Ino, the (in)perfect. Character piece.
[December 3rd, 2003]
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Ino was crying.
She was out in the woods where it was dark, gloomy, perfectly suited to her mood. It was odd because Ino never cried; she was strong and pretty and perfect and had an outer shell not even the devil himself could wear through. The family she came from was one made up of strong nins, after all, a bloodline that, though not as celebrated as the Uchihas or the Hyugas, had their own little niche in shinobi scheme of things. Her family was strong and wore their pride and never cried. She had never seen her mother shed a single tear before, or her uncles, or even her kid cousins. Her father, however, was a different matter.
Her father had fought when Konoha had been under attack. Her father had killed; she'd seen it all herself, the blood and the sweat, heard the screams and the dry, sick heaves that the sound nin had made when she'd died, impaled on her father's knife. But mostly she'd felt the tears that trailed down his cheek and onto her hair, later when he'd held her.
She'd asked him why, because her father never cried, never. And he'd said to her with a sad little smile and a hand on top her head like when she was a little girl, that one of the nins who'd died had been one of his own.
It was her mother who'd told her that the sound nin, a bare girl at sixteen and then some, had been his sister's daughter. Her father's niece. Her mother had seemed a hint sad, too, and her smile that had been meant as reassuring had only weighed all the more heavily on her daughter's mind.
It wasn't easy. And she told herself it wasn't because Shikamaru had left the other day, and so had Chouji.
She didn't know why she was crying, really. Certainly not for /them/ and certainly not for Sakura, who'd sunk into a vague state of things ever since Sasuke had...left. Ino felt pity for her, had seen the other girl staring aimlessly out her window, but when Sakura had caught her waving at her she'd only given her a tear-bright smile and a shake of her head. Later, she'd mouthed, and closed the curtains so very gently.
Konoha was in a panic. She hated it. She hated it all, the fires that had left behind crumpled skeletons of once-homes and the smell and the sight of those who'd been unlucky enough to have been caught defenseless, and the once again godawful /smell/ of corpses, and the flies. She'd tried to shoo them away but the whole swarm of them'd thronged back to the bodies as soon as she backed off.
She'd been trying to help the little girl.
The little girl had pretty wheat hair and slightly crooked white teeth and a forehead that somehow reminded her of Sakura. The little girl was a corpse, lying some lengths away now, there in the forest where she'd fallen trying to run from. If Ino really strained she could hear, just barely, the sick buzzing of flies.
Ino cried, even though she knew if Shikamaru were here he would frown and tell her to get off her soap-box and stop being so goddamned /weak/ for god's sake, she was /Ino/ and that was enough, and Chouji would probably grin his great big grin and offer her his chips when Shikamaru's back was turned.
She wanted them back. She wanted the grump and she wanted the fatty, damnit, wanted their perfect dysfuctional times spent together and all the name-callings and the training sessions and the days they passed by doing nothing at all. She wanted the girl back, the pretty little girl who hadn't looked more than six, and even if she had never seen the girl in her life it just didn't /matter/. She wanted to wipe away her father's tears; she wanted him to not to have cried in the first place, he was her father and fathers just didn't /do/ that kind of thing. She wanted Konoha before it all.
In time Ino stopped crying and stood to her feet (though she weaved a little haphazardly). The girl was still there. She stood at the corpse and concentrated just enough that a single solitary flame gathered at her fingertips. When she blew at it it became a stream of molten death. The flies died immediately.
Ino carried the little girl back to the village, and she was like a feather in her arms, and weighed about as much. Her father smiled at her, tiredly, when he saw what she'd done. She knew that he'd noticed the slightly red eyes and the puffy lids and the straggling hair. Neither of them said anything, though, because there were no words needed. None at all.
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~fin~