A/N: I'm back! Just in time to start procrastinating studying for my final exams, with a new fic, too, yet another multi-chapter and multi-pairing. Wow, I'm really branching out. Enjoy!
Pairings: Genma/Ino, Ino/Sakura, Kakashi/Genma
Warnings: 18+ only. Mature themes. explicit sexual situations. BDSM references, forced prostitution, self-harm, drug-use, torture reference, emotional and physical abuse references, psychological suffering
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, or make money from this.
The Things You Said Would Break Me
Work for it girl. Dance like a hooked fish. Beg me like a stray dog.
X
The smell was the worst-Ino had long ago decided this. The smell-crusty unwashed sheets, the burned butter stink of sticky body fluids, tired sweat and pointless spit.
That dirty-money-note smell, bills so creased the etched ink numbers have almost faded away.
Ino's client rolls off of her with a grunt like a hippo, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull up his underwear.
She considers the heavy scar tissue-meatily textured-that is seared along his spinal cord, with detached interest. The scar curls up over the round curve of his bald head. he must've taken an acid splash for someone with that wound; medically the pattern is not something you'd get otherwise.
From what she's recon she's gathered, Ino knows he's a high ranking bodyguard for one of the heads of the Yamada drug syndicate in Amegakure, this pit of a village where she's been existing for the past nine months.
It's funny how he's self-sacrificing and noble enough to shield someone else from the horrid injury of acid burn, to take on such disfigurement, but he liked to choke the sluts he bought sex from.
He'd dug in his nails too, Ino had noticed, and it had nearly drawn blood.
She'd get extra money for that though, she supposes. Scar-skull doesn't look at her as he slaps the fee down on her dresser. Ino imagines that she can inhale the stink from the banknotes from where she lies with her legs spread open on the bed.
The cheap lilac lingerie she's wearing has ripped again, and this time it'll be harder to hide the mend. She'll have to buy more.
How many months has it been?
The first time her lace ripped, Ino can remember the way her hands trembled, the way her fingers shook so hard she could hardly hold a cup of sake to her lips. Now, there is nothing except a dull numbness, spreading down the back of her neck. Ino thinks that perhaps everything has finally started to blur together.
She wonders if she should feel good about that.
The door shuts with a unobtrusive click behind her client, and Ino pulls the soiled sheets up to her neck and closes her eyes.
X
-Sakura had liked Ino in lilac lace. She used to run her lips delicately over the curve of the frills on Ino's chest, her mouth wet.
"Your skin...Ino..." Sakura nuzzles her head into Ino's neck, affectionate murmurings vibrating softly into the hollow of Ino's throat. "Creamy..."
Her eyes are like fresh-cut grass. Ino laughs, slips her slim fingers under Sakura's milk-soft knee and squeezes. Sakura's answering giggle echos like a patter of rain lining the grey clouds drifting through Ino's memory; heavy, warm, and mild.-
X
Genma has warm, honey-coloured eyes, but when he slips in through her bedroom window in the dead of night later that week, his gaze becomes guarded and professional, hard like crystallized amber.
"You didn't check in for debriefing yesterday."
Ino always wondered how Genma manages to survive like this. He stands at the foot of her bed, sleek and cold in rain-slicked ANBU stealth gear, like a shadow wraith. His eyes are glinting through his mask.
Ino can't wear her mask for this mission, obviously. Sometimes this used to bother her, but she thinks by now she has become skilled enough at wearing different faces on her skin. She doesn't really need porcelain anymore.
Genma is there walking and talking and breathing in front of her like it was nothing, like he is completely unaffected, the perfect soldier.
It's just not really fair, because Ino knows that Genma had to do what Ino's doing now a hundred times over. They don't give Eros agents handlers who are innocent, green like spring grass. Genma is ANBU. He knows this life.
It's not fair that he stands so solidly over her, his gaze upon her body beneath the blankets so aggressively neutral it is almost a judgment in and of itself. His achingly professional scrutiny used to make her angry, but now Ino just wishes she knew how he did it.
(Maybe it's in the way he fucks her, instead, sometimes. It's in that gasp of his breathing when she arches her back. It occurs to Ino occasionally that perhaps Genma just doesn't cope at all.)
He is still watching her. She hasn't changed out of the ripped lingerie, and Genma has made a note of that now, mentally filing away her act of barely moving from her disgustingly ripe bed to scribble in a psychological evaluation report later. Ino can hardly stop from scoffing at the idea of Genma filling out someone's psych evals. It's not that he's unprofessional- he is so professional it hurts-but she finds it laughable all the same.
His voice is brisk. "You'll need to get it fixed."
"Of course."
Genma cocks his head at her, eyes flashing sharply sideways under his lashes in such a deceptively casual way.
"Did the target adhere to procedure?"
"He shot his load all over my damn thighs, so I guess so, huh?"
Genma turns slightly so that he's not facing her, looks at her without directly looking at her. She has to remind herself they are trained for that. They are trained for everything.
"Safeword, Yamanaka?"
Ino snaps her posture straight, closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her nose. This is not her life. This is a mission.
"Safeword. Clover."
X
Ino can still dimly remember when she was young, when she had baby-round cheeks her mother used to pat with white hands that smelled of dew-water and newly clipped flowers.
-"Ino-baby has such chubby cheeks!" A hand, light and soft, patting her face briskly. "Who has the cherub cheeks, my love?" Ino sucks air into her mouth, balloons her cheeks and squints her eyes into a smile, dancing around in her seat at the high, petal-strewn table.
Her mother is a vague figure above her, only downy piles of yellow-cloud hair and a long, pale neck. "Of course! It's you, darling!" Ino squeals with laughter, spewing a shrill spfffttt of air from her clenched lips, and Ino's mother giggles and presses a velvety clover leaf against her daughters mouth. "You're like a kettle about to spout. How about we make some clover tea sweetling, how about that?"-
Ino hates clover tea, but sometimes things aren't about taste.
X
Genma, still standing at the foot of the bed, has given her a minute. Now he dares to look at her directly, his eyes careful. Ino stutters for breath, about to cry.
Ino hates Genma a little bit, but in his own fucked up way she knows he is trying to help. Ino got this mission fair and square, after all.
They were so close to breaking into the drug-runners inner syndicate. Not too much longer now. Not too much longer.
Ino swallows, brings her hands over her face and struggles to control breathing that is starting to choke itself on a sob, cursing herself for crying in front of Genma, again. She wouldn't break down.
She had promised herself when Sakura slammed the door in her face six months ago that she would not break down.
Genma comes closer, ever so slowly. His hand on her shoulder is cautiously gentle.
"Ino...do you need something?"
It's the honey-darkness in Genma's eyes that makes her say yes. It always is.
X
Genma is too stiff in the beginning, because he always is. His movements are so mechanical, adhering to handler procedure with single minded dedication as he bundles her into his arms, lifts her carefully from the bed, and spreads her out wide over the floor.
Ino rolls onto her stomach because she doesn't want to face how much she needs this. The floor under her belly is shockingly cold and she hiccups through tears that haven't fallen yet, not yet.
Genma's breath is warm against her ear, warm down the line of her spine, warm and wet and soothing. "You should not be ashamed, Ino."
She never understood why she had been paired with Genma. Genma has too much history with this job, and she doesn't have enough. It didn't really make for a healthy partnership.
Genma's hands slide down her back and Ino shudders, hating herself for the way she arches and sighs breathily, right on cue. It's an ingrained response at this point, an auto-pilot action that's two parts seductive and one part devastating, just like she'd been taught.
Genma's hands stop moving. Instead, he leans forward and kisses her cheek. "Not like that love, not now."
Ino gasps like there is glass breaking in her lungs-too much at once.
Genma flips her over firmly, like he knows every secret clinging to the dark crevices in her heart, like he knows how to make her scream.
(There is always that moment of shocking clarity that comes when he does make her scream, and it's happened in so many different ways Ino can't actually remember if he has tortured her or not.)
He gathers her ripped lingerie in his fists and tugs it off over her head, slips from his ANBU gear like peeling a second skin. When they do this, she is not the only one who is exposed. She sighs from the bottoms of her feet, opens her eyes, feels somehow luminous.
Genma is heavy over her, kissing his way down the moon-cave of her ribs with a professional precision that is starting to shake, just ever so slightly. This is always how it goes; every time they do this, Ino shudders back into focus and Genma lets himself fade into a blurred smear, mouth dripping and hands warming and eyes hot like honeyed embers.
X
He fucks her. It is so different from how Ino feels when she smiles with devilish sweetness to her clients on the street, so different and so much the same that it hurts, hurts deep, deep down. It breaks her back together.
Genma laps at her skin like it's a sacred blessing, and it hurts. He presses into her-heat so steady and slow-burning she will taste him in her mouth and on her hands for days after-so simultaneously focused and unfocused, both achingly present here with her in this moment, grounding her into this moments crisp reality, and somehow a hundred miles away, in his own mind, in his own world.
Genma often remembers things he'd rather forget.
Ino remembers things too, when his fingers ghost down her chest, or gasp her hip in a tight and unforgiving grip. When his teeth bite that one certain place on the small of her back she arches like a taut bow, her breath ragged and broken-helpless like it never is with her clients, not once.
Not even when the sick bastards turn the tables on her, faces smug and drunk with a cloyingly thick confidence because she is theirs for that night, she really is. She is subject to the smallest whim, the strangest desire.
She doesn't want to think about their desires.
Ino remembers when Genma was training her, when he taught her how to forge her different faces with so many different faces of his own.
Ino knows she never wants to see some of Genma's faces again. Those faces are not friends, are not handlers, are not for loving. Sometimes they darken the edges of her dewy, nebulous dreams in the night, never fully visible but always present, always watchful.
Oh, but his sweetened eyes burn those faces away now, with careful, painful words whispered to her collarbones and a hot tongue along the shell of her ear.
"That's it, that's it Ino, c'mon, give it to me-ahh, goddamn-you gonna fight it-?" His hands curl under the nape of her neck, slide into dampened roots of her hair and curl, slow and steady as you please.
Ino is moaning too, she can't stop herself now, she never could before and now isn't really so different, her sighs high and thin and reedy, like a heartbeat that might flatline at any second.
"Fuck-you can do it darlin', show me we've got this-oh shit--" A twist of their hips and an aching groan pulses the muscles in Genma's jaw, makes Ino glow from within, crackle and snap with fizzing heat along every vein. Teeth, harsh and bleak, scraping along her jaw, searching to suck on her lower lip. "Hah-yes-right like that love, show me you're fightin'."
Genma knows how to talk. He can churn sweet patties of new butter out of his words like it's nothing, like his life depends on it, so Ino really shouldn't be listening. But Genma knows what he's doing, he's always known what he's doing; every handler does.
Ino hates crying in front of him, hates it because it happens every time.
When she comes, Genma's cradled along her body and his rough, heady moans vibrate against her throat, under her own tongue. His hair is a sweaty smear on her cheek where her face is tightly buried into the bare expanse of warm, finely scarred skin on his shoulder. He is close, too close, so close that for a moment- for a split second-she knows exactly who she is.
X
Genma is a courteous lover, Ino thinks.
Afterward, he lies with her on the floor because she can't face the gaping target of the bed yet, and she lets him hold her hand while they pass a cigarette back and forth.
(Sakura would sneer and twit at the cigarette, snap it from Ino's lips with quick pink fingers and lecture for an hour, but Ino doesn't think she can think about that yet either. Genma is too stuck in his methods to stop smoking at this point, and Ino just honestly likes it, likes to crush the filter on her teeth.)
Genma remembers his training, when they fuck. He blurs and smears like a globule of paint much too watered down, spotty color dripping from the brush, but Genma remembers she is the one he needs to steady, supposed to keep in at least usable condition.
Ino is slightly more clear now, the haziness lifted for a brief time, with Genma's fingers curled into her own. She looks at the way his eyes are half-closed in the faint, hopeless half-light of dawn, the sunken and stark hollows of his cheeks, and wonders what it would be like to see Genma unleashed.
X
When Ino wakes up the next morning and he is still lying beside her on the now cheaply laundered sheets, she knows he must be more worried about her than he lets on.
The thought twists her stomach into knots.
ooo
Hatake Kakashi has completed certain missions in his brief, violent life-time that make Genma sick to his stomach at the thought of them. He's spilled blood that will stay crusted beneath those white half-moon fingertips forever.
Genma knows that it's all fucked Kakashi up pretty bad, to be honest.
Sometimes Kakashi grips Genma's throat when they fuck. He sometimes slaps a hand over Genma's eyes, whispers that no one can see him when he screws his own slut, no one can see him. When he covers his face in his hands and sits on the edge of the bed without saying anything for hours, Genma knows the scars etched on his skin are burning their way through his mask-and God, the first time Genma had seen the latticework scars over Kakashi's cheekbones, traced the edges of those torn lips, Kakashi had gone so very, very still.
Genma wishes he knew what to do about it, but the problem is Genma is fucked up in his own little ways too.
Sometimes he likes it when Kakashi wires his hands together carelessly above his head and pulls his legs open, when Kakashi's long-fingered hands slip around his neck. He likes it too much.
When Kakashi curls up on his side in their sweaty bed, flinches away from Genma's touch, Genma feels twisted up all the way from the inside out; hot and heavy between his thighs but cold seeping through his ribs.
Kakashi is messed up-but Genma doesn't know how to fix him. When Genma leaves their bed, the dry, cracked sweat on his back feels like self-loathing, feels like guilt.
He hasn't seen Kakashi in a long time.
X
Genma doesn't love being a handler. It's a good job, ANBU wise, and it pays well, but there is something else about it, something that pulls his skin the wrong way, makes him itch.
Genma wakes up raw often now, there is always something bloody in his mouth-he bites his tongue in the night, chokes on his moans and strangles his screams.
When Genma worked full-time eros missions, as agent instead of handler, he'd been the best fuckboy Konoha owned.
Ask him to lie back and think of the village; he could do it. Ask him to seduce and ruin the youngest daughter of Suna's daimyou; he would do it. Order him to work undercover in the dirtiest trafficking rings of Kirigakure, to suck cock for his country, to get down on his knees and beg for it until he cried; he's done all of it, and he could do it again.
That's what being Eros ANBU meant: you sell your body to your Hokage, and hope to the gods they know how to use it for good of the village. For Genma, the top Eros agent Konohagakure could offer, that was supposed to be all there was to it.
Of course, that's not all all there fucking was to it.
Genma still remembers his first high-risk, long-term Eros mission, and the sour taste it leaves in his mouth whenever he thinks of it. He'd infiltrated an embezzling Grass Country ambassador's perverted inner circle for three months, waited on him hand, foot, and ball-gag.
The lord had called him 'pet,' and loved the look of Genma wearing his hair cropped short, short and spiked-bristled like a collared dog.
Genma prefers to simply remember this as the first mission he where took real pleasure out of killing someone, using every intricately poisoned, delicately sharp senbon in his arsenal-just making it long and sweet, making it last.
He wears his hair long now, that's a non-negotiable point, long and tumbling into his eyes, and he tries to never think about why.
Eros agents have to live their lives like that, he explained to himself a long time ago. Eros agents can't think about the 'whys'. Eros agents live in those spaces in between the reasonings.
ooo
Genma has taught Ino this lesson, taught her with harsh senbon slipping under her fingernails and soft, crooning words slipping into her ear. Ino knows an Eros agent survives by only living in their compartmentalized space.
Some of Ino's more wealthy clients like to take her out with them, outside the confines of her rank bed and her stained lingerie where they mutter thoughtless details to her about suppliers and shipments and "Wouldn't you like to get your hands on my best stuff, huh baby? Get you fuckin' drippin' for my dick with a lil stick of the dope shit."
(Ino writes a mission report every night on the 'transactions'-and it gets harder and harder to remember that's what they're considered, even legally, because this is Amegakure, this is a mission, this is not her life.
When she inks their words and secrets she glances at the veins on her arm where a few of the drug-runners circle have started shooting her up, just to ensure their moneys worth.
She didn't want to, no she didn't want to in the beginning, but first there were glinting needles and then there were demanding hands, and now she's a good little slut for them.
She's always obedient, in the end, because they are all so very talkative on their drugs, dropping secrets in her ears like dead flies Konoha needs to collect and pin neatly into their little glass show-boxes, that Konoha craves like frothed whipped cream on a hot summer day.
Genma notes the development, dutifully slips her detox and high-resistance pills-for all the good that does-and does regulatory bloodwork every week to keep her from being infected by the slipshod needles.
His thumbs are always carefully impartial on the bruised-black skin inside her arm, and his eyes cooly non-judgmental. He is so cruelly professional when her eyelids flutter slowly closed, or her thighs involuntarily quiver, that Ino wants to slap him.)
The more wealthy clients like to keep her on for show. She is their faux-elegant, platinum-blonde tall drink of water, so shiny to look at and thin as a waif, abundantly perfumed in scents like sickly-sweet lilacs and warm crushed velvet. Ino has discovered she makes for some damn good arm candy.
It's a fact that sharply amuses her, to an extent. A lethal shinobi seen as eye-candy. 'The perfect tool for any situation,' Her father always used to say.
Ino wears her bloodiest lipstick, and smiles pretty.
X
There are girls who kiss other girls at the strip clubs they take her to, kiss and fuck other girls, and Ino couldn't quite manage to look them in the eyes for most of the beginning.
In the beginning, Sakura's mouth was on every face.
Now, in the middle, Ino tries very hard not to think about Sakura at all.
It's almost started to work, too.
Sometimes Sakura's face is dull on her eyelids, almost not there. Like a child's crude and colorful crayon drawing-just a little bit off, not really recognizable, a series of shapes and lines that make up a person, but not quite her person.
When this happens, Ino is scared and angry and elated all at once. She doesn't need the stubborn furrow in Sakura's eyebrows here, she doesn't need the concerned set of her jaw, she doesn't need the gentle curl of her eyelashes. Sakura doesn't have to be here, because Ino is alone here, really alone, and what good would it do, really?
Other girls mouths taste like stale vodka, like warm nights and too many cigarettes, salt and sweat and smeared mascara.
During her clear, weakly hesitant moments, Ino tries to remember what Sakura tastes like.
ooo
End of Part One
A/N: I'm thinking this story will have around 4 parts. Luckily I've already got most of it written, so you shouldn't have to wait too long, dear readers!
I really hope you enjoyed the fic. I am branching out in this story, trying a few new darker themes and angles, so we shall see where it goes!
Note: The summary "work for it girl..." is taken from a spoken word poetry piece I love, "At the Owl" by Olivia Gatwood. Check it out!
For anyone wondering if "Brightness..." will ever be finished, the answer is YES. Just give me time darlings, I need time. My fingers have a mind of their own when they type-as much as I tell them to write some Neji/Naru, they simply beg me to torture Genma and Ino some more. I am still working on it, I promise. :)
Thank you for reading! All feedback and criticism is greatly appreciated! (This means review. Please review! I need help to see where this fic will go.)
-Lute