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The Blessed Realm	By : susanna Category: Naruto > Yaoi - Male/Male > Naruto/Sasuke Views: 1746 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: Disclaimer: Naruto, his friends and the world he lives in don't belong to me but to Masashi Kishimoto. I write this story only for my pleasure and I don't make any money with it.

Chapter List
- 6
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Chapter
Four: It's their day

Naruto
had to think before he could come up with an answer to Sasuke's
question. People had told him that it was Gay Pride Day, and he had
watched the parade of course, where people had made fun of themselves
and behaved as if they were proud of being not only gay but also
rather weird, but otherwise he had not given much thought to the
name.

“I
think they are proud that they are no longer ashamed”, he
finally answered. “It used to be different: They hid themselves
as they do everywhere else, and only met at secret places, and later
there were demonstrations that often got beaten up.”

“Why
did they not learn to defend themselves?” Sasuke asked.

“I
don't know.” It was not a question that had occurred to him,
nor had he read anything about it in the newspaper – it had
just been taken it for granted that it was impossible that they might
have struck back. “Maybe they were outnumbered.”

“It
would not have happened to me.”

“Not
everyone is a ninja genius”, Naruto replied irritatedly, and a
bit annoyed by Sasuke's questions. “Anyway, it does not happen
anymore, at least not here. It's a festival for the whole family now,
and straight and gay people are celebrating together.”

“Families?”
Sasuke asked. “Do they think that this” - he waved his
hand in a vague gesture that might have included the dancers, or the
whole festival, Naruto did not know - “is for children?”

“You
don't have any problems, do you?” one of the two mothers next
to them said, challenging Sasuke, her eyes sparkling. The other
soothingly laid her hand on her friend's – lover's? - arm.
“There is no one having sex on the open stage, is there?”

“Please
excuse him”: Naruto apologized in Sasuke's stead. “My
friend has just arrived and has no idea about people's attitudes
here. He certainly does not mean any harm.”

He
turned to Sasuke. “You will have to get used to it”, he
told him. “Gay people live here completely in the open, just as
straight people. You can see them everywhere, on park benches, or
lying on the lawn, kissing and making out, or walking hand in hand in
the streets. I had to get used to it too.”

Truth
was that while he hardly cared any more about the gay and lesbian
couples among the people who made out on the lawn of Heroes' Park on
sunny afternoons, he had not yet got used to the fact that couples
were making out in public at all, fully dressed of course, but often
so close that if they had been naked they just could not have avoided
having sex. Back in Konoha, a married couple walking hand in hand was
a rare sight, and unmarried couples did not touch each other in
public at all. (Though with the revelations on Temari and Shikamaru
Naruto had had to realize that he had been a bit naive about what
they did in private.)

Naruto
was not a very moralistic person in questions of sexuality, and he
did his best to get used to local customs here, but what he had not
get used to, and probably never would, was watching people kiss while
he was all on his own in this town. Yet this was nothing he would
admit to Sasuke.

“I
will manage”, Sasuke answered haughtily, and then in a rather
stiff and formal tone he apologized to the lesbian mothers sitting
next to them: “It was not my intention to offend you. I am
sorry if I did.”

He
was not so much shocked but rather angry – angry at Naruto who
thought that he had to protect him as if he were a little child –
him who had survived three years at Orochimaru's place and could not
be shocked by anything any more at all. Also he had not been shocked
– well, not shocked, but surprised – by what the dancers
did but by the fact that they did it in public – that they were
not ashamed of it, as Naruto had put it. What they did was harmless
in his opinion, though he was not sure whether he would have let any
little children watch it – some of the dancers' figures were a
bit too reminiscent of kissing and embracing in his opinion. There
were some little girls watching the dancing, he noticed, no boys –
well, that was only natural, girls loved dancing. He liked it,
actually, too, but he would not admit it to Naruto: Lean well-muscled
men, in no way effeminate, moving graciously and in harmony with each
other, showing off their strength in extravagant acrobatic figures,
and then, when they got to the fast dances, whirling their partners
around without ever getting confused about their feet. If only they
had not made such a show of taking off their shirts and drying
themselves between dances, he thought, presenting their clean-shaved
chests to all the world. They did not sweat that much, dancing could
not be that exhausting...

Juugo
was out of sight, having fun as it seemed. Again, Sasuke was glad for
him.

The
tournament lasted for half an hour, then the winners were announced.

“Do
you understand this?” Naruto asked him. “The ones with
the red scarfs around their waists were much better, don't you
think?”

Sasuke
had not paid that much attention to the different couples and their
skills, he had rather absorbed the tournament as a whole.

“I
can't tell, I don't understand anything about dancing”, he
said.

The
dancefloor began to fill with other couples now, some quite good too,
others rather standing around and trying to move their feet to the
rhythm of the music. Soon the place was too crowded for any decent
dancing, and Sasuke lost interest.

Karin,
however, was getting interested. “It's now open for straight
couples too”, she observed. “What about us?”

“I
already told you: I don't dance”, Sasuke replied.

She
turned to Naruto: “Do you dance?” she asked him.

Naruto
was surprised: No one had ever asked him to dance, Karin looked quite
pretty, in a weird way, but she was Sasuke's teammate and he was
insecure whether it would be okay to accept. He looked at Sasuke who
shook his head, and Naruto was on the point of accepting just to
annoy him, then he remembered that Sasuke, not Karin was his friend,
and that he wanted to enjoy every minute in his company.

Luckily
some stranger asked her to dance “as the little boys around you
can't appreciate you”, to which she accepted, and Suigetsu
excused himself too: In the festival programme he had read about some
band which he absolutely wanted to hear, meaning that suddenly Naruto
and Sasuke found themselves being on their own, embarrassed again,
not knowing what to say.

“Your
teammates are having fun”, Naruto said.

Karin
was the only one they could see from their places, she had already
found a new partner...

“They
are good at it”, Sasuke answered. “No need to worry about
them.”

“We
can have another look around the festival if you want.”

“I
have to look after their stuff...”

“I
will help you carry it”, Naruto offered, and so they divided
the possessions of Sasuke's team among themselves and began to walk
around, listening to the music from the various stages, getting some
more food and drinks, with Naruto again paying for the food and
Sasuke for the drinks. Just as if nothing had ever happened, Naruto
tried to convince himself, as if Sasuke had never left Konoha and had
never attempted to kill him, as if he was just a friend, visiting him
in this town where he had recently moved to, and Naruto showed him
around. The illusion did not work, they hardly talked, and Naruto was
afraid of saying anything that might make Sasuke disappear.

On
their way around the festival they met Sasuke's teammates, and Naruto
made use of the opportunity to tell them again where he lived and who
to get the key from if they arrived earlier than he did. Only Juugo,
whom they met last, offered to take care of the stuff they were
carrying around, and Naruto wondered why Sasuke accepted this offer
just from the child of his team. Anyway, I will still have to ask him
why he is travelling around with a little child, he reminded himself.

They
ended up in front of the main stage where a play was going to be
performed. Already big crowds had gathered in front of the stage, but
they found themselves places in the background on benches, at a
table. Naruto was not too eager to see the play, he thought it would
be just like Jiraya's novels, all about love.

“The
guys at work told me about it: It's every year the same, some
romantic comedy rewritten so that the protagonists are lesbian or
gay.”

He
took the festival programme from his backpack. “‘A.
and M., two young men from the countryside, have been lovers for more
than five years, and now they want to marry’”,
he read the announcement to Sasuke. “‘They
dream of a big romantic wedding, but there is a small problem:
Neither of their parents know yet that they are in love with another
man. And what would be a romantic wedding without parents?’
You don't want to see that, do you?”

“I
want to sit while I am eating”, Sasuke answered, and so they
were now watching the play.

It
was quite funny, actually, Naruto thought, a quality they did not
share with Jiraya's novels, which were more on the melodramatic side.
Both boys told their parents that they were going to marry and that
they needed their help and advice for the wedding, and most of all,
that they needed them to be present and do their part as groom's
parents. Neither of them however could gather the courage to tell his
parents that he was going to marry another man. When one couple of
parents asked their son to introduce the bride to them his lover
dressed up as a woman, padding himself up so that he had very full
breasts and very round buttocks, and speaking in a very high-pitched
voice. He looked and sounded quite weird, and Naruto wondered how
anyone could be deceived by the disguise.

“You
would have done better with your sexy no jutsu”, Sasuke
whispered to him.

“What me? Never!” he answered,

He
turned his attention back to the play: The disguise had been bad,
still only the sister had seen through it, so she was introduced into
the secret and asked to act the bride instead of her brother when the
other lover's parents wanted to know whom their son would marry.
There was a lot of confusion, embarrassment and misunderstanding
resulting from the young men's efforts to hide the truth, and often
they had to tell gross stories to patch up rips in their web of lies
and illusions.

It
was indeed funny in some way, Naruto thought, still he could not see
the point of this play: Life was difficult enough as it was, why
create even more problems by not telling your parents the truth about
whom you were going to marry?

He
cast a glance at Sasuke, to see what he thought of the play: He was
wearing his usual expression of indifference, only occasionally a
smile moved his lips. Still he did not show any intention of leaving,
not even when he had finished his meal, and so Naruto turned back to
the play. He was in fact getting interested, though he knew that
inevitably the outcome would be that the yound men got married with
their parents approval and blessings. Still he had got curious how
the situation would be resolved. At the moment both families were
planning the wedding in the firm conviction that their son was going
to marry a woman and that it would be mainly the bride's family's job
to organize a place and pay for the food, so that the lovers had a
hard time, not only hiding the truth about themselves, but also
organizing everything and asking their friends to borrow them money.
They whould pay them back when their families understood the
situation and were ready to pay for the wedding.

It
seemed that one boy's mother and the other's father suspected
something, but the other parents were shown to be conservative and
full of prejudices against gays, and even on the eve of the wedding
they did not know the truth.

“You
should marry in your disguise as a woman”, the boy who had let
his sister act the bride told his fiancé.

“And
what will my parents say when they are looking for me and only see a
gross ugly woman? You may send your sister to stand in for you as my
bride if you are afraid of telling the truth.”

“Are
you sure you still want to marry me and not my sister?” the
first boy asked back, and to show him that this was the case his
lover dragged him to the couch for some making out – luckily
the curtain fell before anything serious happened. (Again Naruto
glanced at Sasuke who kept watching the play intently, without
showing any particular emotion.)

On
the morning of the wedding when the families met and were vainly
looking for a bride, the truth had finally to be revealed. The
unknowing father was infuriated, the unknowing mother in tears –
rightly, as Naruto thought, for having been deceived for so long –
but their respective spouses talked to them so that they finally
understood that their sons' happiness was more important than their
prejudices, and both mothers happily led their sons down the aisle.

Naruto
clapped and cheered as everyone did – everyone except Sasuke,
who was still looking at the stage where one by one the actors
appeared to receive the applause. He did not move, and Naruto grew
worried: The play had not been that good, had it, the acting rather
amateurish (will, they were amateurs, so this was okay), and the end
foreseeable. He was glad when Sasuke finally lowered his head.

“I
wish my parents were still alive”, he said silently.

I
should have foreseen it, Naruto thought. I should have foreseen that
the play would stir up memories of his family.

“I
am sorry”, he said. “I should have insisted on leaving in
time.”

Comfortingly
he laid an arm around Sasuke's shoulder, half expecting him to vanish
as his kagebunshin did when they got hit by an attack, but he did
not.

“It's
okay”, Sasuke said. “You still don't understand anything,
do you?”

Naruto
froze, the arm he had just put around Sasuke's shoulder dropped as he
remembered the incident Sasuke was referring to.

“It's
okay”, Sasuke said again, punching him softly in the shoulder
to break the stupor. “It's not your fault. Let's go to your
place – I am tired, and I cannot take any more of this. It's
too many people, and too much noise.”

“Yes,
sure”, Naruto answered. They got up and silently walked to
Naruto's place.

“You
know, the mother of that green-haired guy”, Sasuke broke the
silence while Naruto was searching for his keys. “The
green-haired guy in the play, I mean”, he continued when he saw
Naruto's confused look. “My mother would have been just the
same. She would have seen through the illusion immediately, and then
she'd have put my happiness before everything else, and persuaded my
father to do the same.”

A/N:
So this is the last chapter of the festival. From now on, the story
will take up speed.

Msusumaki:
Thanks for your compliments, and thanks for being happy for Juugo! A
lot of people hate Team Taka, but I really like them – all four
of them.

Synergy08:
Thanks for your comment! I hope that the continuation of that scene
was to your taste.

Midnight
Essence: Well, don't forget that Sasuke comes from a rather
conservative family, has spent his childhood at a rather conservative
place, and his early teenage years at Orochimaru's place where, well,
whatever he learnt, he certainly did not learn about Gay Pride Day.

Thanks
for your comments, and for sticking with the story! :-)

Tansy
Moon: Thanks for the compliments! :-)

Sneakyfox:
Finally someone commenting on it! I managed to surprise my beta, but
I wonder if I surprised anyone else... Thanks for the compliments!

ItaNaruLover:
Thanks for your compliments! It were the Easter holidays, and so I
decided to post two chapters – but it did turn out to be a
strain. It is my intention with this fic is to write a realistic
lovestory, and these don't happen in one moment... (And they still
need help, as the one provided by the festival.)

No,
I am not a native speaker. Native speakers normally notice this...

Jay
is one of the Cloud Nin who watches Sasuke's fight against killerbee.
While his colleague goes to tell the Raikage, he follows Sasuke and
gets caught and – probably – killed (Chapters 417 and
418.)

Well,
and I won't discuss Itachi here. I am planning to write a lengthy
essay (erm, rant) about it... I will tell you when I have done so.
- 6
- 7
- 8
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The Blessed Realm