give/greed; live/concede
rating: m
genre: friendship/angst/romance
pairings: inosaku
POV: Ino
warnings: mild swearing, implication of sex
prompt: for Naruto Femslash Week 2017, Day 4: Soulmate AU
word count: 2,068
"Shinobi don't have soulmates," kāchan chides her, stroking Ino's hair out of her face.
Her hands are calloused sturdy things with dirt under the nail beds, but they're gentle when they touch Ino.
"Why not?" Ino asks, looking up at her mother from where she's curled up in bed. "Aren't you and tōchan soulmates?"
Kāchan smiles sadly.
Her hands don't reach for the place where her colourful mark is tattooed on her wrist, just high enough to kiss the heel of her palm.
"No."
Ino frowns, brows drawing in. "But then who is your soulmate? And why did you marry tōchan?"
Kāchan's soul knot is a rippling ocean of blue, not the stark black outline of a 'mate never met.
Kāchan's smile gets wider and sadder.
Ino wants to cry for it.
"Shinobi don't have soulmates, Ino-chan," she says. "They're a vulnerability we cannot afford."
"Oh," Ino says.
Her mother presses a kiss to her forehead and wishes her sweet dreams, not quite shutting the door to Ino's room as she leaves her daughter to her sleep.
(What Kāchan doesn't tell five year old Ino—what Ino won't know until she is nineteen and her tōchan has been dead for two years and her mother has never looked so old and grief-stained—is that Kāchan's mark bloomed colour as she snapped a man's neck, his eyes glancing down to the oceans raging at her wrist in the moment before the life was snuffed out of them.)
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Ino is Yamanaka.
This she knows in her bones.
She belongs to her family and to her Village.
She doesn't have the luxury of belonging to a single person first.
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But then.
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Sakura.
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In the end, when Ino is old and grey and carries crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes and her life has been innumerable tragedies and infinite joy, when Ino is old and looks back at the long winding road of her life, it all—every breath of it, all the tears and rage and laughter—comes back to Sakura.
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Ino is Yamanaka.
This she knows in her bones.
She will be a shinobi and one day she will be Clan Head and her duty is to her family and her Village.
It could be easy to turn away and leave the civilians to their power-plays.
It isn't her problem. Civilians are strange and unfamiliar and she does not understand the way they jockey for position.
Ino is Yamanaka. She knows exactly where she stands and so do the rest of her classmates (Shikamaru and Chōji at her shoulders, her hands curving into familiar seals).
It isn't her problem. It is not the place for the Clans to interfere with civilian business.
But.
Ino's duty is to her family and her Village.
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It's too easy to stare Ami and her bullies down.
The words of their exchange don't matter.
The only thing that matters in this exchange is the shade of Ino's eyes.
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She's cute, Sakura that is; a small wounded thing, like the baby bird Ino found in the Nara Forest and brought to Yoshino-obasan to nurse back to health. She hides behind her fringe and speaks softly.
Except.
Ino is not a Nara, to analyze a situation and break it down into pieces to be moved across the game-board. But Ino is Yamanaka: her blue eyes watch people and find the fault lines upon which to shatter them or the wounds that needs stitching back up.
Sakura is a small hurt thing, but when she forgets, she turns on Ami and the rest with an upturned lip and cat green eyes.
Ino wants to carve the meekness from her to reveal that ferocity that makes up her foundation.
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Ino pokes Sakura in the forehead, startling the smaller girl who cowers further.
"You shouldn't hide, you know. If you stopped hiding, they wouldn't know you were scared and they would stop trying to take advantage," Ino tells her, only a little bit exasperated.
Then, Ino pushes Sakura's hair out of her face, the way kāchan does to soothe her when she's sad. She wants to see what Sakura's smile looks like when she's not hiding.
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Ino's fingers brush across Sakura's forehead in benediction.
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There is a black circle inked at the base of Ino's sternum that unfolds like a flower but is colourless and bleak.
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Ino's fingers brush across Sakura's forehead in benediction.
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Warmth blooms in Ino's chest.
Ino doesn't know it yet—except for how as the warmth blooms in her, the universe shifting to centre around this scared girl with rounded shoulders whose eyes, Ino just knows, speak of buried greatness—but the flower inked onto her breastbone is blushing with pinks and oranges and lilacs too.
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Warmth blooms in Ino's chest.
Sakura's green eyes go wide wide wide, her hand clamping down reflexively on her thigh, her thumb rubbing over the cloth there like it's a talisman.
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Warmth blooms in Ino's chest.
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Ino is Yamanaka.
This she knows in her bones.
She will be a shinobi and one day she will be Clan Head and her duty is to her family and her Village.
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"Shinobi don't have soulmates," kāchan told her.
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Ino carves the warmth from her chest and the light from Sakura's eyes.
She carves the memory of that blooming warmth from Sakura's mind, too.
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Ino is Yamanaka, and one day she will be Clan Head, but today she is only eight years old.
Her fingers are clumsy as she flickers through familiar seals.
It's an ugly brutal job as she carves the memory from Sakura's mind, the knowledge of what they are to one another.
(It's many years too late that Ino understands the scars she left behind, and worse, the gaping wounds she clawed into Sakura's head that will never quite heal.)
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"Shinobi don't have soulmates," kāchan told her.
But, well, Ino is selfish, and shinobi are liars and thieves.
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Ino steals Sakura and keeps her best she can.
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When Sakura unravels the ribbons Ino has tied them together with (ephemeral useless things that are not enough, will never be enough, not in the face of what Ino sacrificed) for a boy Sakura declares she's in love with, Ino does not weep.
It's no less than she deserves.
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She breaks Sakura's arm in their next sparring match and stares her down when Sakura dares cry for the pain of it.
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When Ino is thirteen she fights Sakura again.
It's familiar and easy to slip into Sakura's mind, the natural walls that should fight to keep intruders out falling away under the slightest brush of Ino's fingers, like Ino is welcome in the darkest and most secret corners of Sakura's soul.
It's familiar and easy.
And then a ghost of a girl, black and white and no colour to be seen, a bleak thing, is towering over Ino.
"How dare you?" the ghost screeches. "How dare you come here? After what you did? Get out. Get out! GET OUT!"
The ghost punches her, a fist right to her breastbone, and Ino's soul plummets right back into her body.
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Her chest aches and every breath she takes freezes.
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Sakura turns up one day at the flower shop, two cups of tea in hand and a container of dango tucked under her arm.
Ino takes the tea and doesn't let their fingers brush.
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Shinobi are liars and thieves.
Ino is selfish. She takes what she can and then takes a little more.
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Ino is not a creature made for forgiveness.
Hatake Kakashi can rot for the way he would have left Sakura defenceless even while he let her team lead her to her death.
Somedays she wants to hiss and claw because Ino has no place to condemn another's selfishness, but Uzumaki Naruto is so blinded that he calls his own righteousness and pushes on without thought. He thinks he loves Sakura, but he doesn't even understand how Sakura was never built to be left alone. (Sakura is a hothouse flower; she requires warmth and watering and tender care.)
If Shikamaru were not there to clamp a hand to the back of her neck, Ino would have ripped Uchiha Sasuke's mind to shreds and damn the consequences.
Once, she would have given him Sakura, if it would have made Sakura happy.
Then he tried to put his hand through Sakura's heart.
Then he looked at her Village and would have seen it burn.
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"Ino," Sakura starts, reaching out to touch her.
Ino stares blank-faced at the horizon. Her blue Yamanaka eyes aren't enough to see the smoking ruins where her tōchan and ojisan's ashes are scattering.
"Don't," Ino rasps out, shifting so that Sakura's hand falls to the side, missing her. "Not now. Not yet. I can't—"
Sakura nods, her eyes red-rimmed and damp.
Sakura's always been such a crybaby, Ino muses.
Ino is Yamanaka.
This she knows in her bones.
She is a shinobi and now, today, she is Clan Head.
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Ino doesn't see the punch coming.
When it hits her, it's like the earth shattering, it's like being unmade.
It hurts.
"How could you?" Sakura demands.
She's incandescent in her fury.
She's the most painful thing Ino has ever seen.
Ino snaps her nose back into place and spits out the blood from the cut along the inside of her cheek.
Ino doesn't have to ask what Sakura means.
She can tell from the way Sakura's hand is clenching on her thigh and by the cracks shining through green eyes.
"How could you?"
Sakura's voice breaks clean through.
Ino swallows.
There are no excuses she can make.
There are no apologies that will ever be enough.
"Because I was scared," she says, because she owes Sakura at least something, even if it will never be enough.
Sakura's eyes burn.
"I hate you," Sakura says.
It's the bleakest, most terrible three words Ino has ever heard.
They split the air and land heavy on Ino's ribcage.
"I hate you," Sakura repeats.
Then she turns and walks away.
Ino falls to her knees under the pain of it, but she does not weep.
It's no less than she deserves.
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Ino doesn't see the kiss coming.
"You bitch," Sakura mutters as she bites Ino's lower lip, teeth and claws, shoving Ino out of her doorway and against the wall in the entrance hallway of her apartment.
"You asshole," Sakura continues, her hands pressing into Ino's hips, pressing bruises.
Ino can't breathe, the air stolen from her lungs as Sakura kisses her and kisses her and kisses her.
"I hate you," Sakura says. "You stole so much from me. From us. I hate you. How could you? You selfish bitch."
Ino doesn't realize she's lost her shirt and bra until Sakura stills, her hands framing Ino's ribcage, thumbs not quite brushing Ino's breastbone.
"Oh," Sakura says, more a gasp than a word.
There's an almost flower bushing pink and orange and lilac between Ino's breasts.
"Oh."
Sakura's eyes are too green, full over with wanting and fury and need.
Slowly, so slowly, as if worried the even the slightest of movements will shatter the moment, will cause Ino to disappear under her hands, Sakura shifts her thumbs up.
Ino is shaking, her own palms pressed against the wall to keep herself steady.
"Oh."
When Sakura finally, finally—after an age, after eleven years, after Ino's lungs are aching for her inability to breathe because if she breathes then maybe this house of cards she has built will come crashing down around her and once again Sakura will be walking away—brushes it, thumbs tracing the delicate curves of the flower unfolding on Ino's skin—
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So this is death, Ino thinks.
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Ino burns.
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"I hate you," Sakura mumbles later, much later, the two of them curled under Ino's covers in a twisted mirror of the way they once curled together as girls.
Ino digs her nails into the soft inner skin of Sakura's thigh where a sharp jagged star glitters in the colours of the night.
"I hate you too," Ino says.
Shinobi are liars and thieves.
Ino will not apologize for taking what is hers.
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"Shinobi don't have soulmates," kāchan told her.
Shinobi are liars and thieves.
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Ino carries dirt and blood under her fingernails.
Sakura kisses with teeth.
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They are fierce creatures.
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Ino will not apologize for this.