Ripples

Chapter 26

                 Closing of the Circle

-xxx-

"And you're quite sure Danzo was interrogating her on who she'd informed of the Uchiha massacre?" Tsunade asked, her eyes piercing.

Sai nodded. "She asserted it once when she was still drugged, and then I confirmed it when she became coherent once again."

Something in Tsunade relaxed. She'd been worried if Danzo's conspiracy to abduct Sakura proved that Madara's version of the massacre was the truth, or if she'd tacitly permitted the assassination of her council on misinterpreted evidence.

But it seemed that the council had indeed been involved in the massacre, or why would Danzo have been interrogating Sakura on who she'd told? No, this was proof that there had been a conspiracy, and that Danzo had acted in an effort to silence Sakura before word of that conspiracy could spread.

Now, she had to deal with the situation she herself had engineered. Search parties were marshalling all over the village, searching for Uchiha Sasuke, the escaped traitor. And because Sakura's arrest wasn't common knowledge, it was all the more damning for Sasuke – instead of two criminals escaping, the searchers believed that Sasuke had kidnapped her...again.

'Now let's see, how to explain this away?' Tsunade pondered as she dismissed Sai from her office. 'We won't go into the details, but I can say that the council was conspiring with the Akatsuki, knowledge of which was brought to me by Sasuke. I can say that they were going to kill Sakura because she interfered with their plans...somehow...and that Sasuke removed her from the village on my orders, for her own protection. That should buy him leniency for his crimes in light of service to the village, and I'll say that the council has been dealt with.'

In a ninja village, 'dealt with' could mean anything from thrown into jail, placed in interrogation or assassinated. No one questioned the Hokage when they said someone had been 'dealt with'.

But that issue wasn't her only problem – she had Root to handle as well. Danzo was dead, yes...but the rest of the organisation was still intact. And frankly, that could be even more dangerous than if Danzo were still alive and leading them. Now they could go in any number of directions, none of them appealing. The most likely was that they would fracture into small groups without their leader, but that still left Tsunade with many ninjas harbouring secret resentment against Konoha and possessing more than enough skill and connections to make her life extremely difficult.

What could she do? She couldn't lock them up – not on the justification that they might do something – and there were far too many to have them watched.

It suddenly struck the Hokage that she had a perfect advisor in the room. Sai had been a member of Root – one of its most loyal members, by all accounts – and now...he was in her office, after having calmly informed her that they were justified in seeking the council's death; in seeking Danzo's death.

"Sai?" she asked, prompting the young man's dark eyes to meet hers. "What changed?"

At his obvious puzzlement, Tsunade elaborated. "You were loyal to Root and to Danzo once...and now you're not. What changed your mind?"

"They did," Sai said quietly. Tsunade didn't bother asking who 'they' were. "At first I didn't understand them, the things they said, the things they did...they made no sense, not as I understood the world. I was curious, and I tried to get closer to learn more about them. And then I found that the closer I was, the more attached to them I became, the more I understood them."