This is the first of several unfinished stories I'd like to share with you although I don't plan to finish them. This one is focused on OC!Ino, and the InoShikaCho family + Asuma.

A detail: I'm french and this isn't beta-ed. Sorry in advance for any mistakes. Send me a nice review with a correction if something bothers you.

Round and round goes the little flower.

"Ino."

Round and round to make a crown of flowers.

"...Ino!"

The little girl looked up. No-one. She looked back down at her flower crown.

"So troublesome... Ino, on your left."

The child glanced aside, blinked and smiled sheepishly at her friend. "Yes, Shika?"

"You were spacing out again," the boy grumbled with his arms behind his head. He was lying on the grass while she was sitting with her collection of fresh wild flowers in her lap.

"So? You do it all the time."

"No. I'm dozing but still conscious of what's going on around me. You know there is a difference."

"Yeah, yeah," she grumbled, pouting and focusing back on her work, "but I wasn't dissociating."

"Good."

"It isn't so bad... just weird."

"It takes ages to get you back on track when you do it."

"You're just complaining because then you have to do something, you lazy bum," she grumbled by force of habit. When no answer came, she glanced at Shikamaru. He was staring at the clouds intently, frowning and pursing his lips. "Shika?"

"That's not it," he murmured before inhaling and admitting: "It scares me when you dissociate... it's like you might not come back."

Taken aback by this surprisingly honest admission, Ino froze. After a few seconds, she put aside crown and flowers to snuggle up against Shika's side with her head on his chest. "That won't happen. Obaasan says I'm getting much better. My souls are merging really well. She said that the ghost soul was probably a very benevolent one, because she didn't try to take over my baby soul. I'll be back to normal in a few years, when my brain reaches a good enough size. "

She meant to reassure him, but Shikamaru tensed. "Are you saying that it could have just... got rid of your soul and taken over your body?"

Ino winced. "Yes? But it didn't happen! And it's not like you could make a distinction anymore you know. I'm both souls equally now! So don't be rude to my older, very nice, half-soul, she's probably the only reason I'm any good at your games for old men, you know."

"She?"

"Well, yeah. Obviously."

Shikamaru glanced at her purple dress and the flowers she had left aside. "Obviously," he relented.

Heavy footsteps came toward them. Ino sat up to greet their friend. Chouji appeared with arms full of food and sat in front of them with an eager smile. "Snacks!"

Ino adjusted her ponytail and glanced at what he brought. "Fruits?"

"Of course," Chouji nodded, giving her a little basket of strawberries and grapes. He was happy that his friend liked to eat snacks, no matter how strange her preferences were.

"Thank you," Ino replied before eating the first one primly.

Shikamaru looked at her from the corner of his eyes and snorted. "Yeah. You're 100% girly, alright."

"So? Are you implying that's a bad thing?" she asked dangerously with sharp eyes.

Shikamaru froze in his attempt to sit up and backtracked quickly. "No. No, no, it's fine. You're the good kind of girly..."

Her glare softened, but she rolled her eyes. "I'll let it pass because you're still a child but don't grow up being a misogynist, Shika. You're smarter than that." After tutting a little, she focused back on her snack.

Shikamaru relaxed and accepted the mackerel riceballs his best friend was offering.

"What was that?" Chouji asked in a hushed voice.

"Her older soul gets scary when she thinks I criticize women," Shikamaru whispered back.

"I can hear you, you know," Ino said with a roll of her eyes. "And stop making the distinction. I told you: both souls are me now."

"Maybe, but who says what still shows," Shikamaru grumbled, immediately approved by a nod of Chouji.

She looked up, curious. "It does?"

"I don't know how it feels for you, but when the older soul speaks up, it's pretty obvious. It's in the way you stare and talk."

"Yeah, you use big words," Chouji agreed between two mouthful of chips, "also, you're scarier, like the time when you lectured that merchant for bullying Naruto."

Both boys shivered at the memory. Ino's wrath had been merciless. It usually was, of course, but she only directed her anger at other children most of the time. She was an angel with adults. So, to see her publicly lecture a fifty years old man about child abuse, customer service and discrimination had been unforgettable.

Ino huffed. "All right. That time was special. I was really pissed..." She ate a grape and stared into space. "I think she liked children a lot."

Shikamaru leant his arm on his raised knee and stared at Ino thoughtfully. "Weird."

"What?"

Shikamaru shrugged. "This double soul business is weird."

Chouji nodded. "I don't know how you deal with it. I couldn't."

Ino waved her hand. "Yamanaka's psyche is more malleable and complex than any others. We're used to the tricks of the mind."

"No other Yamanaka was ever like you, Ino," Shikamaru pointed out. He knew because he asked Inoichi if they had anything he could read about this. There were no records of a child with two souls.

"Obviously, since there was only one newborn Yamanaka during the Kyuubi attack," she replied, pushing back her ponytail over her shoulder with pride. "I'm one of a kind!"

"That you are," Shikamaru agreed. "One big headache too."

"I'm not! Take it back!" She threw the flowers at him.

Shikamaru dropped to the ground with a groan, covered in colorful petals. "You win. I'm defeated."

Ino jumped to her feet and raised her arms in victory. "Ahah! That shows you! I'm the best!" Then she immediately crouched and gathered the flowers to carefully put them in his hair instead.

"What are you doing?" Shikamaru asked, opening an eye.

"I'm making you pretty."

"So troublesome…" He sputtered as a dandelion flower ended up in his mouth, stem first. "Hey!"

"Dandelions are edible."

"Doesn't mean they taste good."

"True. They're yucky, too bitter. Sorry." She gently removed the flower and threw it away.

"How do you know what they taste like?" Shikamaru asked, suspicious.

"Sometimes I know things, but it's weird to know things and not why you know them, so I tended to check when I was little. I ate a lot of flowers. Mom and dad had to hid the poisonous ones."

Shikamaru sighed and carefully didn't comment with his usual catchphrase. He listened quietly as Chouji and Ino discussed edible and poisonous plants.

oOo

"So, Ino, I have been told about your special circumstances. However, I'd like to hear your take on it, if you don't mind," Asuma said after they passed his test and officially became his students.

Leaning back on her hands, Ino groaned and breathed out sharply to get her hair out of her face. On her left, Shikamaru and Chouji were both lying down, exhausted by their test. Their sensei hadn't worked a sweat though. Cross-legged, he was slouching and looked at them unimpressed.

Head thrown back, Ino stared at the sky as she gathered her thoughts. When she spoke up, her voice took an unusually deep quality, catching the attention of her whole team. "I was born on September 23rd. When the Kyuubi attacked Konoha, I was a little more than two weeks old. The body of a newborn, while quite malleable, is extremely fragile and underdeveloped. It's sensitive to its environment and in particular to malevolent intent, which is why the toxic chakra oozing from the Kyuubi caused many miscarriages and neonatal deaths. In my case, it provoked cardiac arrest."

"What?!" Shikamaru and Chouji both sat up suddenly. They had never heard the details about that day.

Ino ignored them, lost in thought as she was. "My mother, having basic medical capacities, managed to restart my heart, but technically I was dead for a few seconds."

Chouji choked around the chip he was eating and Shikamaru hit him in the back without looking away from his female teammate.

"Now, at the time, Konoha was under attack by the Kyuubi, like I said, and the Yondaime had to get him away from the village. To this end he used a space and time technique. But it turns out that when you mix a lot of chakra coming from the Kyuubi with complex and delicate techniques, weird things happen, like the summoning of souls from limbo, probably because the walls between worlds are weakened."

Asuma was lighting a cigarette when his student started to speak, but it went out as the jounin stared, wide-eyed, as Ino mentioned this damned day. He hadn't expected such a detailed explanation from her. How did she even know what the Yondaime did that day?

"So, you have lost souls roaming around Konoha, right? And there is this baby, which is from a spiritual clan, you know, and who is so close to dying. It's like a beacon to those souls, a door to the corporeal world. It's just there for the taking..."

Ino stopped speaking for a few seconds. They waited for her to speak, but her eyes were unfocused. Shikamaru made a face as he realized she had dissociate. True, it happened less and less as time passed, but it was still as spooky as the first time.

"What happened, Ino?" Asuma asked gently.

"The souls were desperate. As soon as the worlds became separated again, they would return to limbo. They rushed on the baby… The baby's soul wouldn't have survived. It wasn't fair. It was her body, why would they steal it from her? I stepped in. I reached her first." Ino tilted her head, her hair falling in front of her face without her notice. "It was to protect her, but once the worlds were separated again, I was stuck. I couldn't leave the baby's body. It wasn't made for two souls, we were cramped. It caused headaches and nose bleeding. We couldn't sleep, we couldn't eat. The parents, the medics, they didn't understand. All they notice was an excess of spiritual energy. They gathered that it unsettled the chakra's balance and stifled the physical energy. The baby was dying. They decided to seal the excess energy. But with the spiritual energy of a baby, we couldn't survive. The soul of an adult was too large for this body anyway. It had to disappear. It doesn't work this way though. When two souls are in the same body for a long period of time, the strongest one takes control and feeds on the other. It doesn't need to be conscious. It's just how it works. The soul of an adult is always stronger than that of a baby. I wanted to protect her, but I was unwillingly killing her. It was unacceptable. So, when the shortage of spiritual energy came, I distributed it in the only way I know could change the situation. I willingly starved the episodic memory. She was a baby, she didn't remember anything, only I did, and the memories of my own past were hurting the undeveloped neuronal regions. I willingly starved every part of the brain holding my consciousness, therefore crippling my soul. Remnants of an adult soul are less than an intact baby soul. Now, we'll merge. I'm leaving this message in her subconscious, so it can be triggered in due time. I'm sorry, I tried. Take care of her. Of us."

In a heavy silence, Ino blinked quickly and straightened. She raised her hands to her cheeks and rubbed them. "Uh? Why am I crying?" She sniffled and looked at her teammates. "Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked defiantly. "It's just all this dust you threw in my eyes, I'm sure. Just… give me a tissue, idiots!"

Asuma obeyed mechanically.

Ino hid her face behind the handkerchief. A second later, she was crying heavily, sniffing loudly with her shoulders shaking. "It's stupid! Why am I crying?" When no answer came, she kicked Shikamaru in the knee. "Shika! Why am I crying?!"

Her friend was too shaken to answer. Chouji was drying his own cheeks. None of them knew what to say to comfort their teammate when she didn't remember what she had just revealed.

That's when her father decided to show himself. He landed next to her and crouched to take her in his arms, gently petting her hair and murmuring comforting words. His best friends, Shikaku and Chouza, landed a little further and gestured for their sons and Asuma to leave with them.

"When Inoichi insisted to come and see your meeting, I thought he was being overprotective again. I take it back," Shikaku said once they were too far to be heard. "It's best to let him deal with this. Ino will be back to her normal self tomorrow," he said to Asuma.

The jounin sensei nodded and glanced at his students, wondering what to say. In the end, he settled for a simple: "Training starts tomorrow at ten." He disappeared in a cloud of leaves, planning to think this through with the help of a few glasses of saké.

The Akamichi and Nara went to the nearest compound in silence. They settled on the patio of Shikaku's house, finding comfort in their routine of food and shogi.

Shikamaru wasn't playing at his best, his thoughts being filled with other matters than strategy. Finally, in the middle of the game, he asked: "When did the Yamanaka realize what happened to Ino?"

Shikaku met his friend's eyes before replying. "After the excess of spiritual energy was sealed, Ino's physical troubles calmed. She ate and slept like any baby, but she never behaved exactly like one. At a time when babies learned by trial and error, she never did. She used to look at a game until she had found a solution and then she succeeded on the first try. She also showed signs of two distinct personalities, with one distinctly calmer than the other."

"And then she started to talk," Chouza murmured, looking in the forest with a faraway look.

"What happened?" Chouji asked, munching on chips nervously.

"Her speech pattern didn't match that of a baby. She was able to make sentences from the start," Shikaku explained, pushing a piece forward.

"And she used to talk to herself, a lot," Chouza pointed out. "That's what tipped Inoichi off."

Shikaku hummed in agreement. "When he checked her mind, he noticed something was unusual, but he didn't understand it. His mother was the one to guess they were looking at two souls merging together. Everything else was guesswork. They never really knew how or why this happened. They gathered clues from Ino's comments and behavior, but that's it."

"It shook Inoichi," Chouza murmured. "To think he could have lost his baby girl completely..." His eyes drifted to his son and he petted his hair distractedly.

"How much are the souls merged now?" Shikamaru asked, frowning at the board.

"By the end of puberty, they'll be completely merged. Ninety percent of the process is already over."

"So Ino… is and will always be Ino."

"Yes."

"... That's good enough for me," Shikamaru decided, focusing all his attention on the game. He was off to a bad start, but he planned to salvage what he could.

oOo

The next morning, Ino stood in front of her team with her hands on her hips, looking at them defiantly. "Just to be clear: what happened yesterday will stay between us and never been discussed ever again. Not a word to anyone, especially not Sakura. Okay?"

They were all too glad to escape any sensitive discussion and agreed immediately.

"Good. Now, Asuma-sensei," she said with her chin raised. "Smoking is bad for your health, and while I'm aware that there are ways for you to protect your lungs thanks to chakra control, we don't know those techniques yet. As such you shouldn't smoke near us, otherwise you'll be responsible for intoxicating us."

Asuma stared at her, a little wide-eyed, while both Chouji and Shikamaru watched her like it was a show.

"If that bothers you because it became a bad habit of yours that you can't rein in, then I invite you to teach us those chakra control techniques as soon as possible," Ino concluded while clapping her hands and smiling in delight. "Like now."

Shikamaru groaned. Chouji stared at his bag of chips mournfully.

"Don't mind the other two," she added.

After the initial surprise, Asuma chuckled and stubbed out his cigarette on the ground. "This might be more fun than I thought. Alright kiddos, chakra control exercises it is."

Two hours later, Chouji and Ino were running up a tree, while Shikamaru had just finished (he was willing to make an effort of concentration if it meant shortening his suffering). He came to sit down near Asuma, leaning back and staring at the cloud.

"I guess that Inoichi-san told you the important stuff."

"He did," Asuma confirmed. "Would you like to add something?"

"She doesn't dissociate much anymore unless she's really tired or stressed."

"Both states which might occur during missions," Asuma pointed out, squinting at the purple shape waving her arms to balance herself. "Do you think it will be an issue?"

"She can still fight and do stuff when she dissociates. She's just… a little weird. Pain doesn't even bother her."

"She hears orders?"

"Yeah. She'll do whatever you tell her to do, which is creepy," he muttered the last words under his breath. "She won't take initiatives though."

"Alright. I'm sure we can deal with this."

"We've got her back," Shikamaru stated while staring at Ino encouraging Chouji from the highest branch of her tree.

"We do," Asuma agreed with a small smile. Teamwork wasn't something he worried about with them. As long as Ino didn't scare the shit out of him with anymore big revelations and emotive declarations, they should be fine.

"Sensei!" Ino screamed from her tree. "What's next?!"

Shikamaru groaned in despair, while Asuma chuckled.

"Is she always so motivated?"

"Unfortunately."