In this world love has no color,
Yet how deeply my body is stained by yours.
-Izumi Shikibu
Drawing two forefingers together, she formed the hand seal for a Beekeeper's Gathering Technique. Beckoning the wild bees of the forest to join her in battle.
The flow of her chakra running like warm honey from her body to the kunai sliding up her wrist into her palms.
Each kunai looped with smoke bombs imbued with her disorienting poison.
Shino's insects sensed her chakra activation intensify. His Kika bugs hungrily anticipating the curry of a quick Chakra snack, as she took a basic fighting stance against him.
"You seem determined to make me your opponent," Shino unraveled her true intent. "Or maybe you have mistaken me for someone else. The reason is because I have no reason to accept this challenge. So, why take it this far to fight me?"
And that was just her luck.
That he'd be the intellectualizing type, but not in the useful way.
Because how could he really be so ignorant of the reason why they were both there?
How could he not recognize his own enemy, when she had spent her whole life training to master everything Aburame about him?
Was he mocking her clan by failing to respectfully acknowledge her in battle?
Her hands unsteady with rage, she squeezed her kunai so tightly that her own blood tickled her palm, staining its knife edge.
By guess or by good fortune, she'd make sure he never made the same mistake about her again.
And with a fanning sweep of her hand, Shino faced a handful of hidden kunai darting his way. Their hilts flapping with the classic tell-tale tags of paper bombs.
Shino preferred not to take on a girl without a good reason for it, but it seemed he had no choice but to oblige her.
Strays of black insects crawled up from behind his coat collar, scattering across his jasmine-white face.
He wouldn't underestimate her.
Nor would he let her understate him.
"If you fight me," Shino warned her to withdraw. "I will not lose."
Then why wouldn't he shut up and get it over with already?
She went in for the kill, charging across the tree limb that had become their battleground.
Shino's brow arched.
Did she really mean to take him down with just a kunai and a fit of rage?
She must really be pissed off.
Growing up around types like Yoshino Nara, Sakura Haruno, and Lady Tsunade, he knew no jutsu could ever do more damage than a scorned woman and anything close at hand she could make into a weapon.
Shino ordered his insects into action, surrounding her paper bombs and numbing the explosions.
Only to be engulfed by the suffocating toxic smoke that choked out even the fog around him.
The familiar burn of vaporized Wolf's Bane leaving a bitter taste on his lips.
Had it not been for his bugs and their adaptability to quickly absorb poison in his bloodstream, Shino's cells might've bursts from the toxic smoke filling his lungs.
This wasn't just a random hysterical fit of rage.
What she brought to him was a fight to the death.
And she was quick.
At the full extent of her power, he guessed she could wipe the floor with him by the way she evaded his bug wall after the explosions. Using the smoke as cover to land soundlessly behind him.
But it was all too obvious that her primary strategy was to close the distance between them and minimize his ability to fight long-range, assuming that as a bug user, he wasn't as skilled in taijutsu.
Too many before her had put their hope in the same tired strategy.
But Shino would humor her.
Just as she came within an inch of grazing his neck with her kunai, he vanished.
His body bursting into a storm of thousands of kikaichū insects.
Nipping her exposed skin raw and trapping her in a disordering whirlwind of black wings and insatiable pincers.
The ribbons tying her kitsune mask coming undone.
But hiding her identity from her rival was the least of her worries as her energy waned, her chakra draining with every bug bite.
Those damn insects.
As long as he manipulated them, he'd dodge her attacks every time.
How many of them would she have to get through before they couldn't protect him from her poison anymore?
That dosage of Wolf's Bane was enough to take out a fully expanded Akimichi, let alone a bug-stuffed burrito like Shino.
What critical detail then had she missed?
And now that he had her cornered with a chakra-leeching bug cyclone, would she have enough stamina left to control her bees and finish the job?
Was that why it was taking so long to summon them?
But she didn't have time to try her bee gathering jutsu a second time.
Because just as the kikaichū insects dissolved into the fog, finally giving her a chance to catch her bearings, Shino's voice came quietly from behind her shoulder, "Is that really the best you've got? You'll have to be faster, if you want to kill me."
And in teeth-gritting, simmering fury, she swung around to give him exactly what he dared her to.
But it wasn't Shino's quick reflexes that left her fist blocked against his arm.
It was that first moment, when her wide honey golden eyes stared nakedly back into the mysterious depths of his dark sunglasses.
The pent-up energy behind her punch escaping instead into her dazed exhaling breath.
"Of course," she remembered. "Ladybugs."
Words barely audible on her lips.
The face belonging to his voice becoming clearer behind the distant fog of her memory.
Because now that she thought about it...that boy from the Leaf was taller than she was too. His untamed dark hair sticking out like the petals of a lotus flower. His brows drawn in contemplative silence over oddly darkened sunglasses...and sometimes softened into gentle understanding.
And if she remembered nothing else about the boy from the Leaf, it was the way he understood...
But it had to be a wild coincidence.
Because out of all the members belonging to the Aburame Clan, what were the odds that it'd be him that she was assigned to kill?
"Considering the way you look at me," Shino said. "It's obvious you haven't mistaken me for someone else. That's because I know that look well, when remembering someone meaningful from the past. Though I don't see how it's possible, my instincts tell me I've met you before as well."
And after he said it, she hoped her remembering was a mistake.
But it made no difference now.
They weren't children anymore.
And she would never again be that little honeybee he met in his village.
"Got you," she whispered to him, a weary smile of victory slipping across her lips.
And Shino felt it.
The arm that blocked hers, now turning purple from his wrist to his elbow, his muscles starving for oxygen.
Tiny crystals of gold glimmering against his pores.
Was it honey...or poison?
Of course, he thought. She's quick, after all.
And in more ways than just agility.
She must have caught on that his insects' ability to absorb the poison out of his bloodstream was his primary immunity defense.
The Wolf's Bane smoke bombs were just a distraction then, he realized. Her real trump card was cutting her own hand on her kunai, absorbing the poison into her own body. She then waited for me to block her attack so that she could infect me with her own blood, the way Torune could use his toxins to paralyze his opponents. Once she touched my skin, she used her chakra to shape it into micro-crystalized honey, clogging my pores and immobilizing my insects inside me...much like my technique against Zaku...She understands my clan member's techniques well. If this girl isn't an Aburame, then who is she?
But before Shino could make his best guesses, her smile twitched into agony, as she coughed out splats of blood that stained the corners of her beautifully pale mouth.
"But there's a price to this strategy, isn't there?" Shino concluded his thoughts aloud to her. "Without enough chakra to reverse the effects of the poison on your own body, you succumb to it as well. A reckless game of chance. You never had me. The reason is because my insects have adapted to accelerate their growth. It only takes minutes for an adult to reach their full life cycle. That's why stopping one generation is not enough to poison me...But it seems...this is the end for you."
And as she panted for breath on her knees, Shino turned to walk away.
His hands stuffed casually in his pockets, as he left her to face her own excruciating fate.
Moon-eyed and staggered.
No, she thought. This can't be it.
After everything she'd gone through to find him, this couldn't be how it all ended.
He couldn't just leave her to die like this.
Trembling to get back onto her unsteady feet, her vision dizzy and blurring, she charged at Shino again.
With nothing left in her but the will to fight.
"How dare you turn your back on this fight, Aburame," she damned him hatefully. "We're not finished yet."
And with a strength neither she or her opponent knew she had, she caught up to Shino like a vengeful wasp in flight.
Her fingers gripping the sleeves of his gray coat, taking him down with her from the treetops to the forest floor.
Two starcrossed insect shinobi falling freely into an ever-thickening fog around them.
Falling into defeat and no longer caring that she was.
Until the Kamizuru slowly lost consciousness in the Aburame's arms.
Finding a peaceful comfort in nothingness, as the poison in her veins finally silenced her beating and conflicted heart.