[Naruto] 1sentence InoSaku

[runespoor]

Title: 1sentence InoSaku
Pairing: InoSaku
Theme set: Beta
Author: runespoor7
Rating: PG-13
Notes: contains a healthy dose of side-pairing NaruSasu. Was originally written for the 1sentence comm, but since that InoSaku claim ain’t moving, I’m posting it anyway.


1 – walking

Regretfully Sakura tells Sasuke that she can't; she feels a twinge of what-could-have-been as she walks past him without a word, feeling sorry for his stillness and almost guilty as if she's been leading him on, but at the end of the street Ino's high ponytail is catching the streak of sunlight as if it was a dare (she'd like to help him but she's hurt him and Sasuke always lashes back; and already Naruto is loudly calling his name).

2 – waltz

Sakura grabs Sai’s hand as soon as he lets go of Ino’s, in the middle of a song, and steps on his foot as heavily as she can.

3 – wishes

"Ino, I love you."

4 – wonder

When the years pass and Sasuke turns Naruto’s ‘accidental’ bumping into an excuse to trip the moron up, and Naruto grabs the bastard’s shirt to take him down as he falls and Sasuke’s knee find its way into Naruto’s stomach, and Naruto splutters but doesn’t let go of Sasuke’s wrists before Sasuke knees him a second time in the gut and stands up and, after a moment, extends a hand to help Naruto up (Naruto clasps his other hand on Sasuke’s shoulder as a thanking gesture), Kakashi finds his gaze wandering to Ino and Sakura, who don’t hold hands in public but brush fingers (Ino’s hands resting on Sakura’s hips when Sakura slips Ino’s barrettes back in her hair, Sakura’s arm wrapping around Ino’s waist in front of a shop window), whose shoulders bump ‘accidentally’.

5 – worry

For the legend to steal the girl away, and for Ino to look at her best friend and find only a name on the Hero’s Stone.

6 – whimsy

One lesson Sakura learnt from Sasuke is that whims are convenient things to blame unexpected, unaccepted urges on, so, when she lets go of Ino’s blood-stained but now moving again lips, she doesn’t even care that her trembling hand is clutching Ino’s too-weak fingers as if she feared Ino’s life would slip away if she didn’t.

7 – waste/wasteland

“I’m on Sasuke-kun’s team now, I’m on Sasuke-kun’s team,” Sakura repeats to herself as she combs her hair in front of her mirror, ignoring the tear tracks running down her cheeks, until she’s (calmed down) done, and she looks around, mechanically; when her gaze falls on the forehead protector neatly folded on her bed, she’s brutally reminded that she gave the ribbon back to Ino two hours ago, and she starts crying anew.

8 – whiskey-and-rum

Drunkenness tastes like Sakura’s tongue sliding against Ino’s, sweet and intoxicating; Ino hasn’t had a single drop.

9 – war

The war has turned Sakura’s hands cold, only warmed by Ino’s blood and her own tears.

10 – weddings

One day, Ino made a promise to a girl and the next day backed it up with the gift of a ribbon.

11 – birthday

Of all the dates Ino could celebrate, she chooses the day on which Sakura cut her hair in the Forest to get drunk, because that was always how it was – Sakura's sacrifices to her team, and Ino dumb-struck and outshone, and too late, too late, too late.

12 – blessing

When Naruto and Sasuke come clean, she sees the desperation and determination in Naruto’s eyes, and the way Sasuke averts his; they act as though they’re afraid of her reaction, but Sakura only rolls her eyes and informs them that she, unlike them, has grown up during the last decade, so when she says she’s seeing Ino, she doesn’t mean they gush over prepubescent crushes.

13 – bias

Ino likes Sasuke-kun not at all these days, but he’s still Sakura’s teammate, so Ino will beat on anyone who dares talk as though he’s no longer one of theirs.

14 – burning

Most of the time Ino is okay with being the third, because it means she will never have to know the pain of Sakura dying for her; she doesn't want to think of the pain if Sakura dies for her team, and swears that she'll throw herself in front of Sakura before that happens – like everything else she did, selfishly.

15 – breathing

The hum of the oxygen machine makes for a sad sort of serenade; when Sakura stands in Ino’s hospital room and looks at her best friend’s closed eyes, she can’t even hear her own breathing.

16 – breaking

"B-but why," Ino stammers, struggling to understand, when Sakura tells her that it's over with Sasuke; Sakura is silent as she sits down next to Ino on Ino's bed (in Ino's room in Ino's life) and Ino straightens and looks at her with huge wide eyes, and finally Sakura says, with a quick glance Ino's way that make a sudden warmth flood through Ino, "I guess we finally admitted we were blinding ourselves."

17 – belief

When she was a child, Ino thought she had to be Sakura’s friend if she wanted her to bloom someday; when she was a girl, she thought Sakura didn’t need her and was growing into a warrior instead; now Ino knows it doesn’t matter, because she’ll stand by Sakura’s side anyway.

18 – balloon

‘When you love something, let it go’; thus, when Sakura starts tugging on the ribbon-shaped string Ino is holding, Ino knows to open her hand, and she watches her friend’s dreams take her away, floating away from Ino and toward Sasuke.

19 – balcony

Sometimes they kiss on the arch of a rooftop, rolling slowly one over the other like cats drinking in the sun’s warmth and each other’s – hair tickling their throats, legs entangling and hands fisting and relaxing in each other’s clothes – until the moment they tumble over the edge and only check their fall with chakra to their feet, a second before nervous laughter erases the scream they might have let out if they weren’t two kunoichi kissing upside down on the top of the world.

20 – bane

Any medic will tell you that there is nothing more annoying than having the patient’s family constantly under one’s feet, and Sakura thought she’d hit rock bottom when she’d had to keep Naruto away from Sasuke’s hospital room after the thing with Kyuubi, until the moment Ino comes down with the freaking flu, and she meets Ino’s genins; they’re agglutinated around Ino’s bed (and her’s, Ino and her’s, their bed, in their apartment) and turn toward her the ferocious, stony glare of teenaged ninja who have found their crush is not being well-cared enough for their taste.

21 – quiet

Sakura runs a finger along Ino’s spine, who arches and lets out a low hiss.

22 – quirks

Sakura never told Ino, but when they were kids and Ino could throw flowers like kunai and always hit bull's eye, Sakura wanted to take the flower in her mouth and nibble on the stem, even those which Ino said were noxious.

23 – question

“Say, Chouji...” Ino’s voice drifts uncertainly, and she bites her lip until Chouji looks interrogatively up at her from the mission report he’s completing for her; she hesitates, then starts again, twisting a long blond lock between her fingers, a nervous habit she’s had since she started growing out her hair, “Shikamaru says... Not that I believe him, but, just to be sure... he says that... Well, obviously he’s mistaken, but, I mean... I – I’m not in love with Sakura, am I?”

24 – quarrel

They are the last to realise that, at some point, ‘Sasuke-kun’ has become code.

25 – quitting

It takes Sasuke a while to notice fangirls are no longer as persistent as they used to be, a few more days to debate whether this concerns him in any way apart from the obvious (and reach the conclusion that really, it shouldn’t, but rules have a tendency to be flouted where his teammates are concerned, and see: Sakura) and for Naruto to laugh at his face once Sasuke mentions it, then to drag him to the ice cream parlour where Sakura and Ino are tongue-feeding each other to realise why, exactly...

26 – jump

As a ninja Ino can and has propelled her body to act as a shield, as a friend she fears her heart will never be able to do the same, and tell Sakura that she thinks she loves her.

27 – jester

"Here's your giiiiiirlfrieeeeeend," Naruto shouts, cackling as he ducks Sakura's punch, her cheeks tinted pink rather than red.

28 – jousting

“Forehead,” Ino calls appreciatively when Sakura walks past without seeing her; Sakura whips around, her green eyes narrowed, and replies “Pig”.

29 – jewel

Ino has seen pearls brighter than Sakura’s smiles, and emeralds greener than Sakura’s eyes, but none more precious.

30 – just

‘Friends’, even when everything points to the contrary.

31 – smirk

The most difficult thing in her relationship with Ino, Sakura reflects, is not how Ino drives her mad about twice a day, or how Sakura has shown up late for work more often in the five months since they’ve started dating than in the five years previous, it’s not even how they are two girls in an unconventional unlikely-to-produce-ninja-babies relationship; it’s how they’re two girls with usually fairly well-combed hair, and so, when Sakura shows up at the hospital after lunch with screamingly tousled hair, her coworkers just smirk in that damnably knowing way (Naruto and Sasuke don’t know how easy they have it).

32 – sorrow

It’s been six years; Sakura still looks around at the word “forehead”.

33 – stupidity

Sakura-chan is one of the smartest persons Naruto knows (perhaps the smartest, because Shikamaru's brain shows signs of having turned to natto if his behaviour about Temari is any indication) but maybe love makes intelligent people go kinda dumb, because Sakura-chan gripes about Ino's 'special missions', and is in a foul mood whenever Ino has had a one-night stand, and has never been able to say more than four sentences to one of Ino's dates without breaking something, and it's like she doesn't even realise it.

34 – serenade

Ino’s dulcet tones (“Forehead! Foreheaaaaaaaaad!”) stab through Sakura’s closed shutters, pierce through her exhaustion, drag her forcibly to her window until she has no other choice but to bellow, “Dammit, Pig, some of us are working at six in the morning!” – Ino only looks up and Sakura could swear her eyes are gleaming before she says, “And it’s my mother’s birthday party, and no way I’m enduring that alone, so get your forehead moving!”

35 – sarcasm

“Oooh, Sakura-sama, you’re so good to me~,” Ino’s mocking voice can’t quite make it into simpering territory, because her teeth are gritted; Sakura ignores her and rips a band out of Ino’s top to wrap it around Ino’s no longer broken arm – “So trendy~ you shouldn’t have!”

36 – sordid

She would be Sasuke's wife, and Ino would be a highly successful infiltrator, and she'd have to pop out Uchiha babies and Sasuke would come home late because it would be expected for the ANBU captain to be held back by the Rokudaime (Ino would have been home for tea), and Sakura wouldn't call Sasuke on his funny walk or the oddly shaped bruises adorning his throat, and at night she'd swear to herself that tomorrow, tomorrow she would kiss Ino over the teacups (but the next day Ino would be off on a mission).

37 – soliloquy

“Look, Ino, you’re my best friend, and – Konoha isn’t the same without you, it’s never been like you to be quiet, and I know you’re alright, you hear me?, I’m a medic-nin, I know there isn’t anything wrong with you, you just – everyone misses you, Shikamaru and Chouji, they come every day, and Kurenai, she brings the baby, you know that? and everyone asks how you are, even Sasuke asks, and I miss you, Ino, I miss you so much, so please, wake up?”

38 – sojourn

Wordlessly, Sakura pushes the door open for Ino, who stands pale-faced and immobile with a bag in her hand; gently, she takes her best friend to the living room, and once Ino is sitting on the sofa with a mug of warm wine clutched between her unseeing hands, Sakura says quietly, “You can stay as long as you need, Ino.”

39 – share

Sakura’s days and nights are Ino’s, but the life-long remorses in front of the Hero’s Stone are her team’s.

40 – solitary

When Ino found Sakura playing cards by herself, she wanted to know if her next move would be to start emptying her sensei’s bottles as well, or if it was just because she didn’t know how to play poker and woulnd’t have the guts to play it strip even if she did; Sakura’s response came in the form of a smirk when, half an hour later, Ino found herself gaping in her undies.

41 – nowhere

“This way,” Inner Sakura points a patch of blankness that doesn’t look any different to Ino from the rest, but she guesses that Sakura’s alter ego is unlikely to get lost in her own mind; this would be so much easier if Ino could just deal with the regular Sakura and not the bipolar loony sharing her name, not to mention that there’d be an actual mindscape, but then, if Sakura hadn’t been hit by the mind-wiping jutsu, Ino wouldn’t have needed to go looking for her best friend in the bowels of her own mind.

42 – neutral

“Whoa whoa there,” Naruto lifts his hands in a placating gesture, in itself a sure sign that the world is about to end, and also that becoming a jounin doesn’t get you free brains, “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, okay?”

43 – nuance

Sakura gave the pink ribbon back; it was easier than severing a red thread.

44 – near

“Almost there,” Sakura calls, the fierce happiness on her face echoed by Naruto’s cheers at the sight of the Hokage monument, and Sasuke himself is smiling between his two teammates; they’re looking straight ahead at the future, while Ino, on Sakura’s other side, can’t take her eyes off her best friend’s face, and thinks, not quite.

45 – natural

“Say, Ino... Now you’re with Sakura, maybe you can tell us... Sakura’s hair, is it—”

46 – horizon

There's no limit to Ino's eyes, even when Sakura closes hers.

47 – valiant

Just – take her hand, Ino tells herself, take her hand, it can’t be that hard; next to her, Sakura tries to steel her nerves and turn toward Ino to ask, casually, if she’d like to da— no, she can’t do it.

48 – virtuous

A ninja’s virtue is a mission’s success, but Ino has taken to decline those missions since she moved in with Sakura.

49 – victory

After the first moment of shock, Ino’s fingers clutch at Sakura’s shoulders and she kisses her as if she’s wanted nothing else since she was twelve.

50 – defeat

“Every time I see them,” Kiba mutters, “I can’t shake the feeling that I’m about the lowest human form to ever crawl the Earth – I mean, how is it fair that two of the hottest girls in Konoha are just not interested?”