My entry for The-Da-Ranger-Group's Spring contest on deviantART. Hope you like it, and happy Spring everybody!
Also, Happy early Brithday to our dear Tamaki Suoh! We love you!
The front door burst open. It was an incredibly sudden thing. Haruhi hadn't been expecting any visitors tonight, and Tamaki was supposed to be in class until 8:30. She had been content to spend a quiet night in, taking notes from one of her legal textbooks. Maybe she'd go pick up some ramen for dinner; tonight, she was in the mood for chicken. Other than that, she didn't expect much of anything to happen. Then she heard the banging of the door, sending her to her feet and her notebook and papers scattering to the floor. She looked around for something to defend herself with, in case the person now running into the room was a burglar or worse. Then, she heard a voice.
"HARUHIIIII!"
And she was no longer worried.
Tamaki was a flash of yellow and blue. He ran into the room and grabbed her into a hug before she could speak. His arms wrapped tightly around her waist constricted her breathing, and it didn't help at all when he started spinning her. He was also screaming her name in her ear.
"HARUHIII! HARUHI HARUHI HARUHI!"
"Tamaki... Senpai... please let go..."
Her choked plea fell on deaf ears, but he did it on his own a moment later. While Haruhi caught her breath, Tamaki began doing a little happy dance around the room. He sang a little tune in time with his movements, something Haruhi had never heard before and assumed he was making up as he went along. When he deigned to stop, Haruhi had collected her fallen papers and was trying to re-organize them. She immediately set them down when he started for her, but all he did was sit down on the couch.
"Haruhi, isn't it wonderful?" he asked joyously. "The day we've been waiting for is finally here!"
Haruhi stared blankly at him. Day? What day? The wedding wasn't for another two months, and neither of them was graduating this year. It definitely wasn't anyone's birthday, or a holiday. Was this just another one of Tamaki's random spazz moments? Because Haruhi knew well how often that could happen.
"What day?" she finally asked.
Tamaki's jaw dropped comically. Haruhi wondered if maybe she should have phrased that a little less bluntly.
"What? You don't know? Haruhi, I don't believe this."
He ran out of the room without another word, going all through the house and coming back, out of breath, with her bedroom calendar in hand. The thumb tack was still hanging out of it and everything. He shoved it in her face, his finger poking furiously at tomorrow's date: March 21st.
Oh...
"It's SPRING, Haruhi!" Tamaki did another spin around the room. "Springtime is finally here! No more cold weather, no more ice and snow, no more big bulky winter jackets and hats!"
"I thought you loved the snow," Haruhi said, picking up her textbook again and opening it to a page. "And aren't you the one always saying that I look 'completely adorable' in my winter clothes?"
"I do and you do," Tamaki answered dismissively. "But Haruhi, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. This has been one of the coldest and snowiest Winters I've had since I lived in France! It's suffocating us, Haruhi! What we need now is the sun, and warm air to walk around in. We need leaves on the trees and sprouts in in the garden. We need April showers to bring May flowers!"
He finished his impassioned speech by pulling Haruhi to her feet. Her school work went flying again, but Tamaki's dragging her out of the room prevented her from picking it up this time.
"Come on," he said amidst her protests. "Today is the final day of Winter, let's get something really fancy to celebrate!"
His choice of restuarant, despite all of Haruhi's expectations, did turn out to be a ritzy five star place. They hadn't been there before, Haruhi didn't even know Tamaki liked this kind of food. When they walked in and she saw kotatsus littered around the dining area, it all started to make sense.
"I've got a whole list of plans for tomorrow," he started up in the middle of the first course. "We're going to welcome Spring with festivities abound. I was thinking of starting with a walk in the park, just the two of us. Then, later on, we can get everyone else together and go on a picnic. We can go out to the farms and watch them tend to the animals, or we could get some ice cream and eat it at the boardwalk. We could go to a movie later at night since it may still be a little cold out. We could..."
Second course followed the first, and then came third. Then Tamaki decided in the middle of dessert that a movie was far too casual for as important a day as the first day of Spring, so they caught a midnight showing of the latest action thriller they'd both been waiting to see. They were home by 11:30. Haruhi wasn't all that tired yet, but she was exhausted compared to her fiancee.
"And maybe after the boardwalk we could go back to the park and have a tree climbing contest! Of course, we'd have to divide into teams and made sure Hikaru and Kaoru are NOT on the same team. They'd just use their evil doppelganger powers to cheat. How does that all sound, Haruhi?"
"Sounds great, Tamaki," Haruhi answered dully. "It sounded great the first one hundred times you told me too."
That flew right over his head, as she knew it would. Tamaki was all but bouncing off the walls, the (for fact of a better term) spring in his step hadn't faded even a little in all this time. How he expected to get any sleep tonight and be ready for tomorrow, she didn't know.
Which reminded her...
"Hey, Tamaki?" He nodded his head so she'd know he was listening, but now he was singing 'Blue Skies' under his breath and getting louder with every word. "Uh... I was going to tell you before, but while we were at the theater, I saw that the weather was on TV over by the bar. They said that there's actually a fifty percent chance that tomorrow will-"
"Oh, tomorrow," Tamaki said, bringing clasped hands to his chest dramtically. "I can feel it, tomorrow is going to be a most amazing and wonderful day. It couldn't come fast enough. I don't know how I'm going to sleep tonight!"
He stopped there, his smile vanishing for a moment as he slowly turned to Haruhi. Then the smile returned, but in a much different form, a form only Haruhi had ever seen.
"Tamaki, I'm trying to tell you-"
He cut her off once again, this time with his lips claiming hers. His hands roamed all around her body and pushed at her clothes. Haruhi forgot all about what she'd been about to say. Not another word was spoken between them for the rest of the night.
Haruhi awoke in her and Tamaki's bed alone. She rolled over under the sheets, which she could feel in certain areas that instantly reminded her of what happened last night. Haruhi pulled them up to her neck and sat up. The adjacent bathroom door was wide open and a musty smell wafted through. Tamaki can't have been in there more than five minutes ago. Strange that he didn't wake her. Haruhi gathered up her clothes for the laundry and then pulled new ones out of the drawer. She was buttoning up her blouse in front of the full length mirror in their shared walk in closet when she heard the scream. Haruhi fumbled with her two remaining buttons before giving up and running out.
She found Tamaki in the kitchen. He was by the stove, which was on high heat. Two eggs were burning on the pan and he had a spatula hanging limp between his fingers. He had a hand over his mouth, like a woman in an old time horror film. His eyes were bugged out and bloodshot. Haruhi followed his gaze, not knowing if she should say something or if he'd even hear her. She looked out the window. Outside, there was nothing but pure white. It suddenly came back to her what she'd been trying to tell him about last night.
"Oh..." Haruhi said softly.
"This... can't... be... happening." Tamaki, slumped over, edged closer to the window with his every emphasized word. He ended up proped up against it, almost to his knees, his cheek smooshed into the glass and slowly sliding down. "How could this happen. On the first day of Spring? What about my plans? All my plans..."
With a whimper, he slipped all the way. He laid there in a pathetic and unseemly heap. He was lucky his Grandmother or Shima wasn't around to see this. They'd have him by the ear. As it was, Haruhi was at a loss. She had suspected that something like this would happen ever since she saw that news report. Like Tamaki said, it had been a very cold Winter this year. A fifty-fifty chance was more than enough. And if Tamaki hadn't been so... distracting last night, maybe she could have warned him and avoided all this. Or at least lessened the blow.
'Well, no use worrying about what could have been,' Haruhi said to herself.
"Tamaki," she said, holding a hand in the air over his head. "It's going to be okay."
He bristled. Haruhi retracted her hand just as Tamaki got up. His face was shrouded in shadow, but she could see the downturning of his lips.
"Okay?" he repeated lowly. "Okay? OKAY?!"
He took Haruhi by the shoulders.
"There is NOTHING okay about ANY OF THIS HARUHI!" he began to shake her. "Everything I've been looking foward to, all of my hopes and dreams, they're RUINED!"
He ran to the window, gesturing wildly outside.
"Look at this! There is snow everywhere! Not a patch of green. There are no flowers, no warm air, no picnics, no garden, NO SPRINGTIME!"
Tamaki threw open the window. Cold air blasted them, sending an uncomfortable shiver running through Haruhi's body. Tamaki was oblivious to it.
"CURSE YOU, JACK FROST!" He shouted, waving his fist at the sky covered with thick, gray clouds. "CUUURSE YOUUUUUU!"
When he ran out of air, he fell to the floor again, moaning and crying dramtic, yet geniune tears of rage and pain. Haruhi stood over him for a little while, then sighed and walked back to the bedroom for her cell phone. She began dialing.
Ten minutes later, she was back to the kitchen. She found Tamaki had moved from the floor to the table. He had his head in his arms and may as well have been asleep from how little he was moving. At least he was awake enough to turn off the stove first so the place wouldn't burn down. Haruhi threw out the smelly, burnt remains of the eggs before tapping him on the back. When that didn't work, she tried again, and kept going until he grunted and shifted his arms a little.
"Hey, get up," Haruhi said in his ear. "Come on, we're going out."
There was a pause, and then Tamaki lifted his head halfway. Miserable, dull violet eyes looked back at her.
"Do I look like I want to go anywhere today, Haruhi?"
Haruhi shrugged. "Well, we're going anyway."
He stayed still.
Haruhi pursed her lips. She could see by now what direction this was going in. It was the same every time some sort of inconvienence (major or mild) got in Tamaki's way. With a sigh, Haruhi pulled Tamaki into a one armed hug and pressed a soft kiss to his cheek.
"Please come," she whispered. "For me?"
Five minutes later, Tamaki was getting his snow boots and heavy mittens out of the back of the closet while muttering about how 'unfair' Haruhi could be.
"Why are we in the park?" Tamaki moaned as they walked through the gates and passed a group of children making snow angels by the swing set. "This is the last place I want to be right now."
Haruhi rolled her eyes and took him by the hand, getting a little closer to him as a result. "I told you, no matter what kind of weather there is, we should be able to go out and have fun. Isn't that what you really wanted to celebrate Spring for? To have fun?"
Tamaki lost his footing for a second there. The truth of Haruhi's words must have been resonating extra powerfully with him, just as Haruhi knew they would. If there was one thing she could count on Tamaki to be, it was completely predictable with his own emotions. And utterly unpredictable in everything else, but that was neither here nor there.
"Yes, but... I don't know, it's just not the same."
Haruhi frowned and looked straight ahead. The conversation ended there and they walked in silence for the next ten minutes. Eventually, they moved away from the families and the people chatting loudly to their friends and into their phones. They found themselves in a field almost at the outskirts of the park, where the public usually didn't care to walk out to. Haruhi stopped there and, as they were still hand in hand, Tamaki followed suit. He looked around for whatever might have gotten Haruhi's attention. There was nothing but trees and more snow for at least a mile. He furrowed his brow.
"What are we doing out here?" he asked.
Before Haruhi could answer, a small, white projectile sailed through the air like a rocket and smacked him dead-on in the back of his head. Unprepared, he fell forward, quickly letting go of Haruhi so that she only stumbled. Tamaki landed face first, laid there unmoving for a split second, then was back on his feet in the blink of an eye.
"WHAT WAS THAT?" he screamed into the air.
"THAT WAS ME!"
Tamaki whirled around, possibly expecting a vicious and sharp toothed snow beast there, ready to make him dinner and Haruhi dessert. What he did find was... a little blonde man. A little blonde man with a big, happy smile like that of a child's and another snowball in hand. Beside him was a tall, dark haired, expressionless man who held two.
"Hunny-senpai? Mori-senpai?"
Incredulous, Tamaki looked down at Haruhi, who just smiled. They were again distracted when two more snowballs whizzed right by Tamaki's face from both sides. One of them went on to smack Mori-senpai in the chest. He just looked down, unfazed. Tamaki turned again, and this time caught the red headed and, as always, cheekily grinning Hitachiin brothers stalking towards them. They had crept out from behind two trees when Tamaki wasn't looking.
"That was just a warning shot, Boss," said Hikaru.
"We can assure you, the next one won't miss."
"Hikaru, Kaoru... wha-" Tamaki looked from them, to Hunny and Mori, to Haruhi, then did it all again a second time. "I don't understand, what are you doing here?"
"Haruhi gave a us call," said Kyoya, who had just appeared out of nowhere next to a nearby tree. "She said you were down in the dumps because of the snowfall and she wanted us to help cheer you up."
"The snowballs were my idea," Hunny-senpai piped up.
"Yeah."
"Everyone..." Tamaki breathed, his eyes shining. "But... today wasn't supposed to be like this. I wanted us to have a picnic and see the flowers and enjoy Spring."
"But we'll have all season to do that, Tama-chan," said Hunny-senpai.
"We won't have the opportunity to do this again until next year," said Kaoru.
"So," Hikaru said, pacing up and down like a drill sargeant. Kaoru stood tall and at attention, but he was the only one. "We'll divide into teams of two. Boss and Haruhi are team 1, Hunny-senpai and Mori-senpai are team 2, and Kaoru and I are team 3. Kyoya will referee, because he sucks at snowball fights."
"Not wanting to parcipate doesn't equate to lacking in skill, Hikaru," Kyoya said, shooting a thinly veiled glare the older Hitachiin's way.
"Yeah, we'll see," Hikaru shot back. "Alright everyone, let's have a nice, clean, friendly snowball fight. Stick close by your teammate at all times and TEAM 3 FIRES FIRST!"
The twins launched their snowballs at Tamaki, and as promised, these two got Tamaki right in the face and chest. They ran, cackling, for the trees while Hunny and Mori threw barely aimed snowballs after them. Tamaki let out a cry of anger and frustration as he wiped the snow out of his eyes. Haruhi helped where she could, and in the end, this mostly amounted to holding on to his arm so he wouldn't run after them.
"Those twisted little-" more grumbled words fell from his mouth, but they died away when he caught Haruhi's gaze on him. They stared at each other wordlesly for a while, and then Haruhi held up her newly crafted snowball. Tamaki looked at it, and then the happy little smile Haruhi had been waiting to see crawled onto his face. He took the snowball, aimed, and threw. Hikaru cried out a moment later, and Tamaki laughed. He reached down and gathered much more snow than was necessary into his arms.
"Come, my Love," he said, winking at Haruhi. "Onwards! TO VICTORY!"
This it went on for upwards of three hours. That nobody ever got too cold or too tired was a small miracle, as was the fact that they didn't end up developing hyphthermia from all the snow being hurled at them. Hunny and Mori came out on top in the end, which was to be expected. As martial artists, they would naturally have more power and stamina than their peers. That didn't stop Tamaki and the twins from arguing mercilessly over which of their teams came in second during dinner.
The group all parted ways in front of Tamaki and Haruhi's house. Plans were made to meet up again tomorrow since nobody had work or classes to deal with. What exactly they would do wasn't decided on, at least not yet. By the time they were alone together in front of the fireplace, Antoinette asleep at their feet and soft, melodius music playing out of the stereo, it was clear to Haruhi that Tamaki had them in as much abundance as ever.
"I was thining about holding a snowman building contest. We could judge them based on size, design, orginality... and after that, we can come back here and roast marshmallows over the fireplace. We could even pretend it's like an extra Christmas and get the tree back out and all the decorations. It'll be hard to find gifts on such short notice, but I have all my Christmas music in the attic, so it'll do. It's pretty nice, actually, celebrating the final snow of Winter. Just as nice as celebrating the beginning of Spring."
Haruhi listened as best she could. Her eyes were growing heavy and she couldn't hold back her yawn, in spite of her efforts.
"That all sounds great, Tamaki," she said sleepily, her head resting on his warm shoulder, which just felt so nice and comfortable right now. "Really great..."
A chuckle rumbled through him. Haruhi felt it more than she heard it. Then she was in his arm, and he was carrying her to the bedroom. She buried her head now into his chest, listening to his heartbeat.
"Get some sleep now, you've earned it." He placed her under the covers and pulled them to her chin. Their warmth was so inviting, Haruhi was out almost instantly. She stayed awake long enough to feel Tamaki's kiss on her forehead, and hear his words in her ear. "Thank you so much for today, my Haruhi. I love you."
The sun peeked out behind the curtains the next morning, rousing Haruhi from her sleep before Tamaki could even open his eyes. He was up shortly after anyway, while Haruhi was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. He sat up and stretched, looking happily around for her and grinning when he caught sight of her.
"Hurry up in there, Haruhi," he said, getting up and pulling his pajama top over his head. "I'll just be a minute, myself. No time for any sort of primping today. We've got a lot to do."
Haruhi spat out her toothpaste and rinsed. "Still thinking about that snowman building contest?"
"Of course," Tamaki answered from inside the closet. "But now I'm thinking of expanding it to include other things. Like, say one of us wanted to make a snow dog, or a snow monkey. Or maybe we could make snow men replicas of important characters from historical dramas. I was thing I could do a samurai and you could do a geisha, or maybe a ninja. Or, if that doesn't work out. We could have a snow angel contest instead, and the prize goes to whoever can make the most perfect snow angel. No handprints or footprints allowed."
Haruhi laughed to herself and shook her head. Sometimes, she wondered how on earth she'd wound up engaged to someone like Tamaki Suoh, right before being reminded that she'd never been happier in her life than the day they'd met.
"Just don't get too many ideas," she called out to him. "We haven't even gotten outside yet."
"That's not a problem," Tamaki said. Haruhi could hear him walking out of the closet and across their room. "I can already tell, we're going to have a most wonderful day out today, just like yester-"
The dying out of his voice was preceded by the high pitched whine of the curtains being thrust open. Tamaki didn't pick up his train of thought for some time. Haruhi finally got out of the bathroom to find him at the window, staring out. He wasn't making any sounds, but he wasn't moving either. That could be a very bad sign.
Haruhi went to stand next to him. The window in their bedroom was smaller and higher than the one in the kitchen, but she could see out just fine. The sunny skies and green grass were prefectly visible, as were the barest visages of snow that had so far avoided melting. Birds were chriping and the gardener was outside looking over the empty garden for future planting. Tamaki's face had completely fallen.
"Are... you... KIDDING ME?"