Birthday fic for juliagulia1017. Because she's awesome and we should get lunch together again some time.
A note on the title-
Ménage a trois: (French) household of three.
I'm sure you can guess where this is going. If you can't, I'm afraid I have to award you nil on the points and a lot on the fail. Guess what, cage is cage in French. I asked. I don't own jack, but looking at what I've gone and done, I think that that's almost a shame.
Cage a trois
You don't normally put snakes in cages. If you're careless, a sinuous twist and your serpent has slithered the coop and is probably hiding in your shoes. But maybe that's an incorrect analogy. He's not a snake, he's a ninja, and this is not a cage, it's a house of paper and watchful eyes. A house of age and esteem and propriety. A house where his every move is under scrutiny. Where the residents move in soft susurrations of cloth, and talk in formal tones as befits them. Where he can be in the fucking bathroom, and yes the guard will be politely looking away but that doesn't make a fucking difference, now does it? Where everything is ice; their eyes, their demeanor, they've even started on him, freezing all but the barest minimum of his chakra. They're working on his attitude as well, but that fire burns too hot.
He can't complain though; they feed him, clothe him, occasionally they train with him. Every thing he does has an audience of a hundred pairs of eyes, and lingering in the still air of a peaceful estate is the threat that he wouldn't feel the blow that kills him. They've kept him in a permanent state of unbalanced vulnerability. He knows it's for their protection, but some times he wonders if it's not also for their pride.
They didn't know where to put him at first. The only heir to the Uchiha, but a traitor, and perhaps worst of all, a walking mass of hormones. He didn't bother to correct that label. If they would keep the rabid she wolves at bay for him, he didn't need to mention just how annoying he thought they were to begin with.
He rooms with Hyuuga 'fucking genius' Neji, and as far away from the Main House daughters as they can put him without dumping him in Branch House quarters. The venerable House of Hyuuga keeps its formalities and hierarchies, and he can safely call them batty in the privacy of his mind. As if somehow living in this room fulfills the delicate balance of his name and his actions. Watched by silvered hawk eyes, caged by delicately curving talons; this is all that remains of the Uchiha.
-----
You don't keep two predators in the same cage, however tame you think you have made them. One bound by blood, the other by chains, and the only thing to take it out on is the other. He protects one cousin, babysits the other, and now they wish him to hold the leash on this one too.
They didn't give him a collar, something he could feel around his neck and hate. Rather, the medics went in to heal him, and while they were there left a circle of characters that ate chakra at the source. So now, when the last Uchiha stands before the mirror and thinks about why he is standing in a paper prison, he has to turn his hate toward himself. Neji sees him do it often enough, eyes closed, hair waterlogged, steam condensing on skin fair enough to be his own. It's cold comfort, but Neji knows now that his lot in life could be worse.
Some days, being the Hyuuga genius just isn't worth it.
-----
You don't put two men with bad blood between them in the same room. Even if they are in essence complete strangers. Once upon a time, they were comrades, and then they were enemies, but they were never acquaintances or friends and now they are expected to be roommates. In a house full of eyes and private lives, how do they expect him to be happy? The glaringly obvious answer is that they don't, but she can't believe they would tempt fate yet again by planting ill will deliberately. The Hyuuga, of all people, should realize there are ways to overcome fate and the lines they draw. She looks at herself in the mirror, silver eyes on silvered glass, and has to remind herself of her station. She peers into her closets and looks for something relatively normal.
She wants to help, as much as she is able. So she calls Ino and Sakura and asks if she can meet them for lunch.
-----
They've got a new toy; a piece you discover in the corner of the board and didn't realize was your own. Or maybe that's not the right analogy. The last Uchiha is one of those geisha dolls with their dull eyes and blood red lips. Something you take with thanks, and do nothing with but put somewhere visible and maintain subtly. Hanabi hears a lot of things, as the second daughter she holds power without the bindings they place on her sister. She must behave as befits a Hyuuga, but the Clan does not rest on her small, sloped shoulders. Behaving as befits a Hyuuga, to her, means knowing everything. So she uses her eyes and her ears and the little grey kitten Hinata gave her and contrives to be in places at times where she can see and hear everything she thinks she needs to. So she's heard that when he was small, he didn't like girls. And she's heard that maybe he's still like that. And she understands that there might be another reason they stuck him with Neji. After all, Neji's hair is prettier than hers.
The girl is more than a match for him. She is small and fast and she doesn't have a spiraling seal below her sternum sucking away nearly all of her power. Even taijutsu only has left him wrung; every time he attacks she counters and his hand stings, every time he can manage to block he can feel his strength yield and his body trembles at the impact of a little girl who only just made genin.
She steps on his foot and tells him that she trained at home for years prior to attending the Academy. Before he is comforted she adds that she knows a few genin that he might land a real hit on if he wants.
She is pulled away by the plume of her hair before he can attack recklessly again.
"Look Hanabi, the oranges are finally ready." Hinata's soft query distracts the girl for him. "Uchiha-san, would you like one?"
He lets her hand him the best one she can find and watches her mince toward the kitchen. He turns at the sucking sound of the second daughter removing her thumb from the fruit before peeling the rind into a twisted flower. She looks up at him, and unabashedly licks her fingers, indifferent to her manners and his presence. She turns back to her citrus long before he walks away, still holding his orange.
They pierce him with their gaze for more reasons than the spoken. They don't trust him, and they fear him when they know they shouldn't, and he doesn't belong here. He can feel byakugan eyes on him, boring holes into his head, dissecting his orange for anything that might reveal a dastardly scheme to turn on the House of Hyuuga, anything that will let them remove him from their pristine white halls.
He's got the most boring roommate in the world. He might even almost have preferred to have Naruto sleeping two feet from him. Naruto at least would be incapable of going an entire night, silently waiting for unnatural movement, observing the dark. Sasuke traces the same silhouetted branch through the paper each night, and tries to think. Sasuke has become an expert at reading nuances. His father had maybe three expressions for his entire life; his first teacher hid his face behind a mask and a porn novel; his next… had twenty different ways of saying the word 'game' and despite very few syllables in the language requiring one's tongue to leave one's mouth, Orochimaru always managed it, and sometimes even that was an indication of which of the hundreds he meant at any given time.
So he has been watching the Hyuuga long enough to think he can understand them.
This whole thing is just some sick test of loyalty; Sasuke to Konoha, Neji to the Hyuuga. Neji has to make sure Sasuke doesn't kill anyone, and hold himself back from killing Sasuke. Sasuke thinks Neji has the easier part of it. All he can do is live day to day here, and try not to step on too many Hyuuga idiocies.
The Heiress is trying to get her cousin to accept how much she relies on him, while her cousin can barely hide how hard he gets just being in the same room. Sasuke thinks Neji might be fully aware of how much Sasuke notices, for he is not in the habit of underestimating his opponents, not after having his ass handed to him by the dead last dingbat. She has hero-worship in her eyes when she looks at her cousin, and maybe part of that is her appreciation of how generous time and training are to a nin who practices regularly. She can't help it, can she, having been forcibly pulled from active duty.
But she has the support of the shinobi; she went to school with the sons and daughters of the ninja clans, and the secondary house of Hyuuga are the only ones on the rosters, the only ones given the chance of dying outside the safety of the village. Her skills are no longer as important as her diplomacy, and so better fighters are given the task of protecting the Hyuuga secrets. He doesn't need to be a genius to know what the looks he is given mean. The submissive little Heiress would be a match for the last Uchiha, but what to do about the progeny? He can read it in their gaze as easily as they can read the pattern binding him. Uchiha is almost as good as marrying back into the family, and the Hokage won't bitch nearly as much about inbreeding. And Sasuke's genes have talent scrawled all over them. And he was bound and determined to repopulate his own clan…
He can hear the calculations in their heads, clicking like beads on an abacus, and he thinks maybe this is why Itachi killed an entire ninja family.
Even so, they don't like him near the daughters of the Main House. They don't like him trading barbs with Hanabi; they don't like him scowling at her while she laughs at him for no reason at all. But they really dislike how he allows Hinata to go out of her way for him. She is too compassionate by far, and he is learning to tolerate her shy kindnesses, because they are the only ones he has. He has heard Ino and Sakura laughing outside the estate several times, and always Hinata darts away with an apologetic wave, dressed in clothes that might be considered normal.
Today is the same; she has gone out for lunch with her friends, leaving the Hyuuga homestead a little colder, a little more blatantly hostile. He asks Neji, who is trying to repair a miniscule pair of zori, what stick his family has up its collective ass.
"For someone who doesn't make a good puppet, you're not very aware of your surroundings, are you?" Neji sets aside the pink fabric with some relief. "If you wooed her, and she accepted, the balance of influence would fall further to forces outside the Hyuuga. Make no mistake, you would be part of the Hyuuga whether you liked it or not, and if you ever get around to reviving your Clan, you would be better off not annoying us. We are immediately wary of anyone Hinata might express interest in."
"More than half of your family thinks I'm gay."
"Unlike me, they also don't believe you're an idiot. Even if you were, are you so emotional that your personal preference would stop you from courting power?"
"The power in question wouldn't know courtship if it bit her where her legs meet her back." Sasuke picks up one shoe, hanao twisted and frayed but otherwise pristine. "What, she trip over your sexual frustration?"
Neji is refusing to acknowledge the Uchiha's jabs, but Sasuke doesn't need permission to needle him.
"The power in question can't even tell her cousin is obsessed with her," he mutters, tossing the shoe to the floor as he stands.
Hinata returns, expression as close to giddy as a Hyuuga's can get. She offers him a package, and it's like a weight is lifted from her shoulders when he doesn't reject it. She patters off to give her cousin and sister matching boxes of rice crackers, and he stares at her impossibly tiny feet.
The Main House and those close to it do not leave often, except for business. There is an ever-present threat to the jealously guarded secrets of the Hyuuga. It's lucky that all of Hinata's classmates are excellent shinobi, or she wouldn't be allowed alone in their company. Himself excluded, for now.
"D'you know," says the shadow dropping down from the ceiling, "that sometimes your eyes go sharingan around her?" In her arms is a fluffy grey ball with icy blue eyes. They both watch him with a bladed edge of amused superiority.
"And?"
"And I wanna know what you think you're going to find. She has nothing to hide, wouldn't know how, really." The cat swishes its tail in agreement. There's something unnervingly familiar about it, the way the girl is holding it.
"That cat," he starts.
"Hinata gave her to me. Some old lady's cat had kittens, and gave Hinata one for all the times she's returned Fluffy-hime." She holds her cat up to her face. "Her mama is a cat that once evaded Team Kakashi for three whole hours. Hoshiakari-hime is a ninja cat."
"So I guess that cat's line is cursed to have owners they don't like."
"We were playing tag," she says carelessly, setting her kitten on the ground. "I'm going to get my rice crackers now." She slips away, kitten padding silently after her. They both throw one last look at him before they disappear into a hallway.
He trains with Hinata now, under the watchful eyes of Hanabi and Hoshi-hime. Hinata is patient, reserved, and above all not a genius. She is content to throw the same attacks at him until he is certain his muscles have remembered how to block it. And he tells her how to improve the attacks she uses. She has no need to become a great ninja, if she will live the rest of her life within a gilded cage, so she doesn't grow bored or frustrated doing this. She is capable enough, he supposes, but she can't bring herself to seriously hurt anyone. She is diplomatic and refined and likable. Her family is slowly coming out of its cloister, and they know they will need these assets more than her shinobi skills. Even if barely making chuunin on her third try is still a sore disappointment.