#mita-rashi

     Sai happens upon the old man on accident, which is how the vast majority of his socializing seems to start-- the Land of Islands is a series of, get this, Islands, just a little too large to be considered an archipelago but still a series of many dots of land separated by slips of ocean and connected by long stretches of bridges. It’s very flat, very quaint, and very fucking boring. He thinks maybe it’s been days since he’s seen a tree, and he finds he actually misses those more than he misses the company of man, because trees make travel faster, easier, and more subtle, and for now he’s just kind of stuck trotting along alone on the caked-brown dirt of the roads and over their deep strips of ocean via their ugly, rickety bridges. 

    It’s over one of those ugly, rickety bridges that he hears The Commotion. There’s no cursing, just thrashing in the water below-- and when he peers over the edge of the bridge, he spots a man waist-deep in the shallows, shirtless, hopelessly tangled in some kind of net and thrashing with his head stuck under water. So of course, Sai does whatever any self-respecting samaritan would do, and he considers continuing on his way. But no, the man looks pretty stuck, and he definitely hasn’t taken a breath in the ten seconds he’s been watching, so he hops down there and stands on the surface of the water, reaches down with a kunai and cuts the net and then hauls the man out of the water by his bicep and kind of just holds him in midair, his toes just barely hanging in the water. 

     It’s shockingly easy. The skinny, shirtless little man weighs almost nothing. Sai’s pretty sure if he tossed him he would easily make it the hundred yards to shore. The man coughs and splutters and hacks out water for a moment, thrashing in Sai’s grip before he realizes he is no longer drowning but he is certainly still trapped, and he gives Sai and his crop top and his tanto and his hitai-ate a suspicious look for a moment, still breathing raggedly. 

          “Hello,” Sai says pleasantly. 

          “You cut the net,” says the funny old man, his voice nasally and a little shrill. 

     “Would you rather I let you drown?” The question is butter-mild, and he carefully holds the old man aloft by his arm and carries him to the bank of the creek, before depositing him on solid ground. The old man falls on his ass, and struggles out of the remains of the net wrapped around his shoulders and his neck. It is only now that Sai realizes he isn’t just shirtless, he’s quite naked. He watches him struggle with the rope for a few moments more, limbs flopping quite pathetically, before leaning down and stilling him with a touch and cutting the rest of the net from him. He stares down at the man, and the man looks up at him curiously. 

          “Thank you, shinobi-san,” he seems almost reluctant to say it. 

     Sai gives him the same plastic smile he reserves for all social situations where he really doesn’t know what to do, and he replies, “you’re welcome, naked stranger,” and does not give the man is name. 

     He does, however, give the man his traveling cloak and walk beside him on the shoreline where the man had just nearly drowned. The man offers no name of his own and no explanation for his little escapade in the water, and Sai doesn’t ask, because he hardly thinks it’s his business what a man gets up to in his free time. Instead the man asks him about any news he’s heard from the world at large, and Sai replies as best he can, having been on the road a while. The old man leads him all the way to a squat house hidden deep in a little inlet, takes him inside, and makes him a cup of dandelion root and kelp tea. He gets dressed as their drinks steep, muttering to himself the whole while. 

     He sits across from Sai at the tiny wooden table and up at him, seeming troubled. “You’re a strange one,” is all he can seem to come up with when he finally comments. 

     “Am I?” Sai responds absently, lifting the tea to his face and sniffing it, then taking a careful sip. It’s hot and more than a little bitter, but it was made for him and so he will drink it. “I cannot call you naked-stranger any longer, can I?” 

    The man shakes his head with a weary sigh and mutters something else under his breath, and then replies, “You may call me monk, if I must call you shinobi. It can be our little charade.”

          Sai smiles beatifically at Monk and says only: “Okay.”

     Somehow the monk gets him to agree to accompanying him to a temple in the low and ragged cliffs in the north of the Land of Water-- technically still on the way back home, but not exactly the swiftest path. He doesn’t think it takes a lot of convincing on the monk’s end. Sai is bored as hell, and at least the old man provides a little life to the dull days of travel. 

     The man jabs him in the side once with his fingers, not hard enough to hurt but Sai still flinches from it anyway, and the monk laughs at him when he sees Sai had instinctively pulled a kunai out from the sudden movement, but he doesn’t comment on it. The ink that’s sunken into his skin shifts restlessly, peeking out of the collar of his shirt and that passes without comment as well. 

     The Land of Islands turns into a series of larger chunks of stone and sand settled into the sea, higher crests, with stubborn plant life in the salty, hot breeze  and some jagged columns of rock. The temple that the monk leads him to is-- well, he thinks it might qualify as a shrine, if they were in Konoha. It’s quite small, with low doorways and made completely of stone. Also, covered in cobwebs. It looks like no one has been here for years. 

          “Monk-san,” he begins evenly. “Is this your temple?”

     The old man grunts, wrestling the doors at the other end of the little temple open to let in a cross-breeze. “As much as anything can be mine,” he responds, and at Sai’s questioning look he elaborates, “I don’t own anything, shinobi-san. Do you?” 

     There’s a long pause, because Sai is not sure how to answer that question. Does he? He owns his clothing and his weapons, he supposes. His books. Though technically everything he owns is dedicated to serving the village, so perhaps he owns nothing at all? Watching the monk watch him offers him no answers on this front. Is it better to own things or to not own them? Perhaps he is simply a thing to be owned? Is that right? He can’t remember, his head hurts, so he cocks his head to the side and asks, “was the home you took the clothes from not yours?”

          The man simply says, “not really,” and Sai thinks: well, fair enough.

     So he takes his sandals off and ducks inside, touching his fingers to the smooth stone walls and the writing inscribed in them, fascinated by the vague artwork of some forgotten man, carved into the temple and faded from age. He thinks it’s a story of some sort. When he looks back to the monk, the monk is watching him, brows furrowed. 

          “Do you know where you come from, shinobi-san?”

     Sai tilts his head, considers, and he says, “Not really.” He was shaped in and he serves Konoha, but beyond that he hasn’t a clue-- this has never bothered him before and it doesn’t start now, he simply watches the old man back, blankly. 

          A grunt, and then, “Well alright then. Would you like to hear a story?” 

     Contemplating this question with as much gravity as the last one, Sai finally decides: sure, why not? He sits when the old man gestures for him to do so, and listens as a tale is told. For a monk, he is a very entertaining storyteller, if not one that makes a lot of sense-- it begins with a spirit, wise but not too wise, kind but not too kind, building a shelter from the storm. No, he thinks he has it confused, maybe. Perhaps it was the storm that came first, an angry god striking out, plucking souls from the ground and the sea with the help of his pack of hunting hounds. And then the not-too-wise and not-too-kind spirit comes in, because he doesn’t want any more souls to be stolen, and he builds the people a shelter. Just the one? Sai had asked, and the monk had shushed him. He wishes he could have understood the tale better, because it seems like one Kakashi may have liked. You know, because of the dogs. 

          The monk pauses, and Sai asks him, “is that it?”

          An exasperated look. “This is the shelter, this temple.”

     “Oh,” he says. And then: “Well, it’s nice of you to look after it, monk-san. Do you need any help cleaning it up? It seems like it’s just been sheltering spiders for a while.” 

     The monk gives him a strange look but acquiesces, getting to his feet and groaning as his bones creak. Sai hauls water from the sea and scrubs the dirt out of the corners with the strange little monk, until the musty smell is replaced with salt and the cool breeze. He stays the night in the shelter and listens to the thunder of a sea-storm rumble in the distance, and the roar of waves crashing against the shore somewhere below, and he thinks he understands, a little, where the myth came from. 

     The monk is not in the temple when he wakes in the morning, and Sai spends a few minutes sitting and peering at the carved, ancient art on the walls, before reaching into his pouch and pulling out a couple of rounded pieces of sea glass, a feather from a gull, and a couple of crushed prunus flowers and leaving them in a neat pile in the center of the floor.