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When Ino and Sakura first became friends Sakura told Ino she thought she was great. Fantastic, even. Pretty and smart and stylish and amazing at being a ninja. Ino would have glowed with pride, would have been smiling so bright sunlight could have been smeared over her teeth, but Sakura didn’t say it like a compliment. She said it like fact.
Flat, dry fact. You’re pretty. You’re smart. You’re great. And with each one, there was a backdrop, an echo, of: And I’m not.
Sakura told Ino she was fantastic. But she only said it—the words only came out of her mouth—because she needed a comparison for herself. Sakura only said it because she found herself lacking.
“You’re like a cosmos flower, Ino-chan,” Sakura said. The words were like wild grasses, growing across mountainsides without anywhere else to build. The words were like wild grasses, like weeds Sakura would have uprooted and thrown away if she had the strength to. They weren’t compliments. They were Sakura turning Ino into an invasive species on her, like Ino was a rash spreading up Sakura's skin. They weren't compliments.
“You know,” Ino said, “one day, you might be even more beautiful than a cosmos flower, Sakura-chan.”
When Sakura looked up all wide-eyed and blushing cheeks, mouth agape and looking so shocked and so grateful and so happy, Ino thought, That day is now. That day is yesterday. That day is forever.
And that was it for her, really.
.
So Sakura’s in love with Sasuke. That’s fine. That’s absolutely fucking fine. So Sakura’s been in love with Sasuke since they were, like, nine. (Those had been Sakura’s exact words. “I’ve been in love with him since I was, like, nine.”) Ino’s completely fine with that.
She’s completely fucking fine with that, alright?
.
“Sakura’s been really excitable lately,” Yuki chirped. Ino agreed. Sakura was getting happier and happier, smile growing more and more. She still cowered from Ami, but she chatted with all the other girls easily, and Ino had even seen her wearing something pink a couple weeks ago. Sakura hated pink. She looked cute it in, though. Ino had told her that. I like your shirt, she’d said. Cute!
Midori gave Ino a side-long glance, as though suggesting something. “It’s because of her crush on Sasuke,” she said slyly.
Ino’d blinked. On who? Sasuke? She laughed a little bit, just at the thought of it.
She didn’t believe that. She and Sakura had been friends for more than a year—a year of sleepovers and teacakes and curry rice and muffins—and she would have known if her best friend—a title not taken lightly—had a crush on someone, especially if it was someone like Sasuke. Sakura and Ino, attached at the hip for a year, and now Midori thought Sakura liked who? Sasuke? “Sakura doesn’t like him,” she dismissed outright. Sasuke wasn’t even nice. Always-always strutting around, like some bird, thinking he was amazing... Sakura wouldn’t like someone like that.
“You sure?” Yuki asked, doubtful. But Sasuke wasn’t even nice. And Sakura liked Ino.
.
Ino looks at herself in the tall mirror she’s got hanging on her door. She’s beautiful.
She’s older, now—they’re all so much older now. Maybe it’s the war they managed to survive or maybe it’s just been a while since she looked at herself but she’s grown. Yamanaka Ino went and grew up. She rests a hand on her stomach, on the muscle there. Lets her fingers slide down to the v-shaped line of her hips, exposed above her low hanging skirt. When she turns her head down to look at the real thing, to look down at her body instead of staring at the image reflecting back at her, long blond hair falls just a bit into her eyes.
When she and Sakura sparred a few weeks ago Sakura had said, “It’s not fair you can still look so pretty after moving around this much.” Ino went flush with something other than pride, with something warmer, with something beating louder than her heart in her chest and collecting thick inside her lungs. But the look under Sakura’s eyes wasn’t just admiration. There was something almost like envy. “Wish I could be that pretty,” Sakura remarked. Then, grinning, laughing, “It’s a good thing we aren’t competing anymore, right?”
The feeling in Ino’s chest fell broken into the valley of her ribs. She breathed in Sakura’s words like she was breathing shards of glass, lungs bleeding and heart aching with each inhale and exhale. “Yeah,” she had said. “Right.”
She’s beautiful. She’s so beautiful. Everyone thinks so. Even Sakura thinks so. She’s muscular and strong and lean and feminine and clean and has great bone structure and she’s smooth and tall and beautiful.
She’s beautiful, but Sakura doesn’t want her.
.
“Ino, I heard Sasuke likes girls with long hair,” Sakura said earnestly, right before biting into a diced pear piece from Ino’s lunch. They shared lunch every day but Ino abruptly wanted her half back. Sakura ran her fingers through the pink strands, fingering the edge of her ribbon where it was tied back behind her ears. Ino watched the movement.
“So?” Ino said. “Who cares what Sasuke thinks? I think you look nice with short hair.”
Sakura knitted her hands together, smiled like Ino’d made a joke. Ino wasn’t joking. “Yeah, yeah, Ino...” Sakura bit at her lip. She looked up at Ino. “I’m growing my hair out,” Sakura shared, just a hint shyly. “Do you think it’ll look okay?”
We both have short hair, Ino thought. You can’t grow your hair out. We both have short hair. “Sure,” Ino said and pretended something in her wasn’t growing heavier and heavier. Sakura giggled, running her hand through her hair over and over again, and Ino stared at the ends as though willing them to stay where they were. Her friend squirmed a bit, anxious, peeking at Ino in a remnant of the shy girl Sakura used to be. “You’d look nice with any length hair,” Ino said and she meant it.
She pushed her own short, choppy hair behind her ears. Was this what it meant to fall behind?
.
“I don’t get why everyone’s pairing off,” Ino says, snorting, waving her dango stick for emphasis. “Since when does Naruto even know Hinata exists? And now they’re married?”
“Ino,” Sakura chides and she hates that. Sakura used to say her own shit back, used to have her own little quips, too. Sakura never used to chide her. Sakura would yell, or laugh, or do something. Anything. But now she chides and Ino hates it. She hates more that it’s this easy to quell her, that Sakura only has to say a few soft words—so soft, so fucking soft, and that isn’t like her at all—and Ino’s tripping over herself to shut up. “They’re in love.”
“Ha!” Ino wags her dango stick some more and then eats the last dumpling off the top before it ends up flying off. “In love,” she says, disbelieving.
“Don’t chew with your mouth full,” Sakura chides and Ino hates that. She swallows.
“They’re in love, huh?” She rolls her eyes, leans back in her chair. “What, like how you and Sasuke are? That’s love, is it?”
Sakura goes red. Sasuke hardly even talks to Sakura. What you have with Sasuke isn’t love, Ino wants to say. Love isn’t like that. Love isn’t begging and wishing and being smacked around until you can’t breathe. Love isn’t getting all your information secondhand and saying you know them. Love isn’t begging someone to pay attention to you, isn’t wishing someone would pay attention to you when they’ve never been anything for you, when you never knew them at all.
Love is this, Ino wants to say. Love is how I know your favorite color and the songs you use to sing yourself to sleep. Love is holding each other when we cry and cleaning blood off your face after a war ends.
But love isn’t like that, either, because everything is still pretty much the same as before. If love isn’t begging someone to notice you, wishing someone would love you, then what Ino and Sakura have will never be love.
Sasuke barely talks to anyone but Naruto. Of the people he talks to outside of Naruto, the list, put in priority, is: Suigetsu, Karin, Juugo, Kakashi, shopkeepers, Sakura. More than half of his lines get dedicated to Naruto. About thirty percent probably go to Team Taka. The bits for Kakashi are mostly legal in nature. Basically, he speaks about three words to Sakura maybe once a week. He doesn’t talk to most everyone else, probably, Ino suspects, because he forgot their names.
Wish Sakura would forget his name, she thinks.
“Hey,” Sakura says hotly and god Ino misses this girl. She misses this loud beautiful fighter of a girl and she hates that the only way to make her come out these days is to talk shit about some guy she’s said a collective of maybe, generously, three thousand words to her whole life. Ino hates that. “I’ve been in love with Sasuke since I was, like, nine, okay?”
“You barely knew him when you were nine,” Ino says lazily. You barely know him now.
Sakura stands and delicately places a few coins on the counter. “That should cover my share of the bill,” she says stiffly. She pushes short hair behind her ears. Ino’s hair falls long and Sakura’s goes short and Ino hates that. Sakura turns away to leave.
“Aw, Sakura, c’mon!” Ino stands, too, reaches out a hand and catches Sakura’s fingers. “Forehead, hey, don’t leave! I won’t talk about it anymore, okay?”
Sakura looks over her shoulder, eyes on Ino. “Why did Hinata and Naruto get married, Ino?” she asks. “It’s because they grew up. It’s our turn.” Sakura pulls her hand from Ino’s and Ino stares at her back, at the tiny movements of her hair going from side to side in time with her steps while she leaves.
Doesn’t she get that while she was chasing Naruto chasing Sasuke, there were people watching her while she vanished? People watching her disappear?
But Sakura doesn’t and it’s selfish to want her to. Ino sits back down and eats the rest of her dango alone.
.
“Now we’re rivals,” Sakura had said, turning around sharply, hair flicking, her eyes narrowed and Ino remembers that everything stopped, that her stomach dropped out, that her chest went empty. “You won’t win,” she’d said and Ino remembers wondering where her Sakura had gone, where the sweet girl with fruit tarts to share, the girl Ino had to bare her teeth to protect, the girl who used to read in the corner with Ino sewing flowers into a crown beside her—where did she go?
Maybe that Sakura wasn’t gone yet. Sasuke hadn’t taken her yet. But Ino remembers looking at Sakura and seeing a stranger and she’d smiled, beautiful and cruel.
“You’re on, Forehead,” Ino said, and so they were rivals.
.
Ino cries at Sakura’s wedding. A couple months after she grows up the way all her friends had and she marries Sai. Sakura says, “Congratulations!” Ino cries more.