the clowns have passed

The Unorthodox Arts of War (Chapter 5) ZOMG

2008-11-04T20:07:10Z

So... hi? I know, I know. I've been unforgivably AWOL for the longest time and I'm sorry, really! Insert the same medley of excuses here, paired with the fact that I was sort of not reading Naruto for a little while (which is now remedied, thank goodness).

But anyway. Here's another chapter for any of the wonderful people that are still following this.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Chapter 5: The Long Night

///

The night started off with a long spell of what was, at least for them, an almost uncharacteristic quiet.

Ino had opted to play along with the excruciating silence, assuming her companion was busy at work formulating a bad-ass plan for their smooth escape, only to surprise her with it when it was fully formed and ready for action. But as the minutes ticked on and the temperature dropped almost palpably around them with no word from Shikamaru, Ino was starting to think that maybe she had a little too much faith in people.

“So, you…uh… going to hit me with that grand escape plan any minute now, Shika?”

She was greeted by the faint hum of the refrigerator.

“Hey, what are –“ Ino looked over to where Konoha’s resident over-stated genius was seemingly fast asleep beside her, head nestled sideways in the crook of one arm. Constant vigilance, her ass. “I can’t believe this! You were the one droning on about not falling asleep… Get up!”

More silence.

Wait a second. As profoundly untalkative as her companion was notorious for being, these were decidedly special circumstances, and there was no harm in being extra careful. “Hey, Shikamaru?” Ino whispered, tentatively pressing two fingers to his neck for a pulse. No, she realized, rolling her eyes, not dead; his heartbeat was still there and flickering strongly under the warm skin. You know, Shikamaru’s neck really was quite warm, Ino noticed suddenly, almost unfairly so, and some slightly-chilled part of her brain made her rest her hand there for a beat longer than was absolutely necessary. In fact, now that she really thought about it, Shikamaru had a surprisingly nice neck – long and well-boned, fairly slender…

Whoa. Now she was definitely going crazy. Horrified with her thoughts, Ino unconsciously pressed down a little harder.

“Not dead,” Shikamaru choked out, cracking open an eye. “Just ignoring you.”

With lightning quick speed, Ino snapped back her hand and scowled at him, praying that her blush wasn’t evident in the darkness. “Then, talk,” she prompted huffily. “Talking keeps me awake. And you’d better be listening.”

The warm body next to her gave a long-suffering sigh. “Alright, then.”

“So?”

“So, what?”

Ino rolled her eyes. “Talk. Say something, I don’t know, something normal. So I can try and forget about the fact that we’re locked in this refrigerated tomb. ”

“Fine, fine,” he drew himself up a little straighter, tugging the blanket closer under his chin. “Last—uh—Tuesday I had to get up early to test the Cryptography Ops Unit, so I set my alarm clock. I figured it wouldn’t work, since it didn’t the last time, so I put the alarm in my bathroom. That way, when I went to turn it off, I’d already be halfway to being ready.”

Leave it to Shikamaru to figure out a rather complex plan for such a simple task. “And?”

“I was late.” He shrugged. “Fell asleep in the bathtub.”

“…”

“The end,” he deadpanned.

“What? What the hell kind of story was that? I was thinking about something a little more nostalgic and uplifting. And since when exactly does you setting your alarm clock qualify as normal? In all our lives, you’ve only done it three times!”

He shrugged back in a way that conveyed exactly how troublesome he found the notion.

Ino rolled her eyes at him. She should’ve seen this coming. “Right, well. Another story. And don’t skimp on the upliftingness.”

“I’ve got nothing,” replied Shikamaru, reaching both hands behind his head in his standard pose of careless ennui. “Nothing uplifting, at least.”

Ino tucked her blanket carefully under one knee, thinking it over. “Oh… hey. Did you know that one of Chouji’s girls made it past the chuunin exams in the last set of tests? Her first shot, and she was one of only three successful genin. Chouji was over the moon – the proudest teacher ever.” She grinned, despite herself.

Beside her, Shikamaru had closed both eyes, looking for all the world as though he was relaxing under a blue sky on some grassy hilltop and not hideously mal-equipped and trapped in a pitch-black freezer. He said nothing, so Ino went on.

“You were out of town on a mission, so you probably didn’t know. But Chouji’s going around calling her a younger, female version of–”

“—Me. I do know.” Shikamaru didn’t crack an eyelid. “I saw Chouji right when I got back.”

Now this was news to her. Chouji may have stopped by every in a while but Ino could have counted the number of times she saw Shikamaru this last year on the fingers on one hand – if not for this mission, the absence of contact would have likely stretched on a lot longer, knowing the two of them – and here she finds out that the rest of her ex-team were merrily cavorting about behind her back all the while. Sure, the boys were the best of friends in a way she had never been with either of them, but that didn’t place a phone call or visit completely above and beyond their capabilities. What gave?

“—happened?”

Ino, stuck in thoughts that were becoming progressively angrier, snapped out in time to catch the tail end of Shikamaru’s question. “Huh?”

“What happened with you? Your kids didn’t test, from what I heard. And judging from what I saw back there, it’s definitely not because they’re not capable enough.”

“Oh,” Ino rolled her eyes. “Riki had this whole stage where he was convinced his life calling was to somehow sabotage the Chuunin testing grounds and become a legend. He got about as far as the front gate. That didn’t stop them from banning him, though, which put the whole team on the blacklist.”

“Ha.” Ino could have sworn she heard a smile in his voice. “And how many bruises did they get for that?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she balked in feigned-indignation. “I’m the picture-perfect example of a compassionate teacher. That black eye, sprained finger and wedgie were all his own fault. Or Hatsumi’s.”

To this, Shikamaru said nothing, resuming his semi-napping state by closing both eyes again and leaning a little further back. The sudden proximity definitely wasn’t an unwelcome change – he was warm and the freezer was undeniably not misnamed. As the moments wore on, Ino’s toes were taking on a slightly distressing numbness. Nothing lethal, though. At least not yet.

The two of them had shared their two blankets between them, following the age-old rule of doubling body heat to maximize survival probability, and it was working well enough so far. Ino flexed her fingers beneath the blanket, taking careful note of extremities first, and was relieved to find the chill no more than any she would feel on a winter night in Konoha. But this definitely didn’t mean the cold wasn’t taking its toll, and more than once during the duration of their predominately one-sided conversation, Ino had felt herself drift a little into sleep; and each and every time this happened, Shikamaru would cough or shift slightly beside her, jarring her from the potentially dangerous slip. Whether or not this was purposeful wasn’t really evident. Back in their stakeout days, Shikamaru was always kind of a shifty sleeper.

Back in their stakeout days… Ino’s mind gave a little jolt of recognition at the circumstance, a throwback to their old days under Asuma-sensei, with the two of them and Chouji huddled out at night while their teacher had a smoke, wondering when he would give up the coffin nails for the betterment of their team and could all just find the next decent lodging for a decent a) night’s sleep, b) meal and c) grooming appliances.

It had been long, Ino realized then. Sure, following Asuma’s death, the three had made a few unspoken efforts at see each other more frequently. But things happened – life happened – and sometimes the hours weren’t enough to spend on holding things together.

Sadly, that was exactly when they’d start coming apart.

But just how long it had actually been hadn’t occurred to Ino before now; now that she was stuck in such sudden proximity with her old childhood friend and found herself unaccustomed to recent things about him – a poorly-healed scar along the back of one hand, likely mended on the fly during some mission or another, the elongation and hardening of bones that came with adulthood evident in his face. God, he did look older – something she had never really seen before. Looking at him now, Ino supposed he had grown well; the face was a slender one, almost leaning towards a more classically aristocratic look. If you ignored the terrible posture. And that was certainly hard to do with him slumping into her shoulder.

She was sitting cross legged, both hands clasped tightly in her lap for warmth. At the beginning, Shikamaru had adopted the same pose, but, being taller, both his knees jutted out from under the blanket. He inevitably settled for tucking them to his chest. It was still cold, though, progressively colder than Ino remembered the minute before and in one sleepy moment, she almost extended her legs over his lap to leach some extra warmth.

Oh, wait.

Startled by the direction her thoughts were straying, Ino shook her head roughly, trying to clear her thoughts. Awake, she thought, mentally chanting the word like mantra. Stay awake. There was no way she was going to succumb the same end as a garden vegetable, spooning with one of her oldest friends, after living through 22 solid years of grueling shinobidom. There will still so many things to see, to do. For example, she was still a virg—

Oh gods. The Ritual. All of a sudden a veritable tsunami of uncomfortable thoughts came rushing at her, and Ino scrambled to change the subject of her contemplations out loud. “Ah hah… um… hey! Do you know what I’ve always wondered about Kakashi-sensei?”

“Huh,” replied Shikamaru, sounding like he cared about the gestation periods of platypuses more than he cared about her thoughts regarding Kakashi-sensei.

“Boxers or briefs?” She finished lamely.

“Alright, this conversation is definitely over.”

Ino huffed. “Well, I had to say something. I’m looking out for your life here – you were totally falling asleep a minute ago.”

Shikamaru didn’t answer, sighing instead in a long-suffering way. If there had been light, Ino was sure his breath would have misted in the cold air. When he said: “Boxers,” she almost didn’t hear him.

“What?”

“I said: boxers.” He sat up a little straighter, shifting his semi-reclining position to face towards her. “You and Chouji had that long-running battle that year you couldn’t stop thinking about what Kakashi-sensei looked like under his mask. Chouji said boxers. You said briefs. He won.”

“He did not win,” she scoffed, feigning indignation. “The results were inconclusive.”

“Nope, Chouji definitely won.” Shikamaru shifted backwards again, resuming his forward-facing stance. “You forced Chouji and I to spy on him in the change room, remember?”

Oh right. Good times.

“But you know, that was only that day though. I’ve seen him in the change room since and I’m fairly sure he’s switches it up.”

Ino bit back a laugh. “And you didn’t back me up?” She asked in mock indignation. “Whatever happened to trust, caring and support in a comrade?”

Shikamaru scoffed. “In our team? To you? You’d be looking for Asuma.” Then he closed his eyes.

Asuma-sensei… that’s right. Ino had usually been the default winner of many intra-team quarrels by the sheer strength of her personality, which just helped to load the rare situations in which the boys took a victory. Despite the fact that they never were too overtly smug about it (Chouji being too nice, Shikamaru being too lazy), Ino would fume about it for days, during which time Asuma-sensei would try to placate her with low-level missions to neighboring shopping towns, the two boys grudgingly in tow.

Asuma-sensei…

“I’m cold,” Ino huffed, blinking away sudden tears she could feel crystallizing on her eyelashes. When she turned a little to the side, her ankle gave a sharp throb. Fabulous. Pressing a hand to the injured joint, Ino closed her eyes, concentrating on opening the gates that would emit the healing chakra necessary to mend the stretched and broken muscle.

Shikamaru opened an eye. “It’s just a sprain, right? I wouldn’t waste my energy, if I were you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” retorted Ino. “Gods know we’ll probably freeze to death in here anyway. That way, the ankle won’t be a hideous size when they drag my frozen corpse out of here with that sack of peas.”

She pressed down harder, adding a touch of heat to the healing emanation. Shikamaru sat up and reached out, grabbing at her wrist without cracking an eyelid. “I said: stop. Don’t be an idiot and drain yourself now by freaking out. Save some of that chakra for our escape.”

“Freaking out?” Ino gaped at him, feeling suddenly, inexplicably angry. “Yes, I am freaking out, because somehow it missed your colossal genius that we’re in a freezer! We’re freezing!”

Shikamaru sighed loudly, dropping her wrist, but still didn’t open an eye.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“No.”

It was probably for the best that Ino couldn’t feel her hands then, because she was pretty sure that there was nothing else to stop her from killing him.

Yuu wasn’t sure of a lot things, but he was pretty certain that anytime Rikimaru went quiet, somehow, somewhere out in the universe, something was going very wrong.

“Uh, Riki?” He asked, looking over his shoulder and losing the alignment of two pins as he did so. Great; yet another fifteen minutes of tedious lock-picking in almost solid darkness wasted. He swiped at his aching eyes.

The unusually silent comrade in question was peering questioningly at the grate above them, a pensive look on his face. This was new. For the most part, their journey had been accompanied by Rikimaru’s unending commentary on Yuu’s slow progress and the seemingly endless amount of locked doors – it seemed that whomever had designed this makeshift base had paid no attention to facility of movement whatsoever; there were even locked panels located throughout the ventilation system, undoubtedly meant to hinder any lock-picking intruders like themselves.

“Keep going,” Rikimaru instructed him, not taking his eyes off the grate above them. “Something’s been bothering me.”

Yuu glanced upwards, catching the faint hum that been a backdrop to their entire night. “Oh, the refrigeration?”

Earlier that evening, Rikimaru had tried to cobble together a device to overcome the refrigeration system, but to no avail. He had managed to create a magnet for the vibration mimicker (something that came in immensely handy when Yuu’s meager supply of adhesive ran out), but the refrigeration system wouldn’t give. In the end, Yuu had suggested they ditch the project for lack of time; it didn’t seem like the system was alerting anyone of their presence, at least, and the room it was cooling wasn’t one they had encountered yet.

“Just leave it,” said Yuu, turning back to his task. He plied the pick, simultaneously pushing the tension wrench, and one more pin gave way. “It doesn’t matter.”

A fumbling noise came from behind him. “Oh, yes it does,” answered Riki, rummaging through their pack. “There’s no way I’m letting something as simple as this get the best of me.”

“Come on Riki, don’t waste—“

“Just gimme until you’re done there.” A light flicked on behind him, and Yuu could hear the snap of the wire clippers. “You’ll take forever, anyway.”

Stubbornness, Ino was learning, always, always was its own punishment. She tried to make this lesson as ingrained as possible each and every time her eyes dipped shut.

Shikamaru glanced at her and sighed. “You’re falling asleep, aren’t you?”

Ino blinked slowly. “No.

He just nodded in an infuriating sort of way.

“And don’t say you told me so.” She hated it when he was right. Suddenly, it felt like all her limbs were four times heavier than they should’ve been, the coldness tugging down on them like weights. Sleep would be blissful now, she thought, eyelids slowly drifting shut. She’d just close them for a minute…

Beside her, Shikamaru shrugged. “Well, when you spend your chakra on healing a little sprain in a sub-zero freezer…”

Awake, she thought. Talk. Stay awake. Something, something….“Hey, Shikamaru?”

He glanced at her.

“Shut up.” God, even her synapses were firing slower now, the message taking a moment to cross the distance between her brain and tongue. She closed her eyes.

"Hey," he said, sounding annoyed. "What did I just tell you?"

If Ino had all of her five senses at her behest at that moment, she would have been more than happy to bite back sharply with a retort that might have included his own apparent narcolepsy and the fact that the two were dangerously courting hypothermia, but figured that really wasn't an option right now. Sleep lapping at her eyelids, she gave the sort of groan she greeted her alarm clock with on an early morning.

Shikamaru shifted heavily under her left ear. "Hey." He nudged her. "Ino. Wake up."

Her eyelids gave a flutter; she was falling asleep. She knew as well as he did that doing so would be potentially fatal. "Hey!" He said, louder this time, patting her twice on the cheek. "Don't fall asleep. Get up."

Was his hand warm? She didn’t know, truthfully, the pressure on the side of her face felt a little further from the skin than it had a millisecond ago.

Suddenly, blue light flared through her eyelids as Shikamaru fired up a burst of chakra, emitting a warm glow that emanated from both hands. Lack of medical skill prohibited any healing benefits, but the warmth was still brilliant in itself, likely magnified by their frozen surroundings and the sensation of her thawing skin. Shikamaru rubbed both of Ino’s hands between his own until she had defrosted sufficiently, leaning into his arm. To her profound dismay, the blessed flow of chakra immediately ceased.

“Ugh,” she groaned croakily. “Selfish.”

“No,” he retorted, not letting go of her arms. “Smart. I’m even lower on chakra reserves than you, and I’m not wasting it until we’re just about to get out of here.”

In any other circumstance, Ino would have fired back with some sarcastic retort or another, but this time she figured she should save her breath. Any shinobi knew that chakra fatigue was in another league entirely: it encompassed not only physical tiredness, but was a considerable drain on the mind as well. The dull, unsheltered ache that came from spending chakra lingered until you managed to create more, permeating down to the bone. Ino closed her eyes, feeling a wave of contentedness wash over her. So tired… It would only be for a second…

“How long’s it been?” Came Shikamaru’s voice, suddenly and viciously cutting through her dreamy state. With him beside her and rubbing her hands between his, the voice didn’t seem nearly as distant as it had a moment ago. But it was still incredibly hard to respond.

Ino lifted a limp wrist, their bundle of hands following, then dropped it. “Check … my watch.”

“Hey,” he warned, lifting her wrist to examine the timepiece there. “You’re not falling asleep again, are you?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, hold on. We’re waiting,” he replied, placing their bundle of hands under the blanket. “You’re fine, nothing critical. Keep talking.”

“Waiting… Seriously?” She asked, numbly watching as her breath misted heavily in front of her face. “No secret, awesome, amazing plan that doesn’t involve freezing here? “

He let out something that sounded like a laugh, and shook his head. “No.”

“So we’re going to die.”

“Also, no.”

“Then you’ve got a plan?”

“Just waiting.” No plan, then. This waiting business was just the expected niceness that came before you witnessed your old family friend and comrade freeze to death beside you in a giant stone refrigerator, her ankle roughly the size of a baby elephant’s. Awesome.

“Stop,” she mumbled, sluggishly trying to extricate herself from his grasp. Unable to pull both hands completely towards herself, she settled for grabbing onto his lapels. “That hurts.”

“Be happy you can feel it,” he retorted distractedly. And while she was busy trying to formulate a snappish response, Shikamaru reached up and carefully detached both her hands from his collar, glancing over at the refrigeration gates. “Well, looks like that’s our cue.”

“Huh?” said Ino dumbly, trying to shake her cold-induced fog away like so many dirty cobwebs. “What cue?”

“The refrigeration’s turned off and I don’t think it’s morning yet. You might want to rescind the threats on your little tech genius when we get back.”

Huh? What did Rikimaru… Oh, of course. He had been moaning about forgetting to set up his new gadget before their departure, hadn’t he? Some remote access kill-switch for any mechanical device. Oh, thought Ino gratefully, bless his smart (and smart-ass) little heart.

“Alright,” instructed Shikamaru, getting up stiffly and moving towards the doorway. “You spent your chakra about forty-five minutes ago. It might not be much, but you should’ve accumulated at least some since then.”

It was true. Though she was still slow and foggy, Ino wasn’t as close to losing consciousness as she was about a half hour prior, the warm energy running hotly through her veins. Experimentally, she tried flexing a hand; a little sluggish, but all parts connected.

“Warm yourself, but don’t overdo it. One or two short bursts of chakra. You’d better be ready to run.”

Ino was already on her second burst. “You don’t need to tell me,” she snapped, feeling better already. “One minute more.”

“No time,” answered Shikamaru, and at that moment brought his elbow down on the neck of the guard that burst through the door.

The Unorthodox Arts of War (Ch. 4/?), The Infiltration

2008-06-09T12:13:51Z

Disclaimer: Naruto is the property of Kishimoto Masashi.
A/N: Fine, so it's not like I've broken the sound barrier with my updating speed here, but this is like a record for me.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 5

//

Ino was fairly sure she wasn't the worst teacher in Konoha.

Sure, she regularly skipped team practices for hangovers and spa days, and frequently allotted an almost shameful amount of the granted team budget to useless (?) amenities like room service and in-bathroom hair straighteners. She was rather fond of threatening one third of her squad to bodily harm on a regular basis, and… oh wait. Just today, she had managed to lose one of the Leaf's most precious heirs.

Not the worst teacher in Konoha, huh? Never mind.

"I can't believe this," she groaned aloud. "I can't believe I lost her."

Shikamaru wearily glanced at her outburst, massaging his forearm in a somewhat embittered way. In an attempt to wrench herself out of their double free-fall, Ino had managed to land him with an exceptionally brutal bloomer, already turning an ugly mottled colour beneath his fingers. Still, it was nothing in comparison to her previously dislocated shoulder and currently twisted ankle (which she had bound just shy of blocking circulation and deemed "walkable on". There was no resting while Hatsumi was missing, not for all the swollen ankles in the world.)

"Nobody's lost anyone yet. If the info we've got is correct, then nothing's going to happen to the Hyuuga kid for another week, at least."

"Her name's Hatsumi," Rikimaru interjected, scowling openly at Shikamaru. "Hatsumi."

Yuu, who up until now had been nervously fiddling with his chopsticks, finally woke from his pensive reverie. He looked between the two teachers seated at the table and frowned. "But I don't understand. Why did they want her? Does it have something to do with her family?"

Rikimaru rolled his eyes. "That's so stupid. Her family’s all the way back in Konoha. What would they have to do with our mission?"

"Shut up, you little idiot," Ino snapped, rubbing at her temples. "Of course it might've had something to do with her family… the Hyuugas are, like, the poster family for Konoha. And I lost her. I can't believe this. Poor little Hatsumi's probably being tortured somewhere awful for some evil purpose the likes of which we can't even begin to figure out and it's totally my fault."

There really wasn't anything to say to this, so nobody tried.

Yuu looked a little disturbed at their teacher's violent image, imagining his teammate bound, gagged and weeping. He stifled a sympathetic shudder. Rikimaru, on the other hand, looked highly dubious, trying very hard to recall the last time he had ever seen tough-as-nails Hatsumi quiver in the face of any threat. In fact, he was fairly sure he once saw her cut a hole in her own leg, then suck out a wriggling parasite with her mouth. Yeah, Hatsumi was pretty hardcore.

The silence dragged on for another painful moment, interrupted by the distant pattering of heavy rain; the three remaining members of Team Four entertained very different thoughts on Hatsumi's fate while Shikamaru stared at the door blankly, obviously deep in unspoken thought.

Ino's eyes finally shifted tiredly across the table towards him, but she didn't move her hands away from her face. "Wait a second," she mumbled around her palm. "Remind me why you're here again?"

"Not that you're not grateful," he added without looking at her.

She growled around all ten fingers and narrowed her eyes. "Don't piss me off, Shikamaru."

He gave her a weary look then lowered his bruised arm, reaching deeply into wet pockets before extracting a piece of heavily lacquered parchment that had obviously seen far better days. He tossed it upon the table.

Ino gave it a wary glance. Both sides were covered in some kind of blocky, foreign script; the right margin ragged. She raised an eyebrow. "… Okay. And this is…?"

Reaching over, Yuu picked it up and turned it over several times, scrutinizing the impeccably scrawled lines of images there. "Cool," Rikimaru commented over his shoulder. "It's like a code or something."

"Yeah," affirmed Shikamaru, returning his eyes to the door. "It's a cipher. Not a verified language, not that I know of, but some characters are partially based in the Tekeste Nomadic script. Semaphoric code, from the looks of it." Ino gave him a look of horrified admiration, because none of the strange pictures and squiggly lines even began to reek of anything remotely logical to her. She was thinking more along the lines of "drunken right-handed man’s haiku with left hand" or something like that.

"I think," he added, shrugging.

Rikimaru was utterly enraptured, deserting his earlier worry for their lost comrade entirely. The dirty little scoundrel. "So? What does it say, Sensei?" He asked eagerly, turning towards Shikamaru. "Is it like a ransom or something? No… it's like a prophesy, right? That would be awesome."

Ino didn't even grace this comment with a look, just picked up her menu and swatted Rikimaru across the back of the head.

"Ow!"

Right. So, weird cipher, missing heir. Um… What? Did this really make sense to anybody? Ino glanced surreptitiously at her old teammate one table-width away, where Shikamaru had resumed the previous slow massage of his battered forearm.

"Here," Ino offered, removing both hands from her face to reach into the pack behind her. She tugged out a (surprisingly) clean, dry length of cloth and motioned for him to extend his hand towards her. "Your arm. So, are you going to explain any of this to us? Like, right now?" Because the only other option was screaming and throwing things, but she had learned the hard way that the latter choice rarely made any leeway in any weighty matters whatsoever.

"What?" He asked distractedly, grimacing as she pulled brutally on the bandage.

She shot him an unamused look. "Oh, please, don't act stupid. Nobody believes you anyway. Knowing you, you've got this whole thing figured out already, so hit me with it. God knows it can’t get any worse."

Ino wasn’t lying. So far, the day possessed all the qualifying traits of being the worst in her life -- despite narrowly escaping certain incarceration and god knew what else (torture? Rape? Murder? Fine, she was getting carried away). Because this was supposed to be a calm, easy, two-week reprieve the village and all its associated woes -- mildly mud-logged at the absolute worst. And not involving kidnappings, missing heirs, ciphers, mapmakers and smart-ass classmates whose pants she currently (and unwantedly) had sudden dibs on.

Ino quickly withdrew both hands from Shikamaru’s arm. He gave her a puzzled look. "All done," she amended hastily.

Ino returned her fingers to her face; once again her not-so-tiny lottery ball was doing a fabulous job of taking up a significant portion of thoughts much better relocated to matters of search-and-rescue, not to mention wreaking utter havoc with all her firing synapses. It figured, right?

"Well? Out with it."

He sighed, turning to her. "Right, right," he acquiesced, reaching above his head in a languid stretch. The desperate escape and missed night's sleep were beginning to take their toll. "What I know."

Yuu held up the cipher in his hands, assuming it would inevitably be part of their slightly belated briefing.

"Okay. My team had the privilege of learning that the nin that took the Hyuuga girl are unaffiliated with any known shinobi village at the moment, although that –" he pointed at the paper in Yuu’s hands. "Says they’re trying to change this."

"What? How?" Ino asked at the same time Rikimaru said: "Whoa… you managed to crack it?" She scowled and swatted the menu near him in a threatening motion.

"By offsetting the current state of the treaty with Takigakure, if I read it right."

Yuu blinked, confused. "But why would they take the word of an unaffiliated group over an ally like Konoha?"

Rikimaru scoffed, and in a surprisingly well-educated moment, said: ""Like this is some big surprise. You know what treaties are like."

"And where the hell did you learn that, exactly?" Ino asked, squinting at him suspiciously.

Rikimaru shrugged. "TV."

Anyway, dubious educators aside, it was still true. All Hidden Villages knew that most treaties were nothing more than glorified truces – transient and prone to decimation at the faintest hint of a crack. The Suna was reigning supreme as the current exception, but Ino would trust that about as far as she could throw it.

Yuu blinked, realization dawning on him. "No. Hatsumi and Itoigawa-san—"

"Right," Shikamaru answered, rolling his cramped shoulder. "Plant some undeniable proof that Konoha’s broken the treaty and you’ve got the boat rocking."

"You’re kidding," Ino cut in flatly, more and more horrified by the moment. "What exactly were they going to do?"

Shikamaru tapped the paper, which Yuu had placed in the centre of the table. "Says here they were looking to murder some higher-up and frame the Hyuuga girl. Short of putting out her eyes, there’s no way they wouldn’t track it back to Konoha."

A chair clattered as Rikimaru abruptly stood up. "Her eyes? No way! We can’t let them –"

"Shut up!" Ino berated, grasping his wrist and yanking him down beside her. Shikamaru figured the younger boy could now expect a few similar bruises to his own. "So they need Itoigawa for the entry points and Hatsumi to place the blame. God, and we stuck them both in the exact same area at the exact same time. So stupid."

Shikamaru didn’t answer, instead leaning back into his chair.

Ino took the appropriate five minutes for unending despair, then rounded up all the sad, half-assed remnants of fighting spirit within her. "Alright, then. Shikamaru, hit us with a plan. I've got to see about getting my fourth member back, or I can else I’ll have to start planning for my funeral." At least once Tsunade got to her. Maybe Neji, too.

"And her safety?" Shikamaru reminded her dryly.

She scoffed, leaning back with a slightly proud smile. A missing child was still a missing child, especially if one possessed the much-wanted Konohan heir status, but Ino couldn't miss the bragging opportunity. "Oh, you don't know Hatsumi, then. I'd be more worried about the current arrangement of her kidnappers' internal organs. Or rearrangement, whatever you want to call it."

At this, Shikamaru shot her a sardonic and slightly relieved grin. He knew a lot of girls like that.

The fortress had looked like this: four wide walls of squat, grey stone arranged in what looked like a depressing prison, the ceiling lower than the level of the surrounding canopy in a feeble snatch at stealth. It was hard to hide a camp of this sort – the area beneath the building had been hastily cleared using what they all assumed was some technique, what with the lack of scorch marks and all, but the earth trembled with the feel of residual chakra.

Rikimaru brushed a hand against the cold stone, gazing upward at the low wall before them. "Stone manipulation jutsu? Whoa…"

"Oh, how fucking perfect," Ino-sensei cursed in a brash whisper. Yuu hadn’t seen her bad fall, but her hobbling limp was becoming fairly apparent as the night wore on, and it was starting to make her pissy. Ino-sensei, despite her tendency to bitch and gripe about creature comforts, was always worryingly mum about things that really mattered, instead becoming progressively more stubborn and testy as time passed – a trait that made diagnosing her injuries incredibly frustrating.

Shikamaru-sensei had glanced at her pained shuffle once or twice before rolling his eyes, giving Yuu the distinct feeling that he was fairly well acquainted with this attribute already. "Okay, shhh…" Yuu hushed in a rare moment of impatience. "I’m almost there." He shifted his stethoscope against the stone. Truthfully, he had been and still was mighty suspicious that standard lock-picking would serve to get them anywhere at all; most of these element-type jutsu constructions had entries triggered by chakra-recognition techniques, impervious to manual jimmying. And Hatsumi, their resident chakra manipulator extraordinaire, was currently on the wrong side of said wall.

"Nah," Shikamaru-sensei had answered, looking somewhat impressed. "This was hastily erected, look at the way they cleared the area: the energy stamp is way too strong. Probably manual chakra key at the most. This would be a problem, but Ino tells me you guys are good at this kind of thing. My team gave it a shot already, but we couldn’t get through."

Ino-sensei gave a nasal scoff. "Right. Your incredibly capable team." Yuu gave an internal wince at her blatant lack of tact, seeing as the abovementioned team was probably dead or severely injured from what they had heard. But Shikamaru-sensei had opted to ignore this, like he did most of her underhanded comments, bringing to light rumors that the two had been on the same genin/chuunin training team years prior. Growing up with Ino-sensei, huh? This was enough to impress anyone.

In any case, the lock was giving now; four tumblers down and about six more to go. Yes, it was a ten pin tumbler, accessed by a chakra molded key in a vibration signature that would usually be impossible to manually mimic. That had been where Rikimaru came in.

"What? Scores! I haven’t seen one of these since I broke into the Academy vault –" he exclaimed, sounding like a kid in a candy store. At this, Shikamaru-sensei raised an appreciative eyebrow while Ino-sensei rolled her eyes. The younger boy reached into his pack with his left arm, the dislocated shoulder on his right having been reset moments before by Ino-sensei, and hefted what looked like a broad-toothed comb. "Hey... Yuu, can you hook me up? Um… lessee… Right here."

"Er… Riki, that’s a vibration detonation, right? I don’t think I’ve got a strong enough adhesive." Hours prior, Yuu’s customary pack had been abandoned in the lam, a few necessary objects hastily shoved into the tool belt around his waist.

"It’ll hold," Shikamaru-sensei cut in. "The vibration signature was still within the visible range, so you won’t get that much motion." He turned to Yuu. "But you’ve got about three minutes. Go."

Rikimaru grinned happily, then hit the detonate button.

The silent detonator worked to mimic the vibration signature a chakra key would generally emit while Yuu plied at the internal pins that composed the physical part of the lock. Four down… Five… He listened for the final click as the two pins parted and turned cleanly and held his breath, counting the moments in his head. Three minutes, three minutes. He was nine seconds shy. Would it work while the adhesive held?

Then the detonator gave a final breathy wheeze and the stone began to flake violently away from behind the device, jostling it towards the ground.

Ino-sensei, had been nervously tapping her foot behind them the entire while, had been straining to keep her mouth shut. "Well?"

Then the stone beside the jimmied lock became a little clearer, the molecules parting in response to their nail-biting efforts. One second, two, then the grey matter gave way to empty space and the darkness of the internal building as a door materialized in the centre of the blank rock. Open. They had access!

Ino-sensei breathed a heavy sigh of relief and, in a twilight-zone-esque moment, scooped up her two remaining charges and hugged them gratefully. "Finally, thank god. You little bums come in handy every once in a while!"

It only lasted a moment; she let go of them before Rikimaru could begin his squirming protestations. "Alright, you two know where you need to go, right? Rikimaru, I swear to god: if you mess this up, when I see you again – "

Yuu carefully went over their earlier instructions in his head: infiltrate the camp through one of the alternative entrances – another chakra keyed access located on the south side of the premises. From there, chart out the internal area through any overhead system, official or not ("If there isn’t one," Ino had explained hurriedly. "Then walk the ceilings. You’re ninja, for god’s sake."), find as many exits as possible and crack them. Secure multiple escape routes for the entire team. It would be hard, but doable.

Beside him, Rikimaru gave her departing back a scowl. "Whatever, Sensei!" He yelled after her. "Just make sure you’ve got Hatsumi with you!"

Ino gave her makeshift tensure bandage a hard tug for good measure, or what she thought was the bandage – it was hard to tell in the godforsaken dark. Denial, it had now been empirically discovered, was the worst pain coping mechanism ever; her ankle was throbbing roughly enough to register a five on the Richter scale. Beside her, Shikamaru watched skeptically.

"You know, tying that thing tighter isn’t going to make the sprain go away." He mock-considered. "Might make the foot go away, though."

"Shut up," Ino retorted witheringly. The moment they had entered the compound, the two had been plunged into an evil and bitter darkness – which was saying much, seeing as dark had fallen throughout the forest prior to their infiltration. She could only hope the boys would be slightly better at seeing where they had to go.

"We can sit for a moment," Shikamaru offered in a rare moment of consideration.

"Nuh-uh," Ino eyed him like he had sprouted a second head. "Not until we’ve got Hatsumi. But if it weren’t for this stupid dark—ARGH!"

"Watch the burlap sack."

"Late, Shikamaru! Just a bit." Gritting her teeth at the not-so-distant throbbing in her ankle, Ino squinted at the sack in question and moved to open it. What she found inside was truly puzzling. "What? Potatoes?"

Shikamaru glanced over her shoulder. "Huh. Potatoes." She heard him move away from her to fumble at a few other things around the room.

Ugh. Infiltrations without blueprints were always destined to be shitty, true, but they could’ve factored the impenetrable darkness somewhere into their plans. Ino reached back into her pack to grope for a light.

"Damn it. Shikamaru, do you have a lamp on you?"

In a colossal example of bad judgment, Ino had made Rikimaru carry her portable lamp hours prior because there simply hadn’t been any room in hers, what with the battery-operated hair straightener and all.

There was probably a moral in here somewhere. But she was damned if she could find it.

"Oh shit," she swore as her weathered village guide slid over her shoulder into the darkness. She heard a dull thud as it hit the floor and reached out to feel for it.

"Here," came Shikamaru’s voice, suddenly incredibly near to the back of her neck. "Try not to lose all our supplies yet." He pressed the book into her upper arm.

Ino jumped. "Um…yeah," she affirmed hastily, her current thoughts vacillating frantically between her appalling lack of sense-presence skills and exactly how he had managed to get so close so suddenly. She coughed, inexplicably embarrassed. "So… um, light?"

"Nope," he answered wearily. "No pack, remember?

"Ugh, fabulous. This stupid ankle. This stupid dark."

"Here," he tugged her arm and pressed it against the cool wall for direction and balance. It was a nice gesture. Ino squinted at him, but the darkness obscured everything.

Then a light flickered on in some distant corner of the room.

"Night-access floodlights," Shikamaru noted, almost solely to himself. Ino, half-blinded and disoriented, scowled and squinted at the source of the illumination: a sole floor-lamp had been built right into the stone corner there, revealing the room as fairly massive, empty of all furnishings except for a few haphazardly left bags of wheat and grain. And the now-infamous sack of potatoes.

"Supplies?" Ino murmured, not liking where her thoughts were currently straying. Supplies meant a supply closet. Food supplies meant a – Shit.

A low noise hissed from some hidden grate, followed by a rush of cool air.

The refrigeration had been turned on.

"Uh-oh," said Yuu, shifting his stethoscope against the cold stone. "What is that?"

Rikimaru, nursing a newly-sore shoulder from an injury suffered on his last bathroom break ("I… er, have torch," Yuu offered, just a little late), scowled over at Yuu through the infernal darkness. Overhead, the clouds greedily obscured the moon and any light it had to offer. He hated this stupid season. "Huh? What now?"

"I don’t know," stammered Yuu, seeming utterly perplexed by the new occurrence. "I don’t think it’s my stethoscope…"

"Here, lemme listen." Rikimaru sidled closer and pressed his ear against the listening piece. A low hum droned there, whirring and obviously interfering with the kind of quiet necessary for lock-picking. "Whoa."

Yuu frowned, gesturing at the comb-shaped object beneath the lock. "The vibration detonation, maybe?"

Rikimaru shook his head distractedly. No way. Vibration detonators were specifically designed to not emit sounds that would likely interfere with the lock breaking process. And Rikimaru would know: he had made this one himself. "I can take it off, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t it." Yuu offered him a chisel from his toolbelt and Rikimaru wedged it between the device and the wall. It came free with a few hard tugs and a grunt, flaked stone tumbling to the ground silently.

Yuu pressed his stethoscope back against the stone.

"Still there?"

He nodded slowly. "Seems like a … refrigeration system, maybe? But Shikamaru-sensei said –" Yuu glanced up at Rikimaru.

Who had stopped paying attention after Yuu’s refrigeration diagnosis, instead spending an (extremely) rare moment in deep thought. The source of the noise made no difference, of course, be it a refrigerator or anything else. What mattered was the noise. And the noise meant an unlockable door, which meant a certain ass-kicking with his name on it the moment Ino-sensei and Hatsumi got out of there. If Ino-sensei and Hatsumi got out of there.

Right.

Once upon a time (more accurately: right before this mission), Riki had entertained some grand plans of integrating a sound damper into the detonation, but this plan fell flat when he ended up falling asleep the afternoon before their departure on this dumb mission. (Bright and early the next morning, Hatsumi had kindly woken him up with a rock to the window.

Most people did this regularly. Only Hatsumi did it when the window was open.)

Ayway, going back to the detonator. It wouldn’t be too hard, Rikimaru considered, rubbing the above-mentioned bump on his head distractedly. He had already worked out a kinda-sorta-maybe plan in his head and the necessary tools weren't too exotic, but he couldn’t do anything without some light. He turned to his remaining teammate. "Hey, what have you got on you? Pliers? Adhesive? Anything else? Here, toss me your light."

"Yeah," answered Yuu, removing the toolbelt and handing it over obligingly. Riki looked sufficiently engrossed in whatever plan he had in store, which was entirely fine with him. You maybe wouldn’t want Riki in charge of more delicate matters like grocery shopping or babysitting your pet goldfish, but he was ace when it came to gadgetry and the like. Ino-sensei used to say it was the only reason she put up with him as she did (if you could call the frequent abuse tolerance in the first place). Sitting back, Yuu chewed his lip thoughtfully and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, praying his teammate would finish with godspeed.

A setback meant time, Yuu knew, and time was absolutely of the essence right now.

"Huh. Guess I must’ve overlooked this."

Ino rolled her eyes with gusto. If she had both ankles at her behest right now, she would have stomped right over and strangled his stupid, refrigerator-overlooking neck. Seriously. "And now?"

He shrugged in a way that distinctly infuriated her and said: "I don’t know. Wait?"

"Wait?"

"Exactly." Shikamaru fingered his pockets for a loose smoke, but without much success. Concluding that he must've left all supplies behind in his wild escape from the tent, he breathed a tired sigh. And with Ino in a bad mood too.

"No!" Said Ino viciously, standing up with surprising ease for someone whose ankle was starting to resemble some sort of flotation device, and grabbed the lapels on his vest. "This is your fault in the first place! Your stupid, incredibly flawed plan. Way to be a super-genius, asshole."

Shikamaru sighed apathetically, considering what a really bad time it was to run out of cigarettes. But his characteristic lack of zeal served only to anger his livid comrade more. "Hello?!" She stage-whispered, giving him a few brutal shakes for good measure. "Are you even listening to me?!"

It turned out he wasn’t, instead suddenly going very still in her grasp. Ino gave a furious huff, sick of not knowing what the hell was going on, and squeezed tighter. "Shikamaru! I can’t believe you! Will you just—"

Then a hand shot up in the darkness; Shikamaru wrapped it tightly around her wrist. "Be quiet," he urged her, watching the far wall. "Listen."

Ino slackened her hold, a little taken aback at his strength, and held her breath carefully. There was the dull thud of harsh footsteps in what sounded like an outer hall beyond the stone wall. A door? She mouthed at Shikamaru, who shook his head distractedly. Great. A door might have meant a possible breakaway, but without it they were out of luck. Shikamaru had never been an entry/evacuation specialist and without her team, there was no way Ino could make the break-out alone.

More echoes; the low rumble of voices. They waited in the dark, uncomfortably close; Ino’s hand hurt and she distantly wished he would let go, despite the fact that she'd never stoop so low as saying so. From this distance, she could see the dark fan of his lashes against the upper curve of his cheeks, the crinkled fabric of his vest along the collar. Her ankle gave a brutal throb beneath her and she forced her focus back on the commotion outside.

"Combat boots," Ino said softly, realization dawning upon her.

"Sounds like two of them. Non-shinobi," was Shikamaru's whispered diagnosis. "Guards, possibly. But this is the first time we've heard them, so they're not stationed outside of here."

Ino looked at him quizzically. "Why wouldn’t they post someone outside of an entry point? Why would they post civilians at all? That doesn’t –"

Shikamaru glanced at her, finally letting go of her arm. She rubbed it sullenly. "What time is it?" He asked her.

"I don’t know," Ino answered, feeling a little bitter. "It was around nine-thirty when we last saw the boys."

Shikamaru sighed. "They're turning on the refrigeration. They're hoping we'll fall asleep."

"They’ve turned on the refrigeration, Shikamaru. Seriously, is the cold getting to your head? Anyway. They don’t know we’re here yet, so there must be some way out. We are shinobi, after all." She got up and hobbled to the nearest wall.

"—Who are both trapped in a sealed room with refrigeration, and no guards -- or if so, only lightly trained civilians. Meaning that nothing’s ever survived long enough to break out of here before, or even pose a threat." He raised a hand to test the temperature. "It’s going to get mighty freaking cold in here. Shinobi or not, it doesn’t matter. Well, not mostly." Shikamaru moved over to a corner and parked himself there.

Ino shook her head disbelievingly. "You're mighty optimistic. There’s got to be something we can– " She traced both hands against the length of the walls (albeit in a very slow, hobbling way) and inspected the ceiling, looking for any indentations that would hint at a hidden grate or air duct.

Shikamaru watched her with express disinterest. "Lower," he answered for her. He pointed to the opposing wall, where tiny rectangular ducts lay side by side. Each contained three open slats, a minimum of two centimeters wide. Looking around, Ino could see they lined all four walls. "I've already checked. The refrigeration comes from those ducts there, so unless you can hack off your pinky finger, fit it through the grate and then reanimate it to get us some help, we're stuck here 'til tomorrow."

Ino limped towards the said ducts; predictably, Shikamaru was right. She was hoping for the presence of some vermin to use the Shinten, but there would be none crawling through the frigid vents. Great. "This is brilliant," she huffed, whirling on him. "So what's the plan now, oh Supreme Strategist? Say my prayers and hope I wake up tomorrow?"

Shikamaru was rifling through her pack in an appalling lack of proprietal respect. "I said 'mostly', didn't I?" Withdrawing two wide blankets, he tossed her one. "They just erected this place, remember? So they're getting pretty comfy in assuming no one could get out of here." He gestured at the blanket. "And, you know – fail to prepare… and stuff."

They were two standard grade-issue thermal blankets usually brought on outdoor missions, so customary Ino had forgotten that she had even packed them in the first place. Shikamaru looked at her, nestling in a far corner from the vents. "It's still going to suck, though," he warned, ever the optimist. "Just don't fall asleep. I can't believe I just said that."

Ino sighed deeply, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, and hobbled over to sit down beside him. It was going to be a long, long night.

The Unorthodox Arts of War Chapter 3: The Client

2008-05-30T20:51:44Z

AAAAAAAAAND, it's done. I had so much trouble with this chapter, guys, seriously. I don't even know why. I have the bulk of the next few chapters completely fleshed out, but maybe it couldn't been the fact that the content below isn't as couple-centric as the rest of the story.

I have big, update-related plans. Seriously. Stay with me, pretty please?

The Client
Rating: This chapter? PG ish. The story? M.

A/N: Unbetaed. If you catch any errors, pardon my godless ways and drop me a line.

Part Four
Part Two
Part One

Summary: An unexpected reunion...

/
///
/

Dawn.

The night prior, it had been decided that the members of team four would meet near the great gates of Konoha at the ungodly hour of 6AM. This was, in and of itself, not exactly the problem – somewhere in the past few years of hard missions, Ino had learned to keep her ritualistic morning bitching and groaning to a safe minimum. A few hours less of sleep, she had learned the hard way, was far, far more preferable to the sheer hell any terrain trip promised to be at night.

Puffy face or not.

It was more the fact that Ino had dedicated an appalling amount of the previous night to vigorously ignoring the tiny lottery ball not-so-artfully stashed in her shirt drawer (she had stuffed it in her underwear drawer initially, but that was so ironic it was hilarious). For a tiny ball, it was sure doing a mighty wonderful job of filling up every available inch of her bedroom, presence-wise.

According to contract plans, the four of them would make their way to a secluded little waterfall located in some patch of backwater forest, meet their mysterious client, escort him to parts unknown and then return home to collect their much-deserved pay.

It sounded so easy on paper. First and foremost, Iruka-sensei nearly burst something at her flippant description: “Takeshi Springs, Ino! As the team leader, you must always know your target location and the terrain surrounding it!”

Oh, that wasn’t the problem. She knew the terrain, alright: the land surrounding the Leaf was what all the guidebooks euphemistically called “unnaturally dense”. Which really meant that the first few hours of their trek would be spent in brutal bush-whacking through thick, (hopefully) uninhabited and unfriendly underbrush; staving off the man-eating mosquitoes and keeping vigilant for more shinobi-esque threats. Followed by a charming six miles of sheer swampland and mountains, in a not-so-helpful turn of evolution. Fabulous.

Luckily, the pre-set meeting date left plenty of time to make the journey and Ino had snuck in a few hours here and there for various (and necessary) breaks throughout. So, seventeen hours, she had posited. A little night travel, but they’d be there the next day.

“What?! A rest again? This is the second one today! You’re lucky we covered any ground at all, Sensei, at your pace!”

And Rikimaru was lucky that the contract she had signed at beginning of this whole teaching stint explicitly forbade her to maim, harm, rearrange or remove any part of her students whatsoever. With her bare hands, that is; Ino glanced mildly around her for a decent-sized stick.

“She’s ignoring you, Riki,” commented the dark-haired girl beside him. “Because you obviously can’t count, can you? Seventeen hours. We’re still on the first nine.”

He flushed an angry red. “No, I’m just saying that we’re never getting anywhere at this rate. It’ll take us a bajillion years! I know Sensei’s old, but she’s not that old yet!”

“Rikimaru,” Ino explained through gritted teeth at the ‘old’ comment. “I am telling you this only one. More. Time. The seventeen hour arrival estimate is a proven fact, not an insult to your track and field skills. So shut up.”

“But that’s crazy!” He continued, totally unfazed. “We always end up making better time than the arrival estimates, Sensei! Come on, let’s just skip the break.”

Clearly, nothing got through to this kid. He was going to drive her to drink one day. “Hey, Rikimaru,” Ino said, violently wringing out her rain-wet ponytail in lieu of the kid’s skinny little neck. “Let’s you and I make a deal. How about: you don’t say another word for the rest of our little voyage and I don’t hang you from the next high tree we see?”

This, predictably, shut him up for the next forty-five minutes.

Because she was nothing if not a fair girl, Ino had waylaid the break during the silent spell as a sort of unsaid reward for Rikimaru, taking solace instead in the simple things along the way: the serene chirping of crickets, the heady scent of florals, the dark-colored clouds lingering ominously overhead.

The dark-colored— Wait a second.

“Alright troops,” she stated, leaping lightly off her tree branch. “Break time.”

Beside her, there was a damp thump as one of her students alighted from her perch and landed beside her. Hatsumi straightened, readjusted the heavy pack gracing her shoulders and looked up at the treetops expectantly. Next came Yuu, his pack even heavier with his usual toolkit and their accompanying silencers; droplets of rain already gracing the dark lenses on his goggles. He flicked up the shaded lenses and glanced up, somewhat nervously, at the dark treetops.

Where the final member of their squadron stared stubbornly back at them, still perched on his branch. “Nuh-uh. Not yet. I can see the mountains from here,” he bluffed, squinting obviously at the darkened horizon. “We’ll rest when we get there.”

“I’m not going to weather another sudden rainstorm if I don’t have to, Rikimaru,” Ino explained through gritted teeth. “Get your ass off that branch right now.”

Hatsumi narrowed her light eyes at him threateningly; he met the stare, but was still utterly unswayed. If anything, he looked marginally more obstinate than before. God, Ino hated kids. She should have taken that transfer to the Konoha prison instead – heaven knew it would be a hell of lot less taxing on her mental health.

“Rikimaru,” she warned, tapping one foot impatiently and hoping she was exuding as much thunder and lightning as she hoped the gods would smite him with in his stupid little tree.

“Come on, Riki,” pled Yuu, a low note of somewhat desperate warning in his tone. “Let’s take a break while we still can. We’ll travel non-stop when we meet up with our target.”

This had clearly gone on long enough. Without another word, Ino reached into her damp rucksack with a frightening sort of calm as the other three watched curiously. First was the glove; Ino pulled it snugly over her right hand, painstakingly making the appropriate adjustments around each finger.

Hatsumi caught on first; at the glint in her light eyes and her devious grin, Yuu gave a nervous start. “Ino-sensei…”

Ignoring him, Ino turned and reached back into her bag. Above them, Rikimaru craned his neck to watch her, both feet still stubbornly planted on the wet branch nevertheless. Until she withdrew a bow and arrow, calmly assembling them with great and evil pleasure.

A thud. Rikimaru had practically leapt from his tree. “Fine, fine! I’m down, see? There’s no need for cold-blooded murder!”

Point made, Ino rolled her eyes and did a purposeful about-face, stalking towards the refreshment hut with a vengeance as the clouds rumbled darkly overhead, heavy with the prospect of rain. Hatsumi gave a gleeful chuckle at Rikimaru’s panicked expression, her white eyes glinting evilly in the half-light before trotting off after their teacher. Behind her, Yuu followed slightly more sedately, not before tossing a few sympathetic glances back at his teammate.

The rain began falling when they were barely twenty feet from the hut, ruining Ino’s ambitious plans at avoiding soakage.

Murder, huh? With students like these, the notion was kind of inevitable.

///

“Sensei. Sensei!”

Ino cracked open an eye in the direction of the voice. It was Yuu, softly shaking her arm. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the violent pattering of rain. “Should we order more tea?”

It had been the humid air coupled with the morning’s four or five missed hours of sleep that lulled Ino into a very brief catnap in her corner of the table.

She could almost hear Iruka-sensei’s utter horror at the fact that she had fallen asleep on the job, quite literally, but then again he was fond to freaking out over little lapses in discipline like they had personally killed his family. That and the fact that she couldn’t seem to will her dream-consciousness into staying far, far away from all notions of the ritual made Ino realize that maybe vigilance was the better option, anyway.

The waiter arrived then, with plates and plates of sticky-looking, multi-colored confections. You take one twenty minute tabletop catnap and the dumb brats totally stomp all over your calorie-Nazi regime. It figured. “I’ll take a coffee, thanks. Black.”

“Sensei,” Yuu asked her. “You didn’t tell us who we’re meeting, or why. What do we know about our client?”

Rikimaru rolled his eyes and scoffed around the four sugary balls crammed into his mouth. “Who cares? He’s a client, which means we get paid, which means we get a C-rank in our portfolios. What does it really matter?”

“Idiot,” answered Hatsumi from across the table. “And how exactly are you going to find someone you know nothing about?”

He shot her a death-glare. “I dunno. Recon isn’t really my thing. Aren’t you the one with the creepy x-ray vision?”

A cool half smile from the girl. “And aren’t those giraffes on your underpants?”

“Hey, let’s keep it clean,” Ino cut in, examining her nails uncaringly. In truth: whatever. She had to sign the big, bold-faced do-not-harm agreement, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have a go at each other every once in a while. She was all front-row seats for that; hell, she’d even bring refreshments.

But it was true; Hatsumi was the latest in the line of Hyuuga heirs, second only to Hanabi once Hinata officially stepped down and they began accepting Branch children for the position (Neji had stoically refused, stating that his place remained forever as a pillar for the main house, or something that sounded equally er... honorable). Hatsumi’s reign, however, was likely a temporary one, being a descendant of the branch house as she was. Her mother was some cousin of Neji and Hinata’s, and until either decided to procreate, the girl would continue to warm the seat for her future relative.

Ino wondered sometimes if that fact bothered her at all.

Admittedly, Ino had experienced a rare moment of self-doubt upon being assigned to the girl's training and care, spending the majority of those first few weeks trying to surreptitiously poke holes in whatever unsaid logic had led to this particular assignation (were all the other teachers taken? Busy on other missions? Had Tsunade simply misspelled the name on the roster?) but in the end, her discomfort was assuaged. Hatsumi’s prickly disposition had made the transplant somewhat rough, but inevitably she turned out to be a most startling talent: keen, sharp and a tad wicked, which made for fairly spectacular fireworks when coupled with Rikimaru’s rather… wearying pace. And Yuu’s mild personality kept the explosions nicely contained.

“Client info is strictly need-to-know,” Ino explained, trying to sound confident. “Don’t worry your pretty little heads over it. We’ll know when we see, okay? Probably.”

“Probably?” Yuu looked politely suspicious.

Ino cleared her throat. “Right. All I need you guys to look out for are brightly colored briefcases.”

“What?” Rikimaru choked down a mouthful. “We’re hoping to just bump into him? We’re going on good faith and your judgment?!”

Eager at the impending fallout, Hatsumi leaned forward. “You sound like that’s a bad thing, Riki,” she prompted slyly.

“It is! Obviously.”

“Tell me, Rikimaru,” Ino deadpanned, tapping a menacing staccato on the tabletop. “Do you say everything with the sole intention of being harmed, or does that just happen?”

He huffed, turning back to his meal.

Yuu was digesting this information slowly. “Strange colors… What color are we looking for in particular, Sensei?”

Ino shrugged elaborately. “Well, I don’t really know.”

Hatsumi looked a unique blend of amused and thoughtful. “And country affiliation?”

Ino scowled at her. “I can’t do that either. Look: it’s complicated. Just trust that we’ll find him, okay?” She tried to look remotely convincing.

It turned out she didn’t need to. At that moment, a soft tapping came from the back of her seat. Ino whirled as the finger first brushed against the wood, hackles raised, reflex-sharp.

“Excuse me,” a mousy-looking man inquired. “Am I to believe those are Konoha hitai-ate? Are you Konoha nin?”

Ino sized him up with seasoned swiftness: slight-figured, light haired, both eyes rimmed with red in what was likely weariness. But most importantly: both hands free, no sign of a briefcase, oddly colored or not.

“Are you?” He asked again, with somewhat tepid apprehension.

Ino narrowed her eyes, reaching towards the holster wrapped around her leg. “Depends on who’s asking,” she answered, expertly turning over the kunai in her right hand.

///

“Oh, no, no,” the man offered, pointlessly raising both arms to show there was nothing there, as if he was a possible threat. “I’m terribly sorry, but there’s been a misunderstanding. My name is Itoigawa Ginta; I believe some of your… affiliates were supposed to meet me later in the day.”

Rikimaru sized him up suspiciously. Itoigawa nervously extended an arm towards him. “Um… Nice to meet you?”

Inwardly cursing Tsunade’s lack of appropriate physical descriptors, Ino sighed and motioned to their messy table. “Please have a seat, Itoigawa-san. I’m Yamanaka Ino and this is the rest of Squad Four. We’re were the ones commissioned to escort you where you needed to go.”

Hatsumi grinned insincerely. “It’s a pleasure.”

Yuu had sat down across from their nervous-looking new arrival and asked: “Itoigawa-san, why are you not at the designated meeting place? And how did you know that we would be here? If you don’t my asking.”

“No, no,” he offered, adjust his sweater. “Of course not. I had finished my contract work early at Takigakure and decided to make my way over to the rendez-vous point, yes. But I couldn’t find my way through the forest and managed to stumble upon this…” he looked around them, seemingly for the first time. “Refreshment hut.”

Ino leaned back. “And your briefcase?”

He sighed heavily. “That’s the problem. I had a particularly… nagging sensation of being watched ever since leaving Takigakure. I disposed of my briefcase for fear of drawing attention, but it seems I managed to lose my map of the area in the process.”

“And Takigakure? They didn’t provide you with any escort to the rendez-vous point?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “They never appeared, so I became rather nervous.”

Sighing, Ino raised a hand to her temples. “Wait a minute… you think someone is following you? Itoigawa-san, that’s really serious.”

“Really?” Rikimaru looked up, mouth full and suddenly intrigued. “Hey, do you have any idea about who’d want to come after you? Old grudges, vendettas and stuff?”

“Oh, it was likely for the material in my briefcase.”

Oh, right. In their sudden surprise, Ino had nearly forgotten entirely about the initial briefing – if the ‘material’ in his suitcase was what she thought it was, then he had on his person blueprints worth as many lives as were present in the Hidden Falls. Likely more.

And the idiot had tried to get through the dark forest all by himself.

Yuu looked like the same notion had occurred to him, as well. “Itoigawa-san, where are you going to? Where’s your next job?”

Nights in the Fire Country were wickedly cold, despite whatever the name entailed. This side of the mountains, night fell with surprising swiftness, usually bringing with it a superficial layer of light frost as the dampness succumbed to the dropping temperatures. It reverently dusted the land in a swaddle of glittering ice, dismissing the land’s cluttered asymmetry. A serene and tranquil mess under the frosty veneer. Come morning, all traces of the night’s alter-ego would be wiped entirely away.

“Oh, yes,” Itoigawa replied. “The Suna. Another hidden village.” He looked like he suddenly badly regretted taking on any such contract.

“I’m not sure if we can leave now, Sensei.” Yuu pointed at the window. “Night’s fallen, it’s cold out there.”

Beside him, Rikimaru gave a dusty scoff. “Oh please. It’s only cold. All you gotta do is put on more layers to get warm, right? It’s not like heat – you can’t take your skin off.”

Hatsumi rolled her eyes. “I’d think again, genius. Cold makes you sleepy, dulls your senses. And of course, the hypothermia, but let’s not get too technical.”

“Heat stroke, duh.”

Yuu made an abortive attempt at interception, but Hatsumi cut him off coolly. “Only if you’re exposed for a significant amount of time. And I don’t really think traveling under direct sunlight outside of Suna counts as stealth, Riki. Or do you need a little refresher course back at the academy?”

Why couldn’t he have just ordered them to pick him up from the Hidden Waterfall? Ino gave a mental sigh; this was all going to hell a lot earlier than she had thought, and the brats weren’t making any of it easier.

Okay, fine. Fine. If Itoigawa really did possess those blueprints somewhere, or at least knew where they were stashed, then the lucky team now had at least a few seasoned pursuers on their heels right now. Likely more.

Fabulous.

That settled it. The best available plan was to hightail it to Suna – luckily the rendez-point was neatly along the way, so they would be able to pick up the back up that they dearly needed. They had to get moving soon, before the cold became bad enough to arrest their progress through the dense trees. Ino glanced at her three students. “Right. Guys, I need you to clear the area. You’ve got ten minutes, then I’m coming out to do it myself.”

“’Course,” Hatsumi affirmed, standing up to join Yuu, who was already hefting his heavy bundle onto his back.

Last of all was Rikimaru, who, for all his usual boisterous disobedience, was still smart enough to listen to his teacher when it really counted. He glanced at Ino with a look of guarded imploration, a half-eaten rice ball still in one hand. “Sensei?”

She gave him a half-smile. “Aren’t you the one who almost chewed my leg off for stopping?

“Sure…” He crammed the last bit of pastry into his mouth, but only in time to see the tail end of his two teammates’ apparently stealthy exit. They were already halfway to the door by the time Rikimaru shuffled messily from his seat.

“Better hurry up, Riki,” Hatsumi called back with a sly grin. “Or we’ll leave you behind.”

///

“Look, Itoigawa-san, I don’t mean to be rude,” Ino said, placing both hands on the table where he could see them. She hoped the kunai she held in one palm would aid in effectively … dissuading any lying he was planning to do. “But you need to tell me the truth about this contract you entered into with our village. Were you or were you not being pursued prior to this?”

He looked down at his lap. “I don’t know. Not that I was aware of, at least. I simply got the feeling as I made my way from my last location through here. I can’t truly explain it all to you… but I really do believe we should get moving as soon as possible.”

This was utterly mind-boggling. The fact that their mild-mannered, non-shinobi target had somehow managed to slip out from under the fingers of the escort squad from Takigakure didn’t bode well at all: they either incarcerated or remarkably stupid, and Ino figured it certainly wasn’t the latter.

That settled it, then. They’d get out of there as soon as possible, make it out past the heavy forest and swamp by morning and into the safe(r) lands of Suna. If things were as bad as Ino was starting to think they were, then rest was so not an option it wasn’t even funny.

Sliding her kunai back into its holster, Ino swung the rucksack onto her back. “Alright,” she said decisively, leaving a handful of coins on the tabletop for the shopkeep. “Let’s get out of here.” Ino made her way to the door, brushing aside the curtain and stepping out into the utterly quiet twilight.

And that’s when she realized something was wrong.

Her unique little squadron was a lot of things: a little loud-mouthed, a little scatterbrained, a little heavy with the team banter, wickedly efficient at break-ins and prone to sleeping in on Monday mornings. But one thing her team had never, ever been was utterly, completely quiet.

Eyes roving around the darkness, Ino drew her kunai back out, crouching low in an attack stance. “Itoigawa-san, get behind me.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

If it was what she was thinking, then most likely everything. But she didn’t say this, moving towards the line of dark trees with aching caution. A dark shape flashed before her eyes and – there! – in the distance there was one, no: two, silhouettes in the darkness, their cut and sway telling of recent pursuit.

Ino blinked, the moment coming to a deafening standstill when all she could hear was the deafening beat of blood in her ears. Only two…Hatsumi. Where was Hatsumi? “Hey!” She yelled, grabbing at the small form nearest to her. “Why are you two alone?”

Rikimaru was holding his left arm at a strange distance from his body, the jut of his elbow looking possibly a little lopsided – she couldn’t tell in the godforsaken dark. “Why…? No, Riki. Where. Is. Hatsumi?”

A dull thud echoed through the tilted, moist expanse of the hill as Yuu dropped down beside them. “Taken,” he explained through raggedy, panting breaths. “They… took her… before we could – ”

Damn it, damn it, damn it. A deep breath, two. Ino tried to desperately center her thoughts.

“Okay.” She drew four kunai from her pouch and tossed them at a nearby tree. “We’re – what – three hours from the rendezvous point? No… that’s too far. Okay, Takigakure. Take to the trees, change your course often. Take Itoigawa with you and wait for me there. If you encounter danger, or think I’ve been offed, just keep going – we’re too far for you to make it home. If you can, hop through city centers, stay around people, alright? If anyone is tailing you, don’t let them get any of you alone at any cost.” She looked at Yuu. “You know where the Ally Entrance is near the Hidden Waterfall?”

He nodded grimly, transferring a handful of strange machinery to his belt before ditching the overweight pack and motioned for a very confused Itoigawa to get onto his back. Too afraid to argue, the man acquiesced, his slender form making the lift relatively easy, despite the child's age. The two looked expectantly at Rikimaru.

“No,” he objected, shaking his head in desperation. “What about Hatsumi?! We’ve gotta find –”

“NO!” Ino screamed abruptly, cutting him off. “You need to listen to exactly what I’m telling you and go now. Get the hell out of here!”

Rikimaru recoiled at her sudden outburst like he had been slapped in the face, but nodded curtly, regaining his common sense. In the corner of her eye, Ino saw a figure fleeing in the distance; Yuu had already taken off before them.

That was enough for her – Ino turned in the opposite direction and flung herself down the hill, adrenaline on overdrive and both legs pumping furiously beneath her. Faster. Faster. When the trees crept back onto the land cleared for the snack hut, she took to their upper branches, running a straight path for haste.

That had been a mistake.

One of the very first lessons imparted to young academy trainees were the inherent problems with linear movement: despite increasing speed and power, it was terribly simple to predict, wickedly easy to intercept. Ino’s pell-mell chase for the Hyuuga girl and her captors was clearly no exception.

One figure, moving upwards, whirred past her at a hair’s breadth – and suddenly her arm was jerked violently behind her back, her path thwarted and momentum began to drag her down, down to the dusty forest floor. She heard something that sounded vaguely like Stop, but Ino had never been the greatest listener, and she wasn't going to start now.

Stupid, she cursed herself, the dirt floor dangerously near her and nearer with every passing moment. There would be only one moment to make a move, if any, and it was now. The earth came closer, looming in the periphery of her vision; the sensation of falling had skewed her senses and vertigo churned her stomach, tightened around her head. But now was no time for nausea. Ino lifted her free arm and drew it back almost simultaneously, furiously blinking away dewdrops from her eyelashes; the chakra gathered in her left hand, pooling in the curves between the knuckles, crackling – electric – against the palm of her hand. Ino wasn’t nearly as adept nor as strong as Sakura, but at this proximity it wouldn’t make a difference. Closer, closer. Three milliseconds, two.

One. She swung.

In an almost supernatural pre-emption of her move, her assailant’s arm shot out bullet-quick a fraction of a split-second later, brutally forcing Ino back-first into the nearest tree. Her shoulder gave a wretched pull on impact. “Will you just stop already?” The voice said.

Then they were falling. Faster, faster, coming into painful contact with the ground with unexpected swiftness. Her shoulder bloomed with sudden pain – it seemed to flow through all the nerves in her body like an electric dam burst somewhere in her brain. Mind whirring, Ino made a furious mental scan of ways to avoid imminent capture until, vertigo dispelled, the earth and sky suddenly right themselves and she realized just how familiar that voice had been.

Ino looked. A Konoha hitai-ate hung from one of the nin’s arms. It couldn’t be –

“Shikamaru?!”

///

Review, pretty please?

A Lighter Logic, Part 4

2008-04-21T14:19:56Z

My muse and I suffered an extremely long time-out, one that regrettably still has yet to finish. But seriously. This puppy comes on the heels of a super glorious AHA moment, in which I took a careful look at my transcript and decided that no, my major does not read masochist, and I should take a break and write something. YAY.

Anyway, getting to the good(?) stuff:

A Lighter Logic, chapter 4

---

They sat there for all of forty-two minutes, in which time the sun miraculously opted to make a surprise appearance and the temperature lobbied fast, rising almost palpably by the moment. Forty two minutes, but for all Ino’s incessant restlessness, Shikamaru swore it had been hours.

He watched her rip at a ragged hangnail one last time before speaking. "So, you two just randomly decided to pay me a visit out here, huh?"

"Yup." Chew, rip.

"Even though you knew I was coming home in two months for the wedding."

"Right." She cupped a hand above her eyes and glared out at the occupied runway, as though the sheer force of her gaze would conjure Chouji’s plane from thin air.

"Uh-huh." Sighing, Shikamaru leaned back against the near wall. Some sort of faux marble that felt cold through his shirt. "And about this favor you mentioned?"

"Look, can we talk about this later?" Her legs dangled over the edge of the railing, swinging anxiously over the slanted drop below. Shikamaru wondered belatedly why she hadn’t opted for a seat. But then again, Ino had always been weird like that. "God, it’s been how long now?"

Shikamaru gave her a sidelong glance. It was fairly obvious that Ino was acting strange and cagey, and it wasn’t the kind of change you could chalk up to three years of separation. Unfortunately, it was more the type of bizarre that meant something, somewhere out in the universe (or, to Shikamaru’s unending chagrin, likely closer) was or was going to be horribly, horribly wrong.

Brilliant. He tried to logically weigh the ups and downs of asking versus flat-out repression but came to a simpler conclusion. Shikamaru had never been one for facing his obstacles head-on before, and you know what they said about old habits.

"Come on, Chouji," Ino was pleading at the runway. "My ass is getting cramped just sitting here."

"You haven’t been just sitting there," Shikamaru pointed out evenly, glancing at her violently fidgeting leg. "Why didn’t you come on the same flight as Chouji?"

"God, I don’t know. My flight only had one seat left or something. Can you just let up with all the questions for once? We came to visit you, Shikamaru, end of story."

"You - okay, fine. Then about the whole favor thing -"

"Well, we’d talk too, right?" Ino shrugged. "Let’s just do this later, Shika. I think Chouji’s flight just got here. Look, look: here he comes."

Ino reached him first, not-so-daintily barreling a path through the frantic, motley crew of fliers, and tapped him twice on the shoulder. Chouji turned at the first brush of fingers against his rumpled sweater.

"Ino!"

"Hi. Oh my god," she noted as a woman pushed past her towards customs. "Flying’s a death wish around here. No wonder Shikamaru never visits."

Chouji grinned and scratched his chin thoughtfully. "Where’s Shikamaru?" He asked as a man elbowed past him towards the luggage carousel.

"Oh, here." She made a flippant gesture at the roiling crowd. "You know, somewhere."

"Huh? Where? How is he? Is he okay?"

"I guess," she shrugged. "I mean… I haven’t really told him, but -""

Chouji blinked at her. "You haven’t told him?"

A woman rudely nudged past Ino’s shoulder. "No," she said. "I haven’t."

"But Ino -"

Sighing huffily, Ino shoved back at the man trying to hurry her along. "I know, Chouji."

"It’s just that I thought that - "

"Chouji, I know," she shrieked, glancing around them frustratedly. "I know. Look, I tried. Well, no, I didn’t."

Chouji hated flying, hated sitting in the cramped little seats thousands of feet above the earth, one stranger snoozing deeply on your shoulder and the other trying to convert you to their own fervent Christian sect. It always felt unnatural, intruding in this other, empty world, where no human feet were likely intended to tread. And so flying was a near never for him, except across the country to see the best friend he had ever had, and even then, only armed with a heavy artillery of snack bars and energy drinks to compensate for the acrophobic anxiety, the eve of sleeplessness. But still, it was only at this very moment that weariness really set into his bones.

All around them, the crowd rushed like a hostile river and Chouji knew that at any moment now Shikamaru would find them. He hadn’t wanted to be the one to tell him, but then again, life was sometimes all about things you didn’t like.

"Chouji, I’ve got to go to Isu," Ino said then, biting at a jagged fingernail. She was doing that a lot lately.

"No, please don’t go to Isu, Ino. You know that’s no good. Let’s just tell Shikamaru and get him to come home with us. I can tell him if you want."

It was a good plan, the original plan. Ino was supposed to head out here first and break the news, mostly because Chouji wasn’t sure what he’d say. Why it had taken so long. What had happened. But that didn’t matter, the important thing was letting Shikamaru know and bringing him home. The plan. But Ino was shaking her head, looking distracted. "Uh-uh," she said. "That’s a bad idea, Chouji, believe me. Let’s just go to Isu, like all three of us, okay? We’ll get Shikamaru to drive. And we can tell him then."

Which was when, as fate would have it, two hurried people parted and Shikamaru found them at last, heads bent conspiratorially and the last words of their conversation hanging thickly in the air.

He raised an eyebrow. "Tell me what, exactly?"

Stupid, Shikamaru thought to himself.

The rush from the gate was unprecedented, to say the least. In the few years since arriving here, he had clearly forgotten what it was like to emerge from a late flight, disgruntled and underfed, simultaneously looking for your luggage, your ride and your sanity. That way, he would’ve been prepared to move against the rush once Ino barely finished her sentence and darted off into the fray. He endured a barrage of hefty shoves as he beat a path through the mob, but Shikamaru just rolled his eyes and forged on. Airport violence, in his opinion, was the kind you just shouldered heroically. Post-flight status was very nearly equivalent to insanity. Any given person in that waiting room would have been trigger-happy about ripping him a new one.

A man passed, cradling a wailing baby. Shikamaru stepped by two twin sisters looking for their luggage. A child and his grandmother wandered past, speaking some foreign language.

Then he found them, the two standing completely still in the fray, Ino with a pleading expression on her face and Chouji looking distinctly uncomfortable. What had he just missed here?

"-We’ll tell him then," she finished.

"Tell me what?"

Shikamaru would always remember the way those two jumped guiltily at the sound of his voice. At the moment, it was all rather hilarious. In hindsight, he figured he should’ve seen it all coming.

"Hey, Chouji’s here," Ino offered, a tad unnecessarily. "He just… got here."

Shikamaru gritted his teeth and mulled over his options: something was obviously going on here the likes of which he wasn’t too sure he’d enjoy. Given Ino and Chouji’s supremely sketchy behaviour…

Well, ‘unenjoyable’ was kind of a no-brainer.

"Okay then, just tell me this: is this going to come back and bite me in the ass in the near future or thereabout?"

Chouji just glanced at Ino, who in turn adopted her custom look of resolute stubbornness. "God, Shikamaru, don’t be such a drama queen."

And that was that. Shikamaru had never really been one for facing his problems head-on anyway and he sure as hell wasn’t going to start now. Besides, peace and quiet (or some vague semblance thereof) was a hard thing to put back together once broken. And any moment now, knowing Chouji…

"I’m hungry," he moaned, rubbing at his stomach. "Can we get some food before we go?"

"You’re always hungry." Ino rolled her eyes. " Haven’t you heard of watching your weight?"

"Nuh-uh; I figure it’d be pretty cold if I was skinny. This way I’m comfortable, see? Oh, hey Shikamaru, do you have any food at your place? I’m broke."

"Sorry Chouji," he answered dully. This place was kind of getting to him. what with the mass overload of restless anxiety crawling through the woodwork. And then there was still that feeling that he was missing something important. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. "Don’t you want to drop off your bags and stuff at the hotel first?"

Chouji blinked. "Hotel?"

Aha. "No." Shikamaru turned painstakingly to the girl at his side. "Tell me he’s kidding."

Ino looked unapologetic. "Don’t be stupid."

"You didn’t book a hotel room," it was more a statement of disbelief rather than a question.

She sighed. "Well, I thought it would be fine if we just stayed with you," Ino explained unapologetically. "I still don’t see why we can’t."

"I don’t know. Maybe it’s because, for starters, you guys show up completely unexpected, then you drop the bomb in saying you’re staying? And at my place? What?"

Chouji looked dumbfounded. He turned to Ino. "I thought you called him."

Shikamaru sighed inwardly. Ino hadn’t called him. Of course Ino hadn’t called him. Ino had just shown up on his precious lunch hour, give or take three years, and nearly assaulted him and his sandwich. "Chouji, you guys can’t stay with me. My place is tiny. Like one-bedroom kind of tiny."

He threw this curveball to throw Ino off the prospect of comfort, but she was clearly not to be swayed. "Details. I’ll just take the bed and you two can take the living room. It’s not like we haven’t camped out before?"

Shikamaru couldn’t see how her getting the only bed in the apartment while him and Chouji braved the hardwood floors near-winter even got close to roughing it. On her part. But then again, Ino had spent the majority of their overnight dojo trips whining about the sub-par quality of sleeping bag fabric and totally decimated Shikamaru’s chances at a decent night’s rest like clockwork. Then came black belt, third dan and he vowed never to sleep within hearing distance of her again.

"No, you guys can’t stay with me. My landlord would freak if she found you there." Chouji opened his mouth to protest, but Shikamaru cut him off before he had the chance. "- Even if it’s only for a day. A few. Or a week -"

Ino propped her hands on her hips. "Three," she corrected.

"What! No, whatever. The answer’s definitely no, guys."

Ino just squinted at him in disbelief while Chouji looked sort of hurt. Shikamaru couldn’t help his mind from straying to the world-time clocks overhead and thinking that forty miles into the downtown core, Asahi was just off shift now, likely breathing fire and hunting his blood. Workplace safety was deeply lacking in these parts, seeing as Asahi was the kind of coworker that brought new meaning to the term "poisoned atmosphere".

Crossing her arms, Ino gave a loud sigh. "Well, your life sounds really hard Shikamaru, but we? Don’t have any money. Unfortunately."

Chouji nodded. "Yeah. Sorry, I just spent the last of it on the plane ticket here."

Shikamaru just stared at them like they had grown extra heads.

"So, are you going to toss your two oldest friends out onto the streets of this sleazy city?" A woman, clearly a citizen of the so-called ‘sleazy city’, gave Ino a dirty look as she passed. Ino ignored her, tugging on Chouji’s sleeve. "Chouji, your luggage. Come on, someone’s going to steal it."

"Ino, I don’t think - "

"Of course they will. This is the city, stupid, lots of crazies live here. For example, Shikamaru lives here."

And on that high note, the two stalked off towards the rotating carousel, leaving a very frustrated person in their ruined wake. Shikamaru took a deep breath and sighed, desperately crushing the urge to clutch at his wildly throbbing temples. This day had gone from bad to worse in the space of one lunch hour - since losing his sandwich, his chess partner’s respect and then the latter half of his workday (read: his chance at redeeming his life come the very next business hour), Shikamaru now faced a brand new smattering of issues that might possibly leave him broke and/or broken by the end of the week.

On a more optimistic note, both new arrivals were still semi-staples on his list of Things He Missed About Home But Would Never Admit To, and if he was really lucky, Chouji might have brought some of his aunt’s awesome peanut butter cookies. Failing all that, there was always the comforting thought that hey, he still had his life and sanity.

At least, for now.

The gas meter had dipped dangerously towards empty on their frantic search for a vacant hotel room, so Shikamaru had had to spring for gas along the way ("That didn’t count," said Ino, firmly protesting his threat of starting up an expense tab. "Totally your own negligence."). When they finally found a place that didn’t look like it was crawling with vermin all through the woodwork, in addition to having running water and various other important creature comforts, his two (currently) homeless teammates happily watched him shell over the cash. This day had just passed ‘expensive’ back around the hundredth dollar.

Shikamaru hated it when he was right.

"Thanks a lot," Chouji was saying. He looked a little uncomfortable in the overly lavish room but kept tossing anxious looks over at the complimentary mints on the pillows. "But I think I would’ve been fine with your couch."

Ino thwacked him on the shoulder. "Chouji, shut up. If Shikamaru’s willing to pay, then let’s not stop his uncharacteristic kindness. Besides, it’s too late anyway."

Chouji looked apologetic, Ino didn’t even look close. She picked up a chocolate-covered strawberry and popped it into her mouth.

"Hey. Where did you get that?" Though something was telling Shikamaru that he really didn’t want to know.

"Room service."

Chouji looked up. "Ino-"

"I know, I know. I’ll pay you back, Shika, don’t worry."

Sighing, Shikamaru sat down beside her on the edge of the blue bedspread. Chouji dragged his red armchair closer to the other two and both guys looked expectantly over at the blonde girl beside them.

"Well?" Shikamaru prompted.

Ino bit her lip thoughtfully, as though weighing the relative pros and cons of saying anything about the cryptic reasons behind their sudden journey. After a moment of struggling with his rapidly deteriorating patience, Shikamaru spoke up. Frankly, this was starting to piss him off.

"Okay, seriously. You’re telling me by, um, not telling me anything at all, that you two effectively shelled out how much in cash to haul your asses out across the country just to get me to buy you a room so we could sit around and smile at other like douches for a week?"

"Three," Ino corrected.

"Okay, three."

Nearby, Chouji was crumbling under guilt; after all these years, Shikamaru and Ino were both very well aware of his extremely oversized heart (figuratively, of course) and instead of watching him sweat absolute bullets while torn between the loyalty to his two best friends, Ino - for once - did the right thing and put him out of his misery.

"Okay," she started huffily, rearranging her legs beneath her. "Well, yes, I guess we did come out to see you, a little bit." At this, Chouji gave a her a furtive glance. "But there was also that favor. You know, the one I mentioned. About the guy." Another furtive glance. This was getting highly suspicious.

"The guy… that is or isn’t your current fiancé?"

Ino blinked. "Doesn’t matter. I just kind of need a break from home, is all, and figured that since we haven’t seen you for a while we’d stop by out here and… kindly request that you escort us on this incredibly important mission. Of sorts." The end of her sentence quickly tapered off.

"Huh."

Chouji gulped audibly. "Ino -"

She silenced him with a quick glare. "Besides, you totally know what it’s like to be holed up back there. There’s no space."

"Ino -" Chouji tried.

"Just one favor," she finished, tying up her request. "Come on, Shika. I’ll spring for gas."

Shikamaru sighed. Ino wouldn’t know what to do with please if it jumped out and bit her on the ass, meaning that this was the closest they’d get to a polite demand this side of the century. One favor, huh?

"You don’t have any money," he observed, turning to Chouji. "Neither of you do."

"I have a little," Ino corrected. "I wasn’t going to truck my ass all the way out here without any. That would make me crazy."

At this point, Chouji had totally given up the ghost on his abortive protests and instead nestled back into the voluminous covers, carefully chomping on an engorged strawberry. Shikamaru felt exactly how he looked. So instead of bringing up how the last of her comments was kind of a scarily accurate observation, he just ashed his cigarette on a suspiciously pristine crystal ashtray and signed his life away.

"Okay," he answered. "Let’s do it."

Chouji gave him a depressing kind of half-smile. Ino grinned brilliantly. "Awesome. I knew you’d be up for it, Shikamaru!"

He sighed and moved to stand up. "You’re going home?" Chouji asked, sounding a little disappointed.

"Yeah. Looks like I’ve got a long week ahead of me."

"Three," Ino corrected, turning on the television. "Hey, do you get satellite on this thing?"

---

Argh, etc.

2008-01-07T17:35:29Z

Received a semi-snarky rag on my lack of updates and dude, I am so sorry. Really. Not angry or even bristly or anything of the like (well, fine, maybe a little -- let's not lie here) because I know I'm a dirty, dirty slacker.

On the bright side, though, first semester's ass has now been thoroughly kicked (I'm still in denial about the current one. Check back in four months) so I'm taking this brief (brief. Really, insanely brief) reprieve to catch up on my multi-chaptered babies. Or at least one of them. Success is all about taking the first step, right?

IMMEDIATELY UP-AND-COMING :

The Unorthodox Arts of War Chapter 3 and possibly chapter 4.
Frankly? I think I got a little overambitious with this one... I mean seriously, less wordy? SURELY YOU JEST. I keep losing track of where I want it to go. But there's a good three-quarters worth of chapter 3 written up, so I figure I should just go with the flow and see where that takes me. And plus, it seems to be the only one of all my crap that anyone sort of likes. (It's the porn, right? It's gotta be the porn. Or at least the promise of... Clearly, I should stick it in everything.)

Resistance is Futile One shot, GEN/HUMOR
In which Sakura has a date. Now, this would all be good and well, if she hadn't forgotten to tell Ino.
Once upon a time (fine... this morning. When I started writing it) this was called Shikamaru's Really, Really, Really, Superlatively Bad Day... but despite what they say about eschewing obfuscation, that's just awful. Anyway. This one's likely to get out first.

AND LATER DOWN THE LINE:

Full of Grace (Cowboy Bebop one-shot) Tuesday's child is.
Finally, finally tackling this series, which is the undefeated world champion of my heart. This has sort of been in progress for months now, written in pieces on gum wrappers and the like. If it ever gets near the point of vaguely doing it justice, I'll put it up. Fingers crossed.

The Life Aquatic (Parts 2 and 3: ~~Tripping the Light Fantastic~~ and The Price of Tea in China)
AKA: my baby. This may end up as a very disjointed set of 'parts' over chapters (I'm afraid I've lost my linear vision for this...) but seriously. Falling in love in HG is like the most dysfunctional thing ever.

A Lighter Logic (Chapter 4)
I know, I know. This is written like a freaking dictionary. I'm trying to work on cleaning up my prose here. When I do, the number one thing on my list is tackling this story, because it's one very dear to my heart and I've got some grand plans for it.

Rock and Roll (Could Never Hip-Hop Like This) (Samurai Champloo one-shot)
Sort-of request for somekindofen, to bring her out of hiding. Even if it takes stealing her fantabulous ideas.

You know. Just in case anyone cares.

See this icon? This is my YEARNING icon. You know, for a marginal decrease in flightiness. There is no other circumstance for which it would be more appropriate.

♥

The Unorthodox Arts of War (2/?)

2007-10-10T15:48:08Z

Chapter 2 is done! Sorry folks, this is a little heavier on the adventure than the romance, but bear with me!

Chapter 2: The Mission

Ino had a problem.

Somehow, her father had gotten wind of the ceremonial dates this year and – as if there wasn’t already about a million things wrong with this whole week altogether – was pretty much beside himself with paternal worry. Ino had had quite enough of this; following her mother’s third failed attempt to bring her depressingly inebriated father back from the small bar two streets over, she had gone down there to drag him home herself.

“Daddy, I’m going to say this one more time. I? Am a big girl now. I can take care of myself. Now put down your glass and come with me. We’re going home.”

Her father gulped down his drink in stony silence.

“Daddy,” Ino waited. “Daddy. Are you even listening to me?” She sighed loudly. “Look… please don’t worry about me. You’ve gone through the exact same thing and, look: you’re perfectly fine, aren’t you?”

Inoichi looked up, glassy-eyed, at his one and only daughter: light of his life, apple of his eye. Suddenly, the first four bottles of sake seemed sort of lonely. He gestured at the bartender. “Give me another one.”

This was beyond hopeless. As long as Inoichi knew exactly what the ritual entailed – and it was a little late to curb on this one; he had undergone the same thing himself, after all – paired with unfortunate fact that she would be to one to undergo it, the possibility that there would be any amount of alcohol in the world enough to console him was somewhat bleak.

Outside, the colder season had fallen in a seeming flash; fireflies warily tapped against tree branches, causing them to shed their leaves. Ino sighed heavily. “Ugh, fine. Don’t listen to me, then.”

Ino’s father closed his eyes. “Ino, sweetie, I know you’re trying to make me feel better and I appreciate it. But right now, you’re kind of the source of my woe.”

This was ridiculous – Ino could’ve sworn her father was under the impression that he was the one undergoing to ritual. “Are you serious? Oh, you’re right. It’s all so clear to me now. What with the whole doing my job properly and all, I’m a real terror.”

He father gave her a look for the sarcasm.

“Can’t you just be happy that you… I don’t know… Raised me well, or something?”

Shikaku gave a badly hidden cough from further down the bar.

“You know, I’m going to point out,” said Ino scathingly, “that the three of you are currently drinking at two in the afternoon. Am I the only one who sees something very wrong here?”

That was plenty enough to elicit silence from the peanut gallery; her father’s friends sunk guiltily into their seats.

Inoichi huffed. “I don’t understand,” he said despairingly. “Why has no one rallied this before?”

“Because everyone has to undergo it,” answered Shikaku, leaning over and helping himself to another glass. “You did it, I did it. Ino has to, Chouji has to and probably so does my good-for-nothing son, if he bothered to show up for the raffling.”

Ino realized she was gripping her shuriken holster so hard her fingertips were going numb, and became politely fascinated with the intriguing trajectories of passing fireflies outside of the window.

Chouza gave her a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry you have to do this, Ino,” – here, Inoichi gave a heavy sob in her stead – “the whole thing seems really unfair to girls.”

Inoichi gave him a look that probably aimed to convey something along the lines of: you could never, for a thousand years, fathom the immense intricacies of having a daughter and the immense emotional hurdles I am having to overcome as a result of this, not to mention the relative amount of physical damage undergone from alcohol therapy which has also drained the bank account and angered the wife. This, predictably, shut Chouza right up.

Ino figured she needed to invoke some reality here. “Look, Daddy, it’s nothing you need to worry about. Go home. Despite the fact that I totally appreciate your blood, sweat and tears, I’ll be perfectly fine.” Well, maybe perfectly was a bit too strong. More like ‘maybe’. Or ‘possibly’. If she left Konoha tomorrow and never returned.

“Hey,” her father said, revelation lightening his voice. “Have you thought of talking to Tsunade-sama? She might be able to do something, you know. Perhaps give you an exemption. Or maybe scrap the whole thing altogether!”

Shikaku and Chouza swapped dubious glances further down the barstool.

Inoichi ignored them. “Maybe if you asked really, really, really nicely? People can’t say no to a good, old-fashioned heartfelt appeal.”

“Well, you were told wrong,” Ino explained tiredly, rubbing her temple with one hand. She herself had asked Sakura the same question that very morning – profoundly baffled as to why Tsunade-sama intended on giving such a blatantly sexist ritual the get-go in the first place. Sakura explained that the Hyuuga household had predictably gotten wind of the ceremonial dates that year and were backing it at full force. Ino despaired; hadn’t House Hyuuga ever heard of breaking the mold? Of course, being the oldest and most traditional family in Konoha – with the added monopoly of being the only sprawling example of an inner-city ocular kekkei genkai – she supposed they saw it as some god-given task to uphold the rites most – surprise, surprise – old and traditional.

Of course, it was a little more than surprising that they had so cleanly acquiesced to Hinata’s round-one assigned partner – not only was Sasuke the infamous one-time Konoha defector, he would also sully the bloodline with his rivalling trait. But then again, maybe Hinata just hadn’t told them. Considering the hell that would likely break loose, Ino couldn’t say she blamed her.

And so, with a major house pressing for the fulfillment of the ritual, Tsunade probably wouldn’t be doling out exemptions. If Ino wanted an out, it wasn’t going to happen this way. She’d have to think of something else.

She rubbed her neck thoughtfully. Somewhere in the space of Ino’s ruminations, the number of sake bottles had increased to an alarming seven. This had gone on long enough.

“Okay, okay. You know what? I’ll be perfectly fine, so don’t worry yourself over this.” She steadied her features in an attempt to look convincing. “Right now, I have somewhere I’ve got to be, so I’ll see you three later. Just… promise me you’ll go home soon, alright? And I never want to see any of you drinking at two in the afternoon, so long as I live.”

The three dutifully avoided her gaze.

Ino tapped a foot. “Understand?”

Chouza gave her a guilty smile. “Of course… who could break a promise like that?”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

Taking her leave, Ino breezed past them before Shikaku suddenly spoke up. “Hey,” he asked – and somewhere up there, the fates were chuckling maliciously – “you didn’t tell us who you pulled from the raffle.”

Oh, ho, ho. The irony. This was ridiculous – kind of like a hopped-up version of those crazy, prime-time hidden camera prank shows.

“You know,” replied Ino, sounding a little constipated. “I think this should stay strictly need-to-know.” She meaningfully indicated her father with a tilt of her head. “Don’t you agree, Uncle Shikaku?”

Chouza glared daggers at his friend, elbowing him in the gut and jerking his head towards the other end of the bar, where Ino’s father looked like he was trying to drown himself in a two-ounce sake cup or else by the sheer force of his tears. Shikaku backed off with an embarrassed look. “Oh, right, right. Sorry.”

But Ino, ever the opportunist, was already hurrying away.

The day was already fading by the time the cipher was broken – filaments of dusty sienna light yanked backwards through heavy cumulus like a sewn thread in reverse, bullied beneath the linear horizon by the encroaching, bruise-coloured night.

The target had dropped the coded text in his haste to get away: it tumbled from his rucksack as he spun for escape, limbs stretching, joints popping long enough, light enough but not nearly fast enough before the tendrils of dark shadow tightened around his ankles, holding him fast.

The poor guy never had a chance.

“Jesus,” noted Shikamaru with disdain. “Messy enough there?”

His partner had crouched low beside the body, invoking the appropriate cleanup jutsu. From the look of it, there would simply be nothing to do with all that blood. “What? That’s the fun part, man. Being a ninja wouldn’t be worth it without the garotting.”

“Yeah, but that just reached a new level of gruesome. You didn’t need to saw his head off.”

In return, Ryo just rolled his eyes as though his face wasn’t totally streaked with blood like some movie-grade serial killer – complete with a beheaded corpse by his side. “Fine, fine. Go ahead and spoil my fun. But I guess the blood’s going to be a problem, huh?”

Shikamaru looked up at the fading light; the fireflies had come out and were tracing errant paths through the twilight. A hint of red tinged the sky. “No. Just leave it. Looks like we’re going to have some rain soon, anyway.” Up in the surrounding trees, two more members of the squad crouched among the leafy branches, ready to leap for support if required. Their services hadn’t been needed. “You two! That was the last one; we’ll scour his stuff tonight and make for the meeting point tomorrow. Go on ahead without us.”

Ryo was wiping his kunai off on a leaf just as the rain started falling. “Damn,” he said, looking up with a grimace. “Did I ever tell you that I hate it when you’re right, you son of a bitch?”

But Shikamaru had already turned away, his foot stubbing the dropped piece of intelligence. It gave a wet crackle as he bent to pick it up.

“Awesome,” said Ryo, peeking over his shoulder. “With my beauty and your brains, deciphering this’ll be a snap, right?”

Shikamaru sighed heavily. It was going to be a long, long night.

“So, my life is over,” Sakura muttered darkly over the remains of her lunch. She was apparently in the process of molesting her uneaten salad, pushing it back and forth on her plate so many times, it resembled a platter of green lumps and smears. Ino glanced at it distastefully.

“Sakura, are you going to eat that, or do you want to fondle it some more?”

Sakura dropped her fork. “I can’t eat a bite. My life is over.”

Ino rolled her eyes. “Then you should have thought of this before you asked me to meet you for lunch.”

Sakura gave her a withering look. “Will you stop being such a bitch?”

“Excuse me?” Ino must not have been hearing things correctly. She wasn’t the one walking around with a rain-cloud perpetually over her head. “What is wrong with you these days?”

“Girls,” Tenten interjected, newly arrived and sliding out a seat for herself. “Let’s play nicely, alright?” She glanced at Sakura’s… meal. “Oh, you guys ordered without me. Well, I’m not that hungry. How goes the big suck?”

“Sucky,” pouted Sakura.

Tenten nodded with wide-eyed comprehension. “As I’ve heard these things go.”

In Ino’s opinion, Sakura was just being a drama queen. She rolled her eyes.

The tension in the air clearly had little to do with the impending rainy season. “Oh lighten up, girls,” she grinned cheerily, “it sucked for me, too. I mean, the thought is kind of, you know… appalling. Like, your team-mates are pretty much family.”

Both girls swivelled their heads towards her simultaneously. “Um… same boat here,” Ino prompted cattily. You know, just in case Tenten had forgotten or something.

Across the table, this cracked a slightly more conscious response from Sakura who, refocusing her wrath on Ino, gave her a look that would have likely withered flowers. “Oh that’s perfectly easy for you to say. It’s all hypothetical, right? I mean, it’s not like Shikamaru deigned to show up at the raffling of doom anyway, so do you even have a problem right now?”

Ino looked up at her. “What are you talking about? That doesn’t mean anything,” she offered defensively.

“Oh yes, it does. Today I was going through the assignment roster for Shishou and saw that he just got scheduled for an A-rank mission. He left last night. There’s no way Iruka-sensei caught up with him before then—”

Ino’s heart skipped a beat. “Wait a sec,” she said. “Wait, wait, wait, wait… go back.”

Sakura rolled her eyes.

“So…he’s gone? Not in Konoha? Like, as in ‘not here’?”

“I really don’t see any other way I could have meant that,” Sakura retorted bitterly.

Ino felt sweet, sweet elation well up in her throat. This? Was fabulous. With Shikamaru away, she wouldn’t have to undergo the ritual for the time being. And if she was really, really lucky, then he might not get back until well after the next raffle entirely. From where she was standing, only two things could possibly go wrong: 1) that Shikamaru returned before the next reassignment – the date of which had yet to be announced or 2) that she pulled Chouji in the next draw. Oh well, it was best not to think of these things. The fates were clearly throwing her a lifeline here, and Ino was anything if not ungrateful.

“Ugh. My life is over,” Sakura groaned, just in case no one had heard her the first dozen times. Being the good friend she was, Ino tried to keep her exploding glee to a minimum. It wasn’t working.

“Shishou is, like, crushing my will to live here.” Sakura put her face down on the table, prostrate with despair. “I can’t believe I have to do this.

“Hmm…Well there’s always having you cloned or something, don’t you think? Maybe we could assassinate Naruto? The old cyanide in the ramen trick?” Ino winked at Sakura, who gave her a grimace of profound unamusement.

“Hmm… would you like to brag about your good luck some more or am I going to have to rip you a new one?” Ino stuck her tongue at her. Sakura could be so violent sometimes.

Tenten was worrying her bottom lip thoughtfully. “You haven’t told Takuya yet, have you?”

Ino looked up. In the wake of Sasuke’s return to Konoha, he was already old news. The once enamored girls of the rookie nine had found solace in the plethora of non-shinobi boys about the village – team-mates were an unspoken off-limits, plus there was something intrinsically awesome about being able to kick your boyfriend’s ass by default. Takuya, a shopboy from the place two doors down from the Yamanaka Flower Shop, was Sakura’s recent on-again, off-again boyfriend. Despite the fact that he possessed the mental capacities of lesser species of plants, Ino supposed he was marginally better than those assholes her friend usually dated. Sakura just had really bad luck with men… Look at how the whole Sasuke thing turned out.

Finally, her villainous funk was making some sense.

“Come on,” balked Ino incredulously. “You’re seriously not going to tell him, are you?”

Sakura rolled her eyes. “Oh, I don’t know Ino. I have this sneaking suspicion that the whole ‘sleeping with other people’ thing might not go down so well with him.”

“It’s work,” Ino stated firmly. “It’s not something he can understand.”

“She’s right, you know,” nodded Tenten, “it’s really none of his business.”

Sakura didn’t look particularly mollified, fingering her napkin distractedly. “Yeah, I guess.”

Out of the corner of her vision, Ino spotted Naruto innocently rounding the street corner, a bundle of something-or-other under one arm. Someone spotted him and stopped to chat, the two laughing over something unheard, until Naruto caught sight of Ino and subsequently, the back of Sakura’s head. He stopped short, adopting a look of profound panic, contemplating the safest course of action. His companion was waving a hand in front of his face in an effort of regain his attention, but to no avail. Naruto finally opted for an abrupt about-face before swiftly tiptoeing away with painful caution.

Ino couldn’t say she blamed him – right now, she wouldn’t put Sakura past a little DIY castration.

“What are you looking at?” asked the girl in question, following Ino’s gaze.

By which point Naruto was long, long gone, leaving his companion in a confused daze. Let it not be said that ninja were masters of stealth for nothing. “Oh, nothing,” replied Ino innocently.

“Sakura,” Tenten asked. “When did you say Shikamaru was coming back?”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. It was an A-rank mission, so… a week, maybe? Two?”

“Then I guess you’ve got to start planning for the long-term, right Ino?” Tenten giggled.

She hated to admit it, but Ino knew Tenten had a point. She had no idea when the second draw would be held, or how long they’d have to finish the rite and though it seemed badly structured to her, personally, she supposed Tsunade had bigger and better things to deal with. In all actuality, a direct disobeyance of the rite might even pass entirely under the radar. But Konoha had bred better nin than that and this would be monitored on more than just faith and the honour system. Ridiculous as it was, it was still a test of their shinobi mettle, on the honor of their wills of fire. Unfathomable or not, Ino would never be so crass as to lie when it came to duty.

So fine. But let it be known that there was nothing dishonourable about crossing one’s fingers. “Oh… you know. I’ll just wait and see what happens, right?” Good faith had always done her right. Failing that, there was that patch of field where she had found two four-leaf clovers last year…

Just then, Kiba trotted up along the café fence, interrupting Ino’s thoughts. “Yo, Ino,” he called. “You’re wanted.”

Which could only mean one thing. When Tsunade called, nobody failed to answer.

Sakura was outraged. “No. NO. Now a mission? What, did you like win the lottery and forget to tell me about it? Make a deal with the devil?”

Ino rolled her eyes. “Sakura, you’re already on a mission, remember?”

Sakura gave a depressed sigh; she hated genin team training. “But that doesn’t count.”

“Well, maybe it would if you passed a team for once.” Ino sighed. “But I guess you are Kakashi-sensei’s pupil. You know what they say: like teacher, like stude—”

“Oh God,” interjected Tenten, clearly thinking of Gai. “Don’t finish that sentence. Please.”

Ino stood up; in the time of their little segue, Kiba had disappeared stealthily. “Anyway,” she offered cheerily. “You’ll just have to suck it up, Forehead. Some people just live in the light. You know what they say about jealousy making Jack a dull boy.”

Sakura pressed a weary hand to her face. “You’re quoting that wrong,” she said tiredly, but Ino was already gone.

Ino knew Tsunade’s office would be the usual kind of disorganized – a weird amalgamation of trite but endearing decorating attempts, courtesy of the late Third, plus Tsunade’s own line of day-to-day souvenirs (here, an overturned sake cup, poker chips strewn about, one bent corner of an ace of spades protruding from underneath the lumpy carpet) – but what she hadn’t been expecting was to find the room half-plunged into darkness, curtains drawn haphazardly against the sunlight and the moaning Hokage prostrate on her desk.

“Er… Tsunade-sama? Are you breathing?”

Tsunade didn’t even grace this with a look. “Oh, it’s you. Here,” she gestured at the manila folder balanced on her desk. “There are the mission details. You leave… I don’t know. Tomorrow or something. It’s all in there.”

Ino glanced at the teetering stack of papers dubiously. The mission folder looked a little heftier than she would’ve liked. She picked it up, gently drumming her fingers against the cover. “So… how was your night?”

From the other side of the darkened room, Tsunade finally looked up, raising an eyebrow at her. Despite the low lighting, Ino could see that both eyes were puffy and bloodshot, rheumy with cold. With the seasonal flu going around, it looked like Ino wasn’t the only one with a crappy weekend behind her.

“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, beside the swelling and the fact that I feel like I keep swallowing around a ball of steel wool, it’s been stellar. Any more questions or can I start the briefing now?”

Konoha’s Hokage sometimes made it very hard to feel sorry for her.

Tsunade flipped open a corresponding folder, clearing off the base of a table lamp before she flicked it on. She grimaced at the light. “Ahem. Anyway. So, your departure date’s tomorrow. The client will be waiting for you about twenty-seven paces southwest from the Takigakure’s Southern Border. He’ll be distinguishable by his briefcase and – I quote – its unusual color.”

Ino raised an eyebrow. Other than the sketchy specifics, this mission seemed to be fairly straightforward – C-rank and intended for her current four-man genin training cell. They would chaperone the client from Takigakure to his next job (the details of which Ino was not made privy to), offering him fairly low-level security on the way.

“On the second day, you’ll rendezvous with a backup squad—”

Ino looked up. “What? There’s a backup squad?” Maybe she hadn’t read the mission ranking correctly? Ino flipped a few pages back to make sure. As far as she knew, C-class missions did not require backup squads. C-class missions required rain-boots, sanitizing wipes and Ritalin for one third of her hyperactive team.

Tsunade looked at her expectantly.

Ino coughed, reiterating for the sake of her own personal safety. “Uh… I mean: did you intend to send out other shinobi as well, Hokage-sama?”

The Hokage rolled her eyes largely at her subordinate’s lack of a decent attention span. “Yes, Ino. Was there anything else you weren’t paying attention to that you would like me to repeat again?”

“Oh, no,” Ino said quickly, hoping she wouldn’t get on the wrong side of her cold-ridden superior today. “I was just… testing your enunciation. You know what they about public speaking. You don’t use it, you lose it, right?” And maybe one day, Ino would be able to not lie like an awkward fourteen-year-old boy. She could only hope.

“Right,” Tsunade said knowingly, but recommenced her briefing. “Your mission is straightforward enough; plenty to keep the little firecracker on your team engrossed for the next few days.” Ino sighed inwardly – she’d call Rikimaru a lot of things, but dynamite wasn’t one of them. Had the little idiot found some way to piss of the Hokage when he wasn’t under Ino’s supervision? Or even worse – had this potentially happened when he had been? Tsunade, oblivious to Ino’s clearly deep internal struggle, went on. “But there are two missions.”

Ino visually summarized the loose page. “We’re tailing both the client and his assailants.”

“Exactly,” Tsunade nodded approvingly. “The client is a free-lance cartographer of sorts, though he’s originally from the Wind Country. Turns out he was commissioned to map out the entries to the Hidden Waterfall – which just went top secret, as you well know – and they’re looking to wipe his memory the only permanent way.” Despite the macabre nature of the subject, Tsunade hurried through it summarily. “Clearly, the disposal squad is currently far too high level for one civilian to take on.”

Ino understood. The client would make the most of his hired help by striking out his problem at the source – most nin disposal squads were moderately well-trained and would likely find him anywhere, despite his free-lance status. Off the squad and you’d not only get rid of the problem for the time-being, you wouldn’t be mistaken for any old target. Konoha would be charge of disposing the disposers, financed by their mapmaker friend, of course.

Ino looked up. “And the next set of nin they set out?”

Tsunade nonchalantly rested her head against her hand. "Not our problem, is it?” No, of course not. Unless the client cared to make it worth their while. It was funny how money always tied into these things. “You'll meet a representative from the backup team here," Tsunade indicated a small river south of the village. “If they tell you they need more time, make some. But I’m capping this all off at about two weeks – try not to take any longer than that because we’ll need you back here.” Tsunade looked as though something had just occurred to her. “Plus,” she added blithely. “You’ve got that ritual to complete, right?”

Ino couldn’t say anything around the sudden lump in her throat.

The Hokage cast her eyes back to the folder while Ino swallowed heavily. “Anyway… the list of provisions is here, so I really don’t need to go over all this again, do I? Geez, Shizune’s handwriting is awful… Hmm… Water, food, tent, camouflage, kunai – kunai? No really. Of all the stupid –” She flung open the door harshly, just as Shizune happened to pass by. “Thank you, Captain Obvious. I mean… kunai on a mission? Such brilliance.”

Her assistant proceeded to slam the door in her face, looking very unamused.

The rest of the Hokage’s words blurred into a muddy lecture as Ino reiterated the key mission points and contemplated where this all left her. Shikamaru could return from his cryptic task any day now, bringing Ino back to a frantic square one. Then, in the next little while, a second raffle would be held, at which point she was pretty sure she wouldn’t luck out again. Ino sighed inwardly, looking down at her paper.

This mission was her ticket to a fortnight away from town. Two weeks, Ino thought, biting her lip. At least she could put this stupid thing on hold for the time-being.

Contrary to popular belief, Shikamaru was pretty sure that isolation and lack of other distractions really didn’t make the whole decipherment process any easier than it would’ve been, say, back in Konoha. In fact, it sort of had the entirely opposite effect altogether, making the buzzing of mosquitoes, bad candlelight and Daisuke, Okabe and Ryo’s muffled snores absolutely megaphone magnetized in the (not so) cosy tininess of their makeshift tent.

“For God’s sakes, turn off the fucking light,” groaned Ryo vehemently from beside him, totally oblivious to his imminent death by pillow-related asphyxiation. Shikamaru didn’t even grace his comment with a look.

He had been up half the night decrypting the cipher with uncharacteristic dedication – there was something awfully awry here and Shikamaru wouldn’t be able to relax until he could shirk off that feeling with finality. Unreasonable suspicion, he decided, was a really crappy thing altogether. Paired with the soaked underwear and socks, his discomfort had reached an all-new low.

The basic cryptanalytic mechanics had already been run through in the earlier hours of that night – frequency analysis had proved fruitless, leaving Shikamaru to believe that the text hadn’t been encrypted with a mere substitution cipher – made even harder by the fact that it was composed of foreign characters. It would be slightly more trying than they had originally thought. A foreign alphabet? Syllabilic or phonetic? Semagrams? At this point, the rest of the team had opted to hit the sack, ready to embark for the rendezvous point tomorrow.

“You? Not sleeping?” Ryo held a hand against his forehead. Shikamaru swiped it away. “What, are you dying or something?”

He ignored him. Sure, Shikamaru was tired. Damn, he was tired, but there was something about the cipher that was niggling at him. A jumbled set of symbols that occurred about five times throughout the text, underlined for emphasis. Shikamaru figured that the repeated set of symbols near the middle of the word meant something. An extended syllable, maybe…

The break was found at four-thirty that morning. He wrote the name down in the cluttered margin in heavy black letters. It read: Hyuuga.

Comprehension flooded through the symbols in a heady tidal wave, words crashing into logic and a plan was unfolding before his eyes. “Oh my god,” Shikamaru began solemnly, squinting in the still candlelight.

— The perfectly still candlelight.

Wait. He turned around. “Ryo? Okabe?” Why had the snoring stopped? “Daisuke!”

The tent was empty, nothing around but the dim glow of the candle by which they had picked apart the perplexing script. The flame gave one twitch, two.

Realization dawned on Shikamaru like a ton of bricks. He leapt out of the tent just as the figure shot forward; a heady swoosh from a moving body, the crinkle of desiccated leaves disturbed on the ground and the jittery light of a struggling flame.

Then, the candle flickered out, plunging the night into a blind and bitter darkness.

Chapter 3

The Unorthodox Arts of War (1/?)

2007-10-03T09:21:43Z

The Unorthodox Arts of War
Rating: M
Pairings: Ino/Shikamaru
Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi.
A/N: Am totally still working on a Lighter Logic, so don't worry... just wanted to figure out if I could really write without the bells and whistles, and what better than a porny fic? You know the drill: reading is not simply a spectator sport. Enjoy!
Summary: The important rite of passage for kunoichi was an ancient, time-honored tradition, and the culmination of their learned arts of seduction. This was all very good and well...

Ino just really, really wished they could switch partners.

Chapter 1 - The Lottery

*

Today, there was going to be a meeting in Konoha.

The notice had been sent down through the lessening ranks of nin, spiraling out like a web away from its place of origin: Tsunade’s slightly cluttered desk. For reasons of secrecy, paper had never been a big thing with shinobi, but Konoha had natural resources enough to make use of it, so the notice – in blotchy ink on green paper – was posted on the bulletin board at that month’s jounin rank meeting.

It had been a Tuesday; Ino remembered it as the worst day of her life. The announcement of their final kunoichi rite, the last art of seduction.

“I’m seeing things, right?” Ino was squinting at the two columns of adjacent names as though they’d disappear from the strength of her glare.

“Nope,” replied Sakura, also staring at it despondently. “That’s one hundred percent bonafide lime-green reality.”

In all fairness, the two of them had a good reason for not really anticipating it until now, several of them actually. For starters, the… subject matter of the ritual meant that any older ninja had unsurprisingly little to say on the topic. Ino’s father had suddenly developed a profound interest in sharpening his kunai. Sakura, with no nin-parents in residence, had asked Kakashi-sensei. Despite the fact that she was twenty-two, he smiled awkwardly under his mask and patted her on the head.

So, no help there.

Secondly, there was the fact that some had tried to rally the rite, saying that the modern-day kunoichi had plenty of other skills at her behest. The whole seduction card was hardly ever played; alternative methods of infiltration were far better, cleaner and quicker. Plus, they required marginally less planning and lot less alcohol. Seeing as the current Hokage was a woman, there was some debate as to whether or not it would get the go-ahead for that year but evidently, it had. Ino trusted that there were a lot of good reasons for this, all of which went above and beyond the whole ‘it’s a tradition’ thing. Tsunade would never have okayed something so blatantly sexist.

“Bye Sakura-chan!” Naruto gave the two a wave as he walked through the door.

“Hey, Forehead,” said Ino, gesturing at his orange-clad back. “Shouldn’t we tell him about the meeting?”

Sakura crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh, don’t worry – it’ll just take him a second.”

Ino shrugged. “Um… Oka–”

“Ah!” Naruto raced back. “What’s that?” He asked, pointing at the sheet of paper.

Ino counted the days mentally; it would be three days before the ritual. She’d have to wring some information out of someone, or else head into unknown waters. The likely question on everyone’s lips would be: who was getting who?

“It’s a ritual, Naruto,” Sakura explained, totally deadpan. “A stupid, sexist ritual where the girls get to do horribly archaic things and the boys get to get rid of their untoward yearnings.”

Naruto blinked largely. “Um… What?”

“So,” Sakura went on, ignoring Naruto’s questioning gaze. “That’ll make it about three days, then.”

Ino hated to admit it, but she was pretty sure that they had had ample warning. They probably were alerted of this at the jounin inauguration, for god’s sake. But the idea of it being so close and imminent… well, sort of sucked.

And here it was, their pale green impending doom, scheduled neatly for the next Friday. Three days, Ino thought. In the meantime, she’d have to do a little information gathering.

Naruto was still confused. “Wait – what’s going on this Friday? What’s the meeting about? Why are you guys acting so weird?”

“Three days,” Sakura repeated glumly.

Ino swallowed hard. “I guess so.”

“Wait, are you serious?”

Tenten nodded grimly. Ino had managed to get a hold of her the very next day – Tenten, being a year older than them, had participated in the event the year prior, and her review wasn’t exactly scintillating.

“Yep,” the older girl said, rolling her eyes. “You’re so lucky that you’re the rookie nine. I was part of the rookie three.” At this, she gave Ino a meaningful look.

Neji and Lee. Ino felt sympathetic. “But I’m sure Tsunade was trying to get rid of – ”

Tenten rolled her eyes. “Well, I guess that didn’t fall through. Neji was participating, so obviously House Hyuuga would never let it slide. You know what that means, right?”

Ino felt her heart drop into her stomach. There went her possible petition. “Right. Hinata.”

“Oh cheer up,” Tenten soothed, sipping from her glass of water. “At least you get to draw names, right?”

Ino raised an eyebrow. “Something like that.” Frankly, she had no idea.

“That means you could get anybody. Even Sasuke.”

It wasn’t nearly as consoling as Tenten had intended; drop-dead gorgeous or not, Sasuke was still pretty much socially-retarded. A night with him would be uncomfortable as hell. Ino sighed. “But that also means I could get anyone else. Like Chouji, or Shikamaru, or Naruto. Oh god, I could get Naruto.”

Tenten laughed, a light, silvery sound that probably had nothing to do with how she felt at this exact time last year. Ino glared daggers at her. “Oh don’t worry, Ino! It might be fun.” She gave her a hopeful smile.

Fun, right. “Well,” toasted Ino, raising her glass. “Here’s to randomly sleeping with two people I pretty much grew up with.”

Tenten grinned evilly. “Cheers!”

The worst thing about time, Ino was convinced, was the crappy fact that it only moved forward.

Rounding the corner, Sakura greeted her friend with a depressing and uneasy smile. “So… I guess today’s the day, huh?”

“Oh,” said Ino, turning around. “It’s just you.”

Truthfully, there was no need for the reminder – Ino had spent the last night in an apprehensive, sleepless daze and the majority of the pas three days making flowers wilt wherever she walked. Shikamaru and Chouji had been on high red-alert for any sign of Ino and used all their cunning to evade her warpath; only Sakura’s similarly violent funk helped offset Ino’s wrath. Still, the two of them hadn’t seen each other much during then, trying to occupy their time with sundry chores about the village. Their conversations of late had a nasty tendency of curving to one very depressing and inevitable topic.

But there was no avoiding it; Friday had come like clockwork and well, here they were.

It's not like Ino didn't have her reservations -- the likelihood of drawing anyone she actually wanted to sleep with out of the drum was insanely low. The whole generation of participating jounin this year were people she had practically grown up with her entire life, meaning that whatever happened after Ino drew her pick heralded a very, very awkward encounter.

"Say," said Sakura suddenly, worrying her bottom lip in thought. "Don't you wonder how this is going to work out? Like, are we just getting paired off and a choice few get to bang boots with the same sex?"

"Somehow,” replied Ino. “I really don't think any part of 'old' and 'traditional' covers forced homosexuality."

Sakura squinted suspiciously at nothing in particular. "I guess... But somehow this gives me a really bad feeling."

“Hey,” Ino asked. “I don’t suppose you spoke to Tsunade-sama about this at all?”

“Of course. She agreed that it was archaic and stupid and – most of all – totally sexist, but apparently the Hyuuga household is on her ass about it, so we’ll have to grin and bear it.”

Naturally. Ino didn’t think Tsunade had a whole section of her heart partitioned off for sympathy. “Well,” she said dryly. “I don’t suppose she intentionally set out to kill the modern woman. Just to break her kneecaps and stuff.”

She glanced down the hallway, counting doors as she went. The room was approaching closely, and with it, the dreaded meeting. "Ahem. So, Forehead." She turned towards Sakura with a mock pout. "Think you're going to cry when you pull Naruto from the hat?"

The girl gave her a look that would likely have killed lesser beings. "Oh no, no, no. Don't even, Ino-pig. If you jinx me, I'll never forgive you, so long as I live."

Hinata was rounding the corner just as Ino flashed her friend a terribly evil grin, her usually light pallor bordering on sheer unhealthy. She looked beside herself with worry.

"Hinata," Sakura waved her over unenthusiastically. "Hinata, over here."

She gave a jump at her name, looking around her in a bewildered daze before spotting them. "Oh… hello. A-are you going to t-the..." She pointed in the direction of the meeting room.

Ino grinned grimly. ”Yeah, we are. Want to come with?" Truthfully, the Hyuuga girl wasn’t looking so well, her hands were trembling lightly. Ino didn’t want her collapsing anywhere alone.

Sakura was in bitch-mode, and totally oblivious. "We're going in the same direction, Ino. It's not like she's going to walk behind us."

"Well, excuse me for breathing, Forehead. Anyway, Hinata. Anyone in there that you'd like to pull out of the hat?"

Hinata turned a bright red. "N-no! Of course not. I m-mean… All our friends are very n-nice and everything, b-but this is just…"

Sakura gave a bitter laugh. She really was acting rather strange. "Is there something wrong with you?" Prompted Ino. "I mean, other than the usual?"

Hinata gave Ino a panicked look. Wrong move: now she was insanely curious.

"Oh hilarious, Ino." Sakura glanced at her watch testily. "Great, we're late. All the good ones are probably gone."

Ino blinked singly. "I don’t think that’ll be a problem, Sakura, seeing as this is a random draw.”

"Oh, shut up.”

Sakura had crossed both arms mulishly over her chest; Hinata’s lip was quivering nervously. At this rate, Ino was sure she was on the brink of insanity. “Oh, cheer up guys,” she offered, feigning cheeriness. “Who knows? One of us could get Sasuke, right?”

Hinata smiled weakly; Sakura exhaled a little.

Ino grinned, tugging back the door. “Even though we know that it’s going to be me.”

Shikamaru was cloud-gazing.

His morning had definitely been one for the dogs. First of all, his alarm clock read 8:30 when it rung that morning, meaning that he was despairingly late for his scheduled meeting with the Hokage. Leaping out of bed like a man possessed, he had attempted to dress and brush his teeth at the same time, before making a very bad judgment call and asking his mother why she hadn’t woken him up earlier.

Big, big mistake there. Shikamaru swore the bruises would likely never fade.

Next, there had been the meeting itself. Suffice to say Tsunade had never, ever been tolerant of tardiness and chewed him out thoroughly – thoroughly as in bone-crushing-ass-whopping; inevitably professing going ‘easy on him’ due to the fact that he wasn’t a serial offender. Easy must have been the relative term, Shikamaru figured. He had no idea how Kakashi-sensei any remaining limbs at this point.

And finally, to add insult to injury, he had just been assigned another A-class mission, departure date: that very night. This, in addition to the mission he had just returned from two days ago, would sum up to fifteen days away from the village, enduring outdoor stealth missions and more blood than he wanted to encounter for the rest of the year. It seemed as though Tsunade merely wanted to run him to the ground for the fun of it. Shikamaru figured this wasn't an unreasonable stretch of her character.

A voice knocked him from his thoughts. “Hey! Shikamaru!”

Adding a ruined nap to his tally of fortunes. Would the good karma ever end?

Shikamaru sat up slowly, glimpsing a black-orange blur race towards him. “Naruto,” he greeted dully, stretching both arms languidly over his head for a joint-popping stretch. “What’s your hurry?”

Naruto slowed down, trotting up and down on the spot beside him. "The meeting... this morning – huff – but I think I might – huff – make it in time…" He jogged past him with a half wave.

Shikamaru glanced at his watch: the meeting had started ten minutes ago. How on earth Naruto ever passed academy math was wonder to him. But then again, he really wasn't one to talk.

"Ah! Wait a second!" Naruto jogged back to the bench.

Shikamaru sighed. "What is it?"

"Why aren't you at the meeting yet? We're going to be late!"

"Naruto,” said Shikamaru dryly. “We're already late. We’ve been late for the past ten – wait, eleven – minutes. There's no way either of us will make it to that meeting on time now." He leaned back on the bench. "Better luck next time, okay?"

"Huh?" Naruto glanced at his watch, taking a second to read the time before switching to wide-eyed panic. "Oh no! There's no way I can miss this! If I don't get there fast enough, someone will pick Sakura-chan. It might even be Sasuke! See you later, Shikamaru!"

If he had the energy and the speed to keep up with his hyperactive friend, then Shikamaru might have felt compelled to enlighten him to the fact that it was a random draw, so being late wouldn't affect his chances of getting Sakura at all. But then his guilty conscience would feel compelled to tell him about the subsequent broken ribs he'd get in the off chance that he did get Sakura, and then back to the fact that as a random draw, there was still nothing Naruto could do about it. And that sort of circular logic just made Shikamaru tired.

Admittedly, the grim purpose of the said meeting did not rank particularly high on his list of exciting prospects. The whole thing seemed excessive, to say the least, and didn't really make much logical sense. There were plenty of situations involving the seduction and capture of men who participated in acts involving other males (among other things) and those weren't part of the roster. In fact, Shikamaru was under the distinct impression that the above was still just another age-old shinobi tradition: anachronistic and troublesome beyond all compare.

So, nothing lost in a little well-direct truancy. At least until his mission tonight, Shikamaru was determined to enjoy a few hours of undisturbed peace.

There was one thing wrong with bluffing: it never worked.

Hinata, first up to the plate, had descended the terraced seats looking faint with worry. Iruka had given her a sympathetic smile – his task of raffling off the group was equally awkward, given that he had practically raised all those in attendance.

Earlier in the class he had explained that each year had differing protocol for the ritual -- given the uneven gender ratios and unpredictable number of successful teams. This year, the girls would draw two names, cycling them through the entire amount of males in the class. Ino felt distinctly queasy; Sakura was livid. She turned back towards her friend, mouthing a very obvious: 'like bicycles'. Ino flashed her a weak smile -- the girl had a point.

But then again, many facets of shinobi-dom struck a harsh chord with her -- murder by contract, brutal training hours, wilderness stealth missions and, least of all, the tacky headbands -- so Ino supposed protesting this mid-level atrocity would be a fairly pointless. Yeah, it sucked. It sucked supremely, and the next month would probably be rife with awkwardness beyond all compare, but she'd suck it up and move on. After Asuma's death, it had sort of been the team 10 modus operandi.

Hinata had reached into the tumbler, carefully choosing one of the topmost balls before handing it to Iruka.

"Ahem," he said, affecting an expression that suspiciously resembled pity. "You'll need to read it."

Hinata glanced over, eyes wide, and lost all colour.

Ino considered -- Hinata would have taken first place for most obvious crush ever, so Ino figured she would have likely fainted if she pulled someone she wanted from the drum. Making Naruto a definite out. There were the two on her team, but it was more likely that she'd be blushing madly for that. What else? The curiosity was going to kill her; she'd have to ask Hinata the moment the meeting was through.

But there were still two choices to be made.

"Yamanaka Ino," called Iruka, looking up at her from the podium. "Your turn."

Ino carefully smoothed down her skirt, standing up decisively. A sudden coldness flared in her stomach at the sound of her name, and the trek down the ten or so steps to the front felt like a long mile. Her mind flicked through the options; was there anyone she wouldn't mind receiving? Sasuke would be the obvious choice, but she had a feeling that any experience with him would just be slightly cold and very awkward. Shikamaru and Chouji were totally out, but she supposed it wouldn't be so bad with one member of the other teams. Kiba was sort of cute and marginally less hyperactive than Naruto. And Shino had the whole silent-type thing going on.

"Ino, you have to choose a ball."

Oh right. She finally moved from where she was standing aimlessly by the drum and reached inside, fumbling about for a deeper ball. Kiba or Shino, Ino cheered mentally. Her fingers closed around one near the bottom; she withdrew her hand slowly, feeling apprehension well up at the base of her throat. Ino swallowed. Opening her palm, she took a nervous look at the name.

Then everything went quiet in Ino's head.

"Wait." She turned to Iruka. "This must be a mistake. I'm going to redraw."

Iruka looked at her uneasily. "You don't get to redraw, Ino. At least not until the next round."

"Oh no, I understand. It's just that this… can't possibly count." She held out the ball. "See? There would be so many things wrong with this, I don't know enough words to cover them all."

Iruka frowned at her. "Um… no. Rules are rules." He bent to write the name down.

Ino freaked. "What?! No, Iruka-sensei… there must be rules about this." She gestured at the ball like it had sprouted wings. "Can't you see that there are, like, special, extenuating circumstances involved here? Like my dignity and stuff?"

"Please don't make this awkward, Ino," Iruka soothed in a hushed voice.

"Like my sanity and stuff?"

"No. I'm sorry. You can return to your seat now." Iruka had already written the name down – possibly because he was evil – and Ino stared at it limply, her stomach having risen to the level of her tonsils. She gave a few half-hearted mouth flaps before her legs started to woodenly move underneath her, carrying her back to her seat.

This, clearly, was a joke. It had to be a joke. Any moment now, she'd wake up and it would be this very morning, and she'd realize that maybe she shouldn't have eaten that last piece of falafel because it sometimes gave her nightmares, especially when she was under a lot of stress, and, oh no, she was late for that stupid meeting today.

But it was sure taking a hell of a while to end.

Returning to her seat, Ino was determined to wait out the remainder of the nightmare – bracing herself for the axe-murderers and the falls that should have marked the end. And sat. And sat. Somewhere, in the periphery of her consciousness, she heard Sakura kick up a similar fuss about her assigned partner. Ino counted slow breaths to measure the time.

Nothing. Iruka finished up with a brief notice that he would verbally notify the students participating in this round. Ino counted forty breaths; fifty. The people around her began to thin and disperse. Sakura had come over to her seat.

"So,” she offered, not noticing Ino’s state of catatonia. “Guess who's going to drown herself in the shower tonight?" She held up her ball as Ino looked up glumly. It read Uzumaki Naruto like some sort of blood-written curse.

Somehow, Ino could only feel mildly sympathetic. “Oh spare me the theatrics.” She held up her own ball, where tiny black letters spelled Nara Shikamaru. “Because I’m clearly going to need a grave plot right. Next. To. Yours.”

Hinata, however, did not need to propose a gruesome way to die. She had toddled over worriedly -- still the same deathly shade of pale -- and placed her ball solemnly on Ino's desk. The other two practically butt heads trying to read the name written there. It said: Uchiha Sasuke.

Ino gave a heavy gulp on Hinata's behalf. Clearly, the three had a terrible, terrible month ahead of them.

Part 2
Part 3

A Lighter Logic (3/?)

2007-08-22T00:46:13Z

A Lighter Logic (3/?)
Not mine.
PG-13
AU, Gen/Romance, WIP, Shikamaru/Ino
Summary: One little favor may not have seemed like much to ask for, but in Shikamaru's opinion, there was no such thing as a good roadtrip. Especially when Ino was involved.

Part One
Part Two

Back at the Leaf, the trio had always met Asuma at the new Korean barbeque joint around corner, for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that Chouji had somehow earned them all a verified frequent flier discounts at the place. The restaurant had ridden in on the trendy new wave of Asian-themed eateries, although it hadn’t made the biggest splash of the lot: if not for the insanely cool grills artfully placed in the centre of all the tables, the grease and super-savory delights were just a little too indulgent for the sado-masochistic, self-deniant yuppies.

Asuma had watched a couple practicing meditation on the perfectly-manicured lawn outside with a suspiciously raised eyebrow, shaking his head over his lighter.

“One day,” Shikamaru threatened blandly, poking at the strips of meat sizzling on the grill. “They’ll make this place non-smoking. What’ll you do then, I wonder?”

“You know,” interceded Asuma, hand still cupped over the lighter and cigarette dangling haphazardly from his lips. “This is all bullshit.” He raised one arm, indicating outside and the couple placed there.

Shikamaru looked at them carefully, impeccable posture from years of parent-paid ballet lessons, good skin, toned whatever. Whatever trace spirituality that still lingered in the act was quashed by the superficiality of it all. But, hey, Shikamaru wasn’t an unfair person.

“Maybe,” he said, dangling another piece of meat over the grill. “We’re all just horribly biased against the Disposable-Incomees.”

Asuma grinned ruefully. “What? For stealing our land, ostentatiously changing our neighborhoods and marrying our women? Never.” He had an incredibly agreeable smile on his face suddenly, like the notion of a stake-and-torch overthrow was totally on the menu. “That’s not what I’m talking about, though,” Asuma conceded. “I mean, this,” he gestured to the lawn. “The belief, the spirituality.”

The topic seemed a little heavy for such a lovely day. Shikamaru looked at him a little ruefully for the introduction of such heavy subject matter, and leaned back, having always been one relatively okay with backing down from intellectual challenges.

“You know what I mean,” Asuma began, waving the unashed cigarette at him, causing an ember-lit streak to linger in Shikamaru’s line of sight. “The framework lacks –”

“—Perfection?” Finished Shikamaru with a hard roll of his eyes, conceding to the bait. “You’re right, I guess. Something’s gotta give for the rest to fit. To prove something, you ultimately have to disprove the vehicle with which you arrive with your proof. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem—”

Asuma looked at him, dumbstruck.

“—Or something like that,” Shikamaru sighed, leaning his head down on the table.

Shaking his head, Asuma broke out into a delirious grin; in the distance, Shikamaru watched as storm clouds rumbled on the horizon, ominous and overcast. The general vicinity had a certain flatness to the topography and the Leaf had been notorious for its view of miles and miles around (Naruto had once attested, wide-eyed, that he had seen Akamaru run away for three days that one time he and Kiba got into a rare and ridiculous fight). Imminent storms were basically a non-existent phenomenon. You always saw them coming.

“So,” his teacher croaked amusedly. “You don’t buy, I guess.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” He began absently. Two blocks down the straight lane, Shikamaru spotted Chouji and Ino step onto the sidewalk, the thought occurring to him that somewhere, somewhere it had to be written in stone, the universal law that Ino was perpetually late for everything.

Asuma frowned. “It does. You need to believe in something. If there’s an issue with the framework, then make your own.”

Shikamaru looked at him wearily. “What’s with all this? You’re being very…”

Grinning, Asuma interjected: “Sagacious?”

“I was thinking more ‘obnoxiously cryptic’,” corrected Shikamaru, lifting another piece of meat to his mouth as the doors swung open behind him, Ino’s telltale nag and the rustle rustle of Chouji’s potato chip bag seeming to fill the expanses of the restaurant.

“Hey,” Asuma said, chuckling around the smoked-down cigarette as he slid over to make room. “I’m trying to leave you with some life-long philosophy, here.”

“Move over!” Ino said by way of greeting, thumping Shikamaru rather brutally in the stomach.

He sighed, sliding over. “Depends on how long the life is, though.”

That had been on Monday.

Mr. Narita had not been pleased.

When the two passed back through the parkette, shoulders hunched unaccustomedly to the bitter cold, he had still been there behind the junked-out stone chessboard, pockmarked from acid rain years and bird-beak staccatos, taking a brief moment of delicious glory after he had wiped the proverbial floor with T&T’s tiny form.

In chess, anyway.

“You know,” he commented darkly, glowering as the two passed through his park-bench vicinity with heads tucked low into their collars. “That sure doesn’t look like a sandwich to me.”

This was growing old. Any moment now, Shikamaru was sure the gods would stop shitting him. “No,” he agreed over one shoulder, slowing down in a marginally-friendly way, but still keeping decent pace. “She’s just a remarkably anthropomorphic one, believe me.”

Ino had come to a confused halt, staring between the elderly man on the bench and Shikamaru’s receding back for one befuddled moment before deciding that the only way to deal with people of the less-than-sane persuasion was to not make any sudden movements and back away slowly. Appropriate offerings also did wonders, if the black and stormy days of Sakura’s weepy period were any indication.

“Get back here, you little worm!” Mr. Narita hollered suddenly, coming to the quick decision that the relative trade-off between the effort it would take to make an equally snappy comeback to Shikamaru’s snappy retort and the subsequent 7.0-on-the-Richter migraine this kid gave him every time he opened his mouth was just simply not worth it. “You owe me a game, damnit!”

Shikamaru heaved a sigh, slowing to a standstill. “Sorry old man,” he offered abortively. “I’m…” Walking the green mile? Breathing my last few breaths? Please, Mr. Narita, pray fervently for me? “…On a mission. I’ll owe you.” At Mr. Narita’s sudden intake of breath: “—Again. I know, I remember.”

“Hold on,” Ino interjected (loudly, as was her modus operandi), believing that she was entitled to answers, or something. She decidedly left one of the four remaining coffee cups (she had mixed one into her latte, which, for some unfathomable reason, was a piddly excuse for caffeine for a heavy-weight like her) squarely on the worn stone chessboard in front of Mr. Narita, who looked at her with a blend of jealous distaste (for being a chessmate-stealing bitch) and also mild curiosity. “Where exactly are we going, again?”

“Listen, I’m late for an execution,” Shikamaru stated, a profound note to his voice. “So safe trip home, alright?”

Shikamaru supposed that it had been a rather crappy reaction, but, to be fair, Ino’s had been a rather crappy request. And one was always entitled to grade-A asshattery when propositioned thusly.

Even so, she had asked nevertheless. And this was how it went.

“So what’s this favour I keep hearing about?” Shikamaru asked warily, leaning back into his chair with an air of cautious disapproval. “A kidney? My liver? Although, to be fair, you owe me a lot of money.”

“No, not the first-born-child kind,” Ino agreed, glancing back over at the espresso bar. She fiddled with the hem of her skirt and raised an eyebrow. “Are our drinks ready yet?”

“No,” Shikamaru interjected blandly.

Ino frowned over the tabletop at his brusque reply. “You don’t have to be rude. How the hell would you know if you don’t go over there and pick them up, anyway?”

Sighing, Shikamaru leaned forward, pointedly glancing at his watch with an air of “time’s ‘a wastin’” before looking back at her expectantly.

But if the past twenty-something years had been any indication, Ino had never been one to take a freaking hint. Departing from the table, she made her way back to the counter, returning after a few testy moments with her latte and a cold coffee.

Brilliant.

If Shikamaru had any intention of drinking the stuff anyway (which was, by the way, oozing hippie in all places – volcanic ash, high-altitude, shade-grown Arabica beans that they didn’t pay the poor farmers pennies for every six-dollar latte, rainforest friendly, etc. etc.) he would have noticed that his snappy comment to the barista had resulted in his coffee being poured first and sitting, losing heat and subjected to the elements, upon the counter while Ino’s latte was lovingly being steamed. And his? Lukewarm as hell. And $3.99, too.

But, anyway.

“Favour,” Shikamaru prompted in a not-so-subtle way and Ino gave him a sidelong glance from her cup, head tilted back in mid-gulp.

“Fine, geez.” She placed it down in front of her with a huffy sigh, scowling equally at him and her latte with a disdainful frown. “Hey, this stuff? Tastes like crap, you know.”

“Listen, did you spend several hundred on a plane ticket to come and prevaricate on my borrowed time?”

Ino gave him a withering look. “And you’re an asshole, you know that?”

“Favour,” Shikamaru pressed on, not to be swayed.

Something weird happened then: a hush washed in, the sky obscured with a chill veil, clouds moving towards them, and the lighting suddenly changed – with the fluctuating illumination, so did the expression on her face.

In later moments of backwards rumination, Shikamaru would have lamented the fact that he had stayed seated, wished he had stood up at that very moment and walked through that door without looking back, but inevitably these things don’t go away with careful amounts of regret and you get by without them.

She said: “There’s someone I need to find. Will you come with me?”

And if he had been listening – really listening, rather than staving off immense incredulity at the sheer notion of her ridiculous request – Shikamaru would have heard a note of something else tingeing the edges of her somewhat-familiar voice, an air of guilty sadness that he didn’t really comprehend. His mind, though, working on a sleepy default of shrewdity, filed the notion away for later. It would bite him in the ass, eventually. Everything always did.

What he should have known then was that something was wrong – very wrong – and that the only time he had seen that look on her face had been one day, so and so many years ago, when she had forgotten to feed Sakura’s pet fish. He should have known the moment the vigilant voice echoing through the recesses of his brain went absolutely rabid and resounded with a precise and booming: careful.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Shikamaru looked at her incredulously across the short expanse of the table, thinking of a number of retorts consisting of an abortive string of words that would roughly equate ‘Are you freaking crazy?’ Because there was work and there was life and sundry other things that didn’t stray too far from the above subheadings, and Shikamaru was sure Ino’s little treasure hunt would consist of a lot of missed days and considerable effort and lots of things with which Shikamaru was not openly comfortable.

Ever voluble were his subsequent soundless mouth flaps, and in the end, he opted for a very simple: “What?”

Ino gave a vaguely feral growl. “Ugh… Shikamaru, I’m asking you for this one favour. You can’t help me this once?”

“No,” he said with a resounding note of finality, moving his coffee cup to the side. “This is crazy. You know it is—” At this, she gave him a mildly shifty look. “And you’d better fess up to exactly what it is you’re really here for—”

“Just stop, okay?” She interjected pettily, popping open the lid of her latte to dump in one of her free cups of coffee, courtesy of Shikamaru’s unintentional goodwill. “It’s a guy. Alright?”

Shikamaru paused. Stashed somewhere in the back of his memory was receiving an email from his mother (“Because,” read the sarcastically dripping text. “God forbid you should deign to check your voicemail once a millennia.”) about Ino’s joyous engagement to that Eiki-fellow. She had been elated. Shikamaru had been pleased, but clearly not enough to go home or, god forbid, call her with any jubilant congratulations. He had left home indefinitely for his own reasons. Plus, it just wasn’t his style.

Shikamaru watched her, prompting her with his silence. Eventually she gave in. “He… um… doesn’t live in the Leaf anymore… I have something I need to ask him.” She lapsed back into pale silence, avoiding his gaze intently. He accredited it to the deduced fact that apparently the engagement had fallen through and mentally conceded to the fact that, yes, he really should check his voicemail more often.

Sighing, Shikamaru leaned back against his seat. “What does this have to do with me?”

Ino wasn’t wasting any time. “He’s holed up near here, some weird backwater town without an airport. I need your help. Well, mostly your car.”

“Ino,” he pronounced slowly. “I can’t just up and leave any day I want. I have a job, mind you.”

Looking affronted, Ino leaned forward. “Oh right, that little set-up you got through pseudo-nepotism.” She looked a little bitter.

“Asuma wasn’t related to me.”

Ino waved a flippant hand at his comment. “Same difference.”

Ino had always been able to wear his patience to a hair-thin thread in her own, thankfully patented way. Apparent broken engagement aside, there was really only so much sympathy one could feel for this girl. “Ino,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose agitatedly. “The answer is no. Now I have to go, but I’ll walk you to the subway station.”

At which point he promptly gathered up his stuff and made his way past the gawking barista and out the front door, Ino protesting affrontedly at his heels.

Fine, so he was being an utter asshole. Fine, so this was more like breaking through utter asshole and falling flat on your ass as son-of-a-bitch supreme. And fine, considering that he was leaving a girl (who, let it be mentioned, happened to be one of his oldest acquaintances ever) alone and, god forbid, homeless in the big city, this was likely more akin to spending all your childhood afternoons with Satan, with the teacups and the hair-braiding and golf games and all.

“Shikamaru!” Came her pissed-off yell from behind him and he didn’t feel particularly compelled to turn around. But he did, partially because she did sound a little whacked-out insane what with being out in the cold and the fact that it suddenly started to rain, but mostly because he suspected she was about to take off her shoe and toss it at the back of his head. He had already evaded one shoe-related encounter today and wasn’t about to let his efforts go to naught.

“Please,” Ino said somewhat desperately, and her untied shoelaces merely confirmed his suspicion. “There’s something I really need to know.”

Shikamaru rolled his eyes. The rain clouds were converging now, a confluence of chill dirty grey all along the cluttered horizon, and maybe if he hurried, he’d beat the rain.

“Chouji can’t help you,” he backtracked hopefully, although deep down knew that the suggestion made very little sense whatsoever. If her runaway bridegroom was in the near vicinity, even Ino could make the logical choice and come to ask him. Just because it was logical, though, didn’t make it anymore palatable for him.

“Shikamaru,” she confessed cryptically. “For reasons I can’t really tell you about now, you have to come with me.”

“What?”

“Please,” Ino repeated and Mr. Narita glanced up at him pleadingly, suddenly sympathetic to her cryptic cause – or at least, the desolate note to her plea. “Chouji can’t come. He’s got something he needs to deal with back home. So just say ‘yes’, okay?”

“No,” Shikamaru decided bluntly, turning tail and stalking off in the opposite direction. The storm clouds loomed ever closer and he feared the probable risk of being utterly soaked. The morning had started out so beautifully, too. Until he woke up, at least.

She gave a frustrated growl and turned to Mr. Narita beseechingly. “What do I do now?” Ino appealed to him weepily. “Chouji and I have nowhere to stay!”

So Chouji was here too? This made Shikamaru pause a little in his tracks and almost – almost – turn around. But in the end, it was the tone in Mr. Narita’s voice, as he yelled down the paved walkway: “You get back here, you monster! Don’t you dare leave her alone!” In a voice that might have described some war-camp atrocity and made the old lady feeding pigeons two benches down jump a solid foot in the air.

People were staring now, and Shikamaru was not going to be made into a girl-ditching spectacle if he could help it. He marched back and promptly grabbed her by the elbow, stage whispering agitatedly: “Fine, we’ll get you guys a hotel or something and then sort out what’s going to happen, okay?”

Ino smiled at him smugly, and then brutally whacked him in the arm that held her captive. “Sounds good to me,” she said, totally singsong, as he winced from the pain and let go.

“Fine,” conceded Shikamaru, rubbing his sore arm. “Let’s find Chouji first, okay? I’d like to talk to someone with some sense.”

Above them, the sky was made luminous for a brief moment in time and then came the lagging thunder, like the precedence of senses: first light, then sound, before the onslaught of cold and bitter rain from the bruised and looming sky.

It had caught up to them, after all.

Thoughts? More? Reviews = Part of balanced diet. C'mon folks, hit me ♥.

A Lighter Logic (2/?)

2007-08-11T22:27:45Z

A Lighter Logic (2/?)
Disclaimer: Naruto=Kishimoto's awesome ninja brainchild. I? Am not quite as awesome.
Summary: One little favour may not have seemed like much to ask for, but in Shikamaru's opinion, there was no such thing as a good roadtrip. Especially when Ino was involved.

Part One here.

2.

*

Outside, it had started to rain. The impending season beckoning hypnotically, the sky followed blindfolded, littered through with hot and heavy clouds and spilling cumulus-filtered rays of light and water along the scattered expanse of the street, casting a grey glow through the cold, concrete expanse, dull and wan and ultimately lifeless.

And Shikamaru had mayonnaise in his shoe.

“Look,” he explained rather irately, turning to his new companion and counting off on his fingers. “You owe me a sandwich, possibly a leg brace, and an explanation as to why you’re here.”

“Gee, Shika,” replied Ino in a voice dripping with sarcasm, both hands propped against her hips. “It’s certainly nice to see you, too.”

When her comment was met with a silence that somehow conjured mental images of being lynched by a mob of angry protesters and her caught with a handful of burgers made from meat miscellaneous, she deferred to his powers of bizarre telepathy and scoffed, feigning flippancy.

“Well, I was in the Leaf last night, and the night before, for that matter, but I guess that’s a little off topic. It was a nightmare getting here after the flight landed, by the way, you’d think the whole big city thing would make it more accessible, maybe a little pedestrian friendly, but seriously. Lots of concrete. So hideously grey. Buses late like you wouldn’t imagine.”

Shikamaru gritted his teeth.

“Don’t give me that look. I’m getting to it. So I was there and stuff, and then some things happened.” She appeared a little shifty at this and Shikamaru felt instantly suspicious. “But in the end, it was like, well what are you going to do about it, and we figured we’d come see you.” Ino looked at him frankly, both arms over her head to shield her face from the rain. “So that’s it, Mr. Fourth-Degree. Did I pass customs, or is there like some sort of surprise cavity check?”

Shikamaru actually made an attempt to open his mouth and argue that she hadn’t told him anything at all, except for the fact that she was now here and had something to do, in addition to possibly dropping his IQ by a few points. “Things,” Shikamaru reiterated and rubbed the bridge of his nose agitatedly. It was runaround for sure, and she still hadn’t answered his question, but goddamn did he need a smoke. He fumbled in his pocket briefly while Ino watched him in utter disbelief.

“I’m cold,” she deadpanned at his utter audacity.

Luckily, there was still one left. Shikamaru flicked the lighter, watching the fire flare into crimson life. “Yeah.”

“Want to know why I’m cold?”

A wise man once said that honesty was the best policy, so: “No,” answered Shikamaru frankly.

“—Because,” Ino soldiered on, ignoring him. “I’m standing out in the rain in a time-flash winter, and here I am, without my muffler.”

So Shikamaru debated. There with two ploys to choose from this proverbial fork in the road and, with a little luck, both would end up with answers by the end of the day: 1) Following the creative ways of the ancient Chinese and hoping that the cold, dripping water would inevitably drive Ino crazy enough to at least spill her (real) grim purpose, or 2) taking her inside and making her warm and complacent enough to reveal said grim purpose. And considering that rain here (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter) had never before lasted quite long enough to provoke bouts of insane confession, and that the latter would be infinitely more comfortable for him (and, really now, this was all that mattered), Shikamaru was leaning heavily to 2).

The clincher, though, came at exactly 1:47 PM on that Tuesday afternoon, late as he was from his break and likely to die at the hands of his enraged, boy-hating co-worker, when Yamanaka Ino broke one of the very rules of the universe, reached over, and plucked the cigarette from his fingers.

And took a drag.

Everything went strangely quiet in Shikamaru’s head. It wasn’t so much the fact that here had been one serious Code A violation of personal space, since when one grew up with a girl prone to violent tendencies, one learned to get used to these (often bruising) contraventions. Or even the fact that she had started smoking (and when?), but mostly because you don’t show up and piss off and then steal the last vestiges of veritable lifeblood like that, you blood-sucking whore.

All of this, naturally, was conveyed as a few seething and soundless mouth flaps on Shikamaru’s part.

“I was cold,” Ino explained, both hands held up in a placating gesture and the cigarette shamelessly tilting from her lips.

No, thought Shikamaru’s livid and suddenly irrational brain. Oh no, she didn’t. Now, there was suddenly option 3): snapping her skinny-ass neck right into half, but trace rationality deemed this one for the dreambooks, swinging, heavy and pendulous, to a resoundingly unanimous decision for 2).

“Give me back my cigarette,” he sniped, with an air of ‘you just brought the smack down’. “And get the hell inside.”

Growing up in The Leaf had been a double-edged sword of sorts. For starters, it had resulted in a fairly close-knit group of friends, which, ironically enough, was the blade-edge in question. It meant that Shikamaru had spent copious amounts of his childhood playing with the children of his dad’s best friends. Unfortunately, this also meant that he had spent copious amounts of his childhood playing with the children of his dad’s best friends. If you knew the friends in question, this would all make a sick kind of sense.

Chouji had been okay, and if Shikamaru hadn’t been a guy with the emotional range of a piece of plastic, then he’d wax a little more poetic on how he had been his best friend for ever and ever, and that, until the latter years, they had never spent a day apart. And how Chouji had always stoically agreed upon the understated therapeutic properties of cloud-watching. But in the end, Shikamaru wasn’t, so Chouji, for all intents and purposes, had been okay.

Ino had been – well, more on this later.

The majority of his class (yes, they had gone through all the grades together, a process that reeked strongly of those Friday-night family sitcoms he sadly had all the time in the world for) had attended the (only) local dojo. The place had been built before the yuppie explosion (Pilates classes everywhere, with a healthy side of various spiritual-reinforcing practices: Ashtanga Yoga, aikido, and smoothie bars – yes, Ino used to tell him, overpriced ground fruits and vegetables do improve the soul, so shut up and lend me eight dollars), so it had been the regular, run-of-the-mill Karate kind. To be fair, however, the place had not been untouched by the invasion of the Disposable-Incomees: it had expanded, hired more teachers from around the general vicinity and paid them plenty. This didn’t necessarily filter out the crazies (Kakashi-sensei had always been a tad off his rocker, and that was without considering those books he always read. Reading obviously-named erotica during Parents’ Night? Worst idea ever. “Or the best,” Kakashi had deadpanned cryptically. “Look underneath the underneath.”), but it did guarantee them the most capable teachers.

Asuma had been, well, amazing. His mentor, friend, inspiration, and the only guy who had never really doubted that Shikamaru wouldn’t be absolutely nothing in the endgame (including Shikamaru himself, it was really that bad). But you know: emotional range, piece of plastic and all that jazz.

So, on the bright side, Shikamaru had been with the same group of kids year after year, and the possibility of improvement was rarely masked by embarassment (it became redundant after a while) and was usually fueled by rivalries (Shikamaru excluded, naturally). On the other side, it meant that Shikamaru had to share his precious childhood with the same odd-ball crazies continuously: Naruto’s bizarre, slightly ADHD-antics, Sasuke’s borderline sociopathic disorder, Lee’s – well – Lee-ness and, finally, the most violent girls the world had ever seen.

And this brings us to Ino.

Now, Ino had been the ‘other child of his father’s best friend’, and some son-of-bitch thought it would be mighty hilarious if they had put Ino, Shikamaru and Chouji in the same individual performance teams, just like their fathers before them (le gasp!). This would be sort of fine, since Shikamaru had known them before, played with them during dinners and so on and such forth. And Chouji was cool and squishy and only hit really hard when you called him fat. Except, Ino? Pummelled. Really, really, really hard. Suffering a mottled assortment of bruises in all colours of the rainy-day spectrum had not been worth it for someone’s stupid shits and giggles.

And so, even though Shikamaru had been sure that he would have ended up Chouji’s best friend in some other way: maybe it would have come to be on the playground, or maybe another one of the familiar family dinner parties, he was fairly convinced it would never have been the same with Ino. Time had caused the distance between ‘is’ and ‘what-if’ dissipate, immolate, disappear into a sort of normal that really couldn’t be undermined. Made it reach a point where he respected her, above all things, and knew, possibly better than anyone, all about the inner workings of her bad blood with Sakura. He knew about the ikebana and about Sasuke, about the whole touchy weight-issue and the anger-management problems. And she had never said a word. There, semi-understood, Ino had always remained the one axiom he had never bothered taking the time to figure out.

And that had been alright with him. Although there were a lot of things to lament about the trio, there had never been any assumption of an alternate reality. And in real life, this half-assed sort of bliss was all anyone could ever ask for.

So they had all been a weightier, generic version of happy. At least until Shikamaru left.

Now, Shikamaru had never been one to make proverbial mountains out of molehills, and anyone would contest that one sandwich, as opposed to the kind of switcheroo done by parents with a dead goldfish on their hands and their children due home any minute, actually did equivalently trade for another – in this case, it might even end up far better. But he supposed his lasting grudge was not the product of a childish mind but rather a reaction that was the sum of all individual mood swings occurring since the sad moment he had deemed to wake up that very morning.

And, seriously.

“See?” said Ino complacently, unceremoniously plunking down one overly garnished tomato-pesto-chicken-and-sweet-and-sour-sauce-on-ridiculously-hard-to-pronounce-bread squarely onto their table; five medium-sized coffee cups nestled between her arm and chest. “One of three problems easily solved – even though we both know you don’t really need the leg brace.”

Shikamaru gave it the once over. And it was good thing that he never ate sandwiches with uber-hyphenated names purely on principle since Ino, after nestling herself and the coffee cups down in the seat across from him, reached right over and plucked up one half.

“Wasn’t that barista just awesome?” She commented around a mouthful of the complicated sandwich. “She insisted on giving me all the cups of coffee you haven’t been taking. Seriously, Shikamaru, you were totally entitled to these.”

If Shikamaru didn’t know better, she was being rather shifty after all, overly-cheerful and a little too familiar after having not seen or heard from him for the upside of three years.

The barista had toddled over, pen and paper in hand and Shikamaru, despite having eaten here almost every week for the past several months, had absolutely no idea they waited tables. “Would you guys like anything to drink?”

He was about refuse before Ino sprang to animated life. “Yes. One large West-Coast latté, please. Wait, no – make that Italian, super-dark, possibly, like, six shots?”

“You already have coffee,” Shikamaru deadpanned, indicating the five cups on their table.

“Oh no,” said Ino flippantly. “These aren’t for me.”

The barista, clearly deprived of the happy act of order-taking in Shikamaru’s vicinity, joyfully jotted it all down. “Then who – wait – six shots?” Gaped Shikamaru in disbelief, about to comment that, what with the skinniness and the smoking and caffeine, she somehow seemed to have cultivated a propensity to massive heart-failure in his absence, but then she stood up and excused herself to bathroom to fix her malfunctioning belt.

25 inches, he thought, the notion conjuring up his mother’s conspiratorial sotto-voce as the Nishizaki’s had left for their own home: “I thought she was going to break in half, poor thing.”

“Is your friend a model, or something?” The barista asked somewhat wistfully, looking after Ino. Then, her expression turning troubled, said: “Oops. I forgot to ask what her milk preference was.”

Shikamaru shot her a withering glance. “Just coffee for me, thanks,” he snapped, a tad unnecessarily at her. “Black. And she’ll take 18% cream in her latté, only two shots caffeinated, four decaf. And don’t bother bringing them over – I’ll come pick them up when they’re done.”

The barista looked as though she was about to protest, but thought better of it and slank away to make the drinks, only throwing one bitter look for Shikamaru’s meanness before leaving.

Contrary to popular belief, the world did not stand still merely upon necessity. Shikamaru glanced at his watch and lamented the whopping forty-nine lunchtime overdue minutes it read, and acknowledged that he was clearly living on borrowed time here. Sadly considering Asahi, living had been a painfully fitting wordchoice.

Ino returned a moment later, sliding into the opposite benchseat. “You haven’t touched the sandwich,” she pointed out, swiping up the other half without his consent. Luckily, the surprise and subsequent shenanigans had caused his appetite to go the way of his lunch hour, but that still didn’t quite make it okay.

“Alright,” he started agitatedly, rubbing both temples with disturbing fervour. “I – just – why are you here, again?”

Ino glanced back towards the espresso bar for their in-progress drinks. “Why are you being so weird?” She prevaricated shiftily. “Could it be so strange that I’m just here to see you?”

Weird? Given the fact that Ino had shown up as basically 5 feet 6 of weirdness in oddly slouchy jeans, Shikamaru assumed that she might have been joking. And if not for the undertone of serious intent inherent in her (remembered) lilting tone, he would have.

Shikamaru, sighing indulgently, leaned forward. “Ino. I have an angry coworker waiting to lynch me and string me up on her Christmas tree this upcoming season, one less cigarette in my pocket and no explanation as to why you’re here. So, why. Are. You. Here?”

Ino gave him a withering look. “I’m not lying. There are a few reasons, possibly including but not limited to, a future favour that I may or may not need, but that’s neither here nor there.” And when Shikamaru’s expression suddenly took an express turn for the worse, added complacently: “But really, above all things, we’re actually here to see you.”

And despite the fact that he wanted, order notwithstanding, a real explanation for her supremely-shifty return – and no, he wasn’t convinced that it was to play quirky insouciant to his disenchanted everyman– one change of departments, a smoke, a sandwich and a long, fulfilling nap, Shikamaru staked this one as a sulky cease-fire, turning tiredly towards the adjacent window and looking forlornly down the street. Outside, it had stopped raining.

Regaining sullen equilibrium and turning back to her, the word ‘we’ ricocheting suspiciously through his brain like a boomerang ill-omen, Shikamaru asked: "So, what's this favor?”

Argh... written in one blinding go, so pardon the errors. Reviews still warrant... um, a good word to heaven if I get there first? ♥

A Lighter Logic, Part 1

2007-08-08T17:00:54Z

A Lighter Logic
Canon the original bonafide property of one Kishimoto M.
PG-13
AU, Gen/Romance, WIP, Shikamaru/Ino
Summary: One small favor may not seem like a lot to ask for, but in Shikamaru's book, there was no such thing as a good road-trip.

PCK UP A CURRY BUN, the text message read; all-caps denoting urgency, impatience and, ultimately, laziness. Considering the sender, it was likely a mottled assortment of all three. The battery on his cell phone gave a feeble beep of neglect, protesting the fact that it had been far, far too long since the last time it had been charged.

The noise also insinuated another beckoning: FRM THT MOON BKRY ON CNSTNCE ST.

Shikamaru rued the day this mess had started.

It had been a Tuesday, for sure. Shikamaru swore he’d never forget the date so as to use it as extortion-fodder against the Powers That Were when they tried to send him to hell, or, you know, the actual equivalent. Please observe Specimen A: The Day You (referring specifically to Your Excellencies, of course) Ruined My Life.

It had all begun one apparently inconspicuous morning at work.

For starters, someone had proverbially pissed in his co-worker’s cereal, resulting in her rollickingly bad mood from the get-go. Shikamaru, stepping foot into the office, immediately sensed the sinister aura of him own impending doom – a time-honoured result of his strangely innate Angry Woman Radar (courtesy, of course, of his lovely mother), but mostly deduced from the disgruntled snort she gave at the very sight of him.

“Oh,” Asahi said, sighing aggravatedly and turning back to her blinking computer screen. “It’s just you.”

Well, it was starting to smell suspiciously like one of those days. Shikamaru, knowing a relatively hefty handful of things, realised that today was one in which he’d have to sail fairly low – no problem for him, as he was rather agreeable with peaceful solitude. Hostile situations like these usually required an offering of chocolate or something vaguely akin – failing that, there was always the tried and true method of Shutting Up and Sitting Down. He also figured that making any sudden movements might be rather counter-productive.

So Shikamaru tossed her only one tired and confused glance before making his way over to his own cubicle and heaving himself into one of the ridiculously comfortable desk chairs – the sort of ridiculously comfortable that actually resulted in the discoloured wallspace around the door, where bits of paint had fallen off from time and trauma. Or in other words: from that one time he actually disregarded the immense trouble involved in bringing (read: stealing) that chair home to decorate his sparse living room, only to find, to his frustrated surprise, that it had been brought into the office and assembled there. Incidentally, it was also too big to fit. Surprise, surprise.

Lesson well learned, Shikamaru admitted, somewhat bitterly. I’ll never do anything troublesome again.

“You’re not going to leave that there, I hope,” was Asahi's sudden challenge, clearly not seeing the unspoken ‘Leave Me the Hell Alone’ written all over Shikamaru’s perfectly innocuous, currently low-sailing face.

Oh, she was like this for a reason.

In the wake of what was now dubbed The Breakup from Hell (mostly by other coworkers, of the nosier variety), Shikamaru had expanded his plethora of knowledge by a few more desperately unneeded facts:

a) Somewhere in last past six months, someone in the higher-ups had up and broken the whole ‘no soliciting with co-workers’ rule, venerable and integral to the greater workplace hive mind as it was.

b) Aerospace technician #12, AKA: Minato Asahi, was the lucky lady embroiled in said scandal.

c) Shikamaru, painfully trying to avoid getting embroiled in said a)-through-b) scandal, realized that his chair was a freaking sleep-a-palooza in yellow upholstering – a result of many work hours’ worth of careful ignorance and feigned naps.

d) Scandalous topics were likely headed for scandalous ends. This one proved no exception, occurring as a painful break-up with a healthy side of Yelling in Public Places and an Ocean Full of Tears, to add insult to injury.

________________________________________________

e) It was now empirically proven that the ‘no soliciting with coworkers’ rule prevented bouts of public workplace distress, drama-queen thrashing sessions and sudden misandry, therefore making it incontestably integral to the promotion of a male-safe work environment.

Shikamaru, opening his eyes with pained and deliberate slowness, kept his gaze on the ceiling, counting plasterboard panels as she spoke.

“I said—” Asahi interjected.

Panel four, light. Panel five, panel six, light. “I heard you the first time.”

That was mouthy, Shikamaru thought, wincing internally. Not quite low enough, sailor.

Wrath incurred, Asahi spun towards him, taking one moment to visually partake in about six different kinds of murder, all of which strangely ended up with Shikamaru gutted and creatively hanging upon the coatrack – necessity was, after all, the mother of invention.

And then she looked at his desk. Out of the corner of his eye, Shikamaru could sense what had happened: Asahi had caught sight of his empty coffee mug and was now glaring utter daggers at it.

It was a little unfair, really. So it might have been ugly and slightly feminine and admittedly unwashed, but as far as Shikamaru was concerned, none of the above had ever been any reason for discrimination.

“Your coffee mug,” the She-Overlord of Darkness intercepted, a tad unnecessarily.

Obligingly, Shikamaru glanced at the offending item. The ‘this entirely innocuous, completely harmless, and existing-solely-within-the-confines-of-my-desk coffee mug?’ went unspoken, but lingered sarcastically in the air. Oh, it lingered indeed, and Asahi was having none of that today, or ever.

“It’s hideous and it’s been sitting there for three days. You could wash it, at least, or possibly throw it away.” She gave a harsh and embittered laugh. “Oh no, you’re a guy. Of course you couldn’t do that.”

A ventured ‘why’ would likely end up with her shoe in his mouth, so Shikamaru figured he’d avoid the trouble. What he really needed, though, much more than a mouthful of cheap and foot-rash-ridden pleather, was a smoke. As in, right now.

“God,” Asahi chuckled seethingly, tapping a frantic staccato against her knee with a poor pencil. “It’s distracting me from over here, and god knows you’re not helping with the project deadline.”

Touché, Shikamaru thought blandly, watching the snake-trail shadows of passers-by across their ground-floor window. The afternoon daylight mingled hotly with the sunshine and somewhere out there was a patch of sky with a perfect number of clouds – not too many but far from being vacant blue – and him without an afternoon off. A tragedy, indeed.

Asahi snorted and asked, in a totally unsociable way: “Where the hell did you get that thing, anyway?”

Which Shikamaru, for all his purported brains, should have seen as one of her evil leading tactics a mile away, but didn’t, instead weighing the relative tradeoff of her mild satisfaction (and possibly, possibly her shutting up. Or failing that, her discrimination headlights aimed at someone who wasn’t him) and a stroll down grassy memory lane, and came to the conclusion that even though said lane was nowadays unkempt and burly with weeds, the latter was the kind of reward even he would walk through searing fire for.

So, fine. The mug: ostensibly green and Pepto-pink, chipped along the rim and once smelling of an array of flowers he would never admit to knowing the names of. Shikamaru looked at it sitting there, innocuous in all its odious glory; thought tiredly of a scattered childhood of potato chip bags, tiger lily petals and shougi pieces, and finally conceded: “It was a gift.”

“God,” snorted Asahi in all smugness. “They must’ve hated you.”

Interestingly enough, Asahi had a terribly decent throwing arm.

And so Shikamaru was made privvy to when he had stood up abrubtly, cutting their conversation despairingly short, and left to smoke out that niggling gut-wrench feeling of craving. Solving the new dent in his head was another matter, though.

Contrary to popular belief, one couldn’t live on a strict diet of Marlboro lights, and conquering this one yearning had cleared the stage for another – of the rumbly sort. Maybe it wouldn’t be too troublesome to get something to eat, he conceded, slouching over to the only restaurant cum trendy hipster café providing remotely edible food.

When Shikamaru passed the small parkette around the corner, shoulders hunched against the frigid gale, his plan was mildly thwarted. “Well, well,” said an incongruently jovial voice from his left. “If it isn’t the shitting genius.”

In an act of utter geniality, Shikamaru forcibly restrained himself from groaning out loud and/or uttering inappropriate profanities. It was Mr. Narita, of course, the kind and rather toddly old man that seemed to be around every available corner with a Go challenge after that one and only time Shikamaru had stopped playing games of shidogo (of course, Mr. Narita wasn’t good enough to realise) and completely swept the floor with him. When Shikamaru, learning from his mother that respect of his elders was far, far above cleanliness and godliness and all that other tripe, relented back into his original pushed losses, Narita would kick up a storm and demand rematch after rematch, until Shikamaru managed to somehow wrangle himself away and grudgingly return to work.

Sometimes, Shikamaru sort of suspected Mr. Narita was one hell of a self-masochist in loafers if he had ever seen one. But then again, it took one to know one.

“You’re not going to let this out-of-town whippersnapper get away with that last win!” Said the shougi partner du jour, a tiny old man Shikamaru had seen Mr. Narita playing before and remembered by the sheer voluminous mound that was his head. The man clearly had some sort of hat-hoarding fetish, and insisted on wearing them one on top of the other every single day – for reasons that Shikamaru was fairly sure would forever remain indecipherable to most human beings. The weather’s sudden turn for the worse had just given him an additional reason. He grinned widely at Shikamaru from a silly and toothless mouth.

Mr. Narita bristled. “An out-of-town whippersnapper he may be, but he’s a bloody genius on the board. You’ll see. Shika, boy, how about a game?”

“Nah, old man,” he declined lazily, looking down the road at the two or so more blocks left to overcome. “There’s a sandwich waiting for me at The Watering Hole. Maybe later.”

“Hippies, the whole lot of them,” Mr. Narita harrumphed in his low, grumbly way, but embroiled as he was in a heated game-battle with Tiny and Toothless, he was, for once, willing to let it slide. “Alright, alright. Say, Shika, what’s this? You’re bleeding, you are!”

Right. Sandwich, another cigarette, and back into the male-employee-harassing-coffee-mug-hurling-lion’s den. “Coffee mug,” he explained cryptically, not bothering to elaborate even at their puzzled faces. Then, taking one long look at their game, added: “Checkmate in sixteen moves.”

Exactly sixteen moves later, Tiny and Toothless blinked carefully at the board, the memory of Shikamaru’s strange prophecy lingering in the air between the two of them. “I… resign,” he confessed, utterly dumbfounded.

Mr. Narita pushed aside his surprise and, breaking into a wide grin, taunted: “I told you so, didn’t I? Boy genius, he is. An utter genius.”

“Yeah,” conceded T&T gruffly. “But he’s still an out-of-towner.”

A cold front had taken hostile charge of the city in recent weeks, sweeping in from the north and causing the delicate morning-time etchings in frost along windows everywhere. Despite the fact that Shikamaru was the (not-so-proud) owner of several colour-permutations of scarves large and ugly (courtesy, once more, of one overbearing mother), he was still dressed bone-chillingly wrong for the weather, resulting in the consumption of about four cigarettes in the six-block distance between his office building and the deli, plus one-and-a-half handfuls worth of brittle and very blue fingers.

Looking back on it all, the sandwiches were typically a little dry, making the tradeoff of one (1) simply palatable and hideously overdecorated meal to the frost-bite induced risk of seven (7) digits – with the exception of the cigarette-holding forefinger, middle finger and thumb – seem a tad unbalanced.

There was a very good reason for this, in addition to the mere fact that digging up the purposefully buried winterwear was totally bothersome. And it was that Tiny and Toothless had been completely right in the first place, since Shikamaru wasn’t from around here, at all.

He had grown up in the local suburbia of another town in another part of the country, a quirky little winding-street neighbourhood possessing its own name at that. The Leafy Gales, or more affectionately, The Leaf.

The general (and fairly sparse) populace teemed with young, plastic yuppies recently moved in, laden with money but not enough things to spend it on other than copious amounts of picture-perfect home décor and golf paraphernalia. These couples usually had the standard amount of young children (2 or 3, all within one or two years of the other) but the not-so-standard waistline measurements for the new mothers (“25 inches,” Shikamaru’s mother tutted once, after their new neighbours had come over to introduce themselves. “The poor thing was about to break in half.” Shikamaru was about to assert that her pity had come after she had laced the girl’s café au lait with 18% cream, thus rendering it redundant, but kept his mouth shut in the end, inevitably knowing far, far better.)

As such, there had been a pretty set number of kids in their general age group and few new ones moved in (the only one being that Sai guy… and the bizarre tanlines everyone now associated with him), leaving them with necessity-honored friendships of familiarity and convenience, but god knew those were the best kinds, anyway.

So it was funny that the issue of the mug should have come up that day. Since only the night before, Shikamaru, for once slightly sleepless (!) at the bizarre weather change, had stared at the urgent and blinking cursor on his computer screen and actually considered writing home. And if the power hadn’t gone out and Shikamaru had no choice but to go to bed, since waiting it out would be mighty troublesome irregardless of the fact that it was still 7:30 at night, he might have done it, too.

It had been a while, anyway.

“Coffee with that?” The barista asked him, sliding the boring ham sandwich across the counter. There were other choices, probably tastier and around the exact same price, but that would involve an amount of personal investment Shikamaru had never really been up to. Food was for sustenance, not personal indulgence. At least not for Shikamaru, anyway. He had always left that up to Chouji.

“Nah,” he replied, fumbling through his pockets.

She paused for a moment, then asked: “You know it’s the same price, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You should get the coffee, you know. Someone out there might be drinking up beans and water that you’re entitled to.”

Shikamaru sighed. He knew he shouldn’t have used the sans-change pants; interac only, and here was a comedian in a barista apron. “And what a deal it is,” he complied tiredly, scooping up the overly garnished plate as he spoke. “But I pretty much have a hayload of vices, so let’s not break the camel’s back—”

THUD. One person collided very heavily with his back and the sandwich launched forwards, ejected from its parsley-laced place of rest, and landed on the floor with a mucky splat.

“Oops!” Said a voice from behind him, uttered from the mouth of the sandwich-ruining-perpetrator.

God, he realised to his painful and interminable horror, why did it have to be so ridiculously familiar? “You should watch where you’re standing! Look at my papers!”

“Are you alright?” The hilarious barista asked tentatively, wiping trace cranberry mayonnaise from the corner of her now-soiled apron.

Shikamaru heaved a tired sigh. “You’re wasting your time,” he said to her under his breath. “She hasn’t been alright for years.”

“Excuse me?” The voice demanded from behind him, leaving the barista looking back and forth between the two of them, confused but nosily intrigued. “Look at me when I’m talking to—hey!”

Shikamaru turned around tiredly, then, eyeing the lineup that was building up behind the irate complainee and himself, grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her outside.

“Shika—ow!”

It had been one hell of a day, apparently, but before Shikamaru could say something along the lines of: gee, it's nice to see you. Note that I was nearly brained using the hideous coffee mug you gave me seven years ago —

— Ino kicked him, with full intent, quite squarely in the shin.

More? Reviews will rock my world indefinitely. ♥

Part 2 here.