Chapter 8

                                    

                                          

Ino had never known herself to be afraid of the dark. The dark, the shadows, they were a ninja's friends and in many occasions she had always thought that the absence of light and visibility in all of her endeavors was a blessing to her.
Until now.
Well, the feelings she had inside her right now were far from fear. No, Ino was seldom scared of anything that did not include slimy, crawly living things. If anything she was... what was the right word for it? Ah, yes. She was frustrated. And very, very tired.
How long had they been in the dark since they had been torn away from their respective parties? It couldn't possibly have been more than a day, right? It didn't really matter. Nothing mattered anymore. She was just too emotionally spent.
"Can you tell where it rolled off to?" Gaara asked from somewhere in the darkness.
Ino slowly crouched down and tried to feel around her blindly with both hands. It took everything she had to stay calm and collected. She was starting to wonder if karma was starting to catch up to her. She knew she shouldn't have stolen her father's pudding in the fridge before she left for the Land of Iron. "I think it disappeared somewhere to my left."
"My left? Or your left?" Gaara asked.
Ino thought that that was a stupid question. First off, in the environment with zero visibility, she couldn't even tell which was whose left or right. She got down on all fours and tried to grope around into the nothingness surrounding her. "I don't even know which direction I'm facing."
"I haven't moved an inch since the flare died on us, so I know I'm facing the direction of the cavern we've come from," Gaara offered.
Ino nodded to nothing in particular. "Good. Don't move. At least one of us hasn't lost his sense of direction." With the way she had been crawling around in circles, she didn't even have a single clue as to where what was.
Of course, after everything that they had been through, Ino was not too optimistic in finding the flare she had dropped. In fact, in her head, she was already trying to imagine how it was to die of thirst and hunger, in the confines of a mountain cave, in the dark, and in a man's body. It was not a pretty image. She tried to shake it out of her mind, pushed herself up on her knees and rubbed her hands together gingerly, getting rid of the dust and small pieces of things she could not even see that had clung to her fingers and under her nails.
"It's no use. I can't find it," Ino said.
She heard a bit of movement from Gaara's direction. "Ino, this tunnel is pretty linear, and it isn't wide enough for us to make a wrong turn unless it branches out into a fork somewhere. We can either follow the tunnel back to where the mushrooms are where we can at least have a light source, or we can just take our chances and try to move on and hope for the best."
Ino swallowed hard. The mushrooms were a two-hour backtrack away, and she knew that even if they even make it back, then what? It was not as if they can do anything once they start over from there. But still, moving on in the dark through the tunnel was equally unappealing. A part of her couldn't let go of the possibility of finding the flare that had rolled away from her. But then again, there were no assurances she would be able to stumble upon it in the dark.
She allowed herself to sit down lousily on her behind, pulling those long legs of hers towards her chest. "What do you think we should do?" she asked.
More shuffling from Gaara. "I think we should just move on. There's nothing in the mushroom cavern we can gain but a bit of light, and that wouldn't do us much good anyway. But if we try to take the chance, we might get lucky and find the end of this tunnel."