Chapter 14: Winter Festival

The next few weeks passed in a blur for Ino. Constant sleepovers with Sakura, a couple cooking lessons with Chiharu and Chōji, trying out her new throwing weapons with her cousins and other kids. The Winter Festival included village-wide feasts and dancing, more gift exchanging, and incredible demonstrations of Konoha-nin skills. Purple-haired idol performed an extremely unsafe stunt involving flaming hoops, flips, and five senbon, which landed dead center in 5 bullseyes. Ino sensed heavy disapproval radiating from her father, which only made her swoon more when the woman caught her staring and gave her a smug wink, before striding off.

Her name was Anko, her father hesitantly informed her, clearly struggling with the universal parenting law of “whatever you try to keep your kids away from they want to do twice as much as before”.

At one point during the festival her parents made her take some food over to a ragged looking street urchin dressed in a horrible orange jump suit. When she asked why, they scolded her for needing a reason to help starving children, which made sense, but Ino felt like they had wanted to give food to that specific child. Oh well, adults never changed their mind on stuff like that.

The collection of new Sakura-dreams was as varied as it was interesting. They still weren’t getting much in the way of names or other auditory information, but Sakura yelling at annoying-blonde-guy didn’t need much explanation. Big-sword-guy worked with mask-guy. Long-tongue-creepy-guy attacking Sakura’s team (she said he looked really familiar but couldn’t remember where she’d seen him). Sakura also had trouble telling Ino about a dream where Ino was being really mean to Chōji and Shikamaru and annoying-blonde-guy, which Ino couldn’t stop thinking about for a long time afterwards.

One dream contained more than the usual amount of sound and centered around Sakura breaking off her friendship with Ino over evil-jerk-guy. That one had caused a bit of distrust between the two of them for a while. No matter how much Ino knew it was just a dream, it felt hard to shake the thought that a part of Sakura’s brain was throwing away their friendship because of a boy. Eventually the two of them made a pact together: to never let their friendship be ruined by a boy (or anybody romantic Ino had amended), and if they both liked the same guy to both ignore him.

Ino and Sakura both had steely determination in their eyes; their first year of school was about to begin, and things were not going to go as dream-Sakura thought they would.

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