War-torn future AU, time travel, Ino-centric. revamping for like the fifth time. i know this has been a very hard and annoying process I know it has spanned years and several mental breakdowns but I'm so grateful to you for sticking with me. I love you all so much.

warnings: mild gore, death, blood, suicidal thoughts, overall disturbing themes, mild use of expletives, canon typical violence

thank you for your beta work on this chapter, gnurd!

Ino-centric fic rec: Looking In (On the Outside) by Killaurey

song rec: Same Old Blues by Phantogram

part i. flowers

aSPhOdeL

[hemlock]
you
will
be
my
death

The world doesn't know it anymore, doesn't remember it, but Uzumaki Naruto's soft.

She thinks of the way the world must see him now—the way his world has changed from a place of softness to screaming metal. She thinks about what she can see across the children's faces, the way awe and fear hold equal space in their eyes when they watch him walk through camp. There's something in the way people recoil from him, the way the motion is the same as when they hide behind him. The people in camp are remnants of a village she once loved, the shards of a glass mirror that once was her life and she loved them. She loved them and that village loved her and Naruto loved it, too, but they never loved him.

She thinks about the ninja she fights beside but doesn't really know—were they in the chunin exams with her? Did she cross their path on a long ago mission to the Country of Grass? These people she doesn't know aren't afraid of her. She isn't afraid of them, either—no more than she's afraid of herself. They look at her with a kind of bare bones connection, the kind of thing born from blood and steel and holding strong even when there's nothing left. They have something stretched between them, something created in battle and through shared injury, pulled sticky around them. They aren't afraid of her, even if they are afraid of Naruto.

But Naruto isn't like that.

Oh, physically, sure—he's a ninja, and there isn't anything soft about that, nothing soft about sharp knives and tight-knit muscle and the eyes, all angry and hard and painful, or the teeth, pointed and predatory and dangerous. She's even acknowledged to herself, objectively, that he's dangerous and deadly, that there's something unsettling about how he grins with all his teeth when he's standing over a dead body. There's nothing soft about him there, not physically, not bodily, not unless she took a knife and pulled his skin apart to the organs underneath, not unless she pulled at his tongue until she could show the world how easily it gives to a blade. It used to be the only thing she could think that would prove he's human, too, that he hurts, too, that he cries the same way they do—that he, too, is a human who screams and bleeds and howls.

But she isn't going to do that, so for the sake of things, no. There is nothing soft about him, not physically, not bodily.

The whole of the Elemental Nations might think him little more than a killer, than a weapon utilized in a time of crisis. The army he fights for might think he's a monster. Ino knows otherwise. She knows soft eyes and warm skin, cool hands and the slow pull of a brush before calloused fingers braid through her hair. She knows small smiles and hot, angry tears. Ino knows better.

(Sometimes she wonders if it's the opposite, if she's been wrong for years now and the things she thought she saw in him were never there at all. If he's a monster and she's an idiot and everyone else always knew, if he's been tricking her, if he's smiling to himself when they watch the sun go down not in an attempt at optimism but from the promise of more blood to spill. Sometimes she looks at him and she doesn't know what she sees.

There's no way to find out.)

Ino's always seen that vulnerability as somehow something private. His actions left the young, shiny boy forgotten in the face of them, left the kid forgotten for people who'd never spoken to him and never would. It seemed to those on the outside Naruto was immortal. Inhuman. The unscarred part of him has always seemed somehow secret to her, somehow sacred. The pulse under his skin and the softness of his hands; the way he'd go weak against her when they had a second away from the fighting, dead bodies in the grass and his hands sticky from blood, his face messy from dirt.

It occurs to her now it's never been a secret.

Naruto's face presses against Ino's shoulder, tiny pained gasps of air puffing against the bare skin of Ino's neck and it hits how alive he feels. In this moment where he is still breathing, where he's still moving and his skin is still warm, it seems impossible he would ever stop. Knives have split his skin and she's got a hand pressed to the side of his neck in some semblance of intimacy and blood bubbles up through her fingers and it's messy and she can feel more than hear him hissing in pain but he's still alive and that's what Ino thinks, what she fixates on. That's what sticks for her. Alive.

This alive part of him—it has never belonged to her. Now it's rotting and dying and slipping between her fingers and it feels like she's burning, like a scar is starting to tingling against her spine. He never belonged to her. Naruto's dying. He is not immortal. It was never a secret. His dead body will rot.

Ino holds him and thinks of Madara and burns. Naruto was never hers. His life belongs to his killer.

He tries to lift his head out from the crook of her neck, away from the soft part of her between a harsh jaw and strong shoulders. It's a struggle, and his cheek falls against her forehead and it seems as though time has stopped. "Run," Naruto murmurs, voice weak and blood dribbling from his mouth, staying upright only by leaning against Ino. "Run, Ino."

His blood's splattered across Ino's body, staining her clothes and splashed across her cheeks, leaving her skin feeling hot and touched and tainted and dirty. Her fingers convulse momentarily, fingernails stabbing into his shoulders instead of forming tiny crescent moons in her palms. "No," Ino says and it isn't to Naruto. He isn't supposed to die.

A part of Ino has never been meant for war. A part of her has never been fit for a shinobi and there's no insult in that. This world is cruel and she has never wanted it. She wants to gag, wants to stumble back in something like shock or disgust or fear. A part of her feels so, so dirty, with his blood smeared across her skin and his breath still feeling warm against her neck and she suddenly isn't sure if she's ever felt like this before. People die in war and Ino's watched them do it. She's helped fling her friends into unmarked mass graves she's seen them later the way grass grows over the dirt and animals bite at the stems even though it's rotted she's watched the funeral pyres go up with a backdrop of the moon dipping below the horizon she's watched people die. She's killed them, too. People die in war and Ino knows this.

Naruto always felt different to her. She sometimes thought fate, destiny, the world would keep him alive. He always felt different to her. Even when she had the nerve to think his softness was a secret for her alone she still felt as though he were something ethereal. The part of her not built for war is thinking of funerals and caskets, of gravestones and her demolished village, and this part of her thinks, We deserve better.

Naruto deserves better, this part of her says.

Another piece of her writhes, hot and harsh and angry because she was an idiot and she thought Naruto was forever and that he was going to save her and he isn't. He's dead and no one will save her and she couldn't save him, either.

Naruto gasps out another breath, lips brushing against her hair, and his body slumps against her as his breath stills. She thinks about all the things they never said and the way there's blood drooling from his mouth and staining the underside of her chin. She thinks about the things she's lost the homes that have burned the friends who died and he's all she had left. There's still a warmth to him and Ino is clinging, now, and it isn't fair he's all she had left it isn't fair she needs him—he is all she has left—and he's limp and dead and Ino isn't allowed to need anyone.

The part of Ino unfit for war dies with him, and she pushes at his shoulders, pushes at his limp body, pushes until the weight of it falls away from her. Naruto falls to the dirt. Dead.

It's almost as though she's forgotten to breathe. She chokes past her closed throat.

Uzumaki Naruto's dead. The sentence itself has an eeriness, a wrongness. Naruto-is-dead. It isn't right. The world can't continue without him. A world without Naruto—it's the strangest thought she's ever had. He's all she has. Had.

A twig snaps, and the world starts again.

Ino runs.

She has no time for tears and even as they blur her vision she refuses to let them fall. She'd rather her cheeks bloodied than marred with tracks of salt. She has no time to cry for Naruto, not when she would be crying for herself, for her death realized. He tried to protect her, always acted as a wall between Ino and the war, between Madara's rising age of supremacy and the army he led. She's one of the last relics of Konoha, of their past, and he's done his best to preserve her.

(she is going to scream)

Ino doesn't have time for this.

She lunges into the trees, a tiny jet of gray flashing through the forest with a speed rarely matched, and this is a charade, she thinks, as she swings higher into the trees, long hair curling down her shoulders. This grand game of pretending she can escape will eventually grow old but she goes higher and higher, the branches getting thinner and thinner, and the sky closer and closer.

(she thinks of bloody lips pressing into her hair, of a hand against her cheek and so fucking much unsaid)

Branches stab at her arms and she can't tell what's her blood and what's his, her muscles going reckless, a kind speaking not of carelessness but instead a sort of apathy and maybe she is giving up. Maybe they did die in vain. She feels nearly empty now, and a void running through her is peeling the thin layers of her skin, leaving only a small voice, whispering, "Run, Ino," on a loop in her ears.

(I'm sorry, she thinks, and she means it.)

And Ino does not have time for this because Uchiha Madara is coming to kill her and she's halfway to a tree branch when a knife catches her shirt sleeve and her shoulder is pinned she rips away, the cloth tearing, and she knows he doesn't miss and—

Yamanaka Ino is going to die.

Maybe it is giving up and maybe those before her died in vain. Maybe it is. But he's stronger and better and going to kill her and if he could kill Naruto—and he did kill Naruto she knows it she was there she watched—then of course he can kill her. Ino's last thread was Naruto but even she can admit it, can admit that when his eyes were red from a monster he killed and kunai could bite into him only to be spat out and for the skin to seal shut a second after she can admit it. He's terrifying and he's dead. Ino doesn't want to die and it isn't about that. Her wants don't matter here and maybe they never did. Uchiha Madara's picked off the shinobi of the Elemental Nations in roves. He's swept through their forces as though they were grains of sand to an ocean and a kunai catches her tunic at the neck, her head jerking from the force of it and hitting against the tree trunk, her feet pointing down so she's stretching out her toes. She can just barely brush the branch a bit behind her. It isn't enough to gain a hold, isn't enough to stand, and she's hanging from a strip of fabric.

She writhes, twisting, her shoulder straining and—

A kunai goes through her wrist, cutting through it to the bark. Her shirt rips; she is hanging from her wrist, from her own flesh. She can hear the way her skin pulls, the way the muscle inside her tears from the force.

(it hurts. it hurts and hurts and hurts and hurts and hurts and—)

Ino screams.

For a moment she thinks she might have gone blind. The world is all white noise, all black dots and sharp rasps and Ino can't stop looking at it, at the kunai handle dipping into her wrist and the blood. She tries to twitch her index finger and finds that she can't.

A choked breath leaves her mouth. She makes a noise somewhere between a moan and a howl. Skin touches skin; a hand roughly pulls Ino's face up. "Hello, Ino," Madara says, and Ino can't speak. She stares at him, looking into the strangely, disgustingly enchanting corpse eyes of the Uchiha, watching the cruel smirk tilt across his face.

Uchiha Madara's hand reaches out and traces her cheek, one bare finger inching over her skin and he might as well be made of flames for the trail of burns he inks across her jawline. Stings follow his touch—singes blossoming in the path he left on her skin. His hand travels down to her neck, his thumb smearing the blood still drooled over her. Two of his fingers trace the necklace looped around her neck, and she can't breathe.

Yamanaka Ino isn't the sentimental type.

There are some people who need snowglobes to ground themselves, need figurines scattered along bookshelves and tabletops, bracelets to cling to and rings to tug on. Candles to litter desktops and colorful pens to stuff into cups. Notebooks and baby blankets and keychains. There's little value to place on them. She imagines in a different life they would have meant more to her. In another world, as another girl, she might have been the type to rub gently on a wedding ring or carefully tie back frilly curtains. Ino has no curtains and she had no wedding. She's not the sentimental type and this necklace is ages old, just a green crystal that could've bought mountains once and a worn brown string of leather.

There's still something dehumanizing about it, about the loss of physical objects and material comforts. There's something animalistic and wrong about living in the forests with her only comfort the skin over her bones. There's something painful about it, and as the cord of Ino's necklace snaps easily under Madara's hand, the sting goes from her stomach to her toes.

Uchiha Madara smiles.

It is an ugly thing.

"Goodbye, Ino," he says. Maybe this war has gone on long enough for him to consider himself of value to her, for him to think they have a connection, but it makes Ino feel sick, like just by saying her name he is tainting her, poisoning her with the madness running through his own veins. Ino can see all the evil she's ever known stacking itself across his face right in this moment of small peace in which he has not yet killed her and she watches the shades of black curl around Madara's expression like plastic wrap.

He's going to kill her. She's going to die.

Time slows. It feels as though she's only a witness, watching her own body. He leans closer to her, just inches away, and there's a knife in his hand. She can feel the pulse of her wrist, the blood drooling from her body down the tree trunk. He's never been one for knives, has never specialized in them. Madara's a man of the sword and his chakra's even more dangerous. She knows why she is to die this way, bleeding and immobile and biting down a scream.

She doesn't deserve anything better. She doesn't deserve his respect. She isn't worth more than a slit throat.

The blade traces her neck, and blood starts to bead, wiggling down her skin. Her working hand automatically start to slide into a single familiar seal, her lips forming equally familiar words even as the blade starts a journey upwards, opening skin over her jaw. Madara draws an uneven line over Ino's cheek, digging the blade in, stripping back her skin, and it hurts. The blade catches on the edge of her mouth, cutting into her, and it hurts. She can see her own breath heating the knife's metal blade when he cuts into her lip.

Madara's eyes are black and empty and inches from her own, but Ino almost thinks she sees something in them—she can't have, though, because this is Uchiha Madara, and it's a surety he's never felt panic or fear or happiness or really anything at all. The war against him has been going on long enough for Ino to know.

"Shintenshin no Jutsu," she breaths, and then the blade sinks into the flesh of her neck. For a moment, she's choking, her own blood filling her throat, her trapped arm shaking in a series of spasms and her wrist shrieking because it is so far from numb.

Her eyes go glazed and there is no pain.

Run, Ino.

Yamanaka Ino is dead.

…

Ino jerks alive with tears spilling over her face and a scream caught in her throat.

Her body's heavy and weak and blankets bury her hands. She's choking on something, and bile builds in her throat until she vomits. It's mostly stomach acid, and she can feel it on her chin, dripping down her neck. For a long second stretching to forever, Ino just breathes, her fingers clenching and unclenching in the sheets and her hand, her left wrist—

Her hand flies to it. Her wrist is fine.

Wait.

Ino blinks, eyes adjusting to the sunlight. The room's practically bathed in it, and it drips across the floor and licks at Ino's feet. There are two things shaking in her mind, two different people within her head. One is a child. This room is hers, and it is familiar. It is safe and warm and good. One is a child, and she's pushing at the invasion with the force of a small bird, shoving at the entire ocean that has fallen over her and managing to displace barely a couple drops.

The other has blood on her throat and her bones feel sticky inside her and she's somewhere between crying and killing.

Somewhere in the middle, Ino slides across the bed, feet reaching to the floor. Only the tips of her toes manage to brush against the carpet. She slips from the bed, hands feeling along the room. She drifts to a small window, and behind thick gray curtains, a village beckons. Ino's faced with a sea of buildings, and even further are lively green trees. Ino stares, and four stone faces stare back.

She doesn't remember what happens after the throat is slit—she took anatomy, too, trained in medical ninjutsu, too—but she doesn't remember now if the vocal cords survive. Speech isn't possible—of course it isn't, not for a corpse—but she brings hand to her throat now and feels at it. It is whole. She is whole. Her hands travel down her body, over unscarred skin and smooth shoulders and bones that remain free of bruises. Her fingers feel their way up and down the length of her, pulling at her too-short hair and there are no scars on her face, no cuts on her lips. She feels for the impressions of her skin, for the places where her body goes concave like a crater on the moon, and there is nothing.

She is whole and a stranger and she swallows hard on the thick saliva building in her mouth.

(It's bright and calm and sunny with light dripping down the room like honey and the quiet sounds of living beginning to echo through the house when Ino starts to scream.)

…

It's a couple months of this, of going to school and eating breakfast and feeling her own useless limbs when she tries to throw kunai before she realizes her name is still Yamanaka Ino and she's ten years old. Ino ties a cord into her hair, braiding it within the strands and giving herself a lacy ribbon of steel. It glitters when the sun hits it and it feels smooth against the pad of her thumb. It feels loud, clear, in a way implying truth instead of the falsehood curling in Ino's stomach like a toxic snake.

It's a ribbon. It's a piece of cast off metal, useless and cold. But. It feels like something real. Ino could use something real. Her hair is too short and her body too weak, but her name is still Yamanaka Ino.

Ino watches her own face in the mirror, head tilting to the side and the string shining in the light. Her hand inches forward, pressing against the glass. Ino examines the girl's expression, her eyes narrowed. It looks like the girl in the mirror is fiercely attempting seriousness, but her rounded face, still chubby with baby fat, doesn't allow it.

Ino reaches a hand towards the girl, and the mirror girl does the same. The hand Ino sees—the hand attached to her wrist attached to her shoulder attached to Ino—is very small, and very young.

"That's my hand," Ino says, reminding herself. Sometimes it hits her, sometimes it hits hard, and then something inside her writhes. The girl in the mirror has short hair and baggy clothes and Ino can remember. Yamanaka Ino was a boyish girl, the kind to play in the mud and roll around in the grass. She was a messy girl, and Ino can tell from the bruises on her knees that it's true. Yamanaka Ino is ten years old.

Unmarked graves dance along the edges of Ino's vision and she blinks rapidly to clear them. Her thoughts flee—she can't catch up to them—and Ino has the strangest sensation of waking up from a dream she can't remember. An itch starts in the back of her mind, and it's just on the tip of tongue.

(A little girl in her head is babbling, shouting, crying, and—)

"Shut up," Ino murmurs lowly, one hand pressed to her temple. Her nails start to dig into her skin, first lightly, like an afterthought, and then with more intention, more power, more force. Ino reaches for the counter, steadying, and her hand slowly detaches from her skull, leaving behind five tiny rips in the skin of her scalp, the hand pulling out of her hair before she can give herself a lobotomy. Yamanaka Ino's ten years old and she's loud and she's wild and it makes Ino want to scream.

Ino's nose curls. There's a girl inside Ino who's a child and Ino hasn't quite managed to shake her out. She doesn't have time for it. Ino looks into the blue eyes in the mirror and feels her breath leave her. "Everyone's dead," she says, softly, quietly. She can still feel the blood in her throat, and when she meets her own eyes in the mirror, a little girl stares back.

"No one's dead," the little girl says, clean cheeks shining and blue eyes bright. She's lost, swept under from the sheer force of the wave Ino brings. Her memories sit below the surface, half buried in sand, and no matter how she claws at the surface, this ocean will never belong to her again. Ino's an invader here, the enemy, but she knows from experience that the enemy can easily win. The little girl leans forward, a clean heart with good intent, and it's disgusting. "No one's dead," she repeats, and it's a ripple bouncing across the water.

There are two people inside Ino's head. One is a girl. The other is much more. The two cannot coexist for long.

"Not yet," Ino tells her, and Ino is a wave. The little girl recoils, and Ino pulls her hand from the glass. The little girl's small fingers linger at the edge, clawing at it like she wants to break free.

Ino turns away from the mirror. She's got better places to be.

She pulls chain metal on under her shirt and cuts one of her tiny baby fingers on it when she's trying to fit her vaguely uncoordinated arm through the sleeve. It's uncomfortable—her body isn't used to wearing it, isn't strong enough for it. Everything about her body is wrong. It's too small, too weak; it's inflexible and graceless. She can remember the way her own body was, sewn into her soul and matching her movements perfectly. Bodies are easy to control, but only her own ever truly fit. There's a reason Yamanaka don't often hide inside the heads of others; their own bodies fit better.

This body is worthless to her, but it's all she's got.

(it's all wrong it's so wrong and Ino wants to scream)

Ino's wrapped in armor of her own making and she steps lightly into the academy like she's casing the place, like she's preparing an escape. Naruto's there, and he's loud and elaborate and makes Ino want to scream. Sakura's there too, so shiny and young that it makes something deep inside Ino's stomach ache, makes something inside her chest just fold down under itself, just collapse under the weight, and for a second Ino can't breathe.

So frequently does she find herself unable to breathe.

It's like a pipe dream. Sakura smiles and Ino smiles back, reflexive and bittersweet. Sakura might be a dead girl, but she's alive and whole and clean. No one's dead yet, someone inside Ino murmurs, and she takes a step forward because Sakura's alive and whole and—Ino is whole and a stranger—the little girl under the ocean breaks her face above the surface of the water, eyes bright and that's when she sees him.

His name is Uchiha Sasuke. She's been in the academy with him for two years. Before that, they were in primary school together, in the same class two times of the four. Ino knows him and likes him, maybe even likes him, and when she looks at him she feels so much hate it stills her.

He's sitting at a desk by the window and he looks up when the door slides shut. Ino locks eyes with him, and his eyes are very dark and very black and Ino thinks, for just a second, that it seems very possible that if she stares too long she'll go tumbling into that void forever, lost.

In this second, there is no Naruto. There is no Sakura.

The ocean sends a wave ripping over the little girl's head and the ocean says it's always been about the three of them, always been the circle surrounding them, until Sasuke killed the world and Naruto killed him and Sakura killed herself and there's no way out of that so. There's no one. There's Ino and a killer and a world to save and no one's dead yet and that's all there is room for and the little girl, swamped by these memories and swamped by the weight, begins to drown.

Ino explodes back to the surface, her throat full of something stickier than water, choking and coughing and fighting with a heavy sea even though she can't win. Ino isn't entirely sure what it is about Uchiha Sasuke, what it is he's doing or has done to make her feel an anger better fitting a wild animal. She abruptly finds she isn't entirely sure of anything. There are too many things to choose from, too many options rolling around in her head, and none of the paths are clear and she finds it suddenly difficult to remember where she is, what she's doing. When she sees him, she can't breathe. Dead girls don't lie but Ino's never been fond of telling the truth.

It's strange. Yamanaka Ino is a child and yet she is not.

There isn't any physical defect. She's got ten fingers, two feet, ten toes. Her skin's soft, her eyes clear, and her cheeks fat. She's got bright eyes and blond hair drooling over her shoulders and all of her teeth. The body is all child, all small hands linked to small wrists. This body is pudgy fingers and fat tears, creamy skin and tripping feet. A weak grip and all her joints safely in place, unbroken.

This body belongs to the little girl. Ino's taken it instead.

Ino's the one who isn't a child, despite how her body attempts to coax her back to the smooth comfort of brightly colored cotton sheets and frilly dresses and purple painted walls and ice cream and coloring books and markers and other useless childlike things. Ino isn't a child even though there is one above water, watching the world and controlling this body; there's still Ino, screeching like the grind of metal on metal, hissing into this child's ears and leaving her eyes hollow from a war inside her head. Her body might be all wrong, but one day, hair grown long and fingernails encased in metal, she's going to save the world.

Save the world from Sasuke, a little girl thinks, and she stares at him and she thinks her heart stops. Ino feels herself take a couple steps toward him, deliberately and beyond her will. Sakura seems to notice, because her face falls and she starts to look confused and very lost but this isn't about Sakura, not anymore. It's always been about Sakura to Ino, always been about avenging the one grave she couldn't bring herself to dig, but it can't be, not now.

Ino looks away from Sakura. She stares at Sasuke and takes another step because this is the boy who's going to destroy her world.

She's ten and he's ten and it's hard to believe Uchiha Sasuke was ever a child.

It's funny to think his eyes will end up so deadly. Sasuke's eyes are huge, long lashes lining them with black, and he doesn't look dangerous at all. It's best to catch a tumor like him early, and the little girl starts to cry, pushing at the water and desperate and she doesn't want to die any more than the older girl wants to kill her. They're soft tears, almost silent, because just a little while ago the little girl was happy and now nothing is alright and the nightmares she has aren't normal at all and no little girl should know the feeling of slitting a throat and she's not just lost, she's trapped. Ino's the one who trapped her.

"Hi," Ino says, and Sasuke looks up at her, apprehensive and small. "You're Sasuke, right?"

Ino sits down next to him in the same motion as his nod. She pulls a pen out of her bag, settling it along the desk with one hand tight around it. Naruto's a bit behind Sasuke and to the left, in the row above them. She can feel his eyes digging into the back of her head and her resolve strengthens.

(She's doing this for him, after all. For Naruto and Sakura and Shikamaru and Hinata and Kiba and Asuma and all the people she hasn't met yet but already knows. They don't deserve to die.)

"And you're Ino." Sasuke's looking at her like she's competition, and she shifts her grip on the pen. Not a pencil, of course, not a pencil. The point would break. Ino's accidentally stabbed herself with a pencil before—the graphite stayed in her hand for years, since Ino couldn't figure out a way to remove it without giving herself a horrible scar. She thinks about the way words written in pencil can be brushed aside, pushed away, smudged beyond repair. Pencils are unreliable.

Ino has to do it. She knows that now. She woke up this morning ten years old despite the monster in her head and even though it haunts her, rages against her—it tied a ribbon that wasn't a ribbon in her hair and told her everyone was dead—but she's back, now, a little girl, and she has to kill him. She's not a soldier, not at heart or in body, and she isn't mature enough for her first loyalty to be her country, but she's ten and her parents are dead-alive and she has to kill him. Uchiha Sasuke destroys Konoha.

So she's ten years old and Ino stands up, out of her chair. She smiles, wide and big and pretty, for the classroom. Sasuke's mouth is still curled up, just a little, and it looks like the face she used to see her killer wear and Ino isn't sure she can fully handle the sight of it. She can only see two versions of him; a little boy and the same one blood on his face and the worst kind of smile to him. She can't piece through the memories she's got and even above the ocean, surviving through increasingly violent waves, it still rules her and she's going insane.

She's ten years old and barely over the surface of madness and Uchiha Sasuke needs to die.

She leans down close to him, so close to him she can see that there is actually a very small freckle hiding in the shadow of his brow bone, just a small dot of skin discoloration in the corner of the outside of his left eye. She likes the flaw of it.

(In her head, Ino adjusts the pen in her hand and she stabs him in the neck with it.

She severely overestimates the strength of the little girl hand, even if it's calloused and throws knives, and although the pen pierces the skin easily, it doesn't exactly do the job. Sasuke starts to choke on what would be a scream. In her head, Ino leaps forward on top of him like a wild cat and he goes tumbling out of his chair, to the floor, while Ino tries fiercely to force the pen in deeper.

The dream plays out, someone grabbing her arm, yanking her back, and then it's over.

Khori-san—the teacher, the little girl's teacher—rips at Ino's arm and Ino's going backwards. Her grip on the pen is firm enough to pull it with her, right out of Sasuke's previously unblemished white gold skin. Ino imagines kicking him in the face before she's out of range, catching the sound of breaking cartilage. Sasuke's not screaming anymore. She can't put together the sight of him, evil and tall and beautiful and capable of a grand terror she will never achieve, with playing on the swings and copying his homework and in her head, he's clutching his throat, blood going from his nose up over his forehead to drip into his hair. It's almost beautiful. In her head, Sasuke's a monster. They just don't know it yet. If Ino has it her way, they never will. She's somewhere between twenty three and ten, somewhere between alive and dead. This body can only have one of them and Yamanaka Ino is ten years old and being consumed. All she can hear is screaming all she can see is blood how is she supposed to handle this she has to kill him she has to and—

In her head, the little girl slips under the water, mouth filling with it, choking, screaming, and Ino's eyes go sharp.)

She sits back down and opens her notebook. "I'm only sitting here to copy off you," she says, choked, abrupt, the words familiar with her ten year old mouth but painful where they echo across her mind and she almost tried to kill him. She can see it all reflected in the anger of her ocean, can see it in the drowning girl and the screams she can still hear. The little girl sinks down, down, down, tiny feet kicking uselessly, sand pulling at her toes and seaweed curling along her ankles and her eyes flutter, her struggles starting to cease.

Sasuke snorts, then, disgusted but nowhere near what he could be, and Ino blinks rapidly at her own notebook, at her own shaking hands, at the little girl who saw her parents dead to this boy's hands and was going to kill him for it. Be smart, she thinks, harshly, the words stuttered and lost. Be smart, be smart. The little girl goes still. She is dead.

Ino's painfully aware of Sasuke beside her for the remainder of the day.

…

Yamanaka Ino is dead. Only

she

isn't.

It probably isn't nearly as strange as it sounds.