#requested ficlet

“She saved my life the night we both encountered the wormhole, for starters.” Sasuke said with the exasperated gesture of a teacher explaining something obvious to a particularly dense student.

“So you’ve said before, but you could have considered that debt repayed when you delivered her safely to the passage back through time, or when you assisted her in saving my life.” Mitsuhide said, peering into Sasuke’s impassive face.

“I’ve always been very dependable.” Sasuke said, flatly. A soft breeze lifted his hair out of his face and made him look younger for just a moment, with the idealism of youth still alight in his eyes.

Mitsuhide laughed, mostly at himself, at how the strange course of events had dusted off his own long tarnished romanticism and, gods help him, idealism too.

“As for me, I wonder how a nice girl like her fell for you at the approximate speed of a meteorite. It’s sometimes easier to understand string cosmology than a single human heart.” Sasuke said as he took his glasses off to polish them with a finely made kerchief.

Mitsuhide shifted comfortably in the saddle. “Dear me, squirrel, what good would I be as a spy if I couldn’t successfully win the heart of one woman?”

“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but even you, Akechi Mitsuhide, cannot fool all the people all the time.” Sasuke countered cooly. “Your feelings are just as sincere as hers.”

“That’s a good proverb, I’ll have to remember that.” Mitsuhide answered lightly.

“Please don’t, it’s 350 years too soon.” Sasuke said with a groan.

“You speak as if I’m the kind of fool who goes about spewing information like a drunkard losing his dinner in an alley.”

“Thanks for the colorful metaphor. Fortunately breakfast was too bland to make an impression on my stomach.”

“You insisted that we share cooking duties.” Mitsuhide said with a shrug.

“Fair is fair.” Sasuke said grimly, looking up at the sky as if in the grip of some painful revelation.

“Dear me, did one of your caltrops fall onto the saddle?”

“No, I was just thinking that I wish I could send you to a modern physician to cure your olfactory and gustatory disorder, and then subject you to a dish of what you currently eat.”

“So they can fix that sort of thing in your time, can they?” Mitsuhide asked skeptically.

“Possibly. But as a scientist I never let probability interfere with a good daydream.” Sasuke replied.

“And here I was thinking you had no imagination, just a mind like an abacus and an excellent factual memory.”

“Yes, well, imagination doesn’t look like the endless concoction of sinister plots for most people. Besides, you still refuse to believe me about space flight, so I’m not sure you have grounds to accuse me of a lack of imagination.”

“You yourself admitted that you’d never done it.” Mitsuhide countered. “It’s utterly outlandish rot. It sounds like the most absurd lie a bunch of rulers ever came up with.”

“And I told you that the calculations check out, as does the rest of the evidence. If only I had some tinfoil, I’d make you a hat!” Sasuke answered passionately.

Mitsuhide had been amusing himself by adopting a posture of total disbelief after discovering Sasuke’s intense passion for all subjects related to the heavens.

“I pity your gullibility, it’s a terrible quality in a ninja.”

“And yet you’re absolutely nonchalant about electricity, radio, indoor plumbing, combustion engines, submarines, film-- oh god how did you even get me to tell you so much!”

“It’s a talent.” Mitsuhide answered with a grin. “As you said, you’re very dependable and you’ve experienced all of that directly. One must have standards of evidence in order to make reasoned judgments, after all.”

“I knew I should’ve taken intro to philosophy instead of that film elective.” Sasuke said moodily.

“Why, I just want to understand her world that much better. It’s not as though I could build any of that even if I wanted to.”

“You’re literally having a shower built right now!” Sasuke responded, flinging his hands up in exasperation.

“Yes, but it will be dismantled before it causes any issues, and you did say that it was the thing she said she missed the most.”

“You have such unshakable confidence that she’ll come back. And I’ve told you, even in the best case you’re going to live through a paradox where you’ll simultaneously have lived an entire lifetime without her and one where she returns. It’s Schrödinger's love affair where the ultimate determination of your state will be her observation of it.”

“Then I may as well live as if the best case scenario was the only one.” Mitsuhide answered quietly, smiling gently at the horizon.

“That’s assuming you aren’t killed in the meantime.” Sasuke said flatly.

“Why, that’s what you’re here for, to make sure I live long enough to change things.” Mitsuhide replied.

“You know how people sometimes call their significant other their better half?”

“I do not, since it probably hasn’t been said yet, but do go on.”

“She is unequivocally your better two thirds. If she does come back and you break her heart I’ll kill you.”

“Sasuke, I’m overwhelmed by your affection. I feel that a genuine meeting of minds has finally occurred between us.” Mitsuhide answered airily.

“I don’t mean it in the affectionate way Lord Kenshin does!” Sasuke cried, and tore his glasses furiously off of his face.

“No need to be so diffident my dear bosom friend, I accept your feelings completely.”