There was silence in the kitchen for a long time, and Ino watched her father, growing increasingly afraid. No expression crossed his face, not the faintest glimmer of anger or disappointment or anything.

"I mean…" She started to qualify, twisting a strand of her hair nervously. "I think so. I'm not really sure and it's—"

Inoichi held up a hand, and Ino immediately fell silent. She watched as his hand slowly fell back to the surface of the table, settling back with a solid thump. His green eyes were focused somewhere far in the distance, as though he were manipulating one of his techniques.

The moment of silence stretched so long that Ino feared that the dining room table might break from the sheer weight of unspoken thought that hung in the air. It occurred to Ino at that point that perhaps she had just done the most foolhardy thing she had ever concocted in her entire life, and there were some decent contenders for that title, one of them being the action which had instigated all of this.

What if her father didn't approve of all of this? Certainly, Inoichi and Shikaku were old friends, but there were all sorts of problems that might arise from a relationship between their children. Come to think of it, Ino wasn't really sure what her father thought of Shikamaru.

Of course, on the opposite side of things, what if her father did approve and Shikamaru still wanted absolutely nothing to do with her when he returned from his mission? If that was the case, who knows what Inoichi would do? None of the things which immediately sprang to mind –all of which involved Inoichi exacting retribution for his slighted daughter— were ideas Ino particularly cared to consider.

Ino thought about the two possibilities, growing sicker by the minute as she stared anywhere but her father's face, trying as hard as she could to avoid that penetrating green stare that had now settled on her.

"Ino."

She looked up instinctively, fearing the worst. But as her gaze finally came to rest reluctantly on his face, the expression she was met with was none of the ones she had been expecting.

Her father had a sardonic half-smile plastered on his face, and he looked almost as though he were on the verge of laughter.

"Well, it took you long enough to say so."

Ino's jaw dropped slightly as she regarded this man, the one who had seemed to be so oblivious, with fresh incredulity as he began to chuckle.

"You think this is funny?" She practically screeched, her nails biting into the surface of the table where she rested her hand on it. "You, the man who has been overly protective of me for my entire life, who wouldn't dream of letting any boy who was less than worthy near his precious daughter, think this is funny? What kind of—"

"Ino!" Inoichi held up his hands in protest, laughing all the harder at her outburst. "Dear, calm down. I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at the fact that you and all of your generation seem to think that even though you're grown, your doddering old parents seem to have not the faintest idea of what's going on in your lives. We were young once too, you know."

Ino's jaw clicked shut, but she continued to stare at her father with a slightly wounded air.

"Fine. If you think you're so knowledgeable, to whom am I referring?" She gave him a challenging look, which was met with another amused smile. That only served to infuriate her further.

Her father took a sip of his tea before answering with the assured confidence of a mind reader. Somewhere in the back of Ino's head, it occurred to her that perhaps her father's interrogation techniques extended outside of the department on occasion.

"I'm the Hokage if it's not that Nara boy." Inoichi answered seriously, reflecting back the same challenging look that dared her to defy him.

Ino had almost expected him to be lying about this knowledge that he supposedly have, so her reaction to his words was bumbling, to say the least. She opened her mouth to contradict him, but the words didn't come; the sudden burning red color that had come into her face had already said enough for her.

She blinked down at her tea, all pretenses of defensiveness gone.

"So it's really that obvious?"

Inoichi settled back into his chair. All traces of laughter fell away from his voice as he watched his normally self-assured daughter, cowed under the weight of her own feelings.

"Ino dear, I may be only an oblivious man at times, but even I can tell when there is something wrong with my daughter, and I can recognize the symptoms of love when I see them."

"But how did you know—?"

"… that it was him?" Inoichi finished. "Well, I didn't figure it out nearly as quickly as I would have liked, but after a talk with Shikaku, I was fairly certain of it."

Ino's expression fell even further.

"His father knows?" Her head sank onto the table, folded into her arms with a groan.

Inoichi stood up slowly, adjusting his knee before walking over to crouch down next to his daughter, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Seeing what he was doing, Ino immediately forgot her embarrassment.

"Daddy, you don't need to be doing that! You'll hurt your leg even worse and—"

Her father stopped her, shaking his head.

"I'm alright. But I want you to listen to me."

He waited for Ino to confirm she was listening, which she finally did, though not without a few insistent glances at his knee.

"Now, I'm not sure that I approve of what this boy seems to have put you through, but I know my little girl. And I know she won't give up without a fight. If this is what makes you happy, I expect you, as a Yamanaka, not to give up. If—"

The rest of his sentence was cut off by an urgent knock at the front door. After helping her father stand back up, Ino sprang to the door, opening it to find a breathless Sakura standing on the step.

"Ino, we need your help at the hospital. We've just gotten an injury report from an incoming mission and all available hands have been requested to treat the wounded."

Sakura leaned around Ino, directing her next set of statements at Inoichi. "Yamanaka-san, you're needed at Intel right away. They've recovered one of the rogue-nin for interrogation."

Not bothering with so much as a goodbye, Sakura rushed off toward the hospital.

Ino turned back to her father, and she saw the same thoughts running through her head reflected back in his own expression: the rest of their discussion would have to be saved for later.

Grabbing only the supplies that were necessary, Ino rushed out the door, all thoughts of love temporarily suspended by the reality of the shinobi world.

The week that followed was pure hell. When Ino wasn't at the hospital treating the shinobi from that mission, almost all of whom had been near-fatally wounded, she was pulling shifts at the Intel division, helping her father to sort through the mess that was the information they'd managed to glean from the rogue-nin before a toxin in his blood had made him useless to them.

It seemed that the poison had begun taking its effect even before they'd gotten him back to the division; his thoughts had been jumbled together in a haze of disconnected memories, all of which had to be combed through with precision just in case one of them might be concealing some miniscule shred of evidence at what had prompted the attack.

By the time Ino returned home in the evenings, she was often too exhausted to eat, much less think about anything else. Her life became a blur of chakra probing, sorting information and sleep, punctuated by the occasional necessity of checking stock in the flower shop.

Tending the flower shop, which normally helped to calm Ino in times of stress, ended up being just another source of frustration. For some reason, the shipment of day lily bulbs they had ordered had come up short, and it took several hours of meticulous searching –hours that Ino didn't have—to figure out what had happened. In the end, they just had to start from scratch, counting out all the stock and reordering what hadn't been included. By the end of it all, Ino was so tired that at one point she woke up after a night of working on the accounts still slumped over the desk in the shop, not having even made it back home before she fell asleep.

When the chaos finally died down and things began to settle back into a normal routine, Ino wasn't even sure what day of the week it was, much less how much time had passed. Only after a full day of sleep to relieve her exhaustion did it occur to her to glance at the calendar and realize that it was now exactly two weeks and a day past the date that Shikamaru had been scheduled to return.

At first, she told herself that she was likely just being paranoid. It was an A-rank mission after all, and he had said two weeks at the least; he couldn't be expected to be able to control that. But as it wore into the second day, Ino found herself growing even more on edge. The Intel division hadn't received any information regarding it, and though that wasn't unusual, it still bothered Ino.

It wasn't until the third day on a regular shift at the hospital that Ino finally heard something useful regarding the mission.

One of the chief medics approached Ino, asking her to prepare three rooms for the incoming survivors of a four-man squad sent on an A-rank mission. The glacial fear that gripped her as he described the mission, which had been started approximately two weeks before, was enough to render her almost immobile, but somehow her tongue fought around it, and she managed to squeeze out the question that she almost didn't want to ask.

"Have we received the names of the survivors yet?"

The medic flipped through his charts and Ino felt a glimmer of hope, but the medic shook his head as he looked back up at her.

"I'm afraid not. Even the information that Intelligence got regarding the details of the mission was only cursory. They didn't seem to have the time or opportunity to give a detailed report. I suppose we'll find out when they come in this afternoon."

With that, the chief medic left the room. Ino sunk into a chair next to the cot she had just been preparing, her heart beating out of control in her chest.

A four-man squad, deployed two weeks prior on an A-rank mission. And one of them hadn't survived.

The possibility that it might be him was more than she could bear to think about; if he was dead, and the last thing she'd done was scold him?

She shook the thoughts out of her head and went back to resupplying the rooms, but the worry hung in the back of her mind like a persistent shadow, tainting every other thought that passed through her head.

The remaining hours of that afternoon were perhaps some of the longest Ino had ever experienced.

A/N: Sorry for the late update. The next one may be somewhat late as well, mostly due to writer's block and an insane schedule, but I will do my utmost to make it prompt.

Thank you for the lovely reviews/favorites/story-alerts. Glad to know you all are enjoying this little story.

- Senka