S c a r l e s s

Chapter o0. You're a young lady

"Come on, Yui. Don't be so hard on her. She's an only child and Shikamaru and Chouji are her only friends, of course she's going to roughhouse with them. You don't expect boys to sit around and play tea party, do you?"

Yamanaka Inoichi's pacifying voice spoke softly, slightly muffled through the closed door.

"I know that Inoichi, but look what she did to the carpet! There is mud everywhere, and don't get me started on her yellow ruffle dress. When I finished bathing her the water was brown."

Inoichi chuckled and Yamanaka Yui fumed. Something was getting lost in translation as she attempted to communicate to her husband that essential feminine values had been violated. Obviously.

"Who's going to marry her if she keeps this up?"

"Yui, she's eight."

"She won't be eight forever. You talk to her this time, she listens to you."

A pause, then: "Alright."

The doorknob turned and a small blonde girl peeled herself away from the door and sprinted to her bed, the mattress still bouncing under her bottom as her father entered her bedroom. He crossed the short distance in four long steps before dropping his weight on the space beside her, turning his head to look at her with a relaxed expression.

"You have to eavesdrop better than that, Ino. I could hear you running."

He punctuated the statement with a smile which Ino returned, happy that her father wasn't nearly as upset with her as her mother. He rarely ever scolded her despite always knowing when she was doing something she shouldn't. He was a shinobi, and in her mind that made him parallel to a superhero. If she thought long and hard about it, Ino could only remember two occasions when he'd raised his voice at her and both times she had been doing something decidedly unsafe. Both times he had appeared out of nowhere, scooped her up, and pulled her back to safety before she could even squeak in shock of being caught.

Her dad was amazing and she wore the title of Daddy's Girl like a badge of honor. She'd be just like him one day, she swore it to herself. His life looked a boatload more interesting than what her mother did around the house all day : cooking, cleaning, laundry...where was the adventure in that? The thrill? The victory?

At the moment, something changed in Inoichi's expression as looked at his daughter and tried to think of a way to simplify what he needed to say to her. He brushed short blonde locks out of her face affectionately as he gathered his thoughts.

"Your mother's really angry this time, princess. You know she doesn't like it when you get your clothes dirty."

She broke eye contact, shamed.

"I know."

That was about as stern as Inoichi could get and he wrapped one arm around her reassuringly when she leaned into his side.

"Listen, what your mother's getting at is that you can't keep getting dirty and all scratched up and wrestling boys all of the time. You're a girl."

"But dad~!"

"I know, I know. You're just as good at stuff as Chouji and Shikamaru, but you can't behave like a boy just because your friends are boys. Understand?"

She shook her head 'no'. Boys were boys. Boys were different from girls. If you wanted to play with boys, you had to play like a boy. It made perfect sense to her.

Inoichi sighed.

"Ino...sometimes you have to do the same thing someone else is doing a different way to get the same results. Remember what I told you about your kunai practice? Your aim is a little too far left, so you have to aim more right to hit the center like everyone else. You're still as good of a shot as your classmates – better than some, even – you just have to throw a little differently. This is the same thing."

Ino's face scrunched up, perplexed.

"So...you want me to hit a little further right when me an' Chouji spar?"

"No, Ino. What I meant was that you can still play with Chouji and Shikamaru but you need to behave more like a girl. No mudfighting, no jumping from trees until Iruka teaches you how to climb them, and no getting your clothes dirty. Be a lady. Like-"

He wracked his brain for an example an eight year old girl would be familiar with.

"Remember when the Daimyo and his wife came to town?"

Ino nodded. She'd talked of nothing but how mesmerizing the woman in long flowing blue robes had been for weeks afterward.

"Like her. That's what it is to be a lady. Haven't you started your kunoichi classes yet?"

That's right, she had started kunoichi classes with the other girls under Rina-sensei. You have to learn how to blend in with regular women in enemy territory, she had said something like that on the first day of class. It hadn't occurred to her before that games of snatching the tie out of the lazy kid's hair or pinning the fat kid and sitting on his back weren't standard 'girl' behavior.

"Oh. I get it now."

He smiled, relieved that something had gotten through to her.

"That's my girl. No more fighting unless it's for real. And if Shikamaru and Chouji don't wanna play if you won't fight with them, then find some females to be friends with."

Ino's head tilted to the side, thoughtful. Now that she took the time to think about it, she didn't know any girls that she could honestly call a friend. She was popular with mostly everyone at the academy but only the lazy kid and the fatty really knew her. It would be good to have a friend who didn't spend all of their time eating or sleeping. With a girl, she might actually have someone to listen to her about outfit colors and hairstyles.

"Okay."

Inoichi ruffled his daughter's hair and stood up.

"Now go to bed, it's late."

After they said their goodnights and her father shut the door, Ino slid under the covers of her bed and got comfortable. In her mind, echoes of her father's words and images of the Daimyo's wife circled in her head and she ran her fingers through her hair absentmindedly.

Be a lady.

Maybe she'd grow her hair out while she was at it, Rina-sensei said looking the part often helped to act the role. If she pretended to be a young lady long enough, maybe she could become one for real.

The minute hand on the clock inched closer to the three and Ino counted seven minutes now that Iruka-sensei had been out of the classroom. Naturally, the volume in the room had steadily risen with the noisy chatter of her classmates and Ino, wedged between Shikamaru and the kid with the sunglasses, was staring at the back of the Uchiha's head and spacing out. She was well into a particularly nice fantasy featuring her beloved Sasuke-kun when the commotion in the room peaked so loudly that her daydream was forcibly dispelled. Mildly annoyed, her eyes quickly spied the cause of all the ruckus.

"Keigo, that's mine! Give it back!"

"You don't need it. You're not even using it."

"But it's mine! Keigo!"

"Swipe it back if you want it so bad."

Ino felt like rolling her eyes at Keigo's taunting, but the near-tears expression on his poor victim's face kept her from ignoring his attention-grabbing antics. She cupped the side of her face in her palm and raised her voice to be heard over the crowd.

"Give Issei back his pencil holder, Keigo."

Keigo turned sharply in her direction, face set in childlike irritation.

"Mind your business, Ino. Nobody was talking to you."

Taking that as a declaration of war, the blonde finally stood up from her chair and climbed onto her desk, eyes blazing.

"Yeah? Well I'm talking to you. Snatching a pencil holder from Issei is nothing special. Betcha I can snatch it back from you."

The class whooped and giggled at the turn of events and Keigo, face reddening, refused to back down.

"Bet ya can't."

Thirty seconds. That was all it took for the small blonde to pin the bully to the ground and wrench the pencil case from his hands. She tossed it at Issei as she returned to her seat and the class started to laugh at the humiliated Keigo. Eager to divert attention, Keigo simply turned his focus back to Issei.

"At least I took her on! I didn't have to get a girl to come fight for me!"

The class exclaimed again and, in her seat, Ino slouched over her desk in exasperation. She'd won the battle, but Keigo had ultimately won the war. Her father had a point: behaving like a boy never really gained her anything in the end. So what if she bested Keigo at who was stronger? He carried on teasing others like it hadn't mattered. So what if she could beat Shikamaru in a race? He still pointed out, quite frequently, that she was a girl and that a girl would always lose to a boy no matter how many times she'd shown him that was untrue. Apparently respect couldn't be beaten into people; maybe it really was time to try a different method of proving her worth.

As children poured out of the open doors and spread into different directions, Yamanaka Ino watched each of their backs in interest, sizing them up in her mind. If she was to learn how to behave as an appropriate young lady, she was going to need a decent example to emulate. A friendship would provide easy access to all the lessons she would ever need, given enough time, Ino was sure she could mimic anyone's mannerisms. Fake it until you make it. Now she just needed to select her target.

Ami was out. She was always getting in trouble for passing notes during class. Ino was sure a young lady was supposed to pay attention.

Yuna in Class Two was out. The girl didn't have a graceful bone in her body.

Riiko was afraid of everything; Ino refused to copy someone like that. Just looking at the girl freak out over seeing a spider sent waves of annoyance over her.

Who did that leave? There weren't many girls studying to be kunoichi at the academy, from what Ino could tell, male students outnumbered the females two to one.

The brown haired girl? Ren-Ren or something? She rarely saw the upperclassman, but from what she did see the brunette was just as much of a tomboy as she was. No good.

Ino kicked a rock, stepping away from the doorway and slowly distancing from the school building. Maybe she'd need to find someone who'd already graduated from the academy. Older girls knew how to be ladylike, right? But where did older girls even hang out? Pondering her predicament, Ino crossed into the playground on her route home, passing by boys playing games of chase and girls watching and rooting loudly for their favorites. She studied each one of them with a critical eye, watching their faces, hearing their squeals of excitement.

None of them would do.

Frustrated, Ino continued on her walk and passed by the target practice dummies. Down the other end of the line of them, she could see the blonde whisker-marked boy still trying desperately to hit closer to the target's center with his kunai and shuriken. Sweat poured down his brow and his chest heaved as he panted, pulled his tools out of the edges of the target, and threw them again. She felt a sting of pity for the boy and just as she was turning her gaze back forward, something reflected off the sunlight in the trees nearby her and stared at the spot, unsure if she'd really just seen something or not. She decided to investigate.

Circling around the area where she'd seen something, Ino was amused to find a dark haired girl peeping at the blonde boy from behind a tree.

"Whatcha doin'?"

With a gasp, the surprised girl whipped around with wide silvery eyes and a quickly reddening face.

"I! I-I was just...W-was just..."

Ino flashed a gentle smile at the shy girl, which only served to make her nervous blush deepen. She looked toward the oblivious boy in orange, then back at the girl.

"Oh. Oh, I see! You like him, right?"

More stuttering that degraded into words Ino couldn't decipher.

"It's okay, it's okay! I won't tell him or anything."

"...thank you." , she mumbled back softly.

Ino went through her mental checklist of ladylike behavior. Not loud. Check. Doesn't play with boys. Check. Well-mannered. Check.

Perfect.

"I'm Ino, by the way."

"I-I'm Hinata. N-nice to meet you."

...

She never noticed the group of girls on the other side of the playground picking on a pink haired girl.

A / N : This is a prologue, the rest of the chapters will be much longer than this. And I know, no Neji yet. Bear with me. As always, slow updates. Be warned.