Title: Ordinary

Author: Nimacu

Part: 1 of 2

Disclaimer: Not mine, never has been.

Spoiler Alert: If your not completely caught up on the manga this will spoil you!!!

This fic is to celebrate the success of the "A NarutoxIno Collection" C2.

It had always seemed to Ino that the most extraordinary things seemed to happen on days in which nothing out of the ordinary was expected. This was in the nature of extraordinary things she supposed. She'd been coming home from an afternoon shift at her family's flower shop (a perfectly ordinary thing) when she'd found her mother alone, crying, in the living room (a not so ordinary thing). She, being a fifteen year old girl, was not in the least used to seeing her mother in such an exposed condition and after a few quick pats on the back and a smattering of "there there's" she was very relieved when her mother seem to compose herself. She had attempted to ask her mother what had upset her so; but was diverted with a list of things to take care of before dinner.

Dinner had been another ordinary affair, and if Ino had not been standing in her living room an hour early witnessing her mother's breakdown she would not have ever guessed it had happened. Assuring herself that whatever had been wrong had been righted, Ino continued in her usual activity of clearing the dishes and the table while her parents went into the living area.

What she heard next was quite out of the ordinary however.

I was cleaning out the attic this morning.

Sounds interesting…

I found something I hadn't thought of in awhile

Really?

A box of Kushina's things.

…

The box that the hospital sent to us after she…

And with that her mother was crying again.

Ino was, if anything a bit of a drama queen, she was willing to admit this about herself. And so it was with visions of perhaps a sibling she had never known or an aunt who had been excommunicated from the family that she snuck into the attic later that night when the rest of the household was long asleep. As she climbed up the ladder, it didn't take her long to find the box her mother must have been referring to, it was sitting in the middle of what was in all respects a rather clean attic space. She could see where her mother had pulled it out from the rest of the boxes, she imagined her mother being disturbed by whatever she had found there and leaving without putting it away.

"UZUMAKI"

Ino read the letters on the box a first, second, and third time. The name was not that common…why would there be a box of Naruto's stuff in her attic? And who is this Kushina? Was she related to Naruto?

"She was his mother" Ino wasn't sure if she'd spoken out loud or not but the voice behind her, her father's voice, had answered her question.

"Really?" Ino found herself whispering, looking at her father for the first time as someone who had secrets. She had spent her life believing like most children, that her parent's lives had started somewhere around the time of her birth. That there could be someone in their past that she didn't know? That this person was Naruto's mother? These questions hovered around her consciousness as she looked at her father. He appeared to be waiting for her to ask something.

"Why is it here?"

Her father seemed to settle into himself on the attic floor before answering her. "I guess it would start with the story of two little girls…one from here in the Leaf and one from far away who came to live here after her home was destroyed. The two little girls could not have been more different, one was loud and obnoxious where the other was shy and reserved. But they were the best of friends, and where one went the other would follow."

"What happened after they grew up?"

Her father paused, he had that faraway look in his eyes that only people who've been both extremely sad and extremely happy can have. "As they grew up they became the most beautiful women in the entire village and they both fell in love with strong shinobi men. One day the two women found out they were going to be mothers and they were so happy. They were going to raise their children together and they would grow up best friends as well."

Ino thought she knew what was next but she asked "Did that happen?" anyway.

"Sometimes the things we plan don't turn out exactly as we'd like, and one of the women was unable to watch her child grow up, and her friend…well it hurt her friend too much to see the child in the village; and so she woke up one morning and decided that she was going to pretend that she had never had a best friend and that there was not a child in the village with her laughing eyes"

"That's the end of the story, isn't it?" It felt as if a hollow pit was opening in the bottom of her stomach…this shouldn't have been how it ended.

"It doesn't have to be, you see, the children of those two women are still in this village and I think it may be long time past that the child with the laughing eyes was given the contents of this box."