Ino was never one for flowery speech. She said precisely what she meant and expected other people to do the same.
It got her in trouble with her teachers at the academy, who taught her that as a girl, kunoichi or no, she was expected to display humility and grace. Ino had stuck her tongue out at both these things and excelled at flower arranging anyway.
It was also why she got so angry speaking to Sakura when they were younger. The girl tiptoed about as if any wayward word would shatter her like sheet glass. It had taken Ino whole afternoons to try and get Sakura to say what she really meant. The other girl was all evasive eyes slipping past Ino's shoulders, small muffled breaths and twisting fingers. It was everything Ino could do to stop herself sitting on Sakura's stomach and bashing her head against the floor to make the girl talk straight.
And that was why she could feel a dead black weight on her chest as her best friend explained to her in calm, simple terms that a boy was more important than their friendship. It wasn't a joke. It wasn't something Ino would wheedle out of her and then laugh at while Sakura hid her face, blushing before adding her voice to the giggles.
She was terrified for a moment that Sakura had outgrown her. That she had found her voice and no longer needed Ino to be there for her through every forced confession. Sakura has handed her back the ribbon and Ino's anger and betrayal boiled over into her scowls, only biting back on all the words that begged to be released, because she couldn't bring herself to hurt Sakura.
But from that day on Ino had always bitten back a little of what she wanted to say. She didn't hide behind metaphor, or stumbled sentences; she opened her mouth and let rip with whatever seemed most pressing to say. But there were sentences that changed as she said them, words that got lost along the way and some that she forgot before they had their chance. She looked Sakura in the eye and said that yes, now they were rivals, she would fight for the boy with every inch. She could have said she didn't care. She could have torn Sakura apart as easy as she had pushed her together, years before. She could have dismissed her, told her she was petty and never passed the time of day with her in the street again. But she couldn't. Ino couldn't let Sakura walk away from their friendship that easily. (The truth is she couldn't walk away from Sakura that easily.)
There weren't the right words for Sakura anymore. What used to fall out of her mouth in a garbled rush of syllables, scattered pitches that rose and fell with her wildly gesticulating hands, now faltered and halted as they reached her tongue and lips. The words changed in on themselves and somehow she always found herself walking away from the other girl. The minutes would be gone and a slim back would be marching off down another street. She wondered sometimes where they all went.