Notes: Another odd Ino story, but let's see where it goes. Ultimately Kiba/Ino, a pairing I always wanted to do but probably never got around to.

It's In His Touch

A Naruto Oneshot by

Nate Grey (xman0123-at-aol-dot-com)

Everything Yamanaka Ino needs to know about a man, she learns through his hands, and the way that they feel on her skin.

Shikamaru is rough and callused, and handles her in a way that shows he expects and knows that she is, too. Part of her cannot blame him: they have trained together all of their lives, nearly lost their lives together, and watched lives lost together. He cannot bring himself to treat her gently, either because he thinks she would resent it, or because he cannot force himself to care enough to. Ino isn't sure which possibility disappoints her more.

Chōji is forever gentle, and this is something that Ino tired of inside of a week. She cannot understand it: Chōji would move mountains for her, and even when he does, it only leaves her feeling awkward and obligated, which he intensely dislikes. But when he distances himself out of frustration, the separation wounds them both, more deeply than it should, and when they come together again, Chōji goes right back to being gentle, and Ino goes right back to tiring of it. Yet she knows that without Chōji, her world would crumble. Without him, she would never recognize real love when she experienced it, because Ino knows she will never feel it for him, no matter how much they both wish it was otherwise.

Asuma is surprisingly subtle strength. He is the sort of man that Ino would expect, based on looks alone, to accidentally crush teacups on a regular basis (though it would amuse her to no end to learn that when Asuma did drink tea, Kurenai was usually the one who gave it to him, and rarely were cups of any kind involved). But Asuma's power is tightly controlled, always close to the surface so that it can explode forth at a moment's notice, but never doing so unless there is a real need for it. The hands that are, admittedly, so very good at breaking things, have also held Ino when her heart was broken, supported her when she was weak, and even tickled her when she was taking herself far too seriously (and that last one is a closely guarded secret from the the rest of the team).

Sasuke is loneliness and pain. It was never so much that Ino craved his touch, because it was unyielding and uninterested for as long as she could remember. It was just that his misfortune displayed itself in nearly every aspect of his being, and Ino, coming from a clan that excelled in reading minds and emotions, could not help but feel for him. Part of her even needed to share a little sunshine with him, because Sasuke would never crave it himself.

Naruto is overwhelming warmth and forgiveness, and Ino cannot understand how she ever missed that. More accurately, she cannot understand why Naruto forgives her and everyone else that was ever needlessly cruel to him. He is a walking paradox: the man she has no reason to trust is the one that makes her feel the safest. No matter how many things go wrong around Naruto, Ino has never been afraid of him, only afraid of what being close to him might mean, for herself and her family. Now she curses everything and everyone that ever made her doubt him. Naruto is the one pure and good man left in her life, and because of a lifetime of cruelty and hardship, he is too afraid to let anyone into his heart and share his goodness with them. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he puts as much feeling as he can in every touch, something that is so rare and beautiful and heartbreaking that it makes Ino want to cry each time he does it to her.

Sai is all muted sensation and, when he permits it, ice. Each touch leaves Ino with an intense feeling of after. She has no idea what Sai was like before, only that she would probably prefer it to what he is now. She can tell that he is genuinely trying to change, but that in itself seems against his nature. But he is improving: now he is almost always ice, and his smiles are broken, brittle glass. Ino just tells herself that those are the remnants of the mask that he used to wear. Sometimes that helps, but not often enough.

Shino is both patient and intensely, eternally bored. He has saved her life on three separate occasions, and in the last, he was actually required to grasp her hand for just over twelve seconds. These were easily the longest seconds of Ino's life, not because of the insects swarming over him, but because Shino's unreadable expression didn't change once the entire time. She honestly felt that he was seriously considering just letting her fall off of the cliff, right up until he hauled her up with no apparent effort and not even a word of explanation afterward. Yet Ino would still prefer Shino to Shikamaru on a mission: Shino goes out of his way to avoid touching or talking to everyone but his closest friends, so doing the same to her is not something she takes personally.

Kiba is a perfect blend of rough and smooth, and Ino can never decide whether she wants to hit him or hug him. His constant habit of sniffing new people took a while to get used to, but Kiba is somehow able to sense her moods and respond accordingly. He makes her laugh when she wants to cry, sends Akamaru to lick her toes if she ever thinks of frowning, and would defend her honor to a man three times his size for no apparent reason other than they were once classmates. Kiba has never made a secret of his feelings, for her or anyone else: the very day he grew a brain and realized that he wasn't ever going to do any better than having Ino for a wife, he pursued her like a man possessed. Perhaps the only reason that Ino finally gave in was that Kiba learned Akamaru's "sad puppy face," and used it on nearly every female he knew to devastating effect. That, and because she has learned that there are only two things that can tear an Inuzuka away from their mate: death and horrid death. And Kiba still insists that so long as most of his guts were intact, he would come back from the dead just for the honor of crawling into bed with her once more. Before they were married, Ino just found that disgusting. A few days after they were married (with memories of the honeymoon still fresh in her mind), she found it slightly gross but strangely romantic. After ten years and two kids, however, she simply tells Kiba not to leave zombie juice and/or crust on her good sheets.

The End.

Endnotes:

Urgh, zombie crust. On pizza. But not really.