Disclaimer: I own the ninja known as CHEESE. All else is Kishimoto’s.

Notes: Only 360 words? A drabble-length drabble? Oh noooooo, what is the world coming to? And…I’m feeling pessimistic. Ignore me.

---

On his papers, it was written that Akimichi Chouji, age seventeen, was to no longer be on active duty because of health complications. It was signed by the Akimichi clan medic, witnessed by Shizune, and then notarized by the Godaime herself. Then, like most paperwork, it was neatly filed away and forgotten among similar papers with similar lies.

It wasn’t wholly a lie, though. The Akimichi clan had a history of genetic defects, due to their giant men and favored brand of jutsu. It was fairly often that an Akimichi’s heart failed; their normal-sized hearts had trouble supporting such a large body, and, ultimately, they sputtered and gave up. Asuma and his team had grown up knowing this, and it was always with knotted stomachs that they watched Chouji wheeze after getting a little too excited, or clutch his chest after training due to palpitations and pain. The big boy, standing head-and-shoulders above any of his peers, might’ve seemed damn well invincible, a literal tank, but his friends and family knew that his body was sustained by a fist-sized lump of muscle that had trouble keeping up.

The clan medic said that Chouji would probably die fairly young, and of heart complications. Ninjutsu aggravated it, stress compounded it, and the more time he spent in the field, the less likely it was that he’d survive to see his twentieth birthday. When they heard the verdict, lazy Shikamaru had left class early and procured the release papers from the Godaime; Ino had immediately found him a new job at the flower shop. This was their best way of voicing stop, please stop: we don’t want to lose you.

But that wasn’t the only kind of heart problem that Chouji had. They knew that, too, because they remembered the long nights after missions where he would weep and they wouldn’t know how to comfort him. Physically, it might’ve been too small for his body, but emotionally, his heart was a little too big.

His heart didn’t have the proper calluses to make him a good shinobi. So Ino killed for their village, Shikamaru taught the children how to kill, and Chouji sold flowers for their dead.

That was the irony.