When Ino woke again, it was morning.

Her body acknowledged the change ahead of her conscious mind. The particular slant of the light through the window, the specific strain of birdsong on the breeze, the gradual warming of her skin; all signaled the dawn well before she opened her eyes.

When she finally did, the world was a kaleidoscope. Gradually, colorful outlines resolved into the familiar sights of the hospital, though not at the angle from which she was used to perceiving them. The return of the pain was less immediate, but once she felt it, it asserted itself with a vengeance. She could feel the places where she was bandaged—her wrist and her forehead near the hairline, both swathed in gauze—but those wounds were not the source of this pain. Instead, the ache radiated from right behind her eyes, pushing at the inside of her skull with the force of a sledgehammer. Closing her eyes did nothing to ease it—that only focused her attention on the pain.

She wasn't sure whether it was her swearing or some other monitoring system that brought the nearest medical attendant running to her room, but it wasn't long before she was surrounded by well-meaning medics, taking temperature and blood pressure and every other measure of vitality under the sun.

"Okay, but can someone do something about my headache?" were the words she attempted to form, but through the blinding haze of the pain, she wasn't actually sure that they came out in that order, or at all. She drifted, half-insensate, as people asked her endless probing questions that she hoped she was answering correctly.

Finally, blessedly, the din subsided. The gaggle of medics disappeared, replaced by a lone familiar figure. The woman drew her hand away from the center of Ino's forehead with a practiced air, siphoning the pain away with the motion.

"That any better, Ino-pig?"

Ino chuckled, letting out a long breath, at once relieved and exhausted. "You ought to know how to deal with a headache with that billboard brow of yours."

Sakura raised a skeptical eyebrow. The slightest smile curved her lips. "Wow, you really are out of it. I'd expect much better insults from someone who's had nothing but time to lay around and think them up."

Though the words were teasing, there was a tension behind them. Ino did her best to tamp down a spike of panic and keep her tone neutral. "How much time, exactly?"

Now that her vision was clearing again, Ino could discern more details of the room—the big, beautiful bouquet of purple and white flowers on the bedside table, accompanied by a small card in her mother's neat handwriting; the IV connected to her arm and the shrill beep of the monitors behind her; the way that Sakura's smile pulled the lines of her face just a little too tight.

"It's been a week since we removed you from the observation room," she said. "You gave us a pretty good scare there, I've got to say."

"Please," Ino scoffed with a little smile, "don't try to convince me you were actually worried about me."

"Not just me." Sakura carried on as though she hadn't heard the jibe and that, more than anything, impressed upon Ino the gravity of the situation. "You chose a hell of a time to wake up—Shizune is actually your primary assigned physician, but Tsunade had to physically escort her from the building to get her to go home and get some sleep earlier today. So I got left in charge of you in her stead. Aren't you lucky?" Sakura smirked, tapping the center of Ino's forehead with a finger. "And on that subject, I have evaluations to do. How would you rate your pain overall at the moment?"

"Scale of one to ten?" Ino asked. "I would say a four now, down from an eight."

Sakura made a note on a chart, smiling softly to herself. "I'd call that an improvement. And your head specifically?"

"Much better." Ino closed her eyes, reveling in the feeling of not having red-hot pain thrumming behind her eyelids.

"Good." The expression on Sakura's face eased just the tiniest bit. "Very good."

Sakura paced at her bedside, asking questions and taking yet more readings from the medical equipment. Through the poking and prodding, Ino's memory was returning with more clarity. The removal of the pain and the familiar routine of her banter with Sakura had been a temporary distraction from processing what a week truly meant—a week of lost time, a week in which any number of things could have happened. A week since—

Ino grabbed Sakura's wrist, her heart rate spiking as that barely-controlled bit of earlier panic redoubled and broke loose.

"Sakura, where is he? What happened? Is he okay? Where—?"

Sakura stopped in her tracks, lowering the chart to look directly at Ino. Her expression didn't reveal nearly enough to slow the pounding of Ino's heart against her ribcage.

Sakura gently loosened Ino's grip and set her hand firmly, though not unkindly, back on the bed. "There will be time for briefings once we finish evaluations and make sure you're—"

"I don't care about that." It was only the reluctance of her atrophied muscles to respond to her commands that kept Ino from knocking the chart out of Sakura's hands in her frustration. "I want to know if my teammate is alive."

Sakura fixed her with a stern stare, frowning. "Well, if you'd give me the chance to get out more than a single sentence at a time, Ino-pig, I could tell you that yes, Shikamaru is alive and conscious."

The enormity of the wave of relief that crashed over Ino was nearly enough to send her back to the hazy world of unconsciousness. Her limbs shook, and not just from the current frailty of her body.

"He's alive," she repeated.

"Yes," Sakura confirmed. Her frown deepened, and Ino realized with some bit of tired amusement that it made her look very much like her mentor, Lady Tsunade. "You, on the other hand, may not be for much longer if you keep causing your blood pressure to spike."

Ino barely registered the reprimand. Alive. Shikamaru was alive and conscious, and he was… "Wait. Alive and conscious doesn't tell me anything. His mind, is it…?"

A look passed over Sakura's face that Ino registered as somewhere between consternation and annoyance.

"I wasn't part of the team supervising his care, so as a medical professional, I can't really speak to—"

"Sakura, I don't give a shit about your opinion as a medical professional right now." The outburst drew another disapproving frown from Sakura, but Ino couldn't find it within her to care. "I want to know what you know, as my friend and his."

"As your friend," Sakura repeated slowly, "I can honestly say that I don't really know, Ino. I know that he was well enough a few days ago that Shizune cleared him for supervised release from the hospital. Beyond that, I haven't seen him around. I've been a little more concerned about my friend who was unresponsive for a week."

Sighing, Sakura dragged a chair over and slumped into it. She grabbed Ino's hand, squeezing it a little, a small attempt at a gesture of reassurance. "Look, Ino. I know you're worried about him. I'm not trying to keep anything from you, I promise—I just really don't know that much. And honestly, I wish you would focus a little more on yourself at the moment. Did I mention a week?"

Ino nodded, understanding slowly taking hold. A week of uncertainty. A week of waiting and watching while Ino herself had been… where? She found she couldn't remember much beyond snatches of something bright and reassuring. But while that time had simply slipped away from Ino, her friends and family had had to experience every agonizing moment.

"A week of unconsciousness," she said. "After we did something unprecedented."

"After you did something unprecedented," Sakura corrected. "Honestly, Ino…. we weren't sure that you were going to wake up. Or, even if you did, if you'd be…"

Again, Ino perceived the signs of strain in Sakura's features. Her eyes were bloodshot and a little glassy, like she was trying not to cry. Her hands shook in her gloves, sending little tremors through Ino's arm.

"I'm sorry," Ino murmured. "I didn't realize…"

"Don't apologize for something you can't control, Ino-pig!" Sakura gave a wet laugh. It was a moment before she could speak again, swallowing around a visible lump in her throat. "Unless you can, in which case you're an asshole for making us all worry. You did something incredible, Ino, and I'm really…" The words came with difficulty. "I'm really proud of you. And I'm glad you're okay."

"Yeah, me too." Ino squeezed Sakura's hand back, giving a weak smile. Despite her week of insensibility, torpor still clung to her like a blanket. Her eyelids felt suddenly heavy again. "I'm probably only alive because of all the medical knowledge you've crammed into that gigantic head of yours."

Sakura glared at her, but there was no malice in the look. Just familiar teasing, and relief. "It's not too late for me to refer your care to a vet, Ino-pig."

"You wish. I think you're stuck with me, billboard brow."

For a moment, Ino just sat in the quiet with her best friend, letting the enormity of the past few days wash over her once again. She closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth of sunlight on her skin. Real sunlight. She was determined not to take it for granted this time.

"So," she said, opening her eyes, "what comes next?"

Sakura smiled, getting back to her feet. "Now, we get you properly on the road to recovery."

The days that followed were some of the most tedious of Ino's life. There was medicine, consultations, physical therapy, chakra treatments, and all of it made Ino's head ache to bursting. The pain had refused to fully dissipate—though it had gotten more manageable as the week progressed, she could still feel it lurking just behind her eyelids at any given moment. Shizune theorized that it was a result of overextending the limits of her clan abilities and that it would go away within a few weeks, with rest and a medically mandated sabbatical from the Intelligence Division. Still, she didn't sound as sure about that prognosis as Ino would have liked.

But even as the pain lingered, other things improved. Her muscle tone rebounded, and after the first day or two, she could eat again without immediately feeling nauseated. When Sakura presented her with the discharge papers, she almost thought it was a trick.

"Seriously? I get to go home?"

"Shizune has approved it, provided that you don't immediately go jumping into trouble again." Sakura held the papers just out of Ino's reach, a little crease of a frown between her eyebrows. "If you overdo it, I won't hesitate to drag you back here myself."

"I swear I'll be good," Ino drawled, barely resisting the urge to roll her eyes. She didn't think that would help her case. "Can I please just go now?"

"Yes," Sakura relented, sighing. "But only because someone's already waiting outside to take you home. And I know your mother is going to have dinner ready for you, so I don't want you to be late."

Ino snatched the papers from Sakura as soon as she could reach them. "You know I wouldn't dare disrupt one of my mother's dinners."

She signed the papers and handed them back, then wrapped Sakura in a spontaneous hug. "Thanks for all your help, billboard brow."

Sakura gave a soft snort of laughter as she hugged her back. "Anytime, Ino-pig."

Ino felt like a specter as she wound her way out of the hospital. It seemed like, every hallway she turned down, she caught another medic or patient staring at her with an expression somewhere between awe and fear, raising the hair on the back of her neck and goosebumps along her arms. Maybe she had just been away from people for too long. Surely the whole village couldn't know about a classified mission. It was only her long absence from the real world that made everything feel so strange.

She couldn't reach the lobby quickly enough—the oranges and pinks of the late afternoon called to her like she was a light-starved flower reaching for the sun. The brightness made her eyes water and for a moment, as she stepped out the door and back into fresh air for the first time in weeks, she was blinded by its radiance. She squinted into the glare, eyes burning and watering but chest light, scanning for the familiar silhouette of her mother, who she assumed was the waiting escort Sakura had mentioned.

But as her eyes adjusted to the light, the figure that coalesced in Ino's vision was certainly not her mother, though it was familiar.

Slouched on a bench, a cloud of smoke curling from his mouth, Shikamaru sprang to his feet as soon as he saw her. He flicked the cigarette to the ground, stamping it out with a graceless, guilty motion, self-consciousness etched into his face. Despite everything, the gesture, the expression—it all felt so familiar it made her chest ache.

"Hey, Ino."

Too many thoughts crowded her head, emotions rising up and choking her. She wanted to punch him. She wanted to throw her arms around him and not let go. She wanted to yell at him. She wanted to… she wanted…

"Seriously, Shikamaru? Smoking right outside the hospital? I thought you had quit." The words escaped before she could contain them, more reflex than conscious thought. The mantle of old habits fell so easily across her shoulders—her critical, him avoidant.

To his credit, the guilt in his expression deepened. "I did. I have." His voice was rough, like he hadn't been using it much. He cleared his throat. "I just… sometimes I relapse when I get stressed. It's not a big deal."

Ino frowned. "You know Shizune's gonna kick your ass if she sees you doing that out here."

"Oh, I have no doubt." There was something long-suffering in his gaze that spoke of a more involved story, but he didn't elaborate.

Instead, he just stared at her, his dark eyes searching her for… something. She found that for all her years of studying him, she still couldn't read his expression.

"So… you came to get me?"

"Right. Yeah." The moment shattered as his gaze shifted away again, and he adopted his customary taciturn air. Nothing ever really changed. "I asked your mom if it was okay that I be the one to meet you."

She felt another argument rising through her like steam in a kettle—if he'd wanted to be here so badly, shouldn't he be happy to see her or something?—but she let it disperse. Part of her was still so tired.

"Okay," she said. "Then… let's go, I guess."

They fell into silent, synchronous step, taking the path away from the hospital, the path toward home. Again, Ino felt the maelstrom of emotions swirl up within her, but there was too much she wanted to say and she had no idea where to start. Shikamaru, for his part, was as talkative as ever, walking along with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted skyward, like he couldn't be bothered to pay the slightest attention to the woman at his side.

The longer they walked, the more the impotence in Ino built, and the more she felt her throat swelling, her eyes stinging with tears that wouldn't seem to form. After all they had just been through together, this was it? He had nothing to say to her? She had assumed their reunion might be tumultuous or difficult, but she had never expected just… nothing. Her memories of the journey through his mind were still difficult to parse, more impression than substance, but the emotion of the journey had stayed with her, clinging close as a second skin.

Maybe he didn't remember any of it, or what he did remember was nonsensical and disconnected, as it was for her. Even then, a petty voice in her head whispered, he knows you saved his life. You'd think he'd at least say thank you.

But she let the silence linger, let the tension build, until she thought she might burst with the weight of all she was keeping in her chest. In a moment, they would turn down the next road, and then her mother's place would be a few houses down on the right, and they would part without having exchanged anything more meaningful than their usual bickering.

As they reached the corner, the dam burst. She whirled on Shikamaru, opening her mouth, unsure what was about to come tumbling out.

"Ino, can we… can we take a little detour before I take you back home? I… I'd like to talk."

Confusion replaced every other emotion warring in Ino's chest as she realized that it was Shikamaru who had spoken—he was looking at her now, that inscrutable expression on his face—and she hadn't said a thing.

"Umm… yeah. Yes. We can talk, sure." Other responses filled her head, like 'couldn't we have been talking this whole time we were walking to my mom's house' and 'seriously, that's all you have to say, you asshole', but they were smothered by the weight of her curiosity.

"Okay. C'mon." Without preamble, he grabbed her hand, tugging her back the way they had come. Ino was too shocked to do anything but follow.

The path quickly diverted from the one they had taken from the hospital. It split off and wound toward the edge of Konoha, into the trees and hills that formed the natural border of the village. He stopped when they reached a grass-coveed bluff overlooking a good portion of the rebuilt landscape—though some places even now remained scarred by Pain's destruction. The setting sun cast long shadows into the street; everything else was awash in light, the contrast stark.

Clearing her throat, Ino found her voice again. "You know, if you're bringing me up here to push me off a cliff and murder me, it would've been way easier to kill me while I was still in the hospital."

Shikamaru gave her a withering look over his shoulder, as if that were all the response that comment deserved. "Just come sit down, will you?"

He led her over to a flattened patch of grass. Normally, she would've expected him to flop down and recline, leaving her to figure out her own seating arrangement, but instead, he turned to her and helped her down gently before lowering himself to the grass beside her.

She could see immediately why Shikamaru liked this place. Painted in the shades of the sunset, Konoha was even more beautiful than usual, more like a meticulously crafted miniature of itself than a true, living village. For a moment, her thoughts were consumed only by the view, by the mix of the sun and the breeze ghosting across her skin, and she felt alive—fully alive—for the first time in a long time.

Her attention returned to the present as Shikamaru dropped her hand. She turned to look at him, studying the lines of his profile. Was it just a trick of the sunset light, or did his skin have a vague pink cast to it?

"So," he said.

"So… what?" Ino replied. "You dragged me up here, which is not very polite to do to someone who has just been in the hospital for a week, you know? So what is it you wanted to talk about?"

"Two weeks," Shikamaru corrected.

"What?"

"Two weeks. You were in the hospital for two weeks." Shikamaru turned his head and let his gaze meet hers, and what Ino saw there filled her with a bone-deep shock. "Ino, you almost died."

Shikamaru was not and had never been an expressive man. His primary modes, in Ino's self-appointed expert opinion, were exasperation, fatigue, and sarcasm. They did not include feelings like terror, anguish, and concern.

Yet she saw all of those in his face in this moment, layered over one another and mixed with a heavy smattering of what she knew only from a couple of particularly bad experiences was self-recrimination.

She scoffed and averted her gaze, trying to summon more nonchalance than she truly felt. "Don't be dramatic, Shikamaru. I'm fine. It's fine."

"I disrespectfully disagree." There was a bite to his words that Ino didn't think was meant for her. "You didn't see how you looked after… You were…"

He turned away again, scrubbing a hand over his face. He took a moment to recompose himself before he spoke again. "You shouldn't have risked yourself like that."

Ino's anger, which had been lulled into a complacent undercurrent, resurged with a vengeance. "I'm sorry, what?"

He didn't look at her. "You shouldn't have risked yourself for me. It was stupid."

A spike of white-hot fury stabbed through Ino, and her eyes widened. "Seriously, Shikamaru? Are you kidding me? Setting aside the fact that it was my choice—which we will come back to, don't worry!—this is what you have to say to me? That I shouldn't have risked myself for you? God, you're such an asshole, Shikamaru! How about 'thank you for saving my sorry ass, Ino' or 'I'm sorry for worrying you' or 'I shouldn't have gotten myself into such a dumbass position to begin with'?!"

"I shouldn't have," he murmured, almost too quietly for her to hear. He was still looking away; hard lines of tension tightened along his shoulders, his neck and his jaw. Raising his voice back to its normal volume, he said with a slight edge of exasperation: "I don't want to argue with you, Ino."

"Oh, you don't?" Ino said. "You pick a fight, and then you don't want to argue with me? That's rich. You're the one who said you want to talk and then start reprimanding me like a child, like I can't make my own goddamn decisions about who I do and don't want to risk my life for."

"That's not what I meant. It's not—god, why does it always have to be so difficult with you?" Shikamaru put his head in his hands. "You don't understand—"

"Then explain it to me, oh brilliant genius! I'm clearly too dumb to get what you're trying to say," Ino spat.

"Ino, we both know you're not dumb, and I wish you would stop putting words in my mouth. You just—that was too dangerous. You shouldn't have risked it."

Ino felt color rising to her cheeks. The tears she had been unable to summon before were now piling along her lashes, threatening to spill over at any moment. Despite what he said, she was stupid. Stupid to have thought that this would go any other way than what it had devolved into. They were always like this—always talking at cross purposes, always bickering, always dealing glancing blows.

"Why, Shikamaru?" she demanded. "I don't understand. If it's not because I'm stupid and it's not because I can't make informed decisions, then what is it?"

"BECAUSE I'M NOT WORTH YOU DYING TO SAVE ME, INO!"

Ino froze, even as a couple of tears separated from her lower eyelashes, drawing shining lines down her cheeks. In a small voice she almost didn't recognize as her own, she said: "What?"

Shikamaru drew his hands across his face, leaving brief trails of pink across his pale skin. "Losing you would have been…" He faltered again, wincing as though he'd been struck. "Bringing me back was not worth the risk of losing you."

For a few long moments, Ino just stared at him, dumbfounded. Then, without quite meaning to, she started to laugh.

"Shikamaru Nara, you absolute idiot." She managed the words through a mixture of laughter and tears, her whole body shaking with the effort.

That, at least, got him to snap his head back towards her. It only made her want to laugh harder—here he was, saying he wasn't worth risking her life over, but he was offended when she called him an idiot. The contradiction was so utterly ridiculous and so inarguably him.

"Sometimes you make me so mad I can't stand it, you know that?" Ino reined in her laughter. "Did you seriously think, even for a second, that I wasn't going to come drag you back?"

It was Shikamaru's turn to look confused.

"You honestly think there was any way that I wouldn't do everything within my power to bring you back? It doesn't matter how dangerous it was, or how unlikely the chances were, or whether you think you're worth it or not. It was worth it to me. And that's the end of it."

Another peal of laughter escaped her. She turned toward him and took his face in her hands, so he couldn't look away from her. His skin was warm to the touch and the muscles of his jaw jumped beneath her fingers. "Shikamaru. I have lost so much. We have lost so much. Our teacher, our fathers, so many friends… I was not about to let one of the most important people in my life be taken from me without a fight. I'd do it again. I'd do it again right now if I had to. Even though I'm exhausted and overextended, and you're a dumbass who doesn't value his own life or know how important he is to so many people in this village, I'd still risk my life to find you again. So you can just stop trying to talk me out of that right now, alright? I can and will do whatever it takes to keep you here."

In the moment that she stopped talking, Ino became aware of three things in quick succession:

The first was that Shikamaru was crying, warm tears running down his cheeks to collect in the ridge where her hands met his cheeks.

The second was that her half-crazed tirade had brought her very, very close to Shikamaru's face, their noses centimeters from touching.

The third, which returned with the startling clarity of a slap to the face, was that she remembered.

The emotions of her journey through his mind split into a thousand facets of clear memory, each one as sharp as the polished crystal in the caverns. She saw again the island, the plunge into the depths, the endless glitter of possibilities. She saw the mirror, the many versions of herself, the path of the shadow. She saw the garden and heard him tell her to keep going. She saw the shoji board and felt the click as she placed the tiles. She saw the image of Asuma-sensei and smelled the acrid smoke of his favorite brand of cigarettes. Images cascading upon images. The forest, the village, the control room. She felt his hand in hers as she pulled him back through it all, back to the surface, out of the depths of fear and doubt and loss.

And she remembered a kiss that, though it had existed only in the landscape of his mind, felt as real as this moment now, as the press of her fingers on his skin.

When she kissed him, it tasted like salt and smoke. Even with her eyes closed, she felt the progression of his emotions. First, shock and recognition, puzzlement that this was happening at all. And then, as the realization hit, the gentlest reciprocation, as if he were afraid she might shatter like glass or burst like a bubble if he made one wrong move. Then, with a surge of desperation and longing and hunger, he returned her kiss in force.

When she broke away, her head was spinning—whether from the headache or the exertion of the past few weeks or just the moment itself, she couldn't say. "So," she said, her breath coming in gasps, "do you want to try that again?"

Shikamaru let out a low chuckle that ghosted across her lips. "Which part?"

"'Thank you, Ino, I'm sorry I'm such a dumbass, Ino, I don't deserve someone as beautiful and brilliant and forgiving as you?'" She leaned forward, pressing her forehead to his. "And then we'll see."

"I'm sorry, Ino. And thank you." He let out a long slow breath. "I owe you… more than I know how to say."

"Well, you can start making it up to me by taking me home." Ino let go of the tension in her body, feeling the exhaustion of the past few weeks wash through her again. She let her head drop onto his shoulder. "I think I need to rest."

"I think you more than deserve it."

Shikamaru stood, lifting her, and Ino settled into the feeling of being held—not for the first or last time, she was in his arms again, a place where she had always been and would always be safe.

And finally, after a long and arduous journey, Ino was home.

Author's note: Okay. Wow. Hi. I'm probably gonna be pretty babbly and sentimental and unorganized here, so this is your warning. Proceed with due caution.

We've reached the end! And I honestly don't know what to say. I'm as surprised as you are that you're getting an update today. I've had a draft of this chapter sitting in my files since the last time I posted, but it's taken me a while to refine it and get it to the place that I wanted it to be. I started In the Forest in 2013, and when I began, I never thought it would take me OVER A DECADE to finish it. Not to age myself but I WAS A TEENAGER WHEN I STARTED THIS AND NOW I'M THIRTY. So needless to say, I felt a liiiiiiiiittle pressure in finishing this up. The basic scene structure of the chapter has remained mostly the same-I've mostly been quibbling with wording and exactly how sappy I wanted to make this ending. I dearly, dearly hope that this lives up to expectations. In some ways, I know it can't-10+ years is a lot of time to build toward an ending. But I hope it is at the very least a satisfying ending that doesn't invalidate the journey we took to get here.

I cannot express enough the gratitude that I have for anyone and everyone who has followed and stayed with this story. (Yes, you!) I hope you know that I have read each and every one of your comments with a lot of joyous tears. I have the kindest readers in existence. Every time one of you told me about how this story made you cry or kick your feet in delight, every time one of you rediscovered this story and told me about the experience of rereading it, every time you told me how you stayed up way too late to finish a chapter... it sincerely means so much more than I can express here in lines of text. I simply couldn't have gotten to this place without your encouragement and your enthusiasm and your love. Thank you, thank you, thank you. In a world that is so much sadder and darker and stranger than teenage-Senka could ever have imagined, this little community has been a light to me. I hope I've brought you a fraction of the joy you've brought me.

I'm not sure what I'll be doing next. I'll probably continue to post some short pieces here and there. I have a couple ShikaIno drabbles that have been rolling around my head lately, so maybe I'll get to those soon. Maybe someday I'll actually get around to finishing up some of my original writing and trying to do something with that. We'll see. In the meantime, take care of yourselves. Take care of others, when you can. Know that I'm hoping for good things and better things for you always. Thank you again.