Ninja StarCome, Follow Me
"Here, the maid washed them," Kaoru handed her a bundle of clothes. It was the pair of jeans, t-shirt, and sweatshirt she'd been wearing when she arrived that morning. They looked much more presentable now that they had been washed in a real washing machine as opposed to a bathtub.
"Are you sure you don't need a ride home?" Hikaru asked her for the fifth time since they had returned from school.
Star assured him, "I'll walk home, but thanks." She changed out of her dress in one of the many bathrooms and folded it awkwardly. "What should I do with this?" She asked the twins.
Kaoru took it from her, "We'll have it cleaned and ready for tomorrow morning." Star cringed at the thought of her second day at Ouran. She waved to them and they watched her walk from the doorstep, schoolbag slung over-shoulder, down the street.
Hikaru pulled his cellphone from his pocket and made a call on speed dial. It rang for a few seconds before he heard the click that meant that Kyoya had picked up. "She just left. I hope you know there's nothing you'll gain from doing this. You're just putting everyone in danger."
"We'll never know unless we try."
Honey and Mori held cameras, and Kyoya, his notebook. Haruhi and Tamaki walked with them and Hikaru and Kaoru lead the way. The plan was for the band of hosts to follow Star at a distance and record any findings. Tamaki suggested they use complex disguises so Star wouldn't recognize them, but everyone else voted against it. They changed into casual clothes and headed out to catch up with Star.
They followed her through the upper-class neighborhoods and watched as uppity pedestrians gave her dirty looks. This was the neighborhood that all of the hosts besides Haruhi lived in. The followed her through the city shopping district and even into the middle-class neighborhoods where Haruhi lived.
Star stopped at a tavern called the Crystal Orchid. She went inside, but only for a minute before she flipped her hood up and snuck around the back. The hosts all held their breath, waiting for her to appear again. Hikaru was especially disappointed in her when he saw her with a bottle of Sapporo and a handful of pretzels, sneaking out the back door.
"Haru-chan, is that the bar that your dad works at?" Honey asked her.
"No, but who knows, she may be stealing from that one too."
Honey and Mori were sure to take plenty of pictures as Star popped a few pretzels into her mouth and took a swig from the bottle. She kept on her way, headed towards what the locals affectionately referred to as "Short Bridge".
The hosts followed behind her, if not a little too closely. She stopped suddenly, forcing the Host Club to hide behind the benches on either side of the bridge. She seemed to stare at her reflection in the deep, black canal water running swiftly under the bridge. She polished off her beer and kept walking. Once across, she tossed the empty bottle into a trashcan and, without warning, took off running.
By the time the club had turned the corner into the alley she had disappeared down, Star was gone. Hikaru clicked his tongue and chuckled under his breath. Kyoya whipped around and glared at him. "You told her, didn't you?" He accused Hikaru, "you warned her!"
"I did not! I just think its funny that you all assumed you would be able to keep up with a girl who's been scaling walls for ten years!" He stuck out his tongue and turned his back to them.
Tamaki's hand came down hard on his shoulder. "You've been spending an awful lot of time with her. Are you telling us that even you can't keep up with her?" He asked. He was starting to treat the little field trip like a real espionage. Hikaru closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
"If I help you all with this, you have to promise me nothing bad will come of it. You're just doing this to clear up all of your little delusions, right?"
Hikaru had not been made aware of the real reason they were following Star. "Had we told him, he'd never have gone along with it," was Kyoya's reasoning.
The hosts all nodded and Hikaru, who, though he dreaded it with all his heart, in anticipation wore his studded sneakers, scaled one of the walls in the alley. He gazed out at the city from the rooftop. On the horizon he could see the figure of a malnourished teenage girl bounding from building to building. "She's on the roof of the cafe a block down. She's headed towards the open-air market." Hikaru called to his friends on the ground.
He watched them take off in the direction he told them, Mori scooping up Haruhi who was huffing, completely out of breath. Hikaru skipped along the rooftops above them, leading the way. When they reached the market, he climbed down the wall and rejoined the hosts on the ground.
"We'll split up. Tamaki and Haruhi, Honey-senpai and Mori-senpai, Hikaru and Kaoru, and I'll go alone," Kyoya announced. "If there's any sight of her, call speed dial one and we'll all head that way, got it?" And with that, he walked away. The remaining hosts all took out their cell phones and set everyone's phone numbers to the same speed dial. That way when someone called one phone they called everyone's phone.
Honey and Mori were the first to spot Star. She was walking along with her hands in her pockets. She passed a vendor selling pears, and without anyone noticing, she slipped three into her school bag and disappeared between stalls.
"Look, Takashi, she went that way!" Honey yelled to his cousin, as he ran after her. Mori called speed dial one and explained to everyone where they had last seen her and the direction he though she was headed. He and Honey ran past the pear vendor, looking between stalls for any sign of a purple sweatshirt or a flash of bleach white hair.
Tamaki was dragging Haruhi along in frenzy, searching everywhere for Star after receiving Mori's phone call. "Haruhi, we need to find her!"
"I don't understand why we're doing this, senpai. I mean, she's not getting in anyone's way at Ouran, is she? Why can't we just leave her alone, why do we have to be nosy and follow her home? She's going to think that we're all stalkers."
Tamaki paused. He contemplated this for a moment before running his hand through his clean, blonde hair and answering, "I guess I'm just curious about her. What her life is like and where she lives. I don't want to get her in trouble necessarily; I just want to know more. It seems to be important to Kyoya, also. But if you thought it was such a dumb idea why did you come? I thought you had forgiven her?"
It was Haruhi's turn to fall silent. "I have, I just... When she was talking about how we had so much in common, it really struck a chord with me. Maybe she's not so bad?"
Tamaki chuckled, "Well, we can't know until we find her."
But Star had found them.
She rounded a corner and ran right into the two hosts, knocking the three of them to the ground. "I-I'm so sorry," Haruhi stuttered. Her eyes briefly locked with a two-tone gaze before it disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Tamaki, who had his cell phone at the ready, dialed his fellow hosts, "We just ran into her! She's headed back out to the highway!"
While the hosts were scrambling to find her, Star was laughing like a child. She was enjoying the chase. In her mind, it was retaliation for them never trusting her. They are so stupid! I can't believe that they think that they're being stealthy! I mean, they travel in one huge pack, it's like they're completely unaware as to how much attention they attract– especially when they run around and cause a big commotion.
Star slowed down and walked casually into a small grocery store. She sauntered through the automatic doors and walked through the aisles. She pretended to be considering purchasing a box of cereal, when she was really watching the Host Club stop in confusion and frustration outside the store window.
Hikaru looked like he was having an argument with Kyoya. Kaoru put his hand on his brother' arm and attempted to calm him down. Star had been devising a plan in her head and took this as her chance to slip out unnoticed.
She walked up to the cashier, and asked him if there was a back exit she could use. "I'm trying to get away from my older brother and his dumb friends," She cocked her head in the direction of the window, "They've been harassing me all day and I just want to go home," her bottom lip trembled as she willed a tear to fall. The cashier was an older man, maybe in his late fifties, and was incredibly moved. He led Star through the store and unlocked the back door for her. When he had gone back inside, she was alone again behind the store. The small grocery was in between a bank and a pawnshop, a place very familiar to her. Every so often she'd pick a piece of cheap jewelry from an unwitting woman and pawn it off in that store. She chose this building as the one to signal Hikaru from.
She climbed to the top and crouched down, behind the lip of the roof. She whistled loudly and immediately dropped flat so that the hosts couldn't see her. She counted off fifteen seconds in her head, and looked over the lip again. The only one looking was Hikaru because he was the only one to recognize the significance of the sound. It was the way Star would get his attention if they were running along opposite sides of the street, or were somewhere that they couldn't yell. Hikaru tried to focus on her without drawing the attention of the other hosts. He did see her sign the signal for "home".
There was an unspoken language of symbols and gestures that Star and Ivy used so Star taught them to Hikaru. They were anything from symbols spray-painted on the side of buildings, motions you would make with your hands, or code words. There was a symbol for every district; Ivy's a leaf. Cat, Wilt, and Jin are a circle with a triangle inside. Star had creatively picked a star as her symbol.
"If I were going to leave a message to Ivy that I would be visiting her in two days, I'd make two circles and a star. The circles symbolize a day because the sun and moon both rise and set in a day, making a full circle. Or if I wanted to say, 'I'll be back again soon', I'd leave a circle with a curly line coming off the bottom to symbolize that I don't know how many days I'll be gone."
"Okay, but what about when you're standing right next to the person you have to tell something to, and you don't have the time to write them a letter?" Hikaru asked, leaning back on his hands. He and I were sitting on the roof of the Suou hotel building one late-summer night before the weather started cooling down, watching heat-lightening flash in the distance.
"Well, sassy, you would either use a code word, or you would make some sort of gesture. Like this one," I pointed up three fingers on my right hand and traced them from shoulder to hip and shoulder to hip in an X formation. "That means 'home'. That's probably the most important symbol. So if you don't know where I'm headed, and I sign you that, you'll know I'm going home."
Star thought fondly back to that night. She became so lost in her thoughts that she almost didn't notice that Hikaru had already started leading the hosts in the direction of her apartment. "Maybe if I just take you to her house, she'll be there?" She heard Hikaru mention to his friends, and Star ran off in the direction of home.
She made a big show of climbing down a wall a few yards in front of the hosts, just to make sure that she had their attention. She pretended, just as she had on the bridge, to not notice as they followed behind her into yet another alley. This one, however, was familiar to both Star and Hikaru and was far closer to home.
She wheeled the dumpster away from the wall and stepped through the hole, carefully replacing it afterwards. She crouched, listening to the footsteps of the hosts as they pounded in after her. She wished she could see their faces and the looks of frustration that had been bringing her so much joy.
She hesitated behind the dumpster, awaiting the subtle scraping sound of Hikaru sliding the hulking green box aside. That sound never came, though.
Star heard a gasp that she assumed could have only come from Tamaki, for it was extremely exaggerated. She heard a voice; the one voice that Star dreaded more than any other. The voice that sent chills deep into her spine.
"Well who do we have here?"
AN: Hiyas, okay so I'm going to do that thing where I apologize for being a terrible person: I. AM. SO. SORRY. I know I always leave you guys with cliff-hangers and terrible closers but that's just because I LOVE YOU ALL and want to make sure I keep you interested and reading each update. That also means that when I take three weeks to update a chapter and make a total ass of myself, you all start to hate me. So here we are, the long awaited chase scene. What'll happen next? You'll have to wait and see and HOPEFULLY I don't take THREE WEEKS TO UPDATE! ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻ ~Yuki-mu