It's not dead yet! Thanks to oreobabez for bringing me back! ;)

Chapter 12: Champagne

What's that? Is this the me you've never seen before? Let me tell you something, Mori. I never. Forget. Me.

"It's too perfect," Shirogane muttered under her breath. They had entered the lobby and were jostled into the ceremony hall with hundreds of other doctors and businessmen, entertainers and noisy families. Shirogane pointed out Kyouya's brother, who sat wiping his eyes upon the table at the end of the dais, his sister with a hand on her shoulder.

Diana's breath was being sucked into a whirlpool at the base of her stomach. She clasped Shirogane's arm tighter and realized she was actually a half an inch taller than the woman. Shirogane looked at her. However long she had been passing for a man, she didn't have experience escorting another woman anywhere.

"Just pretend you are preoccupied with your cell phone battery dying," advised Shirogane, leaning into her ear. "Like you can't text your best friend about troublesome developments at your marketing job, and how in the world are you going to sit through an hour and a half without it. And call me Naoto."

"All right. Naoto."

"I am going to be leaving you soon. I want to hear what the Ootoris are saying, or maybe I'll be pacing the perimeter to see what I can pick up from security. I want you to visit the refreshments often. That is where people are most likely to be lax."

"All right."

"And don't go to the bathroom."

"What?"

"They are checking people's cards in the hallways."

Diana needed to go to the bathroom.

"And now we part," Naoto said, her self and her arm swallowed into the crowd.

Diana slowly scanned the people around her, taking out her cell phone and casually checking her email to improve her show of belonging. Which way were the refreshments? The crowd was dispersing now, the forest of people thinning out as people sat down to round tables that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. The seats were all reserved, and with every second fewer people remained standing. At this pace, Diana would be the only one… In a panic, Diana found a couple with a stroller trying to shush their baby, and she quickly took the open seat beside them, giving the mother a sympathetic smile. She casually knocked down the name stand that marked the seat as she waved at the child, and a thundering roar of applause turned the mother's attention away to the microphone stand on the center of the stage at the other end of the room.

If the stage was on the other side, then she must be closer to the back, where the refreshments were most likely to be served. But she couldn't look backwards. The people behind her would think it strange. She couldn't tell who was speaking first. Perhaps a brother. Next it seemed a business partner. The Japanese was coming to a point where she was starting to miss more than a few words. It had been fifteen minutes. A reasonable enough time to excuse herself for a moment to gather refreshments.

There weren't many people in the back yet. Only a security officer who appraised her swiftly and deemed her a non-threat. Soft drinks, lemonade, and a champagne cascade. As an American, she technically wasn't old enough.

But why not?

She brought a glass of champagne back with her, unable to hear for the next fifteen minutes with the baby kicking up a fuss again. The fourth time she went back, at the tail of intermission, she realized the same security officer had watched her take three glasses of lemonade to dilute the champagne. She smiled at him nervously. "I…I need to go to the wash room." He shrugged and let her pass both ways, and by the time she was back, someone else she didn't care about was speaking on the stage already.

If she was going to try and make it through the next fifteen minutes… More lemonade.

A hand caught her wrist mid-reach.

"Kaoru!"

He narrowed his eyes. "Enjoying the view?"

Diana blinked.

"From my seat?"

Her mouth came to a perfect "o".

"Tch." Kaoru drank from his glass. "What?"

"Do you want it back? My apologies—everyone just started to sit down and—"

"Save it. It would be strange for someone else to be sitting there all of a sudden now. Just get out of my sight."

Diana promptly obliged, forgetting her lemonade. She resisted the urge to take out her cell phone and use the reverse camera to check what Kaoru was doing. It was too dark for that anyway.

The baby had finally settled down to a low coo as the lights came faded out, and while the mother breathed a sigh of relief, her husband beside her looked intently at the distance. There were coughs, and the sound of a Samsung phone shutting off, and whispers. Diana looked over to the stage. A tall, blonde man stood sharp in the white light, the casket behind him. He was grasping the microphone with one hand, and covering his eyes with the other. His soft sniff reverberated through the entire room, and when he finally rubbed his eyes and moved his hand away from his face, Diana realized it was Tamaki, a man she had only ever seen vibrant and boisterous. He covered his mouth this time as he looked out and surveyed the entirety of the audience again. Sniffed again. Looked down again.

There were stirrings, but the brink of a restless murmur was cut off almost at once. A woman had suddenly stepped into the light and hurried up the short staircase to stop at Tamaki's side. She quickly covered the microphone with her hand as she whispered into his ear, then pulled it out of the stand and held it up for her future husband to speak. He put his hand over Haruhi's and breathed deeply.

"Welcome! One and all!" Tamaki's voice filled the room in waves, with a minor echo that emphasized the aura of exultation he brought with his voice. He paused again, took another breath, and said, "You are all welcome here. You, the dearly beloved, the friends, the family, the business partners, the illustrious, the catering boys, the strangers, and everyone here." He swallowed. "Kyouya is a very. Bad. Man! He has cheated us all!"

The audience erupted immediately in nervous muttering. Diana could hardly imagine the look Ootori's father must have had on his face. She had seen him in a magazine, and he didn't look kindly.

"He has cheated me."

The audience grew silent.

"I am here to give a speech for him much earlier than expected. I was expecting another couple of years, you see," he said with a hollow chuckle, "because I was out hunting for a future wife for him. He found me my wife," he said, putting an arm around Haruhi's shoulders, "and I thought I'd return him the favor, but he really doesn't make it easy. See, I was waiting for his wedding…and now my best man's decided to leave a little too soon…without leaving me the speech he was preparing for mine."

Beside him, Haruhi had tears running down the length of her face. She couldn't wipe her face, but Diana found herself wiping her own instead.

"So now," Tamaki sniffed. "Now I am going to give you his wedding speech. Because I've realized, when it comes to making these speeches, the things that we say are practically the same." He paused. "The things that we truly say, through tears or through laughter, are truly…the same."

Haruhi handed Tamaki the wine glass she had been holding in her other hand. He raised it to the audience. "Today, we celebrate a man of great accomplishments! A man who, in every single way, made himself the most glorious bastard this world has ever seen! Scourge of the cruel! Prowler of the stock market! The up and coming tyrant of the medical kingdom! That is he, that is he, Kyouya Ootori, my friends.

"But he is more." Tamaki grinned. "He was the scion of the Ootori's, and though his father didn't know it, he was his own man. I'll tell you something—let me tell you a little secret. He'd kill me if he could for telling you this – which is why I am telling you this now. Kyouya, who was meant to inherit Ootori Medical, under a guise once bought it out completely. And slowly, slowly over time, bits and pieces started coming back. Ootori-san," Tamaki nodded to Kyouya's father, Diana imagined, "he is your son indeed."

Tamaki laughed. He was the only one laughing.

"But he is more. He is that chuckle I hear from the corner of the room whenever I announce my next great ambition. He's the flashing sun on a pair of glasses and sometimes, or maybe more times, I hear his words on my dearly beloved Haruhi's lips. He's the hidden pillar you didn't see, that made everything possible. He's the behind-the-scenes, the technicians, the props, the backstage itself. He was my partner in crime in the host club, and he was my first friend." Tamaki closed his eyes. "He was my best friend."

Diana slid a finger over the rim of the empty glass of champagne, biting her tongue. She felt her phone vibrating.

"And I feel," continued Tamaki, "that for every day of my life, I will still be begging him to come back. Because despite all the light shining upon me, despite all the marvels in my life, the world beyond these spotlights is so dark that I can't see it…and I relied on Kyouya to see for me, in that world beyond the light. I know I came here to say goodbye. But I won't. I won't."

Diana looked up. It seemed to her that Tamaki was surveying the audience. It seemed to her that he was searching for a face. And though it had to be impossible, he said so himself – he couldn't see anyone past the lights…it still seemed to her that his gaze fell on her, and he smiled.

"I won't."

A noise, from the back of the room. She didn't realize it at first. She looked back. Kaoru's clapping, lonely at first, then ballooning into a standing ovation. Eight hundred men and women rose to their feet in Kyouya's honor, but Diana wasn't one of them. Diana was already running. The clicks of her heels were lost in the thunderous applause that spilled out of the ceremony room. She barely saw Kaoru's coattail fly about the corner of the halls. Now he was running too, and if she couldn't catch him soon, he and his black tuxedo would be lost in the darkness of the night.

For the umpteenth time in the week, she slipped out of her heels and broke out into an all-out sprint over the red carpets and the dirty mats and the revolving door and the ice-marble steps and the wet grass when the road got prickly and pebbly and then to where it was greener on the other side. To the fountain.

A bottle of champagne in one hand and a wine glass in the other, Kaoru ambled unsteadily along the exact same steps Diana paced only an hour ago. Diana kept a distance, her stomach wrapping itself in knots. He downed the champagne in his glass, and with a roar of agony, hurled it into the water, where it bobbed back up, unharmed, refracting the golden light. Kaoru pulled the bottle to his lips next.

"Stop."

He did. He looked at her, for the first time registering she was there. "You?"

"Don't do it. Don't drink anymore."

Again, he made that "Tch!" sound as she approached. He screamed again and hurled the bottle into the water too. Then the right shoe she proffered him. And the left heel as well. And her first lip gloss, second lip gloss, third lip gloss.

"Wait, what is this?" He stopped, swaying, to examine the fourth lip gloss she had offered to his rage, his words slurring.

"Oh good," Diana said. "I was just running out."

Kaoru looked back at her. "Who are you?"

Diana looked at the bottle bobbing at the surface too now, traced its circuit around the rectangular fountain with her eyes. "Diana." It wouldn't matter anyway.

Kaoru scoffed. "Why are you getting so familiar with me? My services at the host club not enough?"

"I am not a customer," she said through gritted teeth. "And I have earned the right to call you by name. Even if you don't remember."

Kaoru scoffed again and shook his head. "You women just get scarier as the days go by."

Biting on her tongue wasn't helping. "Dammit! How am I the first one to cry?"

Kaoru scoffed. "Yeah. Cry. Cry all the tears in the world for me, 'cause you know what?" He smirked and splashed into the fountain, pulling the floating bottle back out and raising it to his lips again. "I am done with that." He took a long swig from the bottle, tilting his head up, his Adam's apple bobbing as it poured down his throat.

"Kaoru! Stop!"

He slapped her hands away, spluttering and coughing. He shoved her into the water.

"Kaoru!"

Diana looked up. It was Mori, standing at the edge of the fountain behind her.

Kaoru swung wide his hands as if presenting himself upon a stage and bowed. "Welcome to the show, Mori!"

"You forget yourself," Mori stated.

"What's that? Is this the me you've never seen before?" Kaoru began to laugh. "Let me tell you something, Mori. I never. Forget. Me."

"You came to the funeral drunk, shamed the Ootori family, and now you're raving at the center in public!"

Kaoru wasn't listening. "I never forget me, Mori-senpai. He's the better man, all 'long. That's what I had been living with for the past three years. There's me, and there's him, Mori. Tamaki Suoh, the person who is not me." Kaoru announced it to the sky: "The anti-me! …and y'know what?" He looked back down to Diana, his clothes soaked knee-deep and his shoes only emerging out to slap water across her shoulders and face. "Y'know what?" He continued to kick the water as she turned her face away, climbing to her feet. "I knew it. I always had!" Kaoru continued to laugh. "The fact that he had to win. For Haruhi. He's better than the two of us combined!" The bottle came down at a punishing arc upon the rim of the memorial wall centered in the water fountain. For a second, the shattered remains of the bottom half of the bottle was caught sparkling in the air, but they didn't spin off in every direction like in the movies. They just skittered down the side and into the water.

I can't help him, Diana thought, retreating away. She looked at the jagged remains of the bottle in Kaoru's bleeding hand. I can't help him. I can't help him. I can't help him.

"Diana," Mori said. "You and Hunny go in Naoto's car."

"But—"

"I have to take care of him."

Diana stepped away, wiping water off her face and shivering in her wet clothes. What am I doing? What is the advantage of time if I can't do anything? "Kaoru, stop!"

The jagged bottle had already slashed through the arm of Mori's jacket. But it was over before it fell to the water. Mori had twisted Kaoru's arms behind him so fast Diana hadn't even seen it until Kaoru was picking himself up from the water.

Diana started breathing again and rummaged in her purse for her cell phone. And stopped.

"Aren't you going to pick it up?" asked Kaoru.

No, it wasn't the TM that was ringing after all. She answered the phone. Naoto.

"Diana."

"What?" She was trying to understand what it was Kaoru was doing with his arm across his mouth. It looked to her like he was going to bite himself. Come to think of it, why did Mori let him free?

"It's about the accident."

"What is it?"

The human ear is an astounding organ. Whereas the sense of smell, taste and vision rely on the mix and match of chemical reactions, the sense of hearing is the only purely mechanical system, based completely on movement. With the aid of the brain in processing the starts and stops of spoken language, the vibrations caught upon the pinna – the outer ear – are funneled through the ear canal and bounce onto the ear drum, a 10 millimeter cone of skin that is in fact the only aspect of the ear that senses sound.

"You have to get out of here," said Naoto.

It is pulled rigid in the presence of low-pitch hums, the ear drum blocks background noise and picks up on the higher pitches that vibrate it with more vigor, hence controlling what is relayed into the inner ear, the physical-wave-to-electric-signal translation mechanism that in charge of communication with the brain. This reflex that causes the stapedius muscle to contract and stretch the eardrum to block out noise comes into play when a person speaks as well – to stop the sound of her own voice from drowning out the sounds around her.

"Before the yakuza finds you."

The things Naoto was telling her were in there, somewhere. It was jammed somewhere along the process. Maybe the canal closed in on itself and sank her in a silent, underwater world, where the rush of her own blood was the only company she could keep if she couldn't start moving. Maybe the stapedius muscle had contracted so much to block out Kaoru's screaming that the ear drum could no longer vibrate to a sound. Or maybe she'd been screaming too, so her ear drums were completely blocked off. Was this why you sometimes could not hear your own scream?

Or maybe the electric signals were reaching her brain after all.

"Yakuza?"

They had something to say, those messages. But her brain was ignoring those, focused entirely on the input it received from another of her senses.

It started with a sudden change in light for Diana. She was still at a point in which she could not comprehend Kaoru and his actions, so her brain discarded those pieces on information in a hurry to analyze something that made sense. And it found that the change in light was coming from the water at her ankles. And the change in light was due to some dark substance that bucked in little waves closer and closer to her feet.

"The person that was supposed to be in the limousine… was Tamaki, not Kyouya."

And the dark substance that blocked the light originated like a vaporous cape from along Mori's person. As if his black suit was some amorphous garb, like Mori could suddenly disperse into a colony of bats, the darkness kept spreading and now it no longer made sense.

"I don't know who botched it…if this was the work of the yakuza."

So Diana moved, she was walking, skirting around the growing dark, the phone pressed into her ear, the words simply passing through. "…but nothing is lining up…" And she can finally see beyond Mori's shoulder and she promptly became momentarily blind. Not blind in the traditional sense. But effectively blind. Attentional rubber-necking: the brain's inability to process images for a short time after capturing an image erotic or traumatic.

"And they know that we know it."

The spliced bottle lodged in Mori's neck.

"They've already got me," Naoto said. "They're coming right now. Find another phone. They'll track this call and find you too."

"Okay," said Diana. She clicked off the phone. Kaoru had been keeping himself silent by screaming into his arm. Before she knew it, she had caught him by that arm and was dragging him away.

"No," said Kaoru.

"We have to go."

"But he's not dead yet!" said Kaoru.

"We have to go!"

He said nothing more. Witnessing Mori's last moments would not make the man less dead the next minute.

Diana looked out beyond the rolling lawn, where the streets began and the lights started flickering on. They had to get away. Somehow.

Breaking news! A tragic disaster in an already tragic occasion! Reporting live from the Kohaku International Center, this is Izaya Orihara and my classic cameraman Hongshu! (Hongshu, show yourself. Okay good.)

The Ootori funeral today ended with the need for another funeral! The dead in question, Kyouya Ootori, is joined today by his dear friend, Takashi Morinozuka. He was found drowned in the fountain in front of the center, but the police state that he had drowned due to a broken bottle that had been lodged through his throat in the first place.

What's more interesting, perhaps, are the things that were left behind at the crime scene. A pair of black heels and three lip gloss sticks were found floating along the water, which leads us to believe there may have been a struggle involving a woman who had to defend her honor. Whether this is the story of a close call for this mysterious Cinderella is to be determined, however, as Morinozuka's close friends Tamaki Suoh and the Ootori family themselves insist Morinozuka would never do such a thing.

Izaya Orihara here – and I'll be back with more!

Dun dun DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN.

Wow. So it has been eight months since my last post. Honestly, I got stuck here and came back to try to fix it multiple times. I actually had five versions of this chapter and three of the next already - so it kept undergoing completely different revisions. Even though I was able to flesh out multiple way this story could go, none of them enticed me. So I thought: "What is the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen at this point in time?"

And then things started moving again.

I would really appreciate critique regarding that very last scene. Pacing-wise.

1. Was the dialogue interleaved with the description jerky? The importance is a flowing momentum, but if Naoto talking was getting in the way of what was happening, and it should have all been clumped together more so both aspects could flow more logically, that's something I need to know.

2. And all that detail about the sense of hearing - should that have been cut short? I realize that entire paragraph could be cut out (which is bad) since it stands quite independent of the rest. I don't know, I'm not a huge fan of that paragraph, but trying to slow down a scene is a favorite technique of mine when an author does it right.

3. And then there are other authors who just know when to NOT write something. I'm still trying to figure out how to write tense scenes, what to say, when I'm saying too much, when the reading is just going to start skimming. And what isn't even worth saying because the reader will know how to fill in the gap.

I don't know. What do you think?