The Black and White Boy
Summary: AU: And when Ino jumps, she is not afraid anymore, because she knows that Death shall be there to catch her. Ino-centric. SaiIno. SasuSaku.
Pairings(s): (main:) SaiIno. (side:) SasuSaku.
Genre: Romance/Drama
Rating: T
Warning(s): attempted suicide, slight character bashing, darker themes.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
The Black and White Boy
Written by: Just a Girl with a Mission
oOOo
"And all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet." -Shel Silverstein
oOOo
Her name is Ino. She is seven years-old. She likes flowers, the color pink and her family. She dreams of a castle in the clouds and a prince who will sweep her off her feet. She is on wings of fire and never wants to fall.
oOOo
In the beginning, he is that boy, who sits under the oak tree during recess and looks at you without a word and draws pictures in a notebook he holds in his lap.
In the beginning, as well, she is not that boy, or even that girl, but Ino, the girl who comes to school with flowers in her hair and stars shining in her eyes; Ino, the girl who has wishes and hopes and dreams and plans to fulfill all of them; Ino, the girl who swings from the monkey bars and sits on the slide and surrounds herself with friends and admirers and laughter and noise. Ino, whose best friend is Sakura and whom shares her lunch with her everyday.
She is Ino, the girl who is happy and free and without a care in the world.
Of course, she doesn't talk to that boy, because he is that boy, and talks to no one, and is talked to by no one - except for maybe the equally strange boy who is called Shin who looks at that boy's drawings and tries to draw his own.
I wonder why he looks so lonely, she thinks, as she looks at him from the corner of her eye, watching as he sketches in his notebook in the shadow of the tree as he always does. I wonder why…
oOOo
Her name is Ino. She is ten years-old. She likes flowers, the color purple, and her family. Her best friend has turned her life into a competition, one that she is not willing to lose. For the first time in her life, her wings fail her.
oOOo
Sakura throws the ribbon at her feet and runs away, leaving Ino sitting alone on the bench, frozen in place.
"You…you like Sasuke, right?"
"Yeah, what of it?"
Ino picks up the ribbon and winds it through her fingers, tearing at the silky strands that rub against her skin.
"We can't be friends anymore, Ino. I'm sorry."
She clenches her hand into a fist and digs her fingernails into her palm, crumpling the ribbon into a ball.
When she collapses in the field, where she thinks no one will see her, and screams at the world for being so unfair, she never notices the boy who stands alone in the shadows, nearly at one with the darkness with his black eyes and black hair and black clothes, with a notebook clutched in his hand, something like pity reflected in those black, black eyes.
oOOo
She hides the ribbon in her room, locking it away in a box where she'll never have to look at it, but somehow, Ino can't bear to throw it away, so she keeps it; a reminder of what she had once and doesn't have anymore.
She locks herself away sometimes too, and she is not longer Ino, whose best friend is Sakura and who shares her lunch with her everyday nor Ino, the girl who is happy and free and without a care in the world.
She is Ino, whose rival is Sakura and who pines after Sasuke with the rest of the girls in her class. She is Ino, the girl who is angry and jealous and cries alone in her room.
oOOo
Her name is Ino. She is fourteen years-old. She likes winning, Sasuke Uchiha, and the idea of marrying him someday. She is alone.
oOOo
That boy, who, she learns is called Sai, is in her class when it comes to high school, and she pays him no heed any longer, because she is Ino Yamanaka, and those who are below her do not deserve her attention - he may as well be a rock in her shoe, tiny, unimportant, easy to ignore, but always, irritatingly, there.
But he unnerves her, with his bottomless black gaze, and he unnerves her, with the distant indifference he faces the world with, and he unnerves her, because he doesn't seem to care that she is there, that she is winning, and soon, the entire world will know her name, and he should - but he doesn't. Just sits there with his black and white drawings and black and white self, and watches the world revolve before him.
He is like a painting, himself, almost. Made with ink and white paper, hanging on a wall on the hallway of destiny, silent, still, unchangeable, yet unable to change anything.
Sometimes she'd like to be a painting herself, when she sees Sakura and Sasuke in the hallway, their hands intertwined like a cat's cradle.
They don't match, she thinks, as they walk, laughing, by her, as if she is not there at all.
Sakura is too colorful, too right in your face, too loud. Her hair, still bubblegum pink, Ino notes, draws the attention of passerby's and her eyes are a violent shade of green, a shade too bright to be called emerald, a shade to dark to be dubbed apple. Sasuke is nearly as black-and-white as Sai, but more like a statue of some Greek god of ancient times, much too flawless and beautiful and exquisite to be placed by the unattractive mishmash of pink and green that is Sakura.
Ino, however, would suit him perfectly, she ponders. Like the princess and prince in the fairytales her father used to read to her when she was younger.
This world isn't perfect, though, and she knows better than to believe in fairytales.
Fairy tales might not be real, she thinks to herself. But mine will be.
And for a little while, she believes herself.
oOOo
Her name is Ino. She is sixteen years-old. She wishes for darkness and sleep and quietness. So she jumps from the sky and leaves her fiery wings behind.
oOOo
The wind ruffles her hair, like a caressing touch, and she wonders if it will drop her to the bottom of the cliff like she wants it too, fling her aside, like a fairytale prince gone horribly wrong. One who has grown tired of his princess and would care for a new one.
She takes another step forwards.
How my world has changed, she muses, reminiscing of the girl with golden hair and blue eyes much like her own, who laughed and sang and danced all to the rhythm of her heart. And she had thought herself the queen of her own kingdom. The irony of it all.
Another step.
She is afraid, yes. She thinks of a time long ago, back when she was still a little girl, and caught up at the top of a tree. It had been so easy climbing up, higher, and higher, and higher, watching the sky come closer and closer to herself, but when she got to the top, she looked down and feared the way down. The world had seemed so very far away, and her father had seemed so very small.
"Jump," he had said. "I'll catch you."
Another step.
He is gone now. Like so many other people she knows.
Another step.
The chasm looms before her. It doesn't seem so hard anymore.
In another world, another time, a little girl with blonde hair jumps out of the tree and into her father's arms. And when Ino jumps, she is not afraid anymore, because she knows that Death shall be there to catch her.
oOOo
Ba-bump.
Ino wanders inside her mind, lost and alone and frightened. She tries to fan away the mist that hangs heavily around her, but it sweeps back, grey and thick and obscuring her vision.
Ba-bump.
What is that sound? she asks herself. There it is again:
Ba-bump.
A light blooms amidst the grey, bright and warm and welcoming. Like home. She looks back, and sees a shadow. Faces swim in the mistiness.
Sakura. Sasuke. Her father. Her mother.
She twists back towards the light.
Home. Yes, home. I'd like that.
She runs towards her own heartbeat.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
oOOo
When she awakes, he is there.
That boy, her mind supplies, even as her lips form, "Sai."
He looks up for one moment, then turns back to his notebook, hand never drifting from the page.
She falls back onto the bed, but doesn't look away, eyes fixed on his fingers.
"Ino."
It takes a while for her to conclude that it is her name he has just said.
oOOo
Her name is Ino. She is seventeen years-old. She wishes for things she can't have and things that have never been hers, and so tries to draw her worries away.
oOOo
"No. Like this. Grip it tighter."
Ino complies, and pulls the pencil across the page, leaving a trail of charcoal behind. It is black, like ash, or dust, and settles against the white paper just like either of the two, and she misses her wings of fire.
Sai is patient, as she expects him to be, as she awkwardly stumbles over trees that drop scattered ebony into the breeze (Sakura flashes in her mind and she grounds the tip of the pencil onto the page, little black shavings staining the white,) and sunlit hills that are marked through with jagged black lightning (Sasuke dances through her memories and her hand falters, scoring darkness across the sky.)
She does not ask him why he was there in her room that day, and he does not ask her why she was there in the first place. Instead, they draw, and she is glad of the silence that comes with Sai.
There are different types of silence, she has noticed, and she scours the paper with black as she thinks.
The first type of silence is heavy, one that is uncomfortable and awkward, thick enough to be cut with a knife. This silence Ino hates the most, for she has lost any knife she would've used to cut it with long ago.
Then there is the silence that accumulates if left alone for too long in one place. This silence is like dust, gentle, unnoticeable at first, but will gather slowly, but steadily, until it is difficult to remove all of it without much effort and toil.
There is also silence that is hard and thin, and will shatter like glass or ice, when hit, but when broken, it will leave sharpness and coldness behind, and will make one wish they had left it alone in the first place.
Lastly, there is Sai's silence - a different one that only he brings. His silence is like a thin, gauzy veil, nearly imperceptible, but there somehow. She likes this silence, she realizes. It is like a fine barrier against the world, a shield, that she can hide behind, but still delicate enough to be ripped apart by anyone who comes too close.
She learns things about Sai, as well. Things she'd never thought to think about before when he was that boy, and she was Ino.
She'd always thought him a painting, or a drawing on a piece of parchment. Now she knows that he is not like either of these things.
Paper is fragile, but it has sharp edges, and it easy for someone to cut themselves on it. Yet it is easy, as well, to rip apart into pieces, by accident or done deliberately.
No one thinks to mend paper when it is split apart, and it cannot mend itself.
Sai is not like this.
No. Sai is a being made of smoke and shadow, always there, in the background. No one disturbs smoke or shadow, preferring to let it be, but some things do - something always will do. The wind blows smoke into wisps. Light slices shadow in half. However smoke will drift back together again when the wind has died away, shadow will return to blackness once the light has left.
Ino is paper. Sai is shadow.
The world has come to strange places when the shadow finds itself trying to fix paper.
oOOo
She is Ino. She is twenty years-old. She likes drawing, the dark and college. She is almost happy again.
oOOo
Ino decides to undergrad in psychology, when she graduates from high school, for what reasons, she does not know why. Perhaps she wishes to follow in her father's footsteps. Or maybe she has other reasons. But she takes it, and that is the end of it.
She is not sure what Sai does, when he does not come to see her, but she sees the shadows under his eyes and the weariness in his steps when he does, and decides not to ask, because sometimes, things are better left unspoken.
She does well, and she thinks that her professor likes her, even, when he smiles at her from beneath his mask of scars, and she smiles back.
She does not see Sasuke or Sakura again. Nor Naruto or Hinata or Shikamaru or any of her friends from days past. Until an envelope appears in her mail box and she opens it.
oOOo
Sasuke and Sakura's wedding is the epitome of a perfect match, because Sakura is beautiful as the flower she is named after, and Sasuke is as handsome as she remembers, Greek statue still. She picks up the broken pieces of her heart and forms them into a smile as she watches Sakura walk down the aisle, glowing and happy and everything Ino is not.
She is not sure why they have invited her, but she will not ruin their life for them.
"You've changed, Ino," Sakura says to her, still clothed in white, a little later on.
"Yes," she replies. "I have." She doesn't look back when she leaves.
oOOo
She finds Sai beneath a tree, a book in his hands, frowning at the words.
"What is it?" she asks him, kneeling beside him.
It is a dictionary, he tells her, and she follows his slender, pale, artist's finger to a single definition inscribed in tiny, black letters upon the page.
Love
noun.
1. an intense feeling of deep affection.
2. a person or thing that one loves.
verb.
1. feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to (someone.)
"I don't understand," he says. "What is love?"
Ino smiles a smile that she knows is not really one. "I don't really understand either, Sai."
She wishes that she did, so that she could tell him.
Something odd stirs in her, and she shakes it away.
oOOo
She is Ino. She is twenty-five years-old. She likes drawing, the dark, and her job. She thinks that, maybe, she might be in love.
oOOo
She is crying, and she is not sure why.
The sky is shedding tears of its own, and they pitter-patter around her like glass beads that melt into nothingness once they hit the ground.
Perhaps it is because she is clutching a picture in her hand, and picture of he and Sakura and Sasuke when everything was right and perfect. Perhaps it is because there is a ribbon, tattered and wrinkled by age and her own fist, in her other hand. Perhaps it is because she is thinking of the past and the things she has lost. Perhaps she is just crying and she doesn't have a reason to.
The rain stops, and she looks up, and her eyes collide with a pair of black ones.
"Sai," she breathes, and wraps her arms around him.
He drops the umbrella and hugs her back. He smells like paint and autumn and something sharp like pine. She rests her cheek against his chest and lets her tears drip onto his shirt.
"Ino," she hears him say, above the noise of the rain. "I think I know what love is now."
"I…I think I do too," she whispers, and she wonders if he hears.
oOOo
Her name is Ino. She is twenty-six years-old. She likes flowers, sunshine and dancing in the rain. She dreams of castles on distant hills and a prince of black ink on white parchment. Her wings of fire are gone, so she flies on wings of ash.
oOOo
She holds yellow flowers for happiness.
She weaves golden Asiatic lilies and pale saffron Missouri primroses and orange-yellow daylilies and dark yellow Danae roses into her bouquet and against her white dress, they look like little blooms of sunlight.
Yellow is for happiness, she tells Sai, when she picks out the flowers. She plucks out a lily and slips it into his lapel.
She remembers Sakura's roses - pink, they were.
Pink is for love, she thinks. But I've got enough of love already.
Sai tastes like raindrops and salt and something citrusy between orange and lemon.
"Catch me," she says to him.
"I will," he answers.
And she throws her yellow flowers into the breeze.
oOOo
The End
A/N: I feel like SaiIno is a really under appreciated pairing, and I love it, so that's why I ended up choosing that for this… (As well as it being the only canon pairing I ship, but, yeah, whatever.) And I think a lot of people end up forgetting that it's Sakura who ended their friendship in the first place, not Ino, as shown by all those AU high school fanfics where Ino's some really bitchy cheerleader or something, so I wanted to write something where Ino's not the bad guy.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this, I actually quite liked writing it.
Leave a review on your way out!
-the author (obviously)