Ino: Flowers

They tell me I don't own Naruto. I guess they might be right. Read and review all you people! Pwease?

The first time Ino ever picked flowers was for a funeral. She was too young to remember whose funeral it was, but she could vividly remember the stark white petals of the flowers. The shop had been closed, and one of her father's friends had come in drenched and trembling, holding onto a shining set of dog tags. It had been pouring outside, and Ino had been waiting for somebody to come in and praise what a patient little girl she was being. Her father had told her to pick some flowers. White, to represent the dead. She'd come back inside, holding all the white flowers she could find, and a blood red rose that the lady down the street had given her to 'get her out of the rain faster.' The rose had stayed, admired for its beauty. The bouquet had lost its splendor when it was laid in the hands of the dead, she remembered.

Ino had worked devotedly at the flower shop from that point on. Her growth was measured by the number of books she had to stand on to see over the counter top, and her skills as a ninja by the amount of time it took for her to gather flowers for the shop. She soon forgot why she did this, when training got hard, and she was exhausted, but the memory of that single rose never left her.