Chapter Text
The smell was the worst, Ino had long ago decided this. The smell-crusty unwashed sheets, the burned butter stink of sticky body fluids, tired sweat and pointless spit.
That dirty-money smell, bills so creased the etched ink numbers have almost faded away.
Ino’s client rolls off of her with a grunt like a hippo, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull up his underwear.
She considers the heavy scar tissue--meatily textured--that is seared along his spinal cord, with detached interest. The scar curls up over the round curve of his bald head. He must’ve taken an acid splash for someone with that wound; medically the pattern is not something you’d get otherwise.
From what she’s recon she’s gathered, Ino knows he’s a high-ranking bodyguard for one of the heads of the Yamada drug syndicate in Amegakure, this pit of a village where she’s been existing for the past few months.
It’s funny how he’s self-sacrificing enough to shield someone else from the horrid injury of acid burn, to take on such disfigurement, but he liked to choke the sluts he bought sex from.
He’d dug in his nails too, Ino had noticed, and it had nearly drawn blood.
She’d get extra money for it though, she supposes. Scar-skull doesn’t look at her as he slaps the fee down on her dresser. Ino imagines that she can inhale the stink from the banknotes from where she lies with her legs spread open on the bed.
The cheap lilac lingerie she’s wearing has ripped again, and this time it’ll be harder to hide the mend. She’ll have to buy more.
How much time has it been?
The first time her lace ripped, Ino can remember the way her hands trembled, the way her fingers shook so hard she could hardly hold a cup of sake to her lips. Now, there is nothing except a dull numbness, spreading down the back of her neck. Ino thinks that perhaps everything has finally started to blur together.
She wonders if she should feel good about that.
The door shuts with an unobtrusive click behind her client, and Ino pulls the soiled sheets up to her neck, closing her eyes.
X
Sakura had liked Ino in lilac lace. She used to run her lips delicately over the curve of the frills on Ino’s chest, her mouth wet.
“Softest skin in the whole damn village.” Sakura nuzzles her head into Ino’s neck, words vibrating softly into the hollow of Ino’s throat. “I’d be jealous if I didn't get to touch whenever I want, you know?”
Her tone is teasing and light, as her hands wander up Ino’s sides, grazing under one breast. Ino laughs, slips her slim fingers under Sakura’s knee and squeezes, pulling her closer. “I know you’re still jealous, girl.” Sakura’s answering giggle echoes like the patter of rain lining the grey clouds drifting through Ino’s memory; soft, warm, and mild.
X
Genma has warm, amber-colored eyes, but when he slips in through her bedroom window in the dead of night later that week, his gaze becomes guarded and professional, hard like crystallized amber.
“You didn’t check in for debriefing yesterday.”
Ino always wondered how Genma manages to survive like this. He stands at the foot of her bed, sleek and cold in rain slicked ANBU stealth gear, like a shadow wraith. His eyes are glinting through his mask.
Ino can’t wear her mask for this mission, obviously. This used to bother her, but she thinks by now she has become skilled enough at wearing different faces on her skin. She doesn’t need the porcelain anymore.
Genma is there walking and talking and breathing in front of her like it was nothing, like he is completely unaffected, the perfect soldier.
Ino knows Genma has done what Ino’s doing now a hundred times over. They don’t give Eros agents handlers who are innocent, green like spring grass. Genma knows this life.
It doesn’t seem fair now, that he stands so solidly over her, his gaze upon her body beneath the blankets so aggressively neutral it is almost a judgment in and of itself. His achingly detached scrutiny used to make her angry, but now Ino just wishes she knew how he did it.
Maybe it’s in the way he fucks her instead, sometimes. It’s in that gasp of his breathing when she arches her back. It occurs to Ino occasionally that perhaps Genma just doesn’t cope at all.
He is still watching her. She hasn’t changed out of the ripped lingerie, and Genma will have noticed that, she knows, and he’ll scribble it in the weekly evaluation later. Ino almost scoffs at the idea of Genma filling out someone’s evals. It’s not that he’s unprofessional-- he can be so professional it hurts--but she finds it laughable all the same.
His voice is brisk. “You’ll need to get it fixed.”
“Of course.”
Genma cocks his head at her, eyes flashing sideways under his lashes in a deceptively casual way.
“Did the target comply with practice?”
“He shot his load all over my damn thighs, so I guess so, huh?”
Genma turns slightly so that he’s not facing her, looks at her without directly looking at her. She has to remind herself they are trained for that.
“What’s your status, Yamanaka?”
Ino forces herself to snap her posture straight, closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her nose, makes herself remember procedure. This is not her life. This is a mission.
She counts slowly backward from thirty, breathing through her nose. “Five.”
Genma, still standing at the foot of the bed, has given her a minute. Now he dares to look at her directly, his eyes careful. He can tell when she’s lying. Her breath catches in her throat, eyes suddenly wet.
Ino hates Genma a little bit, but in his own fucked up way she knows he’s trying to help. Ino got this mission fair and square, after all.
They were so close to breaking into the inner syndicate. Not too much longer now. Not too much longer.
Five is better than ten, right? Better than six too. She’s never flagged instability higher than five, but hell, what ANBU agent is going to signal a break like that? No one buys a one-way ticket to the psych ward.
Ino swallows, brings shaking hands over her face and struggles to control breathing that is starting to choke itself on a sob, cursing herself for crying in front of Genma, again. She wouldn’t break down.
She had promised herself when Sakura slammed the door in her face months ago that she would not break down.
Genma comes closer, ever so slowly. His hand on her shoulder is cautious, gentle.
“Ino...do you need something?”
It’s the honey-darkness in Genma’s eyes that makes her say yes. It always is.
X
Genma is too stiff in the beginning, his movements mechanical as if he’s still adhering to handler procedure as he bundles her into his arms, lifts her carefully from the bed, spreads her out wide over the floor.
Ino rolls onto her stomach, because she doesn’t want to face how much she needs this. The floor under her is cold and she hiccups through tears that haven’t fallen yet, not yet.
Genma’s breath is warm against her ear, warm down the line of her spine, soothing. “Don’t be ashamed.”
She’s never understood why she’d been paired with Genma. He’s been with her from the beginning, ever since she first reported for Eros training. Genma had stepped into the small room, head tilting slightly as he gazed out from under long lashes, assessing. She dimly remembers lifting her chin, determined to keep it together, and asking his name.
He’d reached out, unceremoniously curling his fingers in the long platinum waterfall of her ponytail over her shoulder. A smile flickered over his lips like a cloud passing over the sun, bitter and fleeting.
“First slip, darling. They always want your name first.”
Genma has too much history with this job, and she doesn’t have enough. It doesn’t really make for a healthy partnership.
Now, Genma’s hands slide down her back and Ino shudders, hating herself for the way she arches and sighs breathily, right on cue. It’s an ingrained response at this point, auto-pilot action that’s two parts seductive and one part devastating, just like she’d been taught.
Genma’s hands stop moving. Instead, he leans forward, kisses her cheek. “Not like that, darling.”
Ino gasps like there is glass breaking in her lungs--too much at once.
Genma flips her over firmly, like he knows every secret clinging to her heart, like he knows how to make her scream.
There is always a moment of shocking clarity when he pulls the first moan from her lips, but at this point she’s screamed for him so many times in so many different ways sometimes Ino can’t remember if he’s tortured her or not.
He gathers her ripped lingerie in his fists and tugs it off over her head, slips from his ANBU armor like peeling a second skin. When they do this, she is not the only one who is exposed. She sighs from the bottoms of her feet, opens her eyes, luminous.
Genma is heavy over her, kissing his way down the moon-cave of her ribs with a practiced precision that is starting to shake, just ever so slightly. This is how it goes every time they do this; Ino shudders back into focus and Genma lets himself fade into a blurred smear, mouth dripping and hands searching, eyes hot like honeyed embers.
X
He fucks her. It is so different from how Ino feels when she smiles at her clients on the street, so different and so much the same that it hurts. It breaks her back together.
Genma mouths over her skin like it’s a sacred blessing. He presses into her, a heat so steady and slow-burning she will taste him in her mouth and on her hands for days after, simultaneously fixated but indefinable. He’s achingly present with her in this moment, grounding, and also somehow a hundred miles away, in his own mind, in his own world.
Genma often remembers things he’d rather forget.
Ino remembers things too, when his fingers ghost down her chest, clench over her hip in a tight and unforgiving grip. When he bites that certain place on the small of her back she arches like a taut bow, her breath ragged, helpless like she never is with her clients.
Not even when the bastards turn the tables on her, their faces smug and drunk with confidence because she belongs to them, for the hour or the night. They can make her do anything.
She doesn’t want to think about what they make her do.
Ino remembers when Genma trained her to fuck like a whore, taught her how to forge herself within someone else's desire. He’d showed her how to slip a secret out from behind a kiss, how to look like a sex-doll and act like one too, because nobody minds what their doll overhears. No one expects their slut to bring a blade to bed.
Some things are easier to learn than others. Ino knows she never wants to see some of the faces Genma wore to train her again. Occasionally they still darken the edges of dewy dreams in the night, never fully visible but always present, observing.
Eros agents are always watchful.
Oh, but his sweetened eyes burn any masks away now, with painful words whispered to her collarbones and a hot tongue along the shell of her ear.
“That’s it darlin’, come on, fight for me.” His hands curl under the nape of her neck, slide into dampened roots of her hair and curl, slow and steady as you please.
“Fuck yes-I know you’re still here with me, aren’t you?”
Their hips twist, and a low groan tightens the muscles of Genma’s jaw, makes Ino glow from within, crackle and flare with fizzing heat along every vein.Teeth scraping along her cheek, searching to suck on her lower lip.
“Hah-yes-just like that Ino, just like that.”
Genma knows how to talk. He can churn sweet patties of butter out of his words like it’s nothing, like his life depends on it, so Ino really shouldn’t be listening. But she can’t help it, because Genma knows what he’s doing, he’s always known what he’s doing.
Ino hates crying in front of him, hates it because it happens every time.
She comes, shatters out and lets herself go, hoping she can pick up the pieces this time. Genma is cradled alongside her, his breath heavy against her throat, under her tongue. Her own moans sound heady and rich in her ears and Genma’s hair is a sweaty smear on her cheek. She buries her face into the scarred skin on his shoulder.
He is close, too close, so close that for a moment, a split second, she knows exactly who she is.
X
Ino thinks Genma is a courteous lover.
Afterward, he lies with her on the floor because she can’t face the gaping target of the bed yet, and she lets him hold her hand while they pass a cigarette back and forth.
Sakura would’ve sneered at the cigarette, snipped it from Ino’s lips with quick fingers and lectured for an hour, but Ino doesn’t think she can think about that yet either. Genma doesn’t give a flying fuck about any health consequences, and Ino honestly just likes it, likes to crush the filter on her teeth.
Genma remembers his own training, when they fuck. He blurs and smears like a globule of paint much too watered down, spotty color dripping from the brush, but Genma remembers she is the one he needs to steady up, the one supposed to be in usable condition.
Ino feels clearer now, the haziness of her thoughts lifted with Genma’s fingers curled into her own. She looks at the way his eyes are half-closed in the hopeless half-light of dawn, the stark hollows of his cheeks in his pretty face, and wonders what it would be like to see Genma unleashed.
X
When Ino wakes up the next morning and he is still lying beside her on the now cheaply laundered sheets, she knows he must be more worried about her than he lets on.
The thought twists her stomach into knots.
X
Hatake Kakashi has completed missions in his brief, violent lifetime that can make even Genma sick to his stomach at the thought of them. He's spilled blood that will stay crusted beneath those white fingertips forever.
Genma knows that it's all messed Kakashi up pretty bad, to be honest.
Sometimes Kakashi grips Genma’s throat when they fuck. He slaps a hand over Genma's eyes, whispers that no one can see him when he screws his own slut.
When Kakashi covers his face in his hands, sits on the edge of the bed and says nothing for hours, Genma knows the scars etched deep in his skin are burning their way through his mask--and oh god, the first time Genma had seen the scars over Kakashi's face, traced the latticework of tracks and the edges of torn lips, Kakashi had gone so very still.
Genma wishes he knew what to do about it, but the problem is Genma is fucked up in his own ways too.
He likes it when Kakashi wires his hands together carelessly above his head and pulls his legs open, when Kakashi's fingers slip around his neck. He likes it too much.
When Kakashi curls away from Genma in the sheets, flinching away from his touch, he feels twisted up all the way from the inside out; hot and heavy between his thighs and cold seeping between his ribs.
Kakashi is messed up--but Genma doesn't know how to fix him. When Genma leaves their bed, the dry sweat on his back feels like self-loathing, like guilt.
He hasn’t seen Kakashi in a long time.
X
Genma doesn’t love being an ANBU handler. It’s the next logical step in their twisted career path, sure, and it pays well, but it pulls his skin the wrong way, makes him itch.
Genma wakes up raw often now, or more often than he used to anyway. When he jerks awake there is something bloody in his mouth--sometimes he bites his own tongue in the night, chokes his moans and strangles his screams.
When Genma worked Eros full-time missions as agent instead of handler, he’d been the best fuckboy Konoha owned.
Ask him to lie back and think of the village; he could do it. Ask him to seduce the daughter of Suna’s daimyo; he would do it. Order him to work undercover in the dirtiest trafficking rings of Kirigakure, to suck cock for his country, to get down on his hands and knees and beg for it until he cried; he’s done all of it, and he could do it again.
That’s what being Eros ANBU meant: you sell your body to your Hokage and hope to god they know how to use it for the good of the village. For Shiranui Genma, the top seductive agent Konohagakure could offer, that was supposed to be all there was to it.
Of course, that’s not all there fucking was to it.
Genma still remembers his first high-risk, long-term Eros mission, and the sour taste it leaves in his mouth whenever he thinks of it. He’d infiltrated an embezzling Grass Country ambassador’s perverse inner circle for three months, waited on him hand, foot, and ball-gag.
The lord had called him ‘pet,’ and loved the look of Genma wearing his hair cropped short, short and spiked--bristled like a collared dog.
Genma prefers to simply remember this as the first mission where he took real pleasure out of killing someone, using every delicately sharp, poisoned senbon in his arsenal and making it long and sweet.
He wears his hair long now, tumbling into his eyes, and tries to not think about why.
Eros agents live their lives like that, he explained to himself a long time ago. Eros agents can’t think about their ‘whys’. They exist underneath the underneath, within the in-betweens.
X
Genma taught Ino this lesson, taught with her hair wrapped tight around his fist as he drags her up from the floor, with soft words slipping into her ear. Ino knows an Eros agent survives by only living in compartmentalized space.
Some of Ino’s wealthier clients like to take her out with them, outside the confines of her bed and her stained lingerie. They mutter thoughtless details to her about suppliers and shipments and “Wouldn’t you like to get your hands on my best stuff, huh baby? Get you fuckin’ drippin for my dick with a lil stick of the dope shit.”
Ino writes a coded mission report every night on the ‘transactions’, and it gets harder to remember that’s what they’re considered, even legally, because this is Amegakure, this is a mission, this is not her life.
At some point, she had another life, she knows. At some point she’d been young, had baby-soft cheeks her mother would pat with white palms smelling of dew-water and newly clipped flowers. Ino’s mother never let the more sordid aspects of shinobi life show on her hands, and now Ino wonders how she managed that, wonders if she’d even still be able to sort flowers now, or if they’d wither in her fingers.
When she completes the reports, she glances at the veins on her arm where a few of the cartel started shooting her up, to ensure their money's worth.
She didn’t want to, and she’s good at her job so she’s good at getting around a need for needles, but first there were suspicious looks and then there were demanding hands, and now she’s a good little cokeslut for them.
She’s always obedient, in the end, because they are all so very talkative on their drugs, dropping secrets in her ears like dead flies that Konoha craves, collects to pin neatly into little glass show-boxes.
Genma noted the development, dutifully passed her detox and high-resistance pills and completed regulatory blood work every week to keep her from being infected by the slipshod needles.
His thumbs are always carefully impartial on the bruised-black skin inside her arm, and his eyes coolly non-judgmental. He is so cruelly professional when her eyelids flutter slowly closed, or her thighs involuntarily quiver, that Ino wants to slap him.
The high-ranking members of the syndicate like to keep her on for show. She is their faux-elegant, platinum-blonde tall drink of water, so shiny to look at and thin as a waif, abundantly perfumed in scents of sickly-sweet lilacs and warm crushed velvet. Ino has discovered she makes for some damn good arm candy.
It’s a fact that sharply amuses her, to an extent. Her, a lethal shinobi who could snap these men’s wrists with a flick of her fingers, eye-candy. ‘The perfect tool for any situation,’ Her father always used to say.
Ino wears her bloodiest lipstick and smiles pretty.
X
There are girls who kiss other girls at the strip clubs they take her to, kiss and fuck other girls, and Ino can’t quite manage to look them in the eyes. In the beginning, Sakura’s mouth was on every face.
Now, in the middle, Ino tries very hard not to think about Sakura at all. It’s almost started to work, too.
Sometimes Sakura’s face is dim and dull on her eyelids. Like a child’s crude and colorful crayon drawing--just a little bit off, not recognizable, a series of circles and lines that make up a person, but not quite her person.
When this happens, Ino is scared and angry and elated all at once. She doesn’t need the stubborn furrow in Sakura’s eyebrows here in Amegakure and doesn't need the concerned set of her jaw. Sakura shouldn’t be here, because what good would it do, really?
Other girls’ mouths taste like stale vodka, like warm nights and too many cigarettes, salt and sweat and smeared mascara.
During her clearer moments, Ino hesitantly tries to remember what Sakura tastes like.
X
End of Part One