We'll Meet Again
Please note that this story is marked ADULT for a reason and may not be read by those under the age of consent for their country of residence. It contains graphic sexual language and activity and is therefore NC17 (US) 18 (UK) in certificate. Please see chapter notes for copyright statement.
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“I’m playing it.”
“Don’t play it.”
“You can’t stop me playing it.”
“I can beat you with the gramophone.”
“It’s your gramophone.”
“I don’t care. Just...dear god...please don’t play it.”
“I’ve never heard you say please before.”
“Call it desperation.”
“I’m still going to play it.”
“What if I gave you my cigarette ration?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You could swap them with Kakashi for those pinups he has.”
“Nah.”
“Don’t you like pinups? He has Betty Page.”
“Of course I do...I’m not odd...Of course I like pinups!”
“Why are you sweating?”
Naruto bit his lip and put away the record. His desire to irritate Sasuke was outweighed by the dangerous direction that the conversation had just taken. Sasuke was looking at him suspiciously as if he knew that Naruto not caring much about Betty Page was highly significant.
Naruto needed to be more careful.
Satisfied that he wasn’t about to be tortured by ‘Run Rabbit Run’ Sasuke went back to his chair and took up a copy of The Lady from 1938. Naruto had grown tired of taking the mickey out of Sasuke’s reading material. Truth was he, like everyone else, had been through everything decent in the camp already and it was better than nothing at all. The Lady had come somewhere after Racing Week and How To Build Your Anderson Shelter.
Naruto felt that the last one had been put there by the guards in a moment of sarcasm, seeing as how none of the camp’s residents actually had a home or garden in which to build a shelter.
Not any more.
Naruto sighed and went to the window. The sea was as grey as ever and covered in wire and landmines. It hardly seemed fair. They had been trapped on this bloody island for two years and they couldn’t even lie on the beach or go paddling. He always felt like pointing out that there was no point barricading the beach against the Germans, seeing as how virtually everyone on the island was a spy for the axis powers anyway.
In theory.
Naruto was fairly sure that he wasn’t a spy.
He would have noticed.
Sometimes he lost count of all the unacceptable things that he actually was, all the different ways he had managed to be wrong. First, he was Japanese, which for some mad reason hadn’t gone down all that well in England since the war broke out. Second, he was poor and had left school when he was fifteen, which hadn’t gone down well with his very educated, very posh, room mate Sasuke, either. Third, he was...well...Naruto wasn’t sure of the technical term. He had only heard slang words for it.
Queer.
Bent.
Pansy.
Oh, and there were the hints, the short hand references to it which weren’t exactly an accusation but the mere use of which about another man put him into some category of no mans land. “I don’t know about him...” was one. Another was, “He’s a strange one.” Either was enough for a prisoner to refuse to share a room with you.
Fortunately Naruto had managed to avoid having anything like that said about him.
But the pinups slip had been a close one. If Sasuke wasn’t so uninterested in Naruto and everything to do with him, Naruto would probably have been in big trouble. After all, what normal man wouldn’t be excited at the thought of half naked female pinups?
Naruto resisted an urge to bang his head on the window.
He was saved from the obsessive merry go round in his mind by Konohamaru who bounded in with a big grin, oblivious to the disdainful glare it earned him from Sasuke.
“It’s seven o clock!” Konohamaru announced, sounding like a manic announcer from the BBC.
“Alright, I’m coming.”
“Are you joining us?” Konohamaru demanded, tugging down Sasuke’s magazine and forcing him to look at him. Sasuke’s eyes narrowed and his thin, pale fingers snapped up to grab Konahamaru’s wrist, squeezing in a way that must be painful.
Konohamaru snatched his hand away and rubbed it, looking both hurt and angry. Naruto kicked Sasuke’s shin hard on his way out.
“Why does he have to be such an old bastard?” Konohamaru complained as they walked downstairs and out the front door. “He acts as though he’s the only one that doesn’t want to be here.”
“He thinks it’s worse for him. He was going to be a fighter pilot. He was going to be a hero.”
“No chance! He would have sneered at the recruiting officer and they would have shot him!”
Naruto grinned, “I would have liked to have seen that.”
“It must be terrible being his room mate. Can’t you do a swap?” Konohamaru kicked a pebble along the road with his elderly shoes.
“Who would take him?” Naruto said, secretly adding in the silence of his head, ‘and besides, I don’t plan to let him go.’
Konohamaru shrugged as if to indicate the mystery that was Sasuke’s place in the universe.
Naruto shivered. It was May and still cold. It didn’t feel like the Isle of Man sometimes. It felt like the fucking Orkneys. He loved the twisted logic of putting all the interned on an island. As if the barbed wire and guards wasn’t enough, they had the sea! And so there was no real need for a prison. They lived in the beach front guest houses and private homes that the rightful owners had been removed from. If it wasn’t for the fact that none of them could leave and that they were surrounded by Germans and Italians and armed guards, it would have been almost like a holiday by the sea.
Except that the holiday had been going on rather too long now.
They arrived at the ‘theatre’ at the same time as Hans.
“Evening!” Hans said cheerfully in his broad cockney accent. Naruto clapped him on the shoulder and they headed into the rehearsal.
The camp authorities approved of the theatre. They also approved of the orchestra, the evening classes, and the athletics club.
They had quickly put a stop to Kakashi’s book club though.
The camp authorities were, in fact, pretty embarrassed about the whole situation. In a very British way they seemed to feel that it was in rather poor taste to lock up ‘enemy aliens’ that were in fact British born and very likely entirely loyal. But people like Hans, despite being a barrow boy from Covent Garden, with a wife called Annie, were German, just as Naruto was Japanese and as such the British were at war with them too. Naruto felt British. He had wanted to fight. He had wanted to help.
But they wouldn’t let him.
They had just, slightly apologetically, hauled him out of bed one morning and dumped him in an internment camp on the Isle of Man where Naruto spent most of the first few months repeatedly explaining that, despite his looks, he was not German but Japanese. They hadn’t believed him until he showed them his passport.
New arrivals still assumed that he had wandered in from the German part of the camp.
It just further proved that he didn’t FIT anywhere.
Konohamaru tugged at his arm, “You look a bit glum, that’s not like you, what’s up?”
Naruto pulled himself together, smiled and denied everything. He reminded himself that he wasn’t usually one to wallow and that it could be worse. Unlike Hans he wasn’t missing his wife and kids, and unlike Konohamaru, he was old enough to know that this couldn’t last forever.
Konohamaru hadn’t coped well for the first few weeks, until Naruto took him in hand and forced him to join in with camp life. Before that the seventeen year old had been home sick and furious and practically simmered with resentment. He kept threatening to tunnel out, with rather more enthusiasm than geographical realism.
Naruto watched Konohamaru jump on stage to set up for act one and congratulated himself on how much the boy had cheered up.
If there was one thing that Naruto knew a lot about it was being cheerful.
No matter what.
They hadn’t had much choice about plays. First they had to exclude any with too many women (there were always ex-public school boys alarmingly prepared to drag up but most of them weren’t very convincing and, queer or not, Naruto objected to ‘women’ who looked like bears wrapped in a blanket) and then they had been forced to exclude all of Kakashi’s suggestions. Mainly because they didn’t have women. Or chickens. Or leather. And several other props that Naruto couldn't even spell and weren't available anywhere but some very specialised shops in the East End.
Which had pretty much left them with two options. A variety show which they had already done five times and they were, frankly, running out of variety. If Naruto had to watch Kiba and his bloody performing dog one more time he was going to hang himself.
Which left them with Shakespeare. Good old Shakespeare, being so frightfully English, was allowed in large amounts in the camp.
Secretly, Naruto couldn’t stand Shakespeare. Mainly because he hadn’t the foggiest what the man was on about. He understood one word in ten and had performed in several productions simply by memorising the words and hoping that the audience was better informed than he was.
This time they were doing Macbeth.
Naruto was A Serving Man.
The British class system. It got everywhere.
The rehearsal got going eventually. It was slightly held up by an air raid but it didn’t sound very near so no one bothered to go to the shelter.
In the end Naruto needn’t have turned up. His scene wasn’t rehearsed that night due to the persistent problems with Macbeth who had turned out to be rubbish. Lady Macbeth looked about to punch him at any minute. Naruto watched ‘her’ thin, evil smile and shivered.
The advantage of casting Orochimaru as a psychotic corrupter of men was that he didn’t even need to act.
It didn’t make Naruto like him any better.
He had been uncomfortable about Orochimaru from the first day, and grown even more uncomfortable as Orochimaru seemed to have an unhealthy interest in Sasuke. He was always lending him books, talking to him about politics (a generally taboo subject in the camp for many reasons) and looking at him with those sickly pretty eyes.
Naruto had to confess that his own interest in Sasuke could be termed unhealthy but that wasn’t the point.
Nope.
Macbeth got his words wrong, AGAIN, and then panicked and fell off the stage.
Naruto banged his head on the table. It looked like a re-casting would be in order.
Two days later Naruto walked into their room to find Sasuke talking to Orochimaru. At once the hair went up on the back of Naruto’s neck and he had to force the smile. Orochimaru barely acknowledged it. He was sitting near to Sasuke, his hand on the chair arm, long fingers idly stroking the threadbare upholstery. Naruto sat on his bed and stared meaningfully.
“I think you would be perfect for the role.” Orochimaru said, softly
“I don’t act.” Sasuke replied, firmly.
“It passes the time.”
“So does reading.”
“Ah, but you are running out of reading material. We all are.”
Sasuke inclined his head in reluctant agreement. Naruto caught a moment of misery in Sasuke’s eyes before he hid it manfully. The prospect of nothing left to read, of no mental escape from where he was, evidently scared him and might even force him to interact with his fellow prisoners out of sheer desperation.
If Naruto had known that lack of books would encourage Sasuke to talk to him (even noticing his existence would be nice) then he would have started hiding them months ago.
“Naruto,” Orochimaru made Naruto jump, “Tell Sasuke to be Macbeth.”
“We don’t even know if he can act.” Naruto tried not to show the way his heart had started pounding. All of his instincts were against Sasuke spending any extended time with Orochimaru, especially not as Macbeth with his ‘wife’ all over him for four acts.
This was of course the wrong thing to say. Sasuke glared, mortally offended at the suggestion that there was any arena of human endeavour in which he might not excel. He would probably claim to be a championship cake maker if pressed. Naruto groaned and collapsed back on the bed.
They had a new Macbeth.
“I’m going to be a tree!”
“Um...well, it’s good to try new things.”
Konohamaru laughed. He flourished some branches that a camp guard had brought in for him, “You know, the bit where Macbeth sees the forest moving but it’s really the soldiers carrying branches?”
“Ah!” Naruto said with some relief, “That’s alright then, I thought you had gone peculiar.”
Hans wandered by, over heard this and sniggered, “No more peculiar than usual!”
Konohamaru threw a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works at him, which would have killed him if it had hit, but which fortunately bounced off the back of Sasuke’s chair instead. Sasuke turned round and snapped,
“Keep your pet under control, Uzumaki.”
“Having trouble learning your lines, Uchiha?” Naruto asked, breezily, as Konohamaru gave Sasuke a backwards victory sign, “Is there actually something you ain’t good at?”
Sasuke snorted, “Unlike some people round here I went to a good school that made us memorise Shakespeare as a matter of course.”
Naruto swallowed his rage, for Konahamaru’s sake. He wanted to get Sasuke in a headlock for that comment but it wouldn’t do for Konohamaru to see that. He was already prone to violence when annoyed.
“Bottom of the class, were you?” Naruto enquired, fake sympathetic.
“I’ve never been bottom anything!” Sasuke blurted without thinking and Naruto burst out laughing.
Sasuke reddened and went back to his script.
“I don’t get it.” Konohamaru frowned.
“Never mind...be a tree!”
Konohamaru started waving his branches enthusiastically.
Some time later Lady Macbeth was telling Lord Macbeth, very wordily, to stop being so wet and get on with killing the king. To be fair, Sasuke didn’t look like the type to need encouragement to kill anyone.
To Naruto’s irritation Sasuke was word perfect but for once Naruto wasn’t actually paying much attention to Sasuke. Orochimaru kept drawing his eye. Naruto watched him, fists clenched, and had to keep holding back from rushing the stage, yelling, ‘Get off him! Stop groping him!’ Naruto looked around to see if anyone else felt that Lady Macbeth was being rather too...familiar...with her husband but no one seemed perturbed.
Maybe he was over reacting. Maybe...
Maybe he was in love with Sasuke.
Naruto walked out.
Some hours later he was lying in his bed, listening to the sea through the open window, when Sasuke got back from the rehearsal. It was dark in their room and Naruto was lying on his side facing away from the door but he recognised the tread and the way Sasuke got undressed and the squeak of bed springs as he tried to get comfortable in a bed much cheaper than he was used to after a privileged pre-war existence.
Naruto supposed that in a sense he was lucky. The lack of food, the second hand clothes, the constant economising. He was used to it. He came from a previously well heeled manufacturing family that had fallen on hard times. The deprivations of the war had come as no surprise to him. For Sasuke it must have been a terrible shock. Most of his life if he needed something he sent his servants out to buy it.
“I know you’re awake.” Sasuke said.
“How?”
“You aren’t snoring.”
Damn it! He should have pretended to snore.
“Why did you storm out like that earlier?” Sasuke demanded. Naruto had noticed long ago that Sasuke couldn’t just ask a question, he always said it as though it was a warning shot across the bows. Answer or else.
Naruto decided that a part truth was the best kind of lie. “I’ve never liked Orochimaru. I don’t like even being in the same room with him.”
“Why join the theatre then? You knew he was a member.”
“You have to join things, spend time with people, or you’ll go nuts. Just some days I can’t endure him.”
“I’ve been here two years without joining anything, until now. Am I nuts?”
“Yes, of course you are.”
Sasuke laughed. It made Naruto jump.
And it made him fall asleep with a smile on his face.
A few days later Naruto made the mistake of walking into Hans’ room to get a record he had lent him and found two men on Hans’ bed, half naked and in each other’s arms. He froze and they looked at him with horror all over their faces. One of them immediately stumbled to his feet and reached out an imploring hand to Naruto.
“Please, please don’t tell...”
“It’s alright.” Naruto said quickly. His face was on fire. He hoped that Hans didn’t know what his room mate did on his bed when Hans wasn’t there. Then again, Naruto had always liked Hans. Maybe he DID know and wasn’t upset by it.
“It is?” the standing man stuttered, looking doubtful, as though convinced that Naruto would run off to the authorities the moment he left the room. His lover was curled up on the bed with a sick fear on his face.
“I...” Naruto swallowed, “I am in no position to comment, let’s just put it that way.”
Comprehension and relief washed over the men’s faces.
“There’s a lot of it about.” The first man said, his laugh a trifle hysterical.
“Maybe you should wedge a chair up against the door next time?” Naruto suggested, backing out.
Back in the street Naruto leaned over the sea wall and threw up.
Because he knew that Sasuke would never want him like that.
These things went on. Everyone knew it. There were no women on the island aside from some rather stolid nurses because, presumably, the authorities didn’t wish to risk the flower of English womanhood amongst so many frightful foreigners.
This amused Naruto, in a grim sort of way. The flower of English womanhood could not have been safer than with him.
In fact, virtually everyone would be safe with Naruto even if they were locked in a bomb shelter with him. He really only had eyes, (and arms, and hands, and heart), for Sasuke.
So, it went on. Men who would never have approached another man in that way before the war got desperate one night (and perhaps tidly on bootleg booze) and one thing led to another. But you weren’t meant to CHOOSE it. Outside the ridiculous situation they were in, it was supposed to be women all the way. You weren’t meant to want it. You certainly weren’t meant to have warm, fluffy feelings for another man. That made you a deviant, an invert, someone to be imprisoned. That made you like Oscar Wilde.
Naruto sighed and stuffed his head under his thin pillow.
He couldn’t sleep. It was June and the three week English summer had finally arrived and he was too hot. In the next bed Sasuke was having no such trouble. His breathing was even and deep and Naruto could almost see his sleeping face.
Swearing under his breath he flopped onto his back with a squeak of bed springs and reflected that this bed wasn’t going to last much longer. It bowed so much with age that his legs sloped away from him. One day he would get in and it would collapse entirely.
Maybe half naked men had been at it on his bed when he was out and it could take no more.
Naruto couldn’t help thinking about them. In the brief moment before he realised what he had been seeing and they had realised that he was there, they had looked so...beautiful and happy. One had been smiling gently and touching the other one’s face. No one had ever touched Naruto with such adoration. It was like something from the movies, a world that Naruto had previously given no credence to.
Growling with frustration he pummelled his pillow.
Out there men were dying all over the world and the Nazis were advancing and all he could do was sit on his arse in a beach resort and pine over Sasuke.
“What’s wrong with you tonight?” Sasuke asked, sounding not at all sleepy.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“No, I can’t manage it tonight. I tried to breathe as though I was asleep to encourage it but nothing giving.”
“Me neither.”
“We’ve been stuck in this place a long time, haven’t we.”
“Forever.”
“I have a wife out there somewhere.”
Naruto gaped, “You do?”
“Yes.”
“I feel for the chaps here that have wives. I always think it’s worse to miss someone than to have no one to miss.” Naruto congratulated himself on sounding calm and not hideously disappointed and heartbroken. Sasuke had a wife. A wife. Even an optimist like Naruto was prepared to admit that that was a bad sign.
“Hn.” Sasuke didn’t sound sentimental, it had to be said.
“Where is she?”
“No idea.”
“They haven’t interned her too? I thought they didn’t intern women.”
“They don’t. When I say that I don’t know where she is I mean that she walked out.”
“After Pearl Harbour?” Naruto prompted, tactfully. It was a common story in the camp. Men who had married English wives only to find that 'til death us do part had a sub clause, 'til death us do part, or until your race goes to war with mine.
“No. She left in 1937.”
Naruto gaped again. Was Sasuke ill? Why was the most private man in unoccupied Europe telling his secrets to Naruto? Maybe the isolation, the tedium, the sense of being rejected by one’s own country, had finally got to him.
“Didn’t you look for her?” Naruto hated her already, despite being grateful to her for leaving. HE would never have left Sasuke. Punched him occasionally, perhaps, but not left. Tried to kill him for being a grumpy tosspot, but not left.
“I was relieved when she went. I was...not really interested.”
“Oh.”
There was a long silence during which Naruto remembered jokily telling Sasuke that he had gone nuts but now wondering if he really had.
“Orochimaru says that you look at me a lot.”
Naruto stiffened. Panic surged up his gullet. He KNEW that Orochimaru was evil. He KNEW it.
Could he turn it into a joke?
“Ha ha,” he said, “I am just looking for a sign of life. Ha ha.”
Sasuke shifted in bed. Naruto tried not to pant with nervous tension.
“Orochimaru says that you’re an invert, a queer.”
Naruto closed his eyes. He was going to fuck over that bastard next chance he got. Orochimaru was obviously out to ruin Naruto’s life.
“I haven’t messed around with anyone here.” Naruto hissed, “And you know it.”
“I agree that you don’t seem to act on it. But, nevertheless, I think that Orochimaru is right.”
“What business is it of yours? Seems to me that this isn’t a thing that chaps discuss.”
“Isn’t it?” Sasuke’s bed squealed. He had stood up. Naruto heard his socked feet cross the floor.
‘He’s coming to kill me,’ Naruto thought, stomach full of sick, ‘He is enraged at the fact that his room mate is ‘one of them’.
Sasuke was now near enough for Naruto to see his face. He didn’t look angry but, Naruto thought, he might be so angry that he had passed through the other side into deadly stillness. Naruto had had a cat like that once. He remembered the starling guts all over the linoleum.
Sasuke leaned down, “Like I said, we’ve been stuck here on this god forsaken island for a long time and we’re not likely to leave any day soon. So,”
“So?” Naruto hissed, coiling for a quick getaway but wondering at Sasuke’s words.
Sasuke sat on Naruto’s bed and the springs failed to do their job as usual. Naruto rolled almost into Sasuke’s lap. A hand collided with a thigh.
Sasuke leaned down and ran a hand down the v neck of Naruto’s pyjamas, cool fingers stroking heated skin. Naruto shivered uncontrollably, lost for words. This wasn’t a form of murder that he knew.
“I think Orochimaru thought that I would be disgusted with you when he told me. Shows what he knows. What I actually thought was that if you are queer, and I know it, then you aren’t going to go about blabbing about this.”
“About this?”
“This...”
Sasuke leant down and kissed Naruto’s mouth hungrily.
Naruto immediately dug his fingers into Sasuke’s hair and pulled his body down against his. Naruto’s body was experiencing none of the doubt roiling in his mind.
Sasuke’s mouth was warm and surprisingly candid. He kissed without uncertainty. He kissed with lust.
Naruto’s ears caught fire and he pushed his hand down Sasuke’s pyjamas at once. There was nothing to be gained by waiting. The rule was to get the other chap happy as efficiently as possible so as not to seem to be savouring it, enjoying it, beyond simple physical release. Besides, Sasuke had ‘sentiment-free sex please, we’re (sort of) British,’ written all over him.
Sasuke was hard and his skin was warm and silky and Naruto felt as though he was bursting with joy. He was touching Sasuke. He was actually touching him.
And Sasuke was jerking his narrow hips against Naruto’s and touching him back.
Knowing, clever fingers reached under Naruto’s clothes and grasped him confidently. Naruto whimpered once and then bit his lip to keep any further, incriminating, sounds to himself.
Sasuke was using him. Naruto had understood his words. Sasuke had needs like anyone else and had so far repressed them because he feared that his partner would talk. Naruto, Sasuke now knew, couldn’t talk because he was in far too vulnerable a position.
With a normal man, such as himself, Sasuke risked a crisis of conscience and subsequent public confession.
Naruto had too much to lose. Plus he had been hiding his whole life and ought to be good at it by now.
Put simply, Sasuke was taking advantage of the fact that his room mate was a poofter.
Naruto didn’t care.
Sasuke’s hand moved wetly and Naruto thrust into it, bliss pouring down his spine. Nothing else mattered.
Sasuke’s breath quickened. Naruto stroked his thumb over the head of him and teased.
The bed shrieked.
Sasuke went very still suddenly. His hand tightened on Naruto’s body, squeezing the climax out of him, just as wet heat spurted into Naruto’s hand.
Two, low groans drifted out the window.
Naruto looked up from his book (he was reading Jane Eyre for the fourth time, he had read more books on this island in two years than the whole of the rest of his life put together) and watched Sasuke going over his lines.
It was as though it had never happened and Naruto would have suspected a dream if it weren’t for the fact that he woke up with dried white stuff on his hand.
He sighed and tried to concentrate on his book. Jane was demanding to know why Rochester thought that she had no feelings and no soul simply because she was poor and beneath him.
Naruto was willing to concede that there was probably a good reason why he had read Jane Eyre four times.
Not that he had much hope that it would turn out as well for him as it had for her.
His own, personal, Mr Rochester was apparently unfazed by their night time encounter and didn’t see it as a reason to be any less irritable or sneering than usual. He was very definitely approaching the whole thing in the prescribed manner, suggesting that he was fundamentally NOT queer.
Naruto was just...convenient.
He re-read the same paragraph and still couldn’t take it in.
Last night he had told himself that he didn’t care that Sasuke had no feelings for him.
Amazing what you’ll tell yourself when there is sex at stake.
Now, more than anything, Naruto wanted to walk over and kiss Sasuke in broad daylight and have Sasuke look at him the way those two men in Hans’ bed had looked at each other. Contrary to his hopes, having Sasuke in his bed didn’t make it better. It made it much, much worse.
Although the memory of it was...persistent.
That night Naruto lay in bed, stomach tight with doubt and hope and watched Sasuke watching him. Only now was it impossible for things to be quite as they were.
Usually Naruto would have teased Sasuke, threatened to sing or tell bawdy jokes, just to rile the man up until a pillow sailed through the air. That was their accustomed bedtime ritual. Naruto had established it early on when he had noticed Sasuke’s tendency to brood in the evenings. Also it was always fun to make Sasuke cross.
Now...now they were both thinking the same thing, and both knew that the other was thinking it.
‘Will it happen again?’
As far as Naruto was concerned the only thing worse than it happening was it not happening. What a choice! Sasuke indulging in some fumbling with him, while Naruto knew that, for Sasuke, he might as well be anyone. That it wasn’t Naruto he wanted, merely relief. Or, even worse, nothing happening at all and realising that it would be that one time and no other.
And never being able to touch Sasuke again except to steal his chocolate ration or take back a hostage gramophone record.
Naruto waited.
The light was turned out and Sasuke’s bed creaked.
Was he really going to bed? Naruto’s heart began to sink.
“Are you asleep?” he asked, tentative, fighting his natural personality which was to reach out for the things he wanted without hesitation. This was the one thing he had spent his life schooling himself NOT to reach out for, for his own safety.
“No.”
Naruto had thus exhausted his fund of seductive banter and so returned to chewing his lip anxiously.
There was eventually a sigh from the next bed.
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
Yes, Naruto thought, you owe me that much. His heart was pounding so that his ribs vibrated. Not just one night then? He could almost hear Miss Eyre cheering him on.
“I don’t think your springs will survive again, so you had better come over here.” Sasuke sounded quite calm, which annoyed Naruto as he himself was anything but. His knees shook as he crossed the floor.
‘Pull yourself together and stop being such a wimp,’ he told himself, firmly.
Consequently, by the time he reached Sasuke’s bed and they could see each other in the dark, he was grinning wickedly.
He sat on the bed and twisted a hand in Sasuke’s pyjama jacket, pulled him roughly up for a hungry kiss and while his room mate was distracted, reached out to turn the light on. Sasuke at once struggled to reach out and turn it off again. Naruto pinned him to the bed and looked into angry, dark eyes.
“The light stays on.” Naruto hissed.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not ashamed.”
Sasuke stared at him, open mouthed, clearly shocked by Naruto’s failure this time to follow the etiquette but Naruto had gone too far to turn back. Somewhere during crossing the floor to Sasuke’s bed Naruto had remembered who he was.
He bent his head and kissed Sasuke again, wondering if he was about to be thrown off the bed by a well aimed kick to the stomach. Because with the light on it was impossible for Sasuke to forget that the person with him was Naruto. That was the purpose of keeping the lights off, it allowed the men to pretend that they were in bed with their sweethearts and also allow a strange sort of plausible denial in the morning.
Sasuke kissed him back then.
Much harder than he had the night before.
This time there was a sense of lingering about it, of taking their time. Naruto was ecstatic but trying to hide it. Any triumph in his face would injure Sasuke’s dignity and the whole thing could still get called off. Sasuke’s mood turned on a die at the best of times.
Fortunately, right now, it seemed to be settled on lust.
Naruto found himself naked before he had even breathed out.
Then, very suddenly, Sasuke was naked too and Naruto’s eyes ran over him, skittering and stumbling at the ache and hunger of it all. They looked at each other and Naruto felt an odd sort of pride that Sasuke was so brave, so able to throw away the rules of this sort of encounter and lie there with no visible regret.
Then there were hands, and mouths and sobbing, thrusting pleasure, and Naruto’s fingers tangled in Sasuke’s black hair and hips shuddering.
Sasuke moaning openly, eyes half closed and body flushed.
And Naruto tasting himself on Sasuke’s tongue afterwards.
Panting, they lay in a woven heap and Sasuke pushed Naruto’s hair back from his forehead and said,
“I...Naruto, I...”
And then the air raid siren went off and sliced right through the moment like a knife through soap.
It was nearer than it had been in a long time. Their shelter hummed to the sound of German aircraft engines and each hit sounded closer than the last. Naruto looked out for Konohamaru but the boy actually fell asleep half way through.
“Sleeping through an air raid...” Naruto said, shaking his head in wonder.
Sasuke, sat next to him, glanced down at the boy curled up on the floor and then at Naruto. “He’s lucky to have met you.” He said, coolly.
“Is he?”
“Yes, you’ll be a good father one day.”
Naruto sighed. Who did Sasuke think he was talking to?
They had dressed quickly once the siren went off, not really looking at each other but, crazed by the strangeness of the last two days and by the fact that, as usual, there was a good chance that this would be the air raid that killed one or both of them, Naruto had pulled Sasuke towards him and kissed him meaningfully before they left the room. After all, the bombers sounded like they meant it, and this could be his last chance.
He would have kissed Sasuke again now in the shelter if it wasn’t for the fact that Orochimaru was sat just across from them and just feeling his eyes on them made Naruto feel dirty and ill.
He supposed though that he ought to be grateful. If it hadn’t been for Orochimaru’s meddling, none of this would have happened.
The raid seemed to last forever. Every time they thought it over there was another wave. Some wag, clearly thinking themselves original, pointed out to a guard that it was peculiar that the Germans should bomb people that were supposed to be on their side.
He must be new in the camp, Naruto thought. He didn’t know that someone said that during every air raid in varying tones of bitterness.
The guard merely smiled tolerantly and passed round a cigarette.
Inspired by Konohamaru Naruto began to drop off towards the end of the raid as the bombers finally began to sound further away. His eyes were heavy; after all, he hadn’t had much sleep lately.
The all clear woke him up and he caught the end of a quiet conversation between Sasuke and someone else.
“Alright, I’ll write to my solicitor and arrange it.” Sasuke said, his voice somewhere above Naruto’s head, suggesting that Naruto had fallen asleep in his lap.
“Thanks, old chap.” Orochimaru’s voice, without question.
Naruto stiffened. What sort of arrangement was Sasuke entering into? Naruto wouldn’t even buy shoelaces from that man.
It was dawn by the time they emerged from the shelter and hardly worth going back to bed so most of the theatre troop decided to head off for an impromptu rehearsal. Air raids always left people a little over-excited, thrilled almost. They had survived another one and it had sounded a close one. There were bells in the distance suggesting that parts of the island outside the camp were on fire but most of the bombs had apparently fallen into the sea because there was no obvious damage to the buildings.
Konohamaru looked disappointed. Naruto knew that the boy secretly hoped that one day there would be a huge raid that would give him a chance to escape. What Konohamaru planned to do once confronted by the sea was anyone’s guess.
During the rehearsal Naruto managed to simultaneously discuss the finer points of Rita Hayworth with Hans, paint some scenery, break up a fight over a packet of toffee and not once take his eyes off Sasuke. Occasionally Sasuke would turn round as though he could sense it. Their eyes would meet briefly then drift away.
Naruto jumped when Orochimaru crept up on him, eyes too bright and too friendly by half. The man leaned forward and Naruto resisted a desire to stuff his paint brush down the bastard’s trousers.
“Sasuke tells me that you aren’t the fool everyone takes you for.” Orochimaru murmured.
Naruto snorted. Talk about a backhanded compliment...
“I was thinking that we should get to know each other.” Orochimaru added. “They are bound to let us out soon; we’ll need each other on the outside.”
“You honestly think that they’ll release us before the war is over?”
Naruto laughed, “No way, mate!”
“The internments aren’t popular on the outside. It’s seen as something that the Germans would do.”
“I don’t know about you but my neighbours were pretty bloody happy when they came and took me away!” Naruto stated, vigorously painting a tree.
“That was years ago, when the war had just started. People have calmed down a little now, so I am told.” Orochimaru was still smiling and Naruto wished he would stop because it was disturbing. “And they are low on man power. I think they will let us out soon to be firemen, air raid wardens, that sort of thing.”
Naruto rolled his eyes. And they called HIM an optimist!
“When they do we’ll need each other.” Orochimaru continued, unflapped, “No one can understand you like your own countrymen.”
Naruto turned the full force of his eyes onto the man. ‘You don’t understand me at all and you aren’t my countryman; I don’t care what blood we carry.’ He wanted to say it but he didn’t want to anger Orochimaru and prompt the man to blab Naruto’s secret all over the camp. “As far as I am concerned I am British.” He said in the end.
Orochimaru inclined his head gracefully and walked off to rehearse his scene of repentance as Lady Macbeth.
As if Orochimaru would ever repent anything.
The opening night came quicker than Naruto could have anticipated. Time passes swiftly when you don’t sleep much. He spent every night in Sasuke’s bed and was starting to feel very much as though he belonged there.
Sasuke didn’t even try to turn the light out any more.
Naruto finished gluing on the last of Konahamaru’s branches and suppressed a chuckle at the memories of the night before.
He wondered if anyone would notice that Lord Macbeth was walking funny.
Backstage was chaotic and noisy, all clanking armour and people shouting at other people for stepping on their robes. On the other side of the threadbare curtain half the camp seemed assembled.
Shortly before curtain up Naruto realised that he had lost his prop and hurried into the warren of corridors behind the stage, peering at shelves and tables of bendy swords and buckets of water (in case of fire). He collided with Sasuke coming the other way, robe in one hand, pasteboard crown in the other. They smiled at each other.
Naruto couldn’t help himself. He glanced around quickly and pushed Sasuke against the wall and kissed him passionately. Sasuke barely struggled and kissed him back almost at once. Happiness surged through Naruto’s skin.
Lately Sasuke, had he but known it, had started to look at Naruto just as Hans’ roommate had looked at his lover.
Like he wasn’t about to let Naruto go.
When they broke apart Sasuke mustered a glare, “You pillock, are you trying to get caught.”
Naruto grinned, “Cheer up, you miserable sod, it’s opening night!”
“I would like to see you be cheerful if you were as sore as I am!” Sasuke hissed.
Naruto’s belly burned, “You were beautiful last night.” He said, softly.
Sasuke opened his mouth and then closed it again and seemed about to touch Naruto’s face when the five minute bell went.
“Go on,” Naruto scrambled around frantically and finally found his platter, “You’ve a country to conquer.”
It happened just before Naruto’s one and only line. He was about to walk on stage when the doors at the back of the auditorium opened abruptly and the house lights came on. There was a rumble of dismay and objection to this until the audience saw a dozen military police stalk in.
Then the building went very silent.
The police worked their way through the room, calling out names and occasionally pulling someone to their feet. By the time they got to the stage one of the guards, who had been frantically whispering to a policeman, took it upon himself to make an announcement.
“No need for any fuss gents, it looks like there’s been a spot of unpleasantness and we are transferring a few people to prison on the mainland.”
“What for?” Someone yelled.
Naruto watched as Orochimaru was dragged out of the wings and added to the small knot of men about to be taken away.
Sasuke was standing in the wings on the other side of the stage. Naruto knew what would happen before it even did and his first instinct was to run across the boards and yank Sasuke out of the policeman’s grasp but Sasuke shook his head almost imperceptibly.
Beside Naruto, Konohamaru laid a hand on his arm.
Sasuke was soon added to the half dozen men. Naruto could hardly see him behind all the policemen. His whole body was screaming at him to DO SOMETHING.
“We have evidence that these prisoners have been getting messages to the mainland and funding spies. They are to be imprisoned for treason for the rest of the war.” The guard told the crowd, aware perhaps that the men would riot if their compatriots were removed without explanation. A buzz of chatter went round the hall. A few men stood up angrily as if about to start trouble but were dragged back down by friends.
“We’re very sorry that this has happened.” The guard told them, “Rest assured that there will be a fair trial.”
Naruto watched as the arrested men were marched out of the theatre.
He watched until Sasuke was out of sight.
1947
Naruto opened the study door with his elbow and congratulated himself on balancing the tea tray successfully. If he broke one more set of china then he wasn’t going to have much wages left.
His employer, an elderly Quaker who scorned to condemn a man just because he was Japanese and had spent the war in an internment camp, was asleep by the fire with a newspaper over his face.
Naruto smiled and put the tray down quietly. He was about to extricate his legs from the cat and creep out when he saw the headline.
TRAITORS RELEASED AFTER FIVE YEAR SENTENCE
His heart nearly stopped. He snatched up the paper, causing a brief grunt from the old man before he settled back to sleep, glasses halfway down his nose.
It took less than a minute to read the article.
It took one month to work out his notice.
It took six weeks to find out where Sasuke was.
It took five minutes stood in Sasuke’s drawing room for them to cross the carpet and smile at each other.
1951
“I’m putting it on.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“Maybe not, but I could deny you sex for the next fortnight until you wish you had never even HEARD of Glen Miller.” Sasuke smirked.
“You’re evil.”
“That reminds me. I got a letter from Orochimaru.”
Naruto snarled and got up from his chair. He went over to where his lover lay sprawled in the South American sunshine. Sasuke blinked up at him.
“How dare he write to you after what he did.” Naruto sat down and started to pick grass out of Sasuke’s hair.
“Stop that, I’m not a monkey." Sasuke batted Naruto's hand away, "Orochimaru always insisted that I knew exactly what his friends would use my money for. He claimed that it was only my own guilt that made me pretend not to.”
“That old bastard.”
“He wants more money, as it happens.”
“What did you say in reply.”
“I told him that he ever came within a hundred feet of you or me again, I would kill him.”
Naruto laid his head on Sasuke’s shoulder and nodded. Sasuke meant it and Orochimaru knew it. The prison authorities had spent five years preventing Sasuke from killing Orochimaru. It was amazing that Orochimaru continued to push it.
Naruto knew that the whole war haunted Sasuke. He knew that Sasuke wondered what his money had been used for, whether any of it had actually made it to the enemy before the authorities cottoned on. Naruto knew that Sasuke blamed himself.
“Cup of tea?” Naruto asked.
Sasuke smiled a little and nodded.
Naruto reflected as the kettle boiled. Tea as the solution to all ills. How could anyone have ever thought them anything but British?
They drank their tea in bed.
Although by then it had gone cold.
--------------------------------------------
“I’m playing it.”
“Don’t play it.”
“You can’t stop me playing it.”
“I can beat you with the gramophone.”
“It’s your gramophone.”
“I don’t care. Just...dear god...please don’t play it.”
“I’ve never heard you say please before.”
“Call it desperation.”
“I’m still going to play it.”
“What if I gave you my cigarette ration?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You could swap them with Kakashi for those pinups he has.”
“Nah.”
“Don’t you like pinups? He has Betty Page.”
“Of course I do...I’m not odd...Of course I like pinups!”
“Why are you sweating?”
Naruto bit his lip and put away the record. His desire to irritate Sasuke was outweighed by the dangerous direction that the conversation had just taken. Sasuke was looking at him suspiciously as if he knew that Naruto not caring much about Betty Page was highly significant.
Naruto needed to be more careful.
Satisfied that he wasn’t about to be tortured by ‘Run Rabbit Run’ Sasuke went back to his chair and took up a copy of The Lady from 1938. Naruto had grown tired of taking the mickey out of Sasuke’s reading material. Truth was he, like everyone else, had been through everything decent in the camp already and it was better than nothing at all. The Lady had come somewhere after Racing Week and How To Build Your Anderson Shelter.
Naruto felt that the last one had been put there by the guards in a moment of sarcasm, seeing as how none of the camp’s residents actually had a home or garden in which to build a shelter.
Not any more.
Naruto sighed and went to the window. The sea was as grey as ever and covered in wire and landmines. It hardly seemed fair. They had been trapped on this bloody island for two years and they couldn’t even lie on the beach or go paddling. He always felt like pointing out that there was no point barricading the beach against the Germans, seeing as how virtually everyone on the island was a spy for the axis powers anyway.
In theory.
Naruto was fairly sure that he wasn’t a spy.
He would have noticed.
Sometimes he lost count of all the unacceptable things that he actually was, all the different ways he had managed to be wrong. First, he was Japanese, which for some mad reason hadn’t gone down all that well in England since the war broke out. Second, he was poor and had left school when he was fifteen, which hadn’t gone down well with his very educated, very posh, room mate Sasuke, either. Third, he was...well...Naruto wasn’t sure of the technical term. He had only heard slang words for it.
Queer.
Bent.
Pansy.
Oh, and there were the hints, the short hand references to it which weren’t exactly an accusation but the mere use of which about another man put him into some category of no mans land. “I don’t know about him...” was one. Another was, “He’s a strange one.” Either was enough for a prisoner to refuse to share a room with you.
Fortunately Naruto had managed to avoid having anything like that said about him.
But the pinups slip had been a close one. If Sasuke wasn’t so uninterested in Naruto and everything to do with him, Naruto would probably have been in big trouble. After all, what normal man wouldn’t be excited at the thought of half naked female pinups?
Naruto resisted an urge to bang his head on the window.
He was saved from the obsessive merry go round in his mind by Konohamaru who bounded in with a big grin, oblivious to the disdainful glare it earned him from Sasuke.
“It’s seven o clock!” Konohamaru announced, sounding like a manic announcer from the BBC.
“Alright, I’m coming.”
“Are you joining us?” Konohamaru demanded, tugging down Sasuke’s magazine and forcing him to look at him. Sasuke’s eyes narrowed and his thin, pale fingers snapped up to grab Konahamaru’s wrist, squeezing in a way that must be painful.
Konohamaru snatched his hand away and rubbed it, looking both hurt and angry. Naruto kicked Sasuke’s shin hard on his way out.
“Why does he have to be such an old bastard?” Konohamaru complained as they walked downstairs and out the front door. “He acts as though he’s the only one that doesn’t want to be here.”
“He thinks it’s worse for him. He was going to be a fighter pilot. He was going to be a hero.”
“No chance! He would have sneered at the recruiting officer and they would have shot him!”
Naruto grinned, “I would have liked to have seen that.”
“It must be terrible being his room mate. Can’t you do a swap?” Konohamaru kicked a pebble along the road with his elderly shoes.
“Who would take him?” Naruto said, secretly adding in the silence of his head, ‘and besides, I don’t plan to let him go.’
Konohamaru shrugged as if to indicate the mystery that was Sasuke’s place in the universe.
Naruto shivered. It was May and still cold. It didn’t feel like the Isle of Man sometimes. It felt like the fucking Orkneys. He loved the twisted logic of putting all the interned on an island. As if the barbed wire and guards wasn’t enough, they had the sea! And so there was no real need for a prison. They lived in the beach front guest houses and private homes that the rightful owners had been removed from. If it wasn’t for the fact that none of them could leave and that they were surrounded by Germans and Italians and armed guards, it would have been almost like a holiday by the sea.
Except that the holiday had been going on rather too long now.
They arrived at the ‘theatre’ at the same time as Hans.
“Evening!” Hans said cheerfully in his broad cockney accent. Naruto clapped him on the shoulder and they headed into the rehearsal.
The camp authorities approved of the theatre. They also approved of the orchestra, the evening classes, and the athletics club.
They had quickly put a stop to Kakashi’s book club though.
The camp authorities were, in fact, pretty embarrassed about the whole situation. In a very British way they seemed to feel that it was in rather poor taste to lock up ‘enemy aliens’ that were in fact British born and very likely entirely loyal. But people like Hans, despite being a barrow boy from Covent Garden, with a wife called Annie, were German, just as Naruto was Japanese and as such the British were at war with them too. Naruto felt British. He had wanted to fight. He had wanted to help.
But they wouldn’t let him.
They had just, slightly apologetically, hauled him out of bed one morning and dumped him in an internment camp on the Isle of Man where Naruto spent most of the first few months repeatedly explaining that, despite his looks, he was not German but Japanese. They hadn’t believed him until he showed them his passport.
New arrivals still assumed that he had wandered in from the German part of the camp.
It just further proved that he didn’t FIT anywhere.
Konohamaru tugged at his arm, “You look a bit glum, that’s not like you, what’s up?”
Naruto pulled himself together, smiled and denied everything. He reminded himself that he wasn’t usually one to wallow and that it could be worse. Unlike Hans he wasn’t missing his wife and kids, and unlike Konohamaru, he was old enough to know that this couldn’t last forever.
Konohamaru hadn’t coped well for the first few weeks, until Naruto took him in hand and forced him to join in with camp life. Before that the seventeen year old had been home sick and furious and practically simmered with resentment. He kept threatening to tunnel out, with rather more enthusiasm than geographical realism.
Naruto watched Konohamaru jump on stage to set up for act one and congratulated himself on how much the boy had cheered up.
If there was one thing that Naruto knew a lot about it was being cheerful.
No matter what.
They hadn’t had much choice about plays. First they had to exclude any with too many women (there were always ex-public school boys alarmingly prepared to drag up but most of them weren’t very convincing and, queer or not, Naruto objected to ‘women’ who looked like bears wrapped in a blanket) and then they had been forced to exclude all of Kakashi’s suggestions. Mainly because they didn’t have women. Or chickens. Or leather. And several other props that Naruto couldn't even spell and weren't available anywhere but some very specialised shops in the East End.
Which had pretty much left them with two options. A variety show which they had already done five times and they were, frankly, running out of variety. If Naruto had to watch Kiba and his bloody performing dog one more time he was going to hang himself.
Which left them with Shakespeare. Good old Shakespeare, being so frightfully English, was allowed in large amounts in the camp.
Secretly, Naruto couldn’t stand Shakespeare. Mainly because he hadn’t the foggiest what the man was on about. He understood one word in ten and had performed in several productions simply by memorising the words and hoping that the audience was better informed than he was.
This time they were doing Macbeth.
Naruto was A Serving Man.
The British class system. It got everywhere.
The rehearsal got going eventually. It was slightly held up by an air raid but it didn’t sound very near so no one bothered to go to the shelter.
In the end Naruto needn’t have turned up. His scene wasn’t rehearsed that night due to the persistent problems with Macbeth who had turned out to be rubbish. Lady Macbeth looked about to punch him at any minute. Naruto watched ‘her’ thin, evil smile and shivered.
The advantage of casting Orochimaru as a psychotic corrupter of men was that he didn’t even need to act.
It didn’t make Naruto like him any better.
He had been uncomfortable about Orochimaru from the first day, and grown even more uncomfortable as Orochimaru seemed to have an unhealthy interest in Sasuke. He was always lending him books, talking to him about politics (a generally taboo subject in the camp for many reasons) and looking at him with those sickly pretty eyes.
Naruto had to confess that his own interest in Sasuke could be termed unhealthy but that wasn’t the point.
Nope.
Macbeth got his words wrong, AGAIN, and then panicked and fell off the stage.
Naruto banged his head on the table. It looked like a re-casting would be in order.
Two days later Naruto walked into their room to find Sasuke talking to Orochimaru. At once the hair went up on the back of Naruto’s neck and he had to force the smile. Orochimaru barely acknowledged it. He was sitting near to Sasuke, his hand on the chair arm, long fingers idly stroking the threadbare upholstery. Naruto sat on his bed and stared meaningfully.
“I think you would be perfect for the role.” Orochimaru said, softly
“I don’t act.” Sasuke replied, firmly.
“It passes the time.”
“So does reading.”
“Ah, but you are running out of reading material. We all are.”
Sasuke inclined his head in reluctant agreement. Naruto caught a moment of misery in Sasuke’s eyes before he hid it manfully. The prospect of nothing left to read, of no mental escape from where he was, evidently scared him and might even force him to interact with his fellow prisoners out of sheer desperation.
If Naruto had known that lack of books would encourage Sasuke to talk to him (even noticing his existence would be nice) then he would have started hiding them months ago.
“Naruto,” Orochimaru made Naruto jump, “Tell Sasuke to be Macbeth.”
“We don’t even know if he can act.” Naruto tried not to show the way his heart had started pounding. All of his instincts were against Sasuke spending any extended time with Orochimaru, especially not as Macbeth with his ‘wife’ all over him for four acts.
This was of course the wrong thing to say. Sasuke glared, mortally offended at the suggestion that there was any arena of human endeavour in which he might not excel. He would probably claim to be a championship cake maker if pressed. Naruto groaned and collapsed back on the bed.
They had a new Macbeth.
“I’m going to be a tree!”
“Um...well, it’s good to try new things.”
Konohamaru laughed. He flourished some branches that a camp guard had brought in for him, “You know, the bit where Macbeth sees the forest moving but it’s really the soldiers carrying branches?”
“Ah!” Naruto said with some relief, “That’s alright then, I thought you had gone peculiar.”
Hans wandered by, over heard this and sniggered, “No more peculiar than usual!”
Konohamaru threw a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works at him, which would have killed him if it had hit, but which fortunately bounced off the back of Sasuke’s chair instead. Sasuke turned round and snapped,
“Keep your pet under control, Uzumaki.”
“Having trouble learning your lines, Uchiha?” Naruto asked, breezily, as Konohamaru gave Sasuke a backwards victory sign, “Is there actually something you ain’t good at?”
Sasuke snorted, “Unlike some people round here I went to a good school that made us memorise Shakespeare as a matter of course.”
Naruto swallowed his rage, for Konahamaru’s sake. He wanted to get Sasuke in a headlock for that comment but it wouldn’t do for Konohamaru to see that. He was already prone to violence when annoyed.
“Bottom of the class, were you?” Naruto enquired, fake sympathetic.
“I’ve never been bottom anything!” Sasuke blurted without thinking and Naruto burst out laughing.
Sasuke reddened and went back to his script.
“I don’t get it.” Konohamaru frowned.
“Never mind...be a tree!”
Konohamaru started waving his branches enthusiastically.
Some time later Lady Macbeth was telling Lord Macbeth, very wordily, to stop being so wet and get on with killing the king. To be fair, Sasuke didn’t look like the type to need encouragement to kill anyone.
To Naruto’s irritation Sasuke was word perfect but for once Naruto wasn’t actually paying much attention to Sasuke. Orochimaru kept drawing his eye. Naruto watched him, fists clenched, and had to keep holding back from rushing the stage, yelling, ‘Get off him! Stop groping him!’ Naruto looked around to see if anyone else felt that Lady Macbeth was being rather too...familiar...with her husband but no one seemed perturbed.
Maybe he was over reacting. Maybe...
Maybe he was in love with Sasuke.
Naruto walked out.
Some hours later he was lying in his bed, listening to the sea through the open window, when Sasuke got back from the rehearsal. It was dark in their room and Naruto was lying on his side facing away from the door but he recognised the tread and the way Sasuke got undressed and the squeak of bed springs as he tried to get comfortable in a bed much cheaper than he was used to after a privileged pre-war existence.
Naruto supposed that in a sense he was lucky. The lack of food, the second hand clothes, the constant economising. He was used to it. He came from a previously well heeled manufacturing family that had fallen on hard times. The deprivations of the war had come as no surprise to him. For Sasuke it must have been a terrible shock. Most of his life if he needed something he sent his servants out to buy it.
“I know you’re awake.” Sasuke said.
“How?”
“You aren’t snoring.”
Damn it! He should have pretended to snore.
“Why did you storm out like that earlier?” Sasuke demanded. Naruto had noticed long ago that Sasuke couldn’t just ask a question, he always said it as though it was a warning shot across the bows. Answer or else.
Naruto decided that a part truth was the best kind of lie. “I’ve never liked Orochimaru. I don’t like even being in the same room with him.”
“Why join the theatre then? You knew he was a member.”
“You have to join things, spend time with people, or you’ll go nuts. Just some days I can’t endure him.”
“I’ve been here two years without joining anything, until now. Am I nuts?”
“Yes, of course you are.”
Sasuke laughed. It made Naruto jump.
And it made him fall asleep with a smile on his face.
A few days later Naruto made the mistake of walking into Hans’ room to get a record he had lent him and found two men on Hans’ bed, half naked and in each other’s arms. He froze and they looked at him with horror all over their faces. One of them immediately stumbled to his feet and reached out an imploring hand to Naruto.
“Please, please don’t tell...”
“It’s alright.” Naruto said quickly. His face was on fire. He hoped that Hans didn’t know what his room mate did on his bed when Hans wasn’t there. Then again, Naruto had always liked Hans. Maybe he DID know and wasn’t upset by it.
“It is?” the standing man stuttered, looking doubtful, as though convinced that Naruto would run off to the authorities the moment he left the room. His lover was curled up on the bed with a sick fear on his face.
“I...” Naruto swallowed, “I am in no position to comment, let’s just put it that way.”
Comprehension and relief washed over the men’s faces.
“There’s a lot of it about.” The first man said, his laugh a trifle hysterical.
“Maybe you should wedge a chair up against the door next time?” Naruto suggested, backing out.
Back in the street Naruto leaned over the sea wall and threw up.
Because he knew that Sasuke would never want him like that.
These things went on. Everyone knew it. There were no women on the island aside from some rather stolid nurses because, presumably, the authorities didn’t wish to risk the flower of English womanhood amongst so many frightful foreigners.
This amused Naruto, in a grim sort of way. The flower of English womanhood could not have been safer than with him.
In fact, virtually everyone would be safe with Naruto even if they were locked in a bomb shelter with him. He really only had eyes, (and arms, and hands, and heart), for Sasuke.
So, it went on. Men who would never have approached another man in that way before the war got desperate one night (and perhaps tidly on bootleg booze) and one thing led to another. But you weren’t meant to CHOOSE it. Outside the ridiculous situation they were in, it was supposed to be women all the way. You weren’t meant to want it. You certainly weren’t meant to have warm, fluffy feelings for another man. That made you a deviant, an invert, someone to be imprisoned. That made you like Oscar Wilde.
Naruto sighed and stuffed his head under his thin pillow.
He couldn’t sleep. It was June and the three week English summer had finally arrived and he was too hot. In the next bed Sasuke was having no such trouble. His breathing was even and deep and Naruto could almost see his sleeping face.
Swearing under his breath he flopped onto his back with a squeak of bed springs and reflected that this bed wasn’t going to last much longer. It bowed so much with age that his legs sloped away from him. One day he would get in and it would collapse entirely.
Maybe half naked men had been at it on his bed when he was out and it could take no more.
Naruto couldn’t help thinking about them. In the brief moment before he realised what he had been seeing and they had realised that he was there, they had looked so...beautiful and happy. One had been smiling gently and touching the other one’s face. No one had ever touched Naruto with such adoration. It was like something from the movies, a world that Naruto had previously given no credence to.
Growling with frustration he pummelled his pillow.
Out there men were dying all over the world and the Nazis were advancing and all he could do was sit on his arse in a beach resort and pine over Sasuke.
“What’s wrong with you tonight?” Sasuke asked, sounding not at all sleepy.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“No, I can’t manage it tonight. I tried to breathe as though I was asleep to encourage it but nothing giving.”
“Me neither.”
“We’ve been stuck in this place a long time, haven’t we.”
“Forever.”
“I have a wife out there somewhere.”
Naruto gaped, “You do?”
“Yes.”
“I feel for the chaps here that have wives. I always think it’s worse to miss someone than to have no one to miss.” Naruto congratulated himself on sounding calm and not hideously disappointed and heartbroken. Sasuke had a wife. A wife. Even an optimist like Naruto was prepared to admit that that was a bad sign.
“Hn.” Sasuke didn’t sound sentimental, it had to be said.
“Where is she?”
“No idea.”
“They haven’t interned her too? I thought they didn’t intern women.”
“They don’t. When I say that I don’t know where she is I mean that she walked out.”
“After Pearl Harbour?” Naruto prompted, tactfully. It was a common story in the camp. Men who had married English wives only to find that 'til death us do part had a sub clause, 'til death us do part, or until your race goes to war with mine.
“No. She left in 1937.”
Naruto gaped again. Was Sasuke ill? Why was the most private man in unoccupied Europe telling his secrets to Naruto? Maybe the isolation, the tedium, the sense of being rejected by one’s own country, had finally got to him.
“Didn’t you look for her?” Naruto hated her already, despite being grateful to her for leaving. HE would never have left Sasuke. Punched him occasionally, perhaps, but not left. Tried to kill him for being a grumpy tosspot, but not left.
“I was relieved when she went. I was...not really interested.”
“Oh.”
There was a long silence during which Naruto remembered jokily telling Sasuke that he had gone nuts but now wondering if he really had.
“Orochimaru says that you look at me a lot.”
Naruto stiffened. Panic surged up his gullet. He KNEW that Orochimaru was evil. He KNEW it.
Could he turn it into a joke?
“Ha ha,” he said, “I am just looking for a sign of life. Ha ha.”
Sasuke shifted in bed. Naruto tried not to pant with nervous tension.
“Orochimaru says that you’re an invert, a queer.”
Naruto closed his eyes. He was going to fuck over that bastard next chance he got. Orochimaru was obviously out to ruin Naruto’s life.
“I haven’t messed around with anyone here.” Naruto hissed, “And you know it.”
“I agree that you don’t seem to act on it. But, nevertheless, I think that Orochimaru is right.”
“What business is it of yours? Seems to me that this isn’t a thing that chaps discuss.”
“Isn’t it?” Sasuke’s bed squealed. He had stood up. Naruto heard his socked feet cross the floor.
‘He’s coming to kill me,’ Naruto thought, stomach full of sick, ‘He is enraged at the fact that his room mate is ‘one of them’.
Sasuke was now near enough for Naruto to see his face. He didn’t look angry but, Naruto thought, he might be so angry that he had passed through the other side into deadly stillness. Naruto had had a cat like that once. He remembered the starling guts all over the linoleum.
Sasuke leaned down, “Like I said, we’ve been stuck here on this god forsaken island for a long time and we’re not likely to leave any day soon. So,”
“So?” Naruto hissed, coiling for a quick getaway but wondering at Sasuke’s words.
Sasuke sat on Naruto’s bed and the springs failed to do their job as usual. Naruto rolled almost into Sasuke’s lap. A hand collided with a thigh.
Sasuke leaned down and ran a hand down the v neck of Naruto’s pyjamas, cool fingers stroking heated skin. Naruto shivered uncontrollably, lost for words. This wasn’t a form of murder that he knew.
“I think Orochimaru thought that I would be disgusted with you when he told me. Shows what he knows. What I actually thought was that if you are queer, and I know it, then you aren’t going to go about blabbing about this.”
“About this?”
“This...”
Sasuke leant down and kissed Naruto’s mouth hungrily.
Naruto immediately dug his fingers into Sasuke’s hair and pulled his body down against his. Naruto’s body was experiencing none of the doubt roiling in his mind.
Sasuke’s mouth was warm and surprisingly candid. He kissed without uncertainty. He kissed with lust.
Naruto’s ears caught fire and he pushed his hand down Sasuke’s pyjamas at once. There was nothing to be gained by waiting. The rule was to get the other chap happy as efficiently as possible so as not to seem to be savouring it, enjoying it, beyond simple physical release. Besides, Sasuke had ‘sentiment-free sex please, we’re (sort of) British,’ written all over him.
Sasuke was hard and his skin was warm and silky and Naruto felt as though he was bursting with joy. He was touching Sasuke. He was actually touching him.
And Sasuke was jerking his narrow hips against Naruto’s and touching him back.
Knowing, clever fingers reached under Naruto’s clothes and grasped him confidently. Naruto whimpered once and then bit his lip to keep any further, incriminating, sounds to himself.
Sasuke was using him. Naruto had understood his words. Sasuke had needs like anyone else and had so far repressed them because he feared that his partner would talk. Naruto, Sasuke now knew, couldn’t talk because he was in far too vulnerable a position.
With a normal man, such as himself, Sasuke risked a crisis of conscience and subsequent public confession.
Naruto had too much to lose. Plus he had been hiding his whole life and ought to be good at it by now.
Put simply, Sasuke was taking advantage of the fact that his room mate was a poofter.
Naruto didn’t care.
Sasuke’s hand moved wetly and Naruto thrust into it, bliss pouring down his spine. Nothing else mattered.
Sasuke’s breath quickened. Naruto stroked his thumb over the head of him and teased.
The bed shrieked.
Sasuke went very still suddenly. His hand tightened on Naruto’s body, squeezing the climax out of him, just as wet heat spurted into Naruto’s hand.
Two, low groans drifted out the window.
Naruto looked up from his book (he was reading Jane Eyre for the fourth time, he had read more books on this island in two years than the whole of the rest of his life put together) and watched Sasuke going over his lines.
It was as though it had never happened and Naruto would have suspected a dream if it weren’t for the fact that he woke up with dried white stuff on his hand.
He sighed and tried to concentrate on his book. Jane was demanding to know why Rochester thought that she had no feelings and no soul simply because she was poor and beneath him.
Naruto was willing to concede that there was probably a good reason why he had read Jane Eyre four times.
Not that he had much hope that it would turn out as well for him as it had for her.
His own, personal, Mr Rochester was apparently unfazed by their night time encounter and didn’t see it as a reason to be any less irritable or sneering than usual. He was very definitely approaching the whole thing in the prescribed manner, suggesting that he was fundamentally NOT queer.
Naruto was just...convenient.
He re-read the same paragraph and still couldn’t take it in.
Last night he had told himself that he didn’t care that Sasuke had no feelings for him.
Amazing what you’ll tell yourself when there is sex at stake.
Now, more than anything, Naruto wanted to walk over and kiss Sasuke in broad daylight and have Sasuke look at him the way those two men in Hans’ bed had looked at each other. Contrary to his hopes, having Sasuke in his bed didn’t make it better. It made it much, much worse.
Although the memory of it was...persistent.
That night Naruto lay in bed, stomach tight with doubt and hope and watched Sasuke watching him. Only now was it impossible for things to be quite as they were.
Usually Naruto would have teased Sasuke, threatened to sing or tell bawdy jokes, just to rile the man up until a pillow sailed through the air. That was their accustomed bedtime ritual. Naruto had established it early on when he had noticed Sasuke’s tendency to brood in the evenings. Also it was always fun to make Sasuke cross.
Now...now they were both thinking the same thing, and both knew that the other was thinking it.
‘Will it happen again?’
As far as Naruto was concerned the only thing worse than it happening was it not happening. What a choice! Sasuke indulging in some fumbling with him, while Naruto knew that, for Sasuke, he might as well be anyone. That it wasn’t Naruto he wanted, merely relief. Or, even worse, nothing happening at all and realising that it would be that one time and no other.
And never being able to touch Sasuke again except to steal his chocolate ration or take back a hostage gramophone record.
Naruto waited.
The light was turned out and Sasuke’s bed creaked.
Was he really going to bed? Naruto’s heart began to sink.
“Are you asleep?” he asked, tentative, fighting his natural personality which was to reach out for the things he wanted without hesitation. This was the one thing he had spent his life schooling himself NOT to reach out for, for his own safety.
“No.”
Naruto had thus exhausted his fund of seductive banter and so returned to chewing his lip anxiously.
There was eventually a sigh from the next bed.
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
Yes, Naruto thought, you owe me that much. His heart was pounding so that his ribs vibrated. Not just one night then? He could almost hear Miss Eyre cheering him on.
“I don’t think your springs will survive again, so you had better come over here.” Sasuke sounded quite calm, which annoyed Naruto as he himself was anything but. His knees shook as he crossed the floor.
‘Pull yourself together and stop being such a wimp,’ he told himself, firmly.
Consequently, by the time he reached Sasuke’s bed and they could see each other in the dark, he was grinning wickedly.
He sat on the bed and twisted a hand in Sasuke’s pyjama jacket, pulled him roughly up for a hungry kiss and while his room mate was distracted, reached out to turn the light on. Sasuke at once struggled to reach out and turn it off again. Naruto pinned him to the bed and looked into angry, dark eyes.
“The light stays on.” Naruto hissed.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not ashamed.”
Sasuke stared at him, open mouthed, clearly shocked by Naruto’s failure this time to follow the etiquette but Naruto had gone too far to turn back. Somewhere during crossing the floor to Sasuke’s bed Naruto had remembered who he was.
He bent his head and kissed Sasuke again, wondering if he was about to be thrown off the bed by a well aimed kick to the stomach. Because with the light on it was impossible for Sasuke to forget that the person with him was Naruto. That was the purpose of keeping the lights off, it allowed the men to pretend that they were in bed with their sweethearts and also allow a strange sort of plausible denial in the morning.
Sasuke kissed him back then.
Much harder than he had the night before.
This time there was a sense of lingering about it, of taking their time. Naruto was ecstatic but trying to hide it. Any triumph in his face would injure Sasuke’s dignity and the whole thing could still get called off. Sasuke’s mood turned on a die at the best of times.
Fortunately, right now, it seemed to be settled on lust.
Naruto found himself naked before he had even breathed out.
Then, very suddenly, Sasuke was naked too and Naruto’s eyes ran over him, skittering and stumbling at the ache and hunger of it all. They looked at each other and Naruto felt an odd sort of pride that Sasuke was so brave, so able to throw away the rules of this sort of encounter and lie there with no visible regret.
Then there were hands, and mouths and sobbing, thrusting pleasure, and Naruto’s fingers tangled in Sasuke’s black hair and hips shuddering.
Sasuke moaning openly, eyes half closed and body flushed.
And Naruto tasting himself on Sasuke’s tongue afterwards.
Panting, they lay in a woven heap and Sasuke pushed Naruto’s hair back from his forehead and said,
“I...Naruto, I...”
And then the air raid siren went off and sliced right through the moment like a knife through soap.
It was nearer than it had been in a long time. Their shelter hummed to the sound of German aircraft engines and each hit sounded closer than the last. Naruto looked out for Konohamaru but the boy actually fell asleep half way through.
“Sleeping through an air raid...” Naruto said, shaking his head in wonder.
Sasuke, sat next to him, glanced down at the boy curled up on the floor and then at Naruto. “He’s lucky to have met you.” He said, coolly.
“Is he?”
“Yes, you’ll be a good father one day.”
Naruto sighed. Who did Sasuke think he was talking to?
They had dressed quickly once the siren went off, not really looking at each other but, crazed by the strangeness of the last two days and by the fact that, as usual, there was a good chance that this would be the air raid that killed one or both of them, Naruto had pulled Sasuke towards him and kissed him meaningfully before they left the room. After all, the bombers sounded like they meant it, and this could be his last chance.
He would have kissed Sasuke again now in the shelter if it wasn’t for the fact that Orochimaru was sat just across from them and just feeling his eyes on them made Naruto feel dirty and ill.
He supposed though that he ought to be grateful. If it hadn’t been for Orochimaru’s meddling, none of this would have happened.
The raid seemed to last forever. Every time they thought it over there was another wave. Some wag, clearly thinking themselves original, pointed out to a guard that it was peculiar that the Germans should bomb people that were supposed to be on their side.
He must be new in the camp, Naruto thought. He didn’t know that someone said that during every air raid in varying tones of bitterness.
The guard merely smiled tolerantly and passed round a cigarette.
Inspired by Konohamaru Naruto began to drop off towards the end of the raid as the bombers finally began to sound further away. His eyes were heavy; after all, he hadn’t had much sleep lately.
The all clear woke him up and he caught the end of a quiet conversation between Sasuke and someone else.
“Alright, I’ll write to my solicitor and arrange it.” Sasuke said, his voice somewhere above Naruto’s head, suggesting that Naruto had fallen asleep in his lap.
“Thanks, old chap.” Orochimaru’s voice, without question.
Naruto stiffened. What sort of arrangement was Sasuke entering into? Naruto wouldn’t even buy shoelaces from that man.
It was dawn by the time they emerged from the shelter and hardly worth going back to bed so most of the theatre troop decided to head off for an impromptu rehearsal. Air raids always left people a little over-excited, thrilled almost. They had survived another one and it had sounded a close one. There were bells in the distance suggesting that parts of the island outside the camp were on fire but most of the bombs had apparently fallen into the sea because there was no obvious damage to the buildings.
Konohamaru looked disappointed. Naruto knew that the boy secretly hoped that one day there would be a huge raid that would give him a chance to escape. What Konohamaru planned to do once confronted by the sea was anyone’s guess.
During the rehearsal Naruto managed to simultaneously discuss the finer points of Rita Hayworth with Hans, paint some scenery, break up a fight over a packet of toffee and not once take his eyes off Sasuke. Occasionally Sasuke would turn round as though he could sense it. Their eyes would meet briefly then drift away.
Naruto jumped when Orochimaru crept up on him, eyes too bright and too friendly by half. The man leaned forward and Naruto resisted a desire to stuff his paint brush down the bastard’s trousers.
“Sasuke tells me that you aren’t the fool everyone takes you for.” Orochimaru murmured.
Naruto snorted. Talk about a backhanded compliment...
“I was thinking that we should get to know each other.” Orochimaru added. “They are bound to let us out soon; we’ll need each other on the outside.”
“You honestly think that they’ll release us before the war is over?”
Naruto laughed, “No way, mate!”
“The internments aren’t popular on the outside. It’s seen as something that the Germans would do.”
“I don’t know about you but my neighbours were pretty bloody happy when they came and took me away!” Naruto stated, vigorously painting a tree.
“That was years ago, when the war had just started. People have calmed down a little now, so I am told.” Orochimaru was still smiling and Naruto wished he would stop because it was disturbing. “And they are low on man power. I think they will let us out soon to be firemen, air raid wardens, that sort of thing.”
Naruto rolled his eyes. And they called HIM an optimist!
“When they do we’ll need each other.” Orochimaru continued, unflapped, “No one can understand you like your own countrymen.”
Naruto turned the full force of his eyes onto the man. ‘You don’t understand me at all and you aren’t my countryman; I don’t care what blood we carry.’ He wanted to say it but he didn’t want to anger Orochimaru and prompt the man to blab Naruto’s secret all over the camp. “As far as I am concerned I am British.” He said in the end.
Orochimaru inclined his head gracefully and walked off to rehearse his scene of repentance as Lady Macbeth.
As if Orochimaru would ever repent anything.
The opening night came quicker than Naruto could have anticipated. Time passes swiftly when you don’t sleep much. He spent every night in Sasuke’s bed and was starting to feel very much as though he belonged there.
Sasuke didn’t even try to turn the light out any more.
Naruto finished gluing on the last of Konahamaru’s branches and suppressed a chuckle at the memories of the night before.
He wondered if anyone would notice that Lord Macbeth was walking funny.
Backstage was chaotic and noisy, all clanking armour and people shouting at other people for stepping on their robes. On the other side of the threadbare curtain half the camp seemed assembled.
Shortly before curtain up Naruto realised that he had lost his prop and hurried into the warren of corridors behind the stage, peering at shelves and tables of bendy swords and buckets of water (in case of fire). He collided with Sasuke coming the other way, robe in one hand, pasteboard crown in the other. They smiled at each other.
Naruto couldn’t help himself. He glanced around quickly and pushed Sasuke against the wall and kissed him passionately. Sasuke barely struggled and kissed him back almost at once. Happiness surged through Naruto’s skin.
Lately Sasuke, had he but known it, had started to look at Naruto just as Hans’ roommate had looked at his lover.
Like he wasn’t about to let Naruto go.
When they broke apart Sasuke mustered a glare, “You pillock, are you trying to get caught.”
Naruto grinned, “Cheer up, you miserable sod, it’s opening night!”
“I would like to see you be cheerful if you were as sore as I am!” Sasuke hissed.
Naruto’s belly burned, “You were beautiful last night.” He said, softly.
Sasuke opened his mouth and then closed it again and seemed about to touch Naruto’s face when the five minute bell went.
“Go on,” Naruto scrambled around frantically and finally found his platter, “You’ve a country to conquer.”
It happened just before Naruto’s one and only line. He was about to walk on stage when the doors at the back of the auditorium opened abruptly and the house lights came on. There was a rumble of dismay and objection to this until the audience saw a dozen military police stalk in.
Then the building went very silent.
The police worked their way through the room, calling out names and occasionally pulling someone to their feet. By the time they got to the stage one of the guards, who had been frantically whispering to a policeman, took it upon himself to make an announcement.
“No need for any fuss gents, it looks like there’s been a spot of unpleasantness and we are transferring a few people to prison on the mainland.”
“What for?” Someone yelled.
Naruto watched as Orochimaru was dragged out of the wings and added to the small knot of men about to be taken away.
Sasuke was standing in the wings on the other side of the stage. Naruto knew what would happen before it even did and his first instinct was to run across the boards and yank Sasuke out of the policeman’s grasp but Sasuke shook his head almost imperceptibly.
Beside Naruto, Konohamaru laid a hand on his arm.
Sasuke was soon added to the half dozen men. Naruto could hardly see him behind all the policemen. His whole body was screaming at him to DO SOMETHING.
“We have evidence that these prisoners have been getting messages to the mainland and funding spies. They are to be imprisoned for treason for the rest of the war.” The guard told the crowd, aware perhaps that the men would riot if their compatriots were removed without explanation. A buzz of chatter went round the hall. A few men stood up angrily as if about to start trouble but were dragged back down by friends.
“We’re very sorry that this has happened.” The guard told them, “Rest assured that there will be a fair trial.”
Naruto watched as the arrested men were marched out of the theatre.
He watched until Sasuke was out of sight.
1947
Naruto opened the study door with his elbow and congratulated himself on balancing the tea tray successfully. If he broke one more set of china then he wasn’t going to have much wages left.
His employer, an elderly Quaker who scorned to condemn a man just because he was Japanese and had spent the war in an internment camp, was asleep by the fire with a newspaper over his face.
Naruto smiled and put the tray down quietly. He was about to extricate his legs from the cat and creep out when he saw the headline.
TRAITORS RELEASED AFTER FIVE YEAR SENTENCE
His heart nearly stopped. He snatched up the paper, causing a brief grunt from the old man before he settled back to sleep, glasses halfway down his nose.
It took less than a minute to read the article.
It took one month to work out his notice.
It took six weeks to find out where Sasuke was.
It took five minutes stood in Sasuke’s drawing room for them to cross the carpet and smile at each other.
1951
“I’m putting it on.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“Maybe not, but I could deny you sex for the next fortnight until you wish you had never even HEARD of Glen Miller.” Sasuke smirked.
“You’re evil.”
“That reminds me. I got a letter from Orochimaru.”
Naruto snarled and got up from his chair. He went over to where his lover lay sprawled in the South American sunshine. Sasuke blinked up at him.
“How dare he write to you after what he did.” Naruto sat down and started to pick grass out of Sasuke’s hair.
“Stop that, I’m not a monkey." Sasuke batted Naruto's hand away, "Orochimaru always insisted that I knew exactly what his friends would use my money for. He claimed that it was only my own guilt that made me pretend not to.”
“That old bastard.”
“He wants more money, as it happens.”
“What did you say in reply.”
“I told him that he ever came within a hundred feet of you or me again, I would kill him.”
Naruto laid his head on Sasuke’s shoulder and nodded. Sasuke meant it and Orochimaru knew it. The prison authorities had spent five years preventing Sasuke from killing Orochimaru. It was amazing that Orochimaru continued to push it.
Naruto knew that the whole war haunted Sasuke. He knew that Sasuke wondered what his money had been used for, whether any of it had actually made it to the enemy before the authorities cottoned on. Naruto knew that Sasuke blamed himself.
“Cup of tea?” Naruto asked.
Sasuke smiled a little and nodded.
Naruto reflected as the kettle boiled. Tea as the solution to all ills. How could anyone have ever thought them anything but British?
They drank their tea in bed.
Although by then it had gone cold.
