Open Plains

Summary: Strange revelations come at night on a battlefield. Ino hasn't got the strength left to wonder. OneShot.

Warning: Slight Angst, a bit of hurt, and, hopefully, the intention gets clearer to the end.

Set: Since I haven't been following the most recent Naruto Arc I don't know what's going on. Last thing I remember is Sasuke fighting Danzo. So this isn't strictly canon though it was inspired by a picture I saw of InoShikaChou fighting some weird shadow with an oversized marmalade jar.

Disclaimer: Standards apply.

There was no place to hide.

The plains provided nothing but dry dust and low dunes, sharp boulders and edged rocks. All of these – covered by a huge, black canopy of sky. Still, the sounds of the camp were muted. Most shinobi of the train were already asleep. Those who were on guard duty were silently perched around the camp, dark shadows in front of an equally dark background and the few people still awake were preparing for rest. Exhaustion was the overall sentiment in the camp, exhaustion and silence. Nobody felt like singing songs at the campfire in which the embers were slowly burning down. Nobody indulged in telling ghost stories or joked around on the costs of others.

The first thing to fall victim to a war was innocence. Ino would never again forget this.

She couldn't remember how long it was since Hidden Leaf had gone to war. It might have been years or merely weeks. She couldn't remember when she had last seen any of her friends – Sakura, Hinata, Tenten, Shino, Kiba, Naruto, Lee or Neji – and she didn't dare to think of the fact that she might never see them again. She didn't remember the last words her father had said to her and the smile her mother had worn through her tears as she had said good-bye. She couldn't remember the last time she had eaten a warm meal and slept in a bed and had had a shower in the morning. A long, hot shower.

She couldn't remember the last time she had worn a skirt.

Innocence, yes. In a way she had lost her innocence to this war. She had believed wars to be romantic and tragic and just. She hadn't imagined them to be swift and brutal and entirely devoid of any emotion. Yesterday she had killed three mere children, enemy shinobi, barely old enough to carry their chuunin vest. They had come in her direction and they would have seen her and alerted the enemy to her team's presence. She couldn't let that happen so she had made a decision and had killed them. She had murdered them in cold blood.

And she hadn't even felt like crying afterwards. Maybe she already had shed all the tears she had had. Maybe she had become cold and unfeeling, like the soldier she was supposed to be. She hadn't felt like crying and she hadn't broken down. She was too far gone to do anything like that. But she had felt hollow.

That was all that was left of her: A hollow shell.

Ino had never imagined she would find herself here one day.

Here was a wide sea of grass, stones and boulders; here was a plain without one single tree in sight. And God, how she missed the trees. She missed the sound of their rustling leaves, the glances of golden sunlight shining through the green foliage in summer, the glorious display of colors in fall, the dark branches coated with silvery icicles in winter. She missed the wind in their tops and the long shadows they threw, the protection they provided. The plains were open and wide and visible to anyone. Sometimes Ino felt like a huge target with a brightly flashing neon-Hit me!-sign on her back. There was no way to disappear, no way to scale trees to spy on the enemy, no way to escape via the long, thick branches.

Leaf-nin belonged into the forest.

She had never imagined she would find herself in such a situation, either. Sometimes, she wondered. What did she look like? She hadn't had a bath in six week's time. Her hair was too tangled to bother sorting it out with the only comb that was small enough to fit her pack. She had stopped bothering shortly after they had left Konoha. She wore a nondescript, dark uniform; dark pants, brown sandals and the green vest that made her disappear in the forest but stood out painfully in the golden plains. It had done so at the beginning, at least, because sand and dust and earth (and blood) soon had colored every single one of them dust-brown and now they were as invisible in the land of plains and rocks as they had been in the land of forests. Ino had abandoned her skimpy, violet skirt and top (what good was it if she stood out like a pink elephant on a reconnaissance mission) and had wondered how long it would take for her to miss it. Not long, she had thought.

She had been wrong.

She didn't miss her old outfit. She didn't miss her former self at all.

The trousers were comfortable and plain. They hid her during day and warmed her during night. She was able to move like she never had been in her skirts. The vest had been a nuisance at first. Unused to its weight and bulkiness, she had tried to abandon it. She changed her mind quickly when it saved her life the second day in field. Her forehead protector long ago had forsaken its use as a pretty item. Now it held back her hair, taking it out of her eyes so she wouldn't need to push it back as soon as it escaped the confinement of her ponytail.

Ino suspected that she looked anything else but good.

She was dirty. She was exhausted. She was hungry – she would never again complain that Chouji cared too much for his stomach – and homesick and hollow. If she measured her outer appearance from the way her comrades looked (since she was the only woman it was hard to tell but she always had had a vivid imagination) she must have looked like hell had swallowed her whole, chewed her through thoroughly and spit her out again.

And they weren't even in the actual combat zone.

She was thankful for it. As much as she was able to murder little children without spilling a tear she still despised killing. The fact that she seemed to have a gift for doing just that had her feel sick every time she thought about it. The first time she had killed a civilian she had emptied the little contents of her stomach entirely onto the dusty, dry grounds, still in sight of Shikamaru, Chouji and the other five jounin and chuunin of her team. Since then, her head-count had only increased. They didn't keep tabs on who had killed how many enemies – they weren't gone that far yet – but the unofficial count hung over them day and night. At the moment a jounin was leading, closely followed by Chouji. Ino made it third place. On nights when she laid awake it scared the shit out of her. During days she continued with her work automatically.

Her ability to kill was what she feared most. The second-scariest thing was what she felt on evenings like this one.

On those evenings, she usually sat at the half-glowing camp fire, a boulder in her back that still was warm from day's relentless sun (another thing that she definitely wasn't used to, she had already caught a painful sunburn twice, everyone in her train had). The sky was a shade of darkest black and the stars were bright and silver.

They always seemed so close.

Next to her Chouji was already sleeping, snoring softly. A loving smile crossed her face as she pulled up the light blanked to cover his shoulders. Then, she wrapped her arms around her knees again and rested her chin on her arms.

She hated war. She hated the killing and the suffering and the silent sneaking, the knowledge of having seven other people around her who were in danger of being killed at the first sight of the enemy. She hated knowing that Shikamaru and Chouji were out here, as well, and that, somewhere else far away; all her friends were putting their lives on the line the same way she was risking hers. She hated the fact that she had somehow, inexplicably, gotten used to the danger and the killing and of constantly being on the run. She felt the darkness approach during night, the exhaustion and fear and sadness. How many, the words repeated in her head, again and again until she was unable to stand it and wanted to smash her own head against the next stone until the voices stopped. How many more have to die? She hated the feeling of numbness whenever she killed someone. She hated the fact that she was unable to summon the proper amount of energy to even hate those things enough.

And, beyond all, she hated that she was fine.

She was alive. She was on the run and she was in constant danger. She was a soldier, she was a murderer. And she was fine. She had been born to do this – do exact this kind of mission, reconnaissance and stealth and spying. She had finally realized that she was so much more than a fancy girl in a violet top and too-short skirt. That there was more she could do than arrange flowers and put herself on display. In the middle of nowhere, the knowledge gave her a strange sense of calmness.

She defined herself in the middle of war.

Why did the world have to turn upside down for her to realize where she belonged? She was different from Sakura and Hinata, perhaps even different from Tenten. Sakura was a model kunoichi, pretty, talented, generalized. Hinata was more than a model; she was a kunoichi of near perfection. And Tenten was a warrior, without doubt. But other than Hinata, who used kunoichi virtues combined with her flawless character, and Sakura, who also was a skilled medic, Tenten was blunt and straight-forward, more like a man than anything else. But even this, she combined with kunoichi rules and skills. Her achievements were admirable, as were Hinata's and Sakura's. But Ino was different. She was a field soldier. She wasn't suited for special missions like Sakura or for ruling a clan like Hinata or for blunt, direct fights like Tenten. She was suited for the slow work behind enemy's lines, for hard weeks in the field without any contact to the main cadres, always in danger. When she had graduated from the Academy, Suzume-Sensei had told her she would probably be best suited for taking kunoichi missions, since she had the brains and, even more necessary, the body. But while her body did her nothing good in the field her brains were put to work even better nowadays.

A shadow fell on her. Ino looked up to see Shikamaru looming over her. He pulled up a brow and she gave a short nod. He sat down next to her, leaning back on the boulder. He was so close warmth radiated off his bare arms. Nights on the plains were cold. She lifted her blanket and he let her cover him without comment.

Wordlessly, they watched the sky above their heads. The stars were so close Ino felt like she should be able to touch them.

Sometimes, it hit her.

It had the force of one of Chouji's strikes. She knew since she had been on the receiving end a few times already, whenever they had collaborated to take down an enemy she first possessed and he then crushed. (Her mind-swapping jutsu wasn't put to work often in the field. She was grateful for it.) On those occasions it ambushed her, stroke her with the cruel force of her own mind: Murderer.

Soldier. Shinobi. Murderer. Warrior. So many different names for one and the same thing.

She felt sick again. Leaning back, she closed her eyes and focused on breathing evenly. The dizziness passed quickly since she had learned to suppress it. The faces remained, though. Ino could tell herself she was fine as much as she wanted and as much as she believed part of it, another part of her still mourned what she had been and what she had lost. Innocent. We all were innocent once. Every single one of us was. But she had seen Sakura alter and use medical jutsu to kill, Naruto overwhelm half an army with Kage Bunshin, Chouji crush an entire camp and Kiba rip out a man's throat with his teeth. She had seen Hinata take on ten grown shinobi at the same time and emerge unhurt. She had seen Shino standing stock-still as his enemies coughed up bugs, had seen Tenten leave to intercept an ambush unit on her own and return relatively unhurt even though entirely covered in blood. She had seen Neji create a crater big enough to fit Konoha's training grounds into it, had seen Lee go past sense and reason and move so fast the enemy never noticed what had killed them and had watched Shikamaru cover countless escapes including the one she and Chouji had disobeyed his order, had come back for him and had found him almost dead. And every single one of them had not felt as much as a hollow victory in their chest. Not even Hinata had cried. Yes, their innocence was gone. There was no turning back now anymore. And even if she had been able to do so she wasn't sure what she would do. Now that she had found the place she had been looking for (maybe she would have been able to find it in Konoha, Chouji and Shikamaru had been there, after all, but who could tell?) she was unable to go back. That was what made war dangerous:

There was no way of ever going back to being the person one had been before.

A part of her wanted to cry. Another part – a younger, more scarred, more experienced part – smiled. Shikamaru saw her and read the bitterness in her eyes. And the longing. And the guilt.

"You should get some sleep."

Ino suppressed something in between a choked sob and a laugh. Closing her eyes, she leaned her head onto his shoulder, feeling the taught bundles of muscle underneath the thin blanket that separated them and his slow, deep breathing. Shikamaru didn't move.

How, she wondered secretly. How would she be able to continue living after the war had ended?

She couldn't even imagine.