Title: … then there are the nights.
Rating: R
Words: 13,334
Summary: They sentence her to life. Ino would have preferred death.
Notes: Dark AU. Ino-centric. Minor InoNaru. Open ending! For those who follow the KakaSaku chats, this is the fic that was known as 'Nightmare' for a very long time. Written to fill neocorleone's request. Fills the 'Deals' square on my Dark Fantasy Bingo Card and the 'Slavefic' square on my Trope Bingo Card.
Warnings: Character death, mass destruction, non-consensual pseudo-incest, suicidal thoughts, and demonic possession (willing and unwilling).
She bleeds.
In some ways the feel of slick, thick liquid gliding down her hands and then hitting the floor with a rhythmic plop, plop, plop, is soothing. She shifts just enough, twisting her hips so that the blood won't stain her clothes (even now that would irk her) and waits for them to hand down her punishment.
She could tell someone about the bleeding. She doesn't. No one cares-not even her.
The cavern she's in is dank, damp and dark. Like most of New Konoha is. Ino wonders if anyone will look at her crimes and realize that without them, without her, they never would have reached New Konoha in time to weather the storms on the surface with minimal casualties.
So far, she lowers her eyelashes and peers around the dark cell, the answer is a definite no. It's too soon, Ino thinks. Far too soon after the end of the world for anyone to be rational. Except for her and she has no idea how long she'll be rational. Even now, the clock is ticking.
She knows that if she begs, if she's properly penitent, properly remorseful, her sentence will be lighter. Sakura has been by three times in the last while (days mean nothing to her, here in the dark) brimming with that expectation. That Ino will feel sorry.
Ino isn't sorry.
Every time Sakura leaves disappointed, bewildered, and upset, Ino finds herself even less sorry. Sakura is alive to feel all those things. She did it right. (And Sakura knows Ino is hurt and never offers to heal her. Sakura also never points out that Ino could heal herself, if she really wants to. Sakura has always been Ino's best friend.)
Ino hopes judgment falls in her favour and that her sentence is death.
She's not sorry, never sorry, for what she's done. It's saved the lives of most of the village. So they had to move, so what? The Will of Fire burns where they are, not where they live.
She's sorry she didn't do it stealthier, in order to keep Shikamaru from twigging that she was up to something and following her to his death. She's sorry because… god, she's sorry for herself, and scared of what awaits her if she lives.
For three days now, her wrists have oozed blood in a steady drip. It should have stopped by now or killed her. It's done neither. Ino bites her lip and tries hard not to think about what that means for her already.
She wants, needs death.
But she won't beg for it. She knows she doesn't deserve that much mercy.
They sentence her to life.
Sort of.
She's exiled from New Konoha and forbidden from ever setting foot in the underground city that's taking place, growing with every day, as people adapt to the changes in their lifestyles.
She's chained, however, with chakra bonds that keep her from going too far and finding freedom in another country, in a place that has been left untouched by the devastation. No one knows at this junction if such a place even exists but they take the precaution against letting her find out.
The verdict is that they will send her up to the surface. The first of the criminals of war and other pettier things to be left to the elements and dangers that Ino unleashed on the world. It's fitting, they tell her.
Ino laughs and laughs so long that it turns to tears of mirth at the sentence until Tsunade, still the Hokage, slaps her across the face. That shuts her up, breaks her jaw in a starburst of white-hot pain. It doesn't alter her amusement one bit and as ANBU grab her roughly by the arms and force her to her feet, Ino knows that the Hokage knows she's still amused.
Knows and doesn't understand why.
The surface is a death sentence to most people.
Not to Ino.
Sakura visits her one last time before she's due to be dragged up to the surface. Ino doesn't turn her head to look at her oldest, truest friend and keeps her eyes closed.
It doesn't fool either of them.
"Why?" Sakura asks quietly, kneeling down beside Ino, almost too close for comfort.
Ino wonders where her guards are but, of course, Sakura is the Hokage's protégé and most likely successor since Naruto went feral due to Kyuubi's influence two years ago. If Sakura told the guards to go away, they would.
She wonders if Naruto still exists, somewhere, in the shell of his body that Kyuubi rules. Will she be like that someday? Ino hopes, if that day comes, she won't be aware of it.
"Why, Ino?" Sakura repeats, her voice steely. The time for hope has past. "You owe me that."
That stings. It's possibly true. Ino shifts, opens her eyes, giving up the pretense of not being awake, and looks at Sakura. It's still dark but she can see some of the green in Sakura's eyes. A lantern has been lit and left outside the cell. She can't talk. Her jaw has swollen and she hasn't bothered to summon chakra to heal it.
Sakura mutters a curse and lifts a hand, glowing green, to heal that. The cessation of pain is both a blessing and a curse. Ino says nothing as Sakura even heals her wrists and the other bruises, scrapes and cuts that come from being in captivity in a village that somewhat rightly places the blame for the destruction of the village at her feet.
"Tsunade is going to kill you," Ino says, her voice raspy. "If I bled to death, or died of starvation, she'd be happy."
"So would you," Sakura says flatly.
Ino doesn't answer. Which is answer enough for both of them.
"Tell me why," Sakura says, dropping her hand, the glow fading out. "It's too late to make a difference in your sentence."
Ino thinks back over the blurred together days since everything changed. "I did it to save the village," she says, finally, telling the truth. She's always been honest when she can be. Her lies are for her own life, not her village. "It was coming anyway. If I hadn't done anything no one would be here. There would be no New Konoha."
"You can't know that."
"I do." Ino doesn't look away from Sakura's eyes. "I accept my sentence, Sakura. I wanted a more final one."
Sakura opens her mouth, then closes it, frowning.
"Everything I did," Ino says, "I did for the good of the entire village."
"Not the individual people?"
Ino's smile is twisted but lively. "I've never been one to put individuals over the village as a whole. Over myself, yes… over Konoha… no."
Sakura nods unwillingly. Her face is shadowed and her eyes are shuttered. She stands. "I hope you live with what you've done for a long time," she says and Ino knows why she's really been healed and who spoke to Tsunade in order to leave her alive. Sakura knows her better than any.
This will hurt more.
"I love you too," Ino says, smiling. Only love would be and is so cruel.
Sakura flinches and turns away.
"No one told me," Ino says. "Did Chouji make it out?"
"If he did, would you want to see him?" Sakura's back is straight and offers no clues.
"No."
Sakura hesitates a moment and then nods. "Yes." she says. "He made it. Goodbye, Ino."
That's the last time she ever sees Sakura.
Hours later (the next morning, she suspects) she's escorted with little ceremony and less fanfare to the surface. Sakura isn't there, with her face pale and drawn and her eyes like chips of frozen jade, but Ino imagines she is because she should be, would be, if she was a little bit colder a person.
(If their positions were reversed, Ino knows she would be front and center in watching as Sakura was escorted to exile.)
As it is, Ino contents herself with pretending Sakura is there as a pink-haired compliment to the Hokage's blonde hair and the white and black of the ANBU. Chouji isn't there either. That's less surprising than Sakura because Chouji hasn't seen her once since Shikamaru died and the village was destroyed.
Hasn't seen her at all because he blames her for the village. For Shikamaru. That she saved his life, he'll never know.
Ino walks blindly along the dark corridors, hastily dug out with earth jutsu, her arms getting bruised by the grip the ANBU have her in needlessly. She has no intention of escaping.
When they reach the surface, she's thrust out into the sunlight, blinding and harsh without a word being spoken—not even a condemnation being said. Behind her, the jutsu-carved tunnel snaps shut and she's left alone with the ruins of what used to be Konoha.
Her, the ruined village, and the monsters.
Ino almost hopes they try for her and doubts they will. If anything, she thinks, they'll know her as mother.
The sun is hot enough, the humidity thick enough to taste, that the weather should be a primary concern for anyone. She doesn't worry about it. Instead of being debilitating, the unnatural sun strengthens her. Ino watches as it appears to bleach the new bruises from her arms and wonders what it will do to her clothing, given time.
She wonders she's supposed to do now.
Lying down and dying isn't an option. For one, she's not sure it'd work.
For another, every scrap of being she has left rebels against the idea. Ino has never laid down and just taken anything. Dying would have been easier and New Konoha and the Hokage had their chance to give her the option.
They didn't.
Now she's got to live.
Ino hopes that no one comes up here. In a few years, five or maybe ten, she's not going to be herself any longer and they will die by her hand directly, rather than indirectly. She hopes they never find out that they really should have killed her when they had the chance.
She doesn't want to see that heartbreaking realization in Sakura's eyes. The knowledge that being cruel rather than kind had backfired viciously. Gathering up her composure, Ino turns away from the village, into the scant remnants of what used to be a full forest, and begins looking for supplies.
How long she'll still be mostly human is anyone's guess. But until Ino dies and the monster she invited in takes over, she's going to need somewhere to sleep.
It takes her two weeks to build a rough house, liberally cheating by creative usage of chakra and unusual applications of war jutsu. A carpenter would scoff at her job but Ino is proud of it, as much as she can be of anything.
In those two weeks, she eats and drinks nothing and is healthier than ever.
When she thinks about it, that frightens her.
(How much has she changed already?)
So she doesn't think about it.
Her home, and the ruins of Old Konoha that it borders on, she aptly renames 'Nightmare'. Making the sign as elaborate as possible, carving it by hand, keeps her busy enough to not think about it.
For a little while.
She's left alone for a few months, to consider her options and consider what mortality means (she comes up with no answers except that, whatever it means, she's probably not it any longer). Ino starts a log, to see how unusual her body is. It takes four weeks and a day for her to feel thirsty. It takes her another month and a half without eating to feel hungry.
Sleep, she still needs more regularly, though even that is diminishing.
Ino doesn't see any monsters unless she goes looking for them. They're around but they seem content to ignore her rough home, which she's glad for even as she wonders why and then wishes she can't think of a few answers.
Instead, she keeps working on her home. She's still trying to figure out how to build a fireplace; thanks to training she knows a great number of ways one can be compromised and not a single way to build one. She's never had to, not in Konoha. Weather in Nightmare is different than what Konoha was used to. During the day it's hot, scorching and blistering and warming her through.
The nights get cold. Colder than she's ever known and the sub-zero winds rip through her house and her bones and her skin with equal ease. Nights are the only real trial and even that, she thinks, she can work around.
After all, it just takes time, and she's got either too much or not enough of that left.
She stands on the edge of the cliff that marks, in her mind, the boundaries between Nightmare, which thrives, if a population of one can thrive, and Old Konoha's remnants, down in the crater. Ino squints and can pick out the small specks of movement-monsters. Biting her lip thoughtfully, she wavers on the edge and considers her model fireplaces and how none of them have worked.
There might be something she can salvage from the village. The monsters, she's almost certain won't touch her.
It's something to consider.
But as the earth rumbles and pulls, twisting on itself the way only earth jutsu can make it do, Ino knows she won't be making a decision today.
She hides herself, painfully thin behind a tree that's seen better days like everything on the surface, and damps down her chakra. Doing so hurts and she bites her lip to keep from gasping at the unexpected pain as a person is shoved out, in front of ANBU who she glimpses for a second, maybe two, all bone-white masks and armour, before the earth slams shut again and only herself and the criminal (for who else would be sent to the surface?) remain.
He isn't someone she recognizes. He moves like a ninja, though, for a few moments, trying to orient himself and failing, not having her peculiar advantages and unused to the light after months of darkness.
Then he collapses and lies, unmoving, in a heap.
Ino tucks her knees up under her chin and peers at him-he's still breathing so that's all right—and considers conspiracy plots as his pasty skin begins, in the course of scant minutes, to turn first pink, then red.
She watches in fascination as he goes from pale and unhealthy to red and unhealthy before belatedly realizing that the reason that's happening is because he can't stand the light. Ino gets to her feet carefully, her conspiracy theories in tatters.
If they were going to send someone after her it would not be someone this pathetic.
Ino ignores the charitable part of herself that points out that, without her situation being what it is, she would have died the way he's dying, burning up quite literally, and that she should help him.
That thought seems right.
It takes her another few minutes to decide if she should act on it. The weird feeling that it's wrong gets her moving over to him and she nudges him with her foot, right on a blistering red burn. He feebly moans as his eyes flutter open in an attempt to see that fails because she moves out of his range.
He doesn't ask for help.
That's the only reason she does. Ino lifts him easily, though he must weigh at least double what she does, and slings him over her shoulders to take him home with her.
He dies that night anyway. Ino stares at his body for a long time before stealing his clothes and dragging his corpse outside her little house. When she hears the monsters come snuffling by later, she does nothing.
His body is gone the next morning.
Ino surveys her riches and considers how to make them last. She has to wash them, so she does that, and then folds them neatly in a pile and promises that she'll figure something out in a bit.
Every day passes with those clothes sitting in a tidy pile and some nights she wakes up and just stares at them for a long while.
She did something wrong.
Ino knows this.
It bothers her that she can't figure out what the wrong thing was. For some reason, she can't bring herself to wear them, even when the nights get colder and colder and colder and she feels like she's going to die.
Someone died in those clothes already, after all.
Eventually she uses the shirt—much larger than she needs—to fashion two curtains from. For her needle she uses a chakra hardened bit of her own hair. For her thread, she uses her hair without the chakra in it.
When she hangs the curtains in her windows, she thinks they look pretty fine, for a makeshift job.
The pants and underthings go to rags and the shoes she eventually cuts down to her size properly.
She never forgets that a dead man is the reason she has these things. There's just days where it matters less than others. When it occurs to her that if they've sent one man up to die that they might send others, it takes Ino three days to actually go and check. She spends those three days lying on ground that used to be lush with grass and letting the heat bake her.
She never so much as tans the slightest bit; her skin has gotten and remains as pale as snow.
Ino spends those three days dreaming under the heat that killed a man in less than twenty minutes (he lived longer, yes, but he was dead by the time she picked him up—he just hadn't stopped moving yet) and wondering if she should be scared.
She was, once.
Not any longer.
It doesn't seem to matter.
When the interest to see if there have been more criminals sent to her, sent to burn, outweighs the apathy for the same thing, Ino wanders over to where New Konoha opens the earth.
There's crumpled clothing and the ashy remnants of what used to be a person. Ino picks up the hair ribbon—pink—and uses it to tie her hair back before gathering the rest of the clothes. She can find a use for them.
It takes her another body found, weeks maybe even months later, before she thinks to set a chakra wire to let her know when a new sacrifice is sent up.
Ino doesn't know if she means to save them or not.
Some she does, and the tiny village of Nightmare slowly grows, the few residents she saves staying in her home long enough to figure out the jutsu to build their own, tunnels being erected between each home, for their ease, not hers.
Some she lets die and takes their things to give to her villagers.
Even on reflection, Ino can never tell why she saves some and why she lets others die.
The other residents avoid her. They need her to survive but she knows their eyes watch her fearfully and Ino ignores them, rarely talking, disappearing for days into the ruins and coming back with various bits and pieces of the old village.
She never brings back a mirror.
There's some things, still, that she doesn't want to face.
Nightmare never flourishes.
It's a broken town of broken people and while this bothers Ino not at all, it bothers the other residents. Few survive more than a few months and those that do, begin to change. They are never as strong as her, never as capable of withstanding the extreme heat, but they listen to her more than the other villagers.
Ino never says but she knows why.
One day, they'll call her 'mother' like all the other monsters.
The others just die. She rules unchallenged over the little village and cares not at all if her citizens kill one another.
Months and years and deaths later, Nightmare is maintaining an average of thirty living people in it when Naruto comes by.
The people of Nightmare send for her. Most of them, these days, obey her every whim. Ino doesn't know when that stopped bothering her and cannot remember why it should bother her.
Seeing Naruto is an uncomfortable smack to the face.
He stands on the edge of the crater that marks where Konoha used to be, his back to her, staring down at where once upon a happier time they'd all lived. Power radiates off him in swooping, spinning tendrils and even as she watches, he burns and then heals.
The sun hurts him but he's constantly recovering from it. Unlike her, who it doesn't hurt at all. She's bleached-white, her hair nearly see-through pale, and her clothing hangs off of her because she's so thin.
(She doesn't remember the last time she's needed to eat.)
"Naruto." Her voice, seldom used, sounds different than she remembers. In her memories, it's a nice voice, a little shrill when she's upset, but normal enough.
Now it's like the tolling of death bells.
Naruto turns around and his eyes are slit and bloody red. He grins at her, sharp-edged and broken.
She doesn't smile back.
"Nice kingdom you've got here," he says.
"It's mine," she tells him, wondering if she can kill him now that she's changed, now that he's changed. "They gave it to me thinking I'd die."
"Maybe we'd be better off dead."
"I thought that, once."
He doesn't ask when she changed her mind and they lapse into silence. It's weirdly comfortable with the sun beating, burning down on them. Ino watches her people, her monsters, wander the ruins like lost ghosts and studies Naruto's perpetually healing sunburn in about equal measure.
"It doesn't hurt anymore," he says, once he realizes what she's watching.
"No more pain?" she asked, barely remembering what pain is. "Or did you just get used to it?"
"Same thing."
She nods slightly, and then asks, "Are there better places in the world now?"
Without the too-hot sun and death and monsters where humanity cannot exist. How is New Konoha doing under the ground? Are they flourishing?
Are they dying?
Are there places that have never been touched by this sort of disaster?
"I don't know," Naruto says. "Maybe. The fox controls me more than I control it."
"Why are you here?"
Naruto glances at her, his eyes flaring a brighter red. "Maybe he wanted some like company."
Ino narrows her eyes. "I'm not a demon."
"Aren't you?" He laughs softly, a snickering thing that Naruto, before hell came, had never possessed. It's not his laugh.
Her voice isn't hers either. Can he tell that? Or is he further gone than she is?
Does it even matter when nothing matters?
"I can't be," she says, wrestling history lessons from disused memories. "Demons have to be born. They're not made."
"Maybe," he says, softly, "they're just working with a different definition of born than you are."
She's silent for a long time. It could be moments or it could be years.
"Maybe," Ino says finally.
Naruto stays.
Sometimes, when thought is easier to accomplish and she doesn't lose track of time just by laying in the sun, Ino wonders if that's really even his name any longer. Then that leads her to wondering if her name is rightly hers which gives her a headache and so she stops thinking about it.
Does it really matter that Naruto is wicked and red-eyed and reeks of demonic chakra and burns and heals continuously?
Does it matter that once upon a time he'd been a blue-eyed blond with dreams to protect people?
It mattered, once. She knows that. It just doesn't seem to matter any longer.
Ino likes him the way he is now. Mostly.
What she doesn't like about him are his questions. Time goes by, like a dream, like something wispy and intangible until Ino cannot tell how long it's been since she created Nightmare, since she was banished to the surface and flourished instead of wilted.
(Her sign is cracked and brittle but that could be the brutal heat followed by the equally brutal cold. It tells time as poorly as she does, these days.)
Naruto stays and with him, now and then, are his questions.
If he asked them more often, she thinks she might have killed him. As it is, he is the one constant in her life. Angry, red-eyed and dangerous. Like a disease in a test tube, just waiting for a clumsy medic-nin to spill it everywhere.
When he's in a questioning mood, she learns to disappear.
His questions leave her headachy and irritable and her minions (her children of this awful dream) are more obedient when she's not killing them from frustration.
He asks about innocuous things. At least, that's what he seems to think they are, for all the import he places on them.
Things like:
Do you miss them?
What happened to make the world like this?
What did you do, Ino?
He never seems to care, it just appears to be idle chatter to him but the questions drive spikes of agony into her mind and rattle her the way nothing else does. When he bothers her too much, she fades into the scenery, like less than a shadow (he cannot find her this way; she's tested this thoroughly and she is less than a breeze and even harder to notice) and broods.
It keeps her minions happier, when she handles it this way, than if she handles it with rage. Even now, Ino can learn.
She doesn't like the lessons though.
Ino never answers Naruto, except in her own mind, and even then the thoughts are pain-riddled and broken and she's bruised with the effort. Her eyes drip with blood that's murky and the wrong shade. Not at all the brilliant splash of scarlet that it should be.
The blood sizzles and burns holds in the ground.
Even that's acidic.
Do you miss them?
She doesn't know. She can barely remember them. How is she supposed to miss people who haven't mattered to her for years, haven't crossed her mind in ages. What are they to her?
Why does she cry tears of blood and why does her head ache fiercely, viciously, like she's fighting for the first time in decades?
Has it even been decades?
Ino lurks around Naruto, soundless and invisible and yet present for three weeks before reappearing on his bed in her house while he paces the room like a restless storm.
He smiles, sharp-edged and cruel at her. It's a pleasure, his smile says, but his eyes are too calculating for it to be Naruto's pleasure.
He doesn't ask her that question again, leaves it be for a few weeks (and since when has she started counting time again?) and then asks the next question when the first is still leaving her aching and restless and discomfited.
What happened to leave the world like this?
Ino doesn't remember, except she does and just doesn't want to remember because those memories are sharp and harsh-edged and leave her feeling broken the way nothing else does these days. Not even the brutal cold, which still tugs and bites at her limbs in the nights, hurts as much.
She avoids Naruto more and more, even while he grins a terrifying grin as he rules her village in her stead.
Her minions are scared of him, so they obey.
Ino hates them all a little, for that.
Truthfully, she hates them and she envies them. It would be nice, she thinks, to not have to do anything but obey someone without thinking. She's never been able to do that. She remembers that. She knows that.
She still is that. Isn't she?
Ino stares out over the ruins of Konoha, her legs clicking against the rock, sounding alien and unreal to her ears even though she's heard it before and had no problems with the sound prior to this. It troubles her that it should bother her now. Ino looks down at herself. She's stretched, too thin, nearly see-through in places. If she squints, she can view the rock through her arms. Is it that she's been changed so much that she really is see-through? Or is it that her eyesight has improved to the point where she can do it?
The minions aren't see-through but then, she knows, they're something different. They're not like the way she is. Naruto isn't see-through either but that's harder to gauge. He is Naruto-with-Kyuubi and Kyuubi's power is incomprehensible and different from hers. Is she a demon? She doesn't feel like one.
But then, what does being a demon feel like?
As she puzzles over these things, skittering around the memories that ache and burn and make her think of strange things like love (what is love? does it matter in this broken world?) her gaze shifts from the rocks and her arm back to the village. There, a hulking black shape of ooze and something less identifiable with a hundred limbs that flail and stretch around, dangerous and deadly and she's seen it before, it's growing.
It doesn't scare her.
That used to be the people of Konoha. While the little minions, the ones that are around her size, not far out of the usual range for a person, are individual minions. The giant one is a combination. She watches it doubtfully. The little ones listen to her. She's never tried to command the big one but it should listen to her.
For a moment, she's tempted to head down to Konoha, what's left of it, and see what can be done with it.
Ino stays where she is.
She remembers what happened, once upon a time, and the acid of her tears eats through the rock she rests on, seeping straight through her body. No, she'll leave the big one alone. She knows who is in there. She doesn't want control over them.
"Crying doesn't help," Naruto says, his voice a low and painful growl.
She dashes away tears and watches them sizzle, her face growing cold. Ino hadn't heard him coming up behind her but it doesn't matter. Right here and now, she doesn't believe he'll kill her. Maybe she is just company. "You're one to talk," she says. "You ran away. Every time something bad happened, you took off. You weren't ever here."
He's silent and clambers over to sit next to her. His every movement is something liquid and inhuman. Ino knows she moves that way too. Perhaps they're not so different, he and her.
"That's one way to look at it."
Ino's hair curls around her arms in living silky tendrils. They're warm against her skin. Warm in a way that even the sun isn't. It should shock her that they move on their own but nothing shocks her these days when every dawn brings a little less of her humanity back with it. (And what use does she have of her humanity these days?)
"It's the only way to look at it," Ino says, letting her heels pound on the rock with a sharp, almost painful, sound of chimes. "Even if you meant to do it for training or for some other reason, you weren't ever there. When things went bad, you left."
He'd been gone when the village had been destroyed. Maybe if he'd been around, she wouldn't be like this right now. That's unfair of her to think. He can't read her mind so she thinks it anyway.
"Do you blame me?" he asks.
"Does it matter?" she returns.
He's silent for a long, achy moment that spins on for what feels like a decade and less than a second all at once. "Tell me what happened at Konoha."
Maybe it does matter.
"I don't want to remember," she says, even though she does and with his questions can't pretend she forgets. The memories burn and twist in the back of her mind like knots of molten agony. "Everything changed then."
"I want to know," he tells her, not a demand but a fact. "You can tell me."
She doesn't deny that. She can. She just doesn't want to.
"If you do," he says, "I'll tell you something interesting."
Ino watches him for a long moment. "What sort of interesting?"
She thinks that the question is born of years of experience with Naruto but then he smiles his twisted and cruel smile-Kyuubi's smile-at her and she wonders. Perhaps it's just prudence from dealing with a demon. It's hard to say.
"You'll definitely want to know it," he tempts. "It's not a joke. Cross my heart."
"Do you even have a heart any longer?"
He laughs, the sound echoing through her bones. "Do you?"
"What use is one?" Her voice is edged. Ino shifts and pulls her feet up so that they no longer dangle over the edge of Konoha's crater.
"Beats me."
She watches the sky. Had it once upon a time been a different shade of blue? It's deep and drowning-a dark pleasant blue despite being day. Is that the night sky they're seeing? No, there's no stars.
Does it matter?
"I will definitely be interested in what you have to say?"
"Promise."
Naruto has always kept his promises. She has no idea of Kyuubi or the hybrid that Naruto and Kyuubi have become will do the same but Naruto always has.
It's that, more than anything else, which has her considering her words and picking through memories that still burn and feel like bile in her mind. "It started in the evening..."
Ino counts the money from the till and, once she's double-checked her figures, closes it out, makes a note on the ledger, and does another round of the shop to make sure that everything is locked up tight.
"Done," she announces, peering into the back room. "Dad, are we still going out for dinner?"
Her dad blinks, looking up from distilling poisons, his eyes huge due to his goggles. "Yeah," he says, sounding distracted. "Give me a few minutes, princess?"
"You got it." Ino smiles at him. "I'm just going to run and wash up."
He waves her off and she heads up to their home. It's an apartment over the shop and it might have been too small for a larger family but for just her and her dad, it's perfect. Her mom passed away years ago.
Ino is in the shower (having decided that her hair really does need the wash) when things go wrong. It's a feeling, a fleeting, directed malevolence, that races over and slams into her head. Her head cracks against the shower wall and blood, slick and shockingly scarlet spill down to mix with the hot water. She bites through her lip in an attempt not to scream as she struggles to locate where the mind came from and what it wants and oh god it hurts and...
Quick as it comes, it's gone.
She heals her lip and her head both, rinses the blood out of her hair, and flings herself out of the shower. It takes her less than a minute to get dressed and down the stairs to see if her father is okay.
He's shoved himself away from the table with the poisons on it and his hunched over, breathing deeply, his elbows resting on his knees. He looks tired. Like his head pounds as badly as hers does.
"Dad?" she says tentatively, moving over to him. Her fingers brush his hair and he wraps his arms around her.
"You okay?" he asks.
"I'm fine," she says. "Headache. What about you?"
"I had enough warning to get away from the table before getting slammed," he says, letting her go and wincing. "I felt you get swept up." Her dad studies her, like he's making sure that she's really in one piece. Ino is glad she healed herself before coming to see him.
"I'm glad," she says honestly. If he'd gotten hit before her... her mind shudders away from the idea. There are so many ways to die when working with poisons. "Let's get this cleaned up and then conference it."
He nods. It's too dangerous to keep working with the poisons when whatever it was might come back. And they need to find out about the rest of the Clan. The Yamanaka Clan isn't as big or populous as some of the other Clans, but there's more than just the two of them.
"I'll do this," he says, reading her mind. "You go and check on everyone. See if it's a family-thing or if it's hit other families too."
"Be careful," she says.
Naruto tilts his head up at the sky and Ino follows his gaze. It's turning a deep bloody red. "Did it touch anyone but your family?" he asks.
"No. But Aunt Kyoko died," Ino says. "She'd gotten hit by the wave during a training bout, just after her teammate had let loose a volley of kunai."
Naruto winces. "Any other fatalities?"
Ino shakes her head. "A few broken limbs," she says, thinking back to what had happened years ago. "A lot of headaches. Aunt Kyoko's was the only death."
The first death, really.
"What happened next?"
Ino curls up on the couch, her knees tucked under her chin, as she watches her father pace. Beside her are Inoko and Inoue, twins, her nieces. They're thirteen and still sniffly from the pain the wave had caused them. Ryouma sits on a kitchen chair; Naomi perches on the coffee table. The Jounin trio, her cousins, Minoru, Makoto, and Yanagi have claimed the kitchen table as their seat.
Uncle Fu-he refuses to go by his original name any longer-is sitting in another chair.
The rest of the Clan is busy getting injuries taken care of or felt nothing. Her heart bleeds for Aunt Kyoko and her utterly devastated teammate, and her mind races. Everyone in this room is the sum of active, in Konoha, uninjured, shinobi of the Yamanaka Clan.
It's a small clan. It's more troubling that those who weren't active in the military weren't touched by the malevolence.
"We're going to have to go looking for it," her father says grimly, once they've hashed out the fact that it hit them all at approximately the same time-seconds between them, at most-and that the biggest time differences occurred depending on altitude. Those who'd been higher in the village had been hit first.
Ino winces. Her head still aches and no one else looks much better.
"Should we tell someone?" Inoue offers after a whispered conference with her sister. "Like, the Hokage?"
"I'll look after it," Inoichi says calmly. "Don't worry; we won't keep this from our Hokage."
"Did you guys find anything?" Naruto asks.
Ino watches the minions in Konoha wander through the broken remnants of the village. It's hard to say what they're thinking from here. She knows that the minions of Nightmare retain some ability to think. If she went down there, would they hate her? Or would they blindly obey her out of fear and something that marks her as their mother and thus someone who must be obeyed?
With the memories of years ago burning in her head, Ino is tempted to go and see. If the minions killed her, it would serve as a fitting ending, she thinks. And if they couldn't, if they didn't, it would tell her something important too.
"No," she says. "We didn't find anything no matter how long and hard we searched. When the Yamanaka who'd been out on missions at the time came back to the village we discovered that they hadn't felt anything out of the ordinary."
"It had a range?"
"As large as the village," Ino says. "Which, in retrospect, should have told us our danger."
Ino toys with her hair, resisting the urge to chew on it (which she hasn't done since she was a child but it's tempting, now, to fall back on old habits) and watches her father.
They're in the white room and while he searches for the cause, Ino serves as his anchor. If anything happens, she will support him. Usually, he doesn't work with an anchor.
But if the malevolence, as she thinks of it, comes back it's better for all of them to be safe. The Academy level children, even though they hadn't been touched by the waves of malevolence, have been banned from weapons class temporarily, none of them are allowed to train with weapons or with anything but straight taijutsu and even that, only by themselves. Distilling and mixing poisons has been put on hold entirely.
They have to be careful. It's happened twice more and while no one else has died, there's been more close calls. The only time any of them are allowed by orders of the Clan head to be fully active is if they're leaving the village on a mission.
Ino feeds more chakra into her net, a delicate glimmering thing that's wrapped around her father, and watches him with narrowed eyes. He looks peaceful, calm, despite the sweat beading down his head and darkening his hair. It's hard work to go searching for something when they have zero clues.
But he and the Hokage are in agreement-they need to find out what is going on, what the malevolence is, and what it wants with the village. Is it something that's directed deliberately at the Yamanaka?
Or is it something that the village itself is in danger from?
Her father gasps and Ino swears as her net writhes and rolls, darkening with energy and something else-something that she's never seen before and can't identify. She slams more chakra into the construction to stabilize the net, struggling to keep it from touching her father-who is in a fight of his own.
Sweat trickles down the back of her neck as she struggles but she's determined and grim and will win this. There's no way she'd lose when it comes to something attacking her dad.
And then, as quickly as it's there, it goes. Her net goes slack. Ino staggers, at a loss from the sudden lack of resistance, and it's her father's warm hands that catch her.
It's not her father who looks out his eyes.
"It took over your dad?"
Ino shivers, remembering the horror she'd felt when she'd realized that there was no way of ousting whatever it was. It had let her try, knowing that she wouldn't succeed, and she'd been trapped in what was supposed to be a family sanctuary with it.
There'd been no way out.
"Yeah," she says shortly. "It took him first."
There'd been one way out, once she'd realized it was hopeless and her dad was already as good as dead.
Thinking about it now made her feel as sick as she'd been back then.
"What do you want?" Ino asks shrilly. Time and time again she's tried to reach her dad to find his mind under the malevolence that whoever it is that's in her dad's body holds.
She can't find her dad. Her net is shattered and her line directly to him has disappeared like it never existed at all.
The malevolence looks bored. It's a weird expression on her dad's face. It's not his look of boredom.
She's bleeding. When she tried to make a break for it, get out of the room, it had hurt her.
Her dad would never hurt her. Never.
"What do I want?" It's her dad's voice but the inflections are all wrong. Somehow alien and somehow terrifying even though the words and tone are mild.
"Yes," Ino says, trying futilely to find her father again. If he's alive, she should be able to find him.
She can't find him. He can't be dead.
She's starting to suspect, to believe, that he is. They've been down here for hours. Ino wishes, again, that they had not constructed their white room specifically to keep out all other influences. It's a dead zone, mentally, in the white room.
No one else can reach them. No one else will know anything. Just her.
And the monster. Or demon. Or whatever it is.
Her father is dead.
Ino breathes shallowly. There's a way out, then, if that's the case. It's ugly and horrifying and if she's wrong-if she's wrong, she'll never forgive herself.
"Something entertaining," the malevolence wearing her father's body says. "I had thought to begin with destroying the village. It's going to be destroyed anyway. Then I discovered that there was a family of mind hoppers here. That's fascinating. I thought we'd destroyed them all eons ago."
"We're hard to kill," Ino says, because it's the truth. Luck, the good kind, haunts the footsteps of her family on every mission. There's a reason that other Clans joke about their shinobi having the luck of a Yamanaka if they escape from a particularly grim looking mission.
Then, before she can think better of it, before she can reconsider that if she's wrong then her Dad will be... Ino lunges, hands glowing with green chakra, healing chakra that's been tuned to death instead.
The malevolence laughs.
"It didn't hurt it at all?" Naruto, or Kyuubi-in-Naruto looks interested. "I have taken a blow to the chest with chakra like that. I can heal it but it still hurts."
Ino holds her head in her hands trying to ward off the headache. Pain pounds through her skull, like the beat of a drum, irregular and loud and dreadful. "It did nothing."
She's pretty sure that, now, a similar blow would do nothing to her as well. She doesn't have chakra any longer. The last time she'd tried to reach for it, however diminished it was, she'd collapsed in screaming agony and convulsed for days. That was years ago. Ino hasn't tried again since. She has power and can use that but chakra is alien.
"What did you do then?" Naruto's hand is warm, almost painfully so, against her skin. He plays with her hair and she can feel his heat through the strands. "You got out of there?"
Pain surges and she squeezes her eyes shut against it. "Naruto," Ino says, "I can't-"
"You can."
She swallows a whimper. "I made a deal with it. That's how I got out."
Ino holds her breath, terrified and grieving and trembling on tenterhooks as the malevolence wearing her father's body considers her offer.
"What's to stop me from just taking over?" he asks with clinical detachment. Clinical curiosity.
"Yamanaka genes," she says, guessing and rewarded with her guess when he narrows his eyes at her. It makes sense. "You took my Dad by force. But because of that you're weak. Dad didn't give you permission. That matters. I'd give you permission-if you do what I want first."
The malevolence keeps her in suspense for hours. Ino doesn't move, barely breathes, during that whole time.
Escaping should be the first priority on her mind.
But she believes it when it says that the village will be destroyed.
The village matters more to her than her own health. This is her chosen sacrifice. Now if only it'll go for it...
"Yes," the malevolence says. "I'll try it. You make an interesting proposition." It kisses her cheek, her father's lips cold as ice and burning against her skin at the same time. "I will make you a mother of a race of monsters."
Tears trickle down her face. Not because of her fate, though she's terrified of it, but because-because this way, she can save everyone else.
"What do we need to do to accomplish your demand?" the malevolence asks.
Forcibly pulling herself together, Ino dashes her tears away. "You need to act more like my dad," she says. "And then we need to go and tell the Hokage that we've found the malevolence and what it wants is to destroy Konoha."
A peculiarly amused expression crosses her father's face. It's an alien expression. Perhaps it's a being called 'the malevolence' but it doesn't give her another name to use. "I had thought to destroy the village but I'm too curious now to do so. It will happen anyway." It tilts her father's head. "The storms are coming. They've stirred everyone up."
"I know." Ino clenches her hands. The malevolence has told her this already. She believes it. She doesn't know if she should, but she does. "It's a lie. It's a lie that makes sense with what's already been said though. It'll work, if you can act like my Dad would."
Shikamaru's dad will believe Inoichi. Nara Shikaku is the highest ranked Jounin in the village. That will count for quite a bit with the Hokage. Tsunade-sama herself has great faith in Yamanaka Inoichi's capabilities. She will be inclined to trust him. Ino will back it up and Sakura will believe her.
It will work.
"Clever," Naruto says, hands still playing with her hair. Ino rubs her head and tries to figure out when he's gotten so close. His arms are around her, comforting and awkward at the same time. She watches him burn and heal tries to will the pain away.
She's not supposed to be talking about these memories.
That's why it hurts.
"It worked," Ino says, swallowing thickly. "Like a charm. There was no reason to suspect we were telling a lie. We weren't, really, we were just changing the exact entity that was going to destroy the village. The malevolence was like... was like a cousin to it. It could have destroyed the village but it… wasn't going to, not once it found something else to play with."
"Unlucky."
"No," she insists. "It would have been worse had it hadn't come."
The saddest thing, Ino thinks, is that she still believes it. Without the malevolence getting curious, they all would have died. Making a deal with it had been the better outcome. She has to believe that.
"What happened next?"
"The Hokage ordered a full-scale evacuation of the village. There were tunnels beneath the Hokage Monument. That's where everyone headed, with orders to take those tunnels and expand them. A lot of people objected, they didn't understand why they had to move. Hokage-sama couldn't give them a proper explanation, just than an enemy had a new bio-weapon that was going to hit the village according to her intelligence. Some didn't believe her."
That was why there were monsters in the ruins of the village now. They hadn't left when they'd been given the chance.
"What did you do then?"
"I had my own preparations to make."
The malevolence in her dad is uncannily good at faking being a real person. Ino hates it and is grateful for it in about equal measures. Even the other members of her Clan pay little attention to the differences. If anyone spots anything, she hasn't heard about it. For her part, she's as jumpy as a kitten in a strange place all alone.
No matter how it lies to the rest of the village, she sees the differences.
Ino spends the two weeks that the malevolence has given as a deadline working her ass off to convince people to go, to help people pack, to explore the tunnels that will be their shelter. Most people are under the impression that it will be temporary.
She knows better.
"Of course," Ino laughs, sharp and bitter and broken, "I'd forgotten something. In my desperation, I was so determined to make sure people were out of the village that I forgot about my teammates."
"Shikamaru and Chouji?"
"Well," she says, "mostly Shikamaru. Chouji was busy in the tunnels, expanding them with his family jutsu, so it was easy to avoid him and make that seem natural but Shikamaru tracked me down and it went..."
Well, it had went.
"Hey." Shikamaru stands there, hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders slouched sloppily, and eyes drooping like he's about to fall asleep. Very few people would know that when Shikamaru looks like that he's at his most dangerous.
Ino knows. Inwardly, she cringes. Outwardly all she does is try for a weak smile. "Hey," she says, hefting a box of supplies. "Want to help me get this to Point 36?"
He takes one of the boxes and they walk slowly down the streets. Konoha is slowly becoming a ghost town-not in the literal sense, which calms her racing heartbeat, but in a physical sense. Nearly all the civilians are gone now. It's just the shinobi who continue moving things into the tunnels. Ino hopes that the tunnels will be deep enough and strong enough and protected enough to keep them all safe.
"What's up with you lately?" Shikamaru asks.
Ino glances sidelong at him. His brow is furrowed and his mouth is frowning.
"Is there something I should be up to?" she asks. "I've just been worried about Tsunade-sama's orders."
"That's crap."
"It's not," Ino insists.
"That's not all it is." He sounds so sure that Ino's heart stutters.
Luckily, she's got a ready-made lie that makes total sense. "Yeah, it is," she says. "My family was the one that found this threat. You think I didn't feel it? It's fucked up, Shikamaru. It's coming and if we're here it's going to destroy all of us. So excuse me if I'm stressed out."
Shikamaru grunts, unconvinced, but drops it for the moment.
But after that, to her hidden dismay, Shikamaru turns up wherever she goes. Sometimes they speak, sometimes they don't. One thing that doesn't change is that he always watches her.
Ino hates that about as much as she loves him for worrying. It's only that, she knows, it's far too late for worrying to matter now. Her path is set.
"He always was the best at figuring things out," Naruto muses.
"Not really," Ino says. "It was only that he knew me. If he hadn't, then it would have been different."
Naruto plays with her hair, his too hot fingers oddly gentle. "You think so?"
"I know so. Remember, I knew him at least as well as he knew me."
Finally everything that Hokage-sama has wanted moved is moved and the shinobi are under full orders to retreat into the tunnels with the rest of Konoha. Only a few ninja stay behind to guard the village.
Ino is one of them. So is her father, though Hokage-sama had been loathe to let them go. Not even Tsunade-sama however had been able to deny that, more than anyone else in the village, they'd be able to sense an attack of this nature incoming before anyone else.
She can feel the malevolence ripping under her father's skin though no one else sees anything. She wants to tell the shinobi who've remained that they've made a dreadful mistake, to go back to their families, to hide under the ground and not look up. There's nothing she can say.
According to the duty logs, Shikamaru is not one of the shinobi given leave to stay behind. Ino is grateful for that.
"Have I fulfilled my side of the bargain?"
Ino wants to lie, say he hasn't, because the shinobi up here with them are going to die and there's no way around that. But most of the village is safe, including most of her important people, and that matters. As far as she's concerned, honestly, he's done the job. "Yeah," she says, feeling hollow and terrified, "yeah, you did."
It nods, her father's face a comforting farce in light of what is behind it.
"When?" she asks the malevolence wearing her father's skin.
"Soon," it says. "I'm looking forward to it."
Ino shivers. She's not. "Will it hurt?"
"How should I know?"
She hates it a little more for that bit of unfeeling, uncaring logic.
"Of course," Ino says, when Naruto's fingers go very still, "I'd definitely underestimated Shikamaru's determination to make sure I got to safety. He'd argued with Hokage-sama to keep me in the tunnels. Why, he'd wanted to know, did I have to go when my father was going."
"What did you tell him?"
"That if my dad was going there was no way in hell I wasn't," Ino says. "Which, if the malevolence hadn't taken over my dad anyway, would have been entirely true."
She'd always been a Daddy's girl. The only reason she wouldn't have gone along would have been if he'd forbidden it and even then it would have been a huge argument.
For the first time in years-how long has it been since Konoha was destroyed?-she mourns. She misses her dad.
"As it was..." Ino pulls her hair out of Naruto's grasp and sits up straight. "Shikamaru was right at ground zero when the malevolence took me over. I don't think he ever understood what he was seeing."
"It's time."
Ino closes her eyes and then, thinking better of it, opens them. These are her last seconds as human. She should be able to see the world during them. Konoha echoes emptily around her.
The malevolence at her side burns cold and hot in equal measure. It is eager to leave her father's body.
"What do we have to do?" she asks, not looking at it, choosing instead to look at the shop her dad ran for years, her home. The flowers are beginning to wilt. She thinks that's suitable.
It grabs her and, before she can offer more than a half-voiced protest, it plants her father's lips on hers. Ino recoils from the kiss, horrified and traumatized at kissing what's essentially her father's corpse and, distantly, hears Shikamaru's voice, swearing.
Then Shikamaru is there as she struggles, trying to pull who he thinks is her father off her, rage transcendent on his face-what must he think of the situation?-and the malevolence flings him away so hard that he smashes through the wall.
Something slick and cool and slimy trickles down her throat and her stomach begins to burn. Her father's body lets her go, collapses, rotting quickly. Ino doubled over and trying not to vomit, stumbles away from it.
"Ino?"
Shikamaru's looking from her dad's body to her, white-faced, and she wishes, desperately, that he was anywhere else. "Run," she says, her voice cracking and sounding off. Her hands clench at her head.
It would be so easy to resist but she gave her word and it's too late, she knows, for it to be taken back. Already the malevolence is settling into her. "Run!"
He doesn't.
Ino collapses to her knees, screaming in a different voice, as bit by bit her control is wrested from her.
It's alright, the malevolence, herself, whispers. It will only hurt a little longer.
Then things disappear in a white-wash of red pain and her last glimpse as a human is Shikamaru's worried eyes.
Ino shudders and studies her fingers. The nails are shiny, like a coat of nail polish has been applied and the digits themselves are nearly see-through. Her whole body is. "Like the malevolence said," she says, her bell-tone voice ringing over the ruins of Konoha, "giving permission made a difference. I'm it and I'm her. Neither of us are separate any longer but we're not two-in-one. We're a different one."
Naruto has nothing to say to that.
She's almost sad he remains quiet. Ino wants to hit something right now. Hard. Hasn't she remembered enough?
Eventually Naruto does speak, but it's not to mouth condolences. "How did the village get..."
"Destroyed?"
He nods. She can't see it, with her back to him, but she knows he does.
"The malevolence neglected to tell me that the merger would destroy my father's shop," Ino says blandly. "Of course, I also didn't ask. But it was the storms that destroyed the village. It also neglected to tell me that it was a harbinger and in releasing all the energy it held… that signaled the first storm. Told it where to strike the hardest and longest."
Who is more at fault? She blames herself, the malevolence doesn't consider it worth blaming either of them.
Night sets around them, the moon blazing and leaving her feeling both scorched and frozen. Ino doesn't move.
Neither does Naruto.
The next day or the next week-neither of them pay enough attention to the passing of time to really care which it is-Ino stirs. "You said you had something interesting to tell me."
Naruto stares over the ruins of Konoha. "Let's go down there."
That's about the last thing she wants to do. Ino gets to her feet in a liquid motion of limbs and hair. "I don't want to," she says, which he should know given the story she's told him. "Why do we have to go down there?"
"I want to show you something."
"I don't remember that being part of this agreement."
"It'll be something you definitely want to know," Naruto tells her. "I still keep my promises."
Her eyes narrow. If Naruto was the one in charge, she would believe that. But this is Naruto-and-Kyuubi and the demon, by his own admission, won that fight long ago. It's not such a different story from hers though it is revolting to think that her situation had more consent to it. "We should check on Nightmare first," Ino says, knowing it's a stall for time. "If we've been gone days and days the minions will be restless."
"You don't care about them."
"That's not true. Half of me does." The half she sold herself to in order for the village to survive. Now that she's thinking about, now that things have changed, Ino can feel the differences between the two halves of herself. It's uncomfortable.
It feels like she's thinking for the first time in years.
Naruto's broken laugh is like shattered glass across her skin. "Stop stalling," he says. "This will take a day, maybe less. They can survive another day without their mother."
She, the human she, cringes. Her other self doesn't even stir. They are the mother, like the malevolence promised. Ino looks at her see-through hands and wonders if the price was worth it. Are they flourishing down in New Konoha? Or have they all died and her sacrifice worth nothing? It matters more than it did before telling the story.
Ino regrets ever telling it. "Fine," she snaps, "but it had better be super interesting or I'll pound you into the ground." With that she turns and leaps off the cliff and into the crater.
Naruto's laugh trails behind her, chases her.
Once in Old Konoha, Ino lets Naruto take the lead. Her dread grows as he leads them unerringly towards the place where her father's shop had once been, where Shikamaru died and where she gave away her humanity.
"Naruto-"
"It's fine," he says.
"You already knew my story," she accuses sharply. If she'd been human she'd use her mind jutsu now to confirm what's just a good guess. "What was the point of making me tell it?"
Red energy, dangerous and brutal, trails down Naruto's back. She watches in fascination. "So you would pay attention," he says. "You were so far gone that nothing would get through to you about your old life."
"Maybe that was better. Maybe I didn't want to remember."
"Since when do you give up?"
Ino's eyes blaze-she can see the light they reflect off the rubble. Naruto doesn't visibly react. "Do you have any idea of how much I've had to give up to save people here? Excuse me, asshole, if I didn't want to spend the rest of eternity dwelling on my choices and being horrified." Being numb had been a blessing. She misses it.
"Yeah," he says, "but that's not Ino-chan's style either."
She stops walking as he turns onto her old street. There's no monsters around. They fear her like the ones above the crater. Once upon a time they'd been proud Konoha shinobi. Times have changed them.
Times have changed her.
She doesn't want remember being Ino-chan. It's too sad.
Naruto with his red demon-eyes looks back. "Coward," he says and disappears.
Ino stands there, staring after him, as that word reverberates through her mind and her rage grows. Coward? She has never been a coward. Taking her fear-feeling fear does not make a coward alone-in hand, she takes one step and then another, unwilling and unwanting and furious with Naruto, with the village, with everything that has led to her being right here.
Naruto stands precisely in front of her old home.
As Ino reaches him, she punches him, hard. He goes flying. She waits there, bristling with indignation and worse, as he picks himself out of the rubble.
He laughs.
She hates and envies him in about equal measure.
"Good," he says as he comes back to stand by her. Ino debates punching him again. "That's the girl I remember, back before I left the village."
"I'm not that girl any longer. You're not the boy who left the village either."
"No." Naruto looks briefly solemn. "But they're still part of us. You were throwing that part away."
"Why do you care what I do?"
"I wonder about that too," he says and steps into her father's shop.
Ino hesitates a moment longer and then follows him. There's very little left of the shop. The roof is entirely gone, along with the whole second floor which had been where she'd lived. She struggles to remember what her bedroom had looked like and can't. Even the walls around them are crumbled, decaying and broken.
They come barely up to her knees.
She still walks through the shop, like she can see where the aisles used to be and when she looks up, she finds Naruto watching her.
"Drop dead," Ino tells him and goes back to tracing her way through the shop, like it used to exist. Over here had been the civilian flowers, bright and beautiful and carefully harmless unless you really knew what you were doing with them.
Over here had been the moderate flowers. Ones that pure civilians wouldn't have known how to make dangerous but had been very common for shinobi to buy for their deadly qualities.
The truly deadly flowers, the ones that civilians and Genin alike weren't allowed anywhere near without having to go through years of listening and paperwork weren't kept in the open shop.
Those had been in hidden greenhouses and any shinobi that wanted them had to be at least Chuunin-ranked or higher.
"Why are we here?" she asks, again. This time she knows better than to look at him. If he laughs, she will send him through another wall. Ino doesn't approach where he's standing.
He's right where she died. Right where Shikamaru died.
Her skin crawls at the thought of going nearer.
"Who died that day?" he asks her.
The blaze returns to her eyes. "You already know."
"I do," Naruto says, his voice a comfortable growl. It's inhuman but so is her voice. It's the least of their problems. "Do you?"
"Me," she says, "Shikamaru. Dad, if you don't accept that he died before everything blew up. All the shinobi who'd been left to guard the village and verify the danger was real."
It had been. Just not in the way they'd suspected.
"You didn't die right here," he says, kneeling down to scoop some dirt up. "This is just where you lost consciousness."
Ino doesn't see the point in the distinction.
"How did New Konoha get their hands on you?" he asks. "If you'd died here, there's no way they would have been able to find you."
Her blood, such as it is, turns to ice. "I don't remember." Ino struggles to do so, now that he's mentioned it.
What had happened?
She remembers nothing from collapsing and then waking up already in captivity, Sakura wanting to know why and getting no answers from her.
"I don't remember," she repeats, her bell-like voice rising. All around them the ground starts shaking.
"Stop that." Naruto's voice is like a lifeline, however twisted it is. "I know what happened."
"I hate you."
"But you want to know."
She can't deny that. But it's the truth that she hates him for all of this. Why couldn't he just tell her? Why does she have to find out this way? She feels sick and lightheaded and cannot remember the last time she's felt this way.
"Come on," he says, "let's go to what's left of the Hokage Monument. When you collapsed, Shikamaru brought you there."
"He was hurt," she insists. "He would have died when I was taken over."
"He did." The words are like a blow. "But he didn't die the moment you stopped knowing what was going on, Ino."
She's pathetically grateful that he doesn't call her Ino-chan again. When he starts walking, she stumbles after him, clutching her head and struggling to breathe.
It's hard to do that, all of a sudden. She's never questioned the blanks in her memories before.
Naruto doesn't slow down, doesn't wait for her, and she's glad for that too. If he did she would be angry, like she's holding him back and-
When has that mattered again?
Pain lances through her head and her fingers clutch harder, trying to press it out. Ino registers nothing but the pain and the steady forward motion of one uneven step after another following the sound of Naruto.
(Distantly she realizes that he must be making noise on purpose, just so she can follow him. That he has to do that upsets her on a deep level even as she continues to follow him.)
After an eternity, she walks right into Naruto's back. He grunts, she wraps her arms around his waist to hold herself upright and buries her face in his back so she doesn't have to see.
The pain doesn't subside.
"Why?" she asks.
"You were brought here," he says. "That's when things went really wrong."
"How do you know?"
How does he know? He's been gone for years and years and there's no one up here to tell the tale except her and she's never known this.
"I told him."
The voice is one she knows. One she hasn't heard since she became like this-half-human half-monster-and Ino goes very very still. Chouji.
Ino pushes herself away from Naruto and, wobbly on her feet, steps around him. Chouji.
It takes her eyes a few moments to pick him out. He's pressed into the rock, the same colour as it, all blasted stone and then scorched by the brutal sun. He looks like he's been melted to it.
She can't figure out how he's alive.
"I told him." Chouji's mouth is a slit in the rock. It looks more like an irregular crack than anything a mouth should look like. Ino stomps down on the urge to scream. His eyes are darker pebbles in the stone's face.
"What... what happened to you?" Her mind goes in circles, trying to figure out how he's alive, how he's present, how he's broken like this.
It breaks her a little to think that he's been here, like this, the entire time she's been staring down into the ruins and refusing to come near the places where… where her life had crumbled. Refused to go to where New Konoha's entrance was.
"Sakura said you were fine," she says, her voice tiny for the first time in longer than she can remember. Even though Sakura had hated her at the end in equal measure to the amount they'd loved one another she never would have thought that Sakura would lie to her about this.
Sakura lied. Rage, warm and ugly, bubbles under the shock.
The rocks that are Chouji shift ponderously. "When Shikamaru came dragging you back," he says, "you began glowing as he reached about where you are standing. I was just inside the entrance to the cave-I was waiting. He'd told me that he was going to bring you back no matter what because something was wrong."
Even now, Chouji manages to look reproachful. "Something was."
"I had no choice," she says hollowly. "It was what I did or the entire village would have been killed."
Not destroyed. That happened anyway. But all the lives her sacrifice saved matter even still.
"Either way," he says, "you began pulsing with a glow and then-things got messy. You exploded. Shikamaru managed to throw you towards the entrance before the explosion obliterated him. I got you inside but touching you at that moment..."
"Turned you into what you are now," she whispers, her voice tight. Ino reaches out to touch the stone and then, before she can make contact lets her hand fall. It seems wrong to touch him like this when she's not human.
Neither is he.
She's a demon and he's a sentient rock.
Shikamaru, she thinks, got the best deal. He's just dead.
"I was angry for a long time," he admits. "And scared. The monsters here... they're remnants of those who died here. Shikamaru's monster comes here every now and then, like he doesn't understand why he's drawn to this place."
Her mind shudders away from that idea.
"What do you want me to say?" she asks. "Sorry? I don't think that's going to cut it, Chouji."
She has to give Naruto credit. This is something she should have found out for herself years ago. It qualifies as interesting.
Sakura lied.
"No," Chouji says, "there's no sorry that can fix this or make it better. I want you to live, Ino. Stop drifting. Naruto told me the way you exist."
"What is there to live for?" she asks. "I'm not even human. You're like this! Naruto's a meld of Kyuubi and himself and could turn on me at any time."
"We wouldn't," Naruto says mildly from behind her. "We like you, Ino. We like the you that drifts too but Chouji doesn't."
"You don't drift," Chouji says, before she can process that. "You fight. But you haven't fought since you woke up after the end. Not once."
Ino's hands lay limply at her sides. "I want to die," she says. "I've wanted to die since everything changed. Since it took over my dad, since it took over me. Do you know what it's like to lose yourself to something else? How am I supposed to live? Even now, it's probably only letting this talk happen because it knows exactly how useless it is for me to even consider it being something that's fixable, that's fight againstable."
"That's not a word," Naruto notes, a hint of laughter in his raspy voice.
"Shut up, Naruto," she says. "It's a word since I used it. What am I supposed to do? How do I live in this? There's me. There's you. There's Naruto, if he sticks around. There's the three of us and nothing else."
"There's New Konoha."
The breath freezes in her chest. It hurts, like everything else does. "I'm not destroying them," Ino says. "I hate Sakura for what she's done. I still refuse to take revenge that way. They don't deserve it and if they die and it's my fault then that totally negates everything I've suffered in order to save them in the first place."
Naruto's hands slip around her waist. "Not destroy," he murmurs in her ear. It's vaguely startling to realize that even though she's taller than she used to be, he's even taller. His breath burns against her neck. "Take over."
She shivers against him, her eyes never leaving Chouji's. "Why would I want to take over?"
"Why not?" Naruto murmurs. "It would be something to do. You would have purpose and power."
"I have power." That much she knows. "I don't want to rule them. I don't want anything to do with them. I'm not a toy to entertain you, Naruto. Not even now."
"Find a way to free me," Chouji says as Naruto's hands fall away from her waist. "Is that a preferable idea?"
The pain in Ino's head spikes. "I don't know," she says. "Is it? It might be better to just kill you. You're as good as dead like this anyway."
That sounds about right to her but it leaves Chouji staring at her, like she's said something wrong, and Ino can feel Naruto's frown at her back. She struggles to figure out their problem, hands going to her temples.
"You don't mean that," Naruto says, though he sounds like he's biting back a sharp laugh.
Ino barely hears him through the stabbing pain in her temples. She does and doesn't mean it. Killing Chouji isn't something she should think is a solution.
It just isn't.
She knows that.
But right here and now it seems like the best solution. Ino struggles to reconcile the two viewpoints, knowing one is from the girl-that-was and the other is from the girl that is two-in-one.
Knowing that one is evil does not make a difference.
Both of them are her.
"I need to go," she gasps and wrenches herself from Naruto's grasp. She shimmers and fades out and, even though neither Naruto nor Chouji can sense her when she doesn't exist, Ino runs.
She's really running from herself but there's no way to win that race. She'll settle for getting away from the others.
The sky is orange and pink and purple by the time she stops running. Ino looks up at it and tries to guess if it is dawn or dusk that is painting the canopy of colours. The world is hued in twilight but that's no help.
She's not breathing heavily. She's not tired.
Ino doesn't know why she's stopped running.
Only, really, running hasn't been doing her any good. She can still hear Naruto's off-hand suggestion about New Konoha. Still hear Chouji suggesting an alternative.
Still hear herself saying that maybe Chouji would be better off dead.
Who is she now, anyway?
Those words don't belong to the her of her memories.
Where does she go from here?
The malevolence stabbing her temples whispers back, Wherever I want you to go.
Ino starts laughing. She laughs and laughs and laughs until she cries. She doesn't even notice when she fades into view and the sound of her desperate, crushing mirth rips through the village.
It's right. They're right. There's no winning.
Where does she go from here?
"Well fuck," Naruto says, his head tilted to listen to Ino. "That didn't work."
Chouji gives him a baleful look. It would be more effective if he wasn't a hunk of rock.
"It didn't," Naruto points out. "We've just upset it."
"Ino isn't an it."
"She's half one," Naruto says, "and if you asked her, she wouldn't be able to tell you where she ends and it begins. I should know."
"Demon."
"You say that like it's an insult." Naruto smiles lazily. "I'm going to go see her. Have fun eroding."
"Where are you going to go from here?" Chouji asks. He doesn't ask Naruto about what will happen to him, if they'll just leave him behind. That's good.
If Chouji had asked, Naruto might have destroyed him. Ino would and wouldn't care.
"No idea," Naruto says amidst Ino's choked laughter. "I'll leave that up to your imagination."