Title: "Love and Faithfulness"
Series: Ouran High School Host Club
Genre: Introspective / Speculative, some angst
Word Count: 1,104
Characters: Kyouya, Haruhi, Tamaki
Pairings: KyouyaxHaruhi, one-sided TamakixHaruhi
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Kinda spoilers for Volume 6 of the manga / episode 25 of the anime.
Notes: For Riceball-san…but as a warning, it is not at all fluffy.
Disclaimer: Unless I am very clever and trying out plot ideas on you, I totally do not own any of this.
Love and Faithfulness
sciathan file
"Love and faithfulness keep a king safe.
Through love his throne is made secure."
- Proverbs 20:28
The first time he had caught her surreptitiously glancing at him, he thought that he had imagined the very specific nature of her look.
Instead, he had passed it off as merely a brief aberration or a rare mistake on his part due to the decidedly few hours of sleep he had managed to catch the previous night.
But after a week of such "rare" mistakes occurring, Kyouya was forced to admit that there was something in those glances of Haruhi's that did not resemble any aspect of her normal calm and observant gaze.
No. There was something in them akin to…
…interest.
And, try as he might to make it otherwise, after a length of time had passed, he could safely admit that there was no trace of the usual anthropological interest she usually displayed when observing the rest of the club.
And…try as he might…he himself couldn't help but think that these uncharacteristic glances were, for lack of a better way of putting it, interesting in turn
This revelation, clear and sharp and intense as he found it, only allowed room for a single thought in him – Kyouya found such mutual interest to be disturbing at best.
It was a feeling he would not dare to disturb the universe with. In fact, to this disturbance of the framework of his immaculately ordered world, the carefully constructed facades and deceptions all reacted and a single rationale was born –
Such interest was a veritable liability.
The second thought that occurred to him as a result of his unfortunate and unsettling revelation was the fact that he now had indisputable proof that Tamaki would indeed be disappointed in his pursuit.
Even though his idiotic best friend had fooled the majority of the world into thinking that his love for the masses was boundless and that by dint of a purely stubborn frame of mind he had somehow rendered himself impervious to any sort of misfortune, Kyouya knew better.
Contrary to popular belief, Kyouya knew that Suoh Tamaki was not indeed immune to every unpleasant thing that happened to him by virtue of his positivism.
Kyouya had stretched everything out to its logical and rational end and had come to the conclusion that what Tamaki felt for Haruhi was nothing less than the rarest and purest form of love he possessed.
Watching him, Kyouya had ticked each possibility off of his list concerning his involvement with Haruhi. He had filled pages upon pages of his notebook with notes of encounters between them, measures of progress of his self-realization, lists of Haruhi's habits, and the ever increasing list of uncharacteristic blunders in her presence.
It was, he decided, not simple infatuation, not a misguided affinity for the Commoner's culture placed on the shoulders of a representative figurehead, not the same sort of love that flowed out in the form of the well-refined verbosity that he showed to any other female.
Kyouya had concluded that, in Tamaki's case, it was nothing less than pure, unadulterated, awkward, inexperienced, Love.
But Kyouya also knew that, events and emotions being the way that they were, it was his duty to remove all liabilities from the space of their floating world.
He would keep things a matter of business and not emotion. By necessity.
Taking out his ledger, he opened up to the section in which he recorded his hard copy of the Club's accounting. Fingering a well-worn page, he looked over the section that displayed the Special Scholarship Student's debts.
The pages were impeccably laid out, figures in orderly rows and columns, calculations and enumerations of items laid out on an invisible grid – orderly, immaculate, contained.
Picking up a pen he began calculating every facet of every transaction, every broken teacup, every slightly irate customer, every slight hike in interest, every few minutes wasted. He totaled every column and began applying conservative adjustments and found that everything could be brought down to a new and perfectly numerically feasible conclusion.
In the end he found that she would have only a single week's worth of designations to cover the remaining balance.
When he made this announcement, rather than the upwelling of noise that usually occurred when anything of note happened within the Third Music Room, there was a hanging, penetrating silence.
Tamaki didn't even seem to fathom his words. He just stared up at him with a look of shock laced with an underlying hint of pained accusation.
For a moment Kyouya wondered what he suspected.
But it was more than likely that he had saw the announcement as a betrayal of a perceived tacit agreement.
With a nod and slight look around at the rest of them, the Special Scholarship Student who had crashed through the walls of the Ouran Host Club, left.
When it was certain that he would not meet up with her unexpectedly, he followed her out of the room at a safe distance, offering neither comment nor excuse to anyone as to what had just transpired.
He had merely done what had needed to be done.
With a passing note of concern that he would not allow himself to fully realize, he noted that Tamaki had neither called his cell phone nor his home number.
Deep into the predawn hours, the study of the Ootori mansion remained a sanctuary of uninterrupted silence.
Love and faithfulness keep a king safe, he thought ironically, sipping black coffee and filling in transactions and newly acquired data. He glanced at the phone, expecting it to ring at any moment, but it had stayed stubbornly quiet even when Kyouya finally went to bed in the early hours of the morning.
Love and faithfulness kept neither king safe, it seemed.
Fin
A/N: Hope no one wandered in here expecting fluff. U Different characterization of Kyouya than I usually use...which was interesting. The lack of the use of proper nouns for distinguishing between Kyouya and Tamaki at some points was intentional, so is the fact that Haruhi isn't mentioned by name during the entire second half of this…and I totally made Kyouya Prufrock. But really, I'm just trying to figure out the phenomenon that is KyouyaxHaruhi to myself…I'd love it if more people managed to successfully account for Tamaki and Kyouya's loyalties to him as well as his own future prospects. Challenge…? Thus, you have this fic.
Thanks for reading! As always comments are greatly appreciated and will almost always be answered personally.
Music – "Nocturne for Orchestra" - Ouran OST, "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" – Panic! At the Disco
