Death Is In her Bones

Friends

Sarutobi Asuma dies from a Janshin cultist when Ino is sixteen. She couldn't save him and Death took him.

She cried at the scene.

She did not cry after that.

The problem was the people expected her to feel an emotion called grief. Ino knew the logistics of it, she knew when it came and why.

But she felt nothing but the urge to get back to the hospital, to get back to the screams, the familitary of Death.

Noriko and Inoichi catch her before the funeral.

"I know death is something you're familiar with, but please, be considerate for Shikamaru and Choji." Noriko tells her. "They're not like you."

Ino smiles. It's the one Inoichi taught her.

"Mama, I'm not stupid," Ino says. "The dumb blonde is only an act."

Noriko grins. Ino has a smile that matches the feral nature of her mother's natural smile. Inoichi just sighs.

("You two will either rule the world or destroy it," he told Ino and Noriko one day when Ino battled with her mother over who got the last strawberry.) (Inoichi got it.)

Ino is respectful. She knows the motions of a funeral. She's been to more than enough in Konoha.

Shikamaru doesn't show up.

Ino's not that surprised.

Maybe she should have been?

("Why'd you pick that one?" Choji asked when Ino plucked a dried flower from the year before. "It's dead."

Ino pouts. "Dead is better."

Shikamaru looks at her at that sentence. "Do you know what Death is?"

"I know what it is," Ino promises. Shikamaru knows she knows. He's come down to Ino's basement when they were exploring. He's seen her respect a dead cat from an alley. He's seen her pray for the ones in the hospital.

He knows Ino knows what Death is. He also knows she doesn't have the same views on Death as the general populace.

Shikamaru grumbles and goes back to cloud watching.)

<>

Ino sits on the roof of the Academy, twirling a wilted flower between her fingers. She wonders why anyone would buy flowers. Life was boring. Birth, life, life, life, life, life. It was so ridiculous.

Death was much more comforting. It would come for everything eventually. Even trees. Even rocks. Even the World, one day in the far off future.

Ino wonders when the smell of Death will not be comforting to her nose.

(Noriko grew up blood, Death, decay and screams. She exposed Ino to them as soon as possible.) (Inoichi grew up stealing souls and falling asleep to screams of tortured voices. It became Ino's lullaby as a baby.) (Ino is a mixture of her parents.)

Her bedtime stories were of demons pushing travellers off cliffs, of witches eating children. Ino's bedtime was full of horrors and Death.

Ino never knew the problems with Death, why people didn't like it.

She loved Death.

<>

Ino knows the horrors of war.

She knows it's dark, bloody and unforgiving. She knows there's no honour in war.

("Do you know what war is?" she asked Tsunade when she was fifteen and had come out of her first S-class mission gone-wrong surgery.

Tsunade scrutinizes her student. She learned very early on, in teaching Yamanaka Ino, that if she asked a question, it was not out of curiosity. "I fought in two wars, Ino-chan. I know what it is and what it does."

Ino studies Tsunade long enough for five new people to enter the hospital. Then she smiles. It is not a kind smile Tsunade has seen her use for children, the sad one usually directed at the Rookie Nine, or the playful one that she uses when she's about to do something... illegal. It is not the dumb blonde smile Tsunade has seen her use on a spy from Kumo to admit that he was a spy (Tsunade was still conviced that entire mission was a fluke. Yamanaka Ino could not do that to anyone.) or when she was on a mission that required dumb blonde tatics.

The smile is feral. Animalistic in nature.

Tsunade felt her shoulders hunch. She forced them to relax.

"So you do." Ino said distantly, like she asked a question and didn't get the answer she wanted but knew she couldn't get anything better. "My mistake."

Ino leaves Tsunade standing in the hospital hallway.

Tsunade feels like she failed something important, like a test.)

The Fourth Shinobi World War comes and Ino is put in the Fifth Division. She smiles while waiting to start the war.

When Ino was a child and still in the Ninja Academy, Noriko would return from S-rank missions smelling like Death. Inoichi would pick Ino up from the Academy and smell like faint Death.

War, Ino soon realizes, is where she belongs. The screams are songbirds, the hollowed faces were more familiar than the faces she grew up with.

War constantly smells like Death. Ino is surrounded by comforting things that should not have been comforting.

(It's not that strange)

The war goes on. One year. Two years. Three, four. Five years. Ino smiles and smiles and smiles. When healing someone's lungs, when fixing someone who only sees blood red, when watching the life drain from enemies and allies alike. She just kept grinning from ear to ear.

(Because her first friend was Death.) (Because Death is always on her mind)

In the Third Year, Ino is paired with Sasuke for a reason she didn't care.

"Why do you smile?" Sasuke asks in the Fifth Year of the war. He's sitting on a cliff overlooking a valley filled with dead zetsus. Ino is below, slicing zetsus in half and watching them shrivel up in fascination.

Ino looks up at him and grins. Her body is covered in blood and Sasuke wonders if he should make her wash before they get back to base camp.

"Because Death is an old friend." Ino explains. "Why wouldn't I smile at an old friend?"

And Sasuke understands. He understands more than anyone else and he wonders if Ay and Tsunade knew that they were so similar before pairing them together.

Because Death was Sasuke's only friend for years.

(Maybe that's why he went to Ino. Because Sakura had never been Ino's best friend. It had been Death.)

Ino knows the horrors of war because she was friends with Death long before she was friends with Sasuke, Sakura, Shikamaru, Choji, Hinata, Kiba, or Shino. Long before Kankuro, Temari and Gaara.

Her best friend is Death because she knew the truth of Death.

Sasuke didn't. He thought Death was evil before and then he learned it was just a way for life to give gifts to her lover.

Ino had always known Death was better than Life.

It was in her bones. In her blood.

In her very soul.