Notes: Mild yaoi, with Kiba and Shino. Spoilers for up to issue 82; having read that far will also help you understand what it going on.
Animal Instincts
'Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite.' --trad.
Despicable and unfathomable sometimes, the things we do when we fear for those we love.
Amid the splendid decay of the old family district of the Konoha sato, Shino Aburame sits awake at the top of his slumbering house, enthroned amid the dirty-underweared effluvia of boy becoming man and vibrating to the cricket-whisper of the night. The walls shiver with the chitinous purr of tiny wings, a living mosaic of gleaming enameled bodies seething restlessly in response to their master's moods. A wagon train of ants treks relentlessly across the floor through a hostile wilderness of discarded manga and crumpled scrollpapers, crying Westward, ho! en route to the trash bin. On a pillow in the center of his bed, the generals in this motley army hover patiently, the boy who is food and home and god to them asking them questions.
The large lunar moth covers half his hand, like a drape of yellowed flannel polishing cloth, her wings trembling in time to the distant epicenter of his pulse. 'Show me', Shino whispers to her, offering the nectar of his Chakra in return. Her proboscis curls around the tip of his finger like a puppy's tail as she feeds him what she has seen.
The glass beneath her is cold in their shared memories, her fragile body flattened to the window in Kurenai's bedroom in order to be nearer to the mesmerizing danger of the streetlamps outside. Shino can feel the veins in her wings crinkle as she draws them up and loosens her sticky feet to fly a reconnaissance circuit around the room, ascertaining that all is well. Pairs of discarded slippers, an empty mug ringed with lipstick prints on the bedside table, and the brilliant strip of skin glimpsed between the twin barriers of blanket and negligee bloom in Shino's mind, refracted like a millefleur globe by her compound eyes. The fingers of Kurenai's left hand lay folded over by the wall like a sleeping dove, her hair a deeply tangled mass strewn like a clump of seaweed across her eyes. Sarutobi Asuma lays next to her, her creamy shoulders just nudging the furry breadth of his back as if the rest of her body was too shy to admit what must have taken place there earlier that evening. The moth lands silently with the touch of a fallen sheet of paper on the wrist of her outflung arm, and Shino counts off a minute of slow, regular heartbeats until he is satisfied that she is healthy, and as safe as he can make her at the time.
The cockroach was next, taking the moth's place in the cup of Shino's fingers, his thoughts scuttling along their shared connection to reveal a drainpipe along the roof of the Hyuga family estate. Shino could feel the dampness swirling unpleasantly around the roach's hairy legs as his spy scrambled up the pipe and squeezed through a gap at the top of the wall to scuttle upside-down across the ceiling above Hinata's bed. She slept more neatly than their sensei, tucked into a little pajamaed ball of cotton flannel, those visionary eyes that were the hallmark of her bloodline clamped peacefully shut. Across the room, her younger sister buzzed away through her dreams with snores Shino felt as faint vibrations through the roach's legs. Hinata's left ankle was propped up on a collapsing pile of pillows, bandages and a leaking ice bag telling of some kind of training injury she must have had at home. Shino recalled how exhausted she had been at the end of that day's mission; no small wonder that fatigue and clumsiness had done their worst. Still, there was no threat here, save for the inexplicable one posed by her own family, so Shino moved on to the last of his spies.
The flea bounded into his hands, jumping like a miniature metronome back and forth between his palms. The images that spiraled out of her simple mind like cotton sugar fluff were of jungle, the lush softness of Akamaru's fur transformed into a surreal landscape of ancient thorny trunks and rocky scales of dying skin. From the night-smells of bruised grass and sweet wind, he guessed that the puppy must be sleeping in his doghouse for once, instead of at the foot of Kiba's bed. A tremor shook the earth beneath the flea's feet; Akamaru sighing in his sleep. The remains of blood in the flea's stomach were rich and nourishing, tasting of a well-fed and healthy animal- all was well over here at the Inuzuka household.
Back in his rustling bedroom, Shino's three generals leapt, crawled, or flew off the pillow to join their comrades buzzing around the room. But there was still one person left to check in on before he could even think about sleep. Sinking into himself, Shino's mind sought out the vermin in his own flesh, the nest of devourer bugs that sucked nourishment from the essence of his soul and obeyed his every command. And far off across the sato, burrowing secretly into the body of his remaining teammate, the farthest-flung colony of his empire answered.
Shino was not proud of what he had done. He had known from the start what might happen if he let the rising flood of hormones drown out common sense, if the closeness of working together as teammates would be let to ripen into anything more intimate. He had known what would happen, from the day Kiba had yanked aside his collar and tried to kiss him- from that grass-stained and fumbling midnight at the edge of the practice field when Kiba had first admitted that the wouldn't mind knowing what it felt like to have Shino inside him. Shino's family had explained to him, long before pubescence made it a necessity, from where their custom of abstaining from physical intimacy before marriage was derived from- not from empty tradition, but from the simple unfairness of forcing someone unprepared to become a part of their family play host to the infestations that would be transmitted along with their genes. He had not told his friend what it meant to be with one of the Aburame clan, or what Shino had left to swim inside him besides the milky fluids of love, or why Kiba seemed to be so inexplicably hungry lately, and couldn't build his Chakra up to max. And he would not tell Kiba now that this was a permanent condition, something that would always let Shino keep track of him- something that bound them together forever without his knowledge or consent.
He needed no scrying justu to know what would happen if he ever let slip about what he had done, or why- "You put your BUGS in me?! Without telling me?!! Because you think I can't take care of myself?!!!" He knew full well the magnitude of the detestable action he had taken, in the name of Kiba's safety, and his own cowardly fear of rejection. But for now he focused on the nest in his friend's body- who told him that Kiba was sleeping deeply after a heavy dinner of yakisoba; that his pulse and breath rate were normal; that his Chakra level was on the low side, but stable; and that Shino could sleep now, knowing all was right in his world.
Reluctantly, he pulls his awareness away from the slumbering body of his young lover, out of the hive mind that hums deeply in his bones, to the swarming bedroom whose clock strikes a listless 1 am. Stumbling off the bed, he opens the moon-waxed window to let his servants out, a tide of filmy bodies shivering past his skin as they fly out into the clotted blackness of night. Far off to the west across the sato, beyond the bulky humpback of the arena and beside the stork-legged water tower, his eyes pick out one roof dearer than all the others, shingles gleaming like beetle wings in the moonlight. Despicable and unfathomable sometimes, the things we do when we fear for those we love.