A/N: Also known as the Big Damn Fuyumi Project? I'd had the idea of a Fuyumi oneshot/character study in my head for about a year before I actually sat down and wrote this; as if I don't think about the Otoris enough already, but Fuyumi is fascinating and I love her. And hopefully you love minor characters and their dysfunctional families as much as I do, because, surprise, that's what you're getting. Have fun!

This is a story about Yoshio Otori.

It starts not too long after he married his lovely, fragile wife, when the two of them decided that it would be most practical for Yoshio to have an heir—and so, not too long after that, Sadako Otori gave birth to a healthy, wide-eyed boy. They named him Yuuichi, and all was well.

But Yoshio Otori was a man who thought ahead, and he knew that it would be even more practical for him to have two potential heirs, in the event that something were to go wrong. And so Sadako Otori gave birth to another baby; this one, however, was a girl. And girls were not heirs.

So Yoshio Otori ignored his daughter, and allowed her to be raised by her mother and by the servants. (Yoshio Otori, understand, wasn't interested in raising children—he was interested in educating successors, and as he couldn't do that for his daughter she ceased to be his responsibility.)

Several years later, the two decided to try again, and this time Sadako Otori gave birth to another boy, still healthy but smaller and darker than his brother. His name was Akito, and Yoshio Otori was naturally very interested in him.

It was another several years after that when Yoshio Otori decided he wished to have another baby. His reasons were known only to him—perhaps he was concerned as to the fitness of his sons, or (more likely) perhaps he just wanted to have a last failsafe in his grand plan for the future. An emergency back-up heir, if you would.

So Sadako Otori gave birth to one last baby, and he was a boy, and his name was Kyoya.

Fuyumi remembers her mother coming home with Kyoya in her arms, remembered her cradling him while servants bustled about making preparations. She remembers looking at him silently, and—and her twenty-four-year-old self is surprised that her ten-year-old self possessed this level of insight, but at the same time she's not—she remembered thinking we're the same, you and I. True, Kyoya was a boy, and he at least had a chance of inheriting the family business; but those chances, Fuyumi knew, were slim to none. She also knew that her job in this house was to stay out of everyone's way until she got married and left, and she knew that unless something drastic happened to one of his older brothers that was what Kyoya's job was going to be too.

She decided, then and there, that she was the only one who could understand him. She decided she was going to take care of him.

"I'm going to take care of you," she whispered to the baby in her mother's arms—but nobody heard her, because nobody ever heard Fuyumi.

Her fiancé's house is about two-thirds the size of the Otori manor, but she doesn't notice that the first time she's there, and once she does notice it doesn't bother her. What she notices, though, is the sunlight falling through the curtains and dappling on the richly patterned rug, and once she notices that she notices that everything in the room—in the house—is colorful.

The house Fuyumi grew up in is not colorful. In the house Fuyumi grew up in everything is glass and metal, and it's all starkly, distantly new. She got lost in the house for the first time when she was four; she stayed sniffling in one place until her father happened to find her, and he took her back to her mother with a look of silent irritation.

The next time she got lost, she found her way by herself.

She realizes that she's been staring out the window while she was reminiscing, and that Tsukasa is watching her with a look of vague concern.

"Is everything alright?" he asks, because this is her first time visiting the house she'll soon be living in and he's convinced it needs to be perfect.

Fuyumi watches the curtains and the sunlight for another moment before turning to face him, and smiling. "Everything is wonderful," she says.

She tries to convince herself that this could be home, and isn't quite sure why she can't.

She remembers her father mostly in interactions with her brothers—which is, she supposes, logical. She remembers the way his voice sounded when he was angry, even though it wasn't often directed at her, and she remembers the sharp and quiet way he would discipline them.

And she remembers, crystal-clear, their reactions—Yuuichi's face going from surprise to hard-edged determination, his reassurances that it wouldn't happen again; Akito frowning dark and cloudy and later slipping off to go be by himself; Kyoya drawing himself ever-straighter and saying yes, sir and no, sir and always remembering every detail.

The few times her father got angry at her, for breaking something or not doing schoolwork or "interfering in Kyoya's education" again, she remembers looking at him and wanting to throw a fit, wanting to scream at him and smash things and ask him how he could do this, to any of them—but she couldn't, no matter how she tried, and so she mumbled her apologies, turned on her heel, and waited until she was alone in her room to sob into her pillow.

She took care of Kyoya exactly as she promised she would. Neither Akito nor Yuuichi paid him any mind, not that she expected them to; but every time Kyoya trailed after them, only to be ignored, she was the one who swept him up and cared for him. Even as he grew older, even as he didn't need so much caring for, even as he began to understand that his brothers were never going to wait for him—she was still always there. (She couldn't tell, after a point, whether this was for his good or for her own, but by then it had really ceased to matter.)

He learned things quickly; their father made sure of that. He was around six or seven, she thought, when he came to realize that his goal in life was to inherit the company, and to understand the full implications of what that meant. He outlined his plans to achieve this to Fuyumi, in all the detail that a six-year-old could provide, and she listened attentively and offered encouragement; but the entire time she was thinking, guiltily, that she should just tell him to give up.

Wouldn't that save them both an awful lot of pain and heartbreak? Wouldn't it prevent Kyoya from spending years trying to please his unpleasable father, all for nothing? Wouldn't it assuage his disappointment when it wasn't him, because it couldn't be him, because it was never supposed to be?

Wouldn't it be easier for Fuyumi if she didn't have to watch that?

But she couldn't bring herself to say that to a six-year-old—she knew he'd understand, and maybe that was the trouble—and so she smiled, and nodded, and tried not to think about the future.

She's incredibly lucky to have Tsukasa—she knows this, and she counts it as one of the brightest spots of good fortune in her mostly uneventful life. They both went to Ouran together—of course they did, everyone went to Ouran—but it wasn't until after they had graduated that he started courting her, so to speak. She owes her father's acceptance of this to two factors: one, that Tsukasa's family was entirely respectable, and two, that Yoshio's foremost desire, when it came to Fuyumi, was to get her married and get her out of the house.

So when he proposed it was to no one's surprise and to everyone's benefit. Fuyumi loved him; she knew that. He was gentle, warm, idiosyncratic, and everything she hadn't grown up with, and so when he asks her if everything's okay she tells herself it's just pre-wedding jitters.

Jitters are normal; jitters are acceptable; jitters are certainly not what's causing Fuyumi to keep forgetting where she is. She wonders when she'll be able to stop lying to herself.

Kyoya was eight the first time their father hit him.

Or, at least, he was eight the first time Fuyumi heard their father hit him. It's possible there had been other times before that which he simply didn't tell her about, and the thought chills her even now.

It was actually entirely by accident that she overheard it; she was passing by one of the sitting rooms (the door was closed, which by itself was odd) when she heard Kyoya's voice coming from inside, saying something too quickly and too ardently to mean anything good. She stopped and hovered a few feet from the door.

Next came Yoshio's voice, smooth and firm and tinged with subtle anger—oh no no no please no—then Kyoya's, still quicker… and then a smack which Fuyumi was sure could have been heard through the whole house.

Then Kyoya's voice again, quiet. Yes, sir. No, sir. He opened the door an instant later.

"Kyoya…" Fuyumi began, but he stepped past her and headed upstairs. Their father emerged after another moment, and turned and walked briskly back towards his office; Fuyumi glanced after him, and realized that their mother had been sitting on a sofa ten feet away the entire time.

Fuyumi shot her a mostly unintentional look, trying to think of all the things she'd wanted to say for years to the pale, silent ghost that happened to inhabit their house—you're his mother, you're my mother, why can't you fix any of this—but her mother just stared back, as though echoing her question.

Really, Fuyumi? And just what have you done?

She glared for another minute before breaking off and staring back in the direction Yoshio had gone. I'll show you, she thought, and headed purposefully after him.

She opened the office door without knocking, which was one rule broken. Her father didn't look up, however, and just said, "This is my office and you are required to knock, Fuyumi," as though he'd been expecting her. (He probably had; he expected everything.)

"You have to stop doing this to him," she said, ignoring him. That was another rule out the window.

Yoshio looked… almost surprised, then, and actually set down the file he'd been looking at. "That is most certainly not something which it is your place to discuss," he told her, voice on the razor-thin edge of danger.

"Are you going to hit me, too?" she asked, trembling; she was somewhere between bursting into tears and screaming with rage, and she couldn't for the life of her figure out where. "Fine. Go ahead. It won't help me any more than it'll help him."

"…This isn't your responsibility, nor is it your concern," he said. "As I have told you on multiple occasions, Kyoya's upbringing is to be left to me."

She stood there, shaking, for another moment, and found that suddenly everything she'd been wanting to say for years had escaped her; found that Yoshio Otori had somehow done it again.

"You'll see," she said, quietly. "He's better than this; you'll see."

She left her father's office and closed the door behind her.

They were never abused. This is something she has to remind herself today, from time to time, during her fits of melodrama; none of them had an abusive childhood. Kyoya, even at ten years younger, has always had a better grasp on perspective than her, and so she thinks of him when she reminds herself that they had grown up in grotesque amounts of wealth, that none of them had ever wanted for anything and that none of them had ever been injured in any significant way. That there were millions, possibly billions of people in the world who were worse-off than the Otori siblings.

All the same, however, she wonders from time to time what things would be like if they were different. If they all were born into a different family, or to different parents, or in a different order. If Kyoya had been born first, would he be the one with the broad shoulders and the echoing laugh? If Akito had been the third son, would he be the one taken care of by Fuyumi?

If Fuyumi had been a boy, would she matter?

This is the one which plagues her most of all, because she can't quite figure out whether or not she wants to know the answer. There's a part of her that knows, with certainty, that it's only because she's a girl that she was able to escape what she saw her brothers go through, only because she's a girl that she can play the outsider; but there's another part of her (and this is the part that's frightening) that thinks, some days, that she'd gladly trade all that if it meant she could just have that chance.

That part always loses, though, in the end. It's not like she's entirely happy with the way everything turned out; but she's okay with it, and she knows that changing it could make it worse. Especially for Kyoya, and that's the one thing she refuses to do.

He was twelve when she first became convinced he actually could gain control of the company.

There wasn't any specific inciting event that made her think this; she just remembers sitting in his room, and glancing towards him while he did his homework, and realizing with a start that he could actually pull this off, if he wanted to. He could surpass his brothers; he could impress his father; he could create an upset that had never been in Yoshio Otori's master plan. If anyone could, she realized, it would be Kyoya.

The idea both frightened and thrilled her; she wanted Kyoya to be successful, of course she did, but she was wary of what he could become when and if he realized this himself. And maybe he'd think this would be what would make him happy, finally, but what if it wasn't?

What then?

Stop that, she told herself firmly, and she was more than a little surprised to hear herself thinking it. You need to trust him to make his own decisions; then you can start worrying.

"…Okay," she said—whether it was out loud or not she wasn't quite sure. She decided, then and there, that she was going to support Kyoya no matter what he did; and she decided, then and there, that if that meant helping him inherit the company than that was what she was going to do.

She nodded once, firmly. Kyoya continued to do his math homework as though no one was making important decisions around him.

Fuyumi was the one who answered the door on the day that Tamaki Suoh came to visit, and she would be the first to admit that she was… more than a little stunned.

"Hello!" said the radiant blond middle-schooler standing at her front door. "I'm so sorry, I don't mean to intrude—I was just looking for Kyoya. Is he home?"

"…Oh!" said Fuyumi. "I think he was doing something after school… but he should be home in a few minutes, if you'd like to wait?" She smiled at him. "You must be… Tamaki, right?"

"You've heard of me!" He looked genuinely delighted at this prospect. "I'm so flattered. Are you sure I can come in, I don't want to be a bother—"

"It's no trouble at all," said Fuyumi, waving him inside. "I'm sure Kyoya would be delighted to see you."

She remembered clothes flung across the room and Kyoya aiming blows at couch cushions and thought that maybe "delighted" wasn't quite the right word—but it would be good for Kyoya regardless.

Tamaki entered and glanced around the house with something like awe, before his eyes landed on Fuyumi again. "I'm sorry!" he said, holding out a hand. "Where are my manners? You wouldn't happen to be the renowned Fuyumi, would you?"

"…That's me," she said, half-laughing, shaking his hand.

Tamaki grinned like the sun. "Kyoya's told me quite a bit about you," he said. "He doesn't… he doesn't talk about his family very often, but he talks about you quite a lot. You're getting married soon, aren't you?"

"Y-yes," said Fuyumi. "Just… just a few months from now, in fact."

"Congratulations!" said Tamaki, smiling wider, and the enthusiasm in his voice was completely genuine.

"…Thank you," she replied, honestly flattered. "I… I'm actually more than a little nervous about it; it's going to be my first time living alone and I…" I what? I don't know what I want?

"Don't be," said Tamaki, interrupting her thoughts. "You're the kind of person who can do well at anything she puts her mind to. Trust me; I can tell."

Fuyumi blinked, and then smiled small. Kyoya arrived home a few minutes later; she didn't know what the two of them talked about, but she knew that for a few days after that Kyoya seemed lost in thought, and for the next few weeks after that he seemed happier than she'd ever seen him. It was subtle, of course, but it was there.

Tamaki returned to the house several times after that, and every time Kyoya seemed to be drawn further and further out of himself; the night when the two of them came up with the idea for the Host Club also happened to be the eve of Fuyumi's wedding. (She doesn't find out about the club until much later, of course, but when she does she considers it a happy coincidence.)

It's in the morning that Tsukasa is scheduled to arrive, to help transport her things to his house so she can prepare for the wedding there, and Fuyumi is pacing outside of Kyoya's bedroom door while she waits for him. She's debating whether to wake Kyoya up to say goodbye—he and Tamaki, after all, stayed up talking for a long time the night before, and she's going to see him at the wedding anyways—but in the end she decides to open the door.

Tamaki and Kyoya are both asleep on the sofa. Kyoya has one arm on the armrest, his head resting against it; Tamaki lays with his head on Kyoya's shoulder and his back against Kyoya's arm in a way that looks entirely comfortable despite being obviously not so.

Fuyumi stares, for a minute, at the two of them, vulnerable and peaceful and together, and she realizes that Tamaki Suoh has managed to do for her brother in four months what she's been trying to do for him for fourteen years. It's a startling revelation to come to, but somehow she can't bring herself to feel anything other than joy, and relief, and a strange sort of pride.

She closes the door behind her, feeling somehow freer than she's felt in years; He'll be fine, says a voice in the back of her head, and she knows it to be true.

Tsukasa's outside when she exits through the front door. "So," he says, loading the last of the bags in the car and smiling at her, "ready to go?"

Fuyumi looks back towards the house where she grew up. He'll be fine, says the voice in the back of her mind again; and then another voice, one she hasn't heard in a long, long time:

You'll be fine.

"…God, yes," she says, and throws her arms around Tsukasa, and kisses him without thinking.

"H-hey." He pulls gently away after a second, laughing, bright red. "We're not married yet, you know."

"I know," she replies, seating herself on the passenger's side. "But we will be soon. And then…" She kisses him again, on the cheek this time, when he climbs into the car. "We'll live happily ever after."

He looks at her with his lopsided smile. "I hope so," he says, as they start to drive away.

They would; they all would. As Tamaki Suoh would say, she could tell.