And Who?
By The Eternity Dragon/AcaciaBrown
Disclaimer: Naruto is not mine. Thank god the manga picked up again. And I also don't own the rights to DW - how very sad D':
Chapter two of Five
Beta'd by PheonixDown 7
Written for my lovely Aetha who is going through a rough time, and for my Rosi, whom I converted to SasuNaru-ism and Who-ism with a click of my supernatural powers. You guys are awesome.
Sasuke stood in the door of his garage for a moment, poker in hand, staring directly at the blond haired blue eyed man, with insanely long sandy lashes, perched on the roof of his car holding a fire extinguisher of all things.
Sasuke blinked momentarily stunned (a rare occurrence), and the person tilted his head a little to the left like an enquiring bird would examine a cat trapped behind the glass pane of a window.
"You alright?" he asked, his tone smooth, self-possessed, with a dash of charm.
"No," Sasuke snapped and walked right back out the door again, slamming it shut behind him.
Sasuke didn't believe in breakdowns, like he didn't believe in crying or allowing himself to become depressed. Taking this into account, the only logical conclusion he could draw from this bizarre chain of circumstances was that he must have been dreaming. Nothing else could possibly explain the sudden presence of someone sitting on the roof of his black Lexus in his garage which was locked from the outside. It would also account for the triangular faced man with electric blue hair who had dropped spoons all over the park, things like that didn't happen in real life.
As he stood against the wall, breathing hard and trying to wake himself up from what he could only describe as a nightmare (because nothing good could possibly come from something bizarre and chaotic), the door to the garage opened.
"Just seeing if you're okay," the blond said brightly, hands in the pockets of what looked to be stonewashed jeans over orange and black trainers.
"You have no idea about the types of reactions I get sometimes, I remember this one time in Revolutionary France when I accidentally turned up in the wrong basement. I asked this guy for directions to the Eiffel tower – totally wrong time frame of course but I didn't know that at the time – anyway, he was away for simply ages. Turned out he was fetching the family guillotine to behead me with; chased me all around the courtyard and up one of the towers before I got away. Mind you, France is always a bad idea when it comes to me, Napoleon never liked me, you know."
He finished this sentence in such a matter of fact and perfectly sincere tone of voice that Sasuke gaped at him; mouth slightly ajar, poker held loosely in his right hand, and back slumped against the wall. The person grinned at him, clearly delighted by Sasuke's completely unnerved expression.
"I'm – " he began, and then paused, and held out his hand. "You can call me Naruto."
Sasuke's eyes flickered from Naruto's face to his outstretched fingers, obviously uncertain about the etiquette when talking to lunatics. Did he reject the hand and risk making this mad man angry? Or did he politely clasp the fingers (wherever they had been) and play along before he could dial the emergency numbers?
"Sasuke," said Sasuke, not moving from where he seemed to be super glued to the wall. Why hadn't he woken up yet? Why did it hurt when he pinched himself? Why wasn't this all going away? And what did this man want from him?
"Saaa-suke," Naruto said, obviously enjoying the sound of the name melting like butter on his tongue. "It suits you."
"You were in the park," Sasuke put forward, deciding to throw caution to the winds in order to clasp at some threads of remaining logic.
"You were in the park, on that bridge, trying to find – trying to find that man who had those spoons."
"Ah!" Naruto said with a grin that revealed a dimple in his right cheek, and his arms crossed as he leant against the doorpost. "Pretty and smart, huh?"
This obvious form of flirtation snapped Sasuke out of his startled mode and into his more irritable self. He moved away from the wall, holding the poker firmly in his hand as his dark brows descended over his ashen grey eyes.
"This is not the park!" he snapped, "You have no right to be in my house."
"No," Naruto said easily, disregarding the poker but eyeing up Sasuke's pissed off expression with some interest, as one might survey a firework in excited anticipation before it explodes into an array of golden glittering lights.
"I apologize for intruding into your personal property, but you have something I'm looking for and I'm afraid parking outside would have drawn unwanted attention."
He paused for a moment here, bringing his forefinger up to curl against his mouth, "I really am sorry about your car though."
"Parking?" Sasuke spluttered. "My car? What are you on about? How could you park anything in the garage when the garage door is shut?"
(And more importantly of course) "What the hell have you done to my car?"
"Nothing I can't fix," Naruto replied, now looking as though he suspected Sasuke might try to skewer him on the end of that iron poker.
"You just give me what I came for, and I'll sort out your car and leave, no questions asked."
Sasuke shouldered past him, not caring if Naruto had escaped from an asylum for the 'delusional and exceptionally violent', nobody touched his car. He had assumed when he'd gone in there last he'd been dreaming, either that or he'd actually refused to admit the fact that the bonnet of his car was all smashed and mangled up as if it had gotten in a fight with a sledge hammer and had lost spectacularly.
"What the fuck happened?!" he yelled, standing there in his slacks, white shirt and jacket from this morning and feeling completely and utterly out of the realms of normality.
"I didn't ram it into a wall when I parked it so why is it… Why is it – " his eyes travelled right to the strange blue box that was situated just in front of it.
"What the hell is that doing there?" he exploded, glaring at it as if he had caught it doing something both rude and vulgar.
"Why the hell is there a blue fridge in front of my car?!"
"It's not a fridge!" Naruto bit back at him, hands in pockets and looking genuinely irritated. "You can quite plainly see it says 'Police Telephone Box' on the side in big black letters."
"Fine," Sasuke growled out, giving Naruto one of the most heated looks he'd ever conjured up for another human being. "What is a blue police fridge doing in my garage?"
"I parked it there," Naruto said with a shrug of his shoulders, blue eyes glittering with a knowledge of something that Sasuke would never quite comprehend.
"And it's not a blue police fridge, it's called the TARDIS for 'Time and Relative Dimensions in Space'. And I accidentally smashed it into your car bonnet, I'm very sorry but I will fix it once you've given me what I've come for."
"You smashed your 'retarded telephones in space' box into the front of my forty K car, did you?" Sasuke all but hissed at him, barely controlling his temper, which was writhing about beneath his skin like an angry snake.
He couldn't remember the last time he had been this livid, granted he couldn't remember the last time he'd ever been this worked up about anything. And he knew it wasn't all to do with the car, more to do with the fact that this perfect stranger could explode into his life and disrupt it with that perfectly assured and somewhat quirky smile on his face.
"Forty thousand?" Naruto spluttered, looking at the ruined black bonnet of the car as if it was about to reach forwards and bite him. "What did it come with? Its own small city or something tucked away in there?"
"It's a hybrid car!" Sasuke shouted almost stamping his foot in rage. "And you have driven, god knows how, a large blue box into the front of it!"
Something in the back pocket of his jacket began to beep angrily. Sasuke assumed it to be his mobile, perhaps Ino or Sakura ringing to check up on him. At this precise moment he was too preoccupied to even consider picking it up.
"It is not a blue box!" Naruto indignantly stated, as if Sasuke had insulted a relative or a very dear friend.
"Neither is it a telephone box, here I'll show you!" And he stomped resentfully over to it and threw open what turned out to be a door on one of the square blue sides.
"You can't look into that and tell me it's a blue box or a telephone box now!"
"I'm not looking in there!" Sasuke shouted at him equally enraged and utterly incensed, some small (rational) part of him thinking that perhaps if he went over there and looked into it Naruto would seize the opportunity to club him on the back of the head with a hidden cricket bat and then kill him. But the other, greater part of him somehow instinctively knowing that to deny Naruto the pleasure of proving he was right to Sasuke would annoy him more than anything; and my god, he wanted to annoy him. He wanted to get right under his skin and drive him as crazy as he was driving him.
The beeping in his pocket seemed to be getting steadily louder and louder.
"I said I'm sorry!" Naruto rounded on him, holding the door open of that peculiar blue box open and pointing for Sasuke to look inside of it. "I parked one foot forwards from where I was aiming at. Landing is more of an art than a skill."
"Well you suck spectacularly at it then!" Sasuke threw back at him, the beeping of his mobile almost reaching a high shrill pitch, which scraped at the back of his head like long claws raking across a blackboard.
"Look I'll fix your car!" he replied, throwing his arms over his head as if Sasuke was about to pepper him with knives. "I just need you to give me the –"
"You are not going to fix it with some shady, half done, crap fix-it-up job!" Sasuke spat out vehemently all caution thrown to the winds and marching right up to Naruto accusatory index finger prodding him in the chest.
"You're going to pay for it to be repaired, completely repaired until it sparkles like new, do you understand me? New!"
There was a pause, Naruto's hand came up to hold Sasuke's outstretched wrist, his blue eyes narrowed.
"Sasuke, what's that noise?"
The beeping had turned into an urgent high pitched whine and Sasuke, under the sudden nasty suspicion that his mobile was either about to explode or he really had to change that ring tone, dug his hand into the back pocket of his jacket and pulled out a spoon.
A spoon, which was flashing at him and vibrating in his hand.
"Oh shi-" he began under the strong and correct impression that it was about to explode and take the whole house with it.
Without thinking about it he threw the object through the open door of the strange little box Naruto had opened previously, slammed the door shut again as if somehow that would help and leapt away from it.
The resounding explosion knocked them both off their feet.
The inside of Sasuke's head hurt as if someone had pressed red hot pokers into soft flesh lining his skull and left them to radiate a pool of pure agony across his forehead and his cranium.
"Oh god," he muttered, without opening his eyes. He remembered tripping over Fluffy and banging his head against one of the legs of his kitchen table.
"I've got a concussion, no, I've got brain damage." He turned his head to the side; eyes still closed and continued to groan. "No, I've cracked open my skull and my brain's leaking out all over the floor."
"Well don't let me disturb you there, will you?" came a bitterly sarcastic remark from somewhere down by Sasuke's feet.
Sasuke Uchiha froze, a cold knot of ice forming in his stomach. He smelled smoke, remembered what had happened and then sat up, blinking rapidly as the world spun and twirled about his vision.
Naruto was sitting against the back wheel of his Lexus, covered in soot, his eyebrows slightly singed and holding onto that same fire extinguisher which, seeing as Sasuke was up, he promptly turned on him.
Sasuke Uchiha was drenched from head to foot by a very powerful and direct spray of water. It got up his nose, down his ears and into his eyes whilst it saturated every single layer of his clothing.
"Stop it!" he yelled, putting both of his arms over his face but Naruto kept the spray on, getting up from his sitting position on the floor to move closer to Sasuke, his eyes alight with a blue fire that seemed to make his whole body feel as though it was possessed by some supernatural power.
"You broke it," he ground out slowly, not caring if he filled the whole room with water. "My TARDIS, you can't replace it. You threw a bomb into it."
"A what?" Sasuke asked, both his arms over his head now as the cold water rained down on him. "It was a spoon, that man … in the park. I don't know, it seemed like a logical place to put it, I didn't want my house to blow up."
"You could buy a new house!" Naruto yelled at him, throwing away the apparently never ending fire extinguisher and glaring down at Sasuke whilst he coughed and shook his head
"You can't buy another TARDIS, because it's one of a kind!"
"Well excuse me for saving both our lives!" Sasuke bellowed right back at him. "But I don't believe the dead purchase much on the real estate market!"
"You weren't going to die!" was the furious retort Naruto threw him, turning his back on Sasuke and walking over to the strange box, leaning against the blue door to which a small amount of smoke was still curling out of, and looking mournfully into it.
"I was with you."
"Oh that makes me feel so much better," Sasuke snapped sarcastically, taking off his jacket and wringing the water out of it and regarding the large puddle that had formed around him.
"Look I'm really sorry about your fridge, but –" he stopped mind sentence, his eyes suddenly resting on the sight that Naruto's eyes were resting on too. The inside of the fridge, the box, the … what had he called it? The TARDIS?
It most certainly wasn't a fridge that was for sure. Forgetting he was wet, forgetting that he most likely had a concussion but most certainly not forgetting that he was probably going mad, he stood next to Naruto. Mouth a little open, eyes wide, Naruto's left shoulder pressing against his back as Sasuke, almost breathless, pushed the damp locks of hair out of his eyes and gazed into the likes of which he'd never seen before.
The inside was bigger than the outside…the inside was bigger than the outside.
It was like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, although what lay on the other side of the door was definitely not a magical kingdom.
He was looking into the inside of what seemed to be a huge machine – like the inside of a pocket watch, beautifully intricate with cogs and wheels and huge sheets of fluted metal all around the walls as far as the eye could see and yet there was something subtly organic about it too. There was some slight thrum and buzz and life about it, which made Sasuke, feel as if he was peering into the underbelly of some huge, miraculous and sentient animal.
He could see the damage the 'spoon' must have caused, great licks of black soot leaping up the sides of the metal, and the acrid smell of burning plastic stinging his nose. On the floor of the machine strange lights glimmered weakly, flashing at him before dimming out as if they had never existed.
Sasuke felt his insides swoon; clearly he was in over his head here.
"Who are you?" he asked Naruto hesitantly, his hands gripping either side of the doorpost, exhaling steadily and calming himself.
"The last of my kind," Was the blond's defensive and somewhat blunt answer.
"But I'm like you, just, a little different."
"When you say a little different..." Sasuke quipped still staring into the TARDIS and feeling as if he was gazing right into the universe itself and just simply couldn't look away.
"You mean a little different, like this?" he jerked his head toward what he was looking at. "Or do you mean a little different like you say tomato one way, and I say tomato in the other way."
"I travel through time and space," Naruto said flatly. "Or at least, I used to until you threw an exploding spoon into it. Oh god, what am I going to do?"
He raked his fingers through his blond hair looking absolutely devastated.
"Well, fix it," Sasuke told him, looking away from the TARDIS and sternly at Naruto, the type of expression he got in the courtroom when against a particularly tricky opponent.
Naruto stared at him for a moment, his blue eyes unfathomable and intense giving Sasuke the distinct impression that he was staring into the sun.
"Fine," he said after what seemed a fathomless amount of time. "But I'm fixing it here."
"Uh, what?" Sasuke spluttered, not quite believing what he was hearing.
"No, you can't."
"Yes, I can," Naruto bit back, and Sasuke realized he was standing in the middle of his garage, dripping wet and arguing with who was essentially a complete stranger to him.
"You broke my TARDIS!"
"I – it…" Sasuke began, but Naruto was already walking out the garage door and asking him where the kitchen was because he was starving and needed something to eat.
When you wake up on a Thursday morning in the way you would on a Sunday, you know from the moment you crack open your eyes to read the time on the digital clock flickering 12:10 pm at you that something is horribly wrong.
Sasuke had that familiar sinking feeling in his stomach as his body began the long climb back to consciousness, knowing intrinsically that he had done something phenomenally stupid – like allowing Suigetsu to take him out clubbing or accompanying Lee to a wine tasting event. As it was, he found himself on his back, draped horizontally across the mattress, feet curled up against the floorboards and fingers scrabbling against the duvet as he fought to stop himself sliding off it.
His head pounded and his tongue felt uncomfortably large and fuzzy inside the dry sticky cavern of his mouth. Sasuke groaned, a quick glance to his left revealing the culprit to his current state of agony, an empty bottle of brandy sitting gloatingly on his dresser.
That was of course supposing bottles could gloat – something, which Sasuke had never given much thought to before – but if ever a bottle could gloat, that one was certainly doing it.
As he screwed his eyes shut again and just willed the whole world to just bugger off his memories span around inside his mind like the contents of a dirty basin gurgling down the plughole. What he did know for certain was that he had drunk a lot last night, and that all he remembered of it was a lot of hot liquid brushing down his throat in a slow burning trail, loud noises and a marginal amount of swearing. Oh, and a fire hydrant, but he no idea where that image came from. A large chunk of his memory had seemed to have gone missing.
With a groan he let himself slide from the bed and onto the floor, a short sarcastic burst of laughter escaped his lips as he considered crawling out of the bedroom and into the bathroom to puke into the toilet. But no, he was Sasuke, and a stubborn mixture of defiance and pride kicked in, making him get to his feet. He was an Uchiha. You didn't just act dignified around other people, you were dignified, even hung over with sprouting stubble, dark circles under you eyes, and wearing day old Calvin Klein boxers.
He staggered a little and then righted himself, making his way to the bathroom, both hands over his ears and half-blinded by the sunlight that was streaming in through the windows. Why the hell weren't the blinds closed? He was pretty sure the pervert across the street would be getting a good look at him right about now, probably leering at him through binoculars and licking his mouth with that insanely long tongue of his. Sasuke shuddered inwardly and pulled open the bathroom door, hoping to disappear from the prying eyes of Neighbours & Perverts United as quickly as possible, with the sole intention of falling straight into the shower – when he realized slightly too late that there was already someone in there.
Later, he would wish he'd been able to have articulated some witty remark here, something cutting preferably, both incredibly dry and sarcastic, and then sauntered out into the hallway with a smug smile on his face. As it was, he stood there with his mouth open, slowly turning crimson and blowing out air like a weather balloon. He looked like a mess, a delicious mess with wide staring grey eyes as he said something that sounded very much like: 'Murgweeble!'
There was a man in his shower – a blond man, a blond man he somehow knew – who's name was Naruto, but he had no recollection or understanding of how he knew that. Sasuke's throat was unpleasantly dry and Naruto was standing completely naked with hot water sluicing down his body, shampooing his hair with Sasuke's shampoo.
Sasuke's shampoo! Sasuke's shampoo! No one, not even the Queen was allowed to touch that!
He was staring right back at Sasuke with those intensely blue eyes, half a smile on his face as if he was amused by the situation.
"I – you – I…" Sasuke started, one hand propped up against the wall as if that was the only thing stopping him from melting into a puddle of gooey embarrassment all over the white tiled floor. Never in his life had he ever been stuck for words like this before, never ever – ever!
He was Sasuke Uchiha, things like this didn't happen to him.
He would not look down, he would not look down, he would not look down, he would not look down, he would not look down…
"I and you, what?" Naruto prompted helpfully, blinking soapsuds from out of his eyes and scrunching up his nose in an endearing way. He spoke clearly and calmly over the sounds of water spraying out of the shower nozzle and gurgling down the drain, as if people burst in on him in the bathroom everyday – as if this entire situation was perfectly normal.
Sasuke stopped, swallowing his attempts at words. He couldn't argue with Naruto when he was naked. It was too much madness and he'd only just woken up. He literally bounded out of the bathroom slamming the door shut behind him and resisted the urge to bash his head into the wall several times over.
"Is it okay if I use one of your towels?" Naruto called out amicably, apparently unperturbed by Sasuke's hasty exit.
Sasuke didn't answer. Naruto seemed the sort of person to just take what he needed regardless of the consequences to others. Besides, his heart was hammering away wildly inside his chest and his stomach was performing such extraordinary back flips in such a way that made it impossible to speak.
How the hell was this not some bizarre dream? Why was there some blue-eyed stranger in his shower using his toiletries of all things? Why was he talking to Sasuke in such a familiar way as if they'd met somewhere before? Why was he- shit!
What if they'd had sex last night? Had he been drunk enough to have had sex last night? Was this one of Suigetsu's play boy friends he'd finally said yes to and engaged in (probably very unhygienic) coitus with? And if so wouldn't he have left before he'd woken up? And usually, even drunk, he would have had enough sense to do it in a motel, not in his own flat for Christ Sakes.
He lurched back into his bedroom and grabbed the bin checking for used condoms. A wild flood of relief swept through him, nothing there except a gum wrapper and a few tissues.
Thank god.
But then the gnawing worry came creeping up the back of his spine, what if he'd been stupid enough to have had unprotected sex and, if he was a friend of Suigetsu's, he'd surely have picked up Herpes or Gonorrhea – in which case he needed to have himself checked out like an hour ago.
Except this behaviour just didn't fit in with the pattern in which he lived his life. Sasuke was a highly logical, anally neat and self-restrained human being. He didn't have messy one-night flings with anyone ever.
Taking a deep breath in and steadying his nerves, he pretended to regain the pretence of self-control and composure, assuring himself that everything would click into place once he'd drunk a hot cup of strong black coffee.
He made it exactly three steps into the sitting room before he slipped into complete hysterics.
His wonderful, orderly, down to the subatomic clean living space was a complete and utter mess.
It wasn't just a mess either; it was a mess of nightmares, a mess of utter catastrophic proportions. It was like someone had disassembled the contents of one of Isaac Asimov's books all over his sitting room. Or that the whole film set of I, Robot had somehow migrated its way into his four walls and was now lying in a sprawling mess across the sofa, the table, and carpet. Sasuke was inches away from writhing around on the floor and foaming at the mouth.
That Naruto!
And then it came back like someone slamming a sledge hammer into the back of his skull. The park, his car, the explosion, the raiding of his fridge, something about ramen, the incessant banging of metal against metal as Naruto had started repairs on his blue fridge late into the night. It had been the incessant: 'clink, clink, BANG' which had driven Sasuke into his emergency alcohol supplies. Not until quite drunk out of his mind had he managed to fall into an uneasy and uncomfortable sleep.
It was quite clear in Sasuke's head then; one of those crystallizing moments in which the world stops rotating and the universes pauses as if for a quick breath. Sasuke didn't care if this man's precious one of a kind box that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside had been broken by an exploding spoon (technically, he had been the one to throw the spoon into it in the first place –but it was completely accidental!).
No one was allowed to muck up his life like this, literally or figuratively.
"GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" he yelled down the corridor, no longer caring that he was semi-naked or that Naruto might be stark naked when the bathroom door opened. As it turned out, Naruto was dripping wet with a white fluffy towel wrapped across his slim hips. He frowned at Sasuke with those peculiar vertical lines across his face stretching sideways and making him look like a cat.
"What the hell is your problem?" Naruto had no hesitancy in shouting back; actually leaping onto the back of the sofa to stare down at Sasuke, all long supple legs and vibrant blond hair. "I'm trying to get washed here!"
"What the hell is my problem?" Sasuke spluttered, "How about a complete lunatic crash landed into my house, utterly destroyed the living room, mucked up my car and gave me a splitting headache?"
"It's not my fault you can't hold your liquor, and I said I'd fix the car!"
"Before or after you've eaten me out of house and home?"
"Hey," Naruto quipped, not getting down from the sofa but looking slightly offended, "I was hungry!"
"You were hungry or you hadn't eaten in 200 hundred years? Because you certainly ate enough to satisfy at least fifty people last night."
"What are you implying exactly, sir?"
Sasuke narrowed his eyes at Naruto, disliking the way he curbed that 'sir'; it was both flirtatious and sardonic at the same time.
"I'm implying that you took advantage of my fridge last night."
"Perhaps if your fridge had more than celery sticks inside of it I wouldn't have eaten so much! Not everyone is satisfied by eating rabbit food!"
"This is my home, this is my fridge, and if you're going to eat the entire contents of it you could at least be grateful about it!"
"Grateful!?" Naruto's eyebrows flew so rapidly up his forehead they were in danger of flying straight off his face.
"You blew up my home and now you're complaining because I ate all your day old salad?"
They stood there glowering at each other and breathing heavily for what seemed an age, Sasuke breathing in the low but spicy smell of Naruto's skin, as it sent tingles of electricity whizzing up and down his spine. There was something there between them that he didn't like, something hot and intangible that could explode at any moment. Naruto's eyes flickered momentarily to his mouth and Sasuke blinked, unconsciously taking a step backwards.
"Look, Sasuke – I'm …" Naruto opened his mouth to say, and Sasuke was suddenly aware of the fact that they were both almost nude and standing close enough to feel the others breath against their skin.
He was almost glad when the doorbell rang, and he sped off down the corridor to answer it, not caring that he would be answering it in his underwear, which turned out to be a lie after all when the person standing at the door turned out to be Ino, who looked him up and down with a scrupulous eye and asked calmly whether or not he was alone.
Before the lie was even out of his mouth, Naruto's torso was pressing up against his shoulder blades and a hand sneaking around his waist to introduce himself to Sasuke's secretary.
It really was the last straw. Without a moment's further consideration, he walked down the corridor and locked himself up in the bathroom. The rumours that would be spreading around the office and his circle of friends now would just be pure unadulterated agony.
Clearly Naruto was trying to drive him insane, and succeeding.
A/N: One person guessed what this was 'crossed over' with. I'm a little upset no one else seems to watch this show, guys, come on, it's excellent. And yes, will be updating I am pretty excited about this one, partially because it makes me laugh and partially because it's fun to write. I hope you guys enjoyed it anyway!
Love TED
