Finding Forever
a collection of themes
november 2; animal presence; shikaino (minor nejiten)
i.
Ino is beginning to understand why Tenten avoids the girls' nights in at any opportunity. At the moment, they all sit in Ino's living room, drinking a sweetened tea and talking. The topic of conversation somehow wends its way back (as it almost always does, but that's not Tenten's reason for hating these gatherings) to men.
"I don't see why he likes you," says a kunoichi whose name Ino can never remember. Even nicknames seem to slide away from her grasp on the girl.
She stirs a stick of honey into her tea, one hand on her chin. "I mean, he hates to work. So why does he like you?"
"Must be because men are shallow," another adds. This one titters, and Ino watches Tenten's eyes narrow. A slender hand, with well-groomed and shiny pink fingernails lifts to cover a pair of plump, pink lips. The nails gleam in the light, hiding the way the girl's mouth glistens, wet with lip gloss, and smothering her laughter. After a moment, a perfectly waxed and plucked eyebrow arches. "We all know what they want."
Her smile is warm, returned by most of the girls. They all laugh. A shared joke. They are sisters in this shared pain; beautiful, desired, stared at and wanted, and touched and felt and used.
The kunoichi who specialise in seduction often take a vicious joy in the culmination of their art: overturning the dynamic, going from victim to victimiser.
They all have sway over men, they know. They are young and beautiful. Soft and demure and gentle and round in all the right places, with voices like snowfall and ankles like willows and hair like silk. Like strands of spiderweb they entrap and entangle men-- the sweetly sexual cherry-pink virgin or the snapdragon witch-wife with eyes that smoulder. They drive them to trust, to fondness (interesting fact, Ino remembers Asuma-sensei once saying, but 'fond' used to mean 'foolish'), love them and leave them, pushing them away and somehow drawing them back in and then there is blood.
And women have this power, this sorry sisterhood says, because men are stupid. They split their brains between two places. They are shallow and silly and sex-crazed. And all the while, Ino knows, they ignore their own follies.
At each gathering, Ino finds, there are more and more little moments of clarity. She hears something, hears the appropriate laughter and warm agreements, or carefully worded, inoffensive disagreements, and startles a little. Her eyes widen as she realises: gods, I used to be like that!
It is not a good feeling.
"Oh, for the love," Sakura murmurs. She holds her mug to her chest, body still and spine straight in a fashion Ino has come to understand means that she is angry, extremely angry, but doesn't dare explode. They've all learned what explosions do. "Ino-pig's whatever-it-is with her whatever-he-is is their business. And if anybody's going to dig into that," a fake laugh, "it's going to be me."
Hinata nods her agreement. She turns her teacup in circles. "W-we wanted to be n-nice, after all. Didn't we?"
Conversation pauses for a moment as they all register and process the excruciatingly subtle threat. Everyone knows just how not nice Hyuuga can be, if they choose. Ino knows from experience, garnered in comforting Hinata and Tenten, just how sedately, calmly, classily, politely nasty they can be. They sting and they cut and they hurt in cold, calm voices and with polite or even mild words.
Tenten (barely-a-girl Tenten, the others sometimes joke) plays with her tarot cards. Idly, she pulls one out and holds it so they can all see. The illustration is beautiful; classical-looking, like an ukiyo-e. A man holds a woman in a dancer's dive, surrounded by flames. Despite the lack of detail, the shiny surface of the card looks like the picture of sensuality. The angles of their arms and legs, the beautiful curve of the woman's hair flowing from her head-- it all looks so intimate.
This is more than a dance, more than romance, more than intimacy, this card is lust.
Bold black characters split the card at the top and bottom: Strength.
Conversation stops.
"I don't think it's wrong that guys like sex," Tenten says. Her voice is high-pitched, faintly accented. In person, she sometimes seems too demure to be a woman with a kill count to make several macho ANBU writhe in jealousy. She smiles, winks, flushes a little. "I know I do."
They share another laugh, although Ino is sure that most of them remind themselves of barely-a-girl-Tenten. And then they say no more on the matter.
There are other things to talk about.
"Did you hear about what Miyagi Nodoka told her instructor?"
"I'd call it old news, but it's just so--!"
"I don't think I'd have ever had the nerve to say something like that."
"Well, yeah, but you didn't have the nerve to ask questions. You were almost as bad as our dear Hinata!"
ii.
She knows he's there because she smells the cigarettes. He isn't trying to hide his presence, for once, and it makes her smile. She taps neatly clipped but unpainted fingernails against his arm, her smile widening a little.
Ino isn't wearing any lipgloss; it wiped off on the apple she started to eat as soon as the other girls left. The tea, she consigned to the sink. She left the sweets and cookies to Sakura, who will probably give them to the class she student-teaches. The full-time teacher (Sakura's boss) is a sexist asshole. None of them feel anything at all about giving him rambuntious, unteachable students.
"Hi," she says, voice slightly lower than normal.
She knows what he wants. She isn't ashamed about wanting it too. That's what catches a kunoichi, eventually. You find yourself hating men, hating sex, hating your body and what it can do.
He smiles, face half-hidden in the shadow of her kitchen, and has to hold onto the cigarette with his teeth. The cigarette is a single point of red-orange glowing light; a puff of breath and it gets brighter, small and cylindrical like the candy she always imagined The Mean Men Who Take You Away giving out to the Naughty Girls Who Trust When They Shouldn't. She reaches out and flicks at his topknot, laughter breezy like the smoke drifting out her open window, and teases, "You'd better not try to kiss me with that in your mouth."
"Pushy, pushy," he says. "Who said I planned on kissing you at all? Maybe I was just stopping by before heading cloud watching."
"Cloud watching... in my bedroom," she nearly cackles.
He mock-grumbles and mutters, "You wear me out."
"You love me anyway."
She plucks the cigarette out of his mouth and tosses it away. It lands in one of the tea-cups she left three-quarters full of water and soap in her sink to rinse the honey out. The cigarette sputters and smokes a little, a faint hissing sound rises from the water, and then the light dies and the ashes spread out.
As she half-drags-half-leads him up the stairs, she notices that Tenten must have dropped her tarot card as she left. It is still there, bold kanji proclaiming STRENGTH, gleaming like the nickname-defying kunoichi's lips in the night mix of streetlights and moonlight.
(tarot is right; there is strength in lust sometimes)
(minor note: an alternate name for the 'strength' card is 'lust'. also, Asuma's random fact is true.)
