Written for Christmas, for sherriaisling.

Kiba finds the idea of bugs disgusting. The thought of something crawling around, beneath his skin, makes him squeamish, but more than that, it's the mentality. The Aburame clan is like a hive. Shino's grandmother is the queen. She sits in the center of the collection of houses and buildings, and the rest of the clan revolves around her. They live and die by her will, work under her eyes. There's no playing in the Aburame clan, because they're all about the hive, about gathering food and building tunnels and living their days or weeks or months of life they have.

The Inuzuka clan is as opposite as possible. It's a pack, full of roughhousing members who bark and snap at each other, but in a pinch, they pull together. Someone's always fighting for leadership, but beneath the bickering and arguing and loving backstabbing, they're all watching out for each other, protecting the pups and gnawing old bones together. Kiba likes to call it love. He watches Shino, and Shino's family, and he wonders, mostly to himself, how the Aburame clan can call anything they have love, because it certainly isn't a love that Kiba understands.

But times like now, when Shino's lying sprawled on top of him, and he's touching Kiba's face like Kiba's the first person Shino's ever seen, Kiba wonders if maybe, just maybe, the Aburame's know a bit more about love than they're letting on.

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