Chapter Text
“Stop,” Ino says. Or, rather, whispers out so quiet and mangled that it could be mistaken for a sigh.
Sai, however, is not in the habit of making mistakes. He doesn’t touch her, as he knows she doesn’t like being touched. It’s a miracle they’ve kissed. It’s a miracle they’ve been seeing each other for as long as they have. But it’s okay because Sai is a little messed up too.
His bland smile is so inoffensive and Ino wants to curl up. To clutch her stomach against the onslaught of queasy pain she feels.
“Sorry,” she says. “Sorry—just a moment.”
She wishes he wouldn’t look at her or loom over her. She wishes he were dressed instead of bare and rapidly softening. What a relief when he moves away to sit beside her instead.
Awful guilt steals into her. Why can’t she just lay there and take it? How have Choji and Shikamaru done it so easily—following tradition and making a family?
Ino thinks of being a mother and she can’t fathom anything other than terror.
“Sorry,” Ino repeats.
Sai looks at her for a long moment, and then she and Sai lie naked side-by-side like some sort of imitation marriage except they’re not married and Ino doesn’t know what script she’s supposed to follow. It’s terrible. The daylight wanes and they say nothing.
She presses a hand to her chest, surprised to find her breath altered. Heaving—the world a whirl.
***
Feeling purposeful and having direction are very important to Ino, now. Routine. Predictability.
Her days start with a small breakfast—a scone, or sometimes a single egg and a tall glass of water. She opens Yamanaka’s before sunrise and rearranges the display out front. Her handwriting is neat—impeccable as she draws swooping lines of chalk on the sandwich boards she’ll prop up just outside of the door. All surfaces must be dusted. Orders for seasonal flowers must be put in. And she has to read the magazines—those are the most important. She has to know what’s trending, and what’s falling out of fashion.
All of that in a morning.
To say nothing of rare dinners with Shikamaru and Choji. Dinners with Kurenai and Mirai. Hours spent in the community gardens. A one-bedroom apartment on the third floor. A balcony where she curls up with a book at the end of the day.
Ino is content to be outside of any kind of limelight. She’s worked hard to be skilled at what she does. And she has a life she can call her own. That is enough.
Or it should be. Sometimes it strikes her—a vicious and insistent thought. She wonders if this is it. If this is supposed to be the settled and peaceful life that they had all been striving for for so long. Is this what her father had died for, in truth?
Standing in some laundromat in the village, staring at her clothes go round and round, Ino wonders if she’ll ever feel less unremarkable. Somehow, she had been anticipating more. It feels like she should be more. Be doing more. Know more.
Instead, when she allows herself the rare moment of introspection, she feels rather untethered. Lost and disillusioned with everything.
In those moments, everything is simply too tiring. And Ino feels quite alone in her adulthood.
***
Ino often wonders about what shapes and defines people. Call it a Yamanaka quirk.
She saw, in her infinite tsukiyomi dream, an Ino that was accomplished in ways she is not, and charming in ways she is not. That Ino had been unfailingly slender, utterly controlled, elite in her skills, and she had never ever been pretending.
The Ino of this liberated Konoha outside of the dream is often a pretender. She knows the truth about herself when she looks in the mirror, sees the dark circles beneath her eyes and the ragged edge of her hairline. The fingernails bitten down into the quick. The scale that tells her, every week, she’s two pounds heavier. And two pounds more.
But nobody asks, so she imagines she’s gotten quite good at misdirecting—covering up the disgusting fake that she is with someone that always, always carries herself pristinely.
It could be good, actually, to be this talented. Kunoichi are not meant to draw attention to themselves, and Ino was always at the top of the class.
***
Chin up, shoulders back, controlled wrists. Slow gait to accentuate the roll of hips. Ino does not glance at herself in any of the mirrors she slinks past. She doesn’t want to dispel the illusion and end the night early. After all, it is Choji’s wedding and he looks so very happy. She is trying to be a good friend. A best friend, even though every step Choji takes into adulthood makes the distance between them grow.
Ino truly wishes she could be happier for him, but seeing the way he tilts his glowing face to Karui’s is enough to send her running to the adjoining bathroom of the reception venue. Her hands are already shaking and she feels her eyes hot with unshed tears, gulping in breaths like they’ll offer some sort of salvation.
Her knees quiver and buckle under her, and then she’s sliding down to the floor with her back against the wall. Her chest is tight, throat aching as she sobs quietly, knowing her dress will pill all along the back and all her hard work will be for nothing. No matter how well she puts herself back together, the minute she exits the bathroom it’ll all be evident that she’s a mess. A pathetic, maladjusted, envious mess.
All of her peers are moving and she’s just a girl in a bathroom breaking down alone. And Ino…. She doesn’t know what she wants, really. At the end of the day, she’s still that rather indecisive girl. How frustrating to find herself repeating the same patterns. Things she’d thought she grew out of.
And that would be tragic but fine except Ino isn’t even allowed her aloneness to get it all out before putting herself together. The doorknob rattles and the door swings open quicker than Ino is able to reach out and lock it.
Sakura comes to an abrupt stop, glances behind herself, and then steps in and closes the door behind her with a quiet click. Ino hears the lock click into place but she barely registers it over the sounds of her own loud breathing. She’s the worst, keeping the bathroom occupied when people need to use it. She’s so good at taking up space.
Ino starts when she feels a hand on her shoulder, but she simply tucks her face tighter against her drawn-up knees. Sakura’s hand drifts down to her back and then comes to a stop.
“Hey, Ino,” Sakura murmurs gently, as if greeting her in some izakaya and not while witnessing her at a low. Her voice is warm and close. “Long time no see.”
It’s such an absurd thing to say that Ino sputters. She raises her head slowly. She must look awful, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead, makeup streaking. She holds her chin up high even as she gives Sakura a cursory glance.
To her dismay, Sakura cleans up well, but not at all like Ino. Sakura doesn’t look the way kunoichi should. She has always been scrappy. Not elegant, or refined. There has always been an air of disarray around her. And where that had been a source of insecurity when she’d been a child, now she’s grown into it. She exudes a kind of self-possession that makes Ino ache. That makes her angry.
Sakura is sunbronzed, the summer having left her with a smattering of freckles right over the bridge of her nose. Her backless shirt leaves her physique with no room for doubt—wide back, strong shoulders and arms bared. Her trousers are cut in such a way that it makes her look stockier than she is, but the material they’re made of looks very fine.
Her hair has been tapered short in the back and shaved close to her scalp on one side. It strikes Ino that she’s never seen so much of Sakura’s forehead, and a strange feeling of déjà vu comes over her. It’s like she’s five years old again, willing to fight off anyone that would call Sakura anything less than absolutely breathtaking.
It’s yet another demonstration that people are moving forward. Sakura is shedding layers and Ino only seems to accumulate them.
“Where have you been?” Ino asks, clipped.
Sakura rolls her shoulders into what isn’t quite a shrug. “Around,” is her vague answer. And Ino finds herself fixated on the familiarity of that answer. Something inside her relaxes, as if she’d been afraid that Sakura would say something completely alien.
Rumor had it that Sakura had been trailing along after Sasuke during his time outside the village. Sakura has a windswept energy that doesn’t confirm or deny it, but either way Ino wonders. The certain thing is that Sakura has been absent.
“Stupid pig,” Ino says, thumping a weak fist against Sakura’s chest. “You left me alone.”
“Sorry,” Sakura says and the corners of her mouth quirk up. Ino’s never liked Sakura’s mouth very much—she finds it strange. Especially so when stretched into a smile. The smile, however, doesn’t last long, replaced by an expression Ino likes even less: sober concern. “How are you doing, Ino?”
When did Sakura become one inclined to sincerity?
“I’m fine,” Ino says and sniffles. She hardens the look she levels Sakura’s way. “I’m fine,” she repeats, voice steady as she dabs at her eyes.
“Are you,” Sakura says and it falls just short of being a question. Her tone is too pensive and her gaze scans Ino’s form in a way that makes her skin crawl.
“Yes.” Ino wants nothing more than to break their eye contact, but she won’t. It’s humiliating enough that Sakura’s first time back in the village after a long time coincides with Ino failing to keep her cool.
Sakura is the one to relent, but it doesn’t feel very satisfying. She pushes to her feet with a small noise and another one of those half-shrugs. “Fine,” she says and opens the door. Before she closes it behind her, she pauses a moment and looks back at Ino. “I’ll see you around, Ino.”
And then she’s gone, leaving Ino blinking at the space where she stood and listening to the muffled sounds of the party just beyond the door.
She takes a few moments to herself, and then she gets up and puts herself together until she looks just perfect again.
It’s only belatedly that Ino realizes Sakura’s hand remained on her back the entire time they were talking.
***
Ino has always fought dual desires: to flinch and to get closer. She has held herself at a careful distance. It is what has proven least volatile. And, in the end, she always craved Sakura’s friendship. It was not her choice to strain the bond they had.
However, her distance has become impossible. Sakura is everywhere.
Ino can never pretend she’s ever truly known Sakura. She thought she did. She even tried very hard to, once.
Sakura has changed. Slowly but steadily, she’d become something Ino is unfamiliar with. Ino supposes it’s been a long time coming. It might’ve even started the moment Tsunade and Shizune took Sakura under their tutelage. But, somehow, Ino had missed the signs of change then.
Sakura has a different kind of luster. She is part of a group that Ino is not. She is a leader within the medical corps and Ino hears about her often. Reads about her in the newspapers during slow days at the flower shop. Radio announcers debating about her success at another conference in some far off village. There are plenty of stories to go around.
Somehow, over the past couple of months, Ino failed to notice how simultaneously omnipresent and absent Sakura‘s been. She’s been more of a specter than anything else.
Since the wedding, though, Ino keeps seeing her around town. Her rosy hair, the rough bark of her laugh coming from Ichiraku’s, a flash of green scrubs jogging past the storefront.
Here, where the sun smolders down on the training field. Sakura cracks the training dummy in half and the air burns electric.
Ino watches as Sakura wipes the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. The quivers of her overtaxed muscles. Her mouth parted just so, slick and panting. Sakura’s skin gleams in the light and, for a moment, it doesn’t seem like Sakura at all. The kunoichi standing in that field, a snarl on her face as she lifts her gaze to her next target, is very unlike that girl.
Ino clutches her bundles upon bundles of flowers until she hears the butcher paper crinkle and tear. She doesn’t call out. She turns on her heel and continues walking to Yamanaka’s.
Detours—so wasteful. She should know better. At this point in her life, she should be able to stay on track. It’s such an easy thing to do. She just needs to keep her head held high and her sights set straight ahead.
The war, too, has made its mark. It made its mark on everyone. But it looks different on Sakura. Ino has known Sakura her entire life. Even when they have been at odds, Ino has been sure to know Sakura the best out of anyone.
Now—Sakura has the kind of stony anger that Ino has only ever seen in some of their elders. There’s a wildness to her—and it makes everyone flinch away from her. She walks down the street and crowds of marketplace villagers make way for her.
Ino has seen her scared, grieving, and depressed. But never like this—scarred and hardened. Bristling with heat.
And Ino has always been her father’s daughter. She’s never been able to keep away from a closet case.
***
“We’re going to the river,” Ino blurts out. “Some of us—a group of us. You should come. If you’re free.”
She feels silly, heart racing like a schoolgirl. She ran across the street, dodging auto rickshaws and civilians, just on pure intuition. Or, rather, Sakura’s acrid chakra smarted—it was so deeply her, containing all the wells of her turbulent conscience. Ino had been moving before she even thought twice.
Sakura looks like she’ll turn the invitation down. When did she become so elusive and hard to understand?
“Alright,” Sakura says after a beat, and then her mouth becomes strange. “I’ll be there.”
“You look good,” Sakura says after an even longer pause. “Better.”
Ino feels the heat rise to her face. She’s trying not to notice Sakura’s appreciative and assessing gaze. She’s trying not to fidget or snap, but what’s the point. Sakura was never known for her subtlety. Ino just wishes Sakura would stop giving her these looks. Like she’s trying to figure Ino out.
“Thanks,” Ino says. “It’s on Saturday. We’ll meet on the far bank near the onsen and then choose a spot from there.”
Sakura nods genially. She’s still in her scrubs, and Ino’s pretty sure they shouldn’t fit her like that. They shouldn’t be so tight around her arms. “As I said, I’ll be there”
Ino whips her gaze back to Sakura’s face and Sakura has her brows raised, an unspoken question writ all over her face. Ino clears her throat and smiles briefly. “Great!” She can hear her voice high and nasal as it gets when she’s nervous. “Great, great! I’ll see you there—don’t flake.”
“Me? Flake?” Sakura asks with mock offense. She chuckles quietly and Ino’s mouth goes dry.
She can’t say what it is, why Sakura has suddenly returned to her life and made her presence so unignorable. She can’t say what it is about the sharp gleam of Sakura’s eye teeth when she grins, but Ino feels knots in her stomach. She can’t decide if she wants to be closer or put distance between them.