Red to Black
Growing up in a home full of mind-readers and trained killers, Ino is used to a bit of danger. But when a murdering virus breaks out and she wakes up in a world that collapses into chaos and disarray, while people are turned into walking zombies, she isn't quite ready for what it means.
When her parents disappear, and she is left at home, with dwindling supplies, with threats from the outside and within, Ino is determined to get them both back and bring them to safety. But danger follows at her heels, in the form of the living and the dead – will she ever be safe again?
The library held the smell of buttercups, old paper and golden dust that had gathered upon the mahogany shelves and the leather bound cases of the books that stood on top of them.
Ino wasn't allowed here, in the Before. It had fallen determinedly under the "Out of Bounds" label, just as she wasn't allowed in the Office, and the Flower Garden, a high, wild structure made of metal and glass, which stood at the back of the garden, nearing the edge of the woods. There were seals written on the glass, in bright ink, and they flared up in various shades of blue, green and red with surprising intensity, lighting up like colored candles against a flickering, transparent background.
There was no one to keep her out now. She had broken into the Office the day before, but it hadn't been as terribly exciting and exhilarating as she'd hoped. The Office consisted of a dark, mahogany room, with a large desk in the middle. There were some unopened scrolls, some opened scrolls, and golden fish that floated in ceramic tubes, all belly up and flat-eyed. She supposed the oxygen pomp had stopped working some days before. Perhaps even before EVERYTHING WENT WRONG.
"Asphyxiation seems to me a horrible way to die," Ino had said, when she took the fish out of the tubes and studied them in her hands. They had gleamed mockingly in response, glittering scales all golden and yellow. She had given them a proper burial by the back door, and even said a few words, but nobody responded. The house was completely silent and vacant, gathering dust, instead of clean cotton and fresh flower fragrances. Just thinking about it, made Ino feel like crying.
(Once, Dad told Ino about a boy and a talking house. It was a children's story, meant to entertain.
"I don't want to part with you," said the boy, at the end of the story, when he was all grown up and ready to face the outside world.
"Sometimes you must part with the things you love," the talking house said, with a terribly sad smile. "Only then can you grow and become who you were meant to be."
She used to like the story, but the memory seemed cold and distant, after curling up in her room under cold covers, with nobody to kiss her cheek goodnight, with only deafening silence around her. She had tried to escape into her parents' bedroom after that, hopping onto the bed and sniffing into the pillows, to hope and find some missing warmth. Then, she had abandoned that too; she slept solely on the couch in the living room now, facing the door and starting at every sound.
If parting with her parents meant she could grow, then she refused to.
She refused to.)
The library was a wide space, with a carpeted wooden floor and high windows that let in the yellow patch the sun threw down. There were three round tables, with sturdy armchairs that had decorative yellow pillows, which looked comfortable, but were hard and itchy to the touch.
She dropped the Office scrolls on one of the tables and went to one of the windows, placing her hands on the windows sill, which scorched her hands with cold. The garden was vacant, a spreading area of grass, enriched with daisies and buttercups, sprouting up now and then, with on either side of the yard a high wooden fence.
Ino turned around resolutely, and hopped towards the bookshelves, trailing the cases with a finger. The books felt brittle, as if they would disintegrate in the space of a moment, a sudden blink of time when she sneezed or breathed too loudly. There were books about the economics of the Land of Fire, with a picture of the Daimyo in a golden embroidered gown on the front, about sea life in the Land of Waves, a scroll about firejutsu and chakra affinities, which she all discarded without a second glance.
Finally, she found something useful; a scroll about poisonous plants and a book about household etiquette, which included a part about sewing. She dropped them on the table of the Office scrolls.
"I'm going to need those," Ino said, in a much brighter tone than she felt. If nobody comes for me lingered at the back of her throat, a choking weight waiting to be emitted. But speaking the words would make them real – would mean that she was alone and lonely and abandoned, and Ino would much rather disbelieve in reality than accept that as a harsh truth.
"Stay here, Ino," Mother had said.
All of this searching made her hungry, so she retreated from the library to the kitchen, which she cautiously and with a sinking feeling entered. A large splatter of blood stained the white tiles of the floor, which had clotted and dried out. It resembled red paint more than it did blood. She didn't have the guts to touch and clean it. It stank like decay and rot.
A few days after the day EVERYTHING WENT WRONG, the front door had opened.
Stay here, Ino. She had ran towards the hall, angry tears streaking her cheeks, heart hammering in her chest, as if it wanted to escape her ribcage and cultivate bruises on her skin, but it hadn't been her mother who'd entered.
It was the housemaid, Ayano, a civilian woman with a wrinkled face and the kindest heart, but she no longer looked human. Her skin was dry and much too large for her face, hanging around her chin and temples, as if someone had taken skin and plastered it on top of her bones, without knowing the exact measures of her skull. Bits of skin and tissue were missing here and there, exposing the bone underneath.
Ino had seen bones, in class, when Iruka-sensei was covering the human anatomy, but they were bleached white. Ayano's skull was stained and red and pink, and there was a large gash in her chest, and teeth marks on the tanned skin of her arm.
Ino had taken the lamp from the table and smashed her head with it.
She smashed it against the floor and kept going, while everything around her faded. It was as if she was in a dream, and her hand kept going up and down and up and down, to squeeze around that bottlecap neck, while something moist and warm splattered over her clothes in small rivulets. The dream-like state disappeared, when her arms started to tire, and only then did she stop.
After a bewildered, horrified glance, Ino sprung up and vomited all over the floor, red-stained hands pressing against her tailored top. She couldn't bear to look at Ayano, or what was left of her, but then something twitched in the corner of her eye and moved.
Dead things don't move.
Ayano was in the freezer now. Ino had locked the door with three different locks, and put a chair under the handle, which kept rattling. Her clothes she had thrown into the bin, covered under plastic bags and glass bottles, so that she wouldn't retch every unfortunate time her gaze was directed at it.
The handle, which had been still when she entered the kitchen, rattled when she opened one of the cupboards. Ino was determined to ignore it, but her hands were shaking and seemed out of her control, spasming like confused flies trying to find an exit in a glass room. There were a few containers of food left, and half a loaf of bread.
She grabbed the latter and went back to the library, retching and swallowing hard when she passed the splatter of blood. The library felt lush and sweet, full of papery brittleness as she came in; Ino had never liked books as much as she did now, surrounded by shelves and scrolls, as silent as silence could be.
In the Academy, killing had been described as something hard, with everlasting consequences; one must always kill for the mission. For the Village. Ino had been prepared too, to kill and even die, but this was not a mission or a hypothetical situation; this was real and killing had been remarkably easy, which was the scariest part.
She threw the books and the scrolls in one of her bags – a purple one, in the form of a heart, which could be carried on her back, pressing against her spine. It was her favorite one, a birthday present, from her parents, who always knew what she wanted without consulting her.
"Do come back," Ino said to the library, as if her parents were hidden somewhere among the books.
"I'm not a ninja. I won't survive."
The days were long, but the nights were longer.
Ino spent the majority of her time in the library, where she went through books and scrolls, scanned the shelves, and pocketed the ones, which looked useful. She scavenged her bedroom for any textbooks of the Academy and ran through her usual katas, trying to find routine in the movements. It was more out of a sense of obligation, than any real boredom or desperation that she trained, but she felt more in control after it, as if the katas bettered her in every possible way.
The last booby traps in her parents' bedroom she disabled quickly and cautiously, almost forgetting to avoid an oncoming shiruken. It scraped her chin, only missing her mouth by an inch, and left a long red line that ran upwards towards her lips.
She dabbed it half-heartedly with a finger, which came away red.
I am a ninja, Ino told herself, though it sounded unconvincing, even in her head. The sight of the red blood on her fingers made her squeamish and nauseous, so she sat down on the carpeted floor and stared at the creme-colored individual fabric strands that sprung up between her bare toes. They made her think of grass slants, and she realized, after a moment of silent staring, that she hadn't been outside for more than a week now.
There was a fallen picture on the ground. It was right there, in front of her nose, half-hidden under the desk, half obstructed from her view by the mahogany armchair and the wooden desk.
Ino snatched it away and peered closely. The glass was broken, but the picture inside was undamaged; her mother looked like a picture carved from marble, pale and hard-eyed, with an expression that seemed painted and that said I will always persevere. Her smile was a pretty, wide thing – a row of coral teeth. Dad had his arm slung around her bare shoulders, and he was dappled in a red cloak, with a freshly cleaned headband strung around his neck. They looked happy and peaceful, and something about their smiles made Ino's throat tighten.
She ate late, with the picture stuffed among the books in her heart-shaped bag, and ate and ate, until she could no more. She hadn't eaten since yesterday morning; a few rice balls and a piece of dango, serving as breakfast. The rations were steadily dwindling, but Ino knew she would last another week, or more.
The back door was locked, but she undid it quickly, before she lost her courage, hands scraping on the metal. Soon she was leafing down the path, swimming in sweat. The sun bore down on her scalp; a hot, unpleasant burn on her skin.
Her blood stopped moving, when something in the bushes rustled. Her heart in her throat, Ino stared ahead, eyes flicking from side to side, body shifting into a kata, with a sharpened kunai in her hand. If it was another dead thing moving like Ayano...
The bushes rustled again and then a crow took the air, wings flapping strongly. She eyed it until it became a dark spot against the sky in the distance, and only then continued on her way.
Stay here, Ino.
That was all good and well advice, Ino supposed, but she could not keep being cooped up in the house forever. She hadn't heard from anyone, not even Iruka-sensei or the Hokage, the leader of Konoha; authority figures. Surely someone had to know what was going on.
The wireless radio wasn't working. She had tried to dial time upon time, waiting in the Office, with her heart skipping a beat, whenever she imagined the static getting weaker. Yet, there was no one on the other side of the line, and no matter how many times she said "My name is Ino Yamanaka. I am a student of the Academy. Please, respond. I need help.", the static remained. She continued to rattle off the ninja registration numbers of her parents, with a faint hope that someone would answer.
Nobody did.
The Flower Garden towered over her. She put her hand against the glass, and the seals flared up in brilliant colors. They formed a painting of crimson red and the blue of the sky, and the brilliant green of the forest moss that covered the pebble stones by the entrance.
On the windows sat insects, even on the inside of the glass, stuck to the forming mildew around the edges of the window panes. They shone up like oil lanterns in the sun. It reminded her of Shino Aburame, a lean classmate who quietly roamed and occasionally looked up in class to emit something stifling and unnecessarily polite. She had seen him using his bugs only once, during a vicious spar between him and Sasuke Uchiha.
Ino had labeled him as "creepy bug boy" after that. The other girls had laughed, gloating about something for which they themselves did not have to suffer.
Yet it was a kind of bullying. At the time it had been hilarious; that strange boy, with his dark sunglasses, behind which you could still see fiery, light eyes glitter, and with a collar so high that even the tip of his nose was barely visible. Nobody had spoken up or chastised her about it, when Ino described him as such, not even sweet Sakura, who herself had enough experience with such practices.
Ino had never really thought of Shino, but she did now and felt guilty. She hoped he was safe. And happy. That was really all she could do for him.
Her hair lit up golden under the sun, tickling her neck. She tried to open the door, pressing against it with her whole body, but it would not budge.
"Come on," Ino said, softly enough that it could easily be mistaken for a whisper. "Please."
There were flowers behind the glass, angling upwards to the glass ceiling. Their stems were littered with small hairs, pus bursting from small ruptures. The plants were dying, Ino realized. She peered at the Flower Garden, startled with the realization that she was missing something that was right in front of her eyes.
There were coiling steel pipes running over the floor and the window panes. Some were dyed a shade of dark green, and resembled stems. Others were transparent; there was a cerulean substance within, more a gas than a liquid, and at once, she knew what it was: chakra.
The chakra pipes were not buzzing, nor was the substance within moving. She supposed the whole system for generating the lives of plants and flowers had shut down, when EVERYTHING WENT WRONG.
She walked around the glass chamber to the other side of the Flower Garden, where she spotted a whithered, yellowed bush clover plant. It was dying, without the necessary chakra, water and nutrients.
Ino lay a hand on the warm glass, as if she was trying to reach through it. She wondered if she could direct her own chakra through the glass, to bring the plant back to life. Then she shook her head; it seemed a silly thing, saving a plant when both of her parents were missing. Or dead.
As soon as that treacherous sound went through her head, a scream came from the other side of the house, by the street. It sounded distant and far away, but so full of agony that Ino promptly forgot all her lessons and forgot to move. So this is what death sounds like, she thought.
The scream awakened something in her chest, something cold and growling, and then it was abruptly cut short. Ino hadn't removed her hand from the heated glass; it scorched her hand with warmth.
In her thoughts she saw herself moving, she crossed the rose bushes, sinking her feet into the moist spongy ground, stepped over the flower buds at the door - "Do not step on them, Ino. You'll ruin them. In our lives we must keep our destructive tendencies to a minimum. We already break enough." - until she was at the door and took the handle in her heated hands, and then stepped into the hall where she breathed in the cool air, full of scent of safety and something warmth, like dough and gingerbread, that washed away the air of the outside, which smelled like grass and mud, as it should.
Then she was really moving, hopping and tumbling away as fast as she could get those damned legs of her to move, stepping onto the flowers as she approached the house. She locked the door behind her and escaped towards the living room, where she hid under the covers, with only her head peeking out.
Everywhere she looked, she swore she could see Ayano's face moving in the shadows, but some cold, rational part of her brain reassured her that her housemaid was securely shut into the freezer. It did nothing to ease her distress.
It was a long time, until her eyelids grew too heavy for even her fear, and she succumbed to sleep, which was plagued with nightmares.
Ayano featured in her dreams; a dark presence at the edge of her consciousness. She saw red blood, staining tiles like paint splatter on the insides of her eyelids, and in Ayano's flat, glazed-over eyes, grew withering bush clovers, the petals turning a yellow that resembled Ino's own hair, until they burst aflame; alight with a startling fire that Ino had read so much about in all her schoolbooks.
"The Will of Fire," the Hokage had said on the first day of the Academy, when Ino's hair was still freshly cut short, before EVERYTHING WENT WRONG. It seemed so long ago, as if she had aged years in the small time span of the few weeks that she was alone. "That is what drives us. There's a fire in our heart, and a will in our brain – together we will do the impossible."
Afterwards, when she woke up, coiled in her sheets, swimming in her own sweat, she couldn't say whether the moving dead thing in the freezer had featured more in her nightmares, or the dying flowers from the Flower Garden.
She didn't dream about her parents. For the first time, they were the trees behind the fog and she happened to be the ever-ending road.
The chamber was ghost-quiet, when she awoke, only disrupted by the crackle of voices that drifted through the air from the Office.
"...Konoha's military..."
Ino lay very still, hands spasming at her sides. The crispness of the early morning dark penetrated the fabric of her pajamas, and even her skin, sinking deep into her bones underneath to settle within.
She swung her legs over her bed, smacking them on the cold floor. The voices from the Office were barely audible above the wind that howled around the house, the word intelligible, but the speed with which she thundered through the entrance to the Office was sure to break her speed record at the Academy. The wireless radio on the desk crackled again.
"...ask everyone to remain calm and civilized. The Shinobi Village Sunagakure had granted Konoha's civilians and shinobi refuge. We have taken up camp just outside of its gates. We ask every living, remaining citizen of Konoha to return to us safely."
There was salty fluid gathering in Ino's burning eyes. Sunagakure. Dad had gone to that Village multiple times, and she remembered its splendor from his tales; the unending, flat meadows of waste and sand, giving way to splendid gates and tall towers, with long rows of silken pennants swaying in the breeze, the gleam of steel and sweat inside. The streets, Dad had told her, were full of people in long robes, tall and broad, small and slender, and the days had rung with hundreds of voices and the pounding hooves of cattle.
"Is it better than Konoha?" she had asked, eyes lamp-like. She had never seen such a Village.
At that, her father's smile had sobered, and withered on his face. He looked at her, with a gaze that laid her heart bare, and had said: "No. It is not better than Konoha. It is boisterous, yes, and raucous, but Konoha is organized and protects its own. In Sunagakure, it's every man for himself."
"Sensei says that that's what makes us so great," Ino said, in return. "We value every ninja."
"He would be right in saying that," Dad had said. "Every person is important in Konoha. Together we form a good front. Be loyal, Ino. It is Konoha that you owe your life to."
Now, it didn't feel as if Ino's Village was build upon togetherness and social cohesion. She hadn't eaten since yesterday, all the cupboards were slowly starting to empty, and no one had come for her. Stay here, Ino. Easy to say, when you were leaving.
The wireless radio crackled with static. She stared at it, hands balled, gaze roaming over the hard, plastic band, to the metal receiver. It buzzed again, red lights flickering mockingly.
She dialed the radio. The static was loud and overbearing. "Ino Yamanaka, here. Mother, Dad, if you're listening – please – I'm coming for you. I'm sick of seeing your faces in lifeless pictures. I'm sick of being alone."
She paused to take a stuttering breath. Her face was crusted with tears, but she couldn't feel the burning in her eyes, behind the ache in her chest.
"You told me to stay here, Mother. And I did. I stayed, but you didn't come back. I don't get how someone can be here and then they're not. But I'm coming – I'm going to save you and Dad. Wherever you are. I promise."
Thunder rolled outside and a flash of lightning illuminated the room in cold, white light. Rain splattered against the window panes, where her reflection, with a crest of unkempt hair, stared back at her.
"I'm coming."
A/N
Thank you for reading. This is less of a first chapter, and more of a prologue, but it felt wrong to label it that way, since there are definitely events in this part that will play a big part in the future. Let me know if you've spotted any typos, or mistakes, and whether you felt Ino was too OOC. I tried to make her realistic; a scared girl, who has not even graduated from the Academy, in a world that has gone to hell, all alone, without a family.