In the cold of space you find the heat of suns

Apologies if the characters have grown differently in their new environment.

Spacer crews travel the Far Borders and the Fringe of occupied space, trading. Spacing is an ancient and honourable profession carved out by millenniums. Most spacers start out as fourteen-year-old boys seeking a future. Few survive a decade spacing.

44. The desk

They met Garner Parrad in the meeting room beyond the household. He was dark, slim and slight. His skin whispered the message of age retard. He was alone, wore a knife and left the impression that he could use it.

“On this occasion I am a messenger not a negotiator,” he told Sasuke. “This is Klennethon Darrent’s message.

“He wishes to meet with you in person to discuss a deal. He wishes the meeting to be his planet Elessen.

“He sends his assurances as to your safety and that of those dear to you. I am instructed to tell you that what he wishes from you is something that you can freely give and that you will not miss.

“He wishes all members of your current household, with the possible exception of Kurensai-san and her three children, to come with you to Elessen.

“He realises that this is an inconvenience so he will gift you with 1.2 teracredits if you agree and implement the meeting on his terms. This is separate to the deal he wishes to negotiate.

“That is the end of his message,” Garner Parrad concluded. “I will leave you to discuss Klennethon Darrent’s proposal. Shikamaru-san knows how to contact me.”

“Garner-san,” Sasuke asked, “can you give me any hint of what he wants of me?”

Garner Parrad smiled. “No, that is against his rules, but I can tell you why he wants it. You are young, you are beautiful and you are in love.”

Sasuke flushed slightly. “That is… …helpful, Garner-san,” he admitted. “Neji-san will see you out.”

They waited until Garner Parrad was well away and Neji had returned.

“He knows a frightening amount about us,” Shikamaru began. “He knows that we are short of credit, he knows what we got for the interview and he even knows about Kurensai-san and the children. We already know that he understands how to manipulate me and has the means to do it.” He sighed. “1.2 teracredits would make a huge difference. It would mean we could stop worrying about credit.”

“I can find no deceit in him,” Neji told them. “That is rare. There either is no deceit or he is by far the best liar I have ever met.”

“What do you think, Naruto?” Sasuke asked.

Naruto smiled. “I think Klennethon Darrent is a romantic.”


The next day Sasuke was at his desk. Shikamaru had just left and Neji was due to arrive, so when the door opened Sasuke was expecting him and not Naruto. He closed the accounts he had been viewing; Naruto was always welcome.

Instead of hugging him or sitting on one of the rugs Naruto sat in the chair on the other side of the desk. Sasuke was about to ask him what was wrong when Naruto placed a cassette on the desk’s surface.

“I found this among the others…” he admitted.

They had finished reviewing and discussing the applications the day before. There had been five strong candidates and they had decided on a front-runner. It was the lad who had featured on the tape that Kakashi had picked out in the first session. Sasuke could not help feeling that all the additional time and effort had been wasted.

“…on the first morning we were looking,” confessed Naruto.

Sasuke stiffened. Naruto had been keeping something from him for twelve days.

“I could not put it in the ‘reject’ box,” he explained.

There was a soft knock; Naruto had shut the door. Sasuke was up and asking Neji if they could meet later. He then all but shut the door in Neji’s face and returned to his chair.


It did not help that the display for the viewer was a holoprojection that hovered over the desk between them. The woman had been beautiful once but she was too thin, her flesh so pale it was almost translucent, her eyes beyond hope.

“This is how people look when they are dying slowly,” Naruto told him. “I have seen many people dying slowly.”

Sometimes Sasuke forgot about Naruto’s life before. He forgot that a childhood spent catting had been better than the alternatives. This was one of those alternatives. He started the tape playing and the woman spoke.

“My name is Natsuhi. Once I was proud but now I am only desperate. I beg you, Uchiha-sama, to take my son. He is not a monster, as your Naruto is not a monster. He will be utterly alone as you were utterly alone. Our ship is the Snow Willow.” The woman hung her head in shame. “I will tell him that you have agreed to take him. I will tell him that I will awake refreshed from the tank. I will tell him that I love him so that the last thing he hears from my lips is not a lie. He will do as I have told him. He will pilot the Snow Willow to Tarrasade.”

Sasuke exploded from his chair, “Twelve days, Naruto, you waited twelve days! You considered for one second putting it in the ‘reject’ box? This woman gave her son into my care on her deathbed. He is alone on that ship with his mother’s body. How could you, Naruto, how could you?”

Naruto slumped. “I did not wait twelve days. I asked Asuma-san for help. He asked Hiruzen-sama. The little ship is still on its way. The boy responds to hails. We think it best if he is allowed to complete his journey, that he achieves what his mother asked him to do.”

The pieces came together in Sasuke’s head. If the boy had been dead, Naruto would have destroyed the tape. Sasuke would have been spared the guilt. He sat down. He found himself looking at the surface of the desk. “I should not have spoken to you like that. I hurt you. I apologise. I realise now that you were protecting me. I overreacted. It was thought of him being alone with…”

He could not continue. Images filled his mind, some from his imagination and others from his memory. He could not bear them. Familiar words insinuated themselves; a litany of deprecation. It anchored him to a place where the images could not exist. “I do not deserve you, Naruto,” he intoned. “I will never deserve you.”


Naruto knew he had handled it badly. True, Sasuke’s reaction to the tape had hurt but there had been magnificence in his fierce anger. Now instead there was the flat denial of worth that was one step away from withdrawal. Naruto should have reassured him that the boy was safe before allowing him to see the tape. This was the worst Sasuke had been for a long time and Naurto could not even hold him because any affection would be polluted by the terrible things his father had done to people across or over the damn desk.

Naruto hated that desk. He hated it almost as much as he had come to hate Fugaku Uchiha. Only a small part of him understood why Sasuke insisted on sitting there day after day once he had viewed his father’s private journal. The rest thought that the desk should be chopped into tiny pieces. Kisame-san had asked him to save Sasuke from becoming like Itachi and the damn desk had given Fugaku Uchiha a way of touching Sasuke from beyond the grave.

He would have to take the risk. He plucked Sasuke from his chair, hit the button that divided the room and was through the gap between the screens as they closed. Shikamaru had come up with the idea of the screens and Neji had concocted an excuse about the room being too long. When closed they made the other end of the room into a desk-free zone. Naruto sat in one of the chairs holding Sasuke in his lap, waiting, hoping, to feel the tension yield. The smallest hint and Naruto could risk being more active. There it was: Naruto began to rock him gently, to grumble reassurance and, after some time, to nuzzle. Sasuke slowly and surely relaxed. Finally he slept.


Haku was sent to find them when they were missing from the start of the midday meal. He pulled apart the screens a fraction to peer through. The sadness in Naruto’s eyes warned him away even before he saw Sasuke’s starkly white face. At least his eyes were closed. The impossibly long lashes were against his cheeks, suggesting sleep. Haku went back to the others.

“They will not be coming,” he told Iruka.

There was a smatter of fondly lewd comments but Iruka moved to the stove to give them a few moments’ privacy.

“Bad,” Haku whispered. “Naruto has persuaded him to sleep. I think it is to do with this boy Asuma-san has been investigating.”

Iruka looked at him sharply. If Haku thought there was a boy then there was a boy. His close associations with the elite fighters gave him access to more information. He turned and fixed Asuma with a gaze. Asuma flushed rather than smiled and then paid a great deal of attention to feeding little Keitaro. Yes, the man had been up to something.


Asuma had a copy of the tape. The woman’s plea struck deep at Iruka’s heart.

“When were you planning on telling me?” Iruka asked him.

“Once Naruto had told Sasuke-sama,” Asuma insisted. “We needed to know if he was alive. If he were dead, the fewer people who knew the better. Less chance of Sasuke-sama finding out that way.”

Iruka could see the logic of that, although it hurt that Naruto had gone to Asuma rather than him or Kakashi. “What do we know about him?”

“Little. The ship is registered in a false identity that his mother used, so we have to assume the name she gave the authorities for him is also incorrect. She purchased this ship less than a standard ago. Before that we can find nothing. The name Natsuhi gave us no leads.” Asuma sighed. “He’s out of credit and close to being out of supplies. We are sending the new mother ship so that he can dock with her and complete his journey.”


They left when they received word that the Oak had picked up the Snow Willow. She would jump through an ungated hole into the Tarrasade system in four days’ time to rendezvous with their new ship, the Sakura.

It was decided, for this first expedition, that Asuma would captain the Oak with Gai, Kunugi and Choza as crew. Despite initial intentions to the contrary, Kurenai-san and the children would travel with them. The household on Tarrasade would be sealed.

Kakashi would captain the Sakura. Without the rigidity of Tradition, every role on the Sakura had to be discussed and defined. There were two crew rooms, each opening off the single, large galley. Iruka would rule one and also the ship. Haku had responsibility for the other. Everyone, even Kakashi, would sleep in a crew room. For now, Konohamaru would cat for whomever Iruka selected.

They ran drills for three hundred minutes before separating from Tarrasade and beginning their journey.


Being cat was very different to training to be cat. Konohamaru ached. He did not know which was harder work, cleaning to Iruka-sensei’s impossibly high standards or fucking. He had survived sucking Jiraiya on the first night but Ibiki, on the second, had been keen to fuck him. Konohamaru was incredibly grateful for the top of the range e-machines in the heads and was thankful that his grandfather had arranged for a selection of professionals to train him. Unfortunately, none of them had been as well endowed as Ibiki.

The third night was Shino’s. Haku and Shikamaru had, each separately, given him a red lipstick so Konohamaru had expected sucking, which had, indeed, been an accurate prediction. What Konohamaru had not expected was Shino's complete uninvolvement. He had not taken his lenses out and he had not asked Konohamaru to use the lipstick; he did not not even look in Konohamaru's direction. Konohamaru had preferred being with Ibiki; Ibiki had cuddled him and made sure he squirted. Even being with Jiraiya had been better. At least Jiraiya had looked at his face.

It was part of the job. It was part of becoming a spacer. It was part of growing up to be a person like Asuma or Kakashi or, when Konohamaru was being honest with himself, like Sasuke; a person that someone as special as Kurenai-san or Iruka-sensei or, by the Lady, Naruto could admire enough to love.

He was determined to cope. He had slipped out of Shino’s bunk once he was asleep and gone to the head. Then he had crept into his bunk and made himself sleep so that he would be in the galley on time the next morning.

Iruka was a little later than usual so Konohamaru began setting the table for breakfast. He was surprised to see one tear splash on the surface of the table, then another. This was not good. Iruka-sensei would not be pleased if the table was wet.

Then Iruka’s arms were around him and he started to weep. Iruka picked him up and carried him through to the crew room. He approached Sasuke and Naruto’s bunk, ordering them to get themselves halfway decent. Naruto poked his head through the drapes to assess the situation. A minute later he was wearing pyjama pants and sitting cradling Konohamaru in his lap. A sleepy Sasuke was pulling on a pair of shorts.

Being held against Naruto’s chest was more than comforting. His arms were so strong and his skin felt amazing, like velvet. He even smelt wonderful. A firm hand massaged his back, which was a surprise as Naruto did not have three hands. Sasuke’s voice said in a fond, slightly amused tone, “Don’t get too used to it, Kono-kun, there is only one of him and he is mine.”


Sasuke had been impressed at how Konohamaru had been adapting but discovered that he was not disappointed to see him so shaken. It was as if all the new experiences had built up in a wave that had crashed down on him. Sasuke remembered feeling like that, only he had crushed the emotions into a dense ball inside of him rather than letting them out. Sasuke knew that Konohamaru’s reaction was the healthier one. Konohamaru could be relied on to do what was normal and expected.

They were due to dock with the Oak that afternoon. They would finally meet the boy. He decided to leave Konohamaru to Naruto and find breakfast.

“It was a significant day, Sasuke-sama,” Asuma said to him as he entered the galley. “We get to meet your new charge.”

“Yes,” Sasuke replied. “It is also urgent to look over the Oak and sign off the renovation. Then you can take command.”

Asuma laughed. “You make it sound very grand. Commanding a mother ship is hardly exciting, Sasuke-sama.”

Sasuke wondered if he missed Kurenai-san and the children already. She and the children were podded for this part of the journey and for transfer to the Oak. There was less risk in travelling podded than in running about a crowded and unfamiliar ship.

“A day closer to you being reunited with Kurenai-san and the children,” Sasuke reminded Asuma slyly. “Imagine how excited Akemi and Misora will be about their father being the captain of such a big ship.”

Asuma was silent, studying him. Sasuke refused to be uncomfortable. Then Asuma nodded.

“Kakashi is correct,” he said. “You are nothing like your father.”

Sasuke thought of the desk. “Thank you, Asuma-san.”

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