Chapter Text
Shikamaru’s words bring the room into sharp focus.
Ino reaches behind her and shuts the window—best not to leave any evidence of a break in behind—as she catalogues what she’s looking at. It’s not the most fucked up thing she’s ever seen, it’s not.
But it’s up there.
Remember that mission we did in Kusa?
They’d done a lot of missions in Kusa but Shikamaru’s nod and the grim tenor of his thoughts tells her that he knows exactly which one she’s referring to before he ever says anything.
We use the same protocol we used then, he says, his mind’s voice telling he how much he hates this, but also that he thinks it’s a necessity. Make sure you tell me if you’re running low on chakra.
This time, Ino doesn’t complain about him coddling her. It’s not about keeping her around to see if he can pry the secrets she’s keeping (and she’s keeping so many), it’s about—if she dissipates, he’ll be left here without backup. She wouldn’t wish that on any Konoha shinobi, let alone Shikamaru.
Will do. You want left or right?
He shakes his head slightly. I’ll take right. The door’s there. If it opens, hide. I have a better excuse to be here than you do.
Since her excuse for this is basically non-existent, Ino just sends him a wordless wave of agreement and doesn’t point out that he’s already been turned away from the door today. Sneaking in the backway is unlikely to make him any friends, if they’re found out.
Except the ones that turned us away were Konoha ninja. We have yet to meet any Suna nin. Ino rolls that over in her mind, gauging her chakra, then says, Shikamaru, did you want me to do a scan for shinobi from Suna?
He thinks about it. What he wants and what he says are two different things. No. Save your chakra. We haven’t been able to locate either Temari or Naruto via scan. If this is related to their disappearance, then we’re not going to find anything and we might alert them to our presence and interest in what’s going on.
Good thing we’re supposedly at a movie for the next few hours, she says. People won’t be expecting us.
Unless we were followed for some reason.
Ino shakes her head. Did you notice anything?
No.
Then stop borrowing trouble. We’ve got enough to deal with as it is.
More than enough, really, and for once she’s in full agreement with the pessimism in his thoughts. This has been a long, long, long day, and it’s nowhere near over.
They’re quiet then, carefully going through everything they can without touching any of—it.
Hey, Shikamaru, Ino says. Come look at this.
He does, very nearly a shadow at her back as he looks over her shoulder. He’s quiet for a stretched, ugly moment that makes Ino ache in sympathy.
She doesn’t let it show. He’d hate it.
I’m going to destroy whoever did this.
The very flatness of his voice is the scariest thing about his declaration. Even his thoughts feel bladed thin, ruthlessly cracked down upon so that the rage doesn’t cloud his thinking. Honed to a razor's edge, sharp enough to cut the air before it strikes flesh.
It still does; she says nothing. So long as she’s here, she’ll do the thinking he can’t right now. She’s not the one whose loved one is--
Missing. They have no proof of anything further yet.
We’ll finish this room, Ino says. Then where should we start?
Her question doesn’t change anything but it gives him something to latch onto, to focus on constructively.
Shikamaru turns away, heading back to his side of the room.
Ino watches him go, watches him stuff his hands in his pockets and knows they're curled into the fists, ones he'd love to hit someone with.
People always think she's the most emotional of her generation's Ino-Shika-Chou team but they're wrong. Ino doesn't blame them for being wrong, given that she's spent literal years sowing the seeds of that belief herself.
It's easy when people think you're the emotional one. The one who will fly off the handle and scream and cry and laugh. It means they underestimate me and that they aren't looking at my teammates.
Ino sits back on her heels, studying the red lines and black charred remains of what had once been a human and now had been used as some sort of ritual. If she hadn't known what she was looking at, she'd have never known a human had died here.
But it's here, in the way this symbol curves. The way this one stretches. I don't like this. I thought this was the sort of darkness practiced exclusively in Kusa.
It's definitely the only place she's seen it before.
Ino counts the lines, follows the charred marks scored into wood with her eyes, not her fingers--never touch a ritual circle with skin; it's a lesson her dad taught her long ago--and decides that at least two or three people died in this room.
Painfully. Slowly.
And their bodies are gone, extinguished by the ritual. She continues to stare at the marks, in the hopes that she'll glean more from them.
Ino is more puzzled by how this happened, in the heart of the village, in the Sunagakure no Sato embassy, than horrified by the fact three ninja have lost their lives. At this point, they can't even say for sure if it was Suna-nin who lost their lives.
"How many, do you think?" Shikamaru asks.
Ino glances up--he's come up behind her, his presence so commonplace she hadn't paid it any mind.
"Three, I think," Ino says, and stands with his (unnecessary) assistance. She allows it becuase he needs something to do. "We don't know if they're familiar faces or not though. I don't know why we'd find Kusa death circles here in Suna's home away from home, here in our village."
She doesn't like it, though, that much she knows for sure.
"It's not part of your plan?" he asks sardonically.
"My plans never involved anyone but those already from Konoha," she says honestly. "Temari-san never even occurred to me."
And even then the vast bulk of her plans are actually orders, once she's sworn to, ones she'll die for.
Everything else is just her twisting and fitting things she wants in the corners of them, tweaking it for Sakura.
Ino is resigned to her own death but Sakura's is something else. She refuses to ever resign herself to the possibility of that.
She has always tried to be the very best friend she can be to Sakura. Even if most people, including shinobi, would say that someone who reaches out and messes with her best friend's mind is a terrible best friend.
"I just want one boring day," Shikamaru mutters. "With none of this shit."
Ino keeps her mouth shut on the first comment that comes to mind, the one that says if he really wanted peace and quiet then he wouldn't have picked a bossy blonde from Suna to date in the first place.
Especially not when a bossy blonde from his own village was, like, right in front of him. Boys were so stupid. Even when they grew up to be men.
Her second thought was that it was his own fault that this day in particularly kept going worse for him. He and Temari-san could've just... not. Could have just gone on their way, left her alone.
It would have turned out differently.
"Well, you know, my favourite curse has always been 'may you live in interesting times'," Ino says lightly.
He grunts at her and doesn't dignify that with a verbal answer.
Ino allows him that, since the banter is mostly to distract the two of them from the horrors of this room, mutely writ in soot and ash and the fading of chakra that signified lives had once been present here—and died here.
Ino sighs and goes to examine the wall closer to the door. She tracks a trail of soot--so fine and lightly fallen that it is truly barely there, half guesswork to follow it at all--and tries to make sense of the swooping lines of it.
Shikamaru's breath comes out strangled and horrified, a sharp intake that she's only heard a few times in her life.
"What have you got?" she asks, looking over her shoulder to see Shikamaru holding up a glass jar of... something.
Something squishy and pale.
"Eyes," Shikamaru says quietly. "It's a jar full of eyes."
She watches him study the jar and realizes he's searching the eyes, divorced as they are from the faces they belong to, and trying to figure out if Temari-san's eyes are there.
Ino doesn't need mind reading to figure that much out, though his thoughts confirm this is the case, now that she's paying attention.
"How many are there?" she asks curiously.
He gives her a flat look. Resentful horror washes over her.
"Don't give me that," Ino says impatiently. "The number of eyes is important. So far, it's probably safe to say that if they're in the jar, they're dead."
It's a grim thing to say and they both know that it's possible that those with their eyes now in that jar could be alive but, given the ritual that had gone on here, the way there's faint lines of ash where people once stood...
Ino thinks it's a fairly safe assumption.
From the pressure of his thoughts and the expression on his face, Shikamaru does too.
He studies the jar intently, his lips white as he keeps his hands steady. Ino, finding nothing else on her side of the room to investigate, comes over to him but keeps her space.
Shikamaru has never hit her in anger and she doesn't think he would now but she's just a Kage Bunshin of herself, one with little chakra and lessening sustainability. Even a hug, a bone-crushing sort of thing, with desperation in the lines of it, could probably dispel her.
"I don't see Temari's eyes in here," he says gruffly, looking so painfully relieved and guilty too.
"That's a step in the right direction," she says quietly.
Ino takes the jar from him, giving him that moment to just breathe and relax slightly--it's still terrible and macabre but the eyes of the woman he loves aren't in this jar and, while her heart might be tangled up about his feelings for Temari, most of her is just glad for him.
"I count twenty-seven pairs of eyes," she says quietly. The jar could hold more but they're floating there in some sort of clear not-quite-liquid that moves too sluggishly to be water. Ino does not open the jar to see what the goo is. "Three times three times three."
The tilt of his head says he's listening but he doesn't look at her and Ino allows him to get away with that.
"From what I remember in Kusa," she says slowly, dredging up old memories, "that's common for ritual work. Something about the way that twenty seven carries the repeating three but is also the sum of its digits from two to seven add up to twenty-seven. Two, three, four, five, six, seven."
"I remember that," Shikamaru says. "I don't remember why it was important either."
They both stare quietly at the eyes floating there. If there's a message to be read in them, Ino doesn't know the key to decode the cipher.
"Twenty-seven," Shikamaru says. "That's got to be nearly the entire embassy. There's not that many Suna ninja permitted in Konoha at any one time."
"Which means any Suna nin who is still alive is either unaware of what's going on, is evading capture by whoever did this, or who is part of whatever this is," Ino says, presenting the options in a mild, even voice, one careful to not accuse.
He bristles anyway. "Temari wouldn't," he says.
"I never said she would," Ino says. "I can't see her being the kind of person who would do this to her comrades."
And that's true enough. Ino might not like her, and probably never will, but there's a lot of room between disliking someone and believing them capable of pulling off the murder of their own embassy, their own comrades.
Shikamaru studies her sharply and Ino rolls her eyes and carefully puts the jar of eyeballs back on the shelf where they'd found it. She ignores his persistent sense of uncertainty with the ease of long practice.
"If she's evading capture," Ino says, "that would explain why she dropped out of existence so fast."
It doesn't explain why Naruto did as well but--Shikamaru's not quite the asshole he could be about men and their supposed superiority as he was when he was a child but sometimes it's still better to let him make the ugly conclusions.
He's too smart to not make them.
"Naruto, though," he says thoughtfully, and Ino hides a smirk. "I doubt anyone would've been able to take him against his will."
"So maybe Temari-san told him something," Ino says. "And they're deliberately hiding."
Shikamaru frowns at her. "It's possible," he allows.
"Well," Ino says, "we're not going to find out if we don't leave this room."
"I'll go first," Shikamaru says, rather predictably.
Since Ino's just a body built on jutsu and nothing real like blood and bone, she shrugs, nods, and gestures for him to lead the way.
It's not worth arguing with him, not over something like this, not when she can tell that however long this day has been, it's going to continue into the kind of long night that lasts for ages.
The worst sort of night, too, to not have a real body, she thinks, rather grimly.
But she's used to making the best of a bad deal and--even if she wasn't, there's nothing else she can do. If someone else tries to feed chakra into her clone, she'll just dissipate, the real her trapped in a hospital bed, far below.
Naruto could manage but that was different. Naruto had a line on the real her, right down to the soul.
The hallway is painfully normal. Austere, even, without all the little touches that Konoha natives like to add to make a place feel more homey.
She's been to Suna before, though, and she remembers the way they'd pared almost everything down to the very basics. Nothing out of place, nothing unnecessary. Now and then, carefully curated pockets of luxury, hidden from the outside world.
No weaknesses left on display.
Ino kind of hates the whole aesthetic a lot. It's functional.
She gets how they got there--the sands are a danger in their own right and then they have to deal with lords who want them dead, ones disinclined to care for their existence at all, meaning resources were scarce and luxury scarcer--but she's still glad to have been born as another leaf in Konoha.
Where rainy days were, just that, small things that passed soon enough and strengthened the tree in due time.
The next three rooms are all the same to her. Different in their details—for instance, two have blue blankets with wide, geometric patterns, the other a green one, with a different pattern--but even paying attention to such things gives them no information on what happened and where the people who live in such rooms have gone.
Both of them keep their ears open for any noise.
But there's nothing.
Which, it occurs, is also a thing we should be noticing, Ino says flippantly, her voice sliding into Shikamaru's mind with long practiced ease. It'd be easy even if she wasn't so weak on control. He's always been easy to reach. How quiet it is.
There's at least twenty-seven people dead, he points out. It'd be weirder if it wasn't quiet.
Ino shrugs a little. Yeah, she says, but what killed twenty-seven shinobi and did it silently?
Shikamaru's thoughts give her no answers, though she lingers there in the back of them like a bad ryo, not really listening but just feeling the heft and weft of the way he ravels and unravels information. Trying to come up with a response that makes sense and addresses the fact that--
There are at least twenty-seven dead but they had no true sense of how many were supposed to be here in the embassy, and there were Konoha ninja outside pretending to be Suna ninja.
Ino doesn't have his stupid high IQ or his obnoxious talent for thinking through everything but she is perfectly smart enough to see where the lines are being drawn in this case. If he's a master of his trade then she's a jack of all of them.
(And a master of her own.)
It stinks like politics and, worse, the kind that start wars.
This isn't Tsunade-sama's style though, Ino muses. I could see other Kages doing something like this--even Sandaime-sama's kindly grandfather persona was mostly just that, a persona; he might have done this--but it's not her style. She hates the convoluted political nonsense and Suna and Konoha have no reason to feud.
Ino hangs back in the hallway as Shikamaru checks the next few rooms by himself. He gives her a darkly concerned look but says nothing.
She wonders what it looks like as a clone fades away slowly. She is pretty sure she still has time but...
It is kind of nice for him to not argue with me when I don't do something, she admits to herself. And it gives me time to think about how, if this isn't Tsunade-sama's style, and if Suna and Konoha have no known reason to go after one another then... who is picking a fight between our villages?
She thinks about that mission from Kusa, the one where she'd learned about jutsu that could burn a person away to ash in a ritual. Where eyeballs could be kept in jars. She barely knows anything about that branch of jutsu but....
It's clever, all right, she decides. To use a Kusa jutsu to wedge between Suna and Konoha, but who is doing it and why?
The hallway doesn't give her any answers.
Ino explores the hall quietly. Shikamaru's thoughts a familiar and comforting press against her mind. Painful, too, but she welcomes that. It'd be worse if he'd changed how he felt about her because she was dying.
God, that'd piss her off.
It pisses her off just in the hypothetical.
Ino forces her mind back on task. I wonder if this has anything to do with Sakura's situation?
Her own, too.
Or if this is a completely separate plot with the worst timing?
It's hard to say.
Shikamaru grumbles that the room hadn't had anything in it that was interesting, glances at her, and then checks the next room.
Ino drifts back to the doorway to watch him.
"The guards haven't moved," she says, and rattles off their names. They're not ones she recognizes. "You know them?"
Shikamaru frowns. "No," he says.
They study each other for a long moment. It's possible neither of them would have heard these names before. Konoha is a large village.
But Shikamaru is slowly following in his father's footsteps and the Jounin Commander of the village would know all active shinobi, at least to know their name and rank.
Ino, as a Yamanaka, and part of the village's internal security... well... she knows almost everyone in the village by name, enough to rattle through the village and find anyone if she needs to.
"But they're absolutely, definitely, Konoha shinobi," Shikamaru says slowly, standing from where he'd been looking under the bed.
It's not a question.
"That's right," Ino says. "They are very sure of that. No sign of tampering."
They both consider the likelihood of having met someone completely new to them. Konoha nin pretending to be Suna nin.
"I think we need to finish up here and then go have a conversation with our new friends," Shikamaru says slowly. "We'll have to get them inside somehow, without causing any notice outside. Unless there's someone else inside we can ask?"
Despite them having decided not to before, Ino now sweeps her mind through the building. It takes very little chakra, mostly due to long practice.
"I don't think so," she says. "Though there's something on the first floor. Not quite thoughts but--a presence?"
"A presence?"
"I'd call it a ghost," Ino says, "if I believed in them. Possibly the memory of a ghost, given how little thought there is left. You want to go check it out?"
"Can you tell anything else about the presence?" Shikamaru asks. "Without over-exerting yourself, I mean."
"I know what you mean," Ino says, then shrugs. "And not really. It's not fully there, the way your mind theoretically is."
"Is it hostile?"
"Not right now," she says. "But that could change. Sticks and stones and all that nonsense."
"Then let's go poke it with a stick," he says. "See what we can get from it. What room is it in?"
Ino rattles off the location.
"Is there any chance it's what took the eyes and—"
"Put them in a jar?" Ino finishes. "I don't know. It doesn't feel cognizant enough to do that, but I've also never encountered a presence like this before."
"A first time for everything," Shikamaru says grimly. "All right, come on. We'll deal with it and the Konoha nin outside."
He doesn't call them traitors, though the word is there in his thoughts, but Ino doesn't complain.
She doesn't it like it either.
Their names don't resonate with any she knows.
They head down the stairs.