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The deer will graze in the meadow
Where the bud will become a cosmos
And where the butterfly spreads its wings
Ino occasionally observe the shogi pieces being lined up on the board and will envy millimeter concentration to figure out each immediate step, I would see Chouji gobble up all the salted potatoes and will envy their strength.
If Asuma would have to describe Ino, he would say "cunning bitch" but before .he would think twice or Inoichi would bury him alive.
Ino was the most popular in the academy, the handwritten tasks and the complexity of resolution in mathematics were never done by her, she had learned to convince the others to do the hard work for her, in reality she had manipulated people since she was a child, when she wanted to leave home at night she only had to convince dad enough and persuade mom, when she was jealous of her friend she only had to instill insecurity, that incapacity so that Sakura never left her side, but things didn't work well.
As Ino's mother said "the flower will wither and the buds will bloom".
Her friend blossomed
Her friend left her
And she withered away.
…
Chouji would occasionally sit next to Shikamaru and watch the sky with him and think of all the clouds as food plates, he would see Ino skip meals and once he saw Ino going to the bathroom after the refreshment at the academy.
Chouji failed in intelligence and failed in jutsus.
Asuma once asked someone from the Akimichi clan "make sure you write in bold, Chouji is too kind to be a ninja".
A part of him agreed
Chouji was the kind of boy who would hit someone who dared to insult his friends, he was the kind of boy who would save a butterfly from a web, he was the kind of boy who was against his mother when she told him not to approach the boy Uzumaki.
Chouji would never understand the constant pressure to be pretty and thin as Ino but he understood the pressure for deserving be the next leader of a clan.
Chouji would never understand what loneliness is like Naruto but he understood how hard it's that nobody have faith in you.
Asuma promised to make him a great ninja
Chouza whispered one day "Too kind to be the head of a clan"
In the war he proved otherwise.
…
Shikamaru would occasionally watch Chouji overeat when he was tense, sometimes he would not be interested sometimes he would worry, sometimes Chouji would say "he slept too much" he would just shrug his shoulders, he would see Ino snorting when Shikamaru didn't do the work , he heard her scream and he heard her curse.
Unwittingly he had taken the head as the leader in his team, too problematic, he was just a lazy one, he accepted it, he was intelligent, he accepted it, but he never accepted that it was so easy to read for some, when Chouji knew he was locked up when he moved the chips a little faster than usual trying to find a way out, when Ino laughed because he used to raise his right eyebrow less than a millimeter when he was hiding something.
His teachers didn't hesitate to tell Asuma "too much wasted talent".
Shikaku would describe it as "guarded talent to be used at the right time."
Still, Shikamaru failed on his first mission.
Although in his group there were problematic people with personal problems that he did not want to deal with, they were always there to deal with Shikamaru's problems, when he failed in the mission to rescue Sasuke, even though he did not demonstrate it after Chouji's near-death, his two companions knew it.
"Even if you're a genius it's okay if you fail..." Chouji put aside the bag of potatoes on the tatami floor, Ino hit the wall and the atmosphere was tense.
"Shut up Chouji, you sent it to shit, okay? You failed me, you failed us, and what?! If you feel so bad just try again next time and make sure you do it right" she shouted, she always shouted for be heard.
"hey ino, it's not like it's all his fault" this time Chouji squinted, a passive but severe voice, Ino learned that a cotton candy could be poisoned "it's okay if you fail, but you don't have to hide it we'll be there to support you, we're a team , so my problems are your problems and your failures are my failures".
Ino was the first to embrace him, Chouji embraced them both.
Where Chouji was a cloud in the middle of spring
Ino was a storm cloud
The hokage sat down and asked, "And what did you see?"
He didn't answer because he wasn't sure what he saw, because he didn't think they would go that far, because they were kids with a lot of problems hidden under the carpet.
In the war, Asuma remembered him smiled at the sky and whispered "a family".