Sasuke drummed his fingers against the buckle of his belt and squinted down the tracks, waiting for the train that he would board and ride for 7 hours. A deep rumble that grazed his ribs, followed by a warm gust of air signaled its arrival. The tannoy announcements bled into the heady bass of the music thrumming out of his headphones and were rendered useless. Not that he could care less: his enthusiasm at an all time low due to the uncomfortable prospect of sitting in cramped conditions for an excessively long journey he had no desire to be on anyway.

He adjusted the position of the headphones and pulled out the ticket tucked in his coat pocket, checking (for the third time) his carriage and seat number. He was mentally chanting the code before it even reached his gaze. His carriage pulled up nearby as calculated.

Inside the train he scanned the seats for his number and found himself at a table: Convenient for use of laptop or as somewhere to place food and drink but terrible for avoiding contact with the rest of the human race. Sasuke sighed and slung his backpack into the overhead storage. Fortunately there was only one other person at the table that sat four people and he was (inconsiderately) using the other seat on his side for his luggage. All things being well, Sasuke wouldn't be joined by anyone else. The seat next to him showed signs of being recently vacated in the form of an empty crisp packet and an abandoned daily newspaper. He removed these and deposited them in the nearest waste bag before seating himself.

As the slow grinding-jolt of the train began he could feel the eyes of his table-buddy peering at him. In response he pointedly stared out of the window, folding his arms across his chest in a painfully protective gesture. After a moment the gaze was dropped and Sasuke felt a shift beside him as the feet of the person opposite found their way to the empty seat next to him. He chewed the side of his mouth in aggravation and pressed his forehead a little forcefully against the window pane. A silent prayer that the shoes were clean flitted around his head like an angry butterfly.

Rather than letting his seething continue he decided to take the advice of his psychiatrist (for a change) and changed the track on his mp3 player to something less self-harming than Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt. Skimming through his tracklist he wondered if maybe instead of forking out large amounts of money to speak to an apathetic man in a comfy chair he should just change his taste in music. He got to the end of the artists and settled on Story of the Year as he reasoned that he atleast found them vaguely comical. A little of his Rage seeped out of his pores in what he imagined would look like a deep purple mist if it had form and he pondered the origins of the emover. It wasn't long before he relaxed to the extent of his abilities.

Sasuke started suddenly in his seat when he felt movement beside him and looked up to find the other passenger getting up. They crossed looks for a moment and the guy gave him a friendly smile before routing in his bag for something. Sasuke mentally chastised himself for dozing off. The something turned out to be a brown leather wallet.

"Do you want anything?"

Sasuke blinked, taken aback. He felt like looking around to see if this question was addressed to someone else but no, the guy was looking straight at him with a nonchalant expression as he cradled his wallet in his hand. It took him a moment to realize why this stranger might ask him this: He had been staring in his post nap haze. Another moment to figure out how he had heard the question: The album had finished and his iPod had switched itself off. How long had he been asleep?

And then another to be suspicious.

"Pardon?" Sasuke pulled his headphones off his ears incase he had heard wrong.

The guy smiled again, "I asked if you wanted anything. I'm heading to the buffet carriage…" He gestured down the aisle with his empty hand, "So, y'know. Plus you look kinda beat."

Sasuke sized the opposition up. He looked roughly the same age but was the opposite in most other respects. Firstly he was clearly an outdoors person as his skin was sun bronzed and his hair sun-bleached to lighter shades of a natural blonde. His arms were obviously used regularly for some kind of sport as they grew firm and strong from underneath his black t-shirt. Maybe something alternative like windsurfing or rock climbing, Sasuke mused. But somehow, despite these clear signs, his aura of good health and buoyancy emanated primarily from his disastrously blue eyes. He was careful not to look at them directly.

When everything had been considered Sasuke determined he had no choice but to take a disliking to this person. No one that good-looking was genuinely nice. Afterall, he wasn't hideous himself.

After a long pause Sasuke replied, "No… Thanks." He drawled, squinting an eye suspiciously. The guy blinked and shrugged.

"Alright." He said and headed off down the walkway, at ease with the bumping and swaying of the train carriage.

Windsurfer, Sasuke decided. He reached up into the baggage hold to pull out his carefully packed book and settled back into his seat, hoping to while away an hour or two in his favourite form of escapism.

The blonde returned after three pages. From his hand swung a brown paper carrier bag, weighted down with its contents. He sighed contentedly as he settled back into his seat and pulled out a cup of weak smelling coffee and a packet of Haribo Starmix from the bag. Sasuke briefly considered the environment as his opponent crumpled the bag into a ball and left it on the edge of the table. Then he remembered he was not one of those people. He returned to his book.

The guy was still for a moment in his peripheral. Then he looked out of the window and then at his hands, then pulled his feet back onto the seat beside Sasuke. Sasuke could feel his eye twitching and rubbed at it. The Haribo bag exploded outward in large, tanned hands, a few cola bottles and rings rolled onto the table top and were quickly gathered up. The rings became jelly accessories to golden-brown fingers.

"Want one?"

Sasuke looked up with a blended expression of shock and indignation. The blonde gestured to the broken bag of sweets with his coffee.

"Kids and grown ups love it so…?"

Sasuke was aware that he was staring this time, "Uhh… no." He uttered and pointedly went back to reading.

"What's the matter? You don't accept sweets from strangers?" Sasuke looked over his book and met a wide, lopsided grin, "Very wise of you."

There was a long pause while the two stared eachother down. The grin did not falter but took on a challenging quality.

"You're going to keep on talking to me, aren't you?" Sasuke finally said, pressing his book down on the table, three fingers inside the pages to keep his place. The blonde laughed.

"So you are capable of complex sentences." His eyes narrowed but his smile remained.

"That's quite a rude statement to make about someone you don't know."

"Then we have something in common. We both judge on appearances."

Sasuke opened his mouth, shut it again and frowned, "You're either very bored or mentally unstable."

The guy shrugged, "Probably a mixture of the two. They tend to go hand in hand."

"So you probably have ADHD."

He raised his eyebrows, "Amateur psychologist."

"Hn."

"I'm Naruto, by the way."

He hesitated for a fraction of a second. Sasuke was used to impromptu introductions from strangers who assumed he would want to know anything about them but normally he didn't pay any attention to the name. Those eyes were looking straight into his own and they were asking something serious. Serious and familiar. He wasn't asking for his name. He wasn't asking permission. That gaze suggested he didn't need it. There was an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach like a knot tightening or a dark, heavy ball rolling over. And he had a feeling that somewhere else the same thing was happening at exactly the same time.

"Sasuke." Sasuke offered, looking down and away from Naruto's piercing gaze.

"Sasuke… You look worried all of a sudden, Sasuke."

He felt a tug downward at the sides of his mouth and blinked to clear his head, "I just had this feeling…"

"…That you've met me before?"

Sasuke swept a hand across his forehead, brushing a bang back, "Yes." He said firmly. He realized he wasn't surprised that this Naruto understood his thoughts.

"But we haven't."

"No." He removed his fingers from the pages of his book, "I would have remembered."

Naruto nodded speculatively, his own fingers curling tightly around the paper walls of his coffee cup, "That's what I thought." He said quietly and then let out a bark of laughter, "You don't think this is like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Vanilla Sky or something?"

Sasuke smirked, "No. I don't think so."

"It took you a while." Naruto said in a clearly impulsive way. Sasuke tilted his head a little to one side.

"To what?"

Naruto seemed to hesitate, "To get that feeling. I had it as soon as you sat down." He looked embarrassed. Sasuke thought it looked good on him. He watched dusty yellow fronds of hair fall into his eyes and had the urge to brush them away. Then he frowned and wondered what the hell was wrong with him.

"Where are you going?" He asked in an attempt to get away from their bizarre and unsettling topic of conversation.

"Why? Do you want to come with?" Naruto smiled impishly. When Sasuke blinked and frowned he adopted a more sober expression, "Edinburgh."

Sasuke nodded and looked down as he smoothed the cover of his paperback against his thigh, "Then I suppose this can't be predestined."

"Oh really?"

"Mm. My stop is before yours."

"Hmm." Naruto sucked his left canine and rested his chin in his palm. His fingers drummed once against his cheekbone "I guess not then. Must just've been a glitch in the Matrix."

Sasuke brushed his thumb against the pages of the book and settled back into the prickly fabric of the seat, dousing his unwarranted disappointment with healthy reality. For the briefest of moments he glimpsed a fantasy world where he tenaciously missed his station and carried on with the familiar stranger into an unknown that would only always be filled with purpose and being. But then he remembered who he was and that he knew his life was already destined to be just bearable futility. Like the train it had a place to go. The other passengers, with their magazines and comfortable clothes, either got off before or after him. And eventually there was an end of the line. He may offer a short goodbye to this man before collecting his belongings and reaching his arranged destination. They would never meet again and he would be ok with that.

He opened up the beige pages and located his place in the tidy, uniformed script.

"I'm going to read now." He uttered.

If Naruto was affronted he didn't look it. He merely nodded and continued to eat the rings off his fingers.

The hours passed and they did not speak. The sky darkened and the buildings lit up creating cascading horizontal light-waterfalls across the windows of the carriage. Sasuke recalled slow-shutter photographs of speeding cars: red, yellow and white smudges from painted fingers joining up the stars like a dot-to-dot portrait in the heavens. He touched his own fingers to the pane and watched clouds of condensation form around them. After a moment he dropped them into his lap and glanced over at his dormant comrade. An hour or so before Naruto had created a makeshift pillow from his backpack and thick coat and was now dozing idly with his knees bent in tight, upside-down "V"s. His mouth was parted slightly and quirked as if posing a question or just about to argue. Sasuke wondered how he could tell this and then immediately, forcibly immersed himself in the last chapter of his book.

The driver announced their precipitous arrival at the station a stop away from Sasuke's. He had maybe forty minutes before he tasted cold northerly air and station coffee. After that a phone-call from a hotel room and difficult sleep in a hard bed before room service and the daily news on a tiny TV set. And then he would begin another round of does-this-look-right? Is-this-how-you-envisioned-it?

"You look troubled."

Sasuke opened his eyes and looked into a pair of brilliant blue ones. With his eyes closed it was easy to forget their impact. Naruto's face was turned toward him and bore an expression of dreamy contemplation.

"Why are you troubled, Sasuke?"

Sasuke shook his head, "It doesn't matter."

"Why." It wasn't phrased like a question.

"Because I will be gone soon."

Naruto shook his head slowly, his hair rustling against the coarse fabric of his coat, "No you won't. Out there, somewhere, you're going to stay here. You'll tell me because to you it won't matter either way. But there's a you out there that wants to."

"A me out there?"

"Yup." Naruto's hands shaped a ball in the space above his stomach that didn't really articulate anything but seemed to maybe represent a whole, "I've been thinking about it and I figured… that in some other place and some other time, and also in this place and this time but not this here… it's ok that you're getting off soon because we've already met. We've already lived a thousand million lives where we've met… and in some of them I say "Why are you troubled?" and you tell me… and probably in some of them you don't… but it won't always be because you will be gone. Sometimes you'll stay."

"As in… another life?"

"Exactly."

Sasuke wondered if this was supposed to reassure him. He wasn't reassured. Although he wasn't entirely sure what it was he was trying to reassure himself of.

"But if that's the case then… what's the point?" He frowned, "If we meet endlessly. If in a thousand million lives we know eachother then why do we part now?"

Naruto shrugged, "That's what happens in this life, I guess."

Sasuke felt suddenly sick. Envious. Jealous of his own lives. He was astonishingly overwhelmed with useless frustration.

Out of the speakers came the drivers muffled, crisp-packet voice declaring the next stop. Sasuke's stop.

"This is me." He said bitterly. Naruto watched him pitiably as he stood and shoved his unfinished book into the top of his bag.

"This time."

Sasuke was struck with the urge to hit him. Maybe he already knew he was better off without him. Maybe in every single one of those lives this perfect form of man was better off without his wreckage. This time he had escaped unscathed.

Was this the last life?

Why did it have to be his?

He slung his backpack onto his shoulders and stepped out into the aisle, "Goodbye… Naruto."

Naruto nodded but his gaze was turned to the ceiling of the carriage. His hand twitched where it rested on his stomach as if to wave. Sasuke took his leave and walked to the end of the carriage and through the glass-paneled doors as the train slowed into the generic looking station platform. Faces on the outside came into focus and turned towards the train, expecting, hopeful, none of them for him. A high-pitched squeal tore from beneath his feet and his journey was done. He opened the door and took care to mind the gap as he stepped out into musty space, radiating with kinetic heat. The shop fronts were lit from the inside and beckoned weary travelers to purchase overpriced bottles of water and chocolate bars. Sasuke dismissed them and headed mindfully towards the exit. He would leave behind everything that had happened that day. In his mind the journey was already separate from the life he knew. Like a dream. He had woken up and the image of the man was already fading, face first into forgetfulness. What good would it do to dwell on a dream?

He felt a hand on his shoulder and swiveled, all muscles tensed in preparation for an attack. He was met with a wide grin.

"You look worried."

Sasuke stared but did not relax, "You said 'troubled' before."

"Did I?"

"Yes." He shifted his weight onto the other leg and looked up at the roof where a couple of pigeons snuggled in the rafters, "I thought I didn't know you in this life."

"Not yet. But I figured…" Naruto scratched amongst the hair behind one ear, "I would have to do something about that. Clearly you weren't going to."

Behind Naruto's back the whistle blew and the train lurched into life. Somewhere else were they still on it? Was Naruto? Was he?

"So Sasuke…"

"Naruto."

"Why are you troubled?"

AN: Hope you enjoyed this. After a long hiatus from writing I figured I'd have to update the old and the new together if I was going to do this properly. *stretches and bones crack* Hello again.