warnings ahead, just in case: death, gore, scars, violence etc. (this pretty much applies to the whole story but JUST IN CASE lol!)

...

Danzou doesn't trust anyone he hasn't seen bleed.

Her kunai was slippery in her palm, hot and wet. Damp metal filled her nostrils, and the smell of the prisoner's piss and fear.

But he was already dead despite his faithful heart's last desperate beats, drenched in his own blood and still bound in Konoha's finest chains. Shizune didn't bother to close the eyes as she bent over the body, stepping fastidiously around the growing pool of blood. Smart, because her shoes were really cute.

An enemy, Ino told herself yet again, swallowing hard and ignoring the buzzing in her ears. A prisoner of war. A man who knew what might happen to him on a mission, just like you do.

A man who'd been languishing in the darkness for months, a man who'd never seen the sunlight again after being captured by Konoha. To him, she was the enemy, the murderer, the thing that might come in the night to kill everything he loved back in his home country of Wave.

Ino's father was watching from the sidelines with Ibiki, and she was very shocked to find that meeting his gaze didn't make her feel anything.

"All your feelings can come later," Shika had told her once, on a mission, possibly the most helpful thing he'd ever said, if very hard to believe sometimes. She'd killed the man quickly, and nobody had commented on the wisp of merciful chakra she'd brushed over his brain first. He'd died smiling, at least, thinking something happy.

She envied a dead man. The smile disappeared as Shizune's elaborate jutsu settled over the corpse, a funereal veil of glinting chakra. The features morphed. She heard bones crack and muscles tear. Could Sakura do this yet? Change a body, change one person into another, right down to the skeleton and scars and skin?

Dead bones, for Konoha, she reminded herself, resisting the urge to wipe her gory hands. For Sai. This man had died- had been killed for a good cause, if not his own, and she wouldn't let a warrior's life be entirely worthless, enemy or not.

Ibiki glanced between the body and Minoru, who was leaning against the opposite wall. The two were identical now, down to the faint bruises on two mirror-image arms and the unevenly grown-out haircut. "Good?"

"Good," everyone else chorused, 'everybody' being Ino and her father. She winced at the sound of her own voice, cool and composed.

"All right. Minoru, ready?"

Minoru, reverting back to his original status as Quiet Creeper, shrugged amiably.

"Here we go, then," said Ibiki, hefting the body over his shoulder with a grunt.

They all filed together back out into the catacombs of Interrogation, Ino trailing behind her father, who was stiff and silent. Shizune, who'd been told absolutely nothing by Tsunade except, "Go make that man look like someone else and keep your lips buttoned," sent Ino one last considering glance before heading right, up towards the real world.

Ino, her father, Ibiki, and Minoru- the real, living Minoru- went left, deeper down.

Minoru was about to die, as far as his friends and family were concerned, if he had any. Yet he didn't seem worried in the slightest. She did notice his eyes drift once to the slit, gaping scarlet throat of the body thumping limply against Ibiki's back. Blood was still seeping out, a dark shining streak down Ibiki's cloak.

This had to work. If it didn't-

The archive wing was approaching. She'd finally started to figure out the layout of the catacombs, after nearly three weeks of working here every night, and tonight was the night. Cloak Mask had seemed impatient, and she'd told Ibiki she didn't dare wait any longer.

She was surely going to miss the barbecue tomorrow, which sucked, though Chouji and Shika would surely bring her a fridge-full of leftovers. She wished Sai had returned from his mission. She wished- no, she knew that this would work. It wasn't like there was any other option.

Inoichi and Ibiki cloaked their chakra as they entered the dusty archives, just in case. They didn't think Root had any way to monitor what went on down in the catacombs, but Ino didn't really feel like trusting her life to 'probably', not even with all Ibiki's intense, paranoid precautions. Nobody was probably watching, but they'd stick to the script perfectly from beginning to end to be sure.

It was late, and nobody was working. Ino and Minoru had the place to themselves after the other two left with Minoru's deceased double. Her father's hand was twitching at his side, she noticed distantly, watching him leave.

She wondered if he'd told her mother what was going on. For a woman who'd married into the Yamanaka clan, of all things, Ino's mom had always been pathetically easy to fool.

Or maybe she just liked to keep her eyes closed to certain things. For the first time, Ino thought: She married into a clan that reads minds. She was a ninja. She knew what that meant, the scope of it. It must have been frightening to be a young bride, surrounded by golden strangers and clan pressure, wondering if every secret thought was plain on her face. An angry Yamanaka could be a terrible thing.

She wiped her hands at last on her skirt- the fresh blood would cover it soon- and started working, just as if it were any other night, organizing and cataloguing and trying not to die of boredom.

Bad word choice there, Ino.

"Ready?" Minoru murmured, perhaps an hour later.

Dust from the old scrolls they'd been shuffling through choked Ino when she answered faintly, "Yeah... Sorry again they picked you."

"It's okay. It'll be a nice vacation," he said affably, rubbing the missing fingertip on his hand. "There's actually a very nice training wing down here, and nobody trying to stab me. Beds're soft, too."

Ino managed a smile. "Delightful. I'll, uh, try and hurry things along so you're not 'dead' for too long."

"Don't," he said flatly, serious in an instant. She was reminded forcible of her own inexperience. "We're in this mission together. If it takes you years, that's all right. For Konoha."

"Yeah. For Konoha," she mumbled, tucking a very particular and important little book into one of her hip pouches, the whole point of this elaborate charade- the key to infiltrating Danzou's shriveled black heart. It was older than she was, leatherbound, with finely crafted pages edged in sturdy silver, chock full of delicious secrets. Danzou was going to think it was his damn birthday when she handed it over. "Okay, well, you know, don't be afraid to hurt me. The more I bleed, the better. And my best friend is the village's third-best healer, so."

He nodded solemnly, flexing his hand again. She was grateful as she took a deep, grounding breath, running over the escape route one last time in her mind, mentally marking the remote tunnel so near the surface where she would lead him during their fight, where the body double was waiting to play its part, where she could send her signal to Root.

Flakes of dried blood fell like rust from her unclean kunai as she drew it again, and her anxious chakra burned like drowning in her throat.

"Here we go," said Minoru, politely giving her a moment's warning before he lunged.

The Interrogation alarms were shrieking in her ears, yet fading rapidly behind. Her own thundering heartbeat was louder, loud enough to rouse the village, to wake the dead.

Cloak Mask and two others were bearing her silently through the dark trees, far faster than she could ever have made it on her own, though not towards Danzou's house- as if that old goat would put himself in any danger. They were headed away from the village main, towards the northern edge, the most deeply wild part of the city still within the walls. If the moon hadn't been nearly full above them, she'd never have known where they were going, not in the chaotic, bounding, pain-dark night. She managed to dig the book out of her pouch despite the jostling and the pain.

"Here," she choked wetly, thrusting it at Cloak Mask's shadowy form. A real Root agent would put the mission first, before her own health, before anything. "And I'm gonna name you Kei." Luck. He would be one of the lucky ones, like Sai; she'd get him out of Root, out of the shadows and into a real life.

He said nothing from behind his mask, though he took the book from her shaking fingers. Branches whipped across her face.

She closed her stinging eyes, ignored the agony, and tried not to puke again, tried to concentrate on healing herself with the chakra she had left. There's only so much blood in one body, Sakura always said. All the healing in the world won't help if a heart's got nothing to pump. Right now Ino was wearing most of her blood, and a fair amount of Minoru's. And the dead man's, of course.

Cloak Mask was the one carrying that body double, which still looked freshly dead, thanks to whatever useful horror Shizune had performed. The cheeks were pink and flush, the half-open eyes wet, and the throat was still oozing fresh, bright red.

She ran out of chakra entirely after closing up the biggest slash on her upper shoulder, perilously close to her own neck. She was never going to be able to wear a freaking strapless top again with all this scarring.

"Where," she managed, a faint, gurgling gasp.

The two agents carrying her ignored it. Kei, springing lithely from branch to branch beside them, looked at her once, eyes dark flashing emeralds, and said jerkily, "To get fixed."

She tried to say something else, but found she couldn't. The grasping shadows of Konoha's forest swallowed her whole.

Sai, falling helplessly back onto routine, brought her tea in the flowered cup.

It was not beautiful to him this time, watching her delicate, pale fingers trembling against the vines. There was still blood under her nails, in her hair, slick and mask-like on her face. Root had healed her, but that was all. He did not like Ino in red.

He remembered the first time he'd been 'rescued' by his brothers. Borne away into the night, half dead and still a boy, taken without words to a strange, hidden place far beneath the northern mountains as he clenched his teeth to keep from screaming. It had smelled of antiseptic and cold, the same as Sakura's hospital, but it had not been bright and white like hers. Still, they'd healed him, and almost as well as she could have. Danzou, of course, had an eye for talent. Later, after much thought, the fact he'd been healed had been reassuring to Sai. Danzou would not bother wasting resources and risking discovery on a tool with no use. In a way, the fact they'd bothered to heal Ino at all after she handed over the stolen Interrogation book was encouraging, though he wasn't sure she'd see it that way.

"You can use my shower," he offered at last, after ten minutes of sitting and watching Ino stare blankly at her tea.

She jerked, then winced, as if she expected it still to hurt. The wounds he could see on her were still pink and tender, fragile wet parchment. It seemed to him her tender skin would tear at a breath. Even Sakura couldn't have kept them from leaving traces, not wounds this bad. "I need to hydrate," she mumbled, draining her cup in one painful-sounding swallow. "Gotta replace all the blood."

"The blood you're getting all over my previously clean home, you mean," he said, entirely unable to understand the things flickering across her face. He should be used to that, of course, but he felt anxious nonetheless- less so than he'd felt half an hour ago, when she tossed a twig against his window and then crawled inside, wrapped in an unbelievably intense concealment jutsu he recognized as the work of Danzou's personal crony, the red-haired boy Ino called Cloak Mask. Bits of her were still misty and invisible even now inside his fortress of a home; she was faded at the edges, a watercolor ghost. They'd healed her, then told her to go home under cover of the remaining night, just as if nothing had happened- but she'd come to him instead.

He did not know why, and he did not know why her grating, rusty laugh made him tense. "Sorry, Sai. I would very much like a shower, actually, if that's okay." She didn't seem to mind his ineptitude, as usual. He was glad of it; it was hard enough to comfort her like he wished, let alone doing it the 'right' way.

The bathroom was still steamy and humid from his own shower. He'd barely been home three hours from his mission when she came to him. "There will still be hot water," he felt compelled to tell her, picking at a stray thread on the edge of his shirt. "The pipes and furnace in this building function well."

"Oh, good. Um..." She stared at him, raised a scarlet-crusted eyebrow, then sighed and shut the bathroom door in his face, nearly clipping his nose.

Ah. He should have left, obviously. He shook his head, irritated at his own idiocy in the face of Ino's perplexing behavior, and went back to the table to nurse his own tea.

It was very hard to swallow. Sai felt as if the seal on his tongue were trying to choke him, and the steam seemed to form strange and foreboding shapes.

He set it aside to cool, then waited, tracing the wood grain of his table and listening to the shower thunder. Ino stayed in there for a very long time, and he was glad he had not lied about the hot water.

It was equally strange to have her safely installed on his couch, clean once more, wearing a pair of his pants and one of his old shirts, hair dripping everywhere like a furious golden storm. He fetched her a new mug of lukewarm tea, then stood silently beside her, completely at a loss.

She looked up at him after only one sip, setting the flowered cup aside, and her small smile was wobbling.

"Did the mission succeed, then?" he asked, not knowing what else to say. She had come to him after something bad, and he was making a terrible mess of it all, it seemed. Sakura would be warm and supportive, Naruto would make her laugh, Kakashi would be competent and calm, but Sai could give her nothing except tea and a safe place to speak. After she put her life at risk for him, it seemed a paltry exchange, even within his own admittedly unorthodox notions of fairness.

"Yeah. It all went perfectly, actually." She snorted and curled her legs under her, moving stiffly. He could see pain he recognized in every line of her, and the steely flash was back in her red-rimmed eyes. He'd never have believed her to be this strong when he met her; she had grown so fierce, so fast, from nearly nothing. "I didn't see Danzou after or anything, I mean, I suppose things could still go bad. But they wouldn't have bothered healing me, right, unless I was in? They took the body and everything. And they just let me go, so. And Kei took the databook from Interrogation even before they took me to the healer, they could have just dumped me in the woods." Left unspoken was: if they had, she'd have died. "So, yay, right? Success, victory, we win."

"Success," he parroted. Then he stood there, wondering what to do.

Ino took pity on him and began to cry again, thank goodness. He'd been through this enough times to know the expected motions, at least, and he promptly sat down beside her and slung an arm over her shoulders, a casual motion copied exactly from Naruto. She managed to curl up into a tiny blonde ball, half the usual Ino Size, and began to smear snot all over his shirt as she wept. The indistinct edges of her had resolidified as Cloak Mask's jutsu wore away beneath Sai's security, and he was relieved to be able to see her little lavender-painted toenails again. Losing a toe was surprisingly hard to manage for a ninja, almost as bad as losing a finger. People always forgot how much a good fighter relied on their feet. It affected one's balance, too. It was good that she was whole.

"It's all right," he attempted, casting back to things Sakura had said during Naruto's worst moments. "You did well. It sounds as if the plan worked. Good job. You didn't die."

"Idiot," she screeched damply, poking him sharply in the ribs. He relaxed, secure in familiarity.

The good feelings lasted perhaps a minute, until she attempted to disengage his arm and added, flushing even pinker, "I'm sorry I came here, I didn't mean to- I didn't even know if you'd be home, I wasn't- I mean, I know you're tired- it's been a seriously weird day-"

"Aren't we going to screw with Dogbreath tomorrow?" he interjected. Ino couldn't go home in this state. She would give away the night's happenings in an instant, should she meet one of her friends, and honestly he still wasn't sure she would make it across town to her apartment, Danzou's healing be damned. Judging from her hysterical retelling earlier, as well as the alarms he'd heard earlier when entering the village gates, she'd had a tiring night and a close escape. The best ninja could make mistakes when weary and hurt. It would simply be foolish to allow her to leave. The mission, and therefore his life, would be at risk.

"Er- you mean with Kiba?"

"Yes. Isn't that what you said before?"

"Oh. Um- well, I guess. He does deserve it. That might cheer me up, to be totally honest." She peered at him through narrowed eyes, wrinkling her nose. Her long lashes were cool silver beneath the glint of the security seals on his ceiling, and her frizzing hair was dark with damp. The shoulders of the shirt he'd lent her were soaked from it, clinging to her collarbone, only just showing the raw, fresh wound, barely healed at the soft curve of her neck. The skin there was red from her shower and the medical jutsu, and he could not feel the freckles on her neck beneath his fingers, though her pulse was rapid as a bird's beneath his thumb. She was all as smooth as fine china, except for the scars.

"Sai?" she whispered.

He jerked his hand away. He would have stood, if not for her wounded weight against his side. He could not retreat, so he froze, a rabbit beneath a lion's careless paw.

She looked at him mercilessly, searched his face with those wide, weapon-blue eyes. For once, she didn't seem to know what to say either.

Sai managed to gather himself at last, and reached for his tea with that traitorous hand, reheating it with a quick fire jutsu. He overdid it and nearly took out his own eyebrows, but Ino only giggled.

"Where's mine, jerk?" she said.

He considered that, grateful she wasn't making him more confused than he already was, glad she'd given him a graceful retreat. "Reheat your own. It's practice you sorely need."

"Oh, gods. Really?"

"Really. As your sensei, it would be irresponsible to allow you to miss an opportunity for practice your chakra control."

"Well, I'm out of chakra, so there." She made a sound like a satisfied cat.

Because she'd used it all healing herself, he surmised. Or during the fight, or while she fled. "Fine," he said grudgingly, stirring her tea with one flaming finger.

She drank it much more slowly than she had the first cup, and she didn't move from his side, except to click on his neglected television, which was coated in a thick layer of dust.

She snored worse than Kakashi's entire squad of nin-dogs put together, too, a fact that was driven home to him yet again when she fell asleep during something histrionic involving terrible civilian actors pretending to be shinobi, and an even more poorly made set. Sai was pretty sure he could act with more finesse. Even Naruto would be better.

Nonetheless, it was an interesting enough program when treated as a study on human behavior. Since Sakura had long ago forbidden him his books and commanded him to watch 'actual, real, living people', he turned the volume down low and began to pay close attention.

Ino did not wake an hour later, or an hour after that. He sent a mouse messenger to the Nara boy, who would doubtless notify the rest of her team that she'd survived, but otherwise, he didn't move. The day dawned gently outside, seeping gold and purple and soft pink around the edges of his shuttered windows, bathing Ino in the softest and warmest light.

It was incredible that such a delicate-looking girl could snore so very loudly, he reflected, leaning his head back stiffly against the couch and closing his weary eyes, feeling Ino breathe against his side, steady and true.

this is hella short, man, i'm SORRY its been nearly a year, i figured a short update is better than nothing though. I think i'm back in the groove for this story though! and the inosai is AT FULL THROTTLE FORWARDS. i'm so weak. i love these two idiots so much. this is probably a little rusty, i've been having a hell of a time writing lately, but hopefully it isn't total shit lol. anyway, thank you for reading! i truly value everybody's thoughts and hope you enjoy! :3