections were biannual and mainly listed just to fill in for formalities in land claim checks.
But Sai still felt unsettled.
Of course, he had long since learned not solely to trust the orders and written words given to him, but to also give thought to his gut feelings and what he felt to be right. (He was depending more on his own judgement, which made him feel some sort of a warmth and independence at times, although it was still difficult to discern what and when it was appropriate to truly follow those feelings and let his emotions fly.)
(Of course, Naruto made connecting with others seem so easy that empathy must have been what he was born to do, charisma and all. Then again, Naruto Uzumaki was also not the best example when explaining the rules and ticks of fully professional behavior based solely on logic and no emotional attachment at all. Especially when being thrown into tense and dangerously invested situations.)
However, most of the time the uncomfortable sensations pitting themselves deep in his chest made him even more confused (he was trying, and he was learning, at least) and he found that it usually led to him realizing the ugly truths of the situations presented.
He would rather ignore them after all.
The tug at his senses only grew stronger by the hour, and Sai still had not figured out what it was that was pulling at him from every inch of his being. Perhaps his gut feeling was trying to tell him something else? Was there an attack coming soon? Were opposition forces nearby?
Long since the Fourth War’s end, there had been no real threats against Konoha and Konoha only (this was if he took out the incident with the moon), but Sai still stayed sharp and alert for any threats at all, no matter how unconcerning they seemed.
Something rustled and Sai stilled, watching as Fox landed silently right in front of him.
The Anbu nodded briefly and leaped back towards the tree branches above, their shoes glowing a discrete blue to flicker back into the camouflaging shadows. Two paper-white mice suddenly scurried back towards Sai, and he opened his scroll again to a blank section to regroup his information.
Maybe the feeling in his chest was only due to the fact that their backup was in the shape and form of Naruto Uzumaki. That, of course, would be another reason entirely why Sai felt a rather contradictory sinking feeling. He would consider it to be the problem, however the sinking feeling had been there far earlier than when he had received Kakashi-san’s message.
Sai frowned, and his senses sharpened when the air around him suddenly changed, honing in on a suddenly swirling mass of chakra building up rapidly behind him.
There was an explosion.
Chakra radiated in waves straight through the Anbu team in the small forest clearing and Sai whipped his head around, eyes narrowed and hand up to regroup his scattered team members. It came from the outpost.
There was a sudden appearance of a tightly controlled chakra signature in his field of sensing, and Sai tensed - it wasn’t possible for anyone to have made their way into his Anbu team’s perimeters without having any of their members being alerted at the mere presence that was so obviously fluctuating and alerting every life source in the area.
With a twitch of his fingers, Sai and his team swept past the trees, lightly landing just before the forest opened up to the clearing of the outpost they had passed previously. Apprehension built in his chest.
With a nod, Hawk silently swept towards the run-down structure, muting his chakra signature to a flicker.
There was a body of a man at the base of the deserted outpost, lying face down on the ground.
He wore the… former Konoha distributed jounin flak jacket with the Uzushiogakure crest. There was a tanto strapped to his back.
Fox hovered, scanning the body before checking for a pulse. With a brief signal, the Anbu cautiously turned the man to view his face. He wore the Konoha forehead protector. He had untamed grey hair tied lowly at the back of his neck. Grey hair the exact shade of Sai’s former…
Sai felt himself tense even further, a series of questions running through his mind. It couldn’t possibly… Of course he read all about it during his training and memorized the entire history of Konoha’s greatest soldiers… But even if they looked nearly exactly the same -
The man twitched and the team reacted.