Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
The Philosophy
Ino had a philosophy.
She showed me when we first met, all those years so long ago they bordered on oblivion.
She had it all written out, even back then. A preplanned childhood, a preplanned love, a preplanned life. She said that the job of every kunoichi was to set goals. That it was the ninja way.
She gave me the blank scroll, and the thin bamboo brush that was clumsy in my small hand. She set the ink bottle in front of me and told me to write it out, what I wanted my life to be. Write out my future.
The scroll remains empty to this day.
And then she got mad at me, when I told her I couldn't. When I told her I wouldn't set my life into stone. She said she wouldn't play with a goalless outcast. She wouldn't play with a girl without a future. She had better things to do.
Anything better than playing with me.
I asked her about it yesterday, or quite possibly the day before; somewhere between the present and the past, somewhere in the direction of the future. I asked her, and she gave me a look, stalking away to vanish in a convenient herd of people. Did she forget so quickly?
Accidentally, or on purpose?
Perhaps she was right. Her philosophy is lost on me. Perhaps I do have no future, not as a kunoichi, not as a civilian. I just might be a copycat, an imitation, duplicating subconsciously the scroll of her life. Xeroxing into my own dreams 'winning Sasuke', 'marrying Sasuke', 'living with Sasuke for the rest of my life'. I glued them on tightly back then, cut-and-paste kindergartener-style, in a perfect mask of my only idol.
Because we all need to worship something, right?
And when the glue comes loose at last, from moisture, from age, disrepair and all of the above...
Do I want to be like her? Don't I want to see my true face?
Or maybe I don't want to see my face, what I'll look like once the mask is off. Maybe I don't want that.
And now the clock chimes twelve and it's dark out and the scroll is in my lap, a blank yellow-white universe just waiting oh-so-patiently for a god. And the whole world feels like it's slipping, because it's my choice now and I'm afraid. So very afraid.
Or perhaps it is not quite fear as I know it.
And I rip up the scroll, three quick slices with a kunai. Shreds of parchment flutter to the floor, lay still, and I can see that was all they ever were. I feel like the kid who says he's finally done it; he's killed the monster under his bed. The skeleton in his closet that was dead anyway.
And that might not be a bad thing, because skeletons can be road blocks if arranged the right way. As can friends.
Yet another mediocre ten-minute Sakura one-shot, this time looking at Sakura's friendship with Yamanaka Ino. Probably not the best thing I ever wrote, but whatever...