Of Water and Ink

by thenoacat

Years after the end of the war, those who survived linger on-and in some cases, those who should have died twice still walk the earth. Ino outlived her teacher, her best friend, and took comfort in the images she has branded into her skin. Itachi lives while his brother, his family, his mission are all gone. Two paths become one road.

1. I

Of Water and Ink - I

A/N at end

She traces her fingers over the twisting dragon. Even with its new form, the original shape of the ANBU tattoo on his arm is still visible beneath its new façade.

"I wouldn't have thought you to be the type to run away."

"It's not running away," he corrects her gently, distantly, "taking what you have and changing it to be of better use."

Ino and Itachi are sprawled out on the low bed, loosely covered by the mess of sheets shyly pulled to preserve their broken modesty. Itachi sits with his back to the headboard, seeming to barely notice her over his focus on the book that sits open in his hands, though it is plain to see when his eyes linger shut for moments on end that in truth he is savoring the tingling sensation her attentions are sending down his spine. She is lazed out like a cat fascinated by some novelty. Maybe that is what Itachi is to her—a novelty. She relishes the chance to study him like this, to so casually seek out the imperfections in his form. For now, opens however, she studies the dragon.

"Why a dragon, though?" she asks. "Something so ostentatious; it isn't like you. You always keep it buried under all those layers you wear, anyways."

Itachi opens his eyes to look down on her, slowly reaching his arm from under her touch to reach out and so gently brush the long blond hair from her back. "You're one to talk," he murmurs, but his words are lost, for he has already been mesmerized by the tree stained black into her pale skin, sprawled across her back like a spider.

Shikamaru had his smoking; Chouji had always had his eating. But what did Ino have, to deal with the pain? Around her her friends dropped like stones in an avalanche. After the loss of Asuma it had felt like their team would be the first to go, to fall apart in a crucial moment and at least maybe die together. But it had not been them—no, they stuck together, fought together, lived together, but while they were together they would not die. The others were not so lucky. Ten Ten. Shino. Lee. Hinata. –Sakura. Everyone had pitied Naruto and Kakashi when they came out alive, Sakura dead by Sasuke's sword and Sasuke dead by theirs. Everyone had felt the village had suffered a great loss in Sakura. But what about Ino? Losing her best friend—was that not something to be pitied?

But Ino, like her brothers in arms, had shouldered the burden of crying alone and sought an out. She'd found it in Sai, the boy who had seemed to appear at the war's beginning and stood strong, a constant when their comrades fell. At first she had thought it love, romance—but she soon realized that, like her teammates, Sai was something separate from romance. He was a brother just as much as the boys she had stuck with since she was twelve was; someone who knew how to be the strong one when she was failing and—on the rarest of occasions—someone who let her be the strong one in return. They got through the worst of it together, because Sai too had, in his own way, cared for Sakura, for the village.

"Hey Sai," Ino said one day. She was sprawled on her back in the grass, staring up into the sky, like Shikamaru used to when they were kids. "What do you think about tattoos?"

The sound of his charcoal scratching away at the paper stopped. "What do I think of them?"

"Yeah," she said, rolling over to face him. He frowned a bit more and turned the page in his sketchbook, and she knew he's been drawing her, but she paid his pouting little mind. "Like, would you ever get one?"

"I have one already," he answered slowly, catching Ino off guard. She blinked back at him.

"You do?"

Sai tilted his head. "Of course I do. I'm ANBU."

"Was ANBU," Ino corrected. If Naruto and Kakashi had done anything to change the boy's life it had been to get him out of ANBU, where he was just another pawn for the slaughter, as Shikamaru had put it. "But that doesn't count."

"It doesn't? It is ink embedded in the skin—"

Ino stopped the boy with a weak punch to his arm before rolling back onto her back. "Why do ANBU have the tattoo, anyways? It's like a gang sign, or some sort of cult branding. Weird."

"Once ANBU, always ANBU," Sai said. She swore she could hear a bit of the darkness creeping back into his voice, but when she craned her neck to get a look at the boy he had gone back to drawing. She watched him for a moment, and then let herself fall back into a more comfortable position, lazily searching out shapes in the clouds. "Besides," he said. "We all wear the Konoha leaf." His observation drew no response.

"Hey Sai," she asked after a minute.

"Yes?"

"Would you draw me something?"

"…something?"

"Yeah. Something big." She played with the grass, running her hands through its blades like a child's soft hair. "I want a tattoo."

"Why?"

"It'll never leave me," she admitted freely. "Something beautiful and a part of me that I can't lose. Roots to ground me. Imagery to remember things by. You know."

"You're so cheesy," the boy whined. She rolled over and tackled him, pinning him in the grass with scarcely a heartbeat's notice, and her grinning form casts a shadow on him as she blocks the sun from his face.

"Will you?"

"Sure."

"But why a dragon?" Ino forces herself repeat. She rolls over to get Itachi to pay attention to her—or maybe to get herself back to paying attention to him—leaving his hand hanging in the air. "You could have chosen anything."

"What would you have suggested I have done?" he asks instead of simply answering her question. He looks back down to his book, though the conversation continues. "Left myself marked as ANBU? That wouldn't have made me very many friends, where I was going."

"I dunno, something more… suiting." She tries to think of something, studying his face upside-down as the pages rustle when he goes to turn one. There really is nothing she can think of that would suit the man more than the ANBU tattoo—a symbol of devotion to his job and his village, a clear statement of allegiance that would never fade. While to Ino each of her tattoos held meaning captured within the imagery, what icon would have enough meaning to Itachi to have forever rendered in his skin? Then it comes to her, and she rolls back over with a grin. "A weasel," she declares triumphantly.

Itachi raises his eyebrows in what she first thinks to be bemusement, but then he replies: "We considered that, actually. But we could not find a suiting way to incorporate the original ink into it."

"We?" Ino catches. Itachi lowers his book slightly.

"My partner in the Akatsuki and I. He felt it was his business to aid my decision, for whatever reason. As I recall it was he who decided on the dragon, with many a comments of the force it represented."

"The fishy guy?" Ino echoes with a laugh. "I could see him saying that."

"It was the language he spoke, force and power."

As Ino watches the man hesitate in turning back to his reading, she becomes curious. "Do you miss him, ever?" she asks. "Your partner?"

"Kisame and I never were friends, exactly," Itachi answers carefully. "But sometimes, when I'm fighting, I forget that it is not he to back me up. When you learn to trust someone else with your back, your life, you learn to work with their style. Adjusting to working with partners besides him was, admittedly, quite difficult."

He has avoided the question, and they both know it, but Ino is not about to press the matter. She knows he will close up if her prodding gets too forceful, and then she'll never get anything out of him. Instead she reaches up and traces the dragon again.

.

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Hello! This is part one of many. Of Water and Ink is a story I have been working on since NaNoWriMo ended—a good break from novel writing for sure. Though I will be posting it in parts, I would not say that any one part counts as a chapter—rather, each segment of past and present is designed to tie into the others, something which will become more and more obvious as we go along. I will be posting a segment every few days until it is complete. Right now the story stands at about 7k; it should finish up somewhere around 12, if my estimations are not as terrible as the usually are.

ONE KEY POINT: This is a piece designed to challenge myself as a writer. I tend to avoid intimacy (and dare I say romance?) in my longer work, so I'm trying to work on that. I don't normally write 'short' pieces, which is what this is aimed to be. Ino/Itachi is a rather random pairing, hence once of my tasks is to sort out all of the details of how such a pair could come to be. PLEASE, if you have any comments/critiques, ESPECIALLY if you happen to catch any of my verb tense errors (and I know there are quite a few, as I have caught many myself) let me know! My intent in posting this in segments rather than as a one-shot is to be able to take into consideration reader critiques as I go! On the other hand, if your main critique is that Ino/Itachi seem out of character/lacking character, please give them a bit of time for story development.

Thanks much for reading : )