Adult-FanFiction.org : Naruto

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
- 92
- 93
- 94
Chapter Ninety: Biopic Show
In the end Sasuke didn't chicken out. He had to keep an eye on Naruto, he told himself, and also, though he would not admit it (not even to himself) he was curious how Naruto would do: He had watched him practise walking on high heels, he had watched him sitting at his table working out his text, he had even accompanied him to the birthday boy and his partner to receive some information about the different groups so that he knew how to announce them.
“You'll have to improvise”, he was told. “There's always people who withdraw their presentation at the last moment, and other people, distant friends from long ago, whom we were happy to track down as we had lost contact long ago, suddenly decide that they want to do a song too.”
Sasuke didn't chicken out, and he wore what he was supposed to wear, the garments he had worn at Orochimaru's place: he could not afford not to wear them as on the days before the party everyone had reminded him of them (sometimes several times).
He did not wear them on the way to the community center, where the party was going to take place. It was an easy decision: He just went with Naruto who did not wear his costume either and who arrived an hour earlier so that he had time to change and apply his make-up. Sasuke changed too (and applied a new layer of gel to his hair – wearing ridiculous clothes or not, he would not present himself without his hair standing up) and then spent his time watching Naruto until someone told him that he should rather help carry around tables and make coffee. Sasuke felt uncomfortable in his clothes, thinking that everyone was staring at him, but people talked to him just as they did on other days. (Some of them complimented him to his open shirt and told him to wear it more often. He could accept the compliments as they came from men wearing costumes far crazier than his.)
He was glad however when the show began so that he could withdraw into the corner where the gay men were sitting so that the other guests would not single him out. The plan was ruined however when in the first break he was told to help serve coffee: he did his best to behave normal, and people behaved normal, but he could feel their irritation, and the little children were staring at him.
Naruto arrived ten minutes late in the main hall. He looked gorgeous, and you had to look twice to see that he was actually a man. In the last minutes someone must have adjusted his bra to a smaller, more realistic size, meaning he looked now less like a caricature and more like a beautiful tall slender young woman. For some minutes he stood around talking to the birthday boy's partner, then he entered the free space between the tables and began to speak:
“Dear ladies and gentlemen”, he started, then he got rid of the microphone someone had given him. “Dear ladies and gentlemen, I want to welcome you to today's show that will take us on a journey through sixty years, from the moment of our friend's birth to the present day when he's sitting among us, his friends, celebrating a happy and successful life. So now I will ask the people on stage who were the first to welcome him on this earth.”
The man's parents arrived. They were very old, and not able to do a performance or play a musical instrument, but the father read a poem he had written himself, and the mother brought a giant teddy bear she had found in the attic. She had washed the bear and replaced an eye and an ear, had patched a few holes and filled the bear with new material. She also told an episode about how the bear had once got lost and how the jubilant's father had retrieved it after several adventures. (No adventure compared to what he or Naruto had gone through, Sasuke thought, only adventures according to the standards of Music Town as asking all the neighbours and then climbing into some ditch that had partly filled with water and then saving the bear from drowning. There were no real problems in Music Town, Sasuke thought, so people had the time to go to great lengths to save teddy bears.)
The jubilant embraced his parents and happily received the teddy bear and placed it on his lap, and people took photos of him feeding the bear as children do, but later the bear was replaced by a grand-child, and some older grand-children took the bear to play with it.
Naruto announced the next group: some kindergarten friends with guitars and ukulele, doing a performance and singing a kindergarten song that had been popular when the man had been a few years old. The performance was weird and amateurish, Sasuke thought, just as the man's father's poem, but he had been ready to make allowances for the father. The song was okay, though.
Group after group entered the stage, and for all of them Naruto had some friendly words to welcome them and a joke to thank them for their performance, giving them some glamour they lacked when they were actually on stage (or rather in the middle of the hall where the action took place.) The jubilant thanked them and embraced them all, and seemed happy about their amateurish performances, but Sasuke soon grew bored. Naruto was the best part of the show, he decided, taking all the performers more seriously than they deserved, but you could see the twinkle in his eyes: he knew that he was overdoing.
People around Sasuke seemed to be of the same opinion. Sasuke received several compliments from men he had never spoken to – compliments meant for Naruto.
The performances were boring, but the man's life was interesting, actually. Sasuke had learnt about it when he had visited the jubilant and his partner with Naruto to prepare for the birthday party, still he listened intently when Naruto retold the story: The man had been born when Music Town had still been a ninja village, he had attended the local ninja academy and though he had never been an active ninja who went on missions he had fought in the war. He had been a married man with kids already then, so he was not employed in the front line, still he could not avoid getting involved in several skirmishes.
“Like all of us he soon came to hate war”, a speaker of a group of former comrades said. “He hated living in constant danger and seeing his friends and companions die, but even more he hated being forced to kill people who just like us were only doing their duty, fighting for their country, and who might have been our friends if our countries had not been at war. Like all of us he returned from war as a pacifist.”
The jubilant and his boy-friend had talked about this when Sasuke and Naruto had visited them in order to receive some information about the party. His words had been less clear than those of his comrades now: pain and sorrow had been too great to speak much about his time in the military.
Sasuke had mostly listened at the time: he had thought of Itachi, and that he had loathed war too after he had seen it. But this man would not have agreed to any more killing after surviving the war - obviously there was something wrong about the alleged connection between Itachi's love for peace and his massacre against the family.
Naruto had mostly listened too, quite impressed by the man's stories. He then openly told the men about Jiraiya, who had dreamt of peace but never spoken about the horrors of war, but mostly taught Naruto techniques for fighting. Only after his death had he shared with him his dream of peace.
Both old men had listened to Naruto, and for the first time people in Music Town took serious the Gutsy Ninja: They honoured Jiraiya's dream of peace, even though they considered the book's conflict and its solution simplistic.
“Young people take peace for granted so that they don't care about it. But we who still remember the war, we know that peace is precious and fragile. Jiraiya may have been naive, but he knew that there's nothing more precious than peace.”
Sasuke had felt tempted to tell his own story and ask the men whether they thought that Itachi's desire for peace justified the murder of his family, but he didn't speak up as it was obvious that the men would have been horrified by this thought. Also it was Naruto's evening, he was just accompanying him. Sasuke had been glad to see Naruto listening and speaking very seriously, for the first time fascinated by this town not for Sasuke's but for his own sake, so he did not want to interrupt him. Also, who knew it – maybe his family had not been innocent.
He returned to the present, listening to Naruto as he told the saddest episode of the man's life – except the man himself, none of those involved were alive to tell the story: It was during his time in the military that the birthday boy had his coming out as a gay man. He had found a lover there, and finally given in to the desire of his heart which he had denied for years, going so far as to marry a woman and have kids with her. (Wife and kids were present, and the great-children could be heard playing in the corridor while Naruto made a dramatic pause.)
“He had found true love”, Naruto spoke, “a love that was not twisted but that had taken hold of his whole being, body and soul. He and his lover fought to protect each other, they shared their food, they sought each other's bodies for lice and cared for each other when one of them was wounded. Yet when his lover received a fatal wound he was turned away when someone caught them kissing, even though he had carried him to the hospital in his own arms, and had stayed at his side, holding his hand while his wounds were treated without anaesthetics. He was discharged dishonourably, which he did not mind as he was glad that he escaped a war that only lasted on because the military and political leadership refused to admit defeat. But the joy of no longer having to fight was overshadowed by his grief about his lover's death, and the pain that he had not been allowed to stay with him when he died. He swore to himself that in the future he would work for peace so that no one, neither friend nor foe, would be forced to feel the same pain.”
Sasuke closed his eyes while he listened to Naruto: He wanted to hear his voice, not to see his stupid costume. This was how he loved him best, all serious, speaking from his heart, not making a fool of himself. He thought of their visit at the two men's place, where they had been shown a photo of the man and his lover in uniform, hanging at the wall at a prominent place in the living-room.
“Isn't it weird for you to see this every day?” Naruto had asked the man's partner. “I mean, you are his partner now, he's supposed to love you, not some other man.”
The man had looked as if he had difficulties to understand Naruto's question. “We were fifty when we fell in love”, he had said. “You don't expect your partner to be a virgin when he's fifty. You rather expect him not to be a virgin, but a man who has lived a full life of his own. This love is part of him, and I love him as a whole, with this love. I would not want him to forget about it. I've had my own lovers too, after all.”
Sasuke had watched the thoughts rumbling around in Naruto's brain.
“You'll understand this when you're fifty too”, the man had said, but Naruto had taken Sasuke's hand. “I intend to be with Sasuke when we are both fifty”, he had said, and the men had smiled and said that they hoped that nothing unforeseeable would separate them.
Sasuke had been glad to hear Naruto's words, but the man's story had moved him in a different way: So it was possible to be faithful to your old love and find happiness with a new lover at the same time, he thought. He could accept the love he had found with Naruto and be faithful to Itachi and his parents and the rest of the clan.

A/N: Thanks again for your reviews and your plusses! You can find my answers at http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/index.php/topic/14965-blessed-realm/ .It is now possible to access the thread without registration at the forums.
- 92
- 93
- 94
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Blessed Realm