Sai led Haruka into the evacuation tunnels below Hokage Rock. He was moving slower than usual, delaying as much as he possibly could without being too obvious. It wouldn't change anything in the end though and the anticipation was killing her.
"It's going to be okay," Haruka told his back.
Sai might as well not have heard her for all the reaction she got at first, but then, after a dozen more silent steps, he fell into his normal walking speed. Haruka for her part assumed the facade she had used in Wave before Kakashi had woken up, and not a second too late. She barely managed not to falter in her steps when she sensed the chakra signature, or rather signatures. There were so many, but all intertwined like some sick tapestry. It felt disgusting, wrong, as if someone had cut pieces off people and stitched them onto someone else.
With Kakashi's Sharingan Haruka could clearly tell that it belonged to someone else, but it was part of his body now. It belonged, even if it didn't fit perfectly. This though, this was a thousand times worse. The chakra signatures were repelling each other and only held together by force.
Sai held open a metal door at the end of the tunnel. The room behind it looked as if it used to be a storage area at some point, but had long since been forgotten. A layer of dust clung to every surface, even the old spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling, and in the middle of the room stood a single man. His forehead and right eye were bandaged, an x-shaped scar sat prominently on his chin and he held a wooden cane in his left hand.
"Councilman," Haruka greeted him, purposefully keeping emotions out of her voice and mimic. It was hard though. She had never thought that Sai's monster would be some unimportant nobody, but she hadn't expected it to be someone this high up in the government either. Once she had learned just who Orochimaru's sensei was, she had looked into the third Hokage. It seemed all paths lead back to him in the end, for this man right in front of her, Shimura Danzo, used to be his teammate and now had a seat on his council.
"You know who I am then, good," he said, affecting a cough and putting a little more weight on his cane. "As you probably also know, it is the Council's job to ensure that the Hokage's decisions are made with the best interest of Konoha in mind."
She knew that, she also knew that he was leaving out Konoha's inhabitants. Deliberately she assumed, considering what he had done to Sai and who knew how many other children. Haruka didn't say anything though, merely nodded and hoped he couldn't see how terrified she was of letting something slip. Even just knowing how many chakra signatures that weren't his had been forced to become part of his body was probably enough to get her killed.
Danzo didn't frown at her nonverbal response, but she still somehow got the impression that he was displeased.
"Rewarding disloyal shinobi seems like an unwise decision, wouldn't you agree?" He asked and then continued without waiting for an answer. "Gathering intelligence from a crime lord and then not handing it over during or even after an official debriefing with the Hokage does seem like a rather disloyal act."
Haruka's eyes went wide for a moment. How did he even know that? She'd copied those papers and burned the originals right after getting back. If someone had seen her doing that… But how would they know what was written on them? She had been in her own flat, blinds drawn and back to the wall. And why wait three days to confront her about it? Unless…
"They were documents implying that Konoha had had dealings with Gato in the past. Nothing specific, but I thought it better to destroy them nonetheless," she said, hoping very much he couldn't tell she was leaving something out. Danzo smiled. It was small and not exactly friendly, but at least he wasn't signing her death warrant.
"You may go," he told her, never even glancing at Sai.
Haruka could have sworn the boy's steps were lighter when he led her out of the tunnels again, but that was probably just her imagination. Sai never made a sound while moving anyway, not unless he chose to.
He didn't leave once they reached the surface again. Didn't say anything either, merely standing straight and looking ahead, like a soldier waiting for orders. She eyed him for a moment and then left for their usual space on the Shodaime's stone head. Sai followed, two steps behind and to the right. Usually he tailed her from further away or ran right beside her, but this was a guarding position. That little meeting in the tunnels must have shaken him up more than she'd realized.
"How are you?" Haruka asked the second they stopped. Sai blinked at her, confusion clear on his face.
"Fine?"
She sighed. He probably didn't even know. Sai seemingly had the emotional range of a potato and likely wouldn't be able to recognize his own feelings even if they hit him over the head. What did a person have to endure to get to that point?
Haruka had a moment of hysterical laughter, when she thought about what Zabuza had said about shinobi needing to be tools. Sai likely wasn't what the nukenin had had in mind, but she had no doubt that the boy was almost the perfect tool. A shinobi without emotions, bound to a single master, blindly following orders with no sense for right and wrong. Sai wasn't quite like that. He had opinions sometimes, a very vague sense of self and emotions—even if it was mostly confusion—weren't an entirely foreign concept to him, but he came very close.
Her laughter clearly didn't soothe Sai's nerves, so Haruka tried to calm herself down. He looked a little as if he wasn't sure if she would hug or attack him and couldn't decide which one would be worse. She did neither, of course, instead offering him a sad smile.
"Is this place safe to talk?" She asked, and then continued when he gave a short nod: "How many people does Danzo command?" Sai just looked at her blankly, not saying a word, but she could feel a curious flickering of chakra, in his mouth of all places.
"You can't tell me can you?" Haruka ventured, when he continued to stare at her for several long seconds. She tried a few more things, figuring out that he couldn't write, sign or pantomime an answer either. He couldn't even nod or shake his head. The only reason she knew that he even tried was that flicker of chakra. Curiously enough he could confirm that it was a seal by showing her his tongue.
"Okay, let's try something else. Am I a member of Danzo's little group?"
"No. How does that help?"
"It proves that you can answer questions related to the subject as long as you don't divulge Danzo's secrets. If you can answer that means my guess is wrong or irrelevant and if you can't that means I'm on to something, or at least that's my working theory."
Haruka frowned. Danzo had known about the papers, but it couldn't have been from someone who had watched her destroy them in Konoha or that person would have also known that she had made copies. Unless of course they had kept that detail to themselves. To exclude at least one possibility she had Sai confirm that he wasn't the one who had reported to Danzo. He didn't seem affronted in the least, not even before she explained why she had asked.
If nobody had seen Haruka with the papers in Konoha that left two other possibilities. Someone could have spied on her during the Wave mission and watched her take the documents, or someone had come looking for them afterwards and made an educated guess as to who had taken them when they weren't where they were supposed to be. The second option seemed more likely, considering that Danzo had not only known there were papers, but also what they contained.
"Is your group called Foundation?" Haruka asked on a whim. That had been the only concrete name, besides Konoha, the documents had mentioned. She was a little disappointed when Sai shook his head, but then tried again.
"Is it or has it ever been referred to as Foundation?" Secret organizations probably wouldn't give out their real names to foreign crime lords. Danzo seemed like the kind of man that would use code names for everything. This time Sai didn't answer. Haruka felt triumph bubbling up in her chest, but then a terrible thought hit her.
"Root," she breathed because what were roots if not the foundation of a tree? Sai stared at her, wide eyed, chakra roiling.
"How do you—" He started, but then stopped himself. "No, don't tell me. You need to stop digging Haruka, it's too dangerous." It almost sounded like a plea, desperate and helpless. Of course they both knew that she wouldn't stop, but it was enough for one day. Haruka needed time to think.
"Sai, if you need to get out, now or ever, come find me," she told him and then made him promise that he would before she left to start researching seals in the public library.
It only went moderately well. Her thoughts kept straying back to what Ibiki had signed to her.
white—tree—had—deep—roots.
Did that mean Kakashi was no longer part of Root, or was Ibiki simply not aware that Root still existed? Was it official at one point and had then been closed down? Had it been an illegal organization that had been shut down and then reformed? Danzo was so close to the Hokage. Could he really hide something like that right under the Sandaime's nose? Or was their leader turning a blind eye so someone could create shinobi that were almost literally tools?