Almost Sucks
folder
Naruto › Yaoi - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
77
Views:
1,999
Reviews:
327
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
2
Category:
Naruto › Yaoi - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
77
Views:
1,999
Reviews:
327
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
2
Disclaimer:
I do not own Naruto, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
Christmas
Almost Sucks
by Mashiro
Naruto fandom, series, no spoilers
AU, BOYS LOVE: Naruto x Sasuke, Kakashi x Iruka, Lee x Gaara
first time: July 15th 2008, Tuesday
second time: February 3rd 2009, Tuesday
.
SandShadows inspired this chapter. Thank you! It was a wonderful idea.
.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own the rights to the Naruto series or characters and I make no money writing this. I’m just a fan. This is fan fiction.
.
.
73: Christmas
.
Epilogue 4.1: Sasuke
.
.
Sasuke felt like an idiot. He stood in front of the shelf for a long time and just looked at the back of the book. It was thicker than he had imagined, like something very difficult that shrinks had in their office bookcases to show that they were highly educated. ‘Sex’ the back said with black letters on white. Sasuke’s heart was beating.
It was his last chance if he wanted to get it this year, tomorrow the library was closing for Christmas and New Years. Snow was piling up everywhere and the holiday decorations were all over everything; lights, candles, bells, Christmas trees, Santas, stars, wrapped gifts and tinsel; to say the town was sparkling was an understatement. Nothing beat Christmas time when it came to faking perfection and pretending everything was great when it wasn’t and Sasuke’s stomach had been aching more or less for weeks.
He supposed it wasn’t just Christmas though. The aftermath of his running away had not gone unnoticed and it was more than the sex ban. There had been so many things that wanted to land when they came home from the city and Sasuke had spent more evenings crying than he’d done in years. He’d felt pathetic, heartbroken, grateful and overwhelmed. The imposed break from Naruto had proven good for sorting things out, once Sasuke had realized there was no way around it. He had felt bad for ignoring the blond, but known that he wasn’t capable of dealing with it in any other way, and that the solitude would help in the long run. Despite the guilt, it had been a relief to be alone to really get lost in what he needed to get lost in.
But the punch had been too much and the end. Sasuke had decided that it was enough now and spent the day and a half that followed picking himself up from the ground and putting the pieces back together again. When Naruto came and yelled through his window, after the mandatory resisting because he was him, Sasuke had been relieved beyond words to get to unlock the door and let the shivering boyfriend into the house.
Now he was better. The crying fits had stopped and his mood had stabilized. Sasuke felt a bit frustrated though, that once again Naruto had been the one reaching out and pulling him back. It felt like it had been Sasuke’s turn and he would have liked to be the one reaching out. But he supposed that was why he was here. Sasuke ran the tips of his fingers along the smooth back of the book. ‘Sex’, huh? There was one week left of the ban and tomorrow it was Christmas Eve.
Iruka and Naruto were excited beyond words. Or... well... Naruto was excited and Iruka was neurotic. Kakashi was excited too, though he tried to hide it.
Iruka was the very embodiment of what Sasuke didn’t like about Christmas, with his cooking, shopping, decorating and struggling like a madman to make sure everything turned out just right. Sasuke had told the man once to just calm down. Who was going to shoot him if they didn’t have the right nuts or if he didn’t find that star that ‘has always been gazing down on us from the top of the tree’? Iruka had looked surprised at first at Sasuke’s comment and intervention, then he had laughed softly and said that he was right of course. Who would shoot him? But it didn’t take long for the man to fall back into the Christmas panic.
When it came to Naruto Sasuke hadn’t even tried. The blond wasn’t nearly as easily turned as his adoptive father and Sasuke didn’t want to go into why it was idiotic to get excited about just another day of the year. He let Naruto keep on decorating and grinning and guessing what he’d get when Santa finally came with his reindeers and sleigh and obscenely huge bag (‘maybe we’ll get ungrounded!’). Sasuke hadn’t even raised a disbelieving brow and asked ‘you know there is no actual Santa, right?’, even though he had started to worry.
Kakashi knew of Sasuke’s dislike of the season and tried to keep his spirits down, but Sasuke could tell that he was excited too. It had come crawling slowly, the realization of how much Kakashi wanted this. He wanted the normalcy that Sasuke despised; or at least that Sasuke should despise. A part of him had started to claim that there was a difference between faked perfection and normalcy and that they didn’t necessarily both have to be incarnations of evil. It felt strange, even more so because it didn’t feel like such an absurd claim to the rest of him.
Sasuke sighed and his stomach swirled as he made up his mind and finally took the book from its shelf. It was heavy. Like Naruto hadn’t told Sasuke when he borrowed the book, Sasuke wouldn’t tell Naruto. It felt horribly corny and too perverted, but it could be an almost one week late Christmas present. Sasuke remembered the time when he had thought that around Christmas Naruto would have gathered enough courage to put his hands in Sasuke’s underwear. If he had known then how much would happen before Christmas, how many emotional rollercoasters he would have to ride, he wasn’t sure he would have dared to get out of that play house; so he was glad he hadn’t known.
Sasuke walked quickly to the counter once the book had been taken and dumped it in front of the librarian, mentally wincing at how the black ‘Sex’ screamed against its white background. The old, thin woman behind the counter sighed and took the book without looking at him and started typing on the computer.
“Do you have a library card?” she said, staring at the screen and sounding as bored as she looked.
“No,” Sasuke said.
First then the woman looked up and peered at Sasuke through narrowed eyes. She made a face and sighed again. Pulling out a box from a shelf she handed over a card together with a form.
“Write your name, address and phone number and that number there on the card.”
Sasuke wrote.
He walked out into the cold, the snow and the Christmas decorations with the heavy book in a bag and a library card in his pocket. The sky above his head was dark enough that the afternoon felt like night. As he left the center of town and walked towards home, Sasuke marveled at how okay it felt. Despite lights and trees and Santas and tinsel being everywhere, it was pathetic compared to what must decorate the streets of the city. The stores were tiny at best and the people out walking or driving their cars would drown in the masses of the infamous city Christmas rush. Sasuke had never tried to get a library card to borrow books in the city, but if he had tried he was sure that it wouldn’t have been that easy. How could the librarian know that he was Uchiha Sasuke and that what he had written was his address and phone number?
And yet it felt okay. It was just fine.
.
.
by Mashiro
Naruto fandom, series, no spoilers
AU, BOYS LOVE: Naruto x Sasuke, Kakashi x Iruka, Lee x Gaara
first time: July 15th 2008, Tuesday
second time: February 3rd 2009, Tuesday
.
SandShadows inspired this chapter. Thank you! It was a wonderful idea.
.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own the rights to the Naruto series or characters and I make no money writing this. I’m just a fan. This is fan fiction.
.
.
73: Christmas
.
Epilogue 4.1: Sasuke
.
.
Sasuke felt like an idiot. He stood in front of the shelf for a long time and just looked at the back of the book. It was thicker than he had imagined, like something very difficult that shrinks had in their office bookcases to show that they were highly educated. ‘Sex’ the back said with black letters on white. Sasuke’s heart was beating.
It was his last chance if he wanted to get it this year, tomorrow the library was closing for Christmas and New Years. Snow was piling up everywhere and the holiday decorations were all over everything; lights, candles, bells, Christmas trees, Santas, stars, wrapped gifts and tinsel; to say the town was sparkling was an understatement. Nothing beat Christmas time when it came to faking perfection and pretending everything was great when it wasn’t and Sasuke’s stomach had been aching more or less for weeks.
He supposed it wasn’t just Christmas though. The aftermath of his running away had not gone unnoticed and it was more than the sex ban. There had been so many things that wanted to land when they came home from the city and Sasuke had spent more evenings crying than he’d done in years. He’d felt pathetic, heartbroken, grateful and overwhelmed. The imposed break from Naruto had proven good for sorting things out, once Sasuke had realized there was no way around it. He had felt bad for ignoring the blond, but known that he wasn’t capable of dealing with it in any other way, and that the solitude would help in the long run. Despite the guilt, it had been a relief to be alone to really get lost in what he needed to get lost in.
But the punch had been too much and the end. Sasuke had decided that it was enough now and spent the day and a half that followed picking himself up from the ground and putting the pieces back together again. When Naruto came and yelled through his window, after the mandatory resisting because he was him, Sasuke had been relieved beyond words to get to unlock the door and let the shivering boyfriend into the house.
Now he was better. The crying fits had stopped and his mood had stabilized. Sasuke felt a bit frustrated though, that once again Naruto had been the one reaching out and pulling him back. It felt like it had been Sasuke’s turn and he would have liked to be the one reaching out. But he supposed that was why he was here. Sasuke ran the tips of his fingers along the smooth back of the book. ‘Sex’, huh? There was one week left of the ban and tomorrow it was Christmas Eve.
Iruka and Naruto were excited beyond words. Or... well... Naruto was excited and Iruka was neurotic. Kakashi was excited too, though he tried to hide it.
Iruka was the very embodiment of what Sasuke didn’t like about Christmas, with his cooking, shopping, decorating and struggling like a madman to make sure everything turned out just right. Sasuke had told the man once to just calm down. Who was going to shoot him if they didn’t have the right nuts or if he didn’t find that star that ‘has always been gazing down on us from the top of the tree’? Iruka had looked surprised at first at Sasuke’s comment and intervention, then he had laughed softly and said that he was right of course. Who would shoot him? But it didn’t take long for the man to fall back into the Christmas panic.
When it came to Naruto Sasuke hadn’t even tried. The blond wasn’t nearly as easily turned as his adoptive father and Sasuke didn’t want to go into why it was idiotic to get excited about just another day of the year. He let Naruto keep on decorating and grinning and guessing what he’d get when Santa finally came with his reindeers and sleigh and obscenely huge bag (‘maybe we’ll get ungrounded!’). Sasuke hadn’t even raised a disbelieving brow and asked ‘you know there is no actual Santa, right?’, even though he had started to worry.
Kakashi knew of Sasuke’s dislike of the season and tried to keep his spirits down, but Sasuke could tell that he was excited too. It had come crawling slowly, the realization of how much Kakashi wanted this. He wanted the normalcy that Sasuke despised; or at least that Sasuke should despise. A part of him had started to claim that there was a difference between faked perfection and normalcy and that they didn’t necessarily both have to be incarnations of evil. It felt strange, even more so because it didn’t feel like such an absurd claim to the rest of him.
Sasuke sighed and his stomach swirled as he made up his mind and finally took the book from its shelf. It was heavy. Like Naruto hadn’t told Sasuke when he borrowed the book, Sasuke wouldn’t tell Naruto. It felt horribly corny and too perverted, but it could be an almost one week late Christmas present. Sasuke remembered the time when he had thought that around Christmas Naruto would have gathered enough courage to put his hands in Sasuke’s underwear. If he had known then how much would happen before Christmas, how many emotional rollercoasters he would have to ride, he wasn’t sure he would have dared to get out of that play house; so he was glad he hadn’t known.
Sasuke walked quickly to the counter once the book had been taken and dumped it in front of the librarian, mentally wincing at how the black ‘Sex’ screamed against its white background. The old, thin woman behind the counter sighed and took the book without looking at him and started typing on the computer.
“Do you have a library card?” she said, staring at the screen and sounding as bored as she looked.
“No,” Sasuke said.
First then the woman looked up and peered at Sasuke through narrowed eyes. She made a face and sighed again. Pulling out a box from a shelf she handed over a card together with a form.
“Write your name, address and phone number and that number there on the card.”
Sasuke wrote.
He walked out into the cold, the snow and the Christmas decorations with the heavy book in a bag and a library card in his pocket. The sky above his head was dark enough that the afternoon felt like night. As he left the center of town and walked towards home, Sasuke marveled at how okay it felt. Despite lights and trees and Santas and tinsel being everywhere, it was pathetic compared to what must decorate the streets of the city. The stores were tiny at best and the people out walking or driving their cars would drown in the masses of the infamous city Christmas rush. Sasuke had never tried to get a library card to borrow books in the city, but if he had tried he was sure that it wouldn’t have been that easy. How could the librarian know that he was Uchiha Sasuke and that what he had written was his address and phone number?
And yet it felt okay. It was just fine.
.
.