Grow Up

Disclaimer: All rights to the Ouran High School Host Club story and characters belong to Bisco Hatori. The following fanfiction does not represent the thoughts and views of the creator or the site this story is hosted on, and is not written for profit.

Author’s Notes: Tried to make this as cannon as possible and failed miserably. Enjoy the blatant fan service! This is what I call a 1-day practice piece to get me out of my writing funk for the other two projects I’m working on.

Grow Up
Chapter 1: Things Happen

The Ohtori house was extremely quiet tonight. Naturally the place always had a somber feeling around, but today was especially empty since Kyoya’s father had left for the week on business and his brothers were out vacationing in Aspen for a few days. It wasn’t unusual for him to be left alone like this, so he took advantage of the fact that he could have Tamaki over for the evening. Normally Kyoya invited him for the hidden reason that he didn’t want to be alone in the house, but today was very different. Today it was Tamaki that couldn’t be left alone. Not now.

His socks padded along the plush carpeting as the youngest Ohtori son brought up a tray of hot green tea and some “commoner ramen.” This was secretly stashed away for times when the blond was over. Had his father realized that Kyoya was hiding cheap food in the pantry he’d be disowned for certain. But Tamaki was in need of a little perking up and often times the King would drown himself in a ramen bowl like a girl huddling over a gallon of ice cream. As he used an elbow to shove the door open and head into his room, there the other boy was, silent as ever and hunched over the kotatsu looking like a complete zombie. There was depressed, and then there was seriously depressed. Tamaki was on the verge of seriously depressed this time around. “Hey,” Kyoya murmured as he took his usual seat next to his classmate and set the tray down. As he began pouring tea for him he tried to gather up a little conversation, “If you stay like that all night you’ll bore me with your inconvenience. Don’t make me kick you out.” Following that statement a bowl of ramen and cup of green tea was set before Tamaki and for a while he looked over the food and held back a few sniffles. Kyoya’s words might have always been harsh but his actions were extremely kind. That was something Haruhi always seemed to point out about the Shadow King. The boy was like a mother hen always protecting the chicks of the nest even though he ‘protected’ them with cold resolve and blackmail from time to time.

“Am I a fool?” Tamaki finally spoke up. After Kyoya had finished sipping his tea, he set the cup down and smirked, “Yes. You already know that.”

“How could she say that? Did I misread her?”

“You’re an even bigger fool if you couldn’t understand the intent behind it.” Graduation was looming in on them very quickly and just like last year, separation from the Host Club was now inevitable. This time, instead of Mori and Hunny leaving for the university, it would be the club’s two leading men that were heading off for the next phase of their lives. In this, the only ones left were Haruhi and the twins. At this point it would be now or never and Tamaki asked two favors of the apathetic scholarship student of Ouran:

#1: To keep the ideals of the Host Club alive at Ouran.
#2: To come with him when she graduated.

In a sense, Tamaki had worded it that sounded more like a marriage proposal. For all intents and purposes that was probably what he was trying to accomplish. Kyoya found Haruhi to be a very interesting young woman, and he would not have objected to her tagging along next year and being college buddies. But the reality of it was that she was aiming to be a lawyer, and required a different level of schooling to which she had already picked out a few colleges to aim for long before Tamaki and Kyoya were set with their own paths.
While Kyoya knew better on the matter of the ‘relationship’ as it stood between the two, Haruhi had bluntly made it clear that she would not be following him. It was probably for the best since Hikaru had been personally growing independently from his twin sibling and even Kaoru had mentioned his feelings to Kyoya in an odd manner one afternoon. In conclusion, the relationships of having a girl within the Host Club had finally taken their ultimate toll. Feelings were getting more complex, and it was beginning to strain everyone who was left after Mori and Hunny were long gone to balance out the atmosphere. Kyoya couldn’t deny that perhaps there might be a strange sensation whenever he was around Haruhi. The girl was perceptive in all of the unique ways that made it possible for her to mesh so well with them in the first place. But regardless of his own feelings, he would never stoop to quarreling over love affairs and lose a best friend in the process. Like a good business man that his father taught him to be, he shut out and locked up any idea as to actually act on his impulses toward the girl. “Leave that to the idiot to do,” he thought casually to himself on a very frequent basis.
Haruhi’s rejection of Tamaki wasn’t to hurt his feelings. On the contrary, had she wanted to do so she could have been a lot harsher in the long run. Instead, Kyoya was pulled aside one day and asked how to handle the reins. The Hitachiins weren’t much help from the administrative point of view, so they would both be dubbed Vice Presidents and were given the task of assisting the creative themes for the club at the very least. Kyoya’s shrewd financial work over the past two years had gleaned enough money that Haruhi could plan what she would need to do in order to keep the patrons happy. “You’ll probably have to recruit a couple new members into the club to make up for the holes that will be left behind,” Kyoya replied as he compiled the core information of all his notebooks and finally handed one off to her. For a moment she was a bit stunned as she was given her own notebook by the Shadow King himself. Naturally it wasn’t his notebook, but it was like the passing of the baton in a weird kind of way. “I think I have a couple people in mind,” she replied with a smile and Kyoya already knew who those individuals would be. Had Haruhi wanted to reject Tamaki completely, she would have never agreed to take on the role as the Host Club President. Kyoya knew the reason of why she had given Tamaki the equivalent of a verbal slap in the face to his ‘run away with me!’ request. The blond was perceptive to everyone else’s problems except his own. This was something he’d have to learn the hard way.

By now Tamaki was slurping his noodles up and wiping away the residual tears from his eyes. Hopefully the guy would come to his senses soon. It was only a matter of time. This wasn’t exactly Kyoya’s style to baby sit a grown man at this rate. “Are you done quibbling yet?” he finally asked impatiently, but took his time sipping at his tea again. The two sat in a stalemate of mixed feelings while Tamaki contemplated his current situation, “I guess I should have expected that, huh?” A hap-hazard laugh came from his lips before leaning back and plopping on the carpet. As he looked up at the ceiling his friend chimed in once more, “Expected? You should have known and not bothered in the first place.”

“You’re lying,” Tamaki replied immediately afterwards, “But I appreciate the effort.”

Silence came once again to the room as the two of them contemplated the current endeavor. Pretty soon they would be graduating from High School and yet, here they were, wallowing in Tamaki’s emotions just because Haruhi rejected him out of logistical reasoning. In a sense, it greatly annoyed Kyoya. The world ends over one girl? Had Suoh completely lost it? “I should know better,” he thought to himself, “I know better than to expect Tamaki to think like me.” Tamaki was passionate, emotional, openly loving to everyone he met. After all of these years he had rubbed off on Kyoya indirectly, but the two were still as different as night and day. This train of thought, however, was interrupted by the sound of someone lightly…snoring?

Blinking a few times, Kyoya looked over and found that Tamaki had emo-ed himself to sleep. “Oh good lord…” the Ohtori muttered, placing a hand at his forehead and trying to figure out how he was going to move the guy to a bed of sorts. Getting up, he walked over to sleeping beauty and nudged him gently with his foot, “Hey.”

Nothing.

Kyoya’s eyebrow twitched before he roughly stepped on the guy a few times more, “Wake up.” Several times more there was still no further movement. In fact, Tamaki was out like a light and not even a bomb would wake him up. A few curse words escaped from the ‘cool’ host member, and he stalked over to his bed to snatch a spare pillow so that he could at least attempt to give Tamaki something other than the floor to rest his head on. With careful precision, Kyoya propped up the blonds head and delicately placed the soft cushion underneath. Afterwards he put Tamaki back down and went over to the closet to grab a spare blanket so that the soon-to-be-former Host Club President wouldn’t catch a cold. Angst plus illness would equate to Kyoya wanting to go homicidal on Tamaki for causing so much unnecessary grief.
When it looked like his friend was going to be as comfortable as humanly possible on the floor, Kyoya went over to one of his drawers and pulled out his pajamas. There was no need to really change in the bathroom since Tamaki was out like a light anyway. The change took two minutes and after taking several more to perform all the necessary hygienic chores you do before bed, Kyoya set his glasses to the side on his night stand and decided to call it an early night. Normally he was used to going to bed at around three or four in the morning. Currently it was only eleven o’clock. He mentally told himself that he’d have to try getting up early in the morning to make up for the lost hours. With a quick flick of the lamp switch the room turned completely dark, and even he went down for the sleep count in a matter of minutes.