to that other place
misssilivren
for RTS
He meets Sasuke in Paris, because he loves Paris and feels the need to spend every waking moment there. The first glimpse he catches of the other is sitting at the hotel's bar, quiet and slightly hunched over and strange in his isolation. It's those defensive shoulders, the sight of those long slim hands bringing a glass up to his shadowed face, the way that he's turned away from the crowds dismissively, that brings him over to sit down defiantly next to him and toss him a reckless grin.
It is four months since Hinata left, and he feels the need to be a little reckless.
Sasuke - well, no, he didn't know it is Sasuke then - the man glares at him, take a long drink, and insults his intelligence and visual capabilities in a long-winded and extremely clever way that he would find much more cutting if his attention hasn't been caught up in the way his mouth moved around the words, or the slight sheen the alcohol has left on his lips. He smiles, deflects the insults casually, returns a few of his own, and thinks that this evening has the potential to be much more fruitful than he had hoped. There's a wedding ring on the man's finger, curved gracefully around the glass, but that doesn't really mean anything. He has been married, and it certainly doesn't stop him. Besides, he's seen the first long glance the stranger had given him, and he's not completely stupid.
The insults peter out into a blanketing silence. He sneaks a glance at the man's face, inscrutable and eyes staring into the clear depths of whatever it is he's drinking. He shrugs mentally and says, "I'm Naruto. You?"
"Sasuke," says Sasuke, and Naruto grins.
Surprisingly enough, they do not end up sleeping together - much to Naruto's disappointment. But he doesn't actually spend much time thinking about it - Sasuke is an interesting conversationalist, even when buzzed, and Naruto can actually kind of ignore how attractive the man is when he's expressing all of his radical, cynical notions about politics and society. Their conversation jumps from alcohol manufacturing, to the prohibition and its effects on society, to drugs in present-day, to Mexico and then the political situation in South America. Naruto stumbles away from the bar regretfully after he confuses Jorge Videla with Hitler and sees that it's three forty-five.
He sleeps until two-thirty the next afternoon and wakes slowly and softly. His side is cold; he draws the covers tighter around himself and thinks of his very small flat in Paris which he keeps up in order to not have to stay in hotels whenever he's in France. The last time he's been there he had taken Hinata and the sheets probably still smelled like her subtle perfume, and he'd put on soft, old, melancholy music while the rain pattered against the glass and made it look like the window was melting. He shakes off thoughts of her and grimly goes to take a shower, then downs a couple of pills for his hangover and doggedly sets out to find the Sasuke from the night before.
It doesn't take much more than a wink at the receptionist and some Euros slid over the counter to figure out that Sasuke's room is on his floor, twelve doors down. 'Well, whaddya know,' he thinks, rather amused, and wanders around his hotel room trying to figure out what to do with this information. He wishes he'd gotten how long the man was staying from the girl at the counter, but he decides not to go back and push his luck. His conversation with Sasuke is now nothing more than a slightly drunken dream, but he knows it's one he wants to remember. And hey, he likes Sasuke - he is certainly nothing like Hinata, even though in certain a light, all that dark hair and white skin and fine features would make him think...
No. He stops pacing for a moment and leans against a wall. Is that why he's so interested in Sasuke - because he looked like Naruto's ex-wife? '...No,' he determines after a momentary bout of soul-searching. Only the most superficial similarities exist, and Naruto is not a superficial man. Everything - the way they talk, their opinions, what they drink, their gestures - are completely different. He refuses to sink so low as to vainly clasp onto something just because it reminds him of relationships and failures that he wishes weren't in the end; besides, it's immoral to use someone like that.
And Naruto is - normally - a moral person.
Eventually he decides not to do anything. He can't very well show up at the guy's hotel room out of the blue, with no good explanation as to how he knows which one it is. He goes out and flags a taxi; then, steeling himself, he directs the driver to his flat.
His landlord is, thankfully, the kind of guy who doesn't care what you do with your place as long as you don't bring the law down on his head and pay the rent on time. Naruto wires over the money promptly and without quibbling, which makes him one of the old man's favorite people in the world. He enters, giving the key the little extra jiggle it always needs to turn properly, and finds everything covered in dust and exactly the same. Well, he thinks, that's no surprise, and sets himself to the task of cleaning. At least he always cleans out the fridge before he leaves.
He dusts, wipes, mops and scrubs with a kind of pigheaded single-mindedness meant to keep him from thinking things like, 'this was her favorite chair,' or, 'this is where she banged her head on the ceiling,' or, 'this is where she hung up that picture'. It's a nice picture; 'Hinata always has very good taste in everything but men,' he realizes wryly. He cleans until his joints ache and then some; by that time it's evening, and he determines the place to be livable. He almost flops down on the bed to pass out for a few hours before he thinks, 'Sasuke,' and hauls himself up again. It's probably ridiculous to be so fixated on a guy whom he'd only met once, but hey, ridiculous is kind of his thing. He can plead tiredness as an excuse to go up to Sasuke's room; he does just that when he finds Sasuke sitting at the bar, not slouched, but sitting straight up and toying with an undrunk G&T. He grins; "Waiting for me?" he teases, and steps around in Sasuke's line of vision. The other jumps, looks relieved for a split second, then glares. "'Course not," he retorts, somewhat lamely, and Naruto grins even more.
He doesn't have to fake his sigh of exhaustion as he sinks down onto the barstool. Sasuke eyes him and takes a sip of his drink. "Tired?"
"Been cleaning all day," Naruto responds, with a sudden flash of wariness. He doesn't know if he likes where this is going. The other raises a slender eyebrow in question and he elaborates; "I come to Paris so often that I just keep a small flat on the other side of the Seine. It's... tiny and cheap, but nice. I haven't been there since - well, a couple of months, so it was dusty and..." he trails off, hoping Sasuke won't ask why he's staying at a hotel if he has a flat.
"Hn." Sasuke drops the topic, thankfully, and instead asks where he lives when not in Paris; "New York," is the answer, and it's San Francisco for Sasuke. 'SF, hmm?' he thinks, grinning inwardly. Sasuke is, as it turns out, the current head of a multi-million dollar family-owned business; the man deflects all questions about his family deftly and turns the conversation back on Naruto. 'Clever,' he thinks, and allows it to pass. If Sasuke doesn't want to talk about his family, he won't push it. They discuss places they've both been and places they want to go, restaurants in Paris and Madrid and Chicago and London, the pros and cons of various cities and, eventually, countries. Naruto feels like he could happily stay here forever, in a slightly too-cold hotel bar at night in Paris, talking about everything. The subtle tension he's just realized that he's kept curled up in his face, his shoulders, his back, all seem to unwind with every word coming from Sasuke's mouth.
Eventually his head, which had been propped up on his hand, slipped and nearly hit the bar; Sasuke blinked, derailed in the middle of his sentence (something about the impossible driving in Istanbul), and smirks at him a bit. "You're half-way asleep," he remarks, and Naruto snatches the half-suggested opportunity to ask Sasuke if he wants to go his suite so they can talk more privately. The other's face shutters closed like someone has drawn down the blinds; he turns back to his drink and takes a sip with an unreadable expression. He glances down at his hand; Naruto follows his gaze to the wedding ring gleaming quietly on a long finger. "Fine," he says, and Naruto wonders about the sudden twist of guilt in his stomach.
Again, they don't sleep together. Naruto is surprised to find that his invitation to go upstairs and talk is just that. In any case, he's far too tired to have even a vaguely spirited make-out session, and falls asleep on the couch in the middle of his wandering sentence, which had been about Parisian wine and then somehow slid over to cheese and the metro. He wakes up in the stunningly bright morning, with no Sasuke and no note, and feels an acidic tinge of regret which he violently shoves away. He wanders around for the rest of the day doing things which he forgets about five minutes later. He ends up at his flat, violently cleaning things without any knowledge of how he'd gotten there. Things are mostly dust-free now anyways; instead he shelves and re-organizes books until ten. Then he goes back to the hotel, wandering around the bar despite himself and pretending to be looking for something. Sasuke isn't there until he is, suddenly, appearing out of nowhere to go and sit at his usual spot. Naruto feels like someone has filled him with helium; he walks up to the bar, sits down, and orders a whiskey.
This becomes a routine. Naruto will wander around Paris, sitting in cafes and bookshops and wandering around museums he's seen a million times, then come back to the bar and sort of hang around until Sasuke comes. Then they might have drink or two before retiring up to Naruto's room and talking half the night through. Sometimes they don't even talk; Naruto doesn't realize they've fallen silent until someone shifts or makes a noise. Eventually Naruto will fall asleep and Sasuke will leave silently; then he wakes up in the morning and it all begins anew.
One night, Sasuke expresses a muted curiosity in Naruto's flat, and he takes this as an invitation and graciously offers to show it to Sasuke. This earns him a look, a raised eyebrow and a "hn" of acceptance. He knows that Sasuke knows that he's attracted to him, just as he knows Sasuke's interest mirrors his. It is what it is; he just hopes they can figure something out before the week is over and Sasuke has to return to America. He doesn't dare to contemplate this…this thing - well, if it ever becomes a thing - continuing after Sasuke leaves (though even the man's friendship is by now something he would happily walk across the world for), though he certainly has the funds to go to San Fran on a whim. He has no idea how it'll be received, for one thing, and Sasuke has a wife (though he never discusses her).
They go to his flat, and Sasuke wanders around and picks up pictures of Naruto's family and one (very small) photo of him and Hinata on their wedding, and runs his fingers over small statuettes bought in Italy and Greece and eyes paintings and posters up on the walls critically. Naruto hovers, unreasonably nervous, until Sasuke turns, sees him, and arches a questioning brow. He goes and makes tea instead.
He remains unreasonably nervous throughout the evening. He can't concentrate on whatever Sasuke's saying, too busy getting caught up in the lips and teeth and tongue involved in the whole affair of speaking, and he spills his tea on his shirt twice. He gets even more nervous while changing shirts, and comes out of the bedroom coiled tight as a spring, ready to snap. It started raining at some point, and Sasuke's sitting in the window seat, looking outside at the blurred Paris scenery, with the rain creating imaginary trails of water on his face that make it look like he's crying silently. Naruto pauses and looks at him, and he doesn't look anything like Hinata, and he thanks god for that small blessing because it would be horrible if the only reason he thinks he might be falling for this man was that he resembles his ex-wife. Sasuke turns and looks at him and motions for him to sit down on the window seat just next to him and he does, and when Sasuke kisses him it is both no surprise and the most shocking thing that's happened to him since Hinata said "I do".
It's not raining when he wakes up, but it is very cold; colder than it should be with a body next to him, which makes sense because he's alone in the bed. There's a brief moment when he goes through furious, helpless, self-deprecating, and resigned in the space of a second; then, in the most unbearably cliché moment of his life, he hears the sound of a shower running, flops back in the bed, and smiles hugely at the ceiling.
The shower turns off. He hears the glass door sliding open and then, a few minutes later, Sasuke emerges, dressed in Naruto's clothes. The pajama pants fit him fine, but the t-shirt is a little big. Sasuke sees him awake in bed and gestures to the shirt. "Grateful Dead?" he says wryly, and goes into the kitchen as Naruto laughs at the top-hatted skull clothing Sasuke's upper body.
They have breakfast, which is somewhat burnt - but no one remarks on it - and Sasuke goes back to the hotel while Naruto stays at the flat. He comes back with a change of clothes and they spend the day and night there, just sitting around and being lazy. He can't remember the last time he's fallen in love so fast. It's nice. They argue pleasantly over French take-out and that's nice too. The rain taps politely against the window once more. Everything is just absurdly nice, and Naruto starts waiting for the other shoe to drop at around three thirty. It does at exactly ten twenty-four: Sasuke is leaving the next day. "That's nice," Naruto mutters before he can stop himself, and goes to get a beer.
Sasuke leaves. It's not nice at all. Naruto doesn't go with him to the airport and regrets it immediately after the taxi is out of sight; he spends the next few days alternately feeling utterly miserable and scoffing at himself for behaving like a thrown-over teenage girl. He gets horribly drunk and has almost as horrible sex with a girl who turns out to have a horrible personality and feels exactly negative three percent better afterwards, with an absolutely horrible hangover to top it all off. The weather is unseasonably cold. He sulks and wishes he could write bad poetry just to relieve himself of these gloomy feelings; he tortures himself with thoughts of Sasuke and, when that doesn't satisfy his masochistic side, even more painful thoughts of Hinata. He doesn't want to go back to New York, but Paris is no comfort to him anymore.
At one point, sullenly cleaning his apartment for the umpteenth time, he finds Sasuke's business card. He is completely baffled as to how it got there, but eventually realizes that it must've fallen out of his wallet when he was paying for the take-out. It has his address on it. Naruto thanks any and every god and goddess and gender-less divine being he's ever heard of, and books the third-to-next flight out of Paris to SFO.
When he gets there, it's foggy. He vaguely remembers this as being a general trait of San Francisco, and directs a taxi driver to Sasuke's house; he gets out, takes out his bag, pays the man and sits down on the steps with no idea what to do. Of course he can't just waltz in there, he realizes with a sickening wrench, Sasuke's married. Somehow in between the bar and his flat he'd forgotten that; now he mentally hits himself repeatedly with a hammer and looks around for a handy stump to beat his head on. If Sasuke finds him on his doorstep he'll be furious because what is Naruto even doing here anyway?; if the wife finds him on her doorstep she'll be curious, then furious, then she'll probably divorce Sasuke, who will hate him forever and never want to talk to him ever again, much less come to Paris and stay in a small flat and possibly adopt children. These thoughts all jumble up into a huge dogpile of misery in his head, and he blurts them all out with a "sorry" tacked on the end of it to Sasuke, who stumbles over him when coming outside. He cringes after this little rant, and hunches down like a child waiting to be hit.
Sasuke's speechless, he can tell. He would be, too, if some madman he'd had an extraordinarily short-lived fling with in France turned up on his doorstep out of nowhere with an apology on his lips. He groans and puts his head in his hands; "I'll just - yeah, I'll leave," he mutters, unable to fathom what he'd been thinking.
"What?" Sasuke demands, "What are you even - you know what? No. Come inside, you're - it's freezing and – god, you're a moron," and this last is said in an explosive exhale of breath. Sasuke grabs him and drags him inside when he doesn't move, tossing the bag in after and slamming the door so hard the glass rattles. Naruto winces and lets him put him up the stairs. Sasuke's house, he notices absently, is quite lovely; old-fashioned and white and airy. Sasuke dumps him in a guest bedroom and says, "Stay here, don't move, I won't be long," and vanishes down the hall, muttering to himself and raking a hand through his hair. Naruto sits on the bed meekly and worries his lip between his teeth.
Sasuke does, in fact, come back soon. "Follow me," he says curtly, and turns on his heel to walk away. Naruto brings his bag with him, "Leave that," he says exasperatedly, and Naruto drops it back on the bed and follows. The room that Sasuke takes him to is undoubtedly the library. The shelves that line the walls and create a small maze are full of books that look a hundred years old and written on parchment, bound in tooled leather; they don't have names on their spines, and only a few of them look newer than the '60s. At the far wall there's a huge window, presenting a gorgeous view of the sea and the city beside it; a woman is sitting on the window seat, staring out at the ocean. She's wearing a long, light green dress, and her hair is a fair shade of ginger and obscuring her face. She turns to look at them when Sasuke touches her shoulder; she's china-white and beautiful, and the thing he notices most is that her eyes are the exact same pale jade as her dress. "This is Sakura," says Sasuke, stepping back and throwing him a slightly apprehensive glance. Sakura steps forward and smiles, timid, and touches her collarbone nervously, and Naruto understands. He can feel Sasuke holding his breath; he steps forwards, and smiles.
"I'm Naruto," he says, "pleasure," and Sasuke and Sakura smile at him brilliantly.
A/N: This is why I am never supposed to be allowed to make up titles. I mean. I mean what.
Again, my sad sad attempt at romance. I know! You don't have to say it; it's rushed and there's no build-up and it fails at being amusing and arrrrrrrrrgh. "a fine evening" is much better than this, I can tell you. You should go read that instead. D: This is the second part in a series kinda thing. You probably shouldn't have read this one first if you did; the suggested reading order is "a fine evening for a lady"; "to that other place"; and then "dissolution". It's out of chronological order, but whatever. The title is taken from U2s "Beautiful Day", for lack of anything better.
Also, um, Sakura is kind of mildly... I don't know, insane? Not completely there? That's what Naruto "understands" at the end. Also, San Fran is famous for being a kind of gay Mecca on the West Coast. Just for anyone who doesn't know. Sasuke's job is completely random. Also, I know absolutely jack-shit about Paris, and I don't know if people would even say things like "on the other side of the Seine"...IM SORRY FOR RUINING YOUR CITY, PARISIANS also I have no idea why I chose it. It could've been any city, Paris just popped into my mind. Ehe.
Beta'd by Yukihana Hisako; all remaining mistakes are mine.
PSA: This fic was written for Red Thread Studios, a pretty new community developed on FF by myself and my friend, Yukihana Hisako. Red Thread Studios is a group which was created to gather authors and stories interested in writing about Team 7, make it easier to beta fics and form collabs, and have like-minded people for authors to interact with. If you're interested, please check out the rules on our page (just click the author link) or PM me if you have any questions. :D