Some Abruame OCs!

It's Shino's birthday so I rushed to colour the lineart I commissioned from @calvin-arium!!

I have a bunch of other Aburame OCs (I have a master post about them here!) and I hope to do more eventually, but it was only right to start off with Shino and his closest family.

[CW: mentions of death and infant death, mention of homophobia]

Shikie is Shibi's father and the clan head at the time of my main Aburame fic, The Smell of the Rain (circa 2025, blank period). She was a young girl when the clan first joined Konoha under the impulsion of Kodama, her mother and the first hive-bearer. She became the clan head after her in her 50's. She is very much a shinobi of the old guard and has been alive through both the warring state period and the 70 years of global wars that followed. While she does, to a certain extent, support the Shinobi Alliance, she is also still very wary of its future, and has learned to secure the safety of her clan above any other matter. She has had to make sacrifices for it throughout her life, but knowing that her people are where they are today, alive and well, eases a lot of her regrets. (Although, of course, never all of it.) She and Shibi are very different in a lot of ways, but she is proud of him, and he will most likely be the one to inherit her place in the near future.

Yoshino was Shikie's second son and Shibi's younger brother. Very talented Shinobi from a young age, he was promoted to Chuunin during the first exam opening after the Second War, alongside his teammate Amanmori Nagomi. They kept working together a lot after that, working on combined attacks that used Yoshiki's hive as a catalyser and guide for Nagomi's Lightning Release. They started dating as teens, secretly at first, then shortly in front of Nagomi's family, who came from a civilian background with much different pressure surrounding relationships and bloodlines. He came out to his mother shortly before the Third War, who answered she couldn't, given the political context and the state of their clan at the time, be supportive of a childless union. Both young men were deployed together during the Third War, and died in the same battle.

Mahono was born to the Sarutobi clan, of Sarutobi Natsumasa, Hiruzen's older brother. She was a skilled Fire Release user, a technique she used both alone and in combination with chakra blades. She faced Shibi during their first Chuunin exam and overpowered him quite significantly (although, to his defence, the age difference did probably play against him). She still took note of his persistence and willingness to take risks in battle. They met again later and became sparing partners, him to improve his hand-to-hand combat, her to improve her options against wide-range techniques. She joined the Anbu in her late teens and he eventually first asked her out when he was 17 and her 20, a couple years before the Third War started. They had a first daughter shortly after the Third War, Yukatomu, who died from hive implantation-related complications during her first days of life, and then Shino a bit over two years later. She died on a mission when he was five.