Loyalty and silence
Recruit 287 couldn’t get Recruit 304 out of his head. They were both root, they both answered to that control, and yet for some reason that control had no hold over Recruit 304. It was confusing in ways Recruit 287 didn’t have the language to describe. He didn’t understand how the chains that bound him and his comrades could weigh so lightly on the boy who insisted his name was Rokudo Mukuro, who refused to answer to his assigned designation.
Recruit 287 knew about names. He knew that they were important, he knew that they were forbidden. That they were for those who lived in the daylight, not for them, never for them, because names belonged to people, and root agents weren’t allowed to be people. He knew that if you had one, one that you remembered from before, one that you chose for yourself, one that one of your fellows gave you, you kept it secret. You held it close, deep in your heart and you hid it well, for fear it would be stolen like everything else.
“I’ll call you Sai” Shin had said, and Recruit 287 kept that name closer than his own heartbeat, as close as the fact he’d called Shin brother. He was Sai, he was a name, a person, and he didn’t dare let it show. He knew the rules, written on his heart in Shin’s blood.
Recruit 304 was different. It was like he had never learned that rule, or maybe just never realised that it could apply to him. He had named himself and he refused to hide it, refused to bend. Sai knew how that story was supposed to end, he’d seen a dozen and more stubborn recruits who refused to bend, had seen them broken for it every one, and yet there was Mukuro who refused to be recruit 304, who defied all the rules and somehow got away with it. He called into question everything Root stood for and no-one but Sai even realised. Sai didn’t know what to think, or feel about him.
It had taken him an embarrassingly long time to figure out that Mukuro had been messing with people’s heads, influencing them, that sometimes what people knew about him changed, and sometimes people didn’t remember him at all, that sometimes they would have training and he wouldn’t be there, and no-one would register anything odd. Sai suspected even his own memories of the boy might not be entirely accurate, especially the early ones.
It took so long mainly because Sai couldn’t believe that he was seeing and remembering things that his trainers were not. They were supposed to be more experienced, more knowledgeable, if there was something irregular and they didn’t comment on it, then it must have meant he just didn’t have the clearance. The trainers knew what was happening and he didn’t, and he had been there long enough to know not to ask. Except the trainers didn’t know, and Sai did, and nothing in his training had ever covered that possibility.
It wasn’t just the trainers either. It seemed as though Sai was the only person in the whole organisation that noticed how Mukuro came and went, was there and then not. He didn’t know why. He maybe should have told a higher up, Mukuro could be anyone, could be a dangerous infiltrator and a threat to the security of Konoha. He should have told someone, but he didn’t. Partly because initiative really wasn’t encouraged among root operatives, and he honestly wasn’t sure he’d even be believed, but it wasn’t just that, not really. It was because deep down, in the part of him that was named Sai, that had been Shin’s brother, he looked at Mukuro, at how he manipulated, and deceived, and refused to bend, at the way he refused to let the organisation take anything that mattered from him, and he didn’t want to turn him in. There was a part of Sai that admired Mukuro, for doing what he never could, for being what he only wished he could be, and so when it came down to it he said nothing of what he saw.
Sai had bowed his head after Shin’s death, had been the perfect agent in all but that one thing. Feeling hurt too much, defiance had too high a price, and Sai barely knew what it would mean to not be Root. And yet he held his silence on the things he knew Mukuro was doing to the organisation he served, he kept it as close a secret as his own name, and didn’t even blink as Mukuro moved in and out of their lives as subtle and impossible to pin down as the mists that rose over Konoha’s trees in winter.
And so things stood in an odd kind of equilibrium, an unspoken unrecognised conspiracy of silence. Right up until Mukuro upset that, the same way he seemed to upset just about everything Sai had thought he knew. Mukuro had suddenly taken an interest in him and it had been enough of a shock that Sai nearly let a visible reaction slip out before he caught it.
It had started with Sai’s new technique. He had learned to animate his drawings, to make his imagination take flight in ways that would never have been allowed if it didn’t have useful combat applications, and for some reason that had drawn Mukuro’s attention in a way Sai had never done before. He had looked very long and hard at Sai’s drawings, and then he’d laughed, out loud, in that way that no other root agent ever dared to.
“I never fooled you at all did I?” He said to Sai, with a look in his eyes that was half dark amusement, half speculation. “You kept quiet anyway though didn’t you baby mist?”
“It didn’t seem like speaking up would be a wise move.” Sai admitted, trusting to the strange perception warping field Mukuro seemed to have, to hide their conversation. Mukuro had laughed again, Sai was no expert on the subject, but he thought there was something vicious in that laugh.
“True enough.” Mukuro had smiled, “Smart baby mist. I can work with that.”
And that was how Sai found out about dying will flames.