AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Thank you for the feedback, Enigmaticrose4 and Social Safari.

And thank you also to mysterious person, who is indeed mysterious!

Hopefully you will continue to enjoy the story and not guess who the culprit is yet.


CHAPTER II

The back-up generator was a ten-minute walk away, housed in the same dark oak as the lodge and topped with an ornamental roof. Usually, its structure would thrum with the sound of electricity, buzzing just beyond earshot of the lodge and attracting human notice only if something ever went wrong.

And something had gone wrong: the lodge no longer had a power supply. Around two o' clock in the afternoon, access to television and the internet ceased, plunging everyone into a troubling darkness. As part of Kyouya's logical plan, Mori and Hunny volunteered to investigate further and hopefully address the problem themselves. Together, they walked towards the western side of the lodge just as Kyouya and the twins were trudging away to the north.

For Mori, the task was simple. Though he knew next to nothing about back-up generators, the third-year student had inherited the common sense of the Morinozuka family, and so it was in his nature to examine the issue first so that something could be done about it. As he considered what to expect, striding easily through the snow with his longer limbs, he realised that Hunny was a fair bit behind him. He stopped and waited. 'I will carry you,' said Mori, kneeling in the snow so that his cousin could embark and sit on his shoulders, but Hunny was in a peculiar mood, ignoring the offer. 'What's the matter?' he asked, slowing his pace to match that of Hunny's.

'I'm really worried,' Hunny confessed. He was only half a head taller than the snow surrounding them, a fact which did not escape Mori's notice. Without permission, he lifted his cousin out of the snow and placed him securely on the top of his shoulders, indifferent to the slush that was dripping from Hunny's boots. 'Everyone's so… tense,' said his cousin, after a while. 'Don't you think so, Takashi?'

Mori said nothing. The observation was true and the question required no answer. This was just Hunny's way of secretly calming himself; he always riffled through the emotions of others prior to his own.

'Do you think we'll get out of this,' Hunny said. 'Do you think we'll make our flight?'

In hesitating to respond, Mori realised that there was nothing but the crisp, empty silence of the snow-covered valley meeting and filling their ears. What should have reached them by now was a buzzing sound, the sound of electricity. As they approached the back-up generator, its ornamental roof glistening in the sun, they sensed that the power supply could not be restored without a certified engineer.

'Uh-oh, this doesn't look good,' said Hunny, referring to the thick ice encrusting the oak that lined the back-up generator. He watched as Mori strolled around the structure, inspecting it from all angles and testing the ice with swift, powerful kicks where he thought there might be a weakness. 'Is that a door?' Hunny pointed to a dark outline he could see beneath the ice.

Mori crouched in front of it and ran a gloved finger along its sealed surface, eventually shaking his head. 'It must have overheated then cooled back down again. There's nothing we can do.'

'Can't you hit it with a fireball or something?'

'I checked the emergency DIY kit. We don't have a blowtorch.'

Hunny lowered his head, clearly put out. 'Let's go find Kyouya, then... He'll know what to do.'


'Any luck?' asked Kaoru. He was standing with the Shadow King on their second hill of the morning, scanning the horizon through a pair of binoculars whilst Kyouya waited for his cell-phone to pick up a signal. For miles around, all that Kaoru could see were copious dunes of white, rolling back like a sine wave as far as the eye could manage. Amongst these dunes were intermittent patches of bare and evergreen forests, and the gleaming skeletons of electricity pylons, yet no tell-tale signs of any human existence. No smoke from a village which could be somehow out of sight, or the progress of a single snowmobile searching for survivors. There was nothing. No movement. And Kaoru could not help but feel extremely alone.

'Sempai?' said Kaoru, nudging the Shadow King.

'We need another hill,' Kyouya answered, lowering his arm and looking around for the next likely candidate.

There was a hill nearby that seemed to be taller, and there was another one further on much taller than that. In Kaoru's mind, it made greater sense to go for the tallest hill to begin with and consider the day complete, but Kyouya had insisted on trying as many hills as they could for the ever elusive signal: 'You never know, a small hill could be just as effective as a big one.' So why did it feel like they were only passing the time, slogging from one hill to the next? Not that Kaoru would have tackled their problems any better; the snow had caught him completely off-guard, as it had his brother Hikaru, who was internally kicking himself for not being more careful.

As Kaoru turned to follow his sempai down the hill, he noticed Hikaru a few feet away, gathering snow in his arms and dumping it on top of a rough, hardened mound. Without the aid of a book or a stop-watch to overcome his temper, Hikaru was building a snowman to resolve the excess rage. His cheeks had become red with the effort of lugging the snow and his brows were deeply furrowed as he shaped and smoothed the snowman's head.

'Hikaru, come on!' called Kaoru. 'We don't have a signal!'

'Why can't we just split up?' was Hikaru's heated response as he dusted the snow from his gloves. 'If we're going to climb every hill in fucking Hokkaido, why not give us separate cell-phones so we can find the signal quicker and get the fuck out of here? Wouldn't that make a little more sense to you?' His last remark was aimed at Kyouya, who had stopped in his tracks, spectacles glinting in the early sun.

'I've already told you,' Kyouya replied in his most reasonable voice, 'we have to stick together. We've already split into three separate groups.'

Hikaru finalised the design of his snowman before stomping over to the Shadow King, halting within punching distance of his senior's face. 'Listen, you,' he hissed, tensing his hands, 'this is not the Host Club. This is a bad situation where we have to try everything we can to ensure we get out.'

'Hikaru, don't,' pleaded Kaoru, reaching out to his twin; he felt the muscles bunching in his twin's arm. 'It has to be this way. We have to climb every hill until we pick up a signal, even if it means every day. If we used every cell-phone to check the signal that often, then how many working cell-phones do you think we'll have left?'

'What is this, a maths lecture?' snapped Hikaru. He yanked his arm from Kaoru's grasp.

'Hikaru, please…'

'Don't you get it, Kaoru? This guy has lost control! He doesn't know how to solve this!'

Kyouya seized Hikaru by the front of his coat. 'Enough!' he bellowed, giving the older twin a violent shake. The argument between the Hitachiins ceased, switching their attention to the Shadow King, whose breath escaped in short, sharp bursts across the freezing air. 'Enough,' Kyouya whispered. 'Take the cell-phone.' He produced the device from his pocket and held it out with a slightly quivering hand.

'Thanks,' said Hikaru, sarcastically, and took the phone. 'Kaoru, are you coming? Let's try that hill over there.'

Kaoru gazed from the steep hill that Hikaru was ascending to the expression on Kyouya's face as he stared at the horizon. In the morning light, the guy looked older, as if the snow had bleached the youth from his teenage frame. 'Sempai,' said Kaoru, 'are you coming?'

'No,' said Kyouya, 'you go ahead.'

And so Kaoru turned, leaving Kyouya on the hilltop with Hikaru's snowman and the shadow it cast across the glittering snow.


For a while, the sound of crunching boots and labouring gasps occupied the silence as they ploughed up the hill. They were careful to test the ground before planting each footstep in case of holes or rifts that could be hidden in the snow. Occasionally, one of them would glance back, charting their tentative progress and checking on the figure of Kyouya on the hill, but they would never once speak, knowing each other's thoughts.

If anything, the truth of their dilemma had not yet sunk in and it seemed too hard for them to believe that they were in any real danger. After all, what had really changed apart from having to talk more with their friends and burn loads of candles to keep the lodge bright and cheerful? They had wood for fire, food in the pantry, and enough running water to see them through the week, so why all the fuss about electricity and cell-phones? Their families knew where they were, and if they failed to land at Haneda Airport in a couple of days, then somebody would come and look for them at the lodge that they were staying at – simple as that.

'Do you think he's okay?' inquired Kaoru, referring to Kyouya and his unusual outburst. 'I've never seen him break a sweat before. He really wanted to find that signal.'

'Well, so do I,' said Hikaru. He paused to check the cell-phone, swinging his arm in a horizontal arc. 'Why did you side with him? You're meant to be on my side.'

'I didn't side with anyone. I was merely agreeing on the best thing to do.'

'Is this not the best thing to do?'

'Just drop it, will you? We're trying to find a signal.'

They were near the peak of the hill now, using their hands to claw their way up and leaning on knees to counter the tilt. However, the higher they climber, the harder it became to gain a decent footing, so they abandoned their efforts to reach the very top and settled on the hill and its precipitous sides.

After regaining his breath, Hikaru slowly stood, bracing his legs and balancing his weight as he moved the cell-phone from left to right, reaching as far as he could for the clear blue sky. 'No good, there's no signal here.' Kaoru extended his hand, asking for the cell-phone. Hikaru gave it to him. 'What are you going to do?' asked the older twin. 'Kaoru, get down from there!'

'We might get a signal at the other side of the hill. If we go around the hill like this–' said Kaoru, edging away from his brother, '–we might just get one and hopefully make a phone call.' Kaoru ignored the concern in his brother's voice, intent on the cell-phone and its empty bars of signal. 'Great. Still nothing.' He looked past the screen to where they had both left Kyouya and frowned.

'Kaoru!' cried Hikaru.

'What?' retorted Kaoru, just as a snowball hit him in the head and made him lose his grip on the hillside.


'Hey, where did everyone go?' said Hunny as they followed the compass north to where Kyouya and the twins should have been. They had walked across an untouched field between the back-up generator and the north-facing side of the lodge without encountering a soul. At some point, their path collided with the footprints of their friends and they followed these footprints for another ten minutes, until the footprints appeared to divide into two. 'Did they all split up? They only had one cell-phone… right, Takashi?'

Mori studied the footprints, noting the shape and underside pattern of the boots, which made them in the first place. There were two different patterns. One belonged to Kyouya, and the others, he presumed, belonged to the twins. 'They went together,' Mori deduced. 'They are probably up that hill.'

Staring from the footprints to the hill, Hunny puffed his cheeks and accepted the taller boy's offer to carry him up. 'We should have gone back to the lodge,' Hunny muttered, clinging to the fur-lined hood of Mori's coat and shading his eyes from the sun as they traversed the rising hillside.

When they reached the top, they were still alone. No sign of the twins and no sign of Kyouya, just a featureless snowman and its dark, slanting shadow.

Hunny squinted at the neighbouring hills, using his position on Mori's shoulders to see if he could detect where their friends might have gone. Meanwhile, his companion was reading the confusion of footprints marking the hill they were currently on. It seemed that the twins had moved around quite a bit, their footprints scuffed and malformed in comparison with the measured steps of Kyouya as he trekked up the hill. To Mori, it was clear that Kyouya had not built the snowman or ruined the snow by jumping about. He drifted away from the snowman towards the hilltop and peered down, careful not to unbalance Hunny on his shoulders. Nothing down there: only rocks and a ravine. Straightening, he noticed a separate track of footprints heading for a nearby hill, puzzled by what looked like two sets of footprints instead of three.

'Takashi, over there!' pointed Hunny, as if reading his cousin's mind.

But Hunny was not pointing at footprints on the ground.

Mori moved with a sense of urgency, converting his jog to a run as he realised what the two of them had seen. It was not an avalanche; the disruption had been too small. So it must have been something else, something bigger. Like a person, thought Mori, with a chill.

'Hika-chan! Kao-chan! Is that you?' Hunny shouted.

Mori slowed and let his cousin alight. There was no mistaking the cinnamon hair or the matching boots. It was definitely the twins. As Mori caught his breath, Hunny was crouching beside the twin who was cradling the other. Although the Host Club had grown accustomed to this intimate brotherly act, not even they would misread the distress of Hikaru Hitachiin. Were it not for the parting of the older twin's hair, neither Mori nor his cousin would have known which twin was which, and it was proving impossible to extract a word of explanation. 'Please… please…' was all they could understand from Hikaru as he wept, clutching the limp body of his brother, whose face had become a red and bloody mess from tumbling down the hillside.

With a quivering hand, Hunny tried to check if Kaoru was breathing, his fingers barely touching the skin of the injured boy's neck before Hikaru jerked his twin out of reach, treating his friends as if they were enemies. 'We have to get him help,' Hunny insisted, desperate to know if Kaoru had broken a bone or suffered concussion. He could tell that the blood was mostly coming from a gash on the temple, with injuries to the mouth and nose simply making it worse, yet none of this could be healed out here in the snow. 'Hika-chan, are you listening? We're here to help you. Takashi is strong. He can carry Kao-chan. Do you want to go to the lodge now? It's cold here and Hika-chan must be cold, right?'

Hikaru was sobbing now, but Hunny's words had gradually sunk in. Carefully, he surrendered Kaoru to the gentle grasp of Mori.


'Don't tell me they're coming back already,' said Tamaki as he received the binoculars from Momoka and pressed them against his violet eyes. For a moment, he readjusted the lens, squinting at the figures as they progressed towards the lodge at the speed of a snail. 'Whoever they are, they don't have good news,' he murmured, noting their weary, staggering gait.

Since the departure of Kyouya and his volunteers, the Snow Liberation Party had remained close to the second-storey window, watching the movements of their friends as they walked through the snow in opposing directions. Only Kazukiyo had retired to the comfort of the lounge, too depressed by the sight to continue his vigil. In his place was Vice-president Momoka, a girl that Tamaki used to entertain at the Host Club before her designation transferred to Haruhi. She had excused Kazukiyo's lack of interest with a mild, apologetic bow – a gesture that was strangely disconcerting in their present situation.

Despite the trip being arranged in the spirit of friendship, everyone had fallen back on the ranks that each of them held within the confines of Ouran Academy. It was clear that the leadership of Class 1-A deferred to the authority of their older classmates, whilst Tamaki, President of the Host Club and senior to half of the members present, deferred to Hunny and Mori for approval and support, who, in turn, respected the values of their younger acquaintances. If relying on these ranks provided any semblance of peace and cooperation, and revived the dwindling morale of everyone at the lodge, then Tamaki would not disturb this delicate balance in the least, though there was nothing to prevent them from suddenly crumbling.

He studied the figures once more, keen to learn their identities. According to his watch, Hunny and Mori should have returned from inspecting the back-up generator. With any luck, they might have fixed all their problems with the flick of a switch or a well-placed kick, but Tamaki had a feeling things were not that simple. 'They're too far away. I can't see their faces.'

'It can't be Hunny and Mori; you'd know them by their heights,' said Renge, resting an anxious hand on the windowsill and clutching the pendant of her twenty-four carat necklace. 'How tall is the pair that's coming towards us? Is one of them taller? Are they wearing any glasses?'

Tamaki focussed the lens, his mouth a thin line as he deciphered the image. 'It has to be the twins. They're never apart. And Mori-sempai seems to be with them, along with Hunny-sempai…'

Haruhi appeared, presenting mugs of coffee on a polished silver tray, complete with thimbles of cream and a pot full of sugar cubes. With grateful smiles, Renge and Momoka accepted, warming the chill from their fingers as they took cautious sips. As Haruhi turned, about to pass the final mug to Tamaki, something in her sempai's posture subtly altered, causing her to pause. He lowered the binoculars with shaky hands and handed them to Haruhi like he would a random dress or a bouquet of flowers.

Haruhi sighed and placed the tray on a table just behind them in the corridor. What was it this time? Had he really seen something important? Having babbled like a tour guide on their private flight to Sapporo whilst holding her hostage with brochures of the lodge, Tamaki's enthusiasm for the trip had not yet abated – even in the face of wintry isolation. After Kyouya and the others left, Tamaki had amused himself with the binoculars, pointing out random shapes in the clouds which did not resemble any wildlife indigenous to Hokkaido. But when Haruhi looked through the binoculars herself, she found that her hands were shaking too as she realised what she was looking at.


Hikaru was wracked with guilt, unable to explain what happened on the hillside. He was sitting beside Kaoru in the bedroom, the one they chose on their first day at the lodge. It was a double with en-suite facilities designed especially for the twins. The furniture had been mass-produced somewhere in northern Europe and just existed to satisfy the tastes of slightly wealthier commoners. As a joke, the twins selected this bedroom to celebrate the presence of Haruhi on their trip to Hokkaido and to see if she had heard of this infamous company. But the choice was not entertaining now: Hikaru was sick of the dull, blunt fixtures and their modern, minimalistic designs, as well as the fact that it failed as a hospital. The whole room merely served to remind him of the wilderness beyond and the cruelty this wilderness had inflicted on Kaoru.

'You're not lying to me… are you, Haruhi?' said Hikaru, listening to the rattles and clicks of the first aid kit as Haruhi packed it away.

Haruhi glanced at him, then at Kaoru. She answered, 'Of course not, Hikaru. I would never lie to you.'

He stroked the bandage wrapped around Kaoru's head, resting lightly on the spot where the temple had bled not moments before. They assured him that the concussion was minor, repeating their diagnosis until Hikaru had to believe it. All kinds of worst-case scenarios had filled his imagination, from bleeding of the brain to a possible coma. And he would have readily entertained them as well, if only to create an outlet for his silent and unspeakable shame. Squeezing the bruised hand that lay on the blankets, Hikaru ignored the moan that escaped from his brother's lips and the alarm that swiftly entered Haruhi's expression.

'He needs to rest,' said Haruhi, easing Hikaru's hand from Kaoru's and keeping it clasped in her own.

The sight of Kaoru bleeding had placed everybody on edge and they were downstairs in the lounge, discussing the incident with Hunny and Mori. To make matters worse, there was also speculation over the whereabouts of Kyouya, who never came back to the lodge, despite people calling his name and searching the local vicinity. When they asked Hikaru where Kyouya had gone, he drew an immediate blank. His priority at the time had been Kaoru and his mind was not in a state to remember other details.

'Can I tell you something… something you must never tell anyone?' Hikaru asked in a low voice.

Haruhi smiled and softly pressed his hand. 'What's that?' she asked.

'It should be worse than this.'

'What do you mean?'

'All Kaoru has are some cuts and bruises. His nose isn't broken. His teeth are intact. And he'll recover as if this never even happened.'

'But isn't that a good thing?' asked Haruhi, troubled by what Hikaru was saying.

Hikaru tugged his hand from Haruhi's grasp and quickly turned away, the sobs bursting out of him. Physically, he cringed, every muscle in his body stiffening with anguish. How could he be so ungrateful when Kaoru was okay? The arms of Haruhi slipped quietly around him. This only made the betrayal feel worse. Did he not deserve a punishment far more substantial, something which he could honestly, truly feel bad about after what he had done?

'It was – it was – me,' Hikaru sobbed. 'It was my fault that he fell!'

Surprised, Haruhi tried to speak, but Hikaru shook his head over and over. He told her everything: how Kaoru had taken Kyouya's side in an argument, dismissing Hikaru's concerns about the plan they were following, and how Kaoru had dismissed him again whilst climbing the hillside with the cell-phone, and how Hikaru had flipped and thrown the snowball at Kaoru.

'I – I didn't mean to – to do it – believe me – I didn't!'

Haruhi swallowed, blinking a few times. 'Okay,' she agreed. 'Okay.'

Lost for words, she left Hikaru by himself in the bedroom, and in Haruhi's absence, the eldest twin covered his face.