Shadow's Strength
Chapter II - Investigation
The following Monday, Kyouya pulled Haruhi aside before club and mentioned to her that she could take off for the week if she was tired. She started to refuse but then seemed to suddenly remember something and said that she would just take the day off to go home and rest, thanking Kyouya for his concern. Still, somehow it didn't seem like sleeping was her plan which only frustrated the Shadow King more. His business was knowing things, but he couldn't figure out why she was lying to him and everyone else—let alone what she was lying about, and it simply spoiled his mood even more as the club prepared for the day without her.
However, a few minutes before it was time to open the doors, he received a call from one of his older brothers. He was needed at a business deal at one of the local hospitals. It wasn't anything major and Kyouya really didn't have a role to play at the meeting other than stand quietly as the dutiful third son. Of course, even though his presence would be redundant, he still had no right to refuse, so he had to duck out of club activities early as well, but for the duration of the ride to the hospital, his mind continued to be preoccupied with Haruhi.
Obviously, she was in some sort of trouble. He knew that she wasn't the type to ask for help—that point was made abundantly clear when they went to Okinawa—and while that still bothered all of them since they cared for her, he knew it wasn't something that would change easily. But while she wouldn't ask for help, Kyouya never expected that Haruhi would go so far as to lie about her problems to everyone, even her father, to keep from having to rely on them. So, if he knew her as well as he thought—and he was quite certain that he did—she had some sort of really big problem. Or perhaps something she was ashamed of? In any case, it was something that she wouldn't easily share with anyone, no matter how many lies she had to tell.
Groaning, he rubbed his eyes until he saw blasts of color behind his eyelids, frustrated beyond belief.
Once upon a time, he wouldn't have cared about it. If someone else was upset, it didn't matter to him—he had enough of his own problems to deal with—but Haruhi was the exception to all the rules that each club member once held dear. While he wasn't going to admit it to anyone else, Kyouya couldn't lie to himself that even he had become somewhat infatuated with the girl. He didn't plan to act on his sentiments anytime soon, if ever, but seeing her in trouble with some unknown problem bothered him—to put it mildly—especially since he prided himself on knowing everything about everyone.
"—ya-sama? Kyouya-sama, we've arrived," Tachibana called, jarring the boy from his thoughts. Taking a breath, he pushed his frustrations down and replaced his usual stoic expression, heading inside the building.
The meeting was dull, but he forced himself to focus and keep from falling back into his thoughts surrounding Haruhi. However, once the meeting was over he couldn't help letting out a silent sigh of relief to be done with it all. He headed back out, ready to go home, but as he got out of the elevator and headed toward the exit, something caught his eye.
A familiar brown mop of hair in the Ouran uniform stood in line to check in at the front counter. But even facing the opposite direction, he would recognize Haruhi anywhere, and a sinking feeling suddenly appeared in the pit of his stomach, wiping any thoughts from his mind as his body robotically moved into the car, letting Tachibana drive him back home even as his mind was stuck on the image of her hunched shoulders that looked even smaller than normal.
Eventually he found himself sitting on his couch, staring at the ceiling, and his mind set back to work. Haruhi had lied about going home to rest, that much was obvious, and she lied about it so that she could go to the hospital. For a moment, he wondered if maybe she was visiting someone, but he quickly nixed the thought. There were few people that he knew she would go to visit at a hospital if they were sick, but even then, she wouldn't lie to Ranka about it. No, she must have been there for herself.
A wave of nausea coursed through him and he just barely managed to keep himself under control.
She was there for herself, and since she had been lying about it, he knew that there was definitely something very, very wrong. She may not have openly admitted to having a cold under normal circumstances, but she also wouldn't lie about going to a doctor's appointment if it was a simple cold. No, this had to be something significant.
The hair on the back of Kyouya's neck raised up as he thought about the implications of his realization.
Immediately, he reached out for his laptop, deciding to attempt to obtain her medical records. She was at one of his family's hospitals, after all, but after a few hours of effort, he conceded that the system's security was too strong—absently noting that it was a good thing, even if it obstructed his current ambition. Instead, he tried to see if he could at the very least acquire the appointment times or the doctors that she'd seen in hopes that it could give him a clue, but the security maintaining patient confidentiality was still too strong for him to find anything useful. He stared at the ceiling for a while longer and was about to give up for the night before remembering the security cameras in the main lobby.
Surely, he thought, that wouldn't be as hard to obtain. He could at least see how often she'd been going to the hospital. Finally, he hit a stroke of luck as his hunch proved correct and managed to get a hold of the camera footage from the last three weeks. But while he watched it at 60x speed, he still spent the rest of the night and the morning going through it all, and by the time he finished, the sun had made its appearance again and he had to get ready for school.
On the plus side, most of his frustrations were gone, but he would gladly have that back over the nearly crippling worry that had rooted itself in the pit of his stomach. Over the last three weeks, Haruhi had been to the hospital three times. He couldn't know if she had been going even more frequently than that since he only had three weeks' worth of footage available to review, but given the timing of the visits, he doubted that she had any prior appointments. Her first appointment was at a time that would have been after club hours, the Friday before her behavior started to seem odd. Her second visit was the day that she was late to the club, during the time that she said she'd been studying, and the third was when he just saw her the previous afternoon.
If he had any hope left that nothing major was wrong, it was completely wiped out, and during his entire ride to school, he felt like he might get sick.
By all appearances, he didn't seem any different from usual, but he was distracted the entire day. He felt anxious for club hours to begin so that he could see her sooner and finally solve the puzzle that had been bothering him for days, but he also wished that it would never come, knowing that he wasn't going to like the answers that he was determined to find. So, when the final bell rang, his feet were sluggish as he headed to the music room. Upon arrival, he found that the room had another occupant. Haruhi was already there, but she was curled up in a tight ball on the couch in the corner of the room, asleep. Even from a distance, he could see that the bags under her eyes had gotten even worse. He quickly grabbed out some stationary and posted a note on the door, saying that activities for the day were canceled before sending a quick group text to the others and then silencing his phone to ignore the fallout. Haruhi was obviously not getting enough sleep as it was, and he didn't want to force her awake from the little bit of rest that she was finally getting. After staring at her for a moment, he grabbed a blanket from the back room and spread it over her.
Maybe it was because he was up all night, but only at that moment when he was staring down at her did he realize that he was completely out of his depth. He wasn't sure what else to do. While he always played the babysitter—or "mother" as Tamaki liked to say—for the club, he was still a member of the spoiled elite who never had to tend to anyone else.
But once she was covered, he noticed that she not only had black circles beneath her eyes, but there were also streaks of tears. His chest constricted at the sight, but instead an urge to protect her bubbled up from some unknown place within him. He may not have had any idea about how to dote on a person, but his family owned all sorts of medical facilities. So whatever was wrong, surely he would be able to help. He just had to get her to tell him what was going on, but a quiet murmur from the girl in front of him pulled him from his thoughts again.
"Mom…" she mumbled in her sleep, and his heart seemed to squeeze even tighter. He knew that she rarely expressed openly how much she missed her mother, but he knew that she did, and no matter how much Kyouya played the mother role of the group, nothing would fill the hole in her heart that her mother's death had caused even if it was nearly eleven years ago. He understood that feeling, after all. However, his thoughts ground to a halt when she mumbled again. "Now…me too…"
It took a full minute of staring at her before a single thought could pass through his mind.
Perhaps that's...
He cut himself off and immediately went to a table across the room and pulled out his laptop, not wanting to wake her as he worked. He might not be able to acquire Haruhi's medical records, but perhaps he could find her family history. After a while though, he realized it was pointless. The security was still too tight for him to get anywhere. His eyes lifted above the screen to stare at the girl across the room and tried to think of anything that could help him in his quest for answers. Suddenly, a thought hit him and he returned to his search, knowing that death certificates were accessible to the public. But when he found what he was looking for, he hoped with all his might that he was wrong.
Hiya! Thanks for reading, and I hope you liked the chapter. Any guesses for what's up with Haruhi?
I'll have the next chapter up sometime next week, so I hope you'll look forward to it. I'm finally done with classes, so if all goes smoothly, I'll be spending the next few weeks hammering out this story.
Hope you have an awesome day!
