"Would you kill an innocent person if it meant saving your closest friend?"

Cicadas harmonized from the surrounding trees, the sound of summer, of heat.

"What?" Sakura rolled from her back onto her belly, resting her chin on crossed forearms, her expression baleful. "That's a stupid question."

Ino sat up from her own towel using a book to protect her eyes from the sun.

"It's not like I made it up, it's written in here." the blonde fanned herself with the thin volume as she reached for her juice box. Finding it empty, her eyes wandered towards Sakura's half finished mango soda that sat sweating nearby, reluctantly sunbathing with them.

"Well, it's still stupid. What sort of book is that anyway?" Sakura peered through her bangs at the creased spine, trying to decipher cracked kanji while Ino continued to wave it around.

"Dunno. It was on my Dad's desk. Morality and Ethics. I just grabbed it so my face doesn't burn."

Sakura felt the barb of an easy insult hooked to the tip of her tongue; something to do with bacon this time. Instinctively she was always prepared to bait the blonde into a supremely satisfying bout of bickering. Her brain forever crowded with half formed taunts that she didn't even have to think on before summoning to her mouth. However, ever since their re-connection after their tie at the exams, they had agreed to meet up every once in awhile and compete at being civil to one another.

"Anyway, what's your answer?" Ino asked.

A cloud floated overhead, massive and benevolent, casting almost the entire breadth of Konohagakure into reprieve. Sakura chanced opening her eyes once more.

"What was the question again?"

"Um, let me see... would you kill an innocent person to save your best friend - sorry, closest friend?"

Ino grinned and batted her eyelashes at the other girl, taking a sip from and orange can. Sakura rolled her own eyes and reached back to adjust the strap to her bathing suit where it dug into her rib. She noted her stolen soda, but found the heat too heavy to endeavor a retrieval operation.

"Are these questions meant specifically for shinobi or something?"

"Sure, I guess. Come on, stop stalling." Ino reached out to jab a freshly painted nail into her friends shoulder, pink flesh turning white under the pressure.

"Okay, okay," Sakura turned her head onto its side, resting her cheek on the pillow of her forearms. "I guess...I would kill someone to save my closest friend."

"An innocent person? Like a kid? Really?" Ino jerked up, peering at her in surprise, startling a nearby bird into vacating its roost on the roof.

Sakura scowled at Ino's tone, "What? Wouldn't you do anything you could to protect someone precious?"

"Yeah, but...killing someone who doesn't deserve it, that just sounds really... wrong."

Sakura felt her guts curls, something distantly related to shame coiling and squeezing. For the longest time when she was little she'd been afraid to say her own opinions out loud and had opted to stay in the sanctuary of letting Ino make all the choices. It was bizarre to her to discover such a difference in their fundamental cores. They usually had more in common than Sakura liked. She inhaled, nostrils filled with the scent of sun cream.

"We're ninja, Ino, unpleasant stuff comes with the territory," Sakura said, flicking away a beetle crawling across her path, "Right? We need to be ready for anything."

"No." Ino shook her head, "I mean, I get what your saying, but I just - well, I think that if someone killed someone for me I would start to hate them, you know? I'd resent them for placing that burden on me. Knowing my life was at the cost of someone else's..." Ino laid back down, folding her hands over her stomach in contemplation.

Sakura thought Ino looked like a corpse, ready for a final burial; still and pale in the grey cast of the momentary shade.

Sakura decided she might have to ask Tsunade to assign her more time in the upper floors of the hospital. She'd been sent to the morgue too often lately and the stream of autopsies and funereal preparations were starting to effect her.

Sakura flinched as the sun conquered the retreating cloud.

In the moment she had flinched, the light brought life back to Ino's skin and took away the pallor of death.

Sakura resolutely closed her eyes once more and tried to breath as quietly as possible through the cloying humidity. Still alive, she's still alive.

"I think that if I didn't save my best friend when I could, by any means necessary, I would hate myself more."

Ino's gaze, originally drawn by Sakura's voice, shifted away again without her permission, as if Sakura was the opposite to her own magnet. Absentmindedly, Ino shifted her stolen can from side to side, hearing the last bit of flat mango soda slosh around.

It was an unsatisfying sound.

Sakura rolled over once more, front facing the sun, and covered her eyes with her arm. Her forehead was damp, hair starting to mat at the edges where the sweat naturally gathered, strands turning pink to mauve.

Ino picked up Morality and Ethics and tossed it over her shoulder through the balcony door, back into the small loft that her father had appropriated as an office. The book was lost to the chaos of his papers, scrolls, and files.

Sakura peeked out from beneath her forearm.

"It's a stupid book," Ino said, and then scoffed, "what kind of person asks those sorts of things anyways? An idiot!"

"Ino," Sakura sighed, adopting an overly burdened tone, "You read the title, but you didn't see that your Dad wrote it?"

"What?!"

"You're such a..." Sakura paused, remembering civility, and let the half-statement hang, grinning stupidly at the Yamanaka.

"Shut up," Ino threw her previously discarded juice box at the other girl and then she huffed dramatically, "I think we should go in, I'm starting to burn."

"Your kind tends to when there isn't any mud around."

"What was that?"

"Nothing! Come on, you owe me another soda." Sakura crawled to the door and used the frame to help herself up.

"I call the last mango!" Ino shouldered her aside already starting to patter rapidly down the steep staircase that lead to the first floor kitchen.

"No fair! I hate orange! Ino! Ino!"

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So...I'm not really sure what this is.

I was at a party and sitting around reading one of those books that asks you all those questions like, "If you were trapped in a cave with a stranger and running out of air, unsure when rescue might arrive, would you kill them to save yourself?" and it occurred to me that I'll probably never get put into a situation like that. But Ninja would, so those sort of books would actually be kind of mind expanding on a whole other level to someone with that sort of career.

I was also recently been thinking a bit about the differences between Sakura and Ino's characters (as they are an interesting example of friendly rivalry), they have a lot of similarities, as Sakura's personality had been shaped quite a lot from Ino's presence early on, but I'm interested in their differences and how they effect one another.

I think Ino is more the type to move on from things, she's cautious and while impulsive, she has limits. Sakura has always seemed sort of limitless, canon having drawn certain similarities between her and Naruto, she'll barrel into things and only stop when her emotions get the better of her. I honestly think she would believe she could kill an innocent person for someone she loves. Whether she actually could or not remains to be seen of course.

I think that these two interact seriously sometimes, and then revert to playful rivalry when things get too heavy, a sort of defense mechanism unspoken but agreed upon in their friendship. The way these things usually go.

Anyway, that's how this little thing was born. Not that I think anyone is particularly interested. Sorry if I bored you, but I like to take a minute at the end of writing something and explore some of the thoughts that went on behind it.

However, this explanation and exploration of thought has run on long enough,

Later Taters