4. ...in SPACE!!:
Sasuke yanks his seatbelt open, and then he's floating. He pulls himself out of his seat and kicks off the wall, zooming straight through the door with a little too much velocity. Damn it. He absorbs the impact with the corridor wall with both hands and shoves to the side.
He knows that in unplanned zero grav you're not supposed to move away from the walls and a good, solid handhold, but dragging himself hand over hand on the leading rope would be too slow. If the gravity turns back on while he's floating -- whatever, he can pilot with a leg in a cast.
He can't pilot if the stupid mechanic can't fix the engine because he stupidly went and died of engine shrapnel to the face.
"Status!" Sasuke snaps when he reaches the machine room. The door is cracked open where it should be airtight, and for a second he's sure he's going to come into a charnel house, bodies floating limply, red droplets orbiting them like tiny ruby moons.
"No need to yell, flyboy!" a voice answers from somewhere he can't see. His heart lurches and starts thinking about not hammering so much.
After a few seconds scanning the room, he finds a pair of feet sticking out from under a piece of machinery. He's very tempted to go kick them. Their owner sounded so unconcerned.
He snarls. "Would it kill you to use the interphone?"
"Right now? Yeah, actually."
Sasuke pauses. ... Ah.
"Hand me the big twisty wrench, wouldya."
Sasuke clenches his teeth to keep from -- he's not sure what he would yell, but ...something he probably shouldn't. He launches himself off the wall to catch the floating wrench, and then he flips in the air and kicks back off the ceiling. He sees the top of Naruto's face through a grid, catches the blond looking and pretending not to be.
"Here." He holds the wrench out.
Naruto grins suddenly, in that way that always makes him wary. "Can't stick my arms out from over here. Gotta have to follow me underneath." He cackles. And as Sasuke glares, he adds, "Ain't nothing wrong with a bit of honest motor grease, princess."
Irritated, Sasuke drags himself to the crack between wall and motor Naruto wedged himself into, and wriggles waist-deep in. It's a tight fit, borderline claustrophobic. Good thing no one pilots a spaceship if they're scared of being locked in narrow spaces. (Sasuke likes tight spaces fine. It's wide open rooms with viewing bays opening onto Space he has a problem with, especially when they contain family members dead and drifting.) He slaps the wrench in the mechanic's hand. "Here."
"Good. Now can you move higher and hold that piece for me? I don't know what genius forgot to make it magnetic but it keeps floating off on me."
If Naruto sounded mocking, or even just a little bit amused, Sasuke would go right back out and let him handle it, but Naruto doesn't. He's... not extremely serious, not in the 'we're in such deep shit' way, but not teasing either. Sober -- a rare expression on him. So... Sasuke crawls up. He moves his arms up until they're framing Naruto's face, and he presses on the piece overhead.
In the process of not looking at his focused expression, he notices that Naruto's arms could have fit out of the grid to get the wrench just fine.
He's still thinking of explosions and critical system failures and bodies floating like they drowned and him being all alone in an empty ship, so even after the piece is soldered back in and Naruto has gone on to repair things he doesn't need a second pair of hands for, Sasuke stays in the dark crawlspace with him. And he watches his sober face, and his steady hands.
"Better to stay tucked away where you can't be pinballed around, yeah," Naruto says as he works, so casual Sasuke knows he isn't, knows that he knows.
Naruto finishes off his repairs and then the sparks die down and they're quiet, so close they can feel each other's heat.
Afterwards Sasuke doesn't remember who touched first, who kissed first. Here, in the dark and narrow space, it's intimate, strangely timeless, out of reality.
It takes the ship's proximity alerts beeping before either of them even thinks about crawling out. Then they get tangled into each other's legs, and they start insulting each other. By the time they finally manage to get out, disheveled, bruised, blinded by the harsh ceiling lights, the moment is killed pretty dead. Sasuke stomps off in a huff and tells himself it was a fluke, a mistake -- a momentary lapse, at best. What happened in the crawlspace stays in the crawlspace. No need to bring it up again.
(if it helped with his nightmares, he doesn't need to bring that up either.)
He lasts a week before he yanks Naruto in the nearest cupboard.