Bamboo Hearts Firefly

A Moment's Unforgetting

Those gifts you left have become my enemies,

without them, there might have been a moment's forgetting.

-Ono no Komachi

__________

After all, what was Shino Aburame to her now, but another mission?

And just like any other mission, all she had to do was breathe and concentrate on the buzzing flow of her chakra forming her honeybee jutsu.

If only her hands would stop shaking.

The same way they hadn't stopped shaking on the day she first met him in the Leaf.

How could she imagine back then that his steady hands cupping around hers, giving her throbbing wrists so much warm comfort, would belong to a boy she'd one day have to kill. 

Was Shino being chosen as her target the very crux of her bad karma?

A cruel joke of her clan ancestors, punishing her for saving an Aburame boy back in the Hidden Leaf?

Or was he so completely mad as a bush cricket that he couldn't ever stop himself from getting caught up in the middle of Kamizuru politics?

By the weakness of her own stupidity, she'd saved him once.

And unlike him--obviously--she had learned too many lessons the hard way after calling him a friend. 

Why then should she spare such a privileged Aburame from the full weight of his own penance, when she'd never been so lucky to escape hers?

If he was stupid enough not to take the hint when they were kids, refusing to go away quietly and stop interfering with the plans of the Kamizuru, then the beetle boy wasn't her problem anymore.

Except, of course, when he was aggravatingly right.

The despicable know-it-all already assuming that he'd won their fight, fully confident that the bee mistress didn't have enough chakra now to beat him in a second round.

Even if she could summon a few hives from the bamboo forest, she wouldn't be able to control them for long in her weakened state.

And she was already at a disadvantage, knowing that Aburame already carried all the insects he needed inside that annoyingly calm and collected body of his.

Not only would she be forced to restrict her jutsu, but any use of that jutsu would be delayed by merely a fraction waiting for her bee summons to join the battle. The slightest of fractions that gave Aburame just enough time to take her out before a bee ever touched him.

And with nothing stronger than her own maddening rage against him dragging her back into a losing fight, the only thing left to bury her after it all would be the Hidden Stone, savagely laughing her all the way into the next Shōgatsu.

Dammit.

There was no way she was going back to that.

Not without jarring this Aburame shrimp of an insect once and for all.

"You're trembling," Shino found her weakness quickly. "It will make fighting me that much harder for you, and what's more, I hate repeating the same thing twice. But for your sake, I will make one last exception...Accept my offer...The reason is because once I know your name, I will keep my promise to fight you when you are recovered. There is no reason to take things this far."

"Don't talk to me like you're something noble. You're not noble. Noble isn't like any of you Aburame," she declared. "And knowing my name won't matter to you in the end anyway."