Unbreakable Bond
by Nezuko, Prince of Rats
This is a work of derivative fiction based on the manga "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi. The characters and the world in which they live are the property of Kishimoto-sensei.
They met when they were just 18 and 20 years old, while agents in the darkest, most secretive, most hellish branch of Konoha's service: ANBU -- the Special Assassination and Tactics Force. They shared at first only a job description and a wall between their apartments, but in the years they served together, Shiranui Genma and Namiashi Raidou became best friends and best mission partners.
Their friendship was fierce and rich, full of teasing and bravado that disguised a tenderness and affection neither one was willing to admit. Their mission partnership a perfect balance of complementary skills and strengths that made them together a nearly unstoppable juggernaut. They completed successfully missions that would surely have sent almost any other pair of agents to their deaths. They pulled each other from both the fire of battle and the crucible of its aftermath, going through hell and coming out alive because when one was close to death, the other refused to let him go.
When they left ANBU -- at the same time, because no way in hell one of them was going to leave if the other wasn't getting out, too -- Genma was 22 and Raidou 24. They stayed best friends and best mission partners, but there were changes. Enormous changes. Because within six months of leaving the special forces and returning to the jounin corps, Raidou had met and married the daughter of one of his father's shopkeeper friends.
Some said Raidou had rushed into the marriage because he was so in love with the girl, but others, perhaps more perceptively, said he was fleeing from a deeper love he didn't dare acknowledge, one for his closest friend and brother in arms.
Genma, for his part, continued to flirt and date, hook up with and discard, lover after lover in a long string of meaningless affairs. Speculation was rife there, too, and the ones who knew him best said it best: he was already deeply in love with a man he could never have, so what did these other relationships matter to him?
And it might have stayed that way forever, or at least until one of them failed to come home from a mission at last, and the other was left to mourn for a greater loss than he was prepared to face. But the death of another changed all that.
Raidou's wife, whom he did genuinely love, fell ill. She grew weaker and paler, smaller and farther from the world of the living, until one day, scarcely a week shy of their fifth anniversary, she departed this world for whatever lay on the other side. It had felt like an eternity, but had in fact been less than five months from the first fluttering weakness in her chest to her last breath. Raidou had stayed with her throughout that rapid decline, and Genma, strong and solid, had stayed with Raidou, though Raidou hardly knew he was there.
In the weeks following her death, Raidou withdrew into a husk of himself, lost in the house he'd hoped to raise a family in, aching with grief he refused to let himself feel. He was grim and silent, seeing no-one, not even Genma.
After two months of this, Genma forced his way into Raidou's house and told his friend he was taking him home. Raidou decked him. And Genma took the hit. Then, holding a bruised and aching jaw he got up, put his arms around his best friend and said, "Come on, I'm taking you home now." And Raidou's brittle shell cracked at last.
He wept in Genma's arms until he was ill with tears, and Genma held him and rocked him and when Raidou could cry no more, led him numb and unprotesting back to his own apartment, where he fed him and bathed him and put him in his own bed to sleep.
Raidou stayed.
In another two months, they moved to a new, bigger place together. Sharing their home and their lives as those who thought they knew better said they should have done all along.
No one outside ever saw anything other than two best friends and best mission partners, sharing a home now, one widowed, the other bachelor-never-married. Whether they shared a bed was a question to which only they themselves knew the answer. And in time Raidou had a few casual affairs. And Genma continued to have a few casual affairs. But many fewer, and these few even more casual than the ones he had had before Raidou came to live with him.
But what anyone could tell, without even the slightest doubt, including Genma and Raidou themselves, was that two soulmates had finally settled together, bound by a love that was stronger by far than any they could have had for any other. A love forged in battle and tempered in blood, made strong by the many folds and fractures their lives as brother shinobi had built into the metal.
It was an unbreakable bond.
ooo 000 000
dedicated to Kilerkki who developed this idea with me as an adjutant to the stories in the RPG Scarlet Spiral, where she plays Raidou to my Genma.