Title; The Truth About Cats
Rated; PG
Summary; What happens when you take in a stray.
Author's Note; Laur said cat + Sasuke + Neji, so I did. For some reason, I quite enjoyed writing this one. It's quite short, despite how long it took me to produce it, heh.
As usual, feedback is always appreciated and will be met with cookies or suchlike.
---
"What's that."
The creak of a rarely used door sounded louder than the words that were caught up in a blast of winter wind. It whipped through the unguarded opening and into the house, and Sasuke looked up from a pair of warm, yellow eyes to meet a pair of icy white ones not nearly as violent as the storm outside, but freezing just the same. Fingers smoothed soft fur thoughtfully, amusement softening his face as the particularly ordinary house cat on his lap put paws on his chest to touch him, nose to nose. Friendly.
"It's a cat, Hyuuga," Sasuke responded in lieu of the answer to what he knew Neji was really asking. What is that thing doing here.
Neji had only been gone a few minutes, perhaps longer than he should have been due to the weather, but time enough for Sasuke to be left to his own devices. Sitting by one of the partially iced-over windows with a book and warm cup of tea, abandoned for the moment by his Hyuuga guard, Sasuke's eyes had caught movement on the snowy veranda and had gotten up to investigate.
The glossy coat of the black cat spotted with white from what Sasuke had believed to be snow, had stood out against the wintry backdrop. When he'd unboarded one of the shoji to inspect further, the thing had stared at him with two luminous eyes, reminding him of a certain Hyuuga. He could tell that from behind that impassive gaze, the cat was already starting to work things out.
He'd opened the door further and it had walked right in, expectant.
"I can see that," Neji said a moment later, narrow-eyed gaze fixed on the cat as if it were offending his aristocratic sensibilities by simply existing, "I mean, what's it doing here. We don't keep…cats."
Sasuke snorted, one finger smoothing the fur between the cat's ears as he heard Neji put the pile of wood that he'd gone to collect in a stack near the fire. The cat purred appreciatively, and Sasuke let it dictate his attention for a moment. While he'd never had a pet, the clan had kept cats for the work they did—apparently the Hyuuga were not the same.
"Tch, She's harmless, Hyuuga," Sasuke replied, and the cat mewled softly, as if in agreement.
"Harmless and useless," Neji said.
"Reminds me of you."
Neji paused, but remained in the crouch he'd adopted before the fire. One of the logs he'd been feeding into the crackling flames tapped irritably on the wood floor for a moment, and Sasuke knew that the Hyuuga was watching him, even without the traditional cue of eyes on face. It was still slightly disconcerting, but Sasuke had gotten used to the powers of the Byakugan in the many months that he'd lived with Neji.
He could also read the other boy's body language much better now than he'd been able to at the start. The subtlest flash of tension in the Hyuuga's back showed Sasuke that he'd hit a nerve, but it was unusual for Neji to let something like that bother him. They often traded barbs much more wicked than these, and it was usually the Hyuuga that came out unscathed—at least mentally. Sasuke's own fiery nature left him more susceptible to carefully placed words and therefore anger, but Neji always appeared to be calm. Untouched. That jab had been heavy handed, not even meant to sting.
Neji pushed the last of the wood into the fire and stood up, eyes avoiding Sasuke's for a moment before the colorless irises flashed toward the Uchiha in the dim light.
"Get rid of it," Neji said, "I don't want to see it here tomorrow."
Sasuke's eyes flashed red, and he felt the tight prickling of chakra restraints as the Sharingan engaged. There was a strange tenseness in the room that had hardly existed for months, though each of them had the scars to prove that the carefully erected dam that balanced their naturally strong personalities had broken more than once.
This wasn't one of those times, though, and Sasuke wasn't sure why either of them was suddenly so bothered.
"I don't think so, Hyuuga," Sasuke said, sitting up in the chair and unsettling the cat, who jumped to the floor and began cleaning itself, ignorant of (or perhaps pleased by) the argument.
Neji's face was a wall of stone; not ivory or alabaster, but something that would last. No line went unchecked, and Sasuke suddenly found himself hating that rigid control. Just show what you mean, dammit.
"I don't want to see it tomorrow," Neji repeated, and turned to disappear into the colder, darker extremities of the house. Sasuke sneered at his retreating back,
"Fine. You can warm yourself alone tonight, then."
Nothing but the silence of the house answered, and the slow creaking of wind battered planks.
---
Neji really was like a cat sometimes, Sasuke concluded. Aloof, disinterested—even in his mannerisms, Neji carried the quaint unobtrusiveness of a cat acting like it belonged.
The next morning, Sasuke found him perched quite like that in a chair by the window, pale face and eyes turned toward the fledgling light of dawn. The cat trailed at Sasuke's heels, having spent most of the night curled at the foot of his futon and the rest elsewhere—disappeared as Sasuke found Neji often did, but never very far. Tea steamed in a cup cradled by the Hyuuga's hands.
"I thought I told you to get rid of that thing," Neji said without looking, the earlier edge to his voice having not been eased by a night's slumber. Sasuke crossed his arms and watched the cat pad across the room and jump up on the windowsill to sniff tentatively at Neji's tea.
The Hyuuga watched it indifferently before rotating his hand for the cat to smell. Sasuke watched this behavior with narrowed eyes.
"What's your problem, Hyuuga?"
"I don't like cats," replied Neji diffidently as Sasuke's charge licked at his palm. It was a moment any photographer would have wanted to catch on film; soft, winter light from the window, Neji's hair and forehead unbound; the cat, timid but demanding. Sasuke merely swallowed his irritation.
"Che…" he took a silent step forward and looked outside. The snowfall from the previous night would be at least waist high, leaving the whole village trapped by a cloak of white. "Save your bullshit for someone who actually believes it."
Neji looked up, but instead of looking caught in the act, he merely looked resolved. Almost…saddened, if Sasuke had to put an emotion to it. But then, what gaze of Neji's never held something of that in it? Never outright, always hidden, but ever the same. They were similar in that respect; for all their arrogance, damaged. Not cats at all.
"I know the truth about cats, Uchiha," Neji said, fingers passing against the fur of the feline. His white skin was stark against the dark coat, and Sasuke wondered if his own hands looked the same.
"And what's that?" Sasuke pressed, though his voice sounded far away, even to his own ears. As if he was watching the scene unfold not as a participant, but as a third person observer.
"They come and take what they want…" here, Neji's fingers gracefully checked the cat for injury, though Sasuke had already done so the night before, "and then they leave." Finished, Neji's eyes lifted, gaze hard. "So don't get attached."
And then he was up, having left the tea for the cat, and Sasuke alone, trying to figure out exactly what had just happened.
---
The cat stayed.
Sasuke wasn't sure if Neji had just given up, or simply become indifferent to the matter, having already given his warning. His behavior toward the cat—which Sasuke had begun to call Shisui out of some distant affection for the name and a nod to the cat's tendency to disappear and reappear quite suddenly—remained aloof, almost more aloof than the cat toward Neji. For the sake of having a more practical reason for Neji's behavior (and to amuse himself), Sasuke attributed Neji's lack of warmth to jealousy.
It took him a couple of weeks to realize that Neji was treating the cat in quite the same manner that he treated Sasuke himself.
Despite the occasional (frequent) sex and the even more common outbreak of unscheduled sparring (which often led to even more sex), Neji had never stepped outside the small compartment he'd created for himself which he had labeled guardian to Sasuke's charge. Whenever Sasuke felt the Hyuuga slipping (which he did, quite habitually), Neji would always be one step ahead, pulling himself back into order as soon as he noticed the change. It happened, Sasuke noticed, whenever Neji seemed to be enjoying himself.
Quite frankly, the realization pissed Sasuke off.
This arrangement wasn't a walk in the park for him, either, but after having systematically destroyed all of his friendships and returned to Konoha with the intention of restoring a life that wasn't quite a life, nothing was. And at least Neji, he had thought, was indifferent enough to allow him a clean slate.
It wasn't that, though, and Sasuke knew it. Neji's demeanor around him had nothing to do with predisposed notions of Sasuke's status, or his defection from Konoha, or even the murder of Itachi. Neji had dealt with all that on his own, and Sasuke had half a feeling that their ridiculous woman of a Hokage had chosen the Hyuuga for precisely that reason. He had the ability to understand, if not agree. Looking at him, though, you wouldn't have thought it. Neji's attitude was still far too abrasive for anyone else to see everything that Sasuke did.
Enough to know now just what Neji had meant when he'd said don't get attached.
No one knew the Hyuuga like Sasuke. And he was oddly proud of that fact, had claimed it as his own. It was good to own, and everything that Sasuke wanted when he set his eyes upon it would soon give in to the whisper of mine.
He watched the Hyuuga with the cat as winter slowly spiraled onward. Konoha hadn't seen this kind of weather for years, all the papers were saying. People were starting to learn to live in the cold.
Not Sasuke, though. He was used to burning a path of fire through everything until his world was the temperature he wanted, one at which he was comfortable. And that meant that Neji's cold—every drift of snow within him—had to go. Sasuke would not be driven away by a child's fear of abandonment.
---
"Restless, Hyuuga?" Sasuke asked one night when the snow was coming particularly fast outside, snuffing out the lights that could normally be seen from different parts of the Hyuuga compound. Neji shifted for the third time in an hour and looked up at Sasuke, standing before him.
"Maybe," came the testy reply as Neji slipped one finger between the pages of his book, perhaps too ready for Sasuke's next move.
It came without hesitation, and Neji was there to meet it. Sasuke felt his lips bruise as Neji pushed himself out of the chair and against him, book miraculously marked and set peacefully on the table despite the chaos of the motion. The familiar thrill of Neji's fingers on him sent Sasuke back and stepping into the chair that the cat had claimed as her own. Shisui, used to these minor upsets in her daily routine, merely looked up from cleaning her paws and watched them stumble toward Neji's bedroom. She padded along in the wake of discarded clothing.
"Shut the door—don't want the cat—"
"Tch, Hyuuga...such a prude."
"—Reason we don't keep cats—"
"Just shut up."
The door slid closed.
---
Later, when they had finished, Sasuke watched Neji stretch and blink sleepily into his pillow, ivory eyes being slowly hidden from view by dark lashes. This was the point where Sasuke usually got up and left, returning to his own room or another part of the house to occupy his time differently. It never occurred to him that Neji allowed this quite simply, despite orders to watch Sasuke closely. That leash had grown lax, though, and Sasuke had barely noticed.
He lay there for a moment in the afterglow, taking deep breaths of a room that smelled like sex and Neji before he turned over and buried his face in a pillow that smelled equally like the other boy.
Out of the soothing call of sleep, Sasuke felt Neji tense.
"What are you doing," he asked Sasuke, not turning.
"I've seen you fall asleep with that cat sometimes, Hyuuga," Sasuke replied, as if it were an answer. This time, Neji did turn over, and Sasuke watched his long hair spill like ink over the pillows.
"I asked you what you were doing."
Sasuke pushed himself up on one elbow and leaned over Neji, planting his opposite hand next to the Hyuuga's head. For a moment, there was a hint of emotion deep in that normally stoic gaze, and Sasuke smirked. Victory.
"I'm not leaving you...Neji."
Neji snorted weakly, and Sasuke laid down again, this time with his lips against the older boy's shoulder.