if we're only friends, why don't you dance with someone new?
edited: music now added. just say yes to yeye.
---
The weekend drives Éclair to the verge of asking Tamaki if he has forgotten about the trip to Switzerland. It would be easy to forget, she admits. So much (so little!) has happened in between. There was that slip-up in town the other day, and she thinks, though she will never know (and this bothers her, though she can't put her finger on why; it's not that she wants to know every excruciating, inane detail about their friendship, yet all the same--), that the boys had something like a fight afterwards, after dinner. Tamaki's piano playing had been affected, like his fingers were connected to the wrong joints.
Oh, but the weekend (which means nothing except that Éclair doesn't wake up early to review her German or brush up on her maths and Kyouya disappears behind the blank shield of his laptop marginally less) is the worst-- such a lurid mess, as always, of prim, decadent insanity. Éclair wakes up on Saturday to the sounds of thrashing in the pool. Tamaki doing morning laps, she decides, but then the sound of another voice, yelping in surprised Japanese, which couldn't have been Tamaki. She pulls on her dressing gown (a pale green with white trim which Tamaki said reminded him of matcha; "Like green tea ice cream melting in a dish," he had explained; "Melting because of your beauty, of course," he added matter-of-factedly, and she had smiled, feeding him a slice of orange and feeling his lips close around it as Kyouya ignored them) just in time to see Kyouya climbing out of the pool, shaking his glasses in a futile effort to dry them, Tamaki wading quickly to the edge to follow him.
Kyouya had obviously been in bed just moments before the excursion into the pool. He is still wearing his pajamas, and though Éclair had seen him before with his shirt off, wet and waist-deep in water, he had never seemed more naked to her than at this moment: his shirt jerked open to just above his stomach, the fabric clinging though it was already drying in the early morning sun. She forgets her intention to grab her opera glasses. If she had been poolside, she knows, she would have turned her face away. Instead, she leans her cheek against a hand propped up on the window ledge, trying to read their expressions. Kyouya rounds on Tamaki, who is trying to lift himself out of the pool. Conversation. Tamaki making an aborted attempt to stand up, but Kyouya turning away, walking stiffly back towards the house. The door being roughly pulled open, then shutting. Silence. Éclair squints, but she has to give up.
Tamaki's folded, abandoned figure by the pool almost makes Éclair call out. She opens her mouth. By the time she's formed the right words ("Come in before you get a fever as well!") Kyouya's reappeared. He's stripped off his shirt, a towel slung around his neck and another one carried on his arm in a perfect facsimile of an obedient butler (the idea of Ootori Kyouya, Monsieur K.O. being anyone's butler, is more terrifying than laughable). Tamaki rises, his hands held loosely by his sides, the sun casting his face in a strong light.
You can't help looking undignified when you're dripping wet by the side of the pool, Éclair knows, but she can't help wanting to freeze the two of them, sketch the way they have angled their bodies to approach each other; she can't help wanting to know what it is they say to each other that makes Kyouya come forward with the towel, Tamaki meeting him halfway, Kyouya's glasses on the poolside chair, completely forgotten. She can't help flinching when she notices Kyouya starting to turn his head up, accidentally or otherwise, towards her window.
If what they had was an argument, Éclair reasons as she hastily leaves the window and begins pulling her hair into a bun, this would be the making up. But to her it is more like the kiss a boy gives a girl after spending the night in her bed, the one that apologizes for not staying for breakfast.
And so she doesn't ask Tamaki about Switzerland during breakfast (where she prudently doesn't mention anything about the morning's poolside antics, despite an odd gash on Kyouya's elbow that looks like he had hit the side of the pool with particular force), or the lunch that followed (accompanied by the new gramophone churning out an old but decent Françoise Hardy record, which Éclair had purchased on that same trip to town), or the light dinner they have of soup and bread and cheese. On Saturday night Tamaki ties a ribbon on Léon and carries the kitten around the house to the dismay of Marie and the general amusement of Éclair, and afterwards she keeps Tamaki in her room for two hours, with the door closed just to annoy Kyouya.
He gets his payback by disappearing with Tamaki for almost all of Sunday ("We went to the beach! Oh, it was delightful, Éclair, the breeze smelled so nice, and Kyouya even went in the water with me. Hm? We walked, actually. Oh, well, we took Léon with us, and I don't think Léon likes the horses. Do you like seashells? You probably have so many of them, but we chose these just for you. Kyouya found this stone. It kind of looks like a heart. Kyouya says it looks more like an apple--" "I said it looked more like a stone, actually--") without so much as a word of warning. Éclair tries to fume, but that, like all other expressions of disapproval or annoyance, would be a sign of surrender. They adjourn that evening to the piano room with sweet wine, blood orange slices, and lemon cookies, and Éclair drinks perhaps a glass too much and finds herself almost flirting with Kyouya while Tamaki plays an oddly interpreted Schubert.
On Monday, though, an unfamiliar suitcase stands next to the door. "C'est les bagages de Monsieur Ootori, mademoiselle," Gilbert tells her. From upstairs she can hear Kyouya's voice. "If we go to the Alps, there'll be snow, Tamaki," he is saying in calm, measured Japanese. "If you don't have any warm clothes, we'll buy some there. Come on."
The sounds of his footsteps are confident. It makes Éclair reconsider what she knows about the two of them, but Kyouya in particular. She had always thought that Kyouya was the one who gave and gave in. Yet the idea of that calm, measured voice ever relinquishing anything makes her feel cold. It's summer in Provence, and Éclair shivers.
---
On the way to Berne, they stop in Munich to refuel. Kyouya's phone rings (two sharp, vibrating bursts that reminds Éclair of a blunt ax) as soon as Éclair can see the airport through the windows of the jet with her opera glasses. He doesn't look at his phone until they're in the airport's impeccably kept private lounge. The mask on his face that’s pretending to be a calm smile as he pages through the messages makes Éclair wonder if she needs to cancel the third ticket for the train ride back. Tamaki leans in, but Kyouya has already snapped the phone shut again, a little more forceful than usual. "Is it your father?" Tamaki asks, his chin just barely resting on Kyouya's shoulder, so that Kyouya almost bangs into Tamaki's jaw when he starts.
"No, it’s not," Kyouya says shortly, tossing the phone on the seat as he gets up. "Let's go get some coffee. Would you like a cup, Mademoiselle Tonnere?" He walks away without waiting for her answer.
When they're both gone, Éclair debates with herself for a full minute (which is a long time, considering how long she thought about going to Japan, or trying to get Tamaki to marry her, or this whole summer in France) before nonchalantly reaching for Kyouya's phone. Its operations are streamlined to the point of bare minimalism (tiny buttons with barely any differentiation between them, the Ootori family crest in white against a blue background that serves as the wallpaper; the only thing that pops up is the time; even the battery bar is hidden and the menu has no text, just picture icons), but eventually she finds the inbox. There are only two messages. She opens the first one.
It's in Japanese, and Éclair makes a face. She recognizes numbers, a lot of katakana, there: written out in French, an address in Paris. It shocks her less than she thought it would. It's possible that she's been expecting this since she had watched Tamaki leave the record shop.
The second message is also in Japanese. Not signed, she realizes as she scans for a name, and the sender is "Private". Which means she'll have to actually read and translate to get any clue what the message is about. The message is short, though, and only three sentences, and the kanji is easy. She manages to understand the whole thing just as she catches sight of Kyouya and Tamaki approaching and she is forced to slide the phone back onto Kyouya's abandoned seat.
In the distance, Kyouya is holding two cups of steaming coffee. Tamaki has pastries in one hand, gesturing with a cup of coffee in his other hand in casual, elegant flicks, as if conducting. Kyouya says something quietly, pushing his glasses up his face with the back of his hand to avoid dropping the coffee (with no less grace than Tamaki's gesturing; too often Éclair forgets that Kyouya's brand of upbringing is just as refined as Tamaki's, but in a different way; if Tamaki were knights on white horses, a spray of tea roses, or a Prince Charming smile, then Kyouya was a deep lake, the most silent of conversations behind a closed door, or a spiral staircase with no end in sight), and Tamaki turns to him. When they both face forward again, Tamaki is smiling delightedly, eyes bright with his brand of shameless excitement, taking quick strides towards Éclair.
"Kyouya tells me skiing is done on planks of wood!" Tamaki exclaims as he hands Éclair the coffee in his hand, not even thinking to let go until he knows she has a firm grip on it. Without even turning to Kyouya, he reaches for the cup in Kyouya's left hand. The exchange is wordless, natural. Kyouya has not even blinked. Éclair narrows her eyes. "Is it like stilts?" Tamaki continues, almost burning his mouth on his coffee.
This pronouncement makes Éclair stare, from Tamaki back to Kyouya, before she laughs despite herself. Kyouya's eyes are averted into his cup, but maybe Éclair can see an exasperated smile, sliding half into fondness (sometimes she wonders if Kyouya says things a certain way to purposefully feed the fantasy that is Tamaki's view of the world; certainly he would know by now how Tamaki's mind twisted and magnified and reshrunk reality to suit his whims; certainly he would know how to keep Tamaki's head just a little under the line of clouds? But she has spent almost a full summer saying truthful things that have gotten her nowhere. In the end, it’s probably not Kyouya’s fault).
To her left, Kyouya is deftly manipulating the buttons on his phone, his forehead creased, but his expression, the line of his mouth, so casual. He has composed himself. As Éclair touches Tamaki's arm to invite him to sit down, she thinks of the second text message. She imagines each digital character being erased, each word in turn being eaten away. She mouths them to herself, feeling the strange Japanese consonants yield on her tongue. Thank you for being such a good friend to my son, she imagines herself saying to Kyouya. However, when the time is appropriate, I'll tell him the address myself.
I promise.
A/N: in the end, I couldn't decide who wrote the text message. You can make up your mind as to which parent it was. It is no longer my responsibility!! And please don't kill me-- I don't know how private jets refill and I've forgotten what the Munich airport looks like. Also, when choosing a Francoise Hardy song, I came across the original music video for Claude Francois's "Belles, Belles, Belles," and it occurred to me that if there was ever a video rendition of what the world looks like to Tamaki, this would be it.
---
The weekend drives Éclair to the verge of asking Tamaki if he has forgotten about the trip to Switzerland. It would be easy to forget, she admits. So much (so little!) has happened in between. There was that slip-up in town the other day, and she thinks, though she will never know (and this bothers her, though she can't put her finger on why; it's not that she wants to know every excruciating, inane detail about their friendship, yet all the same--), that the boys had something like a fight afterwards, after dinner. Tamaki's piano playing had been affected, like his fingers were connected to the wrong joints.
Oh, but the weekend (which means nothing except that Éclair doesn't wake up early to review her German or brush up on her maths and Kyouya disappears behind the blank shield of his laptop marginally less) is the worst-- such a lurid mess, as always, of prim, decadent insanity. Éclair wakes up on Saturday to the sounds of thrashing in the pool. Tamaki doing morning laps, she decides, but then the sound of another voice, yelping in surprised Japanese, which couldn't have been Tamaki. She pulls on her dressing gown (a pale green with white trim which Tamaki said reminded him of matcha; "Like green tea ice cream melting in a dish," he had explained; "Melting because of your beauty, of course," he added matter-of-factedly, and she had smiled, feeding him a slice of orange and feeling his lips close around it as Kyouya ignored them) just in time to see Kyouya climbing out of the pool, shaking his glasses in a futile effort to dry them, Tamaki wading quickly to the edge to follow him.
Kyouya had obviously been in bed just moments before the excursion into the pool. He is still wearing his pajamas, and though Éclair had seen him before with his shirt off, wet and waist-deep in water, he had never seemed more naked to her than at this moment: his shirt jerked open to just above his stomach, the fabric clinging though it was already drying in the early morning sun. She forgets her intention to grab her opera glasses. If she had been poolside, she knows, she would have turned her face away. Instead, she leans her cheek against a hand propped up on the window ledge, trying to read their expressions. Kyouya rounds on Tamaki, who is trying to lift himself out of the pool. Conversation. Tamaki making an aborted attempt to stand up, but Kyouya turning away, walking stiffly back towards the house. The door being roughly pulled open, then shutting. Silence. Éclair squints, but she has to give up.
Tamaki's folded, abandoned figure by the pool almost makes Éclair call out. She opens her mouth. By the time she's formed the right words ("Come in before you get a fever as well!") Kyouya's reappeared. He's stripped off his shirt, a towel slung around his neck and another one carried on his arm in a perfect facsimile of an obedient butler (the idea of Ootori Kyouya, Monsieur K.O. being anyone's butler, is more terrifying than laughable). Tamaki rises, his hands held loosely by his sides, the sun casting his face in a strong light.
You can't help looking undignified when you're dripping wet by the side of the pool, Éclair knows, but she can't help wanting to freeze the two of them, sketch the way they have angled their bodies to approach each other; she can't help wanting to know what it is they say to each other that makes Kyouya come forward with the towel, Tamaki meeting him halfway, Kyouya's glasses on the poolside chair, completely forgotten. She can't help flinching when she notices Kyouya starting to turn his head up, accidentally or otherwise, towards her window.
If what they had was an argument, Éclair reasons as she hastily leaves the window and begins pulling her hair into a bun, this would be the making up. But to her it is more like the kiss a boy gives a girl after spending the night in her bed, the one that apologizes for not staying for breakfast.
And so she doesn't ask Tamaki about Switzerland during breakfast (where she prudently doesn't mention anything about the morning's poolside antics, despite an odd gash on Kyouya's elbow that looks like he had hit the side of the pool with particular force), or the lunch that followed (accompanied by the new gramophone churning out an old but decent Françoise Hardy record, which Éclair had purchased on that same trip to town), or the light dinner they have of soup and bread and cheese. On Saturday night Tamaki ties a ribbon on Léon and carries the kitten around the house to the dismay of Marie and the general amusement of Éclair, and afterwards she keeps Tamaki in her room for two hours, with the door closed just to annoy Kyouya.
He gets his payback by disappearing with Tamaki for almost all of Sunday ("We went to the beach! Oh, it was delightful, Éclair, the breeze smelled so nice, and Kyouya even went in the water with me. Hm? We walked, actually. Oh, well, we took Léon with us, and I don't think Léon likes the horses. Do you like seashells? You probably have so many of them, but we chose these just for you. Kyouya found this stone. It kind of looks like a heart. Kyouya says it looks more like an apple--" "I said it looked more like a stone, actually--") without so much as a word of warning. Éclair tries to fume, but that, like all other expressions of disapproval or annoyance, would be a sign of surrender. They adjourn that evening to the piano room with sweet wine, blood orange slices, and lemon cookies, and Éclair drinks perhaps a glass too much and finds herself almost flirting with Kyouya while Tamaki plays an oddly interpreted Schubert.
On Monday, though, an unfamiliar suitcase stands next to the door. "C'est les bagages de Monsieur Ootori, mademoiselle," Gilbert tells her. From upstairs she can hear Kyouya's voice. "If we go to the Alps, there'll be snow, Tamaki," he is saying in calm, measured Japanese. "If you don't have any warm clothes, we'll buy some there. Come on."
The sounds of his footsteps are confident. It makes Éclair reconsider what she knows about the two of them, but Kyouya in particular. She had always thought that Kyouya was the one who gave and gave in. Yet the idea of that calm, measured voice ever relinquishing anything makes her feel cold. It's summer in Provence, and Éclair shivers.
---
On the way to Berne, they stop in Munich to refuel. Kyouya's phone rings (two sharp, vibrating bursts that reminds Éclair of a blunt ax) as soon as Éclair can see the airport through the windows of the jet with her opera glasses. He doesn't look at his phone until they're in the airport's impeccably kept private lounge. The mask on his face that’s pretending to be a calm smile as he pages through the messages makes Éclair wonder if she needs to cancel the third ticket for the train ride back. Tamaki leans in, but Kyouya has already snapped the phone shut again, a little more forceful than usual. "Is it your father?" Tamaki asks, his chin just barely resting on Kyouya's shoulder, so that Kyouya almost bangs into Tamaki's jaw when he starts.
"No, it’s not," Kyouya says shortly, tossing the phone on the seat as he gets up. "Let's go get some coffee. Would you like a cup, Mademoiselle Tonnere?" He walks away without waiting for her answer.
When they're both gone, Éclair debates with herself for a full minute (which is a long time, considering how long she thought about going to Japan, or trying to get Tamaki to marry her, or this whole summer in France) before nonchalantly reaching for Kyouya's phone. Its operations are streamlined to the point of bare minimalism (tiny buttons with barely any differentiation between them, the Ootori family crest in white against a blue background that serves as the wallpaper; the only thing that pops up is the time; even the battery bar is hidden and the menu has no text, just picture icons), but eventually she finds the inbox. There are only two messages. She opens the first one.
It's in Japanese, and Éclair makes a face. She recognizes numbers, a lot of katakana, there: written out in French, an address in Paris. It shocks her less than she thought it would. It's possible that she's been expecting this since she had watched Tamaki leave the record shop.
The second message is also in Japanese. Not signed, she realizes as she scans for a name, and the sender is "Private". Which means she'll have to actually read and translate to get any clue what the message is about. The message is short, though, and only three sentences, and the kanji is easy. She manages to understand the whole thing just as she catches sight of Kyouya and Tamaki approaching and she is forced to slide the phone back onto Kyouya's abandoned seat.
In the distance, Kyouya is holding two cups of steaming coffee. Tamaki has pastries in one hand, gesturing with a cup of coffee in his other hand in casual, elegant flicks, as if conducting. Kyouya says something quietly, pushing his glasses up his face with the back of his hand to avoid dropping the coffee (with no less grace than Tamaki's gesturing; too often Éclair forgets that Kyouya's brand of upbringing is just as refined as Tamaki's, but in a different way; if Tamaki were knights on white horses, a spray of tea roses, or a Prince Charming smile, then Kyouya was a deep lake, the most silent of conversations behind a closed door, or a spiral staircase with no end in sight), and Tamaki turns to him. When they both face forward again, Tamaki is smiling delightedly, eyes bright with his brand of shameless excitement, taking quick strides towards Éclair.
"Kyouya tells me skiing is done on planks of wood!" Tamaki exclaims as he hands Éclair the coffee in his hand, not even thinking to let go until he knows she has a firm grip on it. Without even turning to Kyouya, he reaches for the cup in Kyouya's left hand. The exchange is wordless, natural. Kyouya has not even blinked. Éclair narrows her eyes. "Is it like stilts?" Tamaki continues, almost burning his mouth on his coffee.
This pronouncement makes Éclair stare, from Tamaki back to Kyouya, before she laughs despite herself. Kyouya's eyes are averted into his cup, but maybe Éclair can see an exasperated smile, sliding half into fondness (sometimes she wonders if Kyouya says things a certain way to purposefully feed the fantasy that is Tamaki's view of the world; certainly he would know by now how Tamaki's mind twisted and magnified and reshrunk reality to suit his whims; certainly he would know how to keep Tamaki's head just a little under the line of clouds? But she has spent almost a full summer saying truthful things that have gotten her nowhere. In the end, it’s probably not Kyouya’s fault).
To her left, Kyouya is deftly manipulating the buttons on his phone, his forehead creased, but his expression, the line of his mouth, so casual. He has composed himself. As Éclair touches Tamaki's arm to invite him to sit down, she thinks of the second text message. She imagines each digital character being erased, each word in turn being eaten away. She mouths them to herself, feeling the strange Japanese consonants yield on her tongue. Thank you for being such a good friend to my son, she imagines herself saying to Kyouya. However, when the time is appropriate, I'll tell him the address myself.
I promise.
A/N: in the end, I couldn't decide who wrote the text message. You can make up your mind as to which parent it was. It is no longer my responsibility!! And please don't kill me-- I don't know how private jets refill and I've forgotten what the Munich airport looks like. Also, when choosing a Francoise Hardy song, I came across the original music video for Claude Francois's "Belles, Belles, Belles," and it occurred to me that if there was ever a video rendition of what the world looks like to Tamaki, this would be it.