Sixteen: Reconciliation

Author's note: I'm not really a fan of poetry, since prose gives me everything I imagine I need from literature. Stephen Crane, though, is really someone special. His poetry is dark, and ambivalent, and creepy at times. It gives me this feeling that everything is ugly and awful, but there is hope. Unfortunately, that hope is ugly and awful in its own way.

XXIII
Places among the stars,
Soft gardens near the sun,
Keep your distant beauty;
Shed no beams upon my weak heart.
Since she is here
In a place of blackness,
Not your golden days
Nor your silver nights
Can call me to you.
Since she is here
In a place of blackness,
Here I stay and wait.

Stephen Crane
The Black Riders and Other Lines

Ah, love poetry. Look him up! ( I can almost guarantee that poem III will make you fall in love with him.

I know you guys wanted a longer post, but this one isn't very long, either. I'm sorry. So instead, I'm going to say thanks to everyone who read and reviewed the last chapter. And I was really, really surprised that there were so many of you. So thank you to the people whom I can actually name: 0xnaomix0, crazyhorse08, darkens4841, CloudySeikatsuSeiki, Bad Girl762, Nachtweiss, Krokador, Ino-Sakura92 and everyone else who reviewed months and months ago when I used to update with some semblance of regularity. I really appreciate it.

From the moment of her confrontation with Tenten, Ino found herself consumed by an increasing sense of moral urgency. You may not be the cause of the problem but you're certainly not making things any better, she had said. The truth in that was plain. But what, really, could even be done about this situation? The cracks that appeared in Sakura's sense of self ran far deeper than their relationship. What good would it do to patch over the holes at the surface when the foundation had been so seriously eroded?

At the same time, Ino was finding it more and more difficult to distance herself from Sakura's pitiful state and, worse still, she was finding it more difficult to not see a reflection of herself in that blatant morose resignation. Maybe, she thought, just maybe patching up these surface imperfections would grant just enough stability to allow for the much deeper reconciliation and ultimate repair to take place.

But here she was again, speaking of human emotion in terms of pathetic architectural metaphor.

But what Tenten's abortive intervention had certainly achieved was a destabilizing of what Ino had long imagined was a source of her strength – pride. Throughout this whole pathetic episode of reacceptance and rejection, this charade of distance, of control, Ino had struggled to maintain her sense of pride, marred by the ugliness of repeated failures and renewed and utterly brutal attempts to hold at arm's length everything she thought she should hate but knew she couldn't help but love. Ino couldn't help but condemn herself for jerking Sakura around so much, standing now in the rubble of arrogance and conceit.

Ino had wanted, needed, so desperately to be able to reassert her own confidence. And the revelation of this horrific superficiality – of the fact that she had merely been papering over the holes that belied much greater faults in structural integrity – made her feel foolish and weak.

Ino was feeling increasingly trapped by Sakura's weakness because it stood as a glaring revelation of her own weakness.

So, with Tenten out scouting the forest ahead, checking long-established trap lines and other indicators of incursions into the area surrounding Konoha, Ino decided it was now or never. She caught Sakura slowly and methodically sharpening a single kunai, a distracted and half-hearted attempt at industriousness. When she noticed Ino was approaching, she replaced her kunai and whetstone into her pouch and started to rise from where she was sitting. She never even made it beyond rising into a crouch before Ino descended upon her.

Ino caught her by the shoulder, held her in place.

"I don't want to fight," Sakura mumbled, her voice tight.

"Just listen to me a minute," Ino told her, and that strange urgency made Sakura stay, turning to look at the blonde without meeting her eyes. Ino hesitated for a long moment, struggling to navigate through the turgid web of thoughts swirling about in her mind, trying to find out where to begin, and how to end. She grasped desperately at a thread, throwing herself too far into her commitment to pull back, the words tumbling from her mouth with an uncharacteristically tentative haste. "I know where we went wrong, Sakura."

That caught her attention, though Sakura's eyes narrowed more out of confusion – of why they would be talking about this now, of all times – than out of concern. Her expression made Ino feel slightly foolish, but she continued with that same hushed strain in her voice, feeling like she was sliding down a slippery slope, but despite the unsure footing, Ino knew it would take her where she needed to be.

Sakura was waiting, somewhere at the bottom of that decline.

"We were always looking for our happily ever after," she told her, "and it made us so angry, so upset, when we couldn't find it. We won't ever get our happy ending, Sakura. The only thing we have is what's in front of us, here and now." Ino reached out with both hands and touched Sakura's face gently for a moment before she grasped her neck and drew her even closer. Her voice dropped lower, then, and Sakura leaned in, resting her forehead against Ino's. "Here I am, Sakura, right in front of you. Watch for me, stay with me. I can be everything you need."

The change in Sakura's expression was almost profound. As if she suddenly realized that she was as much Ino's lifeline as Ino was hers. "I didn't think I could find you again," Sakura whispered.

"No," Ino told her. "I was always here. What you couldn't find was our happy ending."

Sakura pulled back slightly, just enough to be able to look Ino in the eyes. She stayed still for a long time, her brow furrowed, eyes shifting rapidly in focus from Ino's left to her right eye and back again, looking for something in that milky blue, something not to trust, something not to like. She wasn't sure she trusted Ino's fatalist outlook. But then again, she did make a very good point. Sakura had spent her entire life looking for this ever elusive happy ending, and it had brought her nothing but naïveté, heartbreak, and shame. She thought she might have seen it in Sasuke, then in Naruto, and then in how many others? But they had left her, and perhaps what had upset her most about that was not the present bereavement but the future denial of everything she had hoped for since she was a little girl.

But Ino was right. As shinobi, there was no promise of a future, and it was idiotic to think otherwise. If anyone should have an understanding of the fleeting nature of life and dreams, it should have been Sakura. How many fallen shinobi had she cared for, tried to piece together, tried to save? Every single one of them had had hope for the future, had had their own dreams of a happy ending, and every single one of them had been left brutally bereft.

Ino was right. None of them would find happily ever after.

But Sakura could still hate it.

"I'm sorry," she told Ino.

Ino's eyebrow twitched in a momentary expression of confusion.

"I'm still so naïve," she said, and her smile was humourless and bitter. "You always hated that about me."

"I was jealous," Ino told her, and there was an ashamed grin on her face. "Everywhere you looked you saw cause for hope, and all I could manage was resignation. The world seems so much more beautiful through your eyes, Sakura."

"No," Sakura told her. "It's not so beautiful anymore."

Ino gave her an exaggerated look. "You really shouldn't say that when all you can see is my face."

"Oh, please!" Sakura smirked, managing the tiniest laugh. She leaned forward and kissed Ino gently, feeling her heart come alive in her chest again. A kiss without desperation, without fear, without that frantic search for something long gone.

Ino was smiling, sincere and affectionate. "I do love you," she told her. "You and your overlarge forehead."

"Ino-pig," Sakura murmured endearingly. Then, a pause. "You grew up a lot faster than I did," she added.

Ino's expression suddenly darkened, saddened. She rocked back on her heels, falling out of her crouch and into a sitting position. "I had to," she said, drawing her legs in and crossing them.

"I'm sorry," Sakura quickly added. "I didn't mean to…" she trailed off, not really needing to finish. Instead, she half-crawled, half-shuffled forward to close the distance between them again, moving up beside Ino and snaking her arms around the other girl's waist.

Ino propped her elbow up on her knee and dropped her chin into her hand, looking away from Sakura, off into the darkness. She couldn't help but smile when she felt Sakura rest her chin on her shoulder.

"I know what you're going through, Sakura," she told her quietly. "I know what it's like to have people placed in your care, and how it feels when you lose them." She paused, eyes scanning the shadows, as if searching for the right words. "I don't feel noble anymore. I feel dirty and ugly and useless. I feel like a failure."

"Like I have betrayed everyone's trust. Like I never deserved their faith in the first place," Sakura added, her voice very small at Ino's ear.

"Yes," Ino agreed. She turned, craning her neck back so she could look at Sakura. The pink-haired kunoichi's eyes remained downcast for a long moment before she looked up, met Ino's eyes.

"I betrayed your trust," Sakura whispered.

"And I never deserved yours in the first place."

Sakura seemed at a loss, then, so she leaned forward and kissed Ino again.

The blonde recoiled suddenly, tearing herself away from Sakura. "I killed them," she whispered suddenly, a hideous confession dragged from her heart in a moment of intractable guilt.

"What?" Sakura leaned back, shocked by the vehemence of Ino's self-deprecation.

"I killed them." She repeated. "They were children. I was supposed to protect them and I killed them." Ino was in tears, and though she kept her voice low and restrained, it trembled, carrying with it the vaguest hint of potential hysteria. "They were so frightened," she mumbled. "They were so frightened and so hurt, and I let them die."

"Ino," Sakura began consolingly.

"I could hear them," Ino confessed. "I could hear them but I couldn't get to them. If I was stronger, I could have fought my way to them. If I was smarter, I could have seen it coming. But I wasn't. I wasn't good enough at all. And I killed them."

Sakura bit her lip to keep from bursting into tears.

"All this blood on my hands, it's all theirs," Ino wept. "And then you came back, and I could see their blood on your hands, too." She inhaled deeply, shakily, and stopped herself. "But it makes me feel better to fight," she said. "Because if I'm fighting, then at least they don't have to. But I hate it." She laughed, then, harsh and jarring. "The only thing that can make me forget about the killing is more killing."

She turned suddenly and gave Sakura a terrifying stare. "What is wrong with me?" She whispered. "Why don't I deserve a happy ending?"

Ino was weeping helplessly. Her every word echoed, hard and cold, through Sakura's very being. Sakura knew well the terror of imminent death, made even more grotesque, even more unbearable, when it was children that suffered. She remembered vividly that child, that dead girl. She remembered their screams, their panic, their fear of being alone. They were so frightened, Ino had said.

And I let them die.

Sakura wiped at her own eyes, blinking to clear her vision, to see Ino better than she had ever seen her before. There was at least one thing that Ino had been wrong about; there, beneath that freshly cracked veneer, beneath a shell warped and thickened by the morally terrifying experience of living the life of a killer, of existing for nothing else but killing – below all that, Ino still had a mean noble streak.

It was as if Sakura had found her knight in shining armour, except this knight had just been dredged up from a riverbed, half-drowned and nearly unrecognizable, crushed and suffocated by the sheer weight of that mud-stained armour.

And Sakura smiled.

Maybe she really didn't need her happy ending. Maybe all she needed was her knight, and to get her out from under all that armour.

One Last Author's Note: Yes, the knight in shining armour is really cliché, and yes, it's a theme in a lot of other InoSaku fiction. But it works, damn it! And I like it! (Even though cut-and-paste metaphors make my skin crawl.)

Also, I think I just wrote a chapter without profanity in it.

Huh. So it can be done.