A/N: This is the last chapter to this story already. Thank you very much (especially you, sumtyms) for your continued support and your messages. Every single one was precious to me.
I hope to see you again some day.
Part 7 Never Change
"Why?"
"What do you mean, why?"
"Why Chouji, Shikamaru and me, Kiba, Hinata and Shino, Neji, Tenten and Lee and Naruto, Sasuke and you? Why always groups of two boys and one girl? Don't you think it's strange?"
Sakura regards the flowers she has been arranging closely while she thinks. Usually Ino can't stand it when someone arranges her own flowers for her but she makes an exception with Sakura and Hinata.
"I never thought about it before," she finally answers. "Why do you ask?"
Ino has been thinking about this for as long as she can remember and still she struggles to explain. "I mean, why didn't they put you and Hinata and Kiba in one team, or Tenten, me and Chouji?"
"It's evaluated carefully who gets to be on which team, isn't it? I thought the teachers selected us according to our abilities and stuff."
"So what if Shikamaru would have been best put together with Kiba and Shino? They're good friends, after all, and they do go together well. And Naruto and I-" She stops. "We were a good team, at least."
Sakura is taken aback but composes herself quickly. "Oh, when you both were Anbu, yeah. He never told me much about that time." She sounds sad. "Everyone says Naruto hasn't changed at all. But…"
"You know better?"
"How would I? Maybe you know better, Ino, you've certainly spent more time with him in the past years than I have." Sakura smiles apologetically. "I'm not blaming you or anything. Fact is, I hated having him on my team so many times. He was so annoying, so stupid. He drove me crazy and I thought he was the worst person on earth. Nowadays I know better. There is no better man than him, no better team mate. No better friend, too. I wonder…" She interrupts herself. "No. That's not like him. Still, I can't…"
"You wonder what?" Ino leans forward, touches Sakura's hand. This is one of her oldest friends: one she has almost lost and found again. And while she loves Hinata and Tenten Sakura will always be the one she feels closest to, no matter if she reciprocates or not. And maybe that is the problem, she realizes. "You wonder if he sees you as a friend, too, Sakura? You do know you're married to him?"
"Yes. No." Sakura sinks down into the chair next to her, clasps her own hands tightly in her lap. "I wonder… Does he hate me sometimes, for everything I did when we were younger? Because I don't know. Does he know I love him?"
Ino can't help it: she smiles. "Sakura. I've spent a lot of time with Naruto and you should know him well enough to know what I'm going to tell you now: Naruto loves you more than anything. He loves all of us: it's the way he is. But you are special. If you're so unsure about it, why don't ask him?"
"I did already."
"And his answer?"
"He says he loves me."
"In your place, I'd believe him."
Sakura has grown beautiful in the past years. Ino watches her leave and smiles to herself.
...
So Sakura, Sasuke and Naruto.
She watches them from the window of her little office: Naruto laughs as he tells them something. Sakura smiles and gestures at them and Sasuke listens quietly and smirks. Naruto runs his hand through his hair - Ino knows this gesture of his so well - and his eyes are full of love when he looks at his wife. Their shoulders almost touch. Almost. Sasuke's not wearing the stupid Uchiha fan on his clothes anymore. Well, at least nowhere Ino can see.
She wonders whether the Gods are trying to tell her something.
And Ino still meets Chouji and Shikamaru weekly, cannot imagine a life without them. Is it the same for Kiba, though still on his journey, Hinata and Shino, and Neji, Tenten and Lee? At least with Neji, she has doubts. But looking at Hinata's face when she sees her old teammates – it is all there, plain and simple. Or not so simple. So all the Konoha Twelve share it: this kind of bond that either breaks four months after the end of training or strengthens with every year people are apart. It increases with every year they spend together. So dangerous. So painful. And so, so precious.
Four times three genin. Four times three that became one. Unfaultable math, irrational till the end. Does it make sense? Konoha will forever split her children into groups of three and perhaps logically the two-to-one-rule is a good solution. There always will be more boys attending the Academy than girls. One girl usually is enough to balance the boys, one girl can mediate the rivaling teammates while two girls might be trouble. Also, every team should be assigned a medic which is, statistically, something sixty-five percent of the female shinobi choose to be at. Logic, statistics, empirics. Can it really explain human minds? The development of painful and joyful bonds, so similar to the one in the previous generations. Is it fate, or a curse? Will history keep repeating itself forever? Ino can't say and nobody else can, either. She just knows that every single one of the children that once were the Konoha Twelve will fight hard for the future not to repeat the past's mistakes. It might not always be avoidable, as seen with Chouji's first team. But it is worth a shot. This is the point: when Sakura and Naruto's, or Hinata and Neji's, or Tenten's or Chouji's kids are old enough to become genin, their history will be different. Their future will be different. And even if there might be some mistakes along the road Ino prays that everything will be fine, one day. It is a strange pattern and, at the same time, painfully familiar: Children become parents whose children become parents who wish for their children's happiness, while all the while struggling for their own. They will walk down the painful road to their own happiness while making mistakes, while being hurt, while repeating mistakes of their parents and their own. But in the end – and it is what Ino believes, what she has to believe – everything will be alright.
It just has to.
It starts with Sakura visiting her one day, her face glowing, and Ino knows she is pregnant before she opens her mouth. She gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. It finally has reached that time when all of her friends have settled down and are starting to have families. Ino lags behind, as usual. Hinata's daughter inherits a shock of dark hair, her mother's delicate features and her family's silver eyes. She is pregnant again when Sakura gives birth. Uzumaki Shishiro and Hyuuga Kiju grow up together and seeing them is like seeing a little version of Naruto with his father's boisterousness and his mother's kindness and a little Neji, calm and clever, all over again. They grow up like siblings – Ino watches them when she is over to babysit because of some great clan meeting which both Sakura and Naruto and Hinata and Neji have to attend - and knows there won't be anything that can get between the two of them. Lee adopts an orphan. Sakura intervenes to make sure it gets to keep his sanity – and all the people around them, too. The bowl-haircut is unavoidable, though, and from that day on Lee calls Sakura "beautiful ever-young adopted mother of my youthful child". Kiba and Shino – well. When Shino invites people to his wedding the entirety of Konoha is stunned into silence. Only Hinata smiles knowingly. And Kiba returns from his travels with a child one day – red-haired, green-eyed, shy and so different from her happy-go-lucky father that nobody actually believes he could be her father but since he does not disclose information (again, only Hinata and Shino seem to know something) nobody asks. Inuzuka Yuka grows up with the children of Hidden Leaf: Shishiro, Kiju, Suzu, Henara and all the others. And all of them are a part of the village they live in.
"Ino," Sakura says, in the soft silence that sometimes follows a conversation between friends . "You know you can bear children, too. What are you afraid of?"
Ino's greatest fear, ironically, is the greatest wonder of all.
Shikamaru is still by her side. On the day he proposes to her they both have just seen Temari off, Shikamaru as First Advisor to the Hokage, Ino in her function as Head of Intelligence. The Hidden Sand ambassador waves her fan energetically and calls an invitation over her shoulder which at least Ino probably will never take up but Shikamaru nods and lifts his hand in a good-bye gesture. And she can't help but feel jealous when thinking of the other woman. Temari… Temari is everything Ino never was, never could be and never will be. She's open, easy-going, unafraid, she has so much to give – things Ino can't give anymore. She can imagine the rumors. She heard them. He must be a saint, staying with her all these years. Pity? Ino can take many things, but not that. Not pity, and not from the man she loves.
"You," Shikamaru says, "Are completely out of your mind!"
"Am I?" She can't react other than trying to make herself seem taller in a chair that is her prison. She cannot even move closer to punch him, like she would have done all those years before. "So tell me, what do you have to gain from staying with me?"
Sometimes he shouts back. Sometimes even Shikamaru loses his temper; it is rare but she has seen it happen. This time he stays completely calm and she is abruptly reminded of the night he kissed her the first time.
"Is it a matter of gain and loss? No, Ino, it isn't, and you know that."
She does. It is just that he had dreams of a future and she knows they did not involve a paraplegic wife. And it is so, so hard to keep an optimistic view on herself when there are things she just can't do.
"Whatever I say, you won't believe me, will you?"
He gets up and returns with her coat and a blanket and when she realizes he is actually taking her to the registration office she is struck silent. Shikamaru doesn't even need to bribe the clerk.
"You want me to marry you dressed like this?" She is wearing a plain skirt and a top. No makeup. Her hair, short and golden, hangs down to her shoulders without any clip or pin. It is summer, but the evening is cool already. And she has no flowers.
Shikamaru looks at her with his eyes dark and intense and says, "You are beautiful," and Ino can't remember when she blushed like that the last time.
She believes him.
…
Naruto tells her.
Only people who know the pain of being left – only people who have been hurt before – are able to give kindness. This is you you're talking about, Ino thinks, this is you, Naruto, not me. But his smile is so kind she cannot contradict him and when Ino doesn't say anything Naruto turns his gaze back to the sky. And Ino thinks that nobody ever could have been a better choice for Hokage than Naruto Uzumaki.
"I'm not," she whispers to Shikamaru at night. "I keep pretending. I try so hard to be perfect that I make others hate me. I don't speak up, never try to get things to change, I whine and mope and feel sorry for myself instead. I'm not kind. Why did Naruto say something like that?"
Shikamaru catches her hand, kisses her fingers. "It's the kind people who never think of themselves as such," he says quietly. Ino can only watch, helplessly. He leans over to her, presses his forehead against hers and she feels his breath on her lips, can feel his closeness. His warmth. "You care too much. That's why you get hurt."
"What does it matter?" Angrily, she wipes away a tear that has escaped. "Crap, again. Look at me, I'm weak."
"You are one of the strongest people I know. And despite what you believe, Ino – it matters. It matters to me. If every person that cares has a person to whom it matters – how many people can be saved?"
Ino closes her eyes. "For every human being there is one person out there that can reach out to him, or what? One person you love more than your own life?"
A ghost of a smile. "Something like that."
"It sounds nice. I wish it could be like that."
His lips touch hers softly, just a ghost of a touch. His nearness is familiar and she loves him. "I am sure it works that way."
If there is a reason for her existence, Ino thinks, it is Shikamaru: she was born for him. Through everything – through her entire life, good or bad, through happiness and pain and sickness and health – this sole fact will never change.
