Yamanaka Ino (Iris)

It was the middle of the night, closer to morning than evening, when Ino appeared in the apartment she and Zack shared in a near-silent puff of smoke.

( Cut for blood and minor gore! )

[For the boy! Warning for blood and minor gore. Just to be safe, yo.]

It had taken her ages to fly across the greater part of a continent, and then over a piece of the ocean, in the dead of winter. Ino never wanted to repeat that journey, but it had given her plenty of time to think. Getting into her emails without being noticed was still a… well, she'd managed. But it had been a challenge. Ino was a born hacker of minds, not of machines.

It had been worth it though, when she'd found the first piece of the puzzle. Her phone bill was higher than it had been in years. At first, she'd thought it was due to her calls to Fandom, but while that made a bit of a difference, the bigger one was… Zack's account was in use.

She'd lost two days to that revelation, what it had to mean, and the rage and guilt and horror that it had inspired in her. What had kept her in one place had been less the rage and more the twin emotions of stark betrayal and incredulous joy. Neither had been conductive to stealth, so she hadn't tried. She'd taken her time.

If Zack's account was in use, if Zack was alive… then she'd been lied to for years. It sent her straight back into the empty, ugly spaces of herself where she could do anything, the empty, broken places she'd retreated into after losing him the first time around.

It took two days for her to shake that off, to pick herself up, to be an adult. She had to know the truth. She had to go home.

( Now, she was home. )

It was a fragile, ephemeral conclusion that she came to, but it was the only one that made sense:

I think he was trying to protect us. Or maybe even just me. But from what, and why?

[For the one she's waiting for, please.]

[OOC: So yeah. If you're seeing this... I have no idea why you're reading Ino's journal years after I dropped her, but hi! This post was written waaay back in 2011 as a companion piece to this post over on puppy_fair's journal. (And you should go read that one because it's way, way better than this post.) Then it got lost in my inbox and I didn't feel like posting it and now I do? I'm feeling nostalgic tonight, I guess.]

It's pretty weird for you to be summoned directly to him and when you consider the fact that you've not gotten yourself in trouble--not even because of Silly--you realize that, really, he's probably summoned you to talk about the future and how to proceed with it.

And you're right, in a sick and twisted way that leaves you trying not to vomit on the carpet, as he tells you that he is dead in action and that he (not he) is sorry. He doesn't look at you as he says this. That's right, he was his friend too. You shake your head, long hair tumbling with the movement, tumbling like your thoughts, like your world is spinning and trying to realign and can't because the foundation you've found, made, used here is--

Gone.

You'd been told you had years. To change things, to fix them, to make the world a better place. That he died at some point during all of that.

You'd thought you had years to figure that out and change it. They'd let you go on thinking that, knowing you knew, and beneath the shock is a current of red-hot fury, but the shock is winning now. They lied. You're certain at least one of them loves you, but they lied and let you believe and let you wind your life around his and now… now you're all alone, in a world that's not even yours.

In a world that, maybe, you can still even save. You know a lot, though you didn't know enough.

He's gone, after all.

You realize hazily, belatedly, dizzily, that he, your boss, is waiting for an answer of some sort. Acknowledgement.

You've got none to give.

"No," you say, in a voice that might as well be dead, because you wish you were dead just then, and without hearing an answer (perhaps he gave one, perhaps he didn't) you walk out. You don't even know what you're saying no too. Just that--no. That's it, that's all there is: no. No, you refuse to deal with it. No, it didn't happen. No, he didn't, wouldn't, couldn't, just leave you like that.

No, he couldn't be gone is the same as no, this can't be happening. Except that it has and it did and you're all alone and even if you were to call someone, who would you trust? Those who knew lied to you. That means there's no one to trust. Not in your crumpled up, closed off heart that trusted little and loved few already.

You find yourself at the top of many, many stairs. You don't remember getting there. It makes sense not to go to your room, or to your other room. Too easy to be found by other people and you don't want to talk to them. If you're spoken to right now, you think you might go violent. It would be a release, since you can't cry. (Because this isn't happening. Your birthday is in a few days and he's got a surprise for you so it can't be happening.)

Your hands are trembling, shaking, when you look at them and consider the easiest way to get out of this nightmare. There's so many. Your room is filled with options, your person has others. You shake, wrapping your arms tight around you, leaning against the door and consider it.

But if you did, he wouldn't understand. That's still important to you, his understanding.

Instead, you force yourself down those steps. Waveringly, alarmingly, as they pitch and roll in your eyesight because everything's out of focus and worse, but you keep going, clinging to the railing like it's a lifeline, because it is. One step of steps, around a corner, then another. Then you start picking up your pace as you go spiralling down and down and down which is exactly how you feel and somewhere on the twentieth floor, tears start spilling down your cheeks and you keep running.

Reaching the bottom is like hitting the end of the line. You stand, shuddering, on the last step and refuse to take it. Refuse to touch rock bottom.

Instead, you turn and force yourself to go up and up and up so that you can go down again. You can't talk to anyone, you can't go outside--who knows who'll see you, and here you can at least move, run--you just have to hide from one person, that's all, because if he says anything right now, you might try to kill him and you don't want to do that just because he looks like someone who broke your trust. So you'll avoid him.

That's easy, when you don't feel like you exist anyway. What's one more layer to this farce?

You continue up and up and up so that you can go down and down and down.

And that's fitting too, whispers your thoughts, under the haze of no.

Ino had felt—good, stable, all the way out of Fandom, off the island, and into Midgar, which was her own home now (and that was something she still had to remind herself of), even while they stopped to let her change into her uniform.

It was only as Zack pressed a kiss to her cheek, in the lobby of the ShinRa building and headed off for his own orders, that Ino felt the clawing uncertainty come back.

Talk to the receptionist, she’d been told. Ino could do that, though she despised walking into a situation blind. It was a comfort, at the least, that she already had her uniform, her I.D. , and that she was supposed to be here, so far as anyone was concerned.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t nervous, still, underneath the cool demeanour. This was her first time, after all, on the job, in this capacity. Her hair was down, flowing in careful waves down her back and her shoulders were straight as she approached the mission--reception desk.

“Excuse me?”

And Ino ignored the creeping panic that reminded her she had no idea of what else to say.

[NFB, please! For them that're in the building.]

Being back in Fandom was a peculiar… sort of disconnect.

Ino was curled up on hers and Zack’s pushed together beds and pretending to read. Which was rather futile because she knew it was pretence and so it would have been more productive to actually do something…

But she didn’t really feel like it. There were a lot of things she had to think on, but those thoughts felt almost like she was clinging to broken glass in her hands, and that hurt.

Like a toothache, however, she couldn’t quite stop poking at them. Even when doing so only hurt things more.

And, turn the page. Keeping up appearances, even just to herself, was important.

She was supposed to be reading. Would claim to be reading.

But her gaze wasn't on the book.

[Open door and post!]

The trip to Konoha had been blissfully uneventful and a tension that Ino hadn't even been aware of drained away as the day had gone on, which almost, but did not quite, eradicate the peculiar feeling that she was on vacation in truth and not… home.

It was nice to see her parents, however, and Ino pretended that she didn't notice the way her mother frowned at her appearance or the glances over her head between them (at seventeen, Ino was resigned to never getting to be taller than they were) and concentrated on enjoying just being at the shop and explaining to Zack what each flower was and what it meant when combined with other flowers.

That was a topic that kept her well entertained until supper, wherein the talk had turned to more general matters and Ino found herself trying to stifle yawns over her rice. Zack's dietary habits earned her a raised eyebrow, when Zack wasn't looking, but were handled otherwise without comment for which Ino was grateful for.

All the gratefulness in the world, however, was going to keep her awake long once they'd retired from the table to the living room and had settled themselves on the couch. It wasn't more than a few minutes before she was fast asleep.

And that, all unknown to Ino, was when her father set his tea down on the coffee table and gave her boyfriend a blue-eyed glance that verged on hostile.

"So," he said, "my daughter."

[NFB, for ze puppy, la la la!]

Ino shifted from foot to foot, a bit impatiently, but who could blame her? Their portal was late and they'd been early to meet it so there was no chance of them having, like, just missed it and oh that was a little perturbing.

She toyed with her hair, the movement making her earrings jingle merrily as if in counter-point to her mild annoyance, and waited for Zack, who was on the phone with Portalocity, to tell her what was going on.

( We are sorry for the inconvenience, but portal service from Midgar is temporarily unavailable due to routine maintenance. )

[Preplayed with the fabulous puppy_fair. NFB, NFI and all that jazz!]

Getting back from visiting her dad was—nice. Mostly because Ino was dead tired and being back on Fandom meant that her dad couldn't train her at the moment.

Not that the training had been a bad thing, she thought, unlocking their door (Zack wasn't back yet? That was weird; he'd said he'd only be gone a day or two) and making it far enough inside to flop facedown on the bed.

Okay. So she probably had to, like, sit up and go find food and change into her jammies and everything and would totally do so.

Just… give her, like, fifteen minutes. Of laying here. Maybe more.

Training had even been kinda awesome with what he'd been covering. But at the moment? Mmmmmmm rest.

[Oooopen, sure!]

To say that Ino had been well pleased with her week was understating things more than a little, which meant that today (other than the brief period wherein 'today' had meant 'afternoon'' and she'd wound up talking to Squall), clearly, was a day meant for a) having chocolate and b) sprawling out on her bed in a tank top and shorts and playing with her new phone.

While her weetiny plush ninja rested beside her and, okay, she might've had her new Materia keeping her company on the bed as well. Shush. Don't judge her.

While she nibbled on chocolate and poked around the settings for her phone. The wallpaper, at least, was totally staying.

[Open door, open post!]