Chapter Text
Ino sat there completely still. The exact moment when her ears started to make a weird ringing noise, she didn't know. It was just perceptible enough to drill at the back of her head, but not as strong to stop her thoughts from flooding all at once, leaving her overwhelmed and slowly drowning in the aftermath of them.
"We'll work around it" the voice rose again after a while. Ino was sure it had been exactly two minutes since silence took over. The doctor looked for all in the world like she had overlooked the fact that the declaration almost shocked her into a state of catatonia. The connection between her brain and her tongue felt severed, as if someone took a blade and cut through the strings of her reality. No warning, no indication as to how something could be flipped upside down so fast.
"I don't need to tell you the statistics of depression, I’m sure. You’re someone who has a lot to live for. If we start treatment right away we could have a very positive prognosis, Ino..."
She tuned out, ironically, just after the woman said her name. Depression? A ridiculous assumption. Ino wasn't depressed, she was fine. She was fine because the war was over; because it was finally peaceful again and she could lose herself in watching her flowers grow instead of sharpening ninja tools for another blood-tainted mission. She was fine because she was alive, when many people weren’t.
Then a familiar feeling: the stinge of an intrusive thought. She'd been having a lot of those lately.
Her father's name was in the list of people who didn't come home. Her house was destroyed. Hell, the whole village was. Her sensei was killed and she was too late. Neji died in the war and it could've been her. Suddenly she broke into a cold sweat, but as much as she wanted to wipe her forehead, she couldn't manage to tear her arms away from where they had been resting.
Another one.
She did come home, but only to hug her mother tightly and tell her that her husband wouldn't. There wasn't even a body to recover. It had been three years, and the light in the woman's once beautiful, full of life eyes hadn't returned. Ino sometimes questioned if they ever would.
Depression. Her brain pondered, as if it had suddenly grown tired of the previous subject, changing to one anew without stopping to blink.
Depression. It sounded so weird in her head. Like when you say a word too many times and it stops feeling real. Like it loses meaning. Or never had one.
Did she even know what that meant? Ibiki would say "depression is the manifested failure at suppressing your emotions." It would usually be followed by a "get your head in the game, Yamanaka”. And by game, I mean this person's brain".
Unknowingly, her fingers twitched. It took her a second to register the motion. It felt as stiff as if she had been immobilized for years and was just learning how to command her muscles again. Ino looked at her right hand and after ten seconds of intense concentration, it moved. The first thing she did was curl it into a fist.
"What?" She didn't lift her gaze to meet the doctor's; even if she had regained all mobility from her imaginary paralysis, she didn't have the courage to look her in the eyes. She focused on her whitening knuckles, hoping that if the universe cared enough to feel a sliver of pity for her, the whole room would turn black and she could escape undetected. That, she knew how to do.
It felt inappropriate to laugh, but that was all her brain was telling her to do. The next intrusive thought was the doctor's words from an eternity ago.
"Ino, you're depressed".
As easy as that, the intrusion became an obsession and she giggled. Her mind wouldn't stop replaying the sentence over and over again, even after she had somehow managed to regain control of her body and walk herself out the door without a single word. It felt like a broken record playing between her brows. A broken, twisted and nihilistic record which she couldn't find the button to shut off.
How sure could that doctor be that she was really, as they called it, depressed? And if so, then what now? Would that be an answer that she could find before she finished the four flights of stairs from the psychiatric floor?
Ino scoffed, looking down. She suddenly couldn’t remember the last time she had painted her toenails. She focused on that, because it was easier than to think what would happen if any of her comrades were to spot her before she could exit the building.
What now?
"Ino?" A very familiar and very unwelcomed voice snapped her out of her thoughts. For a second she was grateful, and then entirely annoyed. Shit. She hadn't even been able to pass the second floor.
She didn't swear often. It wasn't, as her mother would often say, very ladylike, so it was something she would only resort to in battle. Logically, she wouldn't want to be cursing often while fighting.
Her first impulse was to take a turn to the left, pretend she didn't hear her name and make a run for it. She had always been the faster one, after all. But there was nothing to her left, and however powerful her jutsu was to let her mind go through walls if she concentrated hard enough, her body couldn't do the same. Suddenly, the idea of doing the mind transfer to the air and just leaving her body helpless on the ground didn't seem so crazy. That way, she wouldn't have to deal with her nosey friend asking questions, and maybe she would hit her head on the floor hard enough to be left in a coma.
If Sakura noticed where she was coming from, which she obviously did, she let her keep her dignity about it.
Ino decided to prey before she was preyed on. "What are you doing here?" She almost physically facepalmed at her stupidness, the girl worked here.
"I come from helping deliver a baby" she answered quickly, with that only-known-to-Sakura honesty that made her feel so grateful and irritated at the same time.
Three, four, five seconds before the next response. Ino felt her body stiff again, and she shut her eyes hard concentrating chakra on her muscles to confirm if the stiffness was really there. She wondered what the sudden shift in her inner network would look like to Sakura, who was obviously trained in sensing those kinds of things. The blonde stabilized her chakra before her friend had enough time to think she had gone crazy (had she?).
"You... what?" Feigning nothing had happened, the mild shock at the answer to the previous question became the perfect excuse.
Ino was also a medic ninja, but she had focused her studies on battlefield assistance rather than sitting still at a hospital waiting for the next baby to be born, or the grandpa to end his suffering with a final breath in his sleep. She did enough of that in her family's shop. Only it was not people, but flowers. She watched them bloom and wither, like all natural things.
And naturally enough also, in times of peace, there were little to no battles to be fought. That meant no assistance needed to heal a punctured lung well enough to have the person get up and fight again in a span of ten minutes.
Even with this evident lack of workload that otherwise Sakura submitted herself to, Ino couldn't say that life after the war had treated her any kinder.
The blonde kept walking right past her friend, towards the stairs. No eye contact, no disposition to stand there and talk like she was interested in how babies came out of their mother's vaginas. As crazy as it sounded, her shinobi ear was much more accustomed to a final moment's cry, than a newborn's. She didn't know if she would prefer it to be any different. It was morbid, but Ino Yamanaka didn't like change.
"You leaving?" Sakura was incapable of sounding gentle. Everything that came out of her was rough spoken. It felt like a reprimand that she shouldn't even have to accept.
"You probably have baby ooze all over you. Go take a shower. I'll be gone, you know where to find me." It was a lie. People did normally know where to find Ino because she was more often than not at the flower shop. But she wasn't clocking in this time.
"My shift isn't over, you know..." the girl expected it to be obvious why she couldn't just 'go shower'.
"Go have lunch?" Ino guessed as she continued to go for the stairs.
"Can't just eat in the middle of a...
Oh no. She definitely wasn't in the right mind for this.
"Then go push the baby back inside her mother or something!" Ino knew she wasn't supposed to yell in a hospital, but she did anyway and ran down the stairs like the police were following her for such a heinous crime. Sakura stood in the hall, perplexed and long forgotten.
Ino saw the light, quite literally and metaphorically. She gave a quick goodbye to the nurse at the front desk and went for the exit. Then she saw red eyes staring straight at her, and straight through her.
Covering her eyes from the midday sun, she used her hands as a shield to hide the silent swearing. It was the second time today. Bad luck. One more and she would be losing the next fight she would be involved in. Ino silently prayed it was an argument.
For a moment, she seriously considered just waving 'bye' and picking up her pace to avoid the universe's vengeance on her for being rude to the psychiatrist, but she saw in Kurenai's eyes that it had been far too long since they had last seen each other. She didn't even remember Mirai being so big.
She still waved, but contrary to what part of her was screaming relentlessly in her head, she slowed her pace to a stop. The woman seemed to snap out of her own little bubble of thoughts. The full-to-the-brim purse at her side, the shifting baby in her arms, and the location they were in, gave her an insight as to what she could've been preoccupied with. Ino wondered if, strangely enough coming from her, she had picked up the wrong social cue.
"Ino! What are you doing here?" Kurenai's sweet tone quickly dispersed her negative thoughts. The perfect antithesis of Sakura: incapable of not being gentle. Kurenai looked at her only half the sentence, the rest, she spent trying to better handle the baby who was wriggling in her arms with a scrunched face. Ino really couldn't differentiate if she was in pain or in need of a diaper change.
She looked at the front door for a second before turning her gaze to Mirai. Suddenly facing Kurenai, the woman she had known for seven years and had been her mentor when Asuma was just too thick in the head for a girl like her, was way more difficult than facing a two year old baby. She waited after the mother shushed her daughter gently before speaking.
"I..." Ino contemplated the idea of telling her she was diagnosed with a deadly disease and she was going to her deathbed at her mother's house. Tomorrow she'd be found dead. Simple enough. "Only a check up. Nothing more" she smiled, letting the idea stay at just that.
Kurenai looked like she had asked out of genuine curiosity, but her daughter's whimpers as she tried to scurry away from her embrace had preoccupied her more and thrown her into a sudden rush to finish the conversation. Ino was more than happy to comply.
"I was feeling uncomfortable around my abdomen, but it turns out it was just really bad period pains." She widened her smile and felt the skin of her bottom lip rip open a bit.
She had worried about her toenails, but when had it been the last time that she put chapstick on her lips, even when they were very obviously cracked?
Kurenai matched her demeanor. "Well, at least you're not pregnant! Wait until you are" a soft warning, very motherly. "Not too long though! That's bad for the baby, but also don't be too eager. You're too young".
The smiling woman looked, even with her hair ruffled and a baby two seconds away from exploding into hysteric crying, very put together. Maybe that's what motherhood does to you? Ino pondered, but decided to stick to her sensei's advice. She didn't want to find out anytime soon if pregnancy was worse than period pains or not. Even if she had never experienced either of them before.
"Mm, we should talk" Kurenai spoke after a few seconds of silence. "We definitely should talk". It had been intended as a warm invitation, but Ino felt it more like an intimidating offer, like when you fail a test and the teacher wants to 'talk' to see what happened. Kurenai, of course, would never make her accept an invitation, but Ino surely didn't feel deserving of one.
"But not right now, I guess. You look busy" she managed to assess.
The older woman frowned a bit, looking at her baby. "Ugh, yes. Mirai's got a fever since yesterday morning and I haven't been able to do anything about it! It usually isn't like that, so I'm just taking precautions.”
Ino made an effort not to step back at the statement, but also guessed it would be better not to approach the baby in a gesture of what would look like condescension. She just skirted past and turned to walk backwards.
"I hope Mirai gets better!" She had to raise her voice the farther she got away. "I'll leave you then! You don't want to be late to your appointment! Bye!" she waved like the first time, only with a little less excitement.
"Bye! I'll invite you over for tea next time!"
To be honest, Ino thought to herself as she turned, she just wanted to go back to her house and cry on her pillow like someone had just died.
Maybe they did.