Title: Flower Shop
Characters Inoichi, Ino
Summary: Giving a gift is never one sided.
Requested theme: Him raising a girl clan heir
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, Kishimoto does I just like to play with his characters because they're fun.
Dedicated to: PenumbraChey in thanks for the points on dA
A/N: Chisaki - the name I chose for Ino's mother - means 'A thousand blossoms' and I thought it was rather apt given the flower shop. Also I took the basic idea of this from a one sentence fic I wrote and always wanted to expand on.

Inoichi loved having a daughter. She was beautiful from the first moment that he laid eyes on her and that would never change. From that day forward she was ihis/i little princess.

When she cried it made him want to smile at how her little nose wrinkled and her big blue eyes shone when bright with tears. At the same time it broke his heart to see his precious, little girl upset. It didn't matter what the cause was, it was the hardest thing in the world for him to face and she was notabove using that fact against him. It took more will power to resist her teary-eyed pleas than it took to resist enemy interrogation methods or practically any other form of torture he knew of.

When she smiled or laughed it filled him with joy. The sound was like music, and it didn't matter what he had seen, heard, or done all day. No matter how bad his mood was when he got home and she wrapped her arms around him and told him animatedly of all the things that she'd learned from Suzume-sensei about flowers it brightened his day.

It was those two things that decided him, of course.

It wasn't because he needed time away from T&I. He did, but not because he was feeling the strain like he claimed. He said that to keep Ibiki from laughing at him and somehow that was less embarrassing than admitting the real reason.

The time away was necessary because as hard as it was sometimes to remember, when Ino understood the root of her mother's name- when Suzume told her that Chisaki meant 'a thousand blossoms'- it struck him that she had nothing to remember.

He re-opened the shop for her. Because she pleaded with him, begged him, and gave him 'the eyes' with her lower lip sticking out for added emphasis. Because seeing her heartbroken whenever she looked at her mother's picture, a mother who'd never had the chance to be there for her, broke hisheart. Because Ino needed her mother and he couldn't give her that.

The flower shop was his gift to Ino. It was his way to give her a tie to her mother; a constant happy reminder that her mother was always around her. Whenever he walked in now, he could feel Chisaki's arms around him, and he knew that while it might have started as his gift to Ino, in a way it had turned out to be Ino's gift to him too.