Never Change

Summary: … A running system. (No matter the consequences.) The Konoha Twelve, and Ino Yamanaka. Complete in seven parts. A story about life – and growing up.

Warning: Major warnings for internal dialogue, plotlessness, introspection and angst. Also, was meant to be purely introspective one shot on Konoha's children turned into a Shikamaru/Ino multi-chaptered story. Read at your own risk.

Set: Story-unrelated.

Disclaimer: Standards apply.

A/N: Summer project.

Part 1 Observations of a Child

"No matter what happens and how far away I am, I'll always come back to you."

When Ino is five years old, she helps her mother arrange the flowers in the shop on evenings when her father is gone. On those nights, her mother lets her stay sometimes, she sends Ino to bed but does not complain when she taps in again, in her night dress and a stuffed animal clutched to her chest. Together, they wait, for hours and hours, and sometimes Ino falls asleep on her mother's lap. But before it happens, they work: there are stacks of unused flower pots, one-two-three, Ino can count long before she attends the Academy. There are red, green and brown ones, neat rows and different sizes and small, carefully inscribed labels on each one of them. Ino can read long before she attends the Academy, too. Next, there are the potted plants: arranged by color, mostly, but sometimes by what they need best to bloom. There is a difference between the corner window and the front street window: Ino knows how to judge the position of the sun for its strength and she reads the time of day from the length of the shadows. Ino knows many things before she even turns old enough to be taught properly in school, but none of them matter when she sits in the dark flower shop with her mother, one dim light fluttering above the counter, and counts her heartbeats.

On the day Ino turns twelve years old, she casts surreptitious glances at the other children in the classroom and wonders. Although nobody knows and guesses, she listens closely while the names are being read. The atmosphere is tense and elated at the same time while all the children wonder whether they have passed the test, whether they will be teamed up in the next batch of genin teams or whether they will have to wait another year. Hinata-Kiba-Shino, Ino-Shikamaru-Chouji, Sakura-Sasuke-Naruto. It seems fitting, somehow, although she cannot say why. There is the small spike of pain in her heart, the same Ino always feels when she thinks about Sakura and Sasuke, and she buries it quickly. She owes them, or, at least, it feels like she owes Sakura, and the conundrum in her thoughts is no greater than it would be would she voice them. So then, Chouji and Shikamaru. She knows them both – has known them long before they entered the Academy together. Shikamaru has something that makes her want to run off and keep her distance, and Chouji has something that makes her inexplicably angry. Maybe it is because the first is so distant and the latter so nice. Nice people are killed far too early and distant things grow closer and then they hurt. There is a difference between necessity and wish: Ino knows that already. Like a wild flower she knows the ground in which she roots, feels the air she breathes, can judge her surroundings by the scent of rain, wind and water. There is potential for sadness here, she can feel it, but she does not know what it means. Not right away, at least.

On her sixteenth birthday she stands on a battlefield. And people around her die. And people around her fight: Sakura as a medic, Hinata and Neji as a team in the defense line, Tenten, Lee and Chouji are attack point, Shino and Kiba reconnaissance. And Ino works as a megaphone for the battle coordinator in their field: Shikamaru's voice floats through her like a river, organizing, requesting, giving orders, strategizing with a clarity of mind that still is incredible. Ino's task is to stay behind him and have his back. It is not a task too small for her, or too unimportant. It is what she does best, with the people she knows longest, and they do what they were trained to do: they fight. They are all the protection the Country of Fire – the entire shinobi world – has. And around them are hundreds of other shinobi from all over the world, fighting, just like them. The strangest thing of all: she does not feel afraid. Perhaps there is no time for fear, and there surely is no time for doubt. There simply is a feeling of detachedness as she fights, and watches: Sasuke and Naruto face the juubi, Sakura heals, the others assist and fight. They could die any second. Burned, crushed, injured, drowned, there is a multitude of possibilities. As a child Ino feared drowning most, now she cannot remember what it feels like to be afraid. Maybe she has lost something essential. Maybe they all have. You have to protect them, Ino, a voice resounds in her mind, and she feels Shikamaru's warmth under her hand on his nape. In another world, it would have anchored her but she has already fallen too deep. Because she knows how to fight, and she knows for what, but she does not know the price and that is all the difference it takes. How could it come that far?

On a day in her twenty-third year, Ino closes the door behind her in the evening and stops in the dark corridor that leads to the two small rooms she inhabits all by herself. Emptiness greets her, along with the familiarity of shelves, chair, desk. There is a picture frame on the night stand, familiar faces, long-past times, she sinks onto her bed and stares at it until the contours blur in front of her eyes. She is tired – so, so tired – and she can see the days stretching out before her in the same way they line up behind her: get up, work, go home, sleep. Rinse, repeat. What has changed, she wonders, really, because she still feels small and alone and because every step that was supposed to take her to the next chapter of her life has only proven to be a tiny fold in the fabric of time. She graduated from the Academy and went off to train as a genin, she left her team behind to be trained as a medic and then as Anbu, she entered active duty two years later and there has been no change since she can remember. Why was it that children dreamed of growing up? Where has the time gone, and her dreams, and where, where is the future everyone promised they would have? It is like looking in front of her: everyone has left, leaving her behind, and Ino stands on her own but it is a terribly lonely thing.

Ino cannot even remember when it first occurred to her: there is a pattern to everything.