If you haven't read Shaw's 'Pygmalion' or watched/heard the musical 'My Fair Lady, please, friend, do so. It is something well worth the time. I of course, own neither Mr. Shaw's nor Mr. Kishimoto's incarnations, but could not resist the idea to put our own favorite Konoha flower girl in the shoes of Eliza Doolittle.

If you are unfamiliar with the story, it is based off of the myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with the statue he created as his perfect woman and then wished to life. In his play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle is the subject of a bet between Professor Henry Higgins and his friend Colonel Pickering. The professor of phonetics proposes to teach Eliza to speak and behave so well, that she will pass as a lady in the upper echelons of London society. The musical My Fair Lady is adapted from Shaw's play.

Offered as a playful diversion, friends, I humbly submit:

A Troublesome Galatea: A Romance in Two Acts.

Act I:

London, 1912

Professor Nara was asleep on the couch with his newspaper over his face when his long-time friend Colonel Akimichi came rushing in the drawing room.

"Nara!" he exclaimed. "I've just heard! When did she disappear?!"

Professor Shikamaru Nara, world renowned authority on the study of phonetics and speech, gave the incredibly articulate response of "Huh?"

"My word, Nara," haven't you heard the commotion? She's gone missing, I tell you, missing! I am going to have to have some tea to steady my nerves; I'll go fetch Mrs. Pearce."

"Colonel," Shikamaru sighed, sliding the paper off of his face and slowly sitting up. "Start from the beginning. Who is missing?"

"Why Miss Hana, of course!" he said, flustered. "What the devil do you think I've been telling you?

Professor Nara frowned. "Well that doesn't make any sense," he said calmly. I saw her in this very room last night, after the ball, just before I went upstairs to bed." He crossed to his massive desk and unlocked the drawer, gesturing to it. "And here are the jewels you hired for her, safe and sound, right where I put them before I went up to bed. It was quite late then; when would she have gone? And why?"

"That's just it, old boy – we don't know! According to Mrs. Pearce, someone came to the door at seven this morning in a taxi, collected her things and went away directly. She disappeared sometime in the night!"

"A taxi?" Shikamaru's frown deepened. "Whatever for? And to where? And from where? As I said, she was here when I went up to bed. Where can one possibly go in the middle of the night that they can't just as easily go during a reasonable time of day and after a decent breakfast?"

At the mention of 'Breakfast,' he saw his friend's pupils dilate. "What a nuisance," he muttered. "Let's have some breakfast, Colonel, and then we shall begin to figure this out."

Earlier that morning:

It had been cold and in the wee hours of the morning when she returned to the familiar street, all of her easily carried possessions in the taxi with Sai. He had eyed the street warily and asked if she wanted him to go with her, but she had smiled and politely declined. He did as she asked and waited in the hansom cab as she stepped out into the flower market of Covent Garden.

Her heels clicked a slow tattoo on the cobblestone streets as she walked as one in a familiar dream, reaching out to phantasms. She saw the burning bin where three men stood alternately blowing on their hands and holding them outstretched to the fire. Their uneven, heavily accented conversation might have grated on the refined ear, but it called to her like some uneducated cockney siren beckoning her to a familiar shore.

She approached and hesitated.

"Might I warm my hands by the fire?" she politely asked the dustman.

The nearest man looked up sharply at the cultured voice. "S-sure miss," he tipped his hat making room for her.

She gratefully stretched gloved hands to the fire while he took her in. He squinted, and then his eyes went wide and he stared at her. "Excuse me, miss, but ain't you…!"

She looked over to him, startled, her wide, blue eyes bright and beautiful in the flow of the firelight. "N-No it couldn't be. I'm sorry, miss. I thought you was someone else."

"Who?" she asked, her eyes bright with hope.

"N-No one, miss," he stammered and blushed before ducking his head. "Best be on my way. G'night, miss." He ducked away from her, and the other two men shrugged and continued their conversation.

She looked around, the sting of tears pressing at the back of her eyes even as she refused to let them fall.

She stared at the streets where she had worked for so many years; at the place and people that had once been her home and family.

She no longer belonged here.

She tucked a stray cornsilk blonde curl of hair back into her bonnet.

What was to become of her? Would she really be able to get a job in the flower shop now? Where was she to go?

Heartbroken at having no home, and belonging nowhere, she went back to where the cab stood. The young artist who claimed that he loved her waited there for her, and asked where she wanted to go. She could only think of one place and gave the address.

That afternoon:

"You mean to tell me," Mrs. Nara said, holding her tea cup and saucer with a far firmer grip than was necessary, "That after all of the work that you did, and after a stunning performance at last night's gala, no one even had the decency – the common courtesy! – to congratulate you, or tell you that you had done well?"

Ino shrugged. "When we returned home from the ball, they spent the remainder of the late evening congratulating each other on how well they had done to present the gutter snipe to royalty all the while passing her off as a lady, and exclaiming how glad they were that it was over." She quietly sipped her tea. "Not a word was said to me."

The teacup and saucer clattered forcefully against the table earning a sigh from the man on the settee, flicking through the morning paper. "Yoshino," he drawled, "mind the china."

"Oh I'll mind the china," she fumed. "I'll mind that I send it straight toward the thick head of that son of mine."

Mr. Nara stood and stretched. "Didn't you say you were going to meet Mrs. Sarutobi in the gardens? You know Kurenai is always punctual."

"I did," Mrs. Nara said, standing. "Stay as long as you like, dear," she said to Ino kindly. "That mutton headed son of mine has no manners. I shall speak with him later." With that, she sallied forth into the garden, leaving Ino to sip her tea quietly.

Shikaku shook his head and went back to his paper. When his son and his son's longtime friend had taken on this bet, he knew there would be trouble. How his lazy son had managed to become a professor of anything, much less phonetics, never ceased to amaze him. Colonel Akimichi was a good influence on the boy, even if he sometimes put more faith in him than he probably deserved. He studied the straight back and fair profile of the blonde woman as she sat deep in thought. She certainly hadn't appeared to be much when she first arrived, but he had seen the clever and quick mind behind the pretty eyes and dirty face. They had encountered the girl outside of the opera in Covent Garden; both he and his son had attended at Yoshino's insistence and had dozed in and out of the performance. Thank goodness the Colonel had been there to keep Yoshino distracted, er, company.

As they exited the performance, they were all caught in the rain, and took refuge in the markets and the portico of St. Paul's. Shikamaru had amused himself by jotting down the speech of those around him, and was particularly intrigued by the uncommonly common speech of the girl peddling her flowers.

"I could teach her to speak like a duchess," he had boasted lazily.

She had shown up at his office – which was also his home – the very next day, looking for lessons. She wanted to work in the flower shops, but they wouldn't consider her unless she "could speak more genteel-like." Shikaku suspected that Chōji had suggested the bet as the only way he could get his friend to help the girl. She was probably around the same age as the three of them, and the Colonel clearly felt badly for her. The next several months were spent training her in etiquette, conversation, diction, mannerisms – anything and everything she would need to pass herself off as a lady and circulate seamlessly in society.

Yes, they taught her everything she needed to know, except for one, final lesson: what to do when everything was over.

No matter how pleasantly she spoke or how gracefully she moved, she was still the low-born daughter of the streets of London, and no marriage of consequence would come to her. Certainly no marriage that would elevate her to actually circulating in the pond in which she had been trained to swim.

Shikaku frowned. They had taken her from her place in her world, and given her the skills to navigate a world to which she could never possibly belong. That was the sad fate of the Hana girl.

He checked his pocket watch. If he didn't miss his guess, his son would come by any moment to tell them about the girl's disappearance. He hoped his old friend down at the Yard would have a report for him not too long from now.

"Mother? Father?" A voice echoed down the hall, rapidly approaching. Shikaku smiled to himself. Right on time. "You'll never believe it – the most confounded thing! The Hana girl has disappeared without a trace. Left in the middle of the night to go to who knows where, and we-"

The voice stopped. Professor Nara stood and stared as his father looked drolly up from his paper, and the woman for whom he had been searching since early morning quietly sipped at her tea.

"I think I hear your mother," Shikaku said, folding his newspaper, tucking it under his arm, and disappearing from the room – in the opposite direction from the gardens.

Shikamaru stared at Ino, who simply sat sipping her tea as if nothing was the matter. He glared at her. How dare she sit there so calmly after the morning he had? He had spoken to the police several times, and Colonel Akimichi was simply beside himself, calling in old friends to help locate the missing girl. None of the servants had seen or heard anything; even the efforts to find the cab she had taken had proved uninformative.

He knew that artist – Sai Somethingorother – had been hanging around lately; probably thought himself in love with the girl. The Colonel had gone off to find him to see if he knew anything about her whereabouts. A tiny part of the Professor was more than a little relieved not to find her in his company.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and descended the short flight of stairs to stand before her at the table.

She looked up at him, calmly. "Tea?" she offered with a carefully perfected 100% socially acceptable smile. "Are you well?" she asked, pouring him a cup. "But of course you are well," she continued airily, "you are never ill. Did your appointments go well this morning?" She handed him the cup of tea.

He reflexively took the offered cup, still staring at her. "I couldn't find my appointment book," he grumbled. He couldn't find anything, it turned out. He had no idea who he was supposed to see, where anything was, or what his commitments were for that morning or any other morning in the near future. He had left Mrs. Pearce to make apologies to anyone who came by, telling her to cite a family emergency. It appeared that without her there, he was quite at a loss.

"Top desk drawer, right hand side," she said plunking several cubes of sugar into his cup. "You put it there last night when clearing your desk after the evening."

"Was that before or after you hurled my slippers at my head?" he asked, taking a seat opposite her.

"Before, I should think," she said with a finger to her cheek as if trying to recall. "You had not yet begun your pompous speech re: how ungrateful I was for all of the attention showered upon me by yourself and the Dear Colonel."

Professor Nara's eyebrow twitched. "The 'dear colonel' is quite beside himself thanks to you and your tomfoolery this morning. Well, you have a bit of your own back, I suppose – time to come back now, Ino, and put an end to this nonsense."

The beautiful girl blinked innocently. "Come back?" she half gasped. "Why whatever for? You said yourself that everything was concluded as of yesterday evening. Why would I return? What purpose would it serve? You need someone to fetch and carry for you? To keep track of your appointments? You did quite well before my arrival; I daresay you shall do so again."

"And so I shall," he said dryly. "But if you do not return to Wimpole Street, then where do you intend to go? Have you found a job a one of those flower shops you were considering? Or will you marry?" he asked stirring his teacup idly. "There were quite a few dignitaries impressed with your company. Seems a bore to me, but I suppose not everyone considers marriage as troublesome as the Colonel and I do." He sipped at his tea. "But I will say, we would miss you," he continued slowly. "It will be different without you."

"Oh, I can imagine," she said coolly, steeling herself against any sympathetic emotion. "Think of all of the things you shall have to do for yourself! Poor Mrs. Pearce – she'll have to put up with you barking orders at all hours." She challenged him with her glare. "But you shall not get around me, Professor Nara. My mind is made up."

"Get around you? Who is trying to get around you? If you wanted so badly to be gone from the place you could have left this morning after coffee," he grumbled.

"And after carefully detailing your commitments to you?" she asked with a note in her voice that rang suspiciously like steel. "Forgive me for having missed that opportunity."

"So whereto now?" He asked abruptly. "If you do not return, where shall you go?" He paused and looked at her carefully. "Have you anywhere to go?"

"Captain Nara has extended an invitation for me to stay as long as I like," she said pouring herself another cup of tea. "Both he and your mother were quite insistent."

Shimakaru frowned into his cup. "Do tell," he muttered.

"I do not intend to stay long," she said pouring the cream into her cup and watching it roil up through the dark tea to make pale clouds on the surface. "As you have said, I must decide where to go."

"To which dignitary?" he asked, his tone bored. "Any of them other than that awful Hungarian would do."

"Your former pupil?" Ino asked, masking the mischief in her smile. "I had thought to hire myself as an assistant to him and help teach phonetics."

Shikamaru looked up at her sharply. "You thought to-! To teach him my methods? My work? My discoveries?! You wouldn't dare."

"I would," she said simply, "if that was my best course of action. As for the dignitaries, I don't have an interest in them."

"And I suppose you are interested in that artist, Sai?" he asked, acid lacing his lazy tone. "All of that mooning about – is that how you wanted the Colonel and me to treat you?"

"That's not what I wanted from either of you," she shook her head. "I've had plenty of chaps that have wanted me that way; even Sai writes several times every day; sheet and sheets worth."

Shikamaru shuddered "I can only imagine it is the most dreadful prose known to man. Can he possibly be less awkward on paper than he is in person? And where does he come off writing to you in such a manner?"

Ino pitched her chin a bit higher. She'd die before admitting Sai's letters were awkward; endearing, but awkward. "He can do as he likes," she said defensively, before adding softly, "and he does love me."

"You shouldn't encourage him," the professor reached for the teapot to warm his cup. "Lord knows he doesn't need it."

"Every girl has a right to be loved."

He stared up at her, but she stared at the bottom of her teacup. He had several arguments to make. No woman should be loved by a fool, and certainly not one that could make nothing more of her. She had worked so hard; would she throw away her training to live with someone that would give her nothing in return? He had no doubt she could be good for the man; he was wrapped up in his own artistic world, and she would be the one to make sure bills were paid, and coal was in the fire. But such a pedestrian life – when she could be so much better?

But if that was truly what she wanted, did he have the right to stop her?

"Nara, I have just come back from the Yard – the detective is with me, and –" Colonel Akimichi stopped short, and stared at Ino. "Miss Hana!" he grinned. "Oh my, but we were worried for you! Look here, Chief Inspector, she is alright!" Chōji strode forward and Ino stood gracefully to greet him.

"I am sorry to have made you worry, Colonel," she said as he reached to clasp her hand in his own.

"As long as you are safe, Miss Hana, that is all that matters. Both the professor and I were beside ourselves this morning," he beamed down at Shikamaru. "Weren't we, Professor?"

Ino looked at the Professor, curiously, who in turn frowned with a slight blush and stared into his tea.

"Is that so?" she asked quietly. "Then… I am sorry," she said turning back to face the kindhearted Colonel.

"Ah, Colonel, good to see you," Captain Nara strode back in the room. "And with Chief Inspector Kakashi – what a pleasant surprise."

"Captain," the detective nodded his head politely. "Might I have a word?"

"Certainly. Join me in my study. Please excuse us gentlemen," he nodded to Chōji and his son, "Miss Hana," he nodded to Ino.

Shikamaru watched them go with a suspicious look. In another lifetime his father's military career had intersected the career of Kakashi, and it piqued his interest that the man would be paying his father a visit.

"Well, as thrilling as this reunion has been," he said, standing abruptly. "I must get back to my appointments. I shall see you later, Colonel. Good day, Miss Hana." Without waiting for so much as a nod in response, he strode out of the room and made his way for the door. He tried not to focus on the image of her startled look, or how large and blue her eyes were in her pale face. He stepped out onto the pavement and decided to forego a taxi in favor of a brisk walk. Damnably, he could not clear his mind from the aching haunt of a missing presence. His brisk pace slowed as the realization crept over him.

"I've grown accustomed to her face," he admitted begrudgingly as he stared up at the passing clouds.

His own words ringing in his ears, he remained grimly silent as his world realigned around something he had long suspected but strongly hoped was not true. He cared for Miss Hana. He cared for the motherless, fatherless daughter of London's streets, who had wanted nothing more than to be able to support herself by selling flowers in a shop. He cared for the girl who had risen so far beyond her former life and available connections as to now be more isolated than she had ever been. Was it any wonder she wanted her independence back?

And what of this Sai, this artist fellow? He came from a good enough family, but they were poor. It was a cruel trick of their society when families lost their money, yet their social position did not allow them to seek employment. Sai's family hadn't had the money to give a decent education and all of the necessary connections; he was qualified to bear on old name in poverty, and not much else. If he married Miss Hana, she'd no doubt spend the rest of her life supporting them both. Something stuck in his craw over that notion. Love or not, it wasn't good enough. Not for her.

He made his way home in this quagmire of new considerations, went directly to his library, retrieved his cigarettes, and sat down to smoke and ponder.

What in the world was to be done about her? He stared up at the high ceilings and began to think.

The next day:

Colonel Akimichi opened the door to the study and peered through the haze of smoke to see his friend sitting in his chair with his eyes closed and his fingers in a diamond shape in front of him. Recognizing the posture, he entered quietly and cracked open a few of the small windows. The Professor didn't budge, though, and remained deep in thought, much as he had for the majority of yesterday and the entirety of that morning.

"He's been thinking again?" a voice asked from the doorway.

Chōji looked up to see Miss Hana in her coat and hat, her face carefully composed. "Miss Hana!" he exclaimed. "It is good to have you back! Come, come, let me take your coat and we-"

"Thank you, Colonel," she said kindly, "but I am not staying."

"Not staying?" the Colonel's face fell. "But why ever not?"

"It turns out," she said slowly, "that I have a few places to go to settle some personal affairs," she replied. "I shall not be in London for quite some time."

Shikamaru's chair faced away from the door. Now, he swiveled it to face her, and took her in with a calculating eye.

"Affairs?" he asked with a hint of incredulity. "What kind of 'affairs,'" he asked skeptically.

"My own," she said stiffly. "And none of your concern, which I should think would be a great relief to you. Thank you for your kindness, Colonel," she took Chōji's hands warmly. "You have treated me as a lady from the moment we met, and that was more than I ever knew I could deserve."

Chōji blushed slightly. "It has been a pleasure knowing you, Miss Hana."

"The pleasure was all mine, Colonel." She kissed him gently on both cheeks and smiled a smile that would have melted even the hardest of hearts.

He looked stunned before blushing fiercely as she turned to look over to Shikamaru with a carefully collected countenance.

"Professor Nara," she extended her hand to him. "Thank you for all of your…time," she finished after a moment of hesitation.

He stared at the proffered hand and rose slowly. She looked up at him as he stood, visibly starting when she realized he did not merely shake her outstretched gloved hand. He took it in both of his and held it firmly while his unreadable dark eyes searched her fair ones. "It was… troublesome, Miss Hana," he said solemnly, "but not unrewarding."

Ino reminded herself that he was being maddening again; not to pay him any mind or give him the satisfaction of a reaction. Even as she thought this, she thought that he looked a little… sad. She quickly dismissed the notion and extracted her hand from his with tact. "That is good to hear," she said quietly.

"Farewell, Miss Hana," the Professor said, and she met his eyes with a bittersweet expression.

"Goodbye, Professor Nara."

He tried not to balk at her choice of words; not farewell, but goodbye.

It was a declaration.

She wasn't coming back.

"Thank you, gentlemen," she stepped back. "No need to follow. I know my way out." And with that, she swept out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the front door.

Shikamaru watched out of the window that afforded the view of the street in the front of the house, as Chōji joined him.

"Do you think she is alright?" the Colonel asked uncomfortably. "I can't imagine anything that would take her from London at this or any other time of the year. She has no family; where could she possibly be going."

Shikamaru narrowed his eyes.

"I do not know," he frowned as he noted the silhouette of another person waiting for her in the taxi, "but I mean to find out."

Edited 11/03/14: Pardon, friends - I forgot to indicate that the final scene happened the next day. - GL