Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or the characters.

Puppet in Pink

5. Your Friend

...the trail took them up towering, rocky

Hills, and over narrow, winding

Paths they had never seen, down steep

And slippery cliffs...

- Beowulf

Yamanaka Ino hurried home from the Haruno residence, almost shaking with fear. She'd stopped by to check on her rival (and best friend), but couldn't get within ten feet of the house without being swallowed alive by an aura of evil. It felt as if taking one more step towards the door of the place would have brought instant suffocation. Was that what losing a parent could do to someone? Could it really turn them upside-down like that?

Not upside-down, right-side-up. But you wouldn't know the difference...

Ino sighed. The Sakura she knew was always so bright and cheery. But she acted like a spoiled brat. She never paid attention to anyone but 'her' Sasuke. Ino knew she was like that herself to some extent, but still...even when Sasuke rejected her, Sakura always tried again, as if she was unaffected by the boy's cold words. It was like the pink-haired girl only had one goal in life—winning Sasuke. Ino would have given anything to have the comet-tail of secret admirers that followed her rival around, but no—Sakura never noticed those 'other boys'. She kept her eye on the prize. Uchiha Sasuke.

Ino remembered how the battle over that one boy had come between the two and destroyed their friendship. She remembered the day when Sakura had walked up to her, after school one day, and said in a quiet voice, "I'm not your friend anymore, Ino. I'm chasing Sasuke full-time now." Ino had stared for a few seconds.

Then she choked out, "Y-you can't do that..."

"Oh yeah? Well watch me, INO-PIG-CHAN!" Sakura's childish voice had risen to a yell on the last words. Ino-pig-chan? Not the most original insult, Ino reflected, but it was enough to bring a shouted response.

"I'm watching, FOREHEAD GIRL!"

And so it began. And so it ended.

There were times when Ino wondered if Sakura was crazy—giving up friendship for a pie-in-the-sky imaginary romance that would never happen. Now she pitied the pink-haired girl more than anything else. Still, it was sad to see Sakura suffering the way she was. Ino could only imagine how hard it would be for herself if she found out that her parents were dead. She could only wonder why the girl was so intent on isolating herself...

She could only wonder why...

"Tag! You're it!"

"Hey, that's no fair! You're a faster runner than me!"

"That's not my fault!" Two young children, a girl and a boy, played in a clearing near the woods.

"This game's no fun. Let's play something else," the girl pouted.

"All right...let's play hide and seek then!" The two ran off into the nearby grove of trees.

"I'll count," the girl exclaimed, standing against a tree and covering her eyes with both hands. "One, two, three, four..."

The boy scurried deeper into the forest as his friend continued to count. "...five, six, seven-eight-nine-TEN! Ready or not here I come!" The little girl scanned her surroundings, and saw a flash of color from behind a shrub.

"I found you!" she called, running over to the bushes. Then she stopped. The boy was standing in the open, stiller than a statue, as if frozen in place. His face was a mask of fear. "W-what's wrong?" the girl asked. She hurried over to him, and then halted again, overtaken by a feeling of danger. A stifling aura of doom infused the air.

"Let's get out of here!" She grabbed the boy's hand and pulled him away, racing to escape the sinister, suffocating energy that permeated the trees...

Sakura giggled as she heard the children scurrying out of the forest. And to think, I was under the impression that children avoided this part of the woods at night, she thought, vaguely annoyed at the disruption of her exercise. At least she had the aura-shield. Two weeks of non-stop training had made the shield almost habitual. Even if she could never build up the inhuman amount of chakra that Naruto possessed, she was getting stronger by the day. And she had to remember- limitless chakra was useless if it couldn't be controlled.

With a little smile, the pink-haired girl watched as the sun set and the forest was swallowed in shadow. She closed her eyes and covered them with her ninja headband, then took a kunai and threw it into the depths of the forest. This activity would cover an aspect that many of her scrolls deemed important—the 'third sight' or intuition. Her mission tonight: to find the knife she'd flung into the woods, without falling into any of the traps she had randomly thrown in earlier. And all within one hour.

With a last little laugh, Sakura leapt into the shadows to begin her task.