It takes Ino three days from hearing of Sasuke's defection to get up the courage it takes to tell her one-time best friend a story. Sakura is Ino's one-time best friend because Sakura loved the same boy Ino did, loved him more than she loved Ino, in fact. Or thought she did. Ino was something to her at one time, and one day, Ino thinks, Saukura will feel the same about Sasuke. That she cared for him at one time, but not now. But today is not that day, and so Ino knocks on Sakura's door and follows Sakura's mom down the hallway into a bedroom that feels stuffy and without air.

When Sakura looks up from her place on the bed, eyes red rimmed and a mountain of medical scrolls around her, Ino begins to talk without waiting for a greeting. This is how she starts:

The scent Ino has always assocaited with Sasuke is fire. She thinks a lot of girls in his fan club would say this. Who didn't know of the impressive coming-of-age jitsu the Uchiha clan once performed? But its not that kind of fire.

Skin and bone leave a scent that can linger for days, especially when a lot of them burn. Over a hundred pyres burned one week, a Uchiha in each one. Later, Ino learned another clan, the Hyuuga, did many of the funeral rituals for Sasuke, who was, after all, only a boy, only one small boy on the morning the city woke and found the rest of his clan dead. The Hyuuga did not do all though, and Ino herself attended several places where she was required to pick up chopsticks and hunt for bone.

And then, when she had passed bone around chop stick to chop stick for the better part of a week, her father had dressed her up in black and they had gone to meet Sasuke.

No. That's not right. If she's going to tell the story at all she needs to tell it straight.

They go to the Uchiha funeral and she sees, for the first time, someone who is truly all alone. Growing up, it was just her and her father at Ino's house, but there is a big difference between one person and none. Ino remembers wanting to brush fingers across Sasuke's small-boy face, but not what his face looked like that day. She remembers hearing murmurs as he spoke to the priest after the ceremony had been done, but those words never carried across the crowd over her way. She does remember fire though. The scent of something gone.

This is what she tells Sakura, whose still crying for loss. Sasuke has always had the scent of leaving saturated right through his skin. So every time you are alone, you are closer than you've ever been to him.