Title: Imprint
Pairing: InoSaku, slight hint of what may be SasuSaku
Rating: PG
Warnings: Shoujo-ai.
Spoilers: If you haven't seen up to timeskip.
Word Count: 1,205
Disclaimer: No, I don't own the anime/manga series Naruto.
Author's Notes: I wrote this before V-day and I put it onto my LJ fic journal but I completely forgot to upload it onto which is why it is one-day late for V-day. I apologize, and I hope y'all had a great Valentine's Day!
Imprint
It was the 8th of February, less than a week before Valentine's Day, and it was snowing. Ino woke up at seven o'clock, and she saw snow everywhere. The land was covered by a white blanket, which was still gradually growing thicker, and outside her house there was a truck clearing away the snow on the roads to ease the traffic. She opened the window and there was a rush of fresh, crisp air filling the house at once. She breathed in, and at once her sleepiness cleared. She breathed out, and there was a puff of white.
She phoned Sakura and asked her out. She would be away on Valentine's Day -- Tsunade had given her a week's prior notice for a mission, with a small twinkle in her eyes that told Ino to do whatever she had planned to do on Valentine's Day early. Here was her chance, for the snow made it a perfect day for friends and couples alike to have fun.
Sakura agreed without any hesitation. Half an hour later, they met near the village gates, for they planned to go sledging in the hills in the outskirts of Konoha. It wasn't really hills as much as small slopes, but they had to do, for the real hills were too far away for them to make it there and back in one day unless they hurried, and the whole point of today was to relax.
Both of them were wrapped up in several layers of clothing to protect themselves against the cold. Sakura wore a pair of pink gloves and a scarf that was just a slightly deeper shade than the gloves. Ino wore gloves too, though they were not purple as one might expect, but black. It had taken Ino a while to dig the sledge out from the storage room in her house, for it hadn't snowed this much in Konoha for years, and Ino couldn't remember using the sledge since she was three. Sakura didn't even have a sledge. They would share; neither of them minded.
The shinobi guarding the gates wished them a happy day as they left the village. It took them less than half an hour to walk to the place they had in mind. There was not a single person in sight, and the snow was undisturbed here, with not a single footprint marring its beauty. "Let's build a snowman," Sakura suggested. So that was what they did. They each took a small ball of snow and rolled it around, until it grew to an enormous size. Ino's was bigger, so they used hers as the base, the lower part of the snowman's body. Together they heaved Sakura's from the ground and put it on top of the base. Sakura held it while Ino secured the two parts together with more snow.
By this time, they were not the only people there. A bunch of schoolchildren had arrived. "Must be no school today," Ino chuckled. "Lucky kids." Ino and Sakura had been working in silence, and now the schoolchildren destroyed their peace by screaming their heads off as they chucked snowballs at each other. Watching those children, Ino remarked in a bemused tone, "And the future of our village falls into those children's hands, Sakura."
They soon went back to finishing their snowman. They made a head and attached it to the body the same way they had attached the upper part to the base. Ino found two twigs and stuck them into the sides of the snowman, and Sakura poked three holes in the snowman's face for a nose and eyes. "It looks weird," Ino commented. "Like an alien, almost. Its nose is a bit off, don't you think?"
Sakura wrinkled up her eyes and scrutinized the snowman's face. "Oh well, who cares?" she said after a while. "Let's go higher up and sledge." At that time, a snowball landed in their direction, narrowly missing Sakura. Ino and Sakura immediately gathered their own snowballs and attacked back with the same ferocity. The children squealed in glee -- they seemed to like receiving attention from older nin.
The fight carried on for a little while, and then Sakura shouted that they didn't have all day to play with children. Some of the children's face fell. "You guys are really adorable though," Ino cried, and that cheered them up quickly.
The two of them climbed up to the top of the slope and sledged all the way down, screaming and laughing as they went, the wind whooshing past their ears. Then when they walked back up again, Sakura said, "You go down yourself. I want to make a snow angel." So Ino left Sakura on her own. Sakura lay down in the snow, ready to make a snow angel, but then she thought of something else. She sat up and watched Ino sledge down the slope. A smile touched her lips, and she drew a heart in the snow. For Ino, she thought, her smile widening.
Then she turned away from Ino, who was starting the climb up. She took off her right glove, and the frosty winter air chilled her hand. Using that bare hand, she drew another heart in the snow. The cold bit her fingers painfully, and that was what she wanted. She wanted that feeling of bitter rawness for this heart, the feeling of numb sorrow. Her heart slowed, beginning to freeze. For Sasuke, she thought, feeling her eyes grow hot despite the cold.
Ino was back now, standing behind her. She didn't ask who the two hearts are for. She looked at the first one and she saw herself (intuition, perhaps), and when she saw Sakura's ungloved hand still buried in the snow and the first tears sliding down Sakura's cheeks, she knew who the second one is for too. She took Sakura's hand and put the glove back on, and then she, too, drew a heart.
"For you," she whispered in Sakura's ear. "Don't cry." She pressed her lips against Sakura's in perfect symmetry. The snow fell around them silently, and Sakura's heart was beating once more, even faster than before. It was too warm to cry, so Sakura's tears stopped falling.
"Happy Valentine's Day," Ino murmured when they broke apart. They decided that they should go home and maybe have some ramen at Ichiraku, and as they left they both thought about how they would never forget this day, at least not that moment at the top of that slope with the three hearts surrounding them. Sakura wondered if she would ever get to tell Sasuke about the heart. One day, she knew, she would look back at this and she might smile, or she might cry, and she wondered if Ino would be by her side then.
And Ino seemed to read Sakura's mind because she said, "The snow might melt, but the hearts won't ever." So Sakura smiled, satisfied with that answer, and she put the hearts at the back of her mind for the moment, because now all she needed to think about was the hot meal waiting for her and Ino in their village, and Ino's hand holding hers tightly, never letting go.
The End