Work Text:
Ino is elbow-deep in reviewing mock interrogations when Shikamaru sticks his head into her office. He doesn’t even knock, and Ino starts to posture at threats to write him up before her brain fully interprets the look on his face.
Ino is currently marking up a report from a new chunnin’s training interrogation of Ino herself. Ino wishes she could have a photo of Shikamaru’s face, right now, to grill a trainee on. His eyes are wary and resigned, his shoulders hunched like he’s carrying the weight of the world. There’s an unlit cigarette between his lips, and he rolls his head back to crack his neck.
So, he’s obviously about to tell Ino something that’s going to make her act extra annoying, but it’s something he knows she’ll enjoy, otherwise he wouldn’t have gone out of his way to come and talk to her in her creepy basement office– and if it were bad news, he’d look even more stressed or upset. Really, that only means one thing.
“Team Seven’s back?” Ino asks just a little too quickly, standing fast enough to knock her chair back.
“They sent a message ahead,” Shikamaru confirms. “Choji’s already in position. You have about twenty minutes– keep your panties on, jeez.”
Ino already has her hands in the slit up her skirt, undoing the bandages around her thighs. It’s more stylish to wear mesh stockings nowadays, but being able to go from professionally dressed lead interrogator to bare legged in seconds is becoming increasingly important in Ino’s life.
“My panties are staying on, don’t you worry,” Ino tells Shikamaru, kicking the bandages under her desk as they fall to the floor. “For now,” she adds, catching his eye and smirking.
Shikamaru just lets out an exaggerated sigh. “I’m married, you know,” he drawls.
Ino undoes the top button on her skirt so that it falls even lower on her hips.
“I could have Temari in a second,” Ino replies. Shikamaru snorts. “Now get out of here– I don’t have a lot of time.”
Ino pulls both make-up bags she keeps out of her desk drawer and bolts for the door. She’s in such a rush that Shikamaru doesn’t even have time to get out properly, and she shoves him out the door in front of her. Reading new trainee mock interrogations is probably a torture technique in itself, but she technically can’t leave Shikamaru alone with them for security reasons, Hokage’s aide or not.
“Troublesome,” Shikamaru says as she elbows past him to get to the lady’s room.
Before the bathroom door has even swung all the way closed behind her, Ino is already pulling her hair out of its ponytail with one hand and rifling through one of her make-up bags with the other to find a brush. She’d shoved a curling iron into the bigger bag a couple weeks ago, but– no– there wasn’t enough time for that.
Her ponytail has left a weird bump in her hair. Ugh! She wanted to show off how long her hair had gotten and leave it down, but… well, this was really Team 7’s fault for coming home early.
At least she had her extra slutty lipstick with her, the one that stings like hell but plumps up her lip. Ino giggles maniacally to herself as she applies it.
xXx
“You have a stick in your hair,” Naruto tells Sakura while they’re waiting for the chunin at the front gate to go through their paperwork.
Sakura’s hands automatically go to her hair, raking through the short strands to find the offending stick. It’s right on the side of her head, and it really is a whole stick, not just a little twig. Sakura tugs at it, but it’s tangled up in her hair and… tree sap, maybe. It’s very decidedly stuck.
“Ah, Sakura-chan…” Naruto says nervously. “Maybe you shouldn’t… nevermind. Don’t mind the stick.”
“What?” Sakura demands, and Sasuke’s eyes drift warily over to her from where he’s been watching the chunin slowly go through the fifteen extra security checks Sasuke requires from his brief stint as a ninja war criminal. “What, Naruto?”
“Well,” Naurto says, awkwardly shifting from foot to foot. “Your hands were pretty dirty… and now, your hair…”
Sakura does not yell at him. But a furious noise does escape through her teeth as she stares down at her hands, covered in mud and little bit of blood and even more tree sap.
And now, it’s in her hair. Great. Just great.
It’s really a bad look for a medical ninja to have dirty hands. Sakura glares down at her hands and executes the sterilization jutsu to burn off the muck. Their mission had involved absolutely no healing, and Sakura had spent the whole time ripping down trees to prevent their targets from escaping, and now look at her…!
“You should get gloves,” Sasuke tells her, slipping their team’s comically large documentation packet into his cloak, and Sakura turns her glare on him. “Or don’t. Let’s go.”
They get barely a block into Konoha proper before Choji is waving them down, appearing from a smoky barbecue stall. It’s one of the leftover ambulatory restaurants that popped up after Pein’s attack on the village, which now still pepper the outskirts of town.
“You’re back early,” he greets jovially, and Naruto immediately starts on a rambling brag about how awesome their team is. Unlike he might have when they were twelve, he skips any confidential details of the mission itself, but his boasting tone is almost exactly the same.
“Are you heading toward Hokage Tower?” Choji says, falling into step with them as Sasuke pushes Naruto forward. Sasuke grunts in ascent. “I’m heading there too,” Choji says, holding up a plastic bag of food boxes. “I’m bringing Shikamaru lunch.”
They’re about halfway to the tower when Choji says, “Hey, Naruto, don’t you and Sakura live in this neighborhood? I can take your report in, and you can head straight home.”
Naruto pauses, looks thoughtful. They’re really not supposed to let random ninja from outside their missions handle reports, but both she and Naruto would trust Choji with their lives. Sakura can see Naruto’s temptation to just fuck off.
“It’s against regulation–” Sakura starts.
Sasuke rolls his eyes. “I can walk it in,” he says. “I need to talk to Kakashi-sensei anyway.”
“Yeah, Sakura,” Choji agrees. “You look really…. Tired.”
Sakura’s eye twitches.
“Yeah, Sakura-chan!” Naruto says. “You can go fix your hair.”
Choji’s apparent genuine concern for her is the only thing that prevents Sakura from hitting Naruto. She’s sure she doesn’t look that bad. Surely…?
Under the weird peer pressure of everyone agreeing she should take a shower, Sakura stomps off in the direction of her home feeling weirdly self-conscious even though she knows she’s spent the last three days being a total badass. Sure, she hasn’t had time to sleep very much or bathe, but neither did Naruto or Sasuke! That’s normal for badass, competent ninja, even if it’s not the glamorous seductress life she’d thought she’d be having when she was a kid…
She runs her hands through her hair some more. It’s… grimy. Textured.
There’s a huge splash of dry blood over her bare knee. Sakira blinks down at it as she walks, mortified. She's not even sure whose blood it is. Her medic’s skirt had gotten so soaked in blood she’d burned it, leaving her with just her shorts and her tank top, which has a giant cut in the side. She must look like a giant mess.
Well, at least she gets to go home and clean herself up before anyone else she knows sees her. On her last three missions, Ino had just shown up out of the blue to positively gloat at Sakura about how hideous she looked coming home from missions. It didn’t help that Ino always somehow looked perfect.
Sakura turns to the corner of her street and nearly screams in frustration.
Ino herself is sitsting on the low stone wall of Sakura’s garden, perfectly clean and back carefully straight, her legs crossed at the knee. Like most kunoichi skirts, there’s a slit all the way up to her hip for improved movement, but today Ino has forgone the leggings or mesh most kunoichi use. With her leg crossed, Sakura can see all of Ino’s leg, smooth and unblemished and completely free of blood stains or mysterious tree sap.
“Oh, Sakura!” Ino greets, tossing her hair over her shoulder. It catches the warm light of the setting sun, turning into a perfect mane of gold. The wisteria tree in Sakura tiny front garden is heavy with purple blossoms, and its branches dance lazily behind Ino in the wind. She looks like a goddamn supermodel, posed for a photo and all.
Ino eyes Sakura up and down, a smirk pulling at her lips. Her lips are painted bright red today and somehow look even plumper than normal, and Sakura feels her cheeks go red.
“Oh my,” Ino says. “What on earth happened to you, Forehead?”
Ino slips front he wall, and her skirt shifts so that it covers up her stupid perfect legs and then proceeds to fall so low across her hips that Sakura can see the top of her hip bones poking out. There’s not a hair out of place on Ino, her outfit doing exactly what she wants it to do, and it’s not fair…!
“Get into a fight with a bear?” Ino teases, taking three steps towards Sakura, her hips swaying as she goes.
Sakura feels acutely dirty as Ino approaches. She can feel the breeze through the hole in her short, and she can distinctly not feel the breeze against a patch on her cheek that must be particularly covered in grime. She feels weirdly self-conscious without her medic shorts, with her butt on display for the whole world to see and judge.
“I’m sure the bear looks worse,” Ino continues, eyeing Sakura’s hips. Ino has definitely been judging Sakura’s butt and how big it got from Tsunade’s physical conditioning for years.
“Not all of us have office jobs,” Sakura gripes, stepping around Ino to open the gate in her garden wall. “Did you come all this way to insult me, Ino-pig?”
“Insult you?” Ino replies, perfectly manicured eyebrows shooting up. “You asked me to keep an eye on your garden, and I thought I’d say hello…”
Ino follows Sakura into the garden, her smirk still firmly in place. She takes two paces in and gestures at the greenery behind her and places a hand on a cocked hip.
Sakura’s garden had consisted of the wisteria tree and a bunch of weeds when she’d moved into her little two bedroom townhouse. The garden had been entirely Ino’s project, including Ino showing up randomly with gardening supplies to maintain it, with barely any work from Sakura besides buying an automatic sprinkler.
It’s really not fair that Ino could come over and literally work in the dirt for hours and still look better and cleaner than Sakura.
Sakura presses her lips together. Why does Ino always get like this after Sakura goes on missions? Dressing up, teasing her…
“Well, I’m going to take a shower,” Sakura says dully. “I’ll catch up with you later. Thanks for watching the garden, Ino.”
She unlocks the door to her house. Instead of leaving, Ino follows her in, swinging her hips in such a way to show them off and her bare legs. Why! She’s basically just rubbing it in Sakura’s face how much of a hot mess she is.
“You really do need a shower,” Ino says. Reaching forward, she carefully pulls at the stick glued into Sakura’s hair. “Look at this! No wonder you couldn’t keep your hair long.”
“It’s easier for the type of missions I take,” Sakura sniffs back, trying to put on a front that’s just as cocky as Ino’s. “You know, for when I have to fight tens of ninja at once, unlike some people.”
Ino quirks an eyebrow. “I’m sure, Forehead,” she says. “I’m sure while I’m in air conditioned rooms all day, you’re out there getting all sweaty from fighting and punching…”
Ino’s smirk widens so much it shows off all her pearly white teeth. “Why, look at this thing in your hair. What did you do, rip a tree in half with your bare hands?”
Something in Sakura finally snaps, and she shoves Ino forward, grabbing her by the shoulders and wrestling her down onto Sakura’s couch. Ino pushes back against her, but that smirk is still there, and Sakura growls and pushes her down harder into the couch. Her goal is not to hurt Ino– they’re both full-grown ninja and they mutually understand the difference between a real fight and a spar between rivals– but just to make her shut the hell up.
“Oh, getting feisty, Forehead?” Ino mocks, surging up and against Sakura and pushing both of them off the couch. They end up grappling on the floor, just like they’re thirteen and being stupid about Sasuke again.
Unlike when they were thirteen, the fight is entirely under Sakura’s control. Ino is an excellent kunoichi, but no one has been able to beat Sakura in hand-to-hand for years. Ino lipstick gets smudged across her face and her hair tangled in the fibers of Sakura’s carpet as she struggles against her.
Good, Sakura thinks as Ino’s perfect makeup is ruined. Excellent.
Sakura flips Ino onto her back, finally ready to end the fight and say something as equally pithy and teasing as what Ino has been doing to her all afternoon, and then–
Ino’s shirt mysteriously unbuttons itself.
“Oh!” Ino cries, arching her back under Sakura. The sides of her shirt fall away, and Ino’s chest is heaving from their brief scuffle, and Sakura suddenly becomes very aware that she’s sitting on Ino’s hips, squeezing them with her stupid giant thighs to keep her in place. “Sakura, you brute–!”
Sakura’s brain momentarily shuts off.
Ino’s smirking, even with her lipstick smeared right across her check and her fake eyelashes off and caught in her tangled hair. She’s wearing a lacy black push-up bra under her shirt, because of course Ino gets to wear sexy underwear that make her boobs look huge and perky while Sakura’s squelching around in her ugly mission clothes.
Sakura is a brute. She’s dirty and messy and she feels her face go hot. She feels humiliated by Ino, and her stupid perfect clothes and perfect make-up and perfect body.
Ino must sense the shift in Sakura because the smirk immediately melts off her face.
“Oh, Sakura…!” She says, hands going for Sakura’s face. “No, I’m sorry, I–”
Sakura pouts, letting Ino cup her face in both hands.
“Do you really,” Sakura asks, working very hard to keep a sad little hiccup out of her voice, “still like making me feel ugly?”
Ino freezes.
“No,” she says immediately, firmly. “I… Sakura, you look so fucking good right now.”
Sakura pauses. Her hold on Ino loosens, and Ino sits up just a little, propping herself up on her elbows.
“What?” Sakura asks. Everyone has been assuring her all day she looks awful…
“Yes,” Ino says firmly. “Sakura, you look… like you.” She beams, smile genuine and not one of her annoying Ino-smirks. “With your sexy beat up clothes and your hair all hot and messed up… like you could snap me in two and not even notice.”
“I wouldn’t–” Sakura protests immediately.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Ino cuts her off, arching her back again to press her stupid boobs forward, “because how could I let someone like you not notice me?”
Sakura frowns down at her boobs, dubious.
“You’re not making sense, Ino-pig,” Sakura tells her. “I think you just like hearing me scream.”
Ino raises her eyebrows. “Yes,” she says plainly. “Now, are you going to keep rubbing my face into things– which is very exciting, by the way– or should we go get cleaned up?”
Something flips in the bottom of Sakura’s stomach, and her face heats up with a brand new, confusing emotion. She realizes that the front section of Ino’s skirt has been shoved between her bare legs, which Ino definitely let happen on purpose, and also Ino’s shirt definitely didn’t just open on accident.
Ino looks… really good, actually, and.. and… Sakura always knew Ino did that for her, but she’d always assumed it was to make her feel inferior… but… maybe it was for her in a different way…? But Ino loved making her blush and yell, and…
Oh no.
Sakura makes a nigh unintelligible noise.
“Shower it is,” Ino decides, wiggling out from under Sakura. Sakura watches helplessly as the movement makes her heaving cleavage jiggle. “Here, let me help me with your shirt; it’s absolutely filthy.”
Ino leans forward, very carefully and unnecessarily slowly unzipping Sakura's shirt. Sakura has a mesh armored tank top on underneath and a boring sports bra, but Ino still smirks down at her like she’s finding hidden treasure.
“Wow,” Ino says, delighted. “There’s grime under the mesh. Sakura, what were you doing?”
“Fighting tens of enemy ninja by ripping down trees and throwing them at them?” Sakura supplies. She feels relaxed now, with Ino’s hands hovering over her. Comfortable.
Ino’s hand, warm and gentle, moves down to Sakura’s hip. “And what happened to your skirt?”
“Too dirty from fighting,” Sakura says, feeling like she’s discovering a new part of Ino as she watches Ino’s lips twitch up upward. “There was no saving it, so I had Sasuke burn it.”
Ino absolutely lights up and laughs, smirking her Ino-smirk up at Sakura. “Brute,” she teases. She moves to pull Sakura’s undershirt off.
Sakura lets her.