Short and dark, and possibly AU. Enjoy
Lesson number one: explosion tags are messy, and they don't always kill fast. Think before you throw.
The mission had just begun, and already Ino had learned something she hadn't known before. That didn't seem right, but there it was. Maybe it was truth, or reality, or whatever the hell you wanted to call it, but all the kunoichi knew was that it had happened like she knew it was supposed it, but yet somehow hadn't expected it to.
Of course, things rarely happened like they were supposed to. Ino would have been suspicious if they did.
Screaming, god, why hadn't the man died when she hit him with it? Why had he been crying, clawing at his face, (but it wasn't his face anymore, no, no, it was his skull, his skull, and his eyes were still in it, and it was blackened, burned, and he hadn't died, why wouldn't he just fucking die?), and fucking screaming, and he wouldn't just goddamn quit it.
Shinobi didn't scream. It was a rule.
A minute passed. The grass turned red where it had been blackened, and somewhere, someone was crying. Yamanaka Ino simply wiped her face off, feeling how wet it was, how sticky. Blood always was. She counted herself lucky that it was no longer hot. It would have made her wonder what she looked like, had it been hot.
Eventually the screaming stopped.
Eventually she made it back home.
Later, when she was older, much older, Yamanaka Ino would tell it, her advice, her experience, to her first genin team, and then the one after that one, but no more, because two was all she survived to tell. The third, well, Hyuuga Neji had offered to take over the task after the mission Ino didn't come back from. He told them some variation of it, but Ino's version was her own.
You always learn something on missions. The only question is if you want to know what it tells you.