The reviews...oh the reviews...so many nice ones. My ego is now giving Alaska a run for its money as the largest state.

K. Masashi didn't like like my 'sharing' idea, so instead of claiming ownership, I merely 'borrow' the characters like a good Earth-fearing hippie and use them for my own sadistic tendencies.


"Okay, who has Janice Joplin on their iPod?"

There was silence.

"Fuck, what is wrong with the youth today?"

Silence.

"Hendrix?"

Still silence. In this case, silence was good. The pilot had managed to coax the plane into flying around in circles, giving them time to get their act together. Temari had managed to make the plane a little less frantic. It involved a fine blend of threats, bribes, and calming words. "Nirvana?" Someone raised their hand. Temari pulled a plastic bag out of her backpack. "In here. Keep it above water at all times. In fact, if anyone has anything classical, that would make everything really, really easy."

Sasuke chucked his iPod at Temari's face.

"You, passive aggressive little boy, I hereby place you in charge of…of…" she broke off. "Food. Yes. You put the food inside the air mask baggies." She pointed at the air mask bags that had fallen from the plane ceiling. "Anything that might keep us alive. Nuts, bread, anything else." There were so many people…no way whatever Sasuke assembled would keep them from starvation for very long.

She glanced around the plane. They were roughly two thousand feet above the water now, and going down fast. Once it hit the water, the plane might stay afloat a minute or two.
"Can anyone not swim?"

Two hands shot up in the back. A few of the people turned to look. Hyuuga Hinata and Gaara had both their hands raised over their heads. Hinata was shaking, her fingers quivering with fear; Gaara, on the other hand, stared impassively forward.

Sasuke didn't bother. It was less 'I want to die', and more like 'why the hell should I try anyway?'

"Only you two?" Temari looked around the plane. It lurched. No more than fifteen hundred feet now. "Anyone else who does not come forward with their inability to swim will, undoubtedly, die. Please step forward." She rolled her eyes. "It's not your fault if you can't swim, but it will be your fault if you're an idiot and don't tell anyone."
Sasuke didn't move.

"Okay, that's it then. Passive-aggressive one, do you have food?" On cue, Sasuke held up a few of the oxygen masks filled with various food rations he had found. Those mashed potatoes you get on airplanes?

The come in little packages that look like condoms.

"Good boy. Alright, if you can't swim, your seats are floatation devices. Remember that. Use those to the best of your ability. Carry-on bags, anyone? Does anyone have what you might use for supplies of any form? Because we're in the middle of fucking nowhere."

Ino raised her hand. "I have floral wire. My parents asked me to grab a flower from a family friend while we were down in Hawaii."

"Okay. You, ditch anything that isn't imperative to survival." The water was rising rapidly from beneath them. "Shit…you guys are going to have to swim upwards, okay?" A thousand feet tops? Sasuke stared impassively forward.

There was a shrieking noise from the back of the plane. "Oh no we're going to die!" Stewardess.

Temari rolled her eyes. "You pick now to freak out? Look, everyone, if you do what she did, you will die. If you remain calm, you won't. People, if it will be useful, grab it. If it's not, don't. If you can't swim with it, than you will die. Does anyone have like, fruit of any form?" No one raised their hand. "Sasuke, man bitch, put cans of juice in the baggies and attach them to seats. Hell, anything that floats."

No one moved.

"God! Move! We have maybe, three minutes before this entire plane goes under."

Chaos ensued. People bumped Sasuke from all sides, scrambling to do as Temari had instructed. In times of crisis, people are surprisingly easy to control. 'But I already knew that,' Sasuke thought blandly. 'Anything that floats…'

Seat cushions were the obvious choice. The second would have been blown up air mask bags, but those were used up. He had never had to make anything float before. Did the peanut packages float?

Did it matter? Water had begun to slowly leak into the plane. Sasuke felt a sudden fear leak into his throat. Water…there was water fucking everywhere.

He didn't want to die. Honestly, he didn't want to die. For a long time he had thought that death would be a welcome change because life was nothing, but now when it was staring him in the face, it seemed cold and unwelcoming. The water had begun to fizz around his ankles and his breath began to choke in his throat. Fear…this is what fear tastes like…

"I have to take my clothes!"

"My mother's watch is in there--"

"Shut up!" Temari shrieked. "Imminent death! Clothes do no good for a corpse. You think I want to leave the vodka? No! I do not! But I am not going to put myself at risk over that." Not much further. Temari flung herself at the wall, wrenching open the emergency exit. "Look, jump as soon as you can. Go." People near the doors began flinging themselves at the open air. There was a rolling, screaming lurch as the plane belly-flopped into the water, the shrieks of people still inside and of those left in the water.

"Everyone to the emergency exits. Get to the surface and try not to die, okay?

The water flooded in in torrents. It slammed Sasuke against the side of the plane, choking him and rendering him immobile.

Fuck.

That was about it. 'I don't want to die,' he thought frantically, struggling against the water. Behind him, he could see red that was probably blood and tangles of limbs and gurgling cries as air escaped from lungs. 'I'm going to die.'

Only, he didn't. Arms circled around his waist, yanking him away from the wall and lurched forward as hands grasped various hand holds and moving forward, forward. Sasuke slammed his eyes shut, mouth gaping as he struggled for air.

His eyes didn't open until his mouth found air above him. He flailed a little but that didn't seem to help. 'I'm going to die…' It didn't help that he lacked swimming skills. He was too mature to flail. Flailing would do nothing. In the end, he would sink like a rock, into the water all around him, all around him, everywhere.

There were worse ways to go out, he supposed. Why fight it?

"Come on, swim." He recognized the voice, but not face came to mind.

'I can't…'

"You can't swim?"

Had he said that out loud?

"I thought Temari told people to raise their hands if they couldn't swim. She had them grab floatation devices or some shit and get out first." Sasuke wasn't sure he remembered this part. He just knew that his body was heavy, that his clothes clung to his form and his skin had broken out in goose bumps. The arms were still around his waist, connected to a body and to a pair of kicking legs.

Sasuke's vision began to clear. "Uzumaki?" If he hadn't been in the middle of the ocean, frozen with fear and cold and helplessness he probably would have kicked the blond boy between the legs and put as much space between them as one can possibly attempt.

Unfortunately, he was in the middle of the ocean, frozen with fear and cold and helplessness.

"Next time," the blond child was mad now, that much was clear. "Do what you're told. Then, people wouldn't have to go into sinking planes so save your sorry ass. Damn Temari…damn everything…" Sasuke watched the blond boy bite the inside of his cheek.

"Where is everyone else?" Sasuke could hear his own voice, the small, shell-shocked whimper of a victim. He didn't want to be a victim; he wasn't going to drown. He cleared his throat. "Temari, Sakura, are they all right?"

The blond haired boy nodded. "They are." His eyes drifted to the space where their bodies met the water. "Not everyone is though. The stewardess for sure, she hit her head." So that's where the red cloud had stemmed from. Blood. The sticky, scarlet substance that separated the living from the dead.

Sasuke could feel the arms around his waist tighten. Even if it wasn't so uncomfortable, he felt it shock through his body, eat at his toes. Sasuke shut his eyes and took a cautious breath. He hated feeling so damn helpless. He had had enough of that for one life time.

"Fuck," the blond haired boy swore. "My leg is cramping up. You're a heavy son of a bitch Uchiha."

Sasuke nodded, vaguely, but that didn't make him any less afraid. 'Cramps?' If the blond boy stopped swimming, the both of them would drown in open water. Nervously, Sasuke glanced over his shoulder to look at the space where the plane had been. It had long sunk under the surface of the water, leaving only a few floating items in its wake.

There were people all around them, Sasuke noticed, people swimming frantically and people floating, numb, on their seat cushions. Sasuke noticed the water had begun to claw at his collar bone. Before it had been just below where his shirt was. The blond boy holding him was clearly beginning to fail. This left Sasuke in a slight bind: if he let go, he would sink like a rock to the bottom of the ocean and if he didn't they would both go under.

In a flurry of motion, Sasuke shoved himself away from the boy holding him. He realized this wasn't the smartest thing to do but it seemed like the only thing to do. A jumble of thoughts raged through his mind, thoughts that if voiced would have shattered his arrogant-seeming exterior and revealed a twisted inferiority complex.

And then the sea drowned out his thoughts and he was under the water. Flailing wasn't helping, and he wouldn't flail much longer: the pale boy could feel the cold of the ocean numbing him from the outside in. His clothing hung to his body, slowing down his attempts to claw at the surface. His hair floated around his head like a dark halo that followed his movement when he turned to look. The water was clear despite the disturbances of people's feet moving in spastic circles.

The plane. It was sitting on the bottom of the ocean, wrecked and destroyed, a good hundred meters away. The water wasn't even that deep, maybe ten meters, but that was thoroughly deep enough to die. Sasuke was starting to regret his decision to leave the comfort of the blond boy's arms, even if it was probably better for the both of them.

However, he was suddenly jerked from his thoughts. Literally jerked. By two pairs of long arms. When his head broke the surface, Sasuke was faced with a pair of blonds who stared at him blankly.

"Uchiha, are you trying to drown yourself?" Temari asked. "I saw you go under and got over here as fast as possible…what happened?"

"I can't swim," Sasuke choked.

Temari shook her head. "Didn't I tell you to tell me if you couldn't swim?" Her gaze softened. "Nothing you can do about that now. Come on love, here. Hold on. There's some kind of landmass in that direction. It doesn't look too far…a mile or two maybe?" Sasuke winced. That wasn't far? "Naruto, how well can you swim?"

Naruto snorted. "Pretty damn well. Fat-ass Uchiha just weighs a ton." The words stung on some level.

Temari focused her eyes on Sasuke. "Sasuke, you can't swim at all?"

Sasuke shook his head. The salt water made his throat sick, sore and swollen. "No." It came out more as a croak and less like a word. Temari looked a little bit concerned. She had taken to holding him against her chest, which was probably a little easier for her than it had been for the blond boy simply because she was bigger. The blond boy had to have been Sasuke's weight. Sasuke felt small.

"Okay…look, stay here. Naruto, are your legs cramping?"

"I have another five minutes of holding him left. Not two miles."

"Naruto, find one of those little baggies with food in it attached to a seat cushion. Sasuke could use that." The only words Sasuke could understand now were his own name and 'food'. Everything was jumbling, a mess of psychedelic colors and feeling. His limbs had gone rigid, stiff from the cold, made heavy by his clothing. Temari's arms were warm around his body, the rhythmic swaying of her body as she kicked to stay afloat. 'Dear dear, how queer everything is today...and yesterday...things went on just as usual...'

"Sure."

"Could you hurry?"

"Wha-- why?"

"Because I'm pretty sure he just passed out and I know his form didn't mention narcolepsy."

'One pill makes you larger, one pill make you small...'


Lack of humor. I know. Oh well.

The words Sasuke is thinking come from Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit'. That is an amazing song. Oh yes.

Review? I should cease asking. You already know it makes me really happy. I fully intend to update every day or at least have a good excuse why I didn't. Do I deserve thirty seconds of time? Besides, Gaara orders you to.

The real question though is...island or abandoned oil platform?