fandom: Ouran High School Host Club
title: that sweetness of life.
pairing: Kyouya + Tamaki
rating: pg-13
description – Kyouya is caught between his father and 'Father'.

Disclaimer – Ouran Host Club has Kyouya and he deserves my love for being evil so here I am with a fic from a manga that does not belong to me.

I held my ears with the headphones
Blasting the music
I chose not to return to.
Yet, a flood came
To me and I listened desperately.
My face could not
Show what I truly felt
Underneath.

Still, I could say it,
Between rain and lightning.
I am the person
You want to be,
The one who can do
So many things,

The same one who wanders from place to place.
Someday, I will
Find a home.

Someday, where
Someone will say
"You can stay here."

that sweetness of life.
By miyamoto yui

How…disgusting.

I watch my father sit with his hands properly in his lap. With an all-knowing expression whose hard eyes stare out at the scenery beyond the tinted windows, his legs are perfectly crossed like a mannequin on display. He doesn't move and nor can he be moved.
He then clears his throat and leans on the handle of the door with his elbow, his index finger pushing on his upper lip. His glasses reflect the rapid whirring metropolis of Shinjuku within them.

"Stop here, please," I gently say to the driver as I place my hand on his shoulder. Without turning towards my father, I get my school bag and get walk out onto the street.

"I can't believe you said that to me. I've tolerated many things, but this is about self respect. Not pride. But you can interpret it any way you'd like. I really don't care what you can or cannot feel for." My tone is not shouting though the short clips between sentences package the wild rage in between the spaces.
From all these years of keeping things inside, I am, for once, glad over the training of being able to cleanly separate emotion and logic from one another though they come from the same body.

Maybe that is why they are always at war with one another, fighting for dominance within the same human flesh.

For the third time in my life, I am forced to take public transportation. The other two times were involuntarily, but this time, it is with my full consent to be molested in every which way by the commuters going back home at this popular hour of 6pm.
Doing this alone, I know this is normal for others, but to have my father know that I will go to a place where others of my class do not even have to think about…

…it is already shameful. I already like this option.

Walking along, I see a group of school girls. They seem to be about the same age as me. They try to pretend they do not see me though they are staring without being conscious of it. They try in their own little way to get my attention.

Is it because I am a boy or is it because of the emblem on my uniform?

Mindlessly, you say your comments without having any defense for the repercussion. It is easy to say things that you only have a quarter of understanding about.

The quiet ones aren't as silent as they should or pretend to be. They'll rise soon with a fury beyond your imagination.

What do you know about me anyway?
What do you know what this person has done? What do you know about what they have said? Only by the way they dress or the things that you see on the outside, do you think that you're old enough to make a judgment call about deeper things?

Do you think you are worthy of talking to me without an open,
unguarded heart?

Though I have been privileged to live among the upper class, it doesn't mean that I'm uninformed. It doesn't mean that I live not knowing that wearing the right clothes shamelessly will give me things than those who don't have the same style or brand-name on. It means that I know I have to wake up, eat, sleep, and work as everyone else does and just as importantly, I feel the same emotions as everyone else. I am no better and I am no worse than the person next to me.

In our society, this just means there are more expectations of me.

Sometimes I feel my refined manners camouflage the fact that I'm a punk at heart. I pass by a store window with a set of furniture from all kinds of time periods. All are reproductions but nonetheless appealing to my aesthetic sense of neatness and simplicity. There is a small table made of Murano glass. It looks like a wine cup cut into a flat surface like a clear skating rink on the top and the single leg is made to appear like vines and veins of a tree. Its colors are transparent white mixed with deep tinges of purple.
I note that when I see my own reflection, I am always wearing clothes that don't fit me.

Thinking of my Father, I want to tell him I've learned one thing in this damn world: If you know you have the power to hurt others and still do, you haven't suffered enough. Real pain is not what you can take, it is the ability to hang by a thread and pretend you're confident of surviving.

You'll be surprised by the things that you'll be able to walk through.

By this time, because the girls stand on one side of the street pretending to look through their bags, they make an assumption that I'm an arrogant bastard (gladly taken as a high compliment, mind you) when I ignore them and I pay my bus fare when I step through its doors. Thank goodness the machine takes bills. I do not like carrying many coins.

Standing in the middle, squished between students, suits, and the elderly, I adjust my glasses. My mind rushes faster than the express train that's passing over us on its elevated tracks.
My mind won't leave me alone. The scene in the car keeps on turning in circles in my head though I show nothing in my blank face.

I want to forgive you. It is bad overtime to keep this up. I am not strong enough in resources to encourage a war with you.

Still, kindness takes over and if it means to kill you and to hurt myself, I still choose to protect you though I do not understand why. Is that kindness if you don't want to feel guilt? Is that cruelty if you continue to hurt yourself knowing that it's more familiar than the feeling of happiness?

That it'll be here more often than that sweetness of life?

To add to my disdain, I hear a familiar laugh on the other side of the bus and hope that the source of it doesn't recognize me. I duck my head and with much elbowing around, I read through a book from my bag. I always bring one to pass the time, especially in conversationless drives.

But even reading does not save me this time.

How can I feel like I'm overreacting if I don't usually show my emotions so extremely? Or is it because I'm more vulnerable since my emotions have been taken by siege due to that earlier incident? My body reacts against me (and my better judgment) whenever I am with you. Doesn't this say a lot about you, 'Father'?
So, this is what small deaths taste like, do they? Uncontrollable, circumstantial failures.

I watch the duality. Two similar, separate scenes that tear important things away from my soul, with my mind bleeding helplessly. When little by little, things are taken away, it is only so that their attachment to you won't detriment their growth.

In the end, You are a disease by yourself with all that negative energy. That's why I always avoided this kind of situation in the first place.
No one will benefit from it. Most of all, not me.

"You should have listened to me," his voice says in a cool and collected manner.
"Your life would have been so much better," he continues on with a matter-of-fact tone.

The eruption happening inside my head and the one I am witnessing in front of my eyes because I can't turn my eyes away is ripping me effortlessly…
Like a masochist wanting more, I am the one now staring while being ignored.

Above the book, I see her looking away affectionately upset. He is laughing at his own predictably stupid joke with a sparkle in his eyes when he's next to her, and it makes my already open wounds sting.

When you don't know how to react after being apathetic for so long, it becomes easier to hide, but it doesn't mean the intensity lessens. The more you hide something inside of yourself, the more it makes you violently shake to let it out, making itself another living entity inside of you.
Sometimes the loneliness of thinking so deeply cannot be discerned from the bitterness of having no one understand you. On the other hand, you too cannot understand small, menial things that others get ridiculously annoyed about.

Here, I am stuck because although I know I 'feel' jealousy, it just makes me feel sicker in disappointment than the disgust I felt earlier with my father.

Was I to turn away and nod just keep the peace? Was I just keep quiet like usual during our drives?
Am I to accept both of these situations?

No, not this damn time.
You can step all over me and you can say what you please, but not when it crosses into my realm of self-respect. That, I cannot let you invade while I'm still breathing and want to stay alive in this body.

I am not so special and I know better than to make it out like someone else in this world hasn't felt what I've felt. That's why I'm unable to say what I want to.

I know exactly where to hurt you, Father.

But you, Tamaki, the person I somehow find myself constantly wanting to be next to, you're always so far away from me. I shouldn't respond to you like I always do because you only react when I step out of your mental bounds, but today, your apparent indifference to me makes me feel like my will to live is decreasing before me.

You continue to lean in closer, wanting to whisper in her ear while she turns around obliviously, and I read the words in front of me "I feel abandoned here…" parallel what I can't say.
I have no right to be upset when I don't encourage you though. When I do have your attention, I turn away indignantly, talking of finances or anything that diverts myself from facing you as a person…

…the person whose attention I want to take control of, of whose devotion I want undivided.

This undying devotion is my secret selfishness. It is the ugly part of me, the weakness that makes me hate myself and you for creating such a thing within me.
I am consciously and constantly hurting myself because of it.

When the doors open and close, a flood of people exit and I don't care if he sees me. I am not paying attention to Tamaki anymore.
Putting the book back into my bag, I look out the windows, changing from skyscrapers to two-story homes and apartment buildings.

Father's presence looms over me.
All my life I have wanted to win his approval and in doing so, trying to outdo what my siblings have done before me, I had miscalculated somewhere: Thinking of doing something greater, silent approval of filial affection would naturally be born. The trajectory seemed impeccable.

But it is not so. I always thought secretly I was the favorite for being the one who suffered the most, reminding my father of what he had built when he was young.

I was wrong.

Where have you gone? Why have you forsaken me? Where is the man I admire and does not conform to his society when it comes to his core?

When I was a child, there was one time when you patted my head in your office. No one was there.

"Take all the good traits and forget all my bad ones within you."

Didn't you tell me that or was it a dream from childhood? I weighed everything I had on that one moment.
Today, it all changed when you couldn't look at me in the eye. You opened your scheduler.

"That's good that you established your 'club' at school, but when will you eradicate that abomination and start living in 'reality', Kyouya? You should have listened to me and invested-"

I stop the horrible memory in mid-sentence. All the emotions wash over me like frozen water splitting my skin with its icicles. I want to scream out to you with all my seething wrath.
I want to say that I am not trying to be difficult, but mindless acceptance will make me worse than the people who say, "As long as everyone else thinks so, then it must be right!" Just because everyone says that's the way it is because of what they 'see' to be true, that is not an opinion at all!
Just because your friends and other 'allies' have sons that are not part of my circle and did exactly as you poor saps have done, doesn't mean I haven't lived life.

I started to LIVE when Tamaki called out my true nature, the one I left in the shadows of wanting you to notice all my effort!

Father, of all the people, not even Sister, I thought you were the one who somehow understood this situation (if not 'me') and then the time I thought you'd see me rise, you made sure to tell me subtly in between the lines, "Oh, I've always been with the others against you."

The betrayal is clean and clear.

The more I think about it, as much as it hurts and is beyond my emotional limits, the more I become aware that happiness can be achieved without you. It can actually be altered and changed to be created without you. I never imagined that possibility!

But you hang over me like a noose.

I know, deep inside, I am ready to die each time I look up to heaven for a pinch of acceptance.

For in saying these few words, everything you told me that day that you reached out to me, instantly turned into a lie.

Still, I must live on without you there for me even if we're in the same room. So, this is what it means to be persecuted from the inside.

I wish I knew how to pray like Tamaki. I wish I knew how to shut off my mind to everything like my Father.

I turn my head away from my reflection intermingling with the darkness that sunset gave way to. It is time to step out and walk home.
I just hope that no one sees me.

But as I walk closer and closer in dread of returning to that place that makes me feel isolated and ill by the walls of its silent judgments, under the lamppost, my grief is clearly seen by the one person I wish most not to see it.
"Konbanwa," Tamaki greets as an opening and I nod my head listlessly in return, annoyed at myself for showing the world what I have been holding back for years.
My face is stern as I cut him short, making sure to show him I wish not to talk to him right that moment. "See you tomorrow."

I don't know what I felt more: dissent, madness, anger, distress, or lonely.

The next day, my mind is gone but my body knows the motions. In the wide hall with many girls sitting on the couch talking to me about music or what are the latest Haruhi items to buy, Tamaki, who is bending forward to kiss one of the school's princesses on the hand, glances at me. He secretly gives me a severe stare that no one else knows.

Of course, they don't. They don't know him.
And I was the teacher of that cold expression…

The one I deny my love to is the one who looks at me with those eyes when I talk to others. He can be popular with everyone and then when it comes to me, I'm the one committing such a grave crime.

I blink my eyes and tilt my head with a smirk for his amusement and the 'aww'-ing of my audience. If I have anything else left, at least let it be pride.

So, at the end of the day, I open my favorite window to its widest capacity. It looks out into the center, the main part of our campus. I do not know why, but that is the one place in the world that I feel at peace. There is nowhere else I can go to, especially with Tamaki finally answering me back like he did this past lunchtime.

I start to think of the time we started talking after the first time we met. Down there where the lane splits, he hugged me saying he wanted to have lunch with me.
I didn't like to be touched by anyone. Only an occasional embrace from my sister.

Going back to the large table to calculate today's earnings, I avert my body away from looking down at memory lane. I sit down and the chair makes a big screech, louder when there is no one around me.

Skritch, skritch.

I keep on writing while my mind wanders between numbers and fathers.

I can handle and manage many things at a time, but love is splitting me open, piece by piece, opening a different wound, new and old, on different parts of my body.

Where is peace?

Is it in eating sweets with someone? Is it walking with that person?
Is it in knowing your own strength?

But if I stroll every night during the hot, hot summer, as if I am going somewhere, but really going in circles and back to the place I do not want to return to, does that mean I am still satisfied?

Father raised me. And Tamaki was the one who taught me to open my carefully shut box of emotions.
So is this contorted hurt just another form of what I really want and pretend to protest against?

It makes my stomach sick all over again.

I drop my pen and grab my stomach. I have tried to hide this from everyone, even when I had to take physicals from the family hospital, but it comes back when even I cannot control my stress. I know it is only a matter of time.

I realize I have been thinking so much and distracting myself that I have not really eaten for a day. Things are becoming hazy.

"I knew I'd find you here. You treat it like it's your sanctuary." The usually bright and light tone of his voice is replaced by someone serious, a person that no one besides myself knows exists in the same body.

I just lean forward to pick up the pen with ease. And Tamaki eyes me while pushing the palm of his hand onto my forehead. "You have a fever and I bet you didn't even know."
"No, I'm invincible," I try to joke and go back to calculating.
"That's it."

Without thinking, he scoops me up and awkwardly carries me to the couch. The chair falls with a loud crack onto the tile floor. He doesn't flinch while I wince because I do not like loud noises. He drops me into the couch and runs out.
I want to leave but I look up at the ceiling thankful that for this moment, I do not have to take care of myself.

He comes back with a bucket filled with water and ice. He doesn't think to bring a rag, but takes off his jacket and shirt, dipping the white blouse into the bucket. Looking at me carefully while I purposely do not meet his eyes, he pats my neck, my face and my forehead.

Although I am honestly glad to have him next to me, I am still mad at him for yesterday afternoon on the bus and how he looked at me just a few hours ago.

The more my emotions want to embrace him, the more my mind wants to push him farther away from me.
There are so many things I want to say and none of my usual eloquence makes itself known. And even if I could, I know it will all be meaningless because I will surely fail explaining something that is a part of me and I do not like to tell anyone.

All my life, I have met many people. I have painfully learned how to charm anyone for survival's sake in the world and in business. I know how to talk to anyone and how to talk anyone into anything I want.

But I am sure, there are things in this world that you hide away. That no matter how confident or unconfident you are, you cover up in the shadows of your heart. These are the things that people deem as 'evil' but everyone has them, along with the burdens and sacrifices we hide behind the expressions of our 'usual mask'.

That is probably the reason why I accepted the title of 'Shadow King' without thinking...

When I first met Tamaki, we looked at each other and he knew something about me that I couldn't ever tell anyone. I knew we were connected somehow and in a way unlike anyone I've ever met or have been close to, especially not on a first encounter.
He openly showed me over and over that he knew and I have continually tried to push it away, stubbornly refusing with my body and mouth that I knew.

My eyes, as he discovered, could never lie to him.

Now, he is leaning over me and I watch him without protesting. I feel my heart beat rise and my face becomes hotter when I feel his breath on my neck. He whispers tenderly into my ear, "Every day since I've met you, I've watched you. I knew that even though you smiled at everyone, you held a great pain inside of you."

Shocked, I take a deep breath of air as if in surprise, as if I am learning to breathe for the first time.

My heart, covered with all its metal parts from all my shields and badges of warring between my mind and soul, is cracked just a little. All the anger I have for him is suddenly lulled and I just close my eyes comfortably.

When the time comes, perhaps he may not return the same affection I do towards him, but I know this moment secures that I am glad I have chosen him, as I had prayed in one of the shrines when he brought me with him to Kyoto.

You make me crazy and possibly jealous, but it is you. Only you.
I have known this since the first time you talked to me.

It was the first time I felt such a strong desire
for someone to know me and
for me to know them.

Without thinking, I pull him and he falls on top of my chest. Wrapping my arms around him, my monotone voice cracks, "Thank you."

He pulls himself up and starts to close his eyes and tilt his head, I stare at his gorgeous face (I have a weakness for pretty things, as everyone knows…) and that messed up hair…

BAM!

"Kyouya~! Can we use some of the money for tomorrow's event for cake from this shop?!"

Honey barges into the room and finds Tamaki putting his wet shirt onto my forehead and I turn over my head to the direction of his voice, adjusting my glasses. "Why not?"
Mori also comes in and nods his greeting with a grunt. "Mm."

"Are you okay?"
I nod my head.
"Hi, Tamaki!"
Honey turns to me again excitedly. "You're not going to look at the pamphlet?"

"I trust your judgment. I was thinking we needed to win more alliances outside the five kilometer radius."
Honey squeals happily and jumps up to Mori's shoulders and they both walk away with Honey whistling his 'Glad glad song'.

When they are out of listening range, I look at Tamaki and he has his hand on the back of his head, sheepishly laughing. "Heh heh heh."

I want to roll my eyes. I have made Fate angry with me for all my misdeeds to have this happen to me, haven't I? But I won't let anyone control me…

Sitting up, the shirt drops into my hand. I get up while Tamaki is still sitting on the couch.
Handing him his shirt, he holds his hand out and I grab the back of his head. I kiss him on the mouth, smoothly but mercilessly.

"Don't be so full of yourself."

Pulling away while he still wants more, he looks at me in awe and confusion, but I stuff the wet blouse onto his face so that he doesn't see me. He just watches my back with a stupid gloat all over his face. I take all my notebooks from the table and walk towards the door.

"Next time, don't stop in the middle, you idiot," I scold as I slam the door.

Turning redder than ever, I rush for the bathroom with all the composure I can conjure up while my knees are still shaking.

Passing by one of the mirrors in the hallway, I smile.

I didn't know you existed inside of me.

Owari.

Author's note:

*winks* I wanted to show some humor along with anger and angst. There are so many things I want to explore with writing, but Kyouya stood out in my head and this is what came out.

Although I do not like leaving Kyouya's father's situation up in the air, I think it is more realistic that way. The more you give in one way, the more you take from another. Life is always strange like that.

Thanks for reading!

Love,
Yui

8/30/2008 7:44:57 AM – LA
8/30/2008 11:44PM - Tokyo