Firebirds

Shameless Monkey

Chapter 4

That night we – mum and dad and me – go over to the Inos' for dinner. It's a long-standing tradition of ours, to go and eat with Inoichi and his daughter, and Chouza and Chouji and Choyo – Chouji's mum – at least once a week. We take turns hosting the get-togethers, and the amount of thought that goes into them is like something out of the Joy-Luck Club.

Tonight Inoichi has made Oden, and even though it's one of Ino's favourites – when she's not being stupid and saying she's dieting, anyway – she isn't at the table.

"Shall I take some up to Ino-chan?" I ask him, but before he can answer, my mum interjects.

"She ate earlier today." The fact that she's been over isn't surprising, but the fact that she almost expected the question makes a sluggish sense of suspicion kick in.

"That would have been lunch."

"Shika-kun, eat your food and be quiet!"

Dad and I exchange glances, and in his eyes I read just do what she says and I wonder, not for the first time, why the hell he married mum at all. The Akimichis, eating, don't pay attention to the outburst, but mum, stewing in furious silence, glares at me until I take a bite of fishcake. And taste garlic.

My mum's secret ingredient.

And I realise that this goes beyond a dinner party, beyond my mother clucking over Ino, beyond my dad and Inoichi going along with whatever she says. I want to ask why my mum cooked dinner tonight, and why Inoichi is so quiet, and why Ino hasn't been training for days, but instead I swallow the lump of fishcake so that it sits in my stomach like some kind of poison.

And I don't say a word.

After dinner, I go up to Ino's room, and stand on the threshold of her space. The curtains are drawn even though it's still light outside, and there's something so unhealthy about her space that I hesitate about going in. But then she rolls over, and her eyes open and she looks at me for a splintered second, her listless blue orbs plunging some hook in me so that, almost against my will, I find myself walking over and sitting on the edge of her bed. She tries to sit up when I come in, but I shake my head and tell her not to bother.

"How've you been, Shika-kun?" she says, in a voice so soft and unrecognisable – as if my presence is exhausting her – that I take a second to decipher what she said at all. For some reason, it makes a flare of irritation rise in me. I didn't want to have to intrude on her sacrosanct bloody bedroom. She's the one who didn't come downstairs for dinner like any normal person would have, and it's so annoying that she's gotten away with it, too.

How many times have I tried to get out of these stupid InoShikaCho dinners? How many times have I been successful? But the rules have been bent for her.

"Fine," I say, and my tone is sharper than usual, and she shifts under the blankets so that her shoulders are no longer exposed to the cool, faintly stale air of her bedroom, and says

"You're mad at me."

I can't work out whether it's a statement or a question, but the fact that she has enough energy to pull an ambiguous move like that on me makes me even more annoyed, and when I snap "No, I'm not." I sound like the biggest liar in the history of the world.

"Okay," she says, caving, and for a minute I'm so shocked by this new turn in our conversation that her room returns to complete silence.

Ino is the queen of arguments, and even though I'm smarter, the fact that she's like a dog with a bone when it comes to nitpicking means that she usually reduces our spats to shouting matches, which Chouji tries to make less noticeable – when we're training and things – by building barriers of pure chakra around us to try and absorb the noise. Asuma used to say that showing our enemies discord like that was a Bad Sign, and even though it was only ever about trivial things - not battles or strategies or tactics, and certainly not when we're actually facing down some foe - we used to split angrily and guiltily and not speak to each other for the rest of the day.

Then later on - at night, mostly - she'll come and get me and we'll talk for hours, and laugh about whatever it was that had seemed so goddamned important before, and I go to sleep with a smile on my face.

Now though, she's just given in, and the unnaturalness of it makes me want to recoil from her, before I banish the instinct as ludicrously stupid. She rolls over again, facing the wall and the curtained window, and her bare shoulder, when I pull the blanket up over her, is cold. She closes her eyes, and against her pale skin, the delicate blue veins make it look like her eyes are recovering from violet bruises. Or maybe indigo ones…

Unwillingly, my thoughts trail back to the Suna kunoichi and I find myself waiting for Ino to ask me what's going on, the way she always does, but she doesn't say anything, and I blurt it out into the discordant silence instead.

"Temari had a go at me today."

"Yeah?" a chink in the curtains makes a stream of golden evening light beam down on her, turning her hair to the colour of sunshine where it lands, and even though her voice is whisper soft and she looks… strange, in a way I can't explain, I hold onto her forced interest (I can hear the indifference in her voice) and say

"Yeah. So I kind of bumbed her out in front of Tsunade-sama."

"I knew I taught you well," she tries to joke, but the words are laced with so much fatigue that I'm relieved to hear my dad call up the stairs that we're leaving, soon after.

Later that night, when I'm lying on the roof, staring up at the drifting night time clouds, thinking about Ino and Temari and Tsunade-sama and my mother, or 'the four most troublesome women on the face of the earth' (but mostly about Ino) it comes to me, what had been so wrong about the light and her closed eyes and the sun shafting down on her through the gloomy dusty curtains.

Once, when we were on a mission, we stopped at a temple, where a priestess in ages past had allegedly turned herself to stone, to save her village from a demon. There was a statue there, of her dying, turning to stone – whakakohatu haere, in the language of the people of that land – and tonight, in the room I don't think she'd left for days, Ino had looked like that priestess.

But Ino isn't injured, and no one will tell me what the hell is going on.

End Chapter

Omg. Sorry for the lack of updating :( I have no good excuse. Well… I found out some nasty family stuff… and then I went on holiday to run away from said family stuff for a while… but still.

And something weird happened here, too. I thought I updated like, earlier this week but I just checked and it told me I only had 3 chapters up :/ So sorry for that as well.

Hope you're all having a good 2009 so far!!! I can't believe I'll be 16 in half a year… craaazy. And then I can have sex legally haha.

I resolved to not drink fizzy drink anymore, unless it's diet. Just to keep my sugar intake down ;)

Yeah. Story goes onwards, at least :D

Disclaimer: I'm sure if you google Naruto it won't tell you that it's owned by a 15 year old new zealander… let me know if I'm wrong though. I'd be thrilled haha.

R&R, pretty please? Tell me how it was?

Much love,

Shameless Monkey x0x0x