Skeleton Bones[shitposts]

Writing for scrapped ideas cuz ya bitch has writer's block.))

Sai lightly drug his fingers along the rough stone walls of his cell, staring off somewhere in the corner, probably looking lost. Dissonance rang throughout him at the horrible sensation of the grime of the walls sticking to his finger pads, but he didn’t care.

Entertainment was something finite in solitary confinement, a slap on the wrist, or a break from more heavy punishments, in comparison to something more egregious and worthy of more severe correction, such as displaying any silly little emotions that could possibly cloud his mind and ability to function in the way Danzo wished. Regardless, his mind was starved and craved engagement. Even wrongful stimulation was more than welcome to torment him. Anything. His mind craved anything.

A fitting punishment rest assured, it did detrimental damage to his sanity, wearing down his patience, eventually leading him to pace like a dog in his cage, or simply running his fingers along various unsavory textures till his fingers were raw and bleeding, leaving pathetic blood smears in five neat lines along the wall. He could appreciate the way the droplets of blood bloomed onto the stone, but found it rather unpleasant when it dried an ugly brown.

However, the punishments did nothing more than teach him how to better hide his slip-ups and wrongdoings, as to avoid getting caught, but still do as he pleased. It wasn’t easy to find workarounds, but they were definitely prominent if approached properly.

In the end, he was grateful for the corrections, eager to try again and repeat his little experiments worry-free in certain aspects with the information gained from getting caught. Not that he could do much genuine worrying, though. Due to his lack of understanding of people he had only seen portrayed in books. It was foreign to him, but he knew that somewhere outside of the foundation, people with proper emotions thrived, simply because of how hard Danzo worked to keep their minds numb.

He tried to understand these things by throwing himself into books, often seeing it portrayed by being the very thing driving the story, even being the catalyst to most conflicts.

It was something he wished he could directly study, due to the simple fact that there’s only so much you can learn from books. At some point, hands-on experience is the only thing left to learn from, the only other angle he would need to see it properly.

But that wasn’t something you could just come by in The Foundation. The unoccupied space where emotions should’ve been kept was horrible, and aching with such a profound emptiness. It caused a discourse in his existence. He understood what was so fundamentally wrong with his existence, but lacked the ability to alter it due to his current predicament.

Shin was often a reminder of that for him, even though Shin seemed like such a distant ideation due to his missing memories, he had a vague image of how the two seemed to exchange emotion; or at least the amount that was welcome in that environment. That was, before their training was turned up another notch. A reminder of something so crucial that he just couldn’t seem to obtain. It bothered him.

It upset him in a way. He wasn’t mad or hurt. He wasn’t capable of those things, not anymore. He was, the closest he could come to being, frustrated. The divide between him and others frustrated him. And seeing that difference between him now and Shin, although it was subtle, irked him to his very core. Striking a chord of unease, and something else he couldn’t name that clawed at his throat, pleading to be let out, and paced in his stomach, making him feel restless.

But alas, there was nothing he could do to quell that raging beast. Shin had been gone for quite some time, leaving his resources for that sort of study completely barren. He was stuck trying to understand something that had been forcefully ripped from his grasp. That empty place where his memories used to reside itched plainly like it always did.

In his own way, Sai ached for his brother's presence again, it had become quite solitary since his death. He had already come to the conclusion that he had only come to crave him due to the painfully boring fact that he only missed the only reference he had ever had for emotions, at least from what little he could remember.

He craved to relearn what it was like to have a sense of "humanity"--he had seen it called. He recognized that if Shin were to somehow see him now he'd hold that festering sense of bitter resentment as soon as he'd see Sai's newfound emotional disconnect. He could just hear the little quips he'd make, disparaging Sai's new developments.

With the extremely hazy image he had of Shin he could practically feel the patronization that would drip from his tone, the venom lacing between his words. It struck discontent in him. He did not want to be seen as lesser, just because he lacked a fundamental portion of human functionality; that was not something that demeaned his intelligence.

He just doesn’t understand why people would follow something like a feeling. Full of subjective flaws based on a person’s limited life experience, as opposed to something more cool and calculated.

Sai couldn’t understand. A vast majority of human error was a result of being emotionally susceptible and weak. It was one of the few things that got under his skin. How could they go into a sensitive mission, completely emotionally intact, and become irrationally upset when it leads to their failure, as well as a few casualties.

His fingers rubbed more harshly on the walls as his thoughts consumed him more, his face still as blank as ever, his eyes still glazed and dead, almost that of a bloated fish sitting on a riverbank, cold and lifeless.

Unfortunately, he was ripped from his thoughts as the sound of screeching metal reverberated in the empty cell, grating on his ears. The cell door finally came to a stop, halting the horrible noise. When he looked up, a familiar face didn’t greet him, but a masked man. Making it obvious that, finally, after three days his confinement portion of his punishment was resolved, even if only temporarily.

He was motioned to follow, being led by one masked individual, and followed by another, neither of which he had seen before, but that wasn’t uncommon. Sai had already become slightly delusional as a result of his punishments. And he had noticed they were becoming much more frequent due to Danzo suddenly ‘discovering’ the shaping Sai still needed to properly eliminate those pesky thought processes. Danzo needed to weed everything out, he strived for perfection and would accept nothing less.

This resulted in him placing a much shorter leash on the boy. Sai wasn’t ignorant, he noticed the behavioral shift when he had come back from training, to his room, finding his books in disarray, specifically his ones containing notes on the human condition. He found that his section on morality and emotional development in correlation to environment had been aggressively torn from the binding.

No doubt Danzo wouldn't want any silly little queries unlocking anything he had been so persistent in tucking away if not eliminating entirely. He was just thankful that the brunt of the extended punishment was up. But the fact that he was consistently held at arm's length to an authority figure made it impossible to escape frequent punishment. But Sai wasn't one to let something like a pesky little reprimand get in the way of his study.

He had found that he could slip a corrective filter over the way he observed others. Regardless of how "perfect" Danzo viewed his methods, it just simply wasn't possible to completely remove the idea of emotions from a person entirely. And if Sai couldn't satisfy his insatiable hunger for something that just wasn't tangible with Danzo, he'd search elsewhere to silence the cravings.