it's so hard to find Ino fics for the ino fic rec so uh you're welcome please read them these are hard to dig up if you have some good ino fics pm me! I gave her mom a name btw and i don't know when graduation is so uhh it happens in the spring i'm so clearly winging it and have no idea what i'm doing! anyway mmm ino can kind of but not quite read minds sorry and i'm breaking all the rules everything you know from canon is wrong (not really as a fanfiction this is based in canon but don't question me it isn't canon i'm doing it anyway this is a fanfic and by nature not canon i'm not even sure if the nagato fight happened yet i'm making bad decisions as we go and i'm not gonna stop overcomplicating things no matter who asks i'm pretty sure a lot of you are gonna be pissed after this chapter oops thanks for reading xoxo)

Ino fic rec: Skiprope by Taivasalla. from sakura's point of view but we all know sakura and ino love each other so

song rec: Borderline by Tove Styrke

aSPhoDEl

[acacia]
chase
away
ghosts

The academy has big classrooms with high ceilings, walls stretching as far as they can without intruding in on the Hokage's office spaces. This building has stood since the Second Hokage's reign. These walls were built by warriors and sanded by soldiers. Ino used to wonder in amazement at them, used to take a small breath in her classroom and buzz with excitement when she realized she was in the same building as the Hokage himself. She used to love these walls, the vast openness, the shining glass windows and smooth polished wood. Used to imagine cute loft-type apartments with similar designs as these rooms, used to imagine walking up those curving steps to the mission office, being assigned some world ending adventure by a chuunin while the Hokage read through paperwork just a couple feet away.

She used to dream in this building. She used to look up at the high ceilings and breathe deep and dream.

Now Ino only feels suffocated. Sakura's nervous next to her, but smiling, pleasantly anxious, like the buzz when you've jumped but haven't yet hit the water. "I have confidence in all of you," Iruka's saying, tests in his hand, one going first in front of Sakura and then to Ino. He looks out over them, over these students he's had for a year, and his smile isn't false. The sincerity hurts her.

This building once made her feel holy, feel incredibly. She'd go over the academy acceptance standards in her head over and over again, repeating them to herself over and over again. Love the village and hope to help preserve peace and prosperity. Have a mind that will not yield, able to endure hard training and work. Be healthy in mind and body.

All arbitrary conditions met? Great. Academy admission granted.

(this building still stands and so does she. this is real and so is she.)

The test, these simple words she's read before, warbles dangerously on the paper, shifting in front of her eyes. She rubs hard at them. She knows the answers—she sometimes feels she knows everything—and most people in the room do. Graduation isn't difficult, or at least, isn't difficult enough. It isn't enough to prepare them.

Us, she thinks. She's taking her final exam today. Graduating. She is twelve years old. She can't gather an army, can't assassinate anyone, can't wage war, and today she will be a ninja. Ino's always been all about appearances—all about the image of control. She wonders if she should think beyond revenge and anger and retribution but she won't and maybe that's okay. She's only angry. Terrified.

There's still time.

It's tempting to think about, to imagine a world where there wasn't a war and no one is dead and Ino's safe and clean. Ino's a selfish person and when she finds something she wants, if she wants it badly enough, she'll get it, but what she wants now isn't the world she knew but the people in it and there's no way for her to have them. They're gone; these people are echoes, memories, puzzle pieces not yet ground down to fit against her own rough edges. She can remember. There was a time when nothing made her feel more alive than the chase, the fight, the war.

Unfortunately, see, there is no war. That puts her at an impasse.

(Two weeks ago Ino was leaning against a low fence, eyes lazing half shut. The spar yard used to be one of her most exciting places—it was then she decided it's really just kids scrambling in the dirt. Ino watched with her arms leaning against the wooden posts and one cheek propped on a closed fist.

There's no war and Ino was tight with tension, the air of it building in the back of her throat and leaving her tongue tasting of trepidation and her throat dry. There's no war and Ino never lived long enough to have survived one.

Kiba's grappling at Sasuke in what's practically mud, hissing and shouting and missing. It'd rained the day before, and the grass still smelled fresh and dewy. Soft. There was something gentle in the air, something drooly about the dappled sunlight and soft winds. Konoha's spring is full of newfangled charm, leading into summers that are cloudy and pleasant.

The autumn is quiet and slow; the winter mild, full of snowflake flutters and clinging frost. Konoha's kind. Gentle. Calm.

Ino wasn't particularly impressed by Kiba's failures or Sasuke's quiet, refined smugness, and her eyes went instead over the class, over these small faces, all watching raptly and some, like Naruto, shouting support. It was less support and more an unearthly wish to see Sasuke beaten. She kept looking at him, trying to memorize his features as though she was going to draw him out, stretch him apart and see what he was made from, but she lingered on Naruto too long and he glanced up and their eyes met and there was a smile on his face and it hurt.)

She looks up and Sakura's looking at her and as Ino watches she smiles. It hurts.

Ino smiles back. "Good luck," she whispers. Sakura flicks a bit of her pink hair behind her shoulder with a hand. It's long, now, down to the small of her back. It shines when she tilts her head. Sasuke likes girls with long hair, Sakura had said. It doesn't matter at all what Sasuke likes, Ino'd thought a bit rudely, a part of her still stinging, a part of her still recoiling from the pang of Sasuke's betrayal, of Sasuke going from a little boy she thought was perfect to a man who ruined her life. He ruined your life, too, Ino wanted to say. Sasuke likes girls with long hair. Ino hadn't argued.

"Luck," Sakura echoes, dismissive. She leans a bit closer to Ino conspiratorially, twelve years old and indignant. "Who needs that?"

Luck. Who needs that?

Me, Ino wants to say. You, too, in just a couple years. Konoha. Everyone, maybe.

The type of people to change the world—Ino knows she isn't one of them. She's not as powerful as Naruto or as smart as Shikamaru. She's not the best with weaponry, isn't the strongest or the fastest or the sharpest. She's smart, sure, and slippery, and strong, but she knows she isn't well-suited to the job. Naruto could have changed the world. He was fire and anger and grinning and wild and watching him was like watching sunlight melt frost. He could have changed the world. Instead he died. Now there's only Ino. She's bitter and beautiful and all the world's got.

Ino lets her hand find a pencil. Her eyes go over the classroom, to the ceiling and down again and back to the exam. Her hand moves then, writing her name, then going down, down, down. Question one, Ino reads. List the Kages of Konoha.

All she can hear is the grind of pencils on paper.

Easy, Ino thinks. Luck—who needs it?

…

She's tied her forehead protector around her neck where it'll stay until she can get it fitted onto something larger, something that would fit over her hip or around her thigh. It weighs fondly against her skin. It isn't a particularly attractive accessory, and the blue doesn't match the purple she still clings to, but Ino forgives it. Mother looks at it as though it is a parasite.

"I passed, Mama," Ino says. She takes a couple careful steps into the flower shop and she hates this. She can feel her mother's tension more than see it and it aches, curls around her wrists and pulls. Mother is still staring at the hitai-ate. She lets her hand go over a couple flowers—the orchid petals, in full bloom, are painfully soft—and her fingers drift to the soil, prodding lightly. Ino frowns. It's dry.

"I can see that," Mother says. "So you're a ninja now, are you?"

She wonders if it's meant as an accusation.

Yes, Ino almost says. I am. I'm an adult, now. I won't apologize for leaving behind trinkets and the children of your friends and sleepovers my father never felt comfortable with. I won't apologize for trading domesticity for strength. I won't apologize for displeasing you. It just might save your life.

"I'm sorry," is what she says. Her mother's eyes go just a hairbreadth wider than normal, the watering can in her hands hitting the counter with enough force to send a couple drops into the air. Maybe it's a warning. Maybe it's an attack. Ino takes another step forward. "This is who I'm growing up to be. I know it wasn't what you wanted from me."

Mother wanted a girl. Instead, Ino's a shinobi.

"I know you've never liked it," Ino says. She stands up straighter, just a bit. She loves her mother and her mother is dead. "But this is who I am. This is who I have become."

She flicks her ponytail over her shoulder, the long hair a mark of femininity and a mockery of what her mother wants. Yamanaka Aimi is the perfect image of domesticity, the ideal version of a civilian wife. She'd wanted to marry a noblemen. Unfortunately, she married a ninja, and now her only daughter is lost to her. When Ino was a child, she was a creature of blood and bone. Messy and confident and selfish, without control or strategy. Artless. It was around ten that she began to take on the traits of her mother, that she began to brag about the dance lessons once forced on her and charm those around her with smiles and practiced words. She'd been a perfect little lady.

Now, Ino spares her perfectly balanced smiles only for people she needs to fool. Here, little lady Ino never happened. She went from wild child to determined student. There was never any popularity, never any bragging, and never any reprieve from the world Aimi shuns. She quit dance and took up more dangerous hobbies. Ino still wears mascara and she still paints her nails, still discusses with Sakura the science behind the perfect cat eye, but she never had to be taught that. Her interests as a child were running, fighting, laughing, climbing; as she grew older, it seemed to Mother that these interests only solidified, crystallizing from artless power to quiet brutality.

The two years Ino's taken were the creation of who Ino became. As it stands, Ino stole her own childhood from her mother and she does not regret it.

"I've always loved you, Ino," her mother says quietly. She releases the watering pail handle. Ino can hear each weighted breath, can feel the way Aimi looks away. "Your father will be very proud."

Ino's surprised to find this stings.

The hurt goes down deeper than the dismissed half-built friendships she'd broken off with her civilian classmates, hurts more than Shikamaru's disdain and Chouji's unease, more than Naruto's lack of attention and Sakura's lack of knowledge. She only spends time with her parents, with Sakura, with classmates, and with strangers. For the first group, she is restrained and polite. With Sakura, she is somewhere between wistful and pained. The last two experience only her cruelty or her indifference. Her behavior towards Shikamaru, towards Chouji, and to a lesser extent towards her parents must be explained. Her chosen explanation is personality. Ino has cultivated for herself a reputation: she is simply a mean person. Yamanaka Ino does not work well with others. She imagines it written in her academy file.

She's giving up everything for this village and no one will ever know it. Her friends are gone to her and no one will ever care.

"I know," Ino says. She spares the flowers another glance, longing to spend more time with them. She turns, hair lashing her back. "I'll be back for dinner," she says, and leaves the way she came. Mother doesn't stop her.

Ino reaches a hand over her head, brushing her ponytail aside to comfort herself with the sword's metal grip. Her relationship with her mother for the world. A fair trade, if not one favoring Ino.

(still, it stings.)

…

The next day, her father's pride and her mother's refined disapproval lost to the feel of a metal hitai-ate in her hand, and she's surveying the classroom for what might be the last time when Sakura's hand tugs at her own. "Ino," Sakura murmurs, hand still holding Ino's, pointing with her free hand. Her hand is warm. The contact burns. "Ino, look!"

Ino follows her pointed finger to a scoreboard of ranks that used to rule her life. She's twelve and twenty five and it's meaningless to her but her eyes look at it regardless, glazed and tired and with sweat from her morning set of katas collecting along her hairline. Yamanaka Ino, she sees, is listed at the top, and then below it, below her name is Uchiha Sasuke. She's rookie of the year. It's somehow an insult. She wasn't better than Sasuke. He ruined her world. The ranking board, putting Sasuke at second best, Sakura right behind him, is a mockery.

She scans it. Naruto is still last.

(Dead-last. It's funny because it isn't true. He didn't die last. She did.)

Scores never really came into her mind when she was younger. Ranking never mattered to her. She was passing and her competition with Sakura kept her in the top five or so but she never cared much for it. She never wanted to be strong. She didn't need to be the best. Being Ino was enough.

It doesn't matter now, either. But she does need to be more than Ino. Being herself isn't enough.

"That's amazing, Ino!" Sakura pulls her down onto a bench near the front if only to better wave their linked hands in the air excitably. Ino eyes the nail polish curiously. It looks like the kind she'd shown her, harder than steel and when liquid hot enough to need sealing precautions to make it safe. Those nails could cut someone's throat open. She's reluctantly proud of her friend. "You even beat Sasuke!"

"It's just academy scores," Ino says pointedly, adjusting her forehead protector. Sakura lets go of her hand. "It doesn't really matter."

"Doesn't really matter?" Sakura's incredulous, pushing her own forehead protector a bit further back on her head. It replaced the red ribbon Ino'd given her. She'd worn it for all her academy years. Maybe it's a way of showing she's grown up.

She hasn't.

"It won't mean anything when we're shinobi," Ino says. Sakura scoffs so loudly it might cause her physical pain.

Sakura's wrong. It won't. Beating Uchiha Sasuke as a twelve year old in scores based on the opinions of chuunin and exams focused mostly on civilian material isn't an achievement. She isn't proud of beating an assortment of children. She wasn't trying to. She was trying to piss off Shikamaru and she was trying to scare off Chouji and she was trying to get Sakura to run laps with her in the morning and she was trying to watch Sasuke and she was trying not to fall apart but she wasn't trying to get rookie of the year. It's a meaningless title.

Judging by the look Sasuke gives her, it wasn't meaningless to him.

Shame. He's bitter enough already.

It's the first time Ino can recall that a girl got rookie. Even though Ino never showed much interest in academy scores after graduation and typically dismissed graduates before her own a twelve year old girl rather than a twelve year old boy making rookie would've floated somewhere in her circles. Girls in the academy are trained the way Ino has been her whole life; they are trained to be kunoichi. They're pretty and polite and trained to hide. There is no brute force. She's pretty and can smile softly and hold a knife but she isn't… She isn't meant to be like Naruto. Even at Sakura's strongest, at Ino's strongest, they were never like Naruto. Never like Sasuke or Madara, never like Kakashi. Even at their best, they were never like Naruto.

(Sometimes someone wants an army, or perhaps just the strength of one, but that was never what Ino was supposed to be.)

"I'm going to be a shinobi," Ino says now. She can tell Sakura doesn't understand. "I'm going to be like the Hokages. I'm going to be a shinobi."

"Aren't we already?"

Ino watches the class spill in, watches Iruka take his place at the podium. "I'm not sure," she says just as Naruto explodes through the door, hitai-ate firmly tied over his forehead and his eyes brighter than the usual. She looks down at him from her elevated bench and he catches her eyes, grinning. She only gets the tiniest portion of his attention before he sees Sakura.

"Sakura-chan!" he calls. Sakura visibly loses favor, lips going to a line. The bell rings; Sakura sighs in relief, falling back against the bench, shoulder touching Ino's. Naruto scrambles to find a seat and after a moment he slides in next to Ino, painfully close in an attempt to gain Sakura's attention. She pushes her shoulder against his, imagining she's grating their bones together.

He's a stranger. She hasn't spoken to him in years. The last time she knew this boy was when she was twelve instead of twelve and twenty five. The Naruto she remembers doesn't smile like that. The Naruto she knew lost everything—except, perhaps, her. He was all she had. They weren't each other's favorite, but they were all there was.

(she's crying wants to be screaming trying to clean the blood from his face but he's shaking with laughter, vibrating from it. "Stop," she's saying, shouting, crying, but the word is lost to her own tears her own hysteria her parents are dead. Sakura is dead Hinata is dead Shikamaru is dead he is all she has and he is nothing. bloodied and dirty he's laughing her world has burned he is all she has, and he is nothing.)

Ino blinks. Shakes her head. There are other options, now. No one's dead and Ino isn't anything to him. Naruto's smiling even wider now, too, but not the way he was then. He looks proud, a bit smug. "I thought he failed?" Sakura murmurs, leaning close to her so they can gossip with further ease. Even in the front of the classroom, the two of them have no trouble giggling and whispering, doodling over their notes and passing slips of paper between them. It's something Ino never imagined, something she saw as lost forever with the academy's burnt walls, but she loves and misses Sakura with the same ferocity. This girl was Ino's closest friend.

(it's funny. funny, isn't it? her parents don't know her Naruto doesn't remember her she's ruined her relationship with Shikamaru and Chouji. maybe Sakura is all she has but Sakura isn't like he was then. she isn't nothing.)

Sakura taps Ino's arm, clearly expecting a response. It takes Ino several seconds to remember the question. I thought he failed? "Guess not," Ino whispers back, feeling Naruto's eyes on her as he either listens in or wishes he was. Her voice is flat. All of her words taste like poison and Ino hates this. She shifts, then, head leaned against an open palm and she tilts her face a bit to the right, looking at Naruto even though she doesn't want to be.

"I wish he hadn't," Sakura says, even though they both know she doesn't mean it. Sakura's not nearly as interested in him as Ino, isn't even bothering to glance his way. Sakura probably knows without looking that he's staring. She sighs. "He's obsessed with me."

"He really is," Ino agrees. It's something they mutually dislike. Before she can stop herself Ino figures if Sasuke had any friends he'd say the same thing about Sakura. The very thought feels like a betrayal.

At the mention of him her eyes inch away from Naruto over to Sasuke. Even the side of his face appears burning, hands clasped. Would they shake with anger if he let them? Ino wants to say she doesn't know what Sakura sees there but she does. Sakura's a little girl and she sees someone scared, someone alone. She imagines a world where brushing arms with someone in the street leads to an elaborate romance. That isn't true, though. But even if she's wrong about that, she's right about Sasuke. There's something—so much—wrong with him. No one can fix him, though. Maybe he isn't broken at all.

Maybe Sasuke was meant to be a monster.

The thought processes and Ino flinches. He's twelve and alone and angry and scared. She's been alone and angry and scared. The Sasuke she knows isn't this boy. The Sasuke she knows is older. This isn't him she has to believe it isn't him or her skin crawls shame in her throat because she's letting him live.

But he can't be fixed. No one can be fixed. Ino wishes Sakura would stop fantasizing about trying.

At twelve, her bloodline is louder than it is soft and she can feel the anticipation in the room, can catch images her classmates have created for themselves and can hear the hum. The room is full of children, young and clean with minds unfractured. Ino risks a look at Sakura, at her side profile, pretty and nice and smiling. She's grateful to Sakura and she knows in a child-like way, Sakura loves her. It's the cleanest feeling she's been gifted with in years.

It helps that her largest talent is her own mind, crawling like a tic on the consciousness of both strangers and friends alike. She doesn't have to hear the words to know it. Ino knows that Sakura loves her, maybe more than she did when Ino was really twelve. She also knows it is nothing compared to the friendship they once shared.

(But Sakura killed herself, then, so maybe their friendship wasn't so grand as Ino remembers.)

"I'm so proud of you," Iruka says. "You are all ninja now—adults, in the eyes of the village. This is a massive responsibility." For a moment, his face is serious, eyes scanning the room. Naruto shifts uncomfortably. Then he smiles. "I knew you could do it."

Naruto cheers without prompting. Sakura starts to clap with their classmates, her eyes bright. Ino taps her fingertips to the other hand's palm politely. They are all so genuinely happy. Ino can feel something exhilarating in her chest.

Love your village. Ino loves her village, sure. But the village these children love isn't the same village as hers. Her village was sent through a crucible; her village burned on a pyre. Her village had secrets and it died for them.

"Now that you're genin, you'll be separated into teams of three and assigned to a jounin." Sakura looks over at her and Ino smiles in what she hopes is reassurance. Iruka looks so proud. Naruto's grinning.

Ino feels ill, intoxicated, electrified.

"Team one," Iruka announces and it begins.

…

"Tell me about yourselves."

Ino carefully tips her soy sauce, spilling a bit across her four gyoza evenly. Making even consumption an elegant act is an almost pleasant dance, one she has mastered. "I'm Yamanaka Ino," she says without looking up, chopsticks capturing a gyoza and dipping it lightly into the sauce collected along the bottom of her dish. She takes a single delicate bite. It isn't particularly good. Beside her, Naruto is loudly inhaling some sort of rice-soup dish. Ino is entirely unimpressed by him.

Her new sensei frowns. "I know your names."

Naruto squints suspiciously. "How?" he asks, mouth full. It's disgusting. "We've never met."

Ino doesn't give him the courtesy of a disbelieving glance. He's loud and messy and rather dumb. She'd figured he would be on her team, but she isn't thrilled. She lifts her eyes from the oval shaped dish, considering the three other people, two tucked into the booth across from her and Naruto at her left.

Across from her, Sakura says, "She's our genin-sensei, Naruto. Of course she knows who we are."

"Creepy," Naruto mutters, rice flying as he uses his chopsticks with the skill of a small child. Ino flicks a stray grain of rice from her shoulder; looks over at the jounin to test the level of disgust she may have.

Uzuki Yuugao raises an eyebrow. "You seem fun," she says, her voice flat and her face blank, betraying her statement. She pushes some of her straight hair behind her ear. The movement leaves the handle of her touken, strapped to her back, visible. The grip is embroidered and beautiful and Ino can't look away from it. "Let's meet up again. I'll be at training ground seven tomorrow morning."

"Of course!" Sakura nods somewhat frantically. Ino knows she's going to take notes as soon as Yuugao leaves the booth. "What time?"

Yuugao blinks slowly. She looks somewhat uncomfortable. "I haven't thought of that," she says.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. She'd meant to be with Sasuke or at least Asuma and instead she's here with a woman dead and a girl she's no need to supervise and the largest idiot she's ever seen.

(She could handle Sasuke. She could take seeing his face and knowing his crimes. She could stop him if she had to. There'd been a time where she cried over him, when he'd killed Orochimaru and been gifted with an entry in the Konoha bingo book and then her village burned and she found her hatred was living, screaming, writhing in her stomach and pulsing with her veins. She hates him. She did hate him. She'd hated him.

Naruto is worse. She can't handle that. She could never have handled that.)

"Seven," Yuugao says abruptly. She stands from the booth with similar aloofness. "See you three there." She twists with the grace of a practiced ninja and exits the restaurant.

"She didn't pay," Ino notes. She dips a second gyoza into the soy sauce, examining the udon still hot and untouched on the table positioned in front of the now empty section of booth beside Sakura. "Rude."

No. It isn't right at all.

Naruto sometimes used to talk all about this day, this moment—and Ino had never been sure she believed him, had never known for certain if she could trust his glazed eyes or his fervent, hysteric voice, had never been comfortable with the way he spoke not as though it was true but as though he needed someone else to believe it—when he sat with Kakashi and Sakura and Sasuke on the academy rooftop and his eyes went from one to the other because it was fate, Naruto used to say, it was meant to be. Him and Sasuke and Sakura, he would say. It was meant to be.

Sasuke killed the world and Naruto killed him and Sakura killed herself and Ino thinks now that maybe she doesn't give a shit about fate.

"She's so cool," Sakura breathes, digging in her kunai pouch for the cash to cover Yuugao. Sasuke killed the world and Naruto killed him and Sakura killed herself. It was meant to be, Naruto would say, and she let him because they were all alone and dying and maybe he needed to hear it but no one is dying now and if it was fate if it was meant to be? Ino doesn't mind being the ghost in the machine. Fate doesn't have a place in the reality she's building. Naruto used to scream it, used to shake her until she thought her bones themselves were chattering, shivering inside her—he used to cry it, wail it. It was fate, the three of us, he would bite out and he was all she had and he was nothing. Naruto wipes his face with his sleeve behind her. Sakura manges to find a couple bills, flattening them on the counter and looking up with wide eyes. "Did you see her?" Sakura asks. Her eyes are wide. She looks like she had when they'd watched Princess Gale in theaters. Only a couple of seconds with a vaguely impressive looking ninja and already if Ino listens closely enough she can almost hear Sakura's heart pounding. "She's so cool."

"She left you to pay for her lunch," Naruto says. It would be more accurate to say she left all three of them to pay, and Naruto was welcome to pitch in for Yuugao's meal anytime, but Ino does not say this. As she watches, he frowns. "I don't like her. How am I gonna become Hokage with a teacher like that?"

(Naruto dropped Sakura's body in the hole as though she was nothing to him. Ino flinched when the body hit the dirt. "She's dead, anyway," Naruto said by explanation. "Not like she cares where we bury her."

"I care," Ino had said, voice a hiss, softly, twenty one and with nothing. The two of them were all that was left of the Rookie Twelve. They were dead and Ino was alive.

Naruto'd paused. Looked up at her. Grinned slow. She could see anger and fire and murder in him and she'd wondered then who had loved Sakura more: her or him. "And?")

Now Ino is alive and Sakura is alive and Naruto is young. Asuma is a stranger to her and Kakashi's team is filled by Sasuke and Shikamaru and Kiba. Her mother assigns her to the night shift in the flower shop and her father presses blade handles into her palm instead of flowers. She still washes her hair with adoration and adds shimmer to her cheekbones and keeps a ritualistic face wash routine but she does that now because she needs it. She does that now because it's what Ino would have done then. The routine is something to cling to, something to hold, something to grasp so tightly it might break. She's still vain and she's still selfish but it's more than that. This body isn't hers and she needs to be kind to it. So many things are wrong and she doesn't know if it's supposed to be like this.

Maybe it isn't, but the world is still recognizable and that's enough.

(isn't it?)

Sakura's face goes cold. "That's so rude," she says. Naruto visibly recoils, only recovering when, after a moment, Sakura adds, "Yuugao-sensei seems really cool."

"I don't want cool," Naruto grumbles and Ino wonders if he's thinking of Sasuke. "I want—"

"It doesn't matter," Ino says loudly. She can hear her own heart beating even louder than her voice and when Naruto flinches a little from her she wonders if he can hear it too. She drops a few dollars on the table when she stands. "I'll see you tomorrow."

(That night Ino stares into the stars with her window held open and both her hands in the open air. She looks down at the village the way a bird glances idly to treetops and she wonders about what might happen if she were to lean forward just a bit further and go tumbling down, down, down. Ino weighs more heavily on the window frame, stretching even more out into the air, neck craning and her stomach pushing against the window sill. Down, down, down, Ino thinks. Her own body, beautiful and broken—down, down, down.

Instead she steps away and closes the window and goes to sleep. There's work to be done.)