1Summary: The heart that is a (w)hole. (Because dogs are smarter than bugs, after all. The first mission alone, and Kiba does not know what to say or how to ask.)

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Pairings: Shino/Kiba

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Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.-'A Dog Has Died', Pablo Neruda

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Hinata tells him one day, that dogs are smarter than bugs. With her small hands, and her ant-sized voice, Kiba cannot quite believe that she could be favoring him. Shino, next to them then, looks only minimally irritated by this (if indeed, Kiba can look at him and know him like he promises to everyone that he does), and so Kiba thinks perhaps it is not an insult at all. On their first mission without Kurenai, Hinata's eyes are wide and round like the moons of the world on her face (by the time she is fifteen, there are many moons to her center, but there is only one world to her moon. Kiba is not this one, and in the short time he pauses to watch her smile at Naruto who passes them and grins and shouts so loudly, Kiba thinks that he does not want to be, that he never tried hard enough to be. and Shino is not either, so it is alright. it's alright.). The spot where Kurenai is supposed to sit is kept open– when Akamaru tries to sit there, curling into his touch, Kiba shoves him away. When a bug crawls from the surface of the earth of the wide space of ground, Shino calls it away.

"I-it's not an insult, Kiba-kun," she explains so quickly, but directs this reassurance for Shino towards Kiba (you wonder sometimes if you are not the only person, not even including Shino, who gets angry for Shino's sake). "Dogs...they have bigger brains, bigger hearts, bigger bones. It's not a matter of favoritism, Kiba-kun."

Kiba thinks about dogs and their brains and their hearts and their bones. He thinks of Shino as he flicks a bug away from the flame of the camp-fire where it crawls into the mulch of the forest floor and is gone. "It's just the truth." she says.

(A dog, with all of it's big-boned glory, cannot carry a hundred times it's weight. There is you, who is smart but entirely dumb, and there is Shino, who is calculating and clueless, who ignores what people say of him simply because his beetle-wrung heart is not big enough to understand why those things are supposed to be painful, and there is Hinata, with her ant-voice, and her small heart (so small, that it drips everywhere like a pen filled with water, spewing ink and blotches, useless with it's staining), and her little brain, and her tiny bones, who carries and carries one-hundred times and smiles.)

"I'm smarter than you," Kiba says. Shino looks up at him, where Kiba pretends he knows the shift of his eyebrow and the twitch of his cheek and exactly what it means, and Shino unzips his jacket and folds it and looks, almost, as if considering to fold Kiba's, which is splayed out in every direction that could make it messiest and crowds over onto the edge of his sleeping bag. Instead, he toes it away, and watches Kiba watch him watch as Kiba stomps mud into the tent with his sandals.

"You are." Shino states, because it is not a matter of favoritism. And Kiba (too dumb to say a thing), watches kikaichuu slip in and out of fresh holes in Shino's skin as he sleeps while Kiba wonders if they do the same to Shino's heart. And he does not know how to ask.