Pitiful

Drabble: …They would have made a great team, Sai thinks, if the pieces of their pasts had fit together a bit differently.

Of Team Seven, Sai can say three things for sure.

Firstly, he understands that Sakura has a mean right hook. He doesn't doubt that she could send even the biggest and toughest of men crawling to the hospital for relief, leaving behind telltale trails of blood as they went.

Secondly, he is able to discern that Naruto is—despite the lengths he goes to in order to conceal it—an idiot, and quite a fine one at that. If there's one positive, whole-heartedly good-natured thing he can say for the blonde, it's that he does nothing halfway. If Naruto is making a fool of himself somewhere—and when isn't he—Sai is perfectly inclined to encourage him.

The last thing that Sai knows of Team Seven is something that concerns its only absent member, a doom-and-gloom little fire-breather by the name of Uchiha Sasuke.

Of the three of them, Sasuke is the one that keeps Sai awake at night. It's almost alarming, how a person he's yet to even meet is capable of instilling enough guilt in him to make him submit to insomnia.

Sai does not sleep for fear of waking up to a snake-like image of the Uchiha crawling through his doorway—as a creature less like a human, something without legs, something plagued with tiny, slitted eyes and a long, pointed tail.

He shivers when he imagines presenting the news of such a body—if it were truly real—to Sakura and Naruto. Surely they would feel far more guilt than him upon such a discovery.

They would feel guilty because they couldn't stop Sasuke from leaving them…because they had allowed Sasuke to willingly walk into Orochimaru's hell, and into an agreement with blurred details.

Sai himself feels guilty because it's his obligation. …Or at least that's what he tells himself.

It's been said that you can never stand to fully empathize with another person until you've tried their skin on for a while and walked around inside it. Sai wonders if maybe Sasuke isn't so far gone that his skin would feel like a sheet of snake scales.

He touches his own fingertips to his cheek, curious, and draws back quickly when he finds that his hand seems like ice against the warmth of his face.

Sai shakes his head at the absurdity of the situation, of his behavior, and then he sighs softly, remembering one final detail of Team Seven.

The last thing that he knows and believes—with all the sureness of his dry, shriveled heart—about Team Seven is the fact that it will never be his.

Even if Sasuke should choose to return as a monster, it was his team first.

Always his.

Fin.

Author's Note: For those that managed to catch it, I mentioned in here that Sai had never even met Sasuke. This drabble's time-setting was just before Tenzou successfully led Naruto and the rest of the squad to Orochimaru's headquarters.

Thanks for reading!