For their first date Naruto had wanted to bring Ino flowers but found it awkward, considering her family ran the only flower shop in the village.
He compared her to Sakura first, her childhood rival. He liked her oval madonna face in contrast to Sakura's round one, and her tall, bony slenderness. She was lean and willowy where Sakura was compact, muscled. Sakura smashed things, Ino nudged them aside.
He remembered being twelve and obstinately in love with Sakura and ignoring Ino, already tall for her age, all pointy knees and elbows and a high petulant voice. He liked her so much more now, if only because of her meticulous mani-pedis (he'd see her hunched over her nails during mission briefings, catch the whiff of acetone that made Akamaru wrinkle his nose in distaste), her insistence on maintaining her appearance (he liked her at the end of missions, too, hair escaping from its long ponytail, dirt smudges on her face.)
And he especially liked her bluntness, the way she brushed aside the curtain of hair covering her right eye when she rejected him for the first time ("Sorry, Naruto, I don't think it's going to work") and he caught a quick glimpse of her eye, pale and greenish blue before she let the glossy white-blond strands fall back again. She'd laughed and mock-pouted, a droll pink-lipped mirror of his own face and kissed his cheek when he'd started to trudge away, dejected.
She never brought up Sasuke, and he was grateful. She'd grown up, left behind the bittersweet memory of a dark-haired boy who scowled and rejected her blushing advances, whose existence now meant less than nothing. But when Kakashi had returned cradling the crumpled body as if it weighed more than all the village's sins, a single tear had crawled its way down her face, a faint shining trail underneath the shadow of her hair. She'd brushed it away and knelt to hold Sakura where she had collapsed in a rosy heap, heaving with sobs. That image alone stood out as he struggled to stand upright, too numb for tears- Ino wiping away Sakura's tears with one hand and pushing back her pink hair with the other, tucking a few loose strands behind her ear. The deliberate tenderness of the gesture made salt sting in his eyes and he bit his lip until it bled and wiped his nose on his sleeve like he was a child again.
Afterward, she brought him flowers, spidery white chrysanthemums, and he noticed sweetpeas on the grave, incongruous among the sea of black-clad mourners. her face was drawn and pale, eyes tear-glassy as Sakura clutched her hand until the knuckles turned white.
She didn't avoid him in the weeks following the funeral and cremation. In fact, she urged him to go out, setting up blind dates, inviting him to dinner parties where Chouji inevitably ate himself sick and got drunk to the point of maudlin tears. And through it all, she showed Naruto an almost matronly concern, hovering on the periphery as he nursed his grief and waited for the dull, constant ache in his chest to subside.
And when the proverbial clouds cleared, they went to the park together, just the two of them, and he'd clumsily tried to kiss her but her hair got in the way, and she'd laughed and ruffled his hair and kissed his forehead, and their hands had tangled together somehow among the dry green blades of grass but he wouldn't have had it any other way.