Friday, September 12th
Tamaki.
He stared. At the unmoving body at the base of the steps. Haruhi... he wondered, what are you doing down there? She didn't answer, but he smiled anyway. It figures that she was still angry with him—all daughters rebel against their fathers, after all! He made a move to get to her but was pushed back to reality by Hikaru, who was shaking his shoulders and crying. Sound rushed back to his brain, overflooding his ears with the sound of hoarse screaming.
"Tono, stop!" Hikaru's voice was also hoarse. It sounded like he had been screaming for a while. "We have to do something!" Tamaki stared at the freshman. He looked down at Haruhi. Wait... He struggled to piece together the situation, but the screaming was getting louder. Hikaru seemed to be getting more agitated, too. He could see his teeth grinding together behind his lips—
Oh.
Oh.
He fainted.
. . .
Tamaki's eyes flew open. His eyelashes were sticky, so he rubbed his eyes as he sat up. An arm rolled across the sheets, making contact with the arm he was using to prop himself up. He followed the appendage to matted brown hair, pale skin, and white bandages dotted with red.
"Haruhi!" He yelped, tears springing to his eyes. The events surrounding his faint came back in a rush, and he struggled to process the information, gaping at Haruhi's limp form. At his exclamation, excited footsteps sounded until a door was slammed, somewhere to his side.
"Tono—you're awake!"
"Hikaru..." He couldn't bring himself to speak, fat tears dripping down his face. He pointed at Haruhi helplessly.
The ginger cursed, running from the room and returning moments later with a basin of water and some more bandages. They were towels, Tamaki now saw, and the basin was a wooden bowl with an awkward oblong shape. When Hikaru lifted Haruhi's head, he saw that some blood had escaped onto the pillow she was resting on. When Hikaru had finished his makeshift job, he sat in a chair across from his friend.
"Tono... I don't know what to do," he confessed resisting the urge to run his blood-stained hands through his hair. "I think... I should call—"
"No!" Tamaki reacted strongly. "Don't call anyone!"
"We have to, we did something bad, she could—" He refused to say the word, but Tamaki caught his implications anyway.
"No! No. She won't. She'll be fine. Listen, Hikaru, she'll be fine."
"But what if she's not fine?! What if she's— if something's happening to her and we don't know and we think she's getting better and she's not and we think she's sleeping and she's dying, and we don't—" Hikaru cradled his cheek in shock. Only three times in his life had he ever gotten hit: once by Haruhi, again by Kaoru a few days ago, and again now. Unable to form words, he stared at the blond, who now paced around the room anxiously.
"Hikaru, we can't let someone take her away." He stopped pacing and grasped his friend's shoulders. "We have to make things right by ourselves. We can nurse her back to health and make her happy and then she'll forgive us. Look, it's just a scratch, she's not even bleeding anymore! She'll be better soon!" Tamaki pointed out with a smile.
Hikaru.
Tamaki didn't seem to notice his tears. The blond was preoccupied with going over ways to apologize and deciding how Haruhi'd react. He certainly didn't notice the inner turmoil that Hikaru was going through. Between his stinging cheek and the situation at hand, Hikaru could barely think.
If his cheek hurt so much, he could only imagine how Haruhi felt. Or would feel when she woke up. He almost threw up. I'm so sorry! He wanted to tell her. He wanted to beg for her forgiveness. Instead, he just looked at his blond friend. Coincidentally, Tamaki finished his rambling just as Hikaru reached a decision.
"Okay."
Saturday, September 13th
. . .
Haruhi.
Haruhi forced her eyes open, recognizing the drunkenness of oversleep and hoping to prevent whatever disasters that usually came with it. Immediately, she recoiled from pain. It felt like she had gotten hit by a truck. Her stomach, her head, her arm; everything hurt. She had to get some water for her parched throat, pills for her head, and then orient herself so she could figure out what to do with this pain!
Moving to prop herself up by reflex, it was a full second before the pain hit her. She screamed, falling back onto the sheets, the impact causing violent aftershocks that shook her to the core. Am I dying? She wondered, trying to curl up but being ignored by her limbs in favor of erratic jerks of movement.
Her body alternated between flashes of cold and heat, and she writhed in place, trying to get her heavy silken prison off of her form. Her eyes becoming heavy, Haruhi thought she heard voices as something cool touched her head. She leaned into it, managing to keep her consciousness just long enough for her to request more of whatever was touching her then, before falling back into the bed with a choked cry.
. . .
When Haruhi awoke next, the pain was even worse than the last time. Blinking away dreams of a dark-haired man, she knew her voice was hoarse even before she opened her mouth to cry out. A forceful cough shook her frame, and she felt like her entire gut twisted with the motion, as if someone had reached in and squeezed her organs like they were trying to wring out a wet blanket.
When she coughed again, she found that her head was stopped by something in front of it. Warm droplets of something rich fell onto her lips, but her stomach would not have it. Bile immediately shot up, and her body convulsed to facilitate its exit. Her throat burned at this, but the acid made a 180 and fell back into her stomach. She spat out the sour taste before falling back to her bed, completely spent from all the movement. Her eyes closed easily.
. . .
Haruhi's eyes flew open. The flash that cut through the gaping darkness told her that there was a nighttime thunderstorm, but something much worse alarmed her. A sense of hysteria took over her, as if something was rising in her chest infinitely, or like she was ballooning up. Her body rapidly passed through flashes of hot and cold, both equally intense. What is happening to me? She tried not to cry as she choked and convulsed. Her body was mostly numb, but she could feel her extremities shaking.
Her field of vision changed suddenly when she fell off the bed. Wrapped in a cocoon of heat, she felt the shaking die down, but it was replaced with an explosion of pain. This time, she couldn't help the scream that she let out. She was more than exhausted, but her body would not let her rest, and another fit of shaking interrupted the pain.
Finally, she felt her consciousness begin to fail, the overactivity proving too much for her brain to handle. She welcomed the darkness.
. . .
Tuesday, September 16th
. . .
Kyoya.
Kyoya stepped into his best friend's home cautiously. He had seen neither tail nor hide of the blond since he broke things off last week. He had been impressed with how quickly Tamaki had stopped blowing up his phone, and had quickly moved his attention to school, his first priority. The Host Club was completely dissolved and, while the others had formed small groups, Kyoya had alienated himself entirely, making for himself a small island upon which he could gather his thoughts. And, it seemed, from within their own groups, everyone had been doing the same.
But that didn't stop him from keeping tabs on those whom he had once considered his closest friends. The only ones who had even attended school that day and the one before it, in fact, were Honey and himself. He had been growing curious. He had certainly not been expecting a call from Tamaki, however, whom he had thought would still be mourning.
He stopped several meters from him. The Ouran student was completely disheveled. His hair was matted, cheeks pale, and outfit filthy with a browned liquid; he was completely unlike the Hikaru Hitachiin he knew. He saw many emotions in Hikaru's eyes. He saw fear, worry, and anger. He saw something he had never seen before on the twin's face, and he knew. Something was very wrong.
So when he turned to run, Kyoya followed him.
If Kyoya thought he was shocked before, then it was nothing compared to what he felt now. When he walked through the door he was led to, he met eyes with his best friend's desperate gaze. He was curled over a bed, over Haruhi's grotesque form. The small girl tremored with a force that she couldn't control. Kyoya pushed Tamaki off without thinking, assessing the girl as quickly as he could. She had a towel pressed to her head, dried blood tainting the white fibers. Her shoulder was obviously dislocated, and his brain cooked up multiple reasons for the bulge in her pelvic region. While the only blood came from her head, bumps around her body suggested more subtle injuries. Kyoya's phone was by his ear in an instant, but it was quickly grabbed away.
"Tamaki, what the hell are you doing?" Kyoya bit.
"Mon ami, we have everything under control—she will be—" Hikaru tackled him.
Pushing down suprise at how quickly Hikaru had turned on his accomplice—well, the twin had called him—Kyoya caught the phone that was thrown his way and, ignoring the blond's crying, called an emergency number he hadn't touched in years: his older brother's. He couldn't risk his father finding out about the situation, after all, lest he use it as something to lord over him.
"Akito, there's been an emergency," he said once the phone clicked, beginning to detail the situation. "I don't care what you have to do, just get here." He delved into the situation headfirst, starting with what seemed to be the worst injuries. Single head laceration with possibility of brain damage, dislocated shoulder, bruised knees... "Did she fall?"
Hikaru blubbered a series of excuses, but Kyoya ignored everything after his initial affirmation, continuing to feed a steady stream of information into the phone. She likely has a bruised bone, may need a blood transfusion, and... Kyoya hesitated.
"Assess for sexual assault."
. . .
Hikaru.
They had come and gone quickly, taking Haruhi away from them before he could even blink.
Kyoya came and revealed that the situation was much more severe than either he or Tamaki had assumed. In the shock of the moment, he had let go of Tamaki, who made for Kyoya without pause, tackling him. Then, a man swathed in a cocoon of paramedics and bodyguards had come, taken one glance at the situation, and tried to arrest them both. But Kyoya had saved them. Or saved them for himself, rather. I'll deal with them myself, he had said, imprisoning the two inside Tamaki's home with a few choice words.
Tamaki had been—was still—ballistic, and he screamed for several minutes straight before turning on Hikaru himself. He could only stare blankly as the blond shook him, the nightmarish vision of Haruhi's broken form flashing behind his eyelids.
And cry.