Acceptance is such an odd thing, not truly an emotion, a sort of feeling.

Knowledge that you had people, friends, who wanted your presence, not because you were strong, or popular or needed to fulfill their own goals. But because your very existence had become important to them.

They accepted your flaws and your strengths equally, accommodating themselves and allowing you to do the same for them in order to fit as part of a greater whole.

It allowed you to accept your weaknesses, knowing that those important people knew, and were willing and ready to protect you, knowing you would do the same. Knowing your existence had become a balm that helped them soothe the pains of reality while in turn theirs became same to you.

Such an odd feeling, a strange mixture of adrenaline pumping through your veins while at the same time soothing like the warm rays of sunlight that bathed the world in its eternal cycle.

Knowing you weren't alone anymore, irregardless what would happen in the future.

He was a ninja, born into the ANBU, raised with sharpened steel, endless training, and death. He new how to follow orders, how to kill. He didn't know about friends, his emotions has died before they truly existed. He didn't know how to live.

He used to draw, he realized, in an attempt to understand concepts like acceptance and friendship, to compartmentalize and store it as simply another human emotion in the back of his brain that was neither necessary or desired. Until he was forced to see beyond his next mission and into what seemed like another world, and became aware this desire to become part of the whole, to support and in turn be supported. To no longer stand alone.

Now he draws because he does understand, because now his future was no longer a blank drab gray filled with faces marked for death in a book, but of color, of browns and yellows, oranges, pinks, greens. Of smiles that radiated a pure kind of happiness, hope, friendship, acceptance.

Sai knew one thing.

Uchiha Sasuke was a fool, to give up such a thing for power.