Work Text:
It goes like this:
Naruto finds Ino at the end of the world.
There’s something voyeuristic about it, he guesses, in the very way he is not himself at this moment and she is not herself either. The figure in front of him is not fully present. Not ever.
He knows it’s a dream.
Truth is, Ino and him haven’t had a conversation face-to-face in years. Haven’t been here at the beach since news of her engagement. Haven’t been orbiting in close proximity since their breakup. It made sense, Naruto guesses. He didn’t know what comfort levels they were to each other in the missing years.
Maybe it’s why his brain decided to stand right here after four drinks, and she’s also at the beach.
He entertains the scenario anyway.
Perhaps comfortability lies in between.
Here, the blonde beauty stands with her hair down, long shiny strands that have once brushed against his shoulder when she reached over on manicured toes, and told him a secret. I’d be happier with you, she said, her thumb over the ring. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe he had left earlier that night after news broke. Maybe he learned about it over social media rather than seeing her face. Naruto knew better than to wait around again and be another hypotenuse in a triangle that he shouldn’t be in. He can’t recall her exact words right now. Doesn’t need to.
The memory sloshes through his fingers like water, some sort of blue haze; but he’s not really that Naruto right now, not the one who congratulated her with a smile and drank one glass with the soon-to-be groom before running out of there. Bolted.
At the beach. On white sand. In a dream. Under moonlight.
“Naruto!” Her voice rings.
She is as beautiful as the day he stood behind.
The mimicry is not even good, is the thing. He knows it’s a dream. That nothing is real and he won’t manage to see her for much longer anyway. But—he’s a creature of habitual routines, and she’s the future and present and it’s Ino, so he takes the first steps towards her outstretched shadow, and greets back. Her arms draw a parallel to the ground, fingers knotted at the end and so locked in, outside of a small triangle where her left index crosses the right thumb.
They ignore the veil pinned to her head.
He still feels his heartstrings pulled.
“I think,” she says and her gaze is staring at the skyline through this tiny hoop. Here, he can almost catch the blueness of the shore in her eyes. Can almost catch his past self from letting go of a good thing. “If nobody has been there to stop me, I would run away for good.”
He exhales.
Stands close enough to strain his eyes through the same part where light slips and catches her mind.
In his gaze, in the haze of his mind, she is always running. Her footsteps are gentle and airy over the sand, never to be seen again. She runs in ways he hopes to never witness. She runs to protect herself. Here, the woman he loves is bleeding over, red dripping down with her heart in one hand. He hasn’t remembered her bleeding, but the dream goes on and the person in front holds a part of her body like a conch to the ear, some sort of sentiment only she can decode.
In the end, the heart yearns—so she throws it away.
They talked about this once. About her needs to run towards things heads on, like ruinous men and the lack of preservation on bare feet. She liked fixing things, but knew when she was no longer needed. She said yes to Sai because it was easier to say yes than I want to give us another go.
They talked about this, once. Her thumb over his own skin where tears dampened their connection.
Naruto possesses a perpetual emptiness that she cannot fill, so Ino touched his waist and they pretended that it was okay, and kisses would help fix whatever broke a man in half. I’m not good enough for you, he told her. Then try, she pleaded. In the end, it’s Ino who runs towards the horizon and he stays back, and is he allowed to act confused when the poetry of their ending has always been there from the start? She is still running away forever in his mind. In a dream. In a nightmare. She runs until he can no longer make out her footsteps in the sand, parted and erased with each beach wave.
“Yeah,” he eventually replies to no one because Ino is getting married in the morning, and the sun is rising from the pit of his stomach.
This dream won’t last much longer anyway. Yeah.