They caught Naruto and Sakura on a date at Ichiraku's on a Thursday evening. Hardly unexpected. The friends-turned-couple frequented the noodle stand together. Still, surprise rooted Shino on the spot. There preceded a tense instant, blank stares exchanged between Hinata, Naruto and Sakura. The moment they sat as a group, Shino was ready to pull Hinata out.

As far as their friendship went, Shino and Kiba would stop at nothing to protect her, and in return, Hinata liked Naruto. They stood on both ends in a balance, and Naruto, or at least the idea of him, kept them from caving into the center.

Now, Shino operated solo on a lopsided beam, holding his ground, waiting with arms spread open should the center fall.

He expected tears, but she laughed at Naruto's jokes. At every off-center remark he said a giggle. And nothing on the surface seemed to change between her and Sakura. Their conversations went on easy with the latter doing much of the talking and Hinata all eyes and ears at the other kunoichi, nodding every now and then.

This sheetedness, the pretense; two versus one. Shino's stomach lurched, threatening to flip. He doesn't agree with this one bit.

Sakura had known Hinata liked Naruto, so what's this? They hurt her; surely they know. Avoiding the hornet's nest, eh?

Shino slurped fast and quiet on his side. The ramen tasted bland, void. Behind him a group of old men were all praises for Teuchi's noodles being extra. Cleansing his palate, glass stayed on his mouth, he thought: Was he only paranoid? Burdened alone by this injustice—her feelings ignored, forgotten, tossed carelessly in the trash like it's nobody's business. Look how she engaged them—is this consolation? Appeasing their conscience by pretending she was fine?

Sakura and Naruto got noisier while Hinata's lighter laugh remained peppered in the background, soothing like a blurry shadow. Shino's grip tensed, his bugs rasped their wings at the irritation running thick in his blood. Before he'd known, Shino slammed his glass of water on the counter. They hushed, all eyes at him. He couldn't make up a shaky hand or slip in a "my bad", and without explanation, left some bills and walked out.

Hinata later caught up lagging a few steps behind him.

"Sakura-san told me everything before she accepted him… I told her I support them," she said, her voice tender and shaky. She understood what irked him. Explanations aren't always necessary between them.

Shino stopped and turned. She was cross, he could tell. The tears on her cheeks were curses she would never say.

"You shouldn't have done that," she said. "I'm mad at you." Her fists trembled on her sides.

"I know." The sense of character quickly fled, but Shino was emulating Kiba, obstinate and devil-may-care. She almost gasped, offended, and pursed her lips in a thin line, her round eyes wide and shimmery. Guilt crept up on him.

Should he continue this? Feeling betrayed for getting angry in her stead? But he couldn't say she did wrong or right her for letting herself be pushed around.

"I will not be pitied at so don't get mad…" Partway, she sounded pleading. Unbearably so that he felt hopelessly soft.

Staring at the ground, he sighed. "I understand. Sorry." Even though his anger was only mildly dissipated.

Hinata dried her tears behind her wrists. "I never really believed I'll be alright seeing them. I can pretend for the rest, for them, for myself. But I want to be brave… So I can finally let go."

He and Kiba watched her grow stronger this way. The calm front she'd put up even under intense pain terrified them at times. She was Team 8's most enduring. They never gave her consoling hugs and Shino wasn't changing now, but he felt more for Hinata that when she held his hand as he walked her home, he knew he was the one being comforted. And he never wanted to let go.

PART II

WHEN HE WAS a child, Shino had a recurring dream. It was dark and hard to breathe. Something encased him, restricting his movement. He'd wriggle and creep, slowly like a worm, until he'd break out into the light. What he had broken out of was his old skin—he had moulted! In the mirror, he'd see his arms and chest made smooth, the gazillion awful tiny holes gone.

Soon as their umbilical chords were cut, Aburame males were fed to insect chambers. Their bodies exist to serve the village. As residence to parasitic bugs squirming their way into pores and sweat glands, they were literal walking hives, ugly beneath their coverings.

In his child mind, as he was often alienated by other children who contended his family served bug soups to guests, Shino would be glad he wasn't repulsed of himself as he was of his father's forearms and of his uncles' and cousins' showing beneath their kimono sleeves at casual family gatherings.

But it was only a dream.

Shino liked to believe he didn't care as much as he used to. Because later on, he'd come to think of the hives as Aburame pride, not in the sense of flaunting battle scars, but as a suffering only Aburame knew. His moulting dreams had also turned him into Naruto.

Naruto's heroism, to be brave and without doubt, to be relentless in the face of things he couldn't easily have—Shino knew what it meant. Or maybe Hinata's regard he wouldn't admit to wanting for himself.

Lately, the dreams have returned ending differently: in the mirror in the dream, it wasn't himself or Naruto; it was Kiba.

Was it guilt? For having Kiba's promotion? For being the one left remaining by Hinata's side? Nonsense. It wasn't his fault Kiba left and these things fell gracefully onto his lap.

As boggled as he was startled awake in bed in the middle of the night, Shino went out the veranda for air. Past the patch of trees lulled by the bright moon, he imagined Hinata peeking out her window in a white nightgown. His heart drummed hard, breath rising over his chest.

Perhaps… perhaps…

Was the dream telling him of a subconscious desire to dare as Kiba did?

He had been considering. God knows he contemplated telling her the truth.

But where to even begin?

He couldn't be mindless like Kiba.

The second his musings drift to what Hinata would think, dread rushes back from when they were twelve and Kiba insisted on a shirtless brawl in front of her. Every pore on his skin felt gaping and pebbled, the pulse of a thousand tiny lives creeping around, filthy.

And her family, what would they think? He was even more doubtful of his own family.

Shivering, he holed back into his room and dove under his blanket.

Get the doctor, get the doctor!, someone screamed.

Candles alight rushed inside the house. Now brisk and alert, he flung off the covers and scurried out.

Shino had seen this happen before, twice, both times false alarms. He sat with his father and relatives gathered around a long table sipping tea, and one by one, were being called into his grandmother's room for her last messages.

"What do you think about settling down?" his father asked. "Mother wants to see you marry before she... She won't rest until you assure her."

Shino swore his relatives directed accusing glares at him. Since when was this about him?

His father took a deep inhale and rubbed his watery eyes. "She's pulling herself together; you know your grandmother. But she seems so tired already, so tired. There's your cousin Yumi. Or Saya; your uncle Hide told me she'd be returning. And there's also…"

Some of his elderly relatives also asserted several other names. Those who were silent on the table didn't give a damn what his opinions were and how he felt, or what his life would be like if he agreed to every single thing they say. Yet, every time, Shino replied the default:

"I'll think about it."

Usually, it ends up with acceptance on his part.

Hinata would often say his grandmother was cute. But when she was of clearer mind, she was the highest counsel in the house, a tour de force infamous for her temperament.

Shino had been teaching part-time in the Academy when his grandmother ordered his transfer to the Intelligence Bureau. She had high hopes he'd break the family's ANBU streak and be vouched for hokage in the future. They were being looked down on, she said, as if the highest place for an Aburame in the village was in ANBU.

Kakashi once offered him a position feeling he was wasted away giving intelligence reports. When Shino had politely declined, Kakashi offered he give the ninja exchange program to Sand a try. Shino reasoned his clan would never permit the arrangement being his father's sole heir.

"I can only imagine the choices being made for you," Kakashi had said peeking between towers of documents. "Some clans don't even permit marriages outside their kin. Must be tough for people who actually fall for people outside their clans."

Shino knew better than anyone. To outsiders, living with bugs for a lifetime isn't the most attractive prospect to begin with.

When it was finally his turn, Shino slinked inside his grandmother's room and squeezed her hands. They felt stripped to the bone and withered like leaves. The smallest nerve he had up to tell he won't marry—at least, not in the next few foreseeable years—dropped to nonexistent.

The wooden blinds stayed fully shut as it was during daytime so he pulled them up and allowed a slight draft in through the sliding panels. He grew sad at the thought he would no longer be drawing the blinds before the year ends. Sometimes she thought he was thirty and called him Shibi, Shino's father, and slapped his arm when he called her grandma.

"That girl you're friends with, what food does she like?" she asked over the cup as Shino fed her barley tea. She stubbornly refused to drink. Her wispy white head curled wearily on top of her pillow.

"Zenzai, cinnamon buns..." said Shino. "Anything sweet. Hinata is a sweets person. She told you to eat well, didn't she? I won't make her come again if you won't…"

His grandmother slowly downed half the cup. "Zenzai…" She hummed and glanced beside her at Shino, seeming to judge him lacking in worth. "Your aunt makes great zenzai. Tell her to teach you how to make it. Then bring it to that pretty young lady."

"Why?"

"Just listen. Go make zenzai. You don't have to marry into our clan… Make her zenzai."

Shino cracked a smile. "That's news." Oh, but he was taken aback, his face mildly heating up. And what is this? This giddiness. Like the time his father gave him his first real terrarium set for grown-ups. "I've never heard you say anything like that."

"You're already thirty. Get married the soonest."

"I'm twenty…"

"You wish you were. Tomorrow, you'll tell me you're a three-month-old infant. And then what? I'll go back to nursing you and cleaning after you. Tiring… Too tiring. Just make zenzai, will you?"

"Hinata has someone she likes." Teetering he went, should his hopes stray too far from reality. He must be grounded, he kept telling himself, but he was floating and dizzy.

"Is she married?"

Shino answered no.

"Then make zenzai!" She was suddenly firm. "You see, the man I liked? I keep thinking what could've happened if I didn't think much of the consequences. If I just burned all my clothes and said 'to hell with the clan!' then deserted the village for someplace else. I think I'd still be an angry person, but not as much. Then I'm reminded it's useless. Because I'd never do it. Being dumb and not thinking like you has its uses."

"I thought you liked me best because I was the smartest," said Shino. For some reason, he wanted to laugh, his face stiff trying to stop a wide grin. This wasn't normal. What sort of reaction was this coming from an insult?

"You wish. You've always been dumb, son. What I'm saying here Shibi—"

"Shino," he corrected,

"—trample all those other guys, be they great, good or bad, and get her before you begin thinking you'll never do it."

Shino stifled a laugh and patted his grandmother's hand, his fingers mildly shaking in excitement. "I'll never trample on anyone because of a girl."

The old woman gave a sly, toothless grin questioning his certainty as if saying he shouldn't dismiss possibilities yet.

He later discovered there wasn't an aunt with a great zenzai; maybe his father did but even he didn't know. So after a week of research scouring downtown for the best zenzai recipe, for the first time in his life, Shino hit the stove much to the cook and the scullery maids' horror, and invited his old students over for a taste test.

The house helps couldn't be fair judges: young master, it's very good! We've tasted nothing quite like it! The best zenzai ever!, they praised, everyone pleasing his ears and stroking his ego, but he knew they were mainly keeping an eye out on the kitchen in case of explosion.

His young jury, on the other hand, all agreed about the red bean soup "working", but were torn with the mochi being too soggy and just okay and "—why are you cooking, teach?" wearing genuinely concerned faces.

As gratitude for their honesty, Shino lent a hand finding horned beetles in the forest by the cemetery.

Cicadas shrilly calling out for mates at the peak of summer blared within earshot; the Tanna konohanensis common in rich cypresses. Just as he grabbed onto a branch by his perch, looking out over the gravestones, he saw Hinata sitting on the grass with an unlikely companion.

Sasuke Uchiha was there and the way the setting sun cast his shadow overwhelmed Hinata's own. Her head occasionally bobbed keeping a conversation and she'd subtly look at the person beside her as if to see if he had been listening. She absentmindedly picked on the grass and then suppressed a laugh, her shoulders shaking. There were golden shine to her white eyes as she turned to the Uchiha in Shino's direction, resting her head on her hugged knees.

No one wore such a face around the Uchiha. For a person of his reputation, no one could.

"Teach," one of the students whispered from below, "Found anything yet? What's taking you so long?" By then the students huddled close at the base of the tree, eagerly looking up to him.

"Does it look really strong, Teach?"

"Can it trample other kinds easily?"

A question with an easy answer. Too easy Shino didn't want to admit. Trample a village, the Uchiha surely can. The world even should he choose.