Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
One Hundred and One.
By: N3L
(This used to be under the title: Reappearance, but I'm revising and editing my old, old works and this title has turned out to be more fitting in the new final product.) :) Sorry for any confusion)
Ino had already died a hundred times over. One more time didn't matter.
Death was something that she no longer feared.
A thousand times she felt Death's numbing fingers caress her mind, her soul while she possessed someone else's body. In bringing death to her targets, there was a price. She brought a little death to herself.
As she felt her life drain out from her neck, Ino would close her mind's eye and was in a few moments able to feel again.
But every time she felt a little less than before.
She grew more beautiful with time, everyone told her so. However, no one told her how eerily hollow her eyes became, or how they all inwardly flinched each time her gaze drifted over them. She wasn't all the way there to notice, anyway. She used to be such a vivid girl. She used to be so loud and confident, so brash and caring. So solid and real.
As the bodies piled up, her success began to follow. Ino Yamanaka started to become the top special kunoichi. Special, becoming the key word. Of the most treacherous and bloody missions she always reported first. Clean cut and undeniably professional. Perfectly unaffected. Cold and unfeeling.
A perfect shinobi. A lovely efficient weapon.
Sakura once asked how the hell she finished her missions so quickly, getting over with a weeklong mission in four days. Ino merely smiled wanly, "I have my ways."
She was dying again on a full moon, after making mechanical love to a stranger.
One thousand and one. By then it was too late when she realized it. Much too late. Her mind was chipped and cracked at places. Uneven. Incomplete. She couldn't even bring herself to care that she was breaking.
Death touched her soul for the first time that night.
A month later, Ino mildly wondered why the fragrance of flowers that reached her nose didn't go past her senses. Days later she wouldn't notice the blue skies that she loved. Or the symphony of colors in her flower shop. Nor would she care enough to wonder.
Nobody told her how her long confident strides went to a distant...drifting. Or how her once lovely golden hair, and complexion seemed to take on this faint undertone of ashen grey. She was made of such light colors, they made it feel like she expected to fade away at any moment. Like one dull forgotten memory.
Sakura observed the curious fluidity of her movements. And wondered about the cause for all this. There was no gen-jutsu. Yamanaka Ino somehow managed to literally drift away with every step. Sakura could not find how that was anatomically possible. Perhaps there was some sort of a mechanism in her long legs to enable her that. Some sort of an odd physical mechanism that she couldn't figure out. Something.
The medic nin called after her friend to wash some of the blood out of her light hair, so as not to scare away all the attendants at her own birthday gathering.
Ino waved languidly without looking back and called out a dismissive thank you.
Then disappeared in that special ninja way.
Tsunade-sama mentioned idly how Ino just breached the one hundredth mark in mission quantity. And Ino mentioned how she couldn't stay long because she had another mission to attend to late this evening.
One hundred and one.
She should be happy for her friend. Yet Sakura couldn't help but fear that she wouldn't reappear one of these days.
Fin.
AN: There are one or two of these sort of pieces somewhere around. I can't remember if I took inspiration from them or not because I wrote this quite a while ago. But I don't trust myself enough to have come up with this idea, so let's just say I was inspired from them.