Naruto // One-shot // The Language of Faces
Focus: Ino/Sai
Rating: T
Warnings: awkwardness?
Wordcount: 4246
Summary: Ino decides to teach Sai how to function in ordinary society. Sai tries his best to keep up.
The Language of Faces
Sai felt the presence at his back, and roundly ignored it.
There were interesting things happening below. The bonds of relationship were so easily tangled, and came in so many strange colours. Watching them play out their patterns was his new hobby, and also a sort of study meant to benefit himself. How was he to learn to be properly human if he didn't watch to see how it was done?
He'd never met the kunoichi Shikamaru was talking to, but he'd gathered the gist of who she was. She was heavily pregnant. Due any day now, at his guess, though admittedly he wasn't an expert on the subject. There was a smile on her face, but it was the wrong kind. Or was it? There were a number of possible expressions she could wear at this time. She could weep, because her lover and the father of her child was dead. She could wear a genuine smile, because she was talking to her lover's beloved student, a good person who cared for her and wanted her to be happy. She could be cool or indifferent, because the student had only a secondhand connection to her and had, indirectly, been the reason for her lover's death.
This expression seemed to be a strange combination of all of those, and something else besides.
Try as he might to decipher it, this was a bit above his level still. He needed to study some more simple things before he tackled it again.
Even so, he could not seem to stop watching. There was something mesmerizing about that sad half-smile.
"Hey, Sai," said the presence behind him, who was not taking well to being ignored. "You realize you're being a creep."
"Yes, beautiful," he replied absently, letting his eyes stay trained on the interesting thing.
Ino sighed.
A moment later, she sat down on the roof edge beside him, dangling her long legs over the three-storey drop and resting her chin on her hands. "Oh," she said when she caught sight of his target. Another strange, unnameable expression flashed across her face, but she chased it away before he could get a good look at it. "It's still weird, you know. Seeing Shikamaru like that. Looking reliable, I mean. In my head, he's still just a lazy, useless slacker kid. You know, he never did a single exercise he didn't have to. He slept through half our classes, I swear. But look at him. It's like Asuma-sensei left half his soul behind when he died."
Sai hadn't known Sarutobi Asuma, though he'd known of him. All he saw when he looked at Nara Shikamaru was Nara Shikamaru. However, the Nara Shikamaru he saw was, as Ino said, a person who looked very reliable. And Kurenai Yuuhi looked like she depended on him, despite not looking like she was normally the sort of person who made a habit of relying on others.
Why did people make exceptions like that? It was a question he was beginning to grasp the answer to, thanks to Naruto and the endless exceptions he had made and continued to make for Uchiha Sasuke. It seemed that as a bond of any sort grew tighter and thicker-woven, the number of exceptions allowed grew. Bonds such as those between siblings and married partners seemed to breed exceptions like algae.
The bond between Shikamaru and Kurenai was neither, but it had to be something approaching them, because of the exceptions she was making for him.
"Sai," Ino said.
He ignored her.
In his observations so far, he had noted that when exceptions were made for bonds that were not strong enough to take them in stride as due course, awkwardness of some sort often occurred. Those who went too far in doing favours for those they loved before they had confessed it invited sidelong glances and curious inquiries. And yet, no one seemed to be asking Shikamaru if he was in love with Kurenai, though he spent much of his free time caring for and assisting her without any sort of quantifiable recompense. What was the difference? Was there some sort of obligation between mentor and pupil that made this normal and expected?
"Sai," Ino said.
He ignored her, again.
For that matter, some labels seemed to cover absurdly large areas. For example, the word "friend." Ino had "friends" in town who were not shinobi. She spent some of her time off wandering the streets with them, laughing and joking and shopping. Sai was sure she would die for them, but with not much more enthusiasm than she would for some other villagers she'd never met. Their friendship was a casual thing, with very low expectations. Most of them hardly even seemed to have an idea of who she was as a person.
On the other hand, there were friendships like the one between Naruto and Sasuke. To Naruto, no price seemed to high to pay for it. He willingly threw everything he had to throw into preventing that red thread from snapping, despite all of Sasuke's not inconsiderable efforts to cause exactly that to happen. Naruto wept and bled and suffered for it without a word of complaint.
How could that bond have the same name as Ino and her silly hangers-on? To Sai, it seemed an entirely different beast, lions to house-cats, with only the vaguest resemblance between them.
"All right, that's it," said Ino, audibly exasperated. "There's a limit to how creepy you can be before it gets out of hand, you know, and you passed it a while back. You've got to stop staring at them. That's private."
"Private?" Sai echoed. This was another concept he only had the edges of worked out. There had been no need for privacy in ROOT. Its members were not permitted to have secrets, or bonds strong enough to make exceptions for. It was like the world outside it spoke an entirely different language, one with a far greater number of words, half of them still unpronounceable to him.
Ino rolled her eyes. "Yes, Sai. Private. Something between them that doesn't involve you in any way, shape or form."
Shikamaru's voice suddenly echoed up from the street, much louder than before. "She's right, Sai. Go away."
"Ah," said Sai. "I see." And he did, almost. He was getting quite good at sensing it when he wasn't welcome. "I apologize."
Ino nodded approvingly, which he took to mean he'd done something right this time, for once. Then she took his arm and hauled him off bodily across the rooftops. He stumbled to keep up.
"Where are we going?" he asked mildly.
"On a date," Ino informed him. "But really, think of it more as a lesson. I'm going to teach you how to be a normal person. Or try to, anyway. If that's possible."
"Oh," said Sai. "I see. Thank you, beautiful."
Ah, there it was again, the colour in her cheeks. She hadn't blushed earlier, because she'd trained herself to accept her nickname with aplomb, but perhaps now, in conjunction with the idea of a "date," it had gained new power?
"Ino," she barked. "My name is Ino. Use it."
"But isn't 'beautiful' also something true about you? My book said-"
"Agh, stop. Stop already. Stuff like that… you kind of have to be a little closer to someone to call them something like that, okay? Part one of your lesson. There are levels to it, see: if you're a little close, you call someone by their name with a softer honourific. Pretty close, you drop the honourific. Really close, you can give them a nice nickname, like the one you gave me. Really, reallyclose, you can risk giving them a nasty one like you gave Sakura, because between real friends stuff like that is like a private joke between the two of you. If you give someone a nasty nickname before you're close enough, you're just treating them like an enemy."
Sai's head reeled a bit, but he drew himself up and did his best to process the new information. "So, you can give someone a bad nickname if you're either very close, or the opposite of that? Am I understanding you correctly?"
Ino sniffed. "Well, it sounds kind of weird when you put it that way, but yeah. Pretty much. Also, there are levels to the kind of conversation you can eavesdrop on. If you're only a little close, or kind of close, it's rude to listen in on a conversation you haven't been invited to. If you're pretty close, it's okay to drop in on the more casual stuff. If you're really close, you can walk in to most things. And if you're really, really close, nothing's off limits, really."
"But if it's an enemy and I need to gather intel, it's also okay to eavesdrop on anything, right?"
"Right," Ino affirmed.
"These rules make no sense," Sai informed her. "Why should the rules for the best of friends and the worst of enemies be the same? "
Ino bit her lip and furrowed her brow. He knew that expression. It was a basic one, and it meant she was stumped, confused by her own logic.
"Well, uh, I think there is a difference. Oh, I know! Respect. If you respect someone, you have to follow the rules. If you don't, it's like the rules in reverse. The less you respect them, the fewer of the rules you have to follow. If it's just that you don't like someone much, you still owe them privacy. But if they're an actual enemy, you don't owe them anything, so you can throw the rules away. Get it?"
He did. It was actually remarkably simple, now that he thought about. Respect was a catalyst, changing the nature of negative interactions to positive ones, to a fairly exact inverse power.
"Good, okay. So, let's do lunch. I want salad. That all right with you?"
"Yes," he said, because he had a hunch that it would be rude to demur and ask for something else when she was the one inviting him. He would get the hang of this yet.
"Cool. Come on, then."
She had let go of his arm, but still had a firm grip on his hand, and hauled him off to the north-east with it at a brisk pace.
The café she led him too was mostly deserted, because it was halfway through the afternoon. The lunch crowd had gone, and the dinner crowd had yet to come, so they had the patio mostly to themselves. There was an intricate dome of trellis-work over it, and jasmine and rose brambles with tiny pink buds wove through and around it to hang indolent with spring above their heads. There was still a mild edge to the air - summer was still a month and a half off - but it was warm enough.
True to her word, Ino ordered a massive salad garnished with apple shavings, crushed walnuts and some sort of berry vinaigrette. It smelled like it should be a dessert, despite all the vegetables beneath the sweet crust.
Sai opted for soup. Warm, filling, easy on the pocketbook. Since leaving ROOT his salary had taken a substantial hit, but his freedom was the worth the cost, so he kept quiet about it. When the soup arrived, it was thin and clear and full of greens and soft barley dumplings. He'd be hungry again in an hour. Perhaps he should have spent the extra for something more substantial… too late now.
"So, what does one do on a date?" he asked conversationally.
Ino paused, mouth full of spinach and thinly sliced cucumber, and held up a finger.
Ah, a signal. This one meant "wait a moment." Patiently, he obeyed.
After she swallowed, she cleared her throat loudly and put her fork down. "Well, it depends," she said.
"On what?"
"Uh, on what the people on it like to do, I guess," she said.
Suddenly, Sai realized that she hadn't been on many. Shinobi life kept its followers very busy most of the time. A fair percentage of the ninjas he knew had not dated at all, let alone managed to create and sustain romantic relationships. Even when pairs of people were obviously in love with each other, there often just wasn't time or space for it in their schedules.
For the first time, that struck him as sad.
"What do you like to do, beau- Ino?" he asked, remembering at the last moment that calling her by her nickname implied an intimacy they did not in fact share.
"Shopping," she said instantly. "Also, canoeing, cliff-jumping, and horseback riding. Oh, and I like going to the archery range. It helps with the accuracy of the mind-body switch."
Sai filed these away for future reference. "I see."
"And?" she prompted. "What about you?"
This required some thought. The only thing that came to mind was painting, but that wasn't very interactive. He knew how to canoe and cliff-jump and all of that, but he'd never looked at it as something to do for fun before. They were useful things for ROOT members to know. "Useful" and "fun" sometimes overlapped, he had learned, but did they here? He wasn't sure.
"Perhaps we should go canoeing," he suggested. There was no way to find out but trial and error.
She frowned. "That wasn't much of an answer."
Sai tilted his head, a half-shrug. "I'm sorry. I don't know what I like. Not yet, anyway. I've never really had a hobby I could share with someone else before."
Ino gave him a mildly poleaxed look, twitched as if she wanted to reach across the table and do… something. Hug him, perhaps. That would be interesting. He had to live through that particular experience.
"I… okay," she said. "Okay. Canoeing it is. Maybe you'll like it."
"Maybe I will."
That was probably the wrong reply, he realized a second too late. Too flippant. But Ino only blinked. She must be getting used to his peculiar inhumanity.
When the bill came, Ino pushed him off with a hard look and paid for the entirety of it. "I have my salary, and my family does all right with the floral business," she said. "I can afford it. I wouldn't have asked you out if I couldn't."
"All right," he said, because he knew next to nothing about end-of-meal restaurant etiquette.
"Good boy," she said, with a rare real smile.
x.x.x
The inside of the canoe was painted green.
Everything else around them was mostly green, too, so Sai felt a little bit dizzy. The water was green because of certain minerals that washed into it from the mountains during the runoff. The banks were green because it was late spring and everything was busy growing as fast as it possibly could. Even the sky had a strange greenish hue to it that day, though that might just be his eyes trying to adjust.
The land of fire was awake and rich with uncountable thousands of leaves.
There was another concept Sai hadn't thought much about: "home." He could see it in Ino's eyes as she looked around, pulling only idly at the oars, eyes lost in the foliage and sunlight swelling in her heart. This land was her home. She had been born here, watched nearly every one of her sunrises from here, slept through most every night under its low canopy of stars.
Sai had been born here too. He wondered why Danzo hadn't seen fit to imbue his ROOT proteges with a loyalty to the land itself. How could a love for their own home, the home they existed to protect, endanger their mission?
Ah, but he knew the answer to this one. One love leads to another. A person cannot love only one thing. If one could love, one would love, whether one willed it or not. That he had also seen. The only way to guarantee that love would not lead a soldier astray was to ensure they never even learned how.
Of course, that was not entirely possible. Even Sai, an ideal candidate in all respects, had come to love his chosen brother, and that love had never died despite all the abuse rained down upon it.
Sai had loved his brother, and that had enabled him to care for Naruto, and now there were a number of things he felt affection for.
The girl in the boat with him was among them.
She was in many ways Sakura's opposite. They were both selfish in their own manner, but where Sakura writhed in guilt every time it came up, Ino was almost proud of it. They were both loyal to their teammates, but Sai got the sense that Ino thought falling in love with one of them would be stupid and make everything harder. Sakura had been doomed in that regard right from the start.
Ino was confident, while Sakura constantly waded through a mire of doubt and self-castigation. Ino was loose and casual with her affections, like she was handing out water in varying amounts as if it could never run out, while Sakura parcelled out hers in large, concentrated chunks whose quantity was most definitely limited. Sai had had to fight to gain even the small one he had now. But now that he had it, he knew, he would have it forever, barring some unforgivable betrayal. Even that, he thought, might not do it, considering Sasuke.
He felt much less secure in Ino's affections, but it was also easier to be around her for that reason, somehow. If he did something wrong, he would know immediately, because she had very little invested in maintaining their relationship as it was. She would simply tell him so, whereas Sakura was in too deep now to say anything without first considering his feelings. That led to well-meaning dishonesty on her part quite often, he found, which meant he always had to be alert and watching for it.
They were both his friends, but in such different ways. What a strange word it was, really.
"This is nice," Ino commented idly.
They had drifted out into the middle of the lake, and now the green water and the green shores and strange greenish sky seemed centered around them, a whole green world with them at the heart.
The rowing required little physical effort, but what there was was pleasant, gentle and rhythmic.
It was nice.
"Yes," he said.
For a while longer there was quiet, just the wind and the ripples and the late spring birdsong.
Then she sat up and held out her hand. "Come here," she said, hastily adding "carefully," when he unwisely stood up to do so and the boat swayed queasily under them. "Sit," she said once he had made his way across the six feet between them, leaving his oars behind.
"What is it?" he asked.
Ino bit her lip. "The last lesson for today," she said, and reached forward to run her fingers up the sides of his face and tangle them in his hair.
It felt very nice. He shivered a little, and felt his scalp tingle under her fingertips.
"This," she said, doing an unsettlingly good impression of several of the teachers he had had at school, "is called a kiss." And then she leaned forward and demonstrated with practiced skill. She made a point to appear casual and at ease with it, but he felt a little shiver go through her, too, before she broke away and leaned back to look at the sky. Away from him.
"I see," he said, "thank you," because he had no idea what else to say.
She laughed, which did not surprise him. "You're not supposed to thank me," she chided. "It's not something I did for you, it's something I did with you. See the difference?"
Sai nodded, suddenly unable to trust his voice. He felt strange. There was a shuddery tightness in his chest he couldn't even begin to identify. He said the first thing that came to mind. "Yes. Is it my turn to try now, then?"
Taken aback, she sat up to face him properly again. Her fingers began to fidget with the edges of her skirt, but she forced them to stillness. Not fast enough, of course. He was the master of observation.
"Sure," she said guardedly. "Careful not to bump my nose."
He nodded, and leaned forward, recognizing the new feeling in his belly - twisting, fluttering, queasy - as nervousness. At first he approached at the wrong angle, and quickly realized continuing on that course would result in a bruised nose for at least one of them. He corrected, but the second course was too fast, and threatened to lead to a cut lip or two. A second correction. She was beginning to look impatient by the time he finally found a workable path.
"Would you just kiss me already," she growled as he began to make his third attempt.
Mentally shrugging, he did as she asked, and was thankful when nothing went bump or started bleeding. Success at last!
Remembering what she had done, he raised a hand to cup the back of her head, just under her ever-present ponytail, and used the slight leverage to angle things together more comfortably.
There was that little shiver again. He hoped that meant he was doing something right. He resolved to ask her when he next had a chance at some air, then promptly forgot when she introduced her tongue to the puzzle, as that was distracting to the point where it became difficult to think about anything else.
The final lesson continued for quite some time, until dusk began to darken the sky overhead and creep down towards the horizon on all sides.
Reluctantly, he suggested that they return to shore while they could still see where it was.
As the last time he'd been in a boat had been some five years ago at least, he couldn't quite remember how to safely disembark, and soaked himself up to the elbows.
Laughing, Ino grabbed his hand again and hauled him home in order to briskly towel him off and pour tea down his throat, some family recipe that he could not identify all the ingredients of. There was chamomile in there, and mint, and lemongrass, and something else he couldn't put his finger on. It warmed his body and cooled his feverish mouth, and left him draped over her kitchen chair, suddenly limp and languorous.
"You should head home soon," Ino reminded him once she was sure he was properly dried and back to a healthy temperature. "If you stay, you're going to get more lessons."
"That sounds nice," he said drowsily, "but I understand that in these situations it would be more polite for me to leave."
Ino heaved a sigh. "What have I gotten myself into?" she asked the ceiling, and held out her hand. "Come on, get up, you can borrow the guestroom. I was joking about the lessons, though, I'm tired."
"Pity," he said, "but thank you. I am… very warm. And sleepy." He let her drag him up by the hand again - the same poor hand she'd been abusing all day, he thought it might be a little sore on the morrow - and lead him up the stairs. "What about tomorrow?" he asked before she closed the door on him.
"Tomorrow?" she said blankly. "Oh, you mean… oh. We'll see. I have tomorrow off too, and I still have some lessons up my sleeve, so… maybe. If you're good."
"I'll be good," said Sai meekly. "Good night, Ino. Thank you again."
It was hard to see, with her silhouetted against the hallway lights, but he thought she was blushing again. He liked that expression. It was warm, and gentle, and somehow special because it was there because of him.
"You're welcome," she said, no trace of it in her voice, but he was sure of it now. "Good night, Sai."
The door thumped shut behind her and left him alone in the soft darkness. There were no edges to the night here, not in the Yamanaka home. It was old, and its walls had seen much grief and sorrow, but its occupants had never had to face it alone. It made such a difference, he thought. He had lived in several apartments, but they had never been homes, and now he could feel the difference soaking into his skin.
He thought perhaps he could sleep here. Really sleep. Maybe even dream.
It wasn't his home, but he was welcome. Another new feeling he liked a lot.
Sai closed his eyes and wondered how much more he would have to learn before he could call himself human. Somehow, he thought there was probably a fair chunk missing from the pile after today. He would have to thank Ino, somehow, though he wasn't quite sure how. All he had was his art.
Maybe a portrait? One in which she appeared as he saw her, the girl he'd nicknamed "beautiful" back when he hadn't known about the levels of intimacy. Would she like that? He wasn't sure. Maybe he should ask. But that would ruin the surprise….
A massive yawn startled him. Somehow sleep had crept up on him. Having no reason to resist, not tonight, he lay back and let it come.
A portrait. Yes. A risk worth taking, he thought, if there was a chance it would make her smile.
She would forgive him if he was wrong.
Rating: T
Warnings: awkwardness?
Wordcount: 4246
Summary: Ino decides to teach Sai how to function in ordinary society. Sai tries his best to keep up.
The Language of Faces
Sai felt the presence at his back, and roundly ignored it.
There were interesting things happening below. The bonds of relationship were so easily tangled, and came in so many strange colours. Watching them play out their patterns was his new hobby, and also a sort of study meant to benefit himself. How was he to learn to be properly human if he didn't watch to see how it was done?
He'd never met the kunoichi Shikamaru was talking to, but he'd gathered the gist of who she was. She was heavily pregnant. Due any day now, at his guess, though admittedly he wasn't an expert on the subject. There was a smile on her face, but it was the wrong kind. Or was it? There were a number of possible expressions she could wear at this time. She could weep, because her lover and the father of her child was dead. She could wear a genuine smile, because she was talking to her lover's beloved student, a good person who cared for her and wanted her to be happy. She could be cool or indifferent, because the student had only a secondhand connection to her and had, indirectly, been the reason for her lover's death.
This expression seemed to be a strange combination of all of those, and something else besides.
Try as he might to decipher it, this was a bit above his level still. He needed to study some more simple things before he tackled it again.
Even so, he could not seem to stop watching. There was something mesmerizing about that sad half-smile.
"Hey, Sai," said the presence behind him, who was not taking well to being ignored. "You realize you're being a creep."
"Yes, beautiful," he replied absently, letting his eyes stay trained on the interesting thing.
Ino sighed.
A moment later, she sat down on the roof edge beside him, dangling her long legs over the three-storey drop and resting her chin on her hands. "Oh," she said when she caught sight of his target. Another strange, unnameable expression flashed across her face, but she chased it away before he could get a good look at it. "It's still weird, you know. Seeing Shikamaru like that. Looking reliable, I mean. In my head, he's still just a lazy, useless slacker kid. You know, he never did a single exercise he didn't have to. He slept through half our classes, I swear. But look at him. It's like Asuma-sensei left half his soul behind when he died."
Sai hadn't known Sarutobi Asuma, though he'd known of him. All he saw when he looked at Nara Shikamaru was Nara Shikamaru. However, the Nara Shikamaru he saw was, as Ino said, a person who looked very reliable. And Kurenai Yuuhi looked like she depended on him, despite not looking like she was normally the sort of person who made a habit of relying on others.
Why did people make exceptions like that? It was a question he was beginning to grasp the answer to, thanks to Naruto and the endless exceptions he had made and continued to make for Uchiha Sasuke. It seemed that as a bond of any sort grew tighter and thicker-woven, the number of exceptions allowed grew. Bonds such as those between siblings and married partners seemed to breed exceptions like algae.
The bond between Shikamaru and Kurenai was neither, but it had to be something approaching them, because of the exceptions she was making for him.
"Sai," Ino said.
He ignored her.
In his observations so far, he had noted that when exceptions were made for bonds that were not strong enough to take them in stride as due course, awkwardness of some sort often occurred. Those who went too far in doing favours for those they loved before they had confessed it invited sidelong glances and curious inquiries. And yet, no one seemed to be asking Shikamaru if he was in love with Kurenai, though he spent much of his free time caring for and assisting her without any sort of quantifiable recompense. What was the difference? Was there some sort of obligation between mentor and pupil that made this normal and expected?
"Sai," Ino said.
He ignored her, again.
For that matter, some labels seemed to cover absurdly large areas. For example, the word "friend." Ino had "friends" in town who were not shinobi. She spent some of her time off wandering the streets with them, laughing and joking and shopping. Sai was sure she would die for them, but with not much more enthusiasm than she would for some other villagers she'd never met. Their friendship was a casual thing, with very low expectations. Most of them hardly even seemed to have an idea of who she was as a person.
On the other hand, there were friendships like the one between Naruto and Sasuke. To Naruto, no price seemed to high to pay for it. He willingly threw everything he had to throw into preventing that red thread from snapping, despite all of Sasuke's not inconsiderable efforts to cause exactly that to happen. Naruto wept and bled and suffered for it without a word of complaint.
How could that bond have the same name as Ino and her silly hangers-on? To Sai, it seemed an entirely different beast, lions to house-cats, with only the vaguest resemblance between them.
"All right, that's it," said Ino, audibly exasperated. "There's a limit to how creepy you can be before it gets out of hand, you know, and you passed it a while back. You've got to stop staring at them. That's private."
"Private?" Sai echoed. This was another concept he only had the edges of worked out. There had been no need for privacy in ROOT. Its members were not permitted to have secrets, or bonds strong enough to make exceptions for. It was like the world outside it spoke an entirely different language, one with a far greater number of words, half of them still unpronounceable to him.
Ino rolled her eyes. "Yes, Sai. Private. Something between them that doesn't involve you in any way, shape or form."
Shikamaru's voice suddenly echoed up from the street, much louder than before. "She's right, Sai. Go away."
"Ah," said Sai. "I see." And he did, almost. He was getting quite good at sensing it when he wasn't welcome. "I apologize."
Ino nodded approvingly, which he took to mean he'd done something right this time, for once. Then she took his arm and hauled him off bodily across the rooftops. He stumbled to keep up.
"Where are we going?" he asked mildly.
"On a date," Ino informed him. "But really, think of it more as a lesson. I'm going to teach you how to be a normal person. Or try to, anyway. If that's possible."
"Oh," said Sai. "I see. Thank you, beautiful."
Ah, there it was again, the colour in her cheeks. She hadn't blushed earlier, because she'd trained herself to accept her nickname with aplomb, but perhaps now, in conjunction with the idea of a "date," it had gained new power?
"Ino," she barked. "My name is Ino. Use it."
"But isn't 'beautiful' also something true about you? My book said-"
"Agh, stop. Stop already. Stuff like that… you kind of have to be a little closer to someone to call them something like that, okay? Part one of your lesson. There are levels to it, see: if you're a little close, you call someone by their name with a softer honourific. Pretty close, you drop the honourific. Really close, you can give them a nice nickname, like the one you gave me. Really, reallyclose, you can risk giving them a nasty one like you gave Sakura, because between real friends stuff like that is like a private joke between the two of you. If you give someone a nasty nickname before you're close enough, you're just treating them like an enemy."
Sai's head reeled a bit, but he drew himself up and did his best to process the new information. "So, you can give someone a bad nickname if you're either very close, or the opposite of that? Am I understanding you correctly?"
Ino sniffed. "Well, it sounds kind of weird when you put it that way, but yeah. Pretty much. Also, there are levels to the kind of conversation you can eavesdrop on. If you're only a little close, or kind of close, it's rude to listen in on a conversation you haven't been invited to. If you're pretty close, it's okay to drop in on the more casual stuff. If you're really close, you can walk in to most things. And if you're really, really close, nothing's off limits, really."
"But if it's an enemy and I need to gather intel, it's also okay to eavesdrop on anything, right?"
"Right," Ino affirmed.
"These rules make no sense," Sai informed her. "Why should the rules for the best of friends and the worst of enemies be the same? "
Ino bit her lip and furrowed her brow. He knew that expression. It was a basic one, and it meant she was stumped, confused by her own logic.
"Well, uh, I think there is a difference. Oh, I know! Respect. If you respect someone, you have to follow the rules. If you don't, it's like the rules in reverse. The less you respect them, the fewer of the rules you have to follow. If it's just that you don't like someone much, you still owe them privacy. But if they're an actual enemy, you don't owe them anything, so you can throw the rules away. Get it?"
He did. It was actually remarkably simple, now that he thought about. Respect was a catalyst, changing the nature of negative interactions to positive ones, to a fairly exact inverse power.
"Good, okay. So, let's do lunch. I want salad. That all right with you?"
"Yes," he said, because he had a hunch that it would be rude to demur and ask for something else when she was the one inviting him. He would get the hang of this yet.
"Cool. Come on, then."
She had let go of his arm, but still had a firm grip on his hand, and hauled him off to the north-east with it at a brisk pace.
The café she led him too was mostly deserted, because it was halfway through the afternoon. The lunch crowd had gone, and the dinner crowd had yet to come, so they had the patio mostly to themselves. There was an intricate dome of trellis-work over it, and jasmine and rose brambles with tiny pink buds wove through and around it to hang indolent with spring above their heads. There was still a mild edge to the air - summer was still a month and a half off - but it was warm enough.
True to her word, Ino ordered a massive salad garnished with apple shavings, crushed walnuts and some sort of berry vinaigrette. It smelled like it should be a dessert, despite all the vegetables beneath the sweet crust.
Sai opted for soup. Warm, filling, easy on the pocketbook. Since leaving ROOT his salary had taken a substantial hit, but his freedom was the worth the cost, so he kept quiet about it. When the soup arrived, it was thin and clear and full of greens and soft barley dumplings. He'd be hungry again in an hour. Perhaps he should have spent the extra for something more substantial… too late now.
"So, what does one do on a date?" he asked conversationally.
Ino paused, mouth full of spinach and thinly sliced cucumber, and held up a finger.
Ah, a signal. This one meant "wait a moment." Patiently, he obeyed.
After she swallowed, she cleared her throat loudly and put her fork down. "Well, it depends," she said.
"On what?"
"Uh, on what the people on it like to do, I guess," she said.
Suddenly, Sai realized that she hadn't been on many. Shinobi life kept its followers very busy most of the time. A fair percentage of the ninjas he knew had not dated at all, let alone managed to create and sustain romantic relationships. Even when pairs of people were obviously in love with each other, there often just wasn't time or space for it in their schedules.
For the first time, that struck him as sad.
"What do you like to do, beau- Ino?" he asked, remembering at the last moment that calling her by her nickname implied an intimacy they did not in fact share.
"Shopping," she said instantly. "Also, canoeing, cliff-jumping, and horseback riding. Oh, and I like going to the archery range. It helps with the accuracy of the mind-body switch."
Sai filed these away for future reference. "I see."
"And?" she prompted. "What about you?"
This required some thought. The only thing that came to mind was painting, but that wasn't very interactive. He knew how to canoe and cliff-jump and all of that, but he'd never looked at it as something to do for fun before. They were useful things for ROOT members to know. "Useful" and "fun" sometimes overlapped, he had learned, but did they here? He wasn't sure.
"Perhaps we should go canoeing," he suggested. There was no way to find out but trial and error.
She frowned. "That wasn't much of an answer."
Sai tilted his head, a half-shrug. "I'm sorry. I don't know what I like. Not yet, anyway. I've never really had a hobby I could share with someone else before."
Ino gave him a mildly poleaxed look, twitched as if she wanted to reach across the table and do… something. Hug him, perhaps. That would be interesting. He had to live through that particular experience.
"I… okay," she said. "Okay. Canoeing it is. Maybe you'll like it."
"Maybe I will."
That was probably the wrong reply, he realized a second too late. Too flippant. But Ino only blinked. She must be getting used to his peculiar inhumanity.
When the bill came, Ino pushed him off with a hard look and paid for the entirety of it. "I have my salary, and my family does all right with the floral business," she said. "I can afford it. I wouldn't have asked you out if I couldn't."
"All right," he said, because he knew next to nothing about end-of-meal restaurant etiquette.
"Good boy," she said, with a rare real smile.
x.x.x
The inside of the canoe was painted green.
Everything else around them was mostly green, too, so Sai felt a little bit dizzy. The water was green because of certain minerals that washed into it from the mountains during the runoff. The banks were green because it was late spring and everything was busy growing as fast as it possibly could. Even the sky had a strange greenish hue to it that day, though that might just be his eyes trying to adjust.
The land of fire was awake and rich with uncountable thousands of leaves.
There was another concept Sai hadn't thought much about: "home." He could see it in Ino's eyes as she looked around, pulling only idly at the oars, eyes lost in the foliage and sunlight swelling in her heart. This land was her home. She had been born here, watched nearly every one of her sunrises from here, slept through most every night under its low canopy of stars.
Sai had been born here too. He wondered why Danzo hadn't seen fit to imbue his ROOT proteges with a loyalty to the land itself. How could a love for their own home, the home they existed to protect, endanger their mission?
Ah, but he knew the answer to this one. One love leads to another. A person cannot love only one thing. If one could love, one would love, whether one willed it or not. That he had also seen. The only way to guarantee that love would not lead a soldier astray was to ensure they never even learned how.
Of course, that was not entirely possible. Even Sai, an ideal candidate in all respects, had come to love his chosen brother, and that love had never died despite all the abuse rained down upon it.
Sai had loved his brother, and that had enabled him to care for Naruto, and now there were a number of things he felt affection for.
The girl in the boat with him was among them.
She was in many ways Sakura's opposite. They were both selfish in their own manner, but where Sakura writhed in guilt every time it came up, Ino was almost proud of it. They were both loyal to their teammates, but Sai got the sense that Ino thought falling in love with one of them would be stupid and make everything harder. Sakura had been doomed in that regard right from the start.
Ino was confident, while Sakura constantly waded through a mire of doubt and self-castigation. Ino was loose and casual with her affections, like she was handing out water in varying amounts as if it could never run out, while Sakura parcelled out hers in large, concentrated chunks whose quantity was most definitely limited. Sai had had to fight to gain even the small one he had now. But now that he had it, he knew, he would have it forever, barring some unforgivable betrayal. Even that, he thought, might not do it, considering Sasuke.
He felt much less secure in Ino's affections, but it was also easier to be around her for that reason, somehow. If he did something wrong, he would know immediately, because she had very little invested in maintaining their relationship as it was. She would simply tell him so, whereas Sakura was in too deep now to say anything without first considering his feelings. That led to well-meaning dishonesty on her part quite often, he found, which meant he always had to be alert and watching for it.
They were both his friends, but in such different ways. What a strange word it was, really.
"This is nice," Ino commented idly.
They had drifted out into the middle of the lake, and now the green water and the green shores and strange greenish sky seemed centered around them, a whole green world with them at the heart.
The rowing required little physical effort, but what there was was pleasant, gentle and rhythmic.
It was nice.
"Yes," he said.
For a while longer there was quiet, just the wind and the ripples and the late spring birdsong.
Then she sat up and held out her hand. "Come here," she said, hastily adding "carefully," when he unwisely stood up to do so and the boat swayed queasily under them. "Sit," she said once he had made his way across the six feet between them, leaving his oars behind.
"What is it?" he asked.
Ino bit her lip. "The last lesson for today," she said, and reached forward to run her fingers up the sides of his face and tangle them in his hair.
It felt very nice. He shivered a little, and felt his scalp tingle under her fingertips.
"This," she said, doing an unsettlingly good impression of several of the teachers he had had at school, "is called a kiss." And then she leaned forward and demonstrated with practiced skill. She made a point to appear casual and at ease with it, but he felt a little shiver go through her, too, before she broke away and leaned back to look at the sky. Away from him.
"I see," he said, "thank you," because he had no idea what else to say.
She laughed, which did not surprise him. "You're not supposed to thank me," she chided. "It's not something I did for you, it's something I did with you. See the difference?"
Sai nodded, suddenly unable to trust his voice. He felt strange. There was a shuddery tightness in his chest he couldn't even begin to identify. He said the first thing that came to mind. "Yes. Is it my turn to try now, then?"
Taken aback, she sat up to face him properly again. Her fingers began to fidget with the edges of her skirt, but she forced them to stillness. Not fast enough, of course. He was the master of observation.
"Sure," she said guardedly. "Careful not to bump my nose."
He nodded, and leaned forward, recognizing the new feeling in his belly - twisting, fluttering, queasy - as nervousness. At first he approached at the wrong angle, and quickly realized continuing on that course would result in a bruised nose for at least one of them. He corrected, but the second course was too fast, and threatened to lead to a cut lip or two. A second correction. She was beginning to look impatient by the time he finally found a workable path.
"Would you just kiss me already," she growled as he began to make his third attempt.
Mentally shrugging, he did as she asked, and was thankful when nothing went bump or started bleeding. Success at last!
Remembering what she had done, he raised a hand to cup the back of her head, just under her ever-present ponytail, and used the slight leverage to angle things together more comfortably.
There was that little shiver again. He hoped that meant he was doing something right. He resolved to ask her when he next had a chance at some air, then promptly forgot when she introduced her tongue to the puzzle, as that was distracting to the point where it became difficult to think about anything else.
The final lesson continued for quite some time, until dusk began to darken the sky overhead and creep down towards the horizon on all sides.
Reluctantly, he suggested that they return to shore while they could still see where it was.
As the last time he'd been in a boat had been some five years ago at least, he couldn't quite remember how to safely disembark, and soaked himself up to the elbows.
Laughing, Ino grabbed his hand again and hauled him home in order to briskly towel him off and pour tea down his throat, some family recipe that he could not identify all the ingredients of. There was chamomile in there, and mint, and lemongrass, and something else he couldn't put his finger on. It warmed his body and cooled his feverish mouth, and left him draped over her kitchen chair, suddenly limp and languorous.
"You should head home soon," Ino reminded him once she was sure he was properly dried and back to a healthy temperature. "If you stay, you're going to get more lessons."
"That sounds nice," he said drowsily, "but I understand that in these situations it would be more polite for me to leave."
Ino heaved a sigh. "What have I gotten myself into?" she asked the ceiling, and held out her hand. "Come on, get up, you can borrow the guestroom. I was joking about the lessons, though, I'm tired."
"Pity," he said, "but thank you. I am… very warm. And sleepy." He let her drag him up by the hand again - the same poor hand she'd been abusing all day, he thought it might be a little sore on the morrow - and lead him up the stairs. "What about tomorrow?" he asked before she closed the door on him.
"Tomorrow?" she said blankly. "Oh, you mean… oh. We'll see. I have tomorrow off too, and I still have some lessons up my sleeve, so… maybe. If you're good."
"I'll be good," said Sai meekly. "Good night, Ino. Thank you again."
It was hard to see, with her silhouetted against the hallway lights, but he thought she was blushing again. He liked that expression. It was warm, and gentle, and somehow special because it was there because of him.
"You're welcome," she said, no trace of it in her voice, but he was sure of it now. "Good night, Sai."
The door thumped shut behind her and left him alone in the soft darkness. There were no edges to the night here, not in the Yamanaka home. It was old, and its walls had seen much grief and sorrow, but its occupants had never had to face it alone. It made such a difference, he thought. He had lived in several apartments, but they had never been homes, and now he could feel the difference soaking into his skin.
He thought perhaps he could sleep here. Really sleep. Maybe even dream.
It wasn't his home, but he was welcome. Another new feeling he liked a lot.
Sai closed his eyes and wondered how much more he would have to learn before he could call himself human. Somehow, he thought there was probably a fair chunk missing from the pile after today. He would have to thank Ino, somehow, though he wasn't quite sure how. All he had was his art.
Maybe a portrait? One in which she appeared as he saw her, the girl he'd nicknamed "beautiful" back when he hadn't known about the levels of intimacy. Would she like that? He wasn't sure. Maybe he should ask. But that would ruin the surprise….
A massive yawn startled him. Somehow sleep had crept up on him. Having no reason to resist, not tonight, he lay back and let it come.
A portrait. Yes. A risk worth taking, he thought, if there was a chance it would make her smile.
She would forgive him if he was wrong.