Thirteen: Renege

Author's Note: I'll explain later! Also later, I may possibly change parts of this chapter. If I do, I'll let you know.

Ino was distant. Ino was cold. Ino was cruel.

Sakura was sitting in the corner, her legs loosely crossed, one knee high, her arms wrapped around themselves beneath the cover of her own jacket. She blinked slowly, languorously, feeling her eyelids hot and aching, resisting her continuing stare. Every few minutes she relented to their fatigued gravity and let her eyes close for precious few seconds, and every time she opened them again Ino was the same as she always was – upright, rigid, idly alert.

After all these years, Sakura still couldn't get over how strikingly beautiful the other girl was. She hated how effortlessly flawless she could be in voice and action, all sensual grace and edged wit, at the same time hyperfeminine in her apparent softness and unsexed by her capacity for violence. Ino's mind might have been her best weapon – and she had never neglected to put it to some viscerally horrifying use, to deprive people of their own will and abilities, of their lives, with a mere thought – but her hands still cut and crushed and killed with the best of them. Hands so slender, manicured beneath the blood, delicate beyond the scabs. In her hands, in her lips, in her voice Sakura found her Ino. But in her eyes…

Sakura blinked again as Ino turned her head slightly, incrementally, as if she were listening to something in the forest. She seemed frozen then, as if even her heart was stilled, and then her gaze grated over Sakura's and she was gone.

Sakura shrugged her jacket aside and gained her feet in an instant, forcing herself to be silent and graceful even as everything ached, even as her mind remained sluggish and fatigued. She skirted the floor, her feet almost touching the wall with every step, consciously avoiding the dozens of loose, clattering, creaking floorboards in the weatherworn building. Tenten was sleeping somewhere in the darkness, her summoning scroll tucked beneath her knees, her eyelids still in dreamless rest.

As Sakura stepped down into the grass, she was struck by an unbidden sensation of guilt. She hesitated, glancing back at the older girl, not even seeing her in the shadows anymore. Tenten had been put in command of a cell that could never work, forced to rely on two utterly broken team mates who were far too preoccupied with their own power struggles to listen to her good sense and hopeful intentions. Tenten was trying to climb the impossible incline while Ino and Sakura threw their weight on each other's shoulders and watched with stilled gazes and subdued breath to see who would lose strength, lose hope, lose the will to hold fast first, and send them both crashing down.

Sakura turned away from the outpost building and took half a step before she raised her eyes and saw Ino standing there, looking vaguely bemused, her eyes hauntingly glassed in the moonlight. "You weren't invited," she murmured quietly.

Betrayed again by her heart, Sakura suddenly felt exposed, vulnerable.

She had a knife in her hand, a kunai transfixed by her index finger, and was spinning it, over and over and over again. She had been playing with it for hours, every once in a while stopping it suddenly with her knuckles and reversing direction with the clack of metal on bone and the bite of edge into scarred skin.

Ino suddenly stopped the motion of the blade, stilling it with a final closing of her fingers over its edges, letting her hand drop to her side. It was as if she had noticed Sakura watching her and suddenly didn't find it fun anymore. "Go to sleep, Sakura," she insisted. And she expected her to obey.

"I've got too many things on my mind," Sakura told her.

"Hmm," Ino mused, and her tone was quietly dangerous.

"Don't," Sakura pre-empted her. "Don't pick a fight."

"Alright," Ino relented calmly, though there was still the slightest hint of a wicked sneer in her eyes. She meshed her fingers together behind her neck, the kunai, warmed by her grip, pressed against the skin, and let her arms hang. She wandered past Sakura, close enough to brush up against her.

Sakura lay a hand on the blonde's stomach, stopping her in her tracks, and turned her head to meet Ino's gaze. "This isn't going to work, Ino, and you know it."

"What isn't going to work?" Ino let her arms fall, sarcastic in her innocence.

She was so close to Sakura that she made her feel weak inside, made her want to lose her nerve, but instead she drew herself up sharply and inhaled deeply. "This whole situation. We're being… unprofessional."

"You mean I'm being a bitch and you're being a doormat," Ino clarified bitterly.

Sakura gave her an exasperated look.

"I never understood why you always sugar-coat things."

"I'm not a doormat," Sakura denied.

"Sakura, darling," Ino chided her, condescending. "Since you came back you've been nothing but tears and self-deprecation." She waved a hand obscurely. "Old hat."

"That's not true."

Ino rolled her eyes, acknowledging and dismissing Sakura's previous fleeting attempts to stand up for herself all with a single expression. "And that lasted how long? Every time you find your backbone you lose it again the moment I look at you."

"I didn't come back to fight with you."

"And you apparently didn't come back to fight for yourself, either," Ino sneered.

Sakura's mouth flattened itself into a grim line. "You really think so little of me as that." Ino's agreement to this was not in doubt.

"There's no challenge in you anymore, Sakura," Ino sighed. "I poke and poke at you but its just dead flesh under those pretty clothes." To illustrate her point, Ino held the kunai between two fingers and prodded twice at Sakura's collar bone with it.

To illustrate her point, Sakura savagely backhanded the blade from Ino's fingers, sending the blade spinning into the darkness and knocking Ino's hand aside. If she was startled by the sudden vehemence of that act, Ino gave little indication. Instead, she surged forward, raising her left hand up into Sakura's throat. There, in a moment of terrified chagrin, Sakura felt the promising itch of a second blade. She swallowed, felt the kunai bite, froze.

"Case in point," Ino murmured. She dragged the point of the knife up along the side of Sakura's windpipe, raising the blade slowly until it hooked under Sakura's jaw, gently lifting her chin. "You've gotten soft, Sakura. All hurt and no fight."

Sakura moved to take a step back but was halted in her tracks when Ino swung out her right hand and clapped it over the back of her neck, fingers digging in hard, startling and hurting her. Ino pressed her forehead hard against Sakura's for a moment before she removed the threat of the knife and simply threw Sakura to the side and down, her hand heavy and brutal on the back of her neck. Sakura stumbled, was about to regain her feet when a casual roundhouse kick clipped off the top of her shoulder, struck her in the ear, and knocked her to the ground.

Dazed and tired, Sakura went down without so much as a cry of indignation.

Ino paced back and forth in front of her, catlike, feral, one hand on her hip and the other raised to her face, smoothing her eyebrows with a thumb and her first two fingers. She dropped her hand and let her head fall back, throwing a grim smile skyward. "Fuck," she murmured. Shook her head. "Pitiful," she declared. "Disgusting," she added.

"Ino, please. I'm not—"

"Sakura—" Ino interrupted.

"—just listen to me!" she begged.

Ino pulled up short, tall and regal of posture, her words a reflection of her expression writ small. "I'm disappointed."

Sakura climbed to her feet but Ino sent her back down into the dirt with a careless one-handed shove. Then she laughed, bitter and cruel.

"Please," Sakura mumbled, and didn't bother to say anything more.

"I'm tired of your grovelling, really," the blonde sneered, turning her back on the other girl. "Find your feet, Sakura."

"No," Sakura said, her voice thick and heavy, childish in its denial. "No, I won't."

"Don't cry," Ino snapped at her.

Sakura didn't reply.

Ino spun on one heel, casting a blistering glance down at the other girl. "Don't you dare," she warned again.

"I give up," Sakura told her, her voice quiet. "There's nothing I can do anymore."

Ino looked appalled. "You're giving up?" A moment, then: "On what?"

"Everything," Sakura said, with bitter finality.

Ino fell into a crouch in front of Sakura. She waited a long time for her to meet her gaze. Then, suddenly, savagely, she backhanded Sakura across the mouth. Sakura reeled, stunned, and would have fallen back if not for Ino's hand snapping out and catching her by the collar, wrenching her forward again. "I waited for you," Ino snarled at her, her eyes dancing with malice. "I waited for you for so long."

Sakura probed her lip with the tip of her tongue, feeling where it had been split open against her own teeth, winced. "I came back," she whispered.

"No," Ino told her. "You've come back in pieces. Whether I love you or hate you, put you back together or tear you down anew, it makes little difference in the end, doesn't it? It's all the same to you, wallowing in self-pity, worshipping your own helplessness." She shook her head slowly. "You're worthless to me."

Sakura looked her right in the eye. "Nothing has changed."

Ino was appalled.

"We're back where we started, all those years ago."

Ino released Sakura and rocked back on her heels. "You meant everything to me then."

"No," Sakura told her quietly. Shook her head as if to solidify her assertion.

"I wouldn't have fallen in love with you otherwise."

"Same old lies." Sakura sounded exhausted.

A muscle in Ino's cheek twitched. She inhaled sharply – as if preparing for a sudden burst of movement. Sakura flinched away from her. Ino hesitated, then reached out and took Sakura's face in both her hands. "Did you ever trust me?"

"I wanted to," Sakura offered candidly.

"But… you're giving up."

"I don't have the energy for this, Ino," Sakura cried softly, helplessly. "I came back, but you weren't there anymore. You're somewhere else, and too far gone. I'm always left behind."

Surprising Sakura, Ino put her hands down, crawled into position beside her, and turned over in a sitting position. "So that's our problem," she said quietly.

"You keep wanting me to be where you left me," Sakura muttered miserably. "And I you."

"But you're somewhere else, and too far gone," Ino echoed, sounding vaguely amused.

Sakura didn't say anything. Instead, she wiped at her lip with the back of her knuckles.

Ino suddenly let out a frustrated cry through clenched teeth. "But you're not all gone! I look at you and I still see… I still want…" she foundered in her speech, abruptly set a different tack. "We can't build from scratch as if we're not standing in the rubble of everything past."

Sakura rubbed at her tired eyes, drying them, and inhaled deeply, shuddering. "How can you lay a foundation on uneven ground, anyway?"

Ino waved dismissively. "Stupid analogy," she said. Sakura laughed, a brief hiccup, sniffly and weak. Ino turned to her in the darkness. "I'm not angry," she began. Sakura rolled her eyes and turned away, only to have Ino catch her chin and turn her back. "I am angry," she corrected. "But I just---" She let out another frustrated growl, then leaned closer and kissed Sakura.

After a moment, Ino pulled away and shrugged. "I hate you for being weak, but I want so desperately to protect you."

Sakura would have flinched at that mixed callous jab and profession of caring had she not been expecting far worse. So she countered: "And I want so desperately to trust you, but your promises mean absolutely nothing to me."

Ino kissed her again. "I'm sorry for hitting you" she murmured into her cheek.

"I wouldn't have recognized you if you hadn't," Sakura admitted sadly.

"I think we're dead in the water," Ino mused.

"Then all that's left to do is drown," Sakura finished, as she put her arms around Ino's neck.