Title: Seeing Gray
Anime: Ouran High School Host Club
Pairing: HikaKao
Chapter 1

Nobody understood them. Nobody understood what had happened between them. What made it hurt that much more is that they themselves were not sure of what had happened between themselves. All they knew was that they didn't feel like talking to each other… or anyone, for that matter.

It went beyond what one could call a simple 'fight'. They couldn't call this a fight. Why? They don't know if it's a fight. They don't know what it is.

The older Hitachiin sat in his chair in their homeroom class scribbling neatly on a sheet of paper with his pencil during a break. Actually, this is what he has been doing even while the teacher spoke. So what if the teacher was speaking? That didn't matter to him. It didn't matter to the younger Hitachiin, either, who, unlike his older brother, hadn't spoken a single word for days.

The brunette sat between them. That was how her place in the classroom had been arranged. She was uncomfortable, but this wasn't like the last fight. Was it a fight? What was this? Kaoru would say anything to anyone. Hikaru was being an idiot. She stood up and walked to her left, standing beside Hikaru. She worked up the nerve, and asked,

"What are you doing?" he continued to scribble on the paper, starting from top to bottom, working towards its pointless completion.

"I'm graying out a sheet of paper." He said, not looking at Haruhi. She looked at a small stack of notebook papers on his desk and picked them up, looking at each individual page. All of them were gray from the top to the bottom.

"Why?" she asked.

"It's supposed to be the way of an artist expressing his feelings." He answered dully, irritated by anyone's presence.

"Just gray?" she said.

"Mm." this was his seventh finish paper. He put it on top of the stack and started another one, doing just the same.

"How many of those are you going to do?" she asked.

"By the end of the day, there will probably be twenty of them."

"This isn't artistic expression, you know. You're just throwing a fit." She said matter-of-factly. He took a binder, placed another sheet of paper on top of it so that he wouldn't harm the expensive desk he sat in, and said,

"No." he stabbed the paper, scribbled on it so hard that the lead tore the paper to shreds, wrecked his binder, snapped the pencil's tip, and then he turned the paper into an ugly paper ball, tossed it somewhere away from him, and threw his left shoe at it. "That's throwing a fucking fit." he stood up to go and sharpen his pencil, and the people nearby him parted to let him pass, afraid of what he might do to them while he was angry. Haruhi watched him walk away, and then looked at Kaoru. He was doing something similar, but he was actually making shapes with his pencil. She walked over to him.

There were hearts on the notebook paper, tinted, buffed, and soulful looking. They looked like they could be picked up in her hand… as if she could hold them and hear them whisper secrets. The tonality made everything look three dimensional. This was artistic expression.

"Kaoru… it's so pretty…" she said, looking over his shoulder. The younger twin didn't say a word. He started adding more details to the hearts. They seemed to be stems of flowers, or possibly curling strings attached to the ends of heart-shaped balloons. There wasn't a point to this, either, just as much as Hikaru graying out many sheets of paper wasn't. She hesitantly touched the other papers he had drawn on, and flipped through them hen she saw that he didn't seem to care. There were more hearts, some stars, flowers, and many pictures depicting what nighttime looked like in his eyes. She continued to flip through them, liking what he had done, when she came across a simple heart with ruffles with Hikaru's name written inside of it in curly, pretty cursive. "Kaoru…" she said softly, knowing that he missed his brother even if he wasn't saying anything about it. "You should add your name underneath his. Keeping your names together makes it feel like you two aren't having problems, right now. And you two look a lot better together than separated." Haruhi suggested. She kept watching him draw his current drawing, and saw that he had placed the heart-flowers inside of a vase-type object. He added a simple border to the page, and then stuck it in the top of the stack that the brunette was holding.

She looked over at Hikaru who was back at his desk, graying out more paper. She looked back down at Kaoru to find that he wasn't drawing, anymore. He just looked at the paper, holding his pencil.

'Maybe… all of his feelings are already drawn, today…' Haruhi thought. Then, he placed the blank sheet of paper on top of the actual artistic pieces. She looked at it, and then watched as he picked up his bag and left the room and his drawings behind. She looked at Hikaru graying out his paper, and then at the white piece of paper Kaoru had. 'The exact opposite. Hikaru's seeing gray… while Kaoru sees nothing.'