A/N: Surprise! After nearly 2 years I'm back with this sequel that has been gathering dust in my drafts. It's not the full story that I'd mentioned in the first, standalone part, but at least it's something :) prepare for more feels!

Ino is wrapping up her graveyard shift and handing over the intensive care unit to Sakura when one of the orderlies comes bursting in, sweating and hair askew as he casts his gaze about wildly. Before Sakura can reach out to him in alarm, he spots Ino and darts up to her with a choked hiss of her name. "Please come with me immediately," he gasps. Ino is too dead on her feet to resist as he grabs her wrist and drags her along.

Waving away Sakura's concerned look with a helpless flap of her hand, Ino jogs along after the young man, her sensible rubber-soled shoes squeaking against linoleum. She can't quite put a name to his face but it might just be the lack of sleep. After the war, after her father's death...

The house seems like a husk of days gone by. In her bed at night, she can hear every beat of her heart, every in-drawn breath and every shuddering exhale. They rattle about in her skull and in her chest, and it feels like she's shrinking, growing too small for this large, empty house. Every morning she puts on her shoes and wonders whether they'll slip right off her feet.

Her father's loving presence had always been the foundation of her heart ever since she could understand what family meant. And now he is gone. If home is where the heart is, then both have just been ripped apart. She doesn't feel like the bloomed bush clover her father says she has become. A wilted one, perhaps. Crushed beneath the sheer weight grief pressing down on her.

"Ino."

She snaps out her musings - half alarmed at her absentmindedness and half apathetic - and looks up.

And stares. And stares, and stares, her mouth falling open. "Shikaku-jisan? You're—?!"

Alive.

Her mind snaps to life and she forgets to breathe.

Tou-chan. Tou-chan was with Shikaku-jisan. Tou-chan must be alive.

Alivealivealive.

Her gaze darts to the waiting area just beyond Shikaku with its rows and rows of chairs. She has to get to past him and find her father. Maybe he's is injured, just resting a while in one of those chairs, and he'll look up with smile and say "Ino" when she runs up to him—

She tries to slip past Shikaku but he blocks her with a quick sidestep, his hands coming up to grip her shoulders. Ino raises her head, wide-eyed with confusion and surprise. The downturn of his lips deepens the lines bracketing his mouth and pulls at the scars lashing across his face. He looks at her and the furrow between his brows deepens together with the shadows under his eyes. She reads the bright pain in his gaze and none of the usual Nara boredom, and suddenly, it's like she's being gutted all over again.

"Is he..." she whispers, her voice thready with dread.

"He's alive," Shikaku says, low and steady. Ino sags against his grip, her whole body becoming so weak with the relief that she nearly stumbles. Before she knows it, tears are flowing in warm rivulets down her cheeks. His warm hands squeeze her shoulders tightly once, and the twisting in her stomach reminds her of the look that is still on Shikaku's face. "But—" The older Nara's voice breaks a little and he seems to be holding onto her for comfort as much as she is. "The Mind Transmission Technique did something. His mind doesn't… seem to be fully there."

The fear that had been building up behind the dam of her mind seems to burst free all at once and Ino chokes on a strangled sound of denial. "I-It doesn't matter," she declares, saying it out loud to make herself believe it. She shoves Shikaku's hands away and he lets her push past him. "Tou-chan's alive." Spotting a glimpse of Konoha green and ash-blonde hair, Ino's vision momentarily blurs with another onslaught of tears. "Tou-chan's back."

Her shaky steps take her swiftly to the corner of the empty waiting room where Inoichi is sitting, hunched over and facing the wall. He's muttering something under his breath, his gaze fixed blankly on nothing as his words slip disjointedly over one another. He doesn't notice even when Ino lays her hand on the shoulder of his grimy flak jacket.

"Tou-chan?" Ino whispers, her throat tight.

She kneels down before him and takes his hands. They're so cold. "Tou-chan?" her voice is trembling dangerously, desperation making her voice high.

"Inoichi," Shikaku says, almost too loudly in the quiet morning silence. "Your daughter is here. Ino's here."

The firm statement seems to break through to Inoichi and he stops muttering to himself. He turns slightly towards Shikaku, a frown pulling his expression tight. His eyes are unfocused, still that beautiful blue-green but achingly lost.

"Tou-chan." Ino copies the firm way Shikaku had spoken to him earlier. She's bursting with too many emotions at once and it's making her hands shake. "I'm Ino." Her father turns and looks at her, focuses on her face and sees her desperate, pleading smile and streaming tears. "Ino," she repeats, tightening her grip on his broad, calloused hands. "Your daughter."

"I-no?"

He doesn't recognise her.

Unable to face his polite uncertainty anymore, Ino buries her face against the back of his hands and lets her ugly sobs tear through her.

Inoichi stays quiet as she draws upon her flagging chakra and checks him over with a medical jutsu. He stares at her, perplexity flitting over his face as he regards her. Ino hiccups on a laugh-sob and Inoichi's frown deepens as if in worry.

Perhaps he is worried. Perhaps, on some level, he remembers who Ino is.

Clinging to that hope, Ino meets her father's eyes and gives him a watery smile. It's not too difficult because her father is alive and that's a miracle in itself. The tension in his expression seems to ease a little and Ino's smile broadens. Turning back to her medical jutsu, she is once again amazed that he only has a few bruises and scrapes to show for the Juubi's attack.

After Ino's fit of sobs earlier, Shikaku had explained how they had survived the Juubi's immolating blast. Her father hadn't yet been in this state when Ao, the Mizukage's right-hand man, had grabbed both of them and activated a teleportation jutsu using the remains of their Sensing Water Sphere. They'd ended up surfacing in a lake just outside radius of the blast, close enough to be lashed by debris and searing heat, but far away to survive. They had to dive beneath the surface of the lake - the only thing that had kept their skin from peeling off entirely - but all three of them had miraculously escaped with only minor scratches and contusions.

They had been caught in Tsukuyomi too. Shikaku had paused in his recounting, his expression unreadable, before continuing. Ino understood. The dreams had been too sweet; they left an aftertaste. But in a way, hadn't her dream come true? Her father is here back with her.

When the three of them were finally released, it was another good two days of camping in Kumo's wilderness before any of them were sufficiently recovered to begin their trek home. Shikaku had initially chalked up Inoichi's moments of absentmindedness and confusion as a side-effect of chakra-exhaustion. Being an expert in the workings of the mind, Inoichi had realised there was something wrong long before Shikaku did. It was a dire self-diagnosis.

The Mind Transmission Jutsu worked like an attenuated from of the Mind Transfer Jutu. By projecting a tiny piece of the caster to the recipient, they could communicate telepathically. Inoichi's use of the jutsu had been on an unprecedented scale and had linked him to too many people for too long. The mind was never meant to be pulled in so many directions at once and it was only by sheer strength of will and an unnatural exertion of chakra that the jutsu had been sustained.

And now that it was done, Inoichi's mind was shattering apart, unable to draw the pieces of himself back into his body.

By the time they reached the border of Hi no Kuni, Inoichi's brief lapses of concentration began to rapidly decline into severe amnesia and periods of complete disengagement from his surroundings. Sprinting through the forests weren't an option anymore and Shikaku had to take Inoichi by the hand to make sure he didn't stop walking and wander off.

It took them two weeks to reach Konoha and when they finally arrived, Inoichi couldn't recognise the gates welcoming them home. As Shikaku quietly relayed all this to her, Ino's heart broke as she imagined how terrifying it must have been for her father to witness himself falling apart yet be helpless to stop it. And still he'd remembered to pass her one last message: that he'd always love her, even if he couldn't say it himself anymore.

The strain of her medical chakra forces Ino to withdraw her hands from her father's bruised shin, even though she wants to heal him until not a spot of pain lingers. A sudden bang of the door startles both of them and Inoichi flinches hard, his eyes wide and chakra spiking as he whips around in his chair. Ino barely makes out the twin blurs that are Shikamaru and Yoshino, darting down the hallway a med-nin had taken Shikaku earlier.

Ignoring the twinge of unnameable emotion in her chest, she reaches out for her father's hand, slipping her fingers around his and squeezing lightly. "It's just Shikamaru and his kaa-san, nothing to worry about."

Her low murmurs seem to soothe him and he relaxes again, his chakra falling quiescent once more. His gaze find Ino's again as she pats his hand. Dredging up every ounce of courage she has within her, Ino puts a smile on her face. "Let's head home."

For probably the first time since she'd started med-nin training at thirteen, Ino is glad that her shift ends late enough for the streets to be empty. It not that she doesn't want to be seen with her father - no, she refuses to entertain those kinds of thoughts - but it has been a trial to simply get him to move from point A to point B. Twice he'd stopped and hunched down in the middle of the road, refusing to move. Then, he'd shunshined away from a drunken civilian stumbling along in the dark and lead Ino on quite the chase before she learnt to hold onto his arm tight. And soon afterwards, he'd startled at the sound of a cat-fight and almost tripped Ino face-first into the dirt.

Ino needs time to sort out the turmoil that her thoughts have fallen into. It frightens her to see her father suddenly become this timorous, unsettled man. How had Shikaku-jisan even gotten him back from all those miles away? She briefly considers knocking her father out and carrying him home, like she would an uncooperative patient while on the field, but the mere idea of doing that to him after all he's been through stings like a kunai grazing her heart. She dismisses the thought immediately and resigns herself to taking however long they need to get home. It's the least she can do.

The Yamanaka compound is one of the larger ones around Konoha, courtesy of their status as one of the founding clans of Konoha. Their lands are abutted by those belonging to the Nara and the Akimichi, positioned such each clan guarded a third of their shared border. Because of the needs of the Nara deer, they had selected the land to the northern forests of Konoha, which are faraway enough from the city center for the nights to be unusually quiet.

Inoichi's grip is tight around Ino's hand as they make their way down the unlit gravel path leading to their little house with its rows of flower beds. It's improper, perhaps, for the Yamanaka Clan Head to live elsewhere than the ancestral home but Ino's mother had never gotten along with the elders living there. Inoichi had moved out for her sake but they'd never returned even after Ino's mother left the family for good.

Ino really doesn't want to think about that now. Maybe not ever. But it means that her dad is the only family that Ino can truly call dear, and Ino... She can't lose him.

The familiar scent of roses begins to tinge the air, joined by the perfume of a dozen other flowers, and Ino unconsciously relaxes. Her father stops and Ino almost cries because her head is splitting from sleep deprivation and chakra exhaustion both. Still, she keeps her tone gentle. "What's wrong?"

His gaze is fixed on the eaves, where a tile had cracked from a lightning strike. A sharp fragment hangs by the edge, liable to slip off and bury itself innocuously into the soft dirt. "That's dangerous. Remind me to fix that, Ino." It's possibly the first two whole sentences that Inoichi has spoken, complete with him recognising her, and it is about the roof tiles?

A sharp bark of near hysterical laughter escapes Ino, alarmingly loud in the silence of the night. The tired jounin hunches over, snorting gracelessly into her hand. "Tou-chan."

Inoichi looks at her, a bemused smile on his face as she hugs him. Her giggles turn into sobs when his arms wrap around her, and then she's crying into his chest like a child all over again.

"I missed you," she hiccups as he hugs her, patting her hair like he always does. "I missed you so much." She knows he'll forget her again and this is only temporary, but she clings onto the moment desperately. "Thank you for coming home."