Title: Strength
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None
Word Count: 394
Warning/s: Implications of sex and assassination.
Summary: The kunoichi of Konoha may lack a shinobi's muscles, but there's more than one kind of strength in the world.
Notes: Um. I don't know where this came from. Actually I do--I was walking home late at night, in the dark, on my own, listening to "Blow Winds," and suddenly I started thinking about a Kurenai fic written by a friend of mine. And about the type of missions that kunoichi have to take. And then I thought that probably Sakura wouldn't have to do that type of missions--she's too valuable as a medic-nin--but that the other girls her age wouldn't have that protection. And a scene came into my head of a confrontation between Sakura and Ino, and of Ino not telling Sakura because she still wants to protect her. That scene never made it into the finished drabble, but...yeah.

So. A kind of scary little drabble, written because very few people seem to respect a kunoichi's true strength.

Ino receives her first solo mission the day after her fifteenth birthday, and she's so scared she's not sure whether to scream or cry. She's not ready for this, she tells herself, but she knows she is, knows they wouldn't have given her this mission if she wasn't ready, knows this is what she's spent the past ten years working for. She wanted to be the best kunoichi Konoha had to offer, and the very fact that they've given her this mission proves that in this, at least, she is.

She still wants to crawl into her father's lap and wrap her arms around his neck and bury her face in his chest and sob herself to sleep knowing he'll make everything better.

But her father can't know about this mission. No one can, not even the boys she's grown up with and played with and fought with and trained with until they worked together better than any genin team in Konoha. She suspects—she hopes—even Shikamaru would try to stop her.

But this is what it means to be a kunoichi. You bear the pain in silence, and when Asuma-sensei invites the three of them out to barbeque tonight for old times' sake, and Shikamaru shrugs and sighs and says he'll be there, and Chouji grins and pumps his fist in the air and cheers like he's just won the lottery, Ino smiles and tosses her hair and says sorry, she has a date tonight, maybe next week, okay?

And when her thighs and her hands are sticky with blood, and only some of it's her own, she closes her eyes and sits on the edge of the bed and refuses to let herself cry.

After a little while she gets up and washes the blood away with water from the bathroom sink, and she wraps her ripped kimono around her bruised body, and then she works methodically around the body in the bed, removing all traces of her presence. She leaves by the window, and she turns in her mission report before dawn.

When she sees Shikamaru on the street the next day, she has to remind herself to smile.

And when he asks her about her date, she reminds herself to lie.

She's a kunoichi of Konoha, after all. And there's more than one type of strength in the world.