Pairing: Shikamaru/Ino
Genre: Romance/Humor
Summary: He knows who she is. Sometimes, it seemed, even better than she knew herself.
A/N: Translation from a one-shot I wrote in Spanish. Feedback, please!
"I know you better than you think," he told her jokingly.
Ino, who believed in feminine mystique above all things, was not amused by his humor. She sent him out the door with a well placed kick at his ass.
She thought she'd heard him whimper, but when she paid attention, she found out he was laughing. It was typical of Shikamaru, she thought as she fumed.
That was when they were both twelve years old.
At fifteen, he knew how to avoid her during her most sensitive days. He never knew if she wanted to stomp him to death or cry inconsolably on his shoulder without rhyme or reason he could understand. Sometimes, not even that could save him from undeserving insults resulting from her bad temper.
On her birthday, she wasn't happy with the many gifts she'd received, all of them stacked like an additional wall in the room. Not even the one marked with the name Uchiha Sasuke made her happy.
One Nara Shikamaru arrived three days late, with various assorted wounds and one badly wrapped gift in orange paper—her least favorite color. Despite being furious, she refrained from beating him senseless. But on seeing the pair of photos in metallic frames, her homicidal tendencies calmed in front of an audience of hospital patients.
The first frame she looked at was of their trio—her, Chouji and Shikamaru three years earlier, when they had first been assigned to Team Ten.
The second was of the two of them—they had been dance partners at an Academy festival when they were five.
"You've always liked blue," he told her as he pointed at the blue dress the smaller version of Ino wore that day.
Although participation in the dance had been obligatory, remembering it was not. Perhaps it was because of that she laughed hysterically and didn't stop smiling for the rest of the week.
At seventeen, Shikamaru was sometimes the victim of savage embraces, spontaneous and truly affectionate from what seemed to be an insane girl. When confronted with the question of why she didn't share those hugs with Chouji, Ino would reply that she didn't have arms long enough to throw around him.
Shikamaru stopped asking.
At nineteen, she stopped talking about Uchiha with the same interest that she once had as a competitive child. He thought it was her way of approving the relationship between Sasuke and Sakura.
Instead a certain nostalgia appeared with the way she talked about the first missions when it was only them three and how the InoShikaChouji team would attack. Although in those days they had never been very successful, to her it seemed important only to remember.
She could make him smile despite him complaining about his Jounin level solitary missions.
When she saw him at Naruto's birthday party, she refused to eat the chocolate cake.
"I'm on a diet," she explained.
Despite that, he took her a piece of cake when she sat down in the porch.
"I know you better than you think," he told her, offering her the plate.
When she didn't do or say anything, he worried. But she knew that since always, he'd known her too well.
This first time, she kissed him.