Title: First Taste (Niiname-Sai)
Author: Timothy Wren
Fandom: Naruto
Relationship: Uzumaki Naruto/Uchiha Sasuke, background Yamanaka Ino/Haruno Sakura
Challenge: Just Write’s ‘Holiday Bingo’ prompt: Hidden, holiday: Niiname-Sai (festival of the first taste)
Genre: Anime, Romance
Warnings: I used a very light version of Niiname-Sai on account of they’re not really in Japan; so it’s not the holiday proper, just a light homage at best. Tsunade’s canon alcoholism (referenced), if you want to learn about overcoming alcoholism, you should click here to learn more about this.
Word Count: 1,813 (complete)
Summary: “We are a hidden village.” Sasuke said with a kind of helpless disgust.
“We are a hidden village.” Sasuke said with a kind of helpless disgust. “Hidden. The security on this is going to be a nightmare.”
“Aw, come on.” Naruto’s voice shook with laughter. “We already let merchants in for other festivals and normal trade, and stuff.”
“Your grandmother wants the excuse to get absolutely fucked up on rice wine so she’s making it a whole thing.” Sasuke hissed. “It’s an official event so we’re having literal thousands of people flood in from the fire capital. The only way it could be worse is if the Daimyo was coming, and the only reason he isn’t is that he literally can’t.”
“He has to thank the gods in the national temple, yeah. Sage, can you imagine the security he’d need to cross the country?”
“Ugh, don’t even say it. I know the Twelve Guardians would take care of most of it, but every other country would probably send an assassin as a matter of course.”
Thank the gods Niiname-Sai had to be at the royal fire temple, all the way off at the capital.
“Probably not Suna.” Naruto offered, still laughing like an asshole. Sasuke hip-checked him.
“I’m glad you think this is so funny.”
“I think it’s hilarious.” Naruto agreed without a hint of shame. “O-baa-chan found out there’s a “celebration of the first taste” festival and immediately made it a village-wide holiday.”
“Your ‘o-baa-chan’ got used to celebrating it while she was on her twenty-year bender and was horrified to learn we don’t celebrate it in Konoha– and she can’t leave the village.”
“Sasuke!” Naruto snickered badly, swatting at his shoulder.
“She’s going to offer her own interpretation, watch. I bet she starts a tradition of taking the first harvest of rice and immediately making it into wine, and then next year that’ll be the “first taste” she’s celebrating, ceremoniously opening the first bottle during the festival.”
“Excellent idea, Uchiha.”
Naruto inhaled a snort and had to bring up a hand to cover his mouth as Sasuke blanched three shades paler. Tsunade had thrown open her office doors at some point, freakishly quiet for someone who could literally move mountains.
“Naruto, Sage help me, you two will be my guard for the opening ceremony. Consider yourself on before-duty rest for the next twenty hours and don’t bother me until then.”
“Yes, o-baa-chan.” He choked, still visibly trying not to lose all his shit.
“Dismissed.”
Sasuke triggered a shunshin so fast it left his head spinning. He landed next to Naruto on the roof and immediately started beating him. Naruto, for his part, finally allowed loud laughter to escape, literally purple in the face as he half-heartedly fended off Sasuke’s hands.
“Sas–Sasuke– you–” He couldn’t even speak. He brayed like a donkey which was fitting for such a jackass.
“Hate you so much.” Sasuke snarled, jerking his own mask off and exchanging his overclothes for standard jonin wear in broad daylight. The two of them were the worst kept secret ANBU had produced since Kakashi– worse, actually.
No Hokage had ever called Kakashi by name when he was masked, and one of them had literally raised the man.
Sasuke tugged on his flak vest and scowled, reaching out to hit Naruto upside the head for good measure.
“Okay, that’s fair, I deserved that.” Naruto breathed deep a few times, rapid-quick, to get the last of his giggles under control. “But the next time you hit me we’d better be sparring or I’d better be naked.”
“Ugh.” Sasuke wrinkled his nose again, just to really hammer in his distaste for the whole day.
“Fuck you very much!” Naruto crowed, offended but still smiling. “The audacity, the nerve–”
“I’m not complaining about how you look naked.” Sasuke said with exasperation. “I’m annoyed about the ridiculous festival and your ridiculous grandmother and my ridiculous life.”
“Well, I mean, your life has some perks. For one, you’re totally right, I’m a fucking treat naked– a whole ass snack–”
“I will give you anything to stop talking right now.” Sasuke said, rubbing his temples as Naruto got changed. He clearly did not feel the need to stop talking even as fabric tugged past his mouth and over his head.
“Anything, huh?” Naruto grinned at him, darting in close to tug on the collar of Sasuke’s mesh undershirt. Sasuke batted him away without heat.
“Ah, yes, the one true, surefire way to shut you up.” Sasuke said. “By literally keeping your mouth full.”
“Bastard!” Naruto laughed, equal parts delighted and appalled, but Sasuke had already leapt off the rooftop.
Naruto followed, purposefully keeping the speed down to reasonable– for them– levels as they engaged in a bit of playful shinobi tag, which predictably got a little bit competitive as they raced home.
Juggling the ‘tag’ and ‘race’ elements was challenging yet rewarding and Sasuke couldn’t help but grin every time he got close enough to get under Naruto’s guard. By the time they landed at the apartment building– which had outside stairwells with open entrances for the jonin who had long outgrown using the ground floor– and blurred through the hallway, both of them were laughing.
They hit the apartment at roughly the same time, race forgotten. Naruto’s sandals hit the carpet outside their door as Sasuke’s hands grasped the lining of his vest, pushing Naruto backward and following up with his entire body, stepping into his space until Naruto’s back hit the wood.
Sasuke tasted the sweet laughter at the source, unable to resist a twitching smile himself.
“Idiot.” He murmured, their noses bumping together, and Naruto’s hands fell easily to his waist, smile still bright.
“Hey.” Naruto said, flirtatiously, the flash of white nearly blinding from this distance. Sasuke kissed him again.
“Hey yourself.” Sasuke returned, voice equally low. He rubbed their cheeks together then dipped lower to mouth at Naruto’s jaw.
“Ah, jerk, we’re still–” His words pitched breathless, the trace of laughter in them betraying delight and desire in equal measure.
“Mm, you’ve got hands.” Sasuke nipped without bothering to be particularly gentle.
“Fucker.” Naruto said but a shadow clone obligingly burst into being for just long enough to get the door, wrists moving and then body vanishing as if it’d never existed in the first place.
They fell through the threshold laughing again, Naruto’s real hands moving up to frame Sasuke’s head as they alternated kissing and rubbing their faces together, animal and senseless in pursuit of closeness.
“Shouldn’t have gotten dressed again.” Naruto huffed, tugging off Sasuke’s layers and pouches, and Sasuke let him, moving with him less like another person and more like an extension of one body, one set of four hands.
“And what, streak through the village?” Sasuke snorted. He jerked the zipper of Naruto’s vest down, hands greedily feeling up the chakra-treated mesh beneath.
“We could probably give some of the council elders a heart attack, so– sure. Next time.” Naruto punctuated his words with a sharp bite to Sasuke’s pectoral as it was revealed, making him hiss.
Pale hands found their way into blond hair, abandoning the stripping efforts in favor of clutching Naruto close as the man kissed and sucked around the resultant mark.
It threatened to break the skin but didn’t bleed and the harsh sting of it went directly to Sasuke’s dick. When Naruto found the edges of the bite and sucked he felt it in his cock, grunting.
“Yeah, just like that.” Naruto slurred encouragingly into his chest, reaching up a hand to thumb at the nearby, neglected nipple. It sent shivers racing down Sasuke’s spine and his mouth dropped open, panting.
“Thought I promised to shut you up.” He reminded, voice brought low and rasping by the attention. Naruto flicked a glance up at him, blue somehow baleful, and closed his teeth around the pink nub of the other nipple in retort.
“You promised us ‘everything.’” Naruto countered, breath warm against soft skin.
Sasuke slid a hand against his sternum, feeling the beating heart beneath. Warm to the touch, like he’d been laying out in the sun.
“Is Kurama coming out to play?” He asked, trying to calm his own racing pulse. They did that, sometimes– a consequence of the love of your life being two beings in one body– but it was always intense.
Well.
It was always intense, regardless.
“He’s sleeping until the celebration starts.” Naruto smiled, dropping a kiss and then his forehead to the space between Sasuke’s pecs, and breathing in. “Said to wake him then, since it’s a rice festival.”
Sasuke snorted. “The demon fox indulging kitsune legends?”
Naruto’s face twisted weirdly.
“We do not want to go there, okay, he started some of those legends.” Naruto shook his head bodily. The motion brushed sun-struck soft hair across the dip in Sasuke’s muscles, tickling over the heart of him.
Tickling as the heart of him.
Sasuke slid a hand through that softness with a more gentle touch than he once thought himself capable of, before wind and rain tore through his arrogance and rage like a hurricane, like a maelstrom.
Naruto tipped his head back to look up at him, the ocean off the coast of Wave in his eyes, as deep and deceptively beguiling as the glittering currents that even now protected the ancestral homeland of his people.
Sasuke’s bloodline stemmed from dragons, though, and the thrill of danger sang through his bones– a fire that burned in his belly and burned behind his ribs and spoke of forever.
“Well, since the blondes in my life are determined to have a celebration…” Sasuke murmured, voice gone deep with wanting. Naruto laughed outright, a sparkly treasure, unafraid; the throaty sound like steel on steel.
“Hang on, you’ve forgotten Ino– if we’re counting all of us, I mean.”
Ino was probably taking the opportunity to slake her thirst like Sakura is the finest of wines, so Sasuke rolled his eyes and dipped his chin to sip joy at the wellspring on Naruto’s skin, eventually pausing and breathing softly, deliberately, behind the curve of his ear.
“Usuratonkachi.” He laughed under his breath, watching the sound twang through Naruto like a fired bow, shaking his frame. “Let’s celebrate. Let’s taste.”
“Yes.” Naruto said fiercely, and then it was Sasuke’s turn to shiver all over, eyes blown wide and dark as he was thrown onto the couch and climbed astride, pushed by the shoulders into the giving cushion.
Yes, he would have agreed, an echoing promise, but his mouth was busy– surging up to meet Naruto’s like the endless waves, and just as consuming, relentless, devouring.
He was drowned. He drowned in turn. Naruto growled into his mouth and pulled them both under, too deep for anything else to reach. The festival was one to please the gods, but Sasuke knew only one ancient god made flesh in the home he shared with his soulmate–
And Kurama approved.