Diet
Ino isn't sure what she was expecting to happen to her friend on his mission to Sunagakure, but it sure as hell wasn't for him to return in a bloody mess, carried by that Temari girl. She and Chouji had waited at the gate for their friend's return, ready to take him out for barbeque, tease him relentlessly on yet another mission that he would have spent with the Sand nija. Both had nearly choked in shock when said Sand ninja appeared, Shikamaru over her shoulder, both drenched in blood.
Now they sit, all three of them, outside the emergency room of Konoha's extensive hospital. Shizune peeked out some hour or so ago, telling them of the damage: punctured lung, internal bleeding, broken bones, quite a bit of blood loss. Temari is alternately twiddling her thumbs and pacing impatiently, still in her bloodied clothes with stuck-on sand and leaves. Ino is rather surprised that the fan girl's temper isn't flaring anymore, as she had cursed up a storm at first. Ino smiles weakly, seeing the devotion to her friend and wondering why she wasn't swearing as well. She feels so hollow, so numb with shock, that she can barely string together a sentence at a time, let alone a complex string of obscenities. Temari's nerves of steel seem to be fraying slightly, but at least she can do something about it.
Chouji is all but inhaling bag after bag of potato chips, because he eats when worried or scared and both combined has a possibility of clogging the boy's arteries in one go. His frantic crunching, the bag's deafening crinkling, are the only sounds beyond Temari's stomping and occasional mutter about stupid lazy bastards believing in chivalry on a battlefield. (According to the story Temari had told when fairly calm, he had taken a hit aimed at her, smirking back and telling her that it was a man's duty to protect a woman -- Temari is still annoyed about it.) Ino can see the rotund boy's fear clearly in his eyes, when they flicker up from the bag's depths and to the locked emergency room door. The red light is still lit above it, as it has been for a good two hours.
Ino wonders idly about many things at once as they sit there in their near-silence. Where is his father? His mother? Asuma-sensei? How long will this take? Will he be okay? When he gets better (because he will get better, he's Shikamaru, he can't die, it'd be too troublesome), will he be even more inseperable from Temari for saving him again? Just how did Temari always seem to find him when he was in trouble? How come she and Chouji never did? And when is that damn light going to go out?
She doesn't realize that she has said the last thought out loud until Temari grunts an agreement to it and Chouji stands, crosses the waiting room, and sits down beside her. She stares at him quizzically, confused even as he holds out his precious bag of sour cream and onion chips for her.
"They help," he says kindly. "A bit. Want some?"
Ino stares down into the bag, at the grease gleaming off of its shiny foil insides, and can practically feel the fat leaping from the chips and into her hips. She's been on a diet for who-knows-how-long, and this would ruin everything.
She looks back up at Chouji, who smiles encouragingly.
"I don't mind," he insists. She knows he really does, that Chouji doesn't much care for sharing food with her (and who would with all the hell she's put him through over the years?), but she smiles nevertheless.
Screw the diet.
Author's Notes: First of many challenges obtained from the book "The Writer's Block". The spark word was 'diet.'