Disclaimer: I still don't own Naruto, sad to say.

Reverberations:Chapter Two

She yawned, toes curling, and gave a startled squeak as she realized that someone had actually joined her in bed, a warm arm snaking around her waist. Her eyes snapped open and she rolled over, knowing that it wasn't her teammates-they would never touch her like that; they were too timid, and besides, Ino wasn't a girl, Ino was Ino. She would have to prove them otherwise someday, she knew, but…

Sakura had rolled in through the half-open bedroom window, fully dressed and disheveled. She wasn't wearing her forehead protector, and her dress was halfway unzipped, showing a pale crescent of skin from her throat to just below her collar. Ino almost took on her usual sharp, patronizing tone, but then she realized that the other girl's cheeks were shiny and slick from tears and she was trembling all over. Shocked, Ino sat up in bed and turned around, flicking on her bedside lamp.

"Forehead-girl? What the hell? It's-" She squinted at her bedside clock, then smacked her forehead lightly. "-it's four in the morning! I may not need beauty sleep, but-"

"They f-found him," Sakura gasped, falling into a fresh spate of tears. Her entire body shook with the force of her tears, rattled and suddenly a bit too like the leaf symbol they fought under. Ino's brassy demeanor faded, and she touched her friend's shoulder, her expression smoothing out into something a little gentler.

"Found who?" Ino asked quietly, rubbing the sharp line of her collarbone with her thumb. "What happened? Come on and calm down before you wake my old man-he will get into you for cutting off his beauty sleep, believe me."

When Ino held her arms open in invitation-though it was more of a 'fine, if you must' than a 'come here and I'll comfort you'; their games of one-up and pretend were laughably complex-Sakura clung to her, burying her moist face in her shoulder as she tried to find the words and force them out. Ino cautiously smoothed down her chin-length pink hair, untangling knots and taming cowlicks with experienced fingers.

"Naruto-N-Naruto-they found them," she whimpered, fists tightening in the back of Ino's nightdress. "Kakashi-sensei found Naruto, a-and the medical teams found the other boys-they told me-they told me to find you, Ino…"

Her stomach turned inside out. Family and friends were only summoned if-

"What happened to Chouji and Shikamaru?" she hissed between her teeth, only angry because anger was so much more appealing than the alternative. If she started crying now, she wouldn't be able to stop. She wouldn't be able to help anyone, especially herself, if she didn't stiffen her lip and curb the urge to fall into a soggy, babbling heap now.

"Sasuke-kun-"

"I don't care about-" Frustrated, Ino jerked up her chin with one hand, silently commanding her to calm down and focus-focus because this was important. Chouji and Shikamaru were like…like her brothers, or her cousins, or her family in some kind of tone or flavor…if they were dead…if they were dead, she had to… "Sakura. What about my teammates?"

"Shikamaru…Shikamaru's in the ICU," Sakura whispered, her green eyes huge and glossy. "I saw them carry him in. He was screaming…Chouji…"

Four a.m. is a hard time to come to the realization that your world's come completely apart. Ino met the storm dry-eyed, waiting to break down until her father had told her in small, distinct terms that Chouji had committed suicide to be a hero, and that none of the mednin knew what Shikamaru's condition would be once he woke up again. If he woke up again, of course. The lines between dead and alive were still soft for the four genin boys who had come home from that mission.

Ino held Sakura and let her cry for the both of them.

It'd seemed so simple at first. Her father had done that purposefully, Ino realized as she looked back on that week that had thrown her world on its side. He had explained the absence of Naruto, Shikamaru, Chouji, Neji, and Kiba in its most basic terms: they were on a mission. They'd come back soon. Ino was an expert at living through a ninja's mission schedule, so they were on a mission was an old and familiar refrain. A ninja was there one day and gone the next, back with a broken limb and a sense of accomplishment; a short stretch of normalcy and pseudo-family life, then the mission cycle would repeat itself. She'd grown up with a single father who happened to be a shinobi, so this was nothing new to her. The fact that her teammates had been summoned to complete a mission on their own, whisked away just after daybreak, was standard procedure to her. It hadn't seemed like anything to lose sleep over.

Inoichi was a jounin, and a shrewd psychoanalyst when it came right down to it. He knew Konoha's situation and the caliber of the genin sent to fetch the Uchiha boy, and he doubly knew what kind of stickiness was standard when dealing with Orochimaru. He knew that Orochimaru had already proven his interest in Uchiha Sasuke, and the depth of his desire to have his bloodline techniques. He had razed Konoha once in hopes of exacting revenge and procuring a body-what were the chances of a handful of low-ranked ninja children against that kind of crushing force? Yes, the boys would come home soon, but whether or not they'd be coming home in boxes was another question entirely.

But Inoichi was also a father, and he couldn't seem to bring himself to tell his only daughter that her best friends wouldn't be coming back-not whole, at least. Tsunade hadn't had the resources to spare chuunin or jounin to the retrieval mission, so she'd sent out five little boys with too much hope in their eyes and not enough experience under their belts. Those genin-exceptional or no-had simply been scapegoats. If she hadn't sent anyone to try to get the last Uchiha heir back, the council of elders would have thrown all kinds of fits: so, the Godaime Hokage had issued an essentially hopeless mission to a team of genin, to cover her own ass at the council table. She could have shrugged and said she'd tried-it wasn't her fault that the shinobi in question had been unable to carry out the mission to its fullest. They'd tried, but these were hard times for the village, and yes, the families would be compensated for their losses…

Older and a little cynical-and why wouldn't she be, given her chosen company?-Ino wondered if Tsunade felt any remorse for her decision, or if she'd buried that, just as a good kunoichi ought to.

The adults had been so forcibly nonchalant about the mission that at first, Ino hadn't thought that anything could go wrong. It was simple enough, wasn't it? Sasuke had gone off to try to seek a source of power that didn't come with restrictions, but he was just one boy who couldn't run very far. The retrieval team had left a couple of hours after Sasuke, and it would be easy to catch up and subdue him. Yes, he was a genius of talent, but five-on-one weren't odds in his favor. She'd joked with Sakura that Chouji had probably ended up sitting on Sasuke, and that Shikamaru had taken a victory nap afterwards. That was why they were late checking in, no doubt about it.

It hadn't even crossed her mind that maybe something had gone wrong.

Ino hadn't known that morning as she leaned out her bedroom window and shouted good bye to her teammates that it would be the last time Chouji and Shikamaru would turn at the sound of her voice and smile. The obvious end of a bunk mission hadn't even occurred to her when she'd waved and told them they'd better do a good job-they were representing Team Ten, dammit, and they needed to get their notoriety up. Had anyone told her that the unspoken compact of InoShikaChou would be ripped in three separate pieces that day, she would have called them crazy. Friendships like theirs never seemed to have an expiration date, though the forces of the outside world always loved to crush such impractical thinking.

Ino strongly believed that she grew up the moment Sakura woke her up with the news: when her pink-haired friend had crawled into bed with her, sobbing and babbling, the sugar-coated buffer had finally dissolved and she'd realized that she'd been living in the ignorance of a child. It was with a squared chin that she'd taken it all in-Neji was in critical condition, Shikamaru was in the ICU, Kiba had deep abdominal wounds, Naruto was immobilized and chakra-exhausted and Chouji-Chouji-dead-and she dealt with it, just as a good kunoichi ought to.

She brought flowers to Shikamaru. She wrote him notes, made him smile when he was conscious enough again to do so. She was an unexpected rock of stability for him as he healed and tried to keep on living. She discovered alcohol dulled her own pain and made dealing with the backwash of daily life unnecessary, so Daddy's sheltering was no longer needed. All she needed now was a steady stream of missions and a bottle to sleep with at night, and that was a fairly regular existence for a ninja.

Suddenly alone, Ino forced herself to grow up and stopkidding herself-the prettiest girl didn't make the strongest ninja, and impressing Sasuke was useless anymore. Sasuke was gone. Sasuke had ruined her best friends-his fault that Sakura was distancing herself, his fault that Shikamaru was broken, his fault that Chouji was dead: his fault, his fault, his fault-and now he was gone. Being the prettiest was no longer essential, even though she was, and she knew it. She only flaunted it when she wanted something, though, just as a good kunoichi ought to. She held the world steady, now, and nothing rocked her.

Nothing, of course, except for the sudden arrival of a missing-nin who looked a hell of a lot like Akimichi Chouji-had Chouji survived to see his fourteenth birthday. A part of Ino wanted to sink her nails into the notion that he was Chouji, and he was alive and he was okay and everything could instantly snap back into being the way it was before. But Ino knew better than that. She knew the odds were slim to none, and even if this was Chouji, it wasn't the Chouji she'd known and grown up with. That Chouji was just as dead as the Shikamaru from that long-departed era, just as dead as her foolish assumptions that best friends always came home, no matter the mission.

Ino watched Hinata sponge him off, her gaze sharp and critical. He'd fallen asleep a couple hours after Shikamaru left-not that he'd been very awake to begin with-and Hinata had taken that as her cue to continue treatment. She'd peeled off his shirt and was tending to his smaller wounds-fingers alight and fizzing with green medicinal chakra, face pinched with Byakugan as she tried to realign chakra lines that Ino didn't have to see to know were an absolute mess. Ino watched and remembered, rolling her lunch-a green apple, freshly stolen from Shikamaru's fruit bowl-between her palms.

So far, he checked out. The registration number on the forehead-protector matched Chouji's, although the defacement was obviously a bad omen. As Hinata gently washed his face, pale spiral tattoos surfaced on his cheeks. Same blood type, same build, same chickenpox scars on his left wrist. Ino had checked the last herself, remembering how she, Shikamaru, and Chouji had caught and shared the chickenpox during the summer before they'd started the Academy. It'd been miserable, and Chouji-being a tubby little boy with very little patience to his name-had moaned and scratched and sweated through the entire ordeal, ending up with a couple patches of scars. This man had those same blemishes, round and tiny pockmarks where the thinner skin had scarred.

Physically, he was Akimichi Chouji, or at least a damn good representation.

Tsunade had said it'd probably be him, as impossible as that felt. She'd heard of Orochimaru having an underling who specialized in expansion techniques-Kumogakure had given her horror stories of a giant Oto nin that had literally trampled a quarter of their village, shrugging off kunai like pinpricks because of his sheer size-but she'd never thought that it could be Chouji. The fact that he'd gone to Orochimaru went against all odds, so his return was even more improbable. It wasn't…

Ino took a bite of her apple, frowning. It hadn't been in Chouji's nature to seek power. -Younger Chouji's nature, at least. She had to base all of her thinking on the model of Chouji she had known from childhood. The boy she'd became a genin with wasn't the type to seek out power-that kind of upward clamber was better fit for the determined world-benders: Sasuke and Naruto, Itachi and Sakura, Kakashi and Orochimaru. Like any young ninja, Chouji had wanted to be seen as strong, but not to the point of some of his peers. He wanted to achieve a level where someone-anyone, really-would be proud of his efforts, and where people would stop calling him weak.

It just didn't mesh in her mind that he'd gone to Orochimaru to fulfill that. Sasuke, yes, but Sasuke had laughably high aims and freakish determination. Chouji had just wanted someone to look at him and see him as a worthy partner...he'd been simple that way. He'd trained by himself because he was embarrassed of his inability to learn branch techniques, and he'd rarely contributed to battle outside of his meat tank because of his fear of messing things up.

So when Hinata made her way to his back and found a seal tattooed into the plane of tanned flesh between his neck and shoulder, Ino had to wonder what had changed the mindset of the Chouji she had known. That boy would have been disgusted to be claimed, refusing to use someone else's chakra-especially chakra like Orochimaru's-to buffer his own power.

But there it was, black and deep and plain as day. It was no larger than a coin, one black crescent curled with two smaller ones.

And now all Ino had to figure out was why Orochimaru had spent the energy to seal someone like Akimichi Chouji, the boy who'd been labeled in youth as Konoha's number one useless ninja.

"Gimme a run-down, Hinata-chan," Ino said, settling herself cross-legged close to the bars. "How's the big boy doing?"

"He's healing fine," Hinata said, sitting back and wiping perspiration from her brow with the back of her wrist. "The ataractics are being flushed out of his system, finally, and he's already becoming more aware of his surroundings. His healing ability seems unnaturally accelerated, and I don't doubt that it is because of…"

"Because of that seal on his neck?"

The mednin nodded slowly, milky eyes downcast. Maybe the romance of the situation was fading for her-something as ugly as a cursed seal tended to do that kind of thing, even to the softest romantic. The seal meant so many things, and most of them were unpleasant.

"He was calling me by name earlier," the Hyuuga girl said in the tiniest voice imaginable. Her clasped fingers wormed together in miserable nervous knots, and she bowed her head until her long bangs hid her expression entirely. "He said 'I'm sorry, Hinata-chan', and I was so surprised I almost hit him with a bucket. He really is Chouji-kun, isn't he? He's really alive, and finally back…Shikamaru-kun must be so happy…"

"That old geezer?" Ino scoffed, taking another large bite out of her apple. Around her mouthful, she added: "Shikamaru can't be happy about anything he can't understand. He couldn't figure out why Temari loved him, for example, and we both know how that turned out. He's just-just unbelievable, sometimes. He won't be able to relax and believe that that-" And Ino almost startled herself with the tone that that had come out; it was flat and more than a little harsh, as if she were describing something particularly unpalatable and not a man she'd grown up with, fought beside, cared for- "-is Akimichi Chouji until I completely brain-pick him and prove it."

"Brain-pick, Ino-chan?" Hinata echoed, wiping off her hands and straightening. Ino opened the cell for her, then shut it and smoothed straight all of the seal notes that were keeping the cell as secure as possible. Tsunade's treatment of Chouji was confusing, even to Ino: she was treating him better than any other ninja they'd 'received' from Otogakure, shelling out orders to speak with him rather than interrogate him with Ibiki's twitchy and usually frighteningly affective methods. Still, she wasn't greeting him with open arms, either-he was soundly imprisoned, and those seals weren't going to be peeled back until Ino could prove that either the service to Oto had been forced, or that he was better off to Konoha dead…

"Tsunade-sama asked me to use my family line of techniques to peek inside his head and see what's swimming around," Ino said, settling herself down next to the sheet of bars again. She drummed her fingers on her thighs for a moment, and then formed the familiar bowl-shaped seal. "Hinata-chan, would you mind watching my body while I'm gone?"

The Hyuuga girl smiled a little, shaking her head so that her glossy-dark hair flopped comically. "N-no, no, I don't mind at all. Will it take long?"

"Well, it's harder to do when they're asleep, but…nah. No longer than ten minutes or so," she returned, slipping her thin arms through the bars and cupping Chouji's sleep-slack face with both hands. His skin was cool and a little clammy. Her chakra flared as the technique caught hold, and-

And black-and-

-been teamed up with Chouji- The gleam of a loop earring as a head turns, the brief smirk and a thin thumb brushed beneath his chin; buck up, I know you're a fighter. They all think you're the weakest, but I know better than that. Use that to your advantage. Shock them. Show them. Make them-

Face it, fatass-they're not coming for you, they think you're-Dead. So, so empty; so empty his stomach doesn't even growl and plead with him anymore. He curls up on his side, holding his starvation-bloated belly and wishing he has the strength to cry; crying wastes salt and he needs the salt to-squeal and refuse to eat all you fucking want, but they're not coming. You've known that-for quite a while-

-pawn.

-easily thrown away. Your village doesn't give a rat's ass about getting-hungry. Logical thought has burned away. He's going to die if he doesn't let go, and when he shoves the rabbit at him this time, he places his hand over its back and squeezes, concentrating until he can feel-

Nothing. Less than nothing. They used you. Trash like you only lives to die, got that? Whatever you feel-breath on the back of his neck, the sensation of drying saliva cooling down the ridges of his spine as she gyrates her hips against the small of his back, teeth coming down on the soft curve between his neck and shoulder. He screams as she clamps down on that new tender spot, the inky curl that still throbs-

We work well together.

Backpedaling out of his mind again was like surfacing through deep, murky water: it took powerful kicks to push through the shadows, arching to get closer to the top to pull in one needy lungful of air. She was almost totally sure she was suffocating inside him, stifled by the weight of all the tangled thoughts/dreams/feelings/memories, beating them away even as they throbbed with their own sick pulse-

When Ino came to again, Hinata was talking to her worriedly, checking her heartbeat as she gasped and writhed, sticky with sweat. Invading someone's head as they slept was never easy, but that-that had been horrible. She could still feel her skin crawling with revulsion at the staccato of sensations and images that had deluged her senses-feelings of love and feelings of pain, starvation and sex and disgust all rolled into one toxic, excruciating cocktail that she'd inadvertently downed. She almost felt like she was going to hurl, but her own stubbornness cut the nausea.

Ino rolled onto her side, just in case she did vomit. She didn't want to choke on it, if it came to that. Hinata murmured something about getting her something to drink and disappeared, leaving Ino alone in the holding room, stretched out on the floor and face-to-face with the prisoner himself. The invasion had woken him up, and he watched her silently, tawny eyes traveling slowly over her. She didn't think his eyes had been that light-hadn't they been dark brown, almost black?-but then again, memories hazed after a while. Details got sketchy and jumbled together in a person's mind, just as she'd witnessed first-hand as she'd tried to sift through Chouji's sleeping consciousness. Dreams were always the hardest to understand.

"God, you got big," Ino murmured under her breath, mentally superimposing the man in the cell to the stout little boy she'd grown up with. He was taller than Chouza had been, and leaner, though by no means thin. He still had a bit of a pouched-out gut-it rolled when brought his knees up, enough flab to hang over his waistband-and childishly round cheeks, but there was enough muscle built up beneath this that it only served as padding. She could only just make out the swirl tattoos on his cheeks, since the colored ink had faded over time without the yearly touch-ups.

"Thanks. Seems like puberty was kinder to you," he said in a thick, gravelly voice, getting up on his elbows and stretching with a slight groan. She startled a little, not having realized that he was coherent enough now to recognize her perusal. A corner of his mouth turned up in the vestiges of a smirk as he looked at her over his shoulder.

"Hi, Chouji," Ino said softly, waving a few fingers and wondering if he would even recognize the name. He'd given Seimon when Shikamaru had asked him before-'western gate', which implied three other cardinal points and a unit that twisted Ino's heart in a knot just to think about.

"Hi, Ino."

Obviously so, then.

She propped herself up, sitting and trying not to let her dizziness seem too apparent. The manual invasion had more or less failed, but questions were always a strong backup… "Are you feeling well enough to answer some questions, maybe?"

"Maybe," Chouji said, sitting up fully and wavering for a moment before he kept the position. He licked his lips, dark eyes sliding over the cell contents. A small lavatory, a cot that was best fit for someone a foot shorter than he was, and a wooden serving tray with a piece of bread, a bowl of miso soup, and some cold edamame. He curled and uncurled his hand a few times, testing his grip before leaning forward and taking the bread. It took two tries to get his fingers to clamp down on the crust, and the resulting frustration was obvious on his face. "Who drugged me-and why?"

"Ah, you're stealing my questions-I was about to ask you that," Ino said, shaking her head. "You just appeared outside the gates last night, sick and hurt and obviously drugged. We were almost afraid you were going to die of poisoning because of it."

"Hahnnn…" Chouji sighed, scrunching his eyes shut. He rubbed his forehead, as if cudgeling his own mind for the answers that still were sunk beneath the oily surface of the ataractics. "I can't say I 'member much about yesterday. Still pretty hazy."

"Well, let's start with the basics, then. Name?"

"Akimichi Chouji," he replied promptly.

"Age? Affiliation? Rank?"

"Seventeen. Former jounin of Otogakure no Sato, former genin of Konohagakure no Sato." Opening his eyes again, he looked down at his bare, dirty feet stretched out in front of him, his expression dim. He flexed and stretched his toes a couple times, reaching to drag his tray of food closer. "I'm unattached now, I guess."

Ino's eyebrows arched up towards her hairline. "'Former'?"

"It's kinda hard to serve a country that's in shambles," Chouji deadpanned, twisting the crust of his piece of bread between his fingers rather than eating it. As far as she could tell, he hadn't actually eaten any of the food given to him-just played with it like a five year old, stress habits and boredom mixing in an effort to keep his hands occupied. It was strange. Growing up, his stress habits had lain in eating and eating alone; he hadn't reached his past girth wholly by bad genetics. "There's not much left there. I was one of the highest-ranking shinobi left."

"You have to be the easiest interrogation I've ever done," Ino said with a laugh, leaning back and crossing her arms over her chest. "Not much for fealty to Otogakure, are you? Usually, when we get a shinobi from there…" She twirled one finger, shrugging. "We have to put them down, or they end up doing so themselves. They're zealously loyal to Orochimaru, however fucked up that is."

"You haven't gotten any Oto nin in your dragnet for a while, have you?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that you haven't heard a peep from Oto 'cause Orochimaru is dead. He suffered a joint coup by Uchiha Sasuke and Yakushi Kabuto…" Chouji looked up, golden-brown eyes briefly lost before he caught back his composure and shrugged. "And I guess Konoha didn't know, then?"

A coup? Orochimaru…dead? And their spies had somehow missed this?

"You're shitting me."

Chouji smiled, then, a hand to his chest in a mock swear. "Would I lie to you, Ino?"

"I think you would," Ino replied coolly, looking up at him through her lashes. The look on his dirty face reminded her of synthetic sugar-plastic and false, too-sweet and too-hard. It wasn't a very Chouji-like expression. It was the exact opposite, actually, and it made her stomach turn and flutter unpleasantly.

"Good," he said with a nod, picking up the small bowl of now-cold miso and taking a sip. His movements didn't shake as badly as before, and she almost would have labeled them as dainty, if that kind of word could be applied to such a big man. Every movement was careful and measured, so very unlike the sloppy and clumsy boy he'd been once. "I'd rather you don't trust me, 'cause I haven't done anything to deserve it. I would think that you all were ignorant if you didn't see what kind of threat I possess."

"I think Tsunade-sama just wants to know how it is you survived. Shizune-san said-"

"She saw me after I took the red-pepper pill and went back to finish Jiroubou and Tayuya, I know," Chouji interrupted. "I got the full report out of one of your jounin a couple of years ago. Namiashi Raidou, I think? Anyways, anyways, it doesn't matter. I'm not sure 'zactly how I ended up back here, and I don't think I'll stay here if you decide not to kill me. I had no intention of coming back to Konoha ever again, 'cause there's nothing here for me anymore."

Her brows crooked together unhappily. She wasn't sure what she'd wanted to hear-maybe oh, Ino, I've had such a terrible time, but I've always held onto the hope that I'd make it back home! or oh, Ino, our childhood is the only thing that kept me alive in Otogakure. Everything happened against my will, I swear; take me back, please take me back! or even something as blunt as oh, Ino, take me home and make me better; can't you see how badly they hurt me?-but this wasn't it. She didn't want to think that Chouji had come back on accident. She didn't want to think about what he'd done, or who he had become. Was that why Shikamaru had reacted the way he had-because the perfect vision of Chouji he'd had lodged in his memories had been broken at the appearance of this man?

"…Chou…ji…"

"I'm sayin', it's just a little hard to care about a village that doesn't give a shit in return," Chouji growled, tossing the mangled remnants of the bread to the side. In the artificial light, his eyes looked dangerously bright, almost amber. "I died for this place, and they didn't even have the fuckin' decency to make certain I was totally dead before giving up on me."

"I went to Godaime-sama for three weeks straight, begging for a widened search," a new voice put in, loud and terse. Shikamaru propped up the doorway with one shoulder, hands in his pockets and his long hair ruffled down nearly to his elbows. He hadn't bothered to pull it back up into its signature high ponytail-he rarely did anymore, claiming it gave him headaches. Personally, Ino thought he was blaming the headaches he accrued just by being a brooding genius on his hair. "She told me to give up the ghost and go home, so I did. I'm thinking now that I should've taken into account your goddamn devotion when I calculated your chances of survival…"

Chouji sat up a little straighter, wavering as his balance faltered.

"Shikamaru?" he demanded, clearly disbelieving. The surprise in his voice was so open and honest it was almost childlike.

"I guess there're things both sides don't know," Ino murmured, watching the battle of expressions on the boys' faces. Chouji had gone from angry and hard to weak and trembling in just a matter of seconds: his eyes were huge and his breath came in birdlike gasps, shallow and quick. Beneath the remaining dirt, his face was pale as unbroken ice, contorted as if he was suffering some kind of physical pain. Shikamaru, on the other hand, looked almost expressionless-which, for the genius, meant not that he was unfeeling, but rather that he was feeling in multicolored and twisted volumes, unable to decide what it was he was feeling, so he buried it all with a flat glare and put his hands in his pockets to hide their trembling. He looked to Ino for an answer, but when she didn't say anything, he returned to staring at Chouji, chin tucked and shoulders curled.

"It's been a while, buddy," Shikamaru said, getting as close to the bars as he dared. Chouji had pressed himself to the barrier between himself and his old teammates, suddenly looking so desperate that it made Ino's heart sink and dribble down near her painted toes.

"Shikamaru…" Chouji's deep voice broke. He sounded like the boy that Shikamaru had left at the mercy of an obviously stronger opponent nearly five years ago. There were prettier terms for it, but the simple truth was that he'd left him to either beat the overwhelming odds and win or die, and dying was such an easier option-they had all thought he'd taken it. "Shikamaru, you're…alive?"

"So I've been told by the medics around here," Shikamaru replied in that same flat, brassy tone, his vowels sharp and hard. "And I was about to ask you the same thing, seeing as there's a grave marker out by the village heroes monument with your name on it. Where the hell have you been, Chouji?"

"Oto-I've been-" A jagged and completely unexpected sob ripped its way out of him, and he bowed his head, fists shaking as he clutched the bars. It was with wide eyes that Ino watched the metal start to bend, beveling between his tightening fingers. Well. That probably was a sure sign that they'd need to up the security on him… "-I saw her kill you. I saw you die."

"Well, I buried you," Shikamaru said, leaning against the bars until they were just touching. He didn't flinch when Chouji let go of one of the bars and fisted his hand in his loose black shirt. "I guess that makes us even, then, doesn't it?" He tapped the cool, marred surface of the forehead-protector wrapped around his forearm. "I left you to fight that big Sound guy, and then I never saw you again. What happened?"

"I lost," Chouji said levelly, the tears leaving clean streaks down his cheeks. "But you already knew that, didn't you?"