Title: Here is the place
Characters: Hikaru PoV. All named characters involved herein exist in the manga canon.
Rating: T, or if you can read The Hunger Games, you can read this.
Disclaimer: Ouran High School Host Club belongs to Hatori Bisco and related companies. The Hunger Games belongs to Suzanne Collins and related companies.
Spoilers: The entire Hunger Games series even though no THG character will appear herein, hence why this is not a crossover. Also, you will find that it is much easier if you know the whole Ouran canon even though there are no specific spoilers given this is obviously AU.
Dedication: To everyone who loves Ouran and who loves THG, and especially to those who love both. As a reader you will need to repose a certain level of faith in my ability to fuse something as light, fluffy and feel-good as Ouran together with the heavy, depressing and important social critique and commentary of THG. I will not disrespect THG by glorifying the instruments and sources of oppression even though Ouran is all about immense privilege and wealth. If you can trust me to do this over the course of the story, or if you have already done so, I thank you.
This is also specifically for Think. Analyze. BeYou and Clarrolx, two of my readers who were told that I was considering writing such a story and yet neither of them discouraged me from this insanity. Particularly, Think. Analyze. BeYou put forward this idea in a message to me that I refused to read because I hadn't finished the books and I didn't want to be spoiled, but when I finished I came up with this concept and wrote it and when I went back to my inbox to search for the reader who said she loved THG, I realized that she'd already suggested I write something along these lines. So here's to you, your creativity and your foresight.
Finally, if it matters to any of you as a reader, I have finished the Ouran manga and anime in full, as well as all THG books and the available movie(s).
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CHAPTER ONE
Deep in the meadow, under the willow
A bed of grass, a soft green pillow
Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes
And when again they open, the sun will rise.
Here it's safe, here it's warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm
Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.
– Mockingjay, Epilogue
This time last year, the world as Hikaru knew it ended.
It began with the girl who stood up to President Suou. It finished with the peasants storming the Capitol and winning. The comfortable life that Hikaru once had was annihilated with shocking speed and finality. Amidst the terror and confusion he came to understand the depths of the commoners' hatred and anger, and what that would mean for him and his kind.
His kind.
It would have been terrible enough if he were merely Capitol born and bred. But he's not just that. He is a Hitachiin. His family overflowed with gold and jewels. They occupied some of the highest rungs of high society. Their name was so prestigious and their extravagant parties so celebrated; the beauty of the members of their family was so renowned that they dominated the posters and advertising campaigns, and individually each of them had a sense of style so powerful that collectively they dictated the fashions of the city.
In short, they are the very picture of what the Prefectures think is wrong with the Capitol, and now all of the past wrongs will be avenged on them.
With every passing day Hikaru has been discovering more and more of how many wrongs were committed and how grievous they were – are. Since the media systems had been taken over by the commoners, they have made it a point to use it as a platform for their immense pain... Pain that had been carefully kept out of sight and out of mind in the old cosseted Capitol.
Kaoru thinks that they should have known, or at least guessed, of the suffering elsewhere. After everything collapsed, Kaoru told him that it seems so obvious with hindsight that the commoners must have been hurting, because how can anyone be fine with willingly sending their children to death each year?
But Hikaru knows that his twin is a better person than him. Of the two of them Kaoru is more easily moved to compassion and Kaoru is more sensitive, with a greater innate capacity for kindness. Hikaru is not good at putting himself into the shoes of someone else. He remembers the boy he was before the destruction of his home. To be honest, he simply didn't give a fuck. His life was glorious. it was exciting and enviable and filled with joy and pleasure. There is nothing on earth as enjoyable as privilege, and Hitachiins were its definition.
It's not like suffering didn't exist in the Capitol either. Kaoru had gasped in horror and warned him never ever to say that in public unless he wants to be lynched. Hikaru gets that there is no way to compare the suffering of these commoners to that of the Capitol denizens, but what his point really is is that: people are always going to feel sad no matter how much they have, and there will always be people who have less. It's relativity. Hikaru's classmates are uglier than him and so they spend their time crippled by low self-esteem and bitter jealousy. The majority of their associates have less money than the Hitachiins and as a result force themselves to do whatever is necessary to climb as far up as they can go no matter how unhappy it might make them. These pains were considered enormous to them. They were consumed by it.
That's why Hikaru doesn't like wasting time on trying to alleviate other people's suffering. Because he thinks it can't be done. If that makes him sound frighteningly selfish, it's because he is. People will find something to suffer about, or they will create their own suffering. Going about trying to help random people like a saint is incredibly stupid. You'd only burn yourself out fast and become empty and dead yourself. It's enough having to cope with the daily worries of the people around you, the people you really actually care about.
Even now, who will bother to pick up a fallen Hitachiin? Who, in the absolute mess of a society they now find themselves in, will show pity and mercy? Who will remind themselves of other people's losses when their own is so fresh in their minds?
Not the rebels, that's for sure.
People are all alike. It's an eye for an eye. The commoners make it out that them Capitol people are monsters because of how they have been oppressed and wounded. The Games were horrific, they wail, and then in the next breath make a decision to create a new Games except the participants would be Capitol children.
If Hikaru's privilege has made him morally inferior, he does not see that their lack of privilege has taught them anything that makes them superior. If anything it makes them eager to gain power only to repeat history except with themselves as winners this time round. All there was, and all there is, and all that will ever be is power. He and his kind wielded power and they used it; now the power has changed hands and the opponents are using it.
And this cynicism is exactly why Hikaru is tougher than his brother.
This is exactly why Hikaru must be prepared to volunteer if the worst comes to pass.
Because today, they will face their first reaping.
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Notes
Japan is divided into prefectures, so I have used that in lieu of districts.