Hey guys! Chapter 2 is now up! This will be about the average time (a week) for each chapter upload. If I haven`t posted one in over a week and a half, feel free to heckle me all you want. I give you permission. But even more important is CONTEST!!!!!!!! YAY! Basically, I dislike the way that the story title came out. It is supposed to be read as "Roxanne-Ino`s Story" but evidently, fanfiction doesn`t let punctuation in the title. How sad. So now, the title (at least in my mind) sounds like RoxanneInosStory. Not the way I wanted it to be. Therefore, I`m letting you (the readers) make up a new title. There are some guidelines, though.
1) I would like it, as much as possible, to follow the "Roxanne" theme since it is based off of the story. Ideally, the title should contain the word "Roxanne" but I`m open to really anything that is good.
2)It has to be versitile. I`m planning on doing similar stories for Hinata and Sakura (still in the planning stages, so its not definite) so it would be nice to have a connection between all of them.
3)Please make it short. I`ve already tried "The Life of Roxanne Through Ino`s Eyes". Yeah, no. Not going to work out.
Are you asking yourself "Why would I bother doing this?" The answer would be because it wouldn`t be a contest without a prize, right? With your suggestion, include a prompt that you would like seen done. The person`s whos title I choose will get their plot made into a story (probably just a short oneshot) and their username/name will appear in both the summary and author`s notes of the story along with a hearty "Thank You!". Looking forward to your suggestions!!!!!!!
Ino sat on the bed and watched the smoke tendrils, illuminated by the lights from within the room, drift away from the glowing end of his cigarette. She pulled the bed's comforter tighter around her shoulders, the cheap cotton and polyester blend fabric scratching against her bare skin. Why did it always have to be so damn cold at night? The window was fully open, thanks to the man who now sat on its sill, smoking that cigarette, and her "work clothes" didn't exactly cover up the most skin.
Sitting on the windowsill, cigarette situated between his fingers, made Shikamaru look far more like a wise old man than any other man she had seen in a long time. One of his legs dangled off of the sill and swung parallel to the wall while his other leg was bent at the knee and served as a resting-place for the hand holding the cigarette. He was gazing distantly at the cityscape, moving only to bring his hand to his mouth to inhale and then move it again to exhale the smoke. She felt like a worshiper gazing up at her idol, or like a young child looking up on the face of her father. It made Shikamaru seem distant, like the idol that is represented in a physical creation, but can never really be brought down to its worshipers. Or like a father's face that is at eye level with the child for a moment, but becomes unreachable again as the man returns back to his normal height. The thought of Shikamaru being so distant from her made Ino sad and frightened in a way.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a glimmer of something white. When she turned her head to look at it, she saw that it was the corner of Shikamaru`s cigarette box peaking out of his coat's inner pocket. She pulled the coat towards her on the bed and freed an arm from her comforter cocoon to pull the box out. The colorings of the label and of the box were slightly faded and the edges of the lid and corners of the body were worn and dented. Flipping open the lid, she counted exactly seven cigarettes that had not been used. She wondered how many cigarettes he went through in a day. He had only smoked a few times with her, and always waited to light up in the hotel room, so she could tell that he wasn't too heavy of a smoker. Also, his jacket didn't reek heavily of smoke; there was only a comforting hint of tobacco.
Ino pulled one of the remaining cigarettes out of the box and rolled it between her fingers, examining it. She had never really wanted to smoke in her life. No had she wanted to do those harder drugs that some of the other girls and some of her clients did. A lot of people would probably laugh at a prostitute who was trying to take the moral highground, but she had seen what the drugs did and decided that she already had enough problems to deal with without an addiction. Besides, cigarettes made her nostalgic, and she didn't want to dwell on the past.
Now, however, curiosity won her over and she began looking around for where Shikamaru had placed his lighter. She found it, a black plastic one that anybody could buy over the counter at a gas station, laying on the nightstand beside her. She reached over and flicked the flame into life with one hand while the other held the stolen cigarette, but before she could unite fire with tobacco a large hand halted the movement of her lighter hand.
"What do you think you're doing?" Ino looked up, startled by the sound of his voice so close. His eyes were looking straight into hers and were only a couple of inches away from her face. His hands, too, were closer than they had ever been and she reddened slightly at the fact that they still rested on her own. She averted her eyes to look at the sill where he had previously been siting. The metal ashtray provided by the hotel was sitting on the sill with the remnants of a still-smoking cigarette in it. Damn. She could never understand how he moved so quietly. It was like he was made of shadows or something.
"Do you know how disgusting these things are?" he asked, plucking the cigarette from her fingers. "They'll make you sick. Don't smoke them." He placed it back into the box and restored the box to its pocket inside his coat.
She laughed incredulously at his statement. He had to be kidding. "Way to call the kettle black, Sir Pot. Besides, why do you care?"
He muttered something unintelligible and, she reasoned something that she probably didn't want to hear. He proceeded with a sigh and said, "Because, without me, you would probably end up in a cue for the pearly gates." He pushed himself off of the mattress with a creak and started to walk back towards the window, but was stopped when she gripped his shirt collar in a death grip and yanked him back down onto the mattress. "Ow!" he exclaimed, rubbing the part of his head that had accidentally knocked against her knee. "What the hell was that for?"
She really couldn't care less about the pain his head was going through. What she did care about was the phrase that kept playing over in her head in both the voices of the young man before her and of the older man whose voice she had not heard in over a decade. Had it really been that long? It seemed like only yesterday that she was clutching her knee, scared into tears by the crimson blood that appeared after a rather harsh meeting with the concrete sidewalk. A pair of comforting arms had wrapped themselves around her tiny shoulders, the hands attached to them ready with a wet paper towel and a colorful bandage. Even more important were the concerned eyes and reassuring smile, hidden slightly by the wisps of blond hair so similar to her own.
When she was situated at the table with a sugar cookie in her hand, he had leaned over the top and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Smiling once again, he had told her to watch out for accidents unless she wanted to secure her spot in a line for the pearly gates. When she asked why he said that, he told her that it had been a favorite saying of his grandmother. He gave her a secretive wink and pulled another cookie from the box for her, saying that there was no such thing as "too sweet" for his little girl.
"Ino1" She was startled out of her memories by another close encounter with Shikamaru`s face. His forehead was wrinkled in confusion and his eyes were searching her face. "What is wrong with you?"
She was a little unnerved by the emotion in his normally stoic face. She didn't really want to look into his eyes anymore, so she averted her own eyes to look at the pack of cigarettes resting once more in his jacket pocket. She leaned in to grab them, but was stopped by a pair of hands on her shoulders.
"No, you are not doing this again. What's wrong?"
She ignored him and reached the rest of the way for the box, pulling out a single cigarette like she had done before. It was only until she was turning it over in her hands that she spoke.
"He used to smoke, you know."
Shikamaru`s eyebrows moved even closer together before saying, "Who used to smoke?"
She continued to avoid his gaze, instead focusing on the tobacco in her hands. "My dad. He used to smoke just like you, except he used a different brand. The ones he used had a little camel on the front of the box. I always thought it was the cutest little camel, but my mom hated everything about them. She used to kick him out onto the porch, even in the dead of winter, because she didn't want her house to smell. She was always pressuring him to quit the habit, but she was never successful."
Ino could feel her eyes starting to water, but she didn't want to stop. "Do you know it was actually me who got him to quit? We had just had one of those anti-drug assemblies at my elementary school and I came home all fired up about not doing drugs. While he was in the bathroom, I stole his cigarette box from the table and began cutting them up one by one with my school scissors. He came out of the bathroom to find me sitting on the kitchen floor, covered in tobacco shavings." She laughed a bit, tears now freely flowing down her face. "As he was cleaning me off, he made me promise that I would never touch another cigarette again and, if I didn't, he would give up smoking. I promised and he gave it up. All because of me. All because he said I was 'Daddy's Little Girl'."
She could barely see through the torrent of water now. The cigarette had lain in her hand through the story, but was plucked out of it by Shikamaru and placed on the nightstand.
"You know what's kind of funny?" she asked, twiddling her now-empty fingers. "Both of my parents died in a fire that I caused. You want to know what happened? Well, when I was fifteen, I brought a guy I really liked over. He was part of that bad-boy scene and he asked if he could smoke in my house," She noticed that twiddling was doing nothing to disguise the trembling of her hands. "I knew my mom would be able to smell the smoke when she got home, so I took him into the flower shop that we owned and that was attached to our house. I guess the cigarette wasn't put out all the way when we left to go to a party because, when I got back, my house and the flower shop were just charred ruins. The police said that they found two adult bodies in the living room. Mar parents` car was in the garage! They died and I killed them!"
Ino sobbed hysterically, tears covering most of her cheeks and her hand shook uncontrollably. Physically, her body couldn't take the emotional stress and she collapsed. She doubled over and her face was an inch away from hitting the mattress before strong arms wrapped themselves around her shoulders and pulled her into Shikamaru`s warm chest. She spent the rest of the evening reliving her past in her head and sobbing into his dress shirt.
Reviews are always loved and remember that contest =)!!!!!
