Ino/Sai - Fear Of Trying

Ino/Sai - fear of trying

words: 2,226 pairing: Ino/Sai summary: He feels a little more for her with each passing day. He doesn’t quite understand it all. A/N: sort of a sequel, but both parts can be read as stand-alones.

part one | part two read on ao3

(1)

She falls ill one day.

“It’s nothing serious,” she tells him, voice thick with congestion, after he’d let himself into her apartment. “I just caught that bug that’s been going around.”

And that is true, he acknowledges. Apparently she had gotten it from Ten Ten, who had gotten it from Hinata. Neither of those two had had their condition turn anywhere near serious. Still, looking at her feverish, pale face half-hidden under her comforter, Sai feels something twisting low in his gut.

“Okay,” he says, and stands there at her bedside wringing his hands.

Her brows furrow, and she studies his face with slightly narrowed eyes. “Is something wrong?” Her voice isn’t loud, even in a quiet room.

He presses his lips together and thinks about her question, long enough that she grows impatient and calls his name to prompt him.

“I don’t know,” he blurts out, because at this point he really does not know if something is wrong. It is not serious. She simply needs rest. And water and nutrients. There should be no twisting of anything anywhere in his gut.

She is fine, and she sits up in bed to demonstrate it. “Are you feeling alright?”

Instead of answering right away, he brings his hands to gently ease her back into the pillows, because she is the sick one, not him. She allows it, but not without complaint. “I won’t keel over and croak just from sitting up, Sai.”

“I understand.” And he does understand. He does. “Please just rest, beautiful.”

She snorts, but gathers the covers back around her shoulders with a knowing look in her eyes. “You should try calling me something else when I’m all sick and snotty like this,” she says. “I don’t feel very beautiful right now.”

“You are, though.”

Her cheeks are already flushed from the fever, but he can see her fluster in the way she curls her legs closer to her body, the way her lips curl into a smile she tries to force away. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

He leans down and rearranges her hair so that it lies on the pillow behind her, away from her sweat-slicked neck. “I always want you to feel better.”

(2)

This is the first time that it seems like she might actually keel over and croak if she tries to sit up, and there is nothing Sai can do except kneel in the grass and lay her down in front of the medical ninja.

“Is it serious?” he asks the medic, and Sai learns that he might just hate that word. Hate how it feels in his mouth, hate the painful tightness it leaves behind in his throat when it goes.

He dislikes even more the way kunoichi’s lips draw ever so slightly into frown. The expression is miniscule, but it is there, and Sai sees it. “I’m doing everything I can.”

That is not at all what he asked, but he decides he should let her work instead of arguing that fact.

The twisting in his gut is suddenly back, and he takes a long, deep breath through his nose in an effort to uncurl it. It does not. He presses at his stomach with two fingers, hoping he would be able to will it into submission. He cannot.

Her eye cracks open, then, red-rimmed and heavy-lidded, and Sai’s throat tightens when their gazes meet. They don’t speak; she can hardly even muster a smile at his pinched, concerned expression. So unlike himself, he’s sure she’s thinking.

Sai brushes her loose hair back off her face, fingers lingering on the skin of her cheek, before he forces himself to stand on bleeding, aching limbs. To their knowledge, they have eliminated their most recent threat, but they are still on foreign ground. He feels weary, uncomfortably off-balance as the stronger of their duo lays injured, but it falls on him to stand watch until her recovery.

Sai draws his short blade and carries it in hand. He spends hours trying to distinguish whether the sick, heavy feeling in his chest is one of sheer, undiluted dread or a desperate, desperate hope.

.

Once the worst of her bleeding is under control, he paints a great hawk and lays her across it, sick with venom, for the remaining thirty-nine kilometers back to the village.

The kunoichi completes her work during the journey, and Sai steers the bird carefully, lest he jostle her too heavily and aggravate the new, soft tissue the medic had so carefully healed.

She survives, and he remains shaken for days afterwards.

(3)

She still tends to his apartment while he’s away on long missions, and he still tends to her plants.

By now he has already memorized each arbitrary decoration she has put out. He already understands how she likes to organize her kitchen, what colors and patterns she prefers on pillows, blankets, and curtains; he already knows whose photos she likes to see on the bookshelf in her sitting room, whose photos are allowed the privacy of her bedroom dresser.

So he doesn’t go snooping when he’s alone in her apartment, but he would be ashamed to admit that sometimes the opportunity is faintly tempting, albeit easily resisted.

She tells him often that they should do their best to learn about each other organically. Even Sakura has said something similar not very long after they first met, and he recalls her advice with clarity while he makes his rounds tending her plants.

Don’t try so hard. Don’t push too much. You can’t force a relationship to develop. These things have to happen naturally. These things take time.

He checks the soil in each of her potted cacti. Three of them are completely dried out, so he carries them to her bathroom sink to drench them. He watches it closely, the soil darkening, tamped down by the pressure of the faucet, the water slowly dripping through the bottom once the soil has overflowed and the roots have had their fill.

He wonders what things would have been like with her if he had been there from the start. Like Shikamaru or Choji, predetermined as her closest confidants. Or like Sakura, an old friend whose company has always been familiar, even through times of conflicting interests.

Sometimes, briefly, he wishes that he could have been there. He wishes he could have seen her become the person he met at 16, and he wishes she could have seen him.

Normally, he tells himself there is so much time to know her. Normally, he is not an impatient man.

But if only he had not gotten to start so late.

Because in reality, there is so much time and still none at all. The only certainty is the time taken from him, the time wasted away in the grime of cold militarism.

He wishes she could have seen him. If only briefly, back then. If not for ROOT, he should have been able to see her.

But such thoughts could not even be dignified with the title of a pipe dream. They are pointless fragments of memories that would never even have the privilege of existing. They are fabrications. And there is no need to pine after them, as if they could ever be anything more. Not when they have each other now. Not when she allows him to learn her, day by day, and not when she learns him in return.

These things take time, he tells himself.

(4)

He would probably never be normal by her standards. He still can’t fully wrap his head around why she finds that acceptable.

And his lover is beautiful. That much is obvious.

His stomach churns with a new type of dread watching her and this stranger.

The man’s hand reaches out, but before the tip of his finger even brushes her hipbone, she throws her drink on him and stomps away.

The twisting remains, even while she drops into the seat next to him with a tired sigh.

“Oh, don’t be jealous,” she laughs when she sees his pinched expression. Her cheeks are flushed from the alcohol. “It’s nothing serious.”

It is, though. Or at least he thinks it is.

But he doesn’t know how to tell her, or how to even articulate it.

She peers at him with hazy eyes while he lowers his head and nurses his share of sweet plum sake. There are gears turning in her head, slowly and carefully, and he lets them. She would ask him sooner or later, and though he isn’t sure if this is the ideal environment for it, he would not lie to her if she pried.

But the moment is interrupted by Naruto, who in his drunken stupor spills an entire pitcher of water over the table. Her focus is torn from him, diverted now toward irritated scolding and clumsy patting of napkins against lacquered wood.

Sai watches her and breathes deeply, and the tension in him loosens ever so slightly. He’s unsure if it means he’s relieved or disappointed.

(5)

He cries to her one night about it, in a way that is just as much liberating as it is pitiful.

It has been over a month since she threw her drink on the man at the bar, and she looks startled and concerned when he brings it up. It was so minor to her. It was minor, and that knowledge only makes his chest clench even tighter. He places a hand there, as if that would help it, but his breathing doesn’t become any less clipped.

“I worry about us sometimes,” he says, staccato-placed words through a stream of tears. “I don’t know where this feeling comes from. It hurts.”

Couples will do this for one another every so often. He knows that much. They hold one another until the other stops shaking, tethering them as they wait for the storm of their emotions to pass. They wipe away the other’s tears and hold their face and kiss their dampened cheeks, they hold the other’s hand and listen to their whimpered admissions of pain.

She does it all for him now, and the gentle acts of kindness leave him so clouded and weary that he thinks he might end up falling asleep, sniffling against the curve of her neck, if he isn’t careful.

“I want to be everything you want,” he says. The bedroom is bathed in sunset yellow and hazy shadows. Her loose hair glows with the traces of day seeping in through the window, soft and smooth while he runs his fingers through it. He takes a lock in his hand and presses it between two of his fingers, thumb running up and down, up and down. The repetitive motion is soothing, and he gathers his breath to speak again. “I want to be good to you.”

“You are good to me. You always have been,” she tells him, and her eyes are glistening too, now. They don’t look as blue, layered with the warm tones of approaching dusk. Her hands travel back to his face, cupping the angles of his jaw with a firmness that tells him she is not willing to argue her point. “You’re the only one I want, Sai. It’s only you.”

The words are soft on his ears, and fill his chest with that flower-blooming feeling that he has never been able to name. What normally is welcomed now settles like tar in his stomach, a swirling pit of doubt and unease.

But silence fills the room, and he can’t gather his thoughts quickly enough before she continues.

“I didn’t know you were so worried about this,” she says. “I would have said something earlier…”

He normally isn’t this worried. He normally is fine. The words get stuck in his throat, so he lowers his face and shakes his head.

“No, Sai, I mean it,” she urges, hands falling to his arm and shoulder. “If something like that bothers you, please just tell me. I don’t want you to feel like I’m looking at anyone else, because I'm not. Not now, not ever. Okay?”

And he doesn’t want her to have to tell him any of these things. He doesn’t want to need her reassurance. He just wants these feelings to disappear, or to never have seized him in the first place.

“I don’t know how it’s so easy for you,” he blurts, and her expression crumples for a moment.

“It-It isn't something special about me,” she says, sniffling into his hair. “It was just made so much harder for you. And it’s not fair.”

His endurance is fraying. What was once a gentle sap of strength has now become a wide-open valve, all his patience and leniency for himself now circling the drain before getting washed away completely.

He wants to run away from these feelings. He wants to be smothered in them for the rest of the night and after. He wants to close his eyes and be unseen. He wants to hold her and be held by her and he wants her to choose him.

It’s too much to process, too complicated to unpack while the sun is still up.

For now, the best he can do is wrap his arms around her and hope things will come to pass.