simply because you're near me
it is sick how much i enjoyed writing this installment. jackie, bing, one of you better swoop in, before i take it on myself to make eclair and kyouya miserable together for the rest of their lives.
---
Kyouya wakes up the next morning alone in Tamaki's bed, hungover with a headache. This is the first time those exact set of circumstances conspire to torture Kyouya in this exact way, but he has since forgotten the number of times he has woken up in the middle of the night in the Tonnerre summer house, still half-drunk, with Tamaki half naked in his bed.
(Actually, he hasn't. The answer is eight.)
At first he stumbles out of bed and grabs at a bathrobe hanging neatly over the back of a chair, but then he remembers. If he stalks downstairs not fully dressed, he might run into Madame Tonnerre. His headache is bad enough that he couldn't care less, but he thinks parading around half-dressed, hungover or otherwise, is something that would get word back to his father in Japan.
Tamaki, with all his flamboyance and half-French blood, might be able to make a joke of it, but the Swiss sun is bright in Kyouya's eyes, he's dehydrated and nauseated at the same time, and there are just some things he can't bear to deal with right now. Not, he amends with a wry grin, that he has ever dealt with his dad with any semblance of grace or fortitude.
His headache gets worse when he realizes that the bottle of aspirin is on the bedside table of his room, and that the bathrobe he brushes his hands over is Tamaki's. It is almost ten in the morning. Knowing Tamaki's oddly Spartan habits when it comes to sleep, it has already been hours since his departure. He'll already be on the slopes with Éclair in tow, her face serene as she watches him slalom around well-bundled children, her control perfect as she lowers her center of gravity, trying to catch up. Kyouya furrows his brow, watching a few specks of dust float serenely back and forth through a beam of sunlight.
The room smells like bergamot and honeyed tea, like something unfolding in a dream. It's Tamaki's smell, lingering on the bedsheets, and it clings to Kyouya all the way back to his own room like a bad dream, while he's swallowing down the aspirin, while he searches for something presentable to wear, while he takes off his glasses, and when he steps into the shower, the steam makes it worse, almost immediate, like he could turn in the shower stall and right there, he can almost touch Tamaki.
Kyouya scrubs himself twice, all over, before he feels like it's safe for him to step out.
*
He is composed by the time he is downstairs, drinking coffee and forcing yogurt into his queasy stomach while sitting in companionable silence with Monsieur Tonnerre. Tonnerre passes him the paper after he's done, and whether or not it's in German by accident or by Tonnerre's design, after reading it he feels for the first time that he has a little of his life back under his control, that both his feet are on the ground again. Kyouya takes advantage of the down time devoid of Tamaki's antics and Éclair's uneasy presence to run some stock market analyses which, predictably, arouse Tonnerre's admiration and interest. If the rest of this summer is useless, Kyouya thinks, he'll at least have made a business partner of Tonnerre. He indulges himself with a brief fantasy of writing back to his father, declaring an Ootori-Tonnerre joint venture to have been the ultimate purpose of his French leave-- then shakes his head.
"You haven't been spending all vacation inside while the others play, Ootori-kun?" Tonnerre asks over Kyouya's shoulder.
Kyouya smiles politely. "It's just that I am not fond of horses or skiing." Or your daughter, he doesn't say. Especially your daughter when she is with my best friend.
Madame Tonnerre returns from her spa visit just in time for lunch-- light sandwiches, birchermüesli with milk and fruit for Kyouya, and tea and coffee served in tableware expensive enough to make even an top-tier Ouran student blush. A few massages and feet rubs seems to have put Madame Tonnerre in an unusually talkative mood. Kyouya suffers through a tedious lunchtime conversation about his own family ("I hardly think it'd be interesting to you--") and Japan's business climate ("As you are of course aware, the Ootori Group specializes in many sectors--") and, in a particularly unpleasant turn of events, his opinion of Éclair ("Now, now, darling, don't put the poor boy on the spot," Tonnerre says with a wink when Kyouya finds himself at a loss for words). The whole thing is made worse by how much better Kyouya's French has gotten since their last time together.
Thankfully, they linger on Tamaki only briefly, but still long enough for Madame Tonnerre to put her hand on her cheek and, in a manner that might have been wistful thirty years ago, say, "But really, you two are such good friends."
"He is very easy-going," Kyouya demurs. Like a typhoon.
"I suppose you'll miss him when you both go to university?" Madame Tonnerre asks, in such a matter-of-fact tone of voice that Kyouya hardly registers what she says.
"I'm sorry?" he asks, still smiling, the birchermüesli like cement in his mouth.
"I remember we had a discussion with Monsieur Suou, didn't we, darling?" she says, half-turning to Tonnerre. "We suggested he consider the idea of his son studying abroad, maybe even at Éclair's college. After all, he was so young when his father took him to Japan. It's like he never even go to know France. Monsieur Suou seemed very open to the idea."
This time, Kyouya doesn't even have an excuse for why he needs to leave the table. He lays his spoon carefully in his bowl of cereal and pushes back his chair. "Excuse me," he says, and Tonnerre waves him away to go rest. His complexion looks a little off, the man continues. In any case, he and the madame are going to have wine with friends in a half an hour. If Kyouya would like to join them...?
"No," Kyouya says, his headache starting again. "Please, go ahead without me. Thank you."
*
Kyouya has never intended that he and Tamaki would be friends for life. Granted, there are only a few zaibatsu and keiretsu families-- most of which send their sons and daughters to Ouran-- so it would be inevitable that even after high school, they would be in the same social circles-- the same Christmas parties, the same company launches. And in the future, of course, Kyouya would send his children to Ouran, and there was always the chance that Tamaki would be the chairman then. But Kyouya has never had visions of him and Tamaki bonding over omiais, over the first pangs of real employment, not even over college graduation. He has never envisioned needing to meet Tamaki's fiancée, or giving a toast at the wedding. He has never allowed himself to imagine anything that did not involve their three years at Ouran.
It's a terrible thing, but if Kyouya were to frame it plainly, every relationship Kyouya makes outside of his family is a relationship that has an expiration date. With the twins, with Mori and Honey, with Haruhi. Likewise, with Tamaki, one day, Kyouya will have to let him go, the same way you let go of an employer who has outgrown the company hierarchy or a dog that can barely limp with three legs. They would have different goals in life, whether or not Tamaki was the Suou heir, especially if Kyouya meant to upstage his brothers. Despite the money and circumstance and shared memories could bring them together, in the end, Kyouya and Tamaki would simply have different lives.
And like all terrible things Kyouya would rather not think about, there is a grain of truth in that thought even now. They would be making serious preparations for exams when they returned from vacation. Kyouya was already in the final stages of mock exams with his private tutor, and all the third years would have less time for extracurriculars as winter drew nearer, host club or no. And then they would wait, and then it would be university, and Kyouya knew it would be Todai for him, but if Tamaki went abroad--
If Tamaki went abroad--
Not for the first time, Kyouya wonders what it would be like to cut Tamaki out of his life. How he would do it, and how it would feel. If it would be like cutting off his hands, or merely like shooting himself in the head. If it would be a quick pain, like getting run over by a car, or if it would bleed slowly out of him, like a poison leaving the system. If it would be like a tumor that came back over and over again, only to go under the knife each time. If Kyouya could do it at all, and if it would ever make him anything but miserable and cruel.
Then Éclair barges into Kyouya's room, her cheeks flushed with snow burn and wind. Kyouya opens her mouth to say something inane about manners and how he was indeed a boy but some things don't change and was that blood on her ski jacket sleeve? But she derails him. "The stretcher is coming in a few minutes," Éclair tells Kyouya, who has no idea what she is talking about, and tells her so. "Tamaki ran into a tree."
"Why is it that whenever I'm not watching--" Kyouya begins furiously, but Éclair puts her finger to her lips and shakes her head. Kyouya is angry enough that he picks up his laptop as if to throw it at her, but then they both hear the door open downstairs, the sound of scuffling feet and something being dragged across the floor, and their elbows click against each other as they rush out of Kyouya's room together.
*
Tamaki has a twisted ankle, a bruise to his ribs, a cut on the forehead, and made friends with the medics on the short way over with his unfailing good humor about anything and everything related to this godforsaken vacation in Europe. He blithely chatters at them while they unload him off the stretcher and into the careful hands of a doctor, who keeps clearing his throat in polite dry hacks. Kyouya paces the length of the hallway outside Tamaki's room waiting for the results of the examination, and he times his corners to the sound of those hacks. Éclair watches him with her eyebrow raised, a cup of hot cocoa in hand. She has already changed into a sweater and long, slim, pale slacks, her hair loose over one shoulder, and when Madame Tonnerre passes by to comment with a chuckle that they are almost dressed identically, Éclair hurriedly makes an excuse to get Kyouya a new cup of cocoa, even though his had been cooling by her feet, untouched.
Tonnerre has a private nurse brought in to take care of all of Tamaki's needs and already contacted the Suou family. He comes back with a smile and pumps Tamaki's hand unnecessarily in a handshake, admiring Tamaki's youthful spirit. Kyouya imagines his conversation with Chairman Suou must have been fascinating from a psychological standpoint, if one ever wanted to know just exactly what shared language cheerful lunatics used to communicate. As for himself, the whole idea that one day Chairman Suou and Monsieur Tonnerre might be in the same room together exhausts him.
The nurse has a strict ban on visitation put in place until tomorrow morning when she and the doctor come out of Tamaki's room, closing it firmly behind them. Both Kyouya and Éclair protest vehemently, and in the middle of their arguments, Tamaki barrels out of the room on crutches, almost flattening the nurse in front of the door. He trips on his own feet and ends up falling straight into Kyouya's embrace. "You know, crutches are like skis in a way, aren't they?" he says brightly, face pressed into Kyouya's neck even as he talks to Éclair, and Kyouya tells him no, you idiot, they're not like skis at all, but he puts his hands on Tamaki's back, firm despite his trembling, and he closes his eyes in relief at feeling Tamaki's hair, slightly damp with sweat, brush against his cheek.
Kyouya and Éclair have an argument in the hallway outside afterwards. It is spectacularly unproductive and would have never happened if Kyouya was still in possession of all his senses. But there's nothing that has scared him more this summer than Tamaki coming to physical harm, and there is nowhere else he can direct his fury. There is no shouting. They don't even raise their voices enough to be heard in Tamaki's bedroom-- in the end, probably a good thing, as Tamaki would have burst out of the room at the slightest hint that they were saying his name. Kyouya says things like "This is all your fault, you wanted him to go skiing!" and "Why didn't you pay attention to where he was going!" and "Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying!", and Éclair says things like "I didn't force him to go, he wanted to go himself!" and "Are you saying that I'm irresponsible?" and "Well, why weren't you out there watching him then, if I'm so untrustworthy?"
"I can't watch him all the time," Kyouya hisses.
"Neither can I," Éclair snaps back. "And please, I beg you, stop blaming me for your misery, okaa-san," she finally bites out, and Kyouya, in that perfect moment of clarity, would have been willing to sell his soul, if it only meant he could backhand her in the face with no consequences.
The moment comes and goes. Madame Tonnerre suddenly appears and tells them that they have a table reserved in the hotel's dining room for dinner, and it was unfortunate that Monsieur Suou could not come with them, but they should at least make an effort to get changed and go. "Yes, Mama," Éclair replies in a rather choked voice, her eyes, bright with angry tears, never leaving Kyouya's face.
There is nothing Kyouya wants less than to spend a meal alone with Éclair. But just as she has parents to obey, so does he, and he's sure that giving the heir to the Tonnerres a black eye over something so silly as someone else's twisted ankle qualifies as a sin enough to get him disowned.
And, more importantly, he doesn't want to be the one to have to explain it to Tamaki afterwards.
*
Both he and Éclair pointedly avoid ordering alcohol. When the waiter comes, Kyouya opens his mouth to ask in German for water, but Éclair cuts in swiftly and smoothly in French, and that shouldn't make Kyouya seethe, but it does. This is a summer of pettiness and irritation building on irritation. This is just another salvo in Éclair's ammunition, and Kyouya sees it now, but it doesn't make it any better.
They don't eat much, and talk even less. Kyouya keeps his shoulders so stiff that his back starts to throb with the strain. He's determined to get through this dinner with as little fuss as possible, and as quickly as they can manage. If he can, he wants to talk to Tamaki before it's too late into the evening. He wants to ask if there's really no way for them to leave earlier, maybe catch the flight out of Munich straight to Tokyo. He's not above begging, if that's what it would take.
With each bite, though, Éclair's frame relaxes. By the time they are done with their soup, Éclair's face has lost all traces of their earlier argument. She spends most of the appetizers with her chin resting on her hand, looking out the window at the night view. It's almost like she's submerged herself completely in some well of serenity, and Kyouya, if possible, hates her even more for that.
Midway through the first course, Éclair reaches for Kyouya's hand. He draws it away quickly, clenching it around the napkin on his lap, and she sighs, taping her fingers against the tablecloth impatiently. "Let's stop this fighting," she says quietly, taking a drink of water. He can see the way the sip ripples down her white throat, and he's reminded, unhappily, of just how little he finds her attractive, how little he likes her company. "We both care about Tamaki. He cares deeply about both of us. There is no point in this tedious bickering."
"Are you perhaps implying this--" he gestures to the table, the dining room, the hotel-- "is all some sort of childish competition for Tamaki's affections?" Kyouya asks, his voice dangerously low.
Éclair tilts her eye at him playfully and then, in a light voice, asks, "Isn't it?"
"No," he hisses. "It is not, and I have no idea why you are under the impression that it is." He reaches for the butter, and doesn't even apologize when his hand knocks her silverware on the ground.
Her mood is disconcertingly cheerful for the rest of the meal. She even orders them dessert-- some sort of spiced hot cake with vanilla ice cream-- and hums along with the live band. More than once, Kyouya catches her glancing his way with something close to a smile on her face, and, fed up, he finally just throws his napkin down on his plate.
"Finished?" she asks him, eyebrow raised.
He eyes the napkin, which is currently soaking in his untouched melting ice cream. Then he looks up, nods curtly, and pushes back his chair.
As they rise from their table, the band strikes up a song with a sashaying beat and a familiar melody. Éclair slides her hand around his arm, and Kyouya remembers Western art history class, the snake whose body wound around a tree until it blossomed into the torso of a man. Her hand is slim, well-formed, and it feels like it is burning a hole through his skin. She smiles up at him, narrowing her eyes just slightly.
Éclair asks, "Would you like to dance, Monsieur Ootori?", and her body is an accommodating question mark around her frame.
Kyouya sneers. If this had been Japan, if they had been in the host club room, he might have schooled his expression and let cooler heads-- Mori, maybe-- prevail. But there is only him, and it's not even Provence, not even France. Éclair can't even give him that small mercy. Everything is foreign, and Kyouya is sick of Europe. With Tamaki resting up on a hobbled leg, there is no one to stop him.
"I'm not fond of dancing," he says. "Besides, we are badly paired."
"Oh, well, Monsieur Ootori," she replies, fluttering her lashes, coy now that she is in public, "we have danced together plenty of times, and with great fluidity."
Kyouya grunts, neither disagreeing or agreeing. He can't trust himself to answer. There is a tic starting where he has locked his jaws together. He doesn't want to think about the "plenty of times"-- terrible evenings with Tamaki watching them, eyes glittering, from the piano as they marched clumsily from one end of the room to another, hands clasped, evenings full of Kyouya drinking too much to chase away the anger or disappointment, Éclair smiling with only the edges of her mouth as she placed her hands on Tamaki's shoulder, telling him, this time, the one in A minor.
Éclair closes her eyes, tightening her grip. "I think, Ootori-kun, that you and I are better made for each other than you think," she murmurs in Japanese.
The whole concept makes Kyouya want to scream it was never my intention to come here at her. Instead, he leans his head so that his lips almost press against the curve of her ear. "Mademoiselle Tonnerre," he whispers. She bows her head as if in assent. "There is, and never will be, such a thing as 'you and I'," he tells her, and, gently, intimately, almost like a lover, brushes her hair away from her ear.
They are just now exiting the dining room, arms still entwined. A waiter acknowledges them with a nod and extends a hand to one side, as if to show them the obvious way out. Kyouya feels his pulse surge when they leave the music behind for the refined, ringing silence of the rest of the hotel, then patter away to a slow, steady heartbeat, almost lethargic. In the hallway, there is a small table, adorned with fresh flowers and a mirror on the wall. As they pass by, Éclair touches the cool marble of the tabletop, her fingernails clicking lightly like the sound of seashells falling back into the Mediterranean. It's a beautiful, feminine sound, one that neither Tamaki nor Kyouya will ever make in their lives.
Stalled in front of the table by Éclair, Kyouya glances at their shared image in the mirror, and discovers to his horror that they look well-matched. Éclair is at a perfect height so that she might, if she chose to do so, recline her head against his shoulder quite naturally. Her hair, a honeyed amber, seemed to make his hair and eyes darker and, pulled back in a low bun, revealed a strange asymmetric similarity in her and Kyouya's faces. She had chosen a blue ruffled shirt that matched the color of her eyes and set off nicely against his tastefully expensive button-down shirt and tie. With her hand still wrapped around his upper arm, his face frozen in a look of genial acceptance, they look nothing less like a young engaged couple learning to restrain their affection in public. Like they would be married in a few months, and had come to the Swiss Alps to acclimate their families with each other.
If we were to have children, Kyouya thinks distantly, they would be like Tamaki-- half-French and half-Japanese.
It takes half a minute for that thought to sink in. Then, revolted, Kyouya rips his gaze away.
---
Kyouya wakes up the next morning alone in Tamaki's bed, hungover with a headache. This is the first time those exact set of circumstances conspire to torture Kyouya in this exact way, but he has since forgotten the number of times he has woken up in the middle of the night in the Tonnerre summer house, still half-drunk, with Tamaki half naked in his bed.
(Actually, he hasn't. The answer is eight.)
At first he stumbles out of bed and grabs at a bathrobe hanging neatly over the back of a chair, but then he remembers. If he stalks downstairs not fully dressed, he might run into Madame Tonnerre. His headache is bad enough that he couldn't care less, but he thinks parading around half-dressed, hungover or otherwise, is something that would get word back to his father in Japan.
Tamaki, with all his flamboyance and half-French blood, might be able to make a joke of it, but the Swiss sun is bright in Kyouya's eyes, he's dehydrated and nauseated at the same time, and there are just some things he can't bear to deal with right now. Not, he amends with a wry grin, that he has ever dealt with his dad with any semblance of grace or fortitude.
His headache gets worse when he realizes that the bottle of aspirin is on the bedside table of his room, and that the bathrobe he brushes his hands over is Tamaki's. It is almost ten in the morning. Knowing Tamaki's oddly Spartan habits when it comes to sleep, it has already been hours since his departure. He'll already be on the slopes with Éclair in tow, her face serene as she watches him slalom around well-bundled children, her control perfect as she lowers her center of gravity, trying to catch up. Kyouya furrows his brow, watching a few specks of dust float serenely back and forth through a beam of sunlight.
The room smells like bergamot and honeyed tea, like something unfolding in a dream. It's Tamaki's smell, lingering on the bedsheets, and it clings to Kyouya all the way back to his own room like a bad dream, while he's swallowing down the aspirin, while he searches for something presentable to wear, while he takes off his glasses, and when he steps into the shower, the steam makes it worse, almost immediate, like he could turn in the shower stall and right there, he can almost touch Tamaki.
Kyouya scrubs himself twice, all over, before he feels like it's safe for him to step out.
*
He is composed by the time he is downstairs, drinking coffee and forcing yogurt into his queasy stomach while sitting in companionable silence with Monsieur Tonnerre. Tonnerre passes him the paper after he's done, and whether or not it's in German by accident or by Tonnerre's design, after reading it he feels for the first time that he has a little of his life back under his control, that both his feet are on the ground again. Kyouya takes advantage of the down time devoid of Tamaki's antics and Éclair's uneasy presence to run some stock market analyses which, predictably, arouse Tonnerre's admiration and interest. If the rest of this summer is useless, Kyouya thinks, he'll at least have made a business partner of Tonnerre. He indulges himself with a brief fantasy of writing back to his father, declaring an Ootori-Tonnerre joint venture to have been the ultimate purpose of his French leave-- then shakes his head.
"You haven't been spending all vacation inside while the others play, Ootori-kun?" Tonnerre asks over Kyouya's shoulder.
Kyouya smiles politely. "It's just that I am not fond of horses or skiing." Or your daughter, he doesn't say. Especially your daughter when she is with my best friend.
Madame Tonnerre returns from her spa visit just in time for lunch-- light sandwiches, birchermüesli with milk and fruit for Kyouya, and tea and coffee served in tableware expensive enough to make even an top-tier Ouran student blush. A few massages and feet rubs seems to have put Madame Tonnerre in an unusually talkative mood. Kyouya suffers through a tedious lunchtime conversation about his own family ("I hardly think it'd be interesting to you--") and Japan's business climate ("As you are of course aware, the Ootori Group specializes in many sectors--") and, in a particularly unpleasant turn of events, his opinion of Éclair ("Now, now, darling, don't put the poor boy on the spot," Tonnerre says with a wink when Kyouya finds himself at a loss for words). The whole thing is made worse by how much better Kyouya's French has gotten since their last time together.
Thankfully, they linger on Tamaki only briefly, but still long enough for Madame Tonnerre to put her hand on her cheek and, in a manner that might have been wistful thirty years ago, say, "But really, you two are such good friends."
"He is very easy-going," Kyouya demurs. Like a typhoon.
"I suppose you'll miss him when you both go to university?" Madame Tonnerre asks, in such a matter-of-fact tone of voice that Kyouya hardly registers what she says.
"I'm sorry?" he asks, still smiling, the birchermüesli like cement in his mouth.
"I remember we had a discussion with Monsieur Suou, didn't we, darling?" she says, half-turning to Tonnerre. "We suggested he consider the idea of his son studying abroad, maybe even at Éclair's college. After all, he was so young when his father took him to Japan. It's like he never even go to know France. Monsieur Suou seemed very open to the idea."
This time, Kyouya doesn't even have an excuse for why he needs to leave the table. He lays his spoon carefully in his bowl of cereal and pushes back his chair. "Excuse me," he says, and Tonnerre waves him away to go rest. His complexion looks a little off, the man continues. In any case, he and the madame are going to have wine with friends in a half an hour. If Kyouya would like to join them...?
"No," Kyouya says, his headache starting again. "Please, go ahead without me. Thank you."
*
Kyouya has never intended that he and Tamaki would be friends for life. Granted, there are only a few zaibatsu and keiretsu families-- most of which send their sons and daughters to Ouran-- so it would be inevitable that even after high school, they would be in the same social circles-- the same Christmas parties, the same company launches. And in the future, of course, Kyouya would send his children to Ouran, and there was always the chance that Tamaki would be the chairman then. But Kyouya has never had visions of him and Tamaki bonding over omiais, over the first pangs of real employment, not even over college graduation. He has never envisioned needing to meet Tamaki's fiancée, or giving a toast at the wedding. He has never allowed himself to imagine anything that did not involve their three years at Ouran.
It's a terrible thing, but if Kyouya were to frame it plainly, every relationship Kyouya makes outside of his family is a relationship that has an expiration date. With the twins, with Mori and Honey, with Haruhi. Likewise, with Tamaki, one day, Kyouya will have to let him go, the same way you let go of an employer who has outgrown the company hierarchy or a dog that can barely limp with three legs. They would have different goals in life, whether or not Tamaki was the Suou heir, especially if Kyouya meant to upstage his brothers. Despite the money and circumstance and shared memories could bring them together, in the end, Kyouya and Tamaki would simply have different lives.
And like all terrible things Kyouya would rather not think about, there is a grain of truth in that thought even now. They would be making serious preparations for exams when they returned from vacation. Kyouya was already in the final stages of mock exams with his private tutor, and all the third years would have less time for extracurriculars as winter drew nearer, host club or no. And then they would wait, and then it would be university, and Kyouya knew it would be Todai for him, but if Tamaki went abroad--
If Tamaki went abroad--
Not for the first time, Kyouya wonders what it would be like to cut Tamaki out of his life. How he would do it, and how it would feel. If it would be like cutting off his hands, or merely like shooting himself in the head. If it would be a quick pain, like getting run over by a car, or if it would bleed slowly out of him, like a poison leaving the system. If it would be like a tumor that came back over and over again, only to go under the knife each time. If Kyouya could do it at all, and if it would ever make him anything but miserable and cruel.
Then Éclair barges into Kyouya's room, her cheeks flushed with snow burn and wind. Kyouya opens her mouth to say something inane about manners and how he was indeed a boy but some things don't change and was that blood on her ski jacket sleeve? But she derails him. "The stretcher is coming in a few minutes," Éclair tells Kyouya, who has no idea what she is talking about, and tells her so. "Tamaki ran into a tree."
"Why is it that whenever I'm not watching--" Kyouya begins furiously, but Éclair puts her finger to her lips and shakes her head. Kyouya is angry enough that he picks up his laptop as if to throw it at her, but then they both hear the door open downstairs, the sound of scuffling feet and something being dragged across the floor, and their elbows click against each other as they rush out of Kyouya's room together.
*
Tamaki has a twisted ankle, a bruise to his ribs, a cut on the forehead, and made friends with the medics on the short way over with his unfailing good humor about anything and everything related to this godforsaken vacation in Europe. He blithely chatters at them while they unload him off the stretcher and into the careful hands of a doctor, who keeps clearing his throat in polite dry hacks. Kyouya paces the length of the hallway outside Tamaki's room waiting for the results of the examination, and he times his corners to the sound of those hacks. Éclair watches him with her eyebrow raised, a cup of hot cocoa in hand. She has already changed into a sweater and long, slim, pale slacks, her hair loose over one shoulder, and when Madame Tonnerre passes by to comment with a chuckle that they are almost dressed identically, Éclair hurriedly makes an excuse to get Kyouya a new cup of cocoa, even though his had been cooling by her feet, untouched.
Tonnerre has a private nurse brought in to take care of all of Tamaki's needs and already contacted the Suou family. He comes back with a smile and pumps Tamaki's hand unnecessarily in a handshake, admiring Tamaki's youthful spirit. Kyouya imagines his conversation with Chairman Suou must have been fascinating from a psychological standpoint, if one ever wanted to know just exactly what shared language cheerful lunatics used to communicate. As for himself, the whole idea that one day Chairman Suou and Monsieur Tonnerre might be in the same room together exhausts him.
The nurse has a strict ban on visitation put in place until tomorrow morning when she and the doctor come out of Tamaki's room, closing it firmly behind them. Both Kyouya and Éclair protest vehemently, and in the middle of their arguments, Tamaki barrels out of the room on crutches, almost flattening the nurse in front of the door. He trips on his own feet and ends up falling straight into Kyouya's embrace. "You know, crutches are like skis in a way, aren't they?" he says brightly, face pressed into Kyouya's neck even as he talks to Éclair, and Kyouya tells him no, you idiot, they're not like skis at all, but he puts his hands on Tamaki's back, firm despite his trembling, and he closes his eyes in relief at feeling Tamaki's hair, slightly damp with sweat, brush against his cheek.
Kyouya and Éclair have an argument in the hallway outside afterwards. It is spectacularly unproductive and would have never happened if Kyouya was still in possession of all his senses. But there's nothing that has scared him more this summer than Tamaki coming to physical harm, and there is nowhere else he can direct his fury. There is no shouting. They don't even raise their voices enough to be heard in Tamaki's bedroom-- in the end, probably a good thing, as Tamaki would have burst out of the room at the slightest hint that they were saying his name. Kyouya says things like "This is all your fault, you wanted him to go skiing!" and "Why didn't you pay attention to where he was going!" and "Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying!", and Éclair says things like "I didn't force him to go, he wanted to go himself!" and "Are you saying that I'm irresponsible?" and "Well, why weren't you out there watching him then, if I'm so untrustworthy?"
"I can't watch him all the time," Kyouya hisses.
"Neither can I," Éclair snaps back. "And please, I beg you, stop blaming me for your misery, okaa-san," she finally bites out, and Kyouya, in that perfect moment of clarity, would have been willing to sell his soul, if it only meant he could backhand her in the face with no consequences.
The moment comes and goes. Madame Tonnerre suddenly appears and tells them that they have a table reserved in the hotel's dining room for dinner, and it was unfortunate that Monsieur Suou could not come with them, but they should at least make an effort to get changed and go. "Yes, Mama," Éclair replies in a rather choked voice, her eyes, bright with angry tears, never leaving Kyouya's face.
There is nothing Kyouya wants less than to spend a meal alone with Éclair. But just as she has parents to obey, so does he, and he's sure that giving the heir to the Tonnerres a black eye over something so silly as someone else's twisted ankle qualifies as a sin enough to get him disowned.
And, more importantly, he doesn't want to be the one to have to explain it to Tamaki afterwards.
*
Both he and Éclair pointedly avoid ordering alcohol. When the waiter comes, Kyouya opens his mouth to ask in German for water, but Éclair cuts in swiftly and smoothly in French, and that shouldn't make Kyouya seethe, but it does. This is a summer of pettiness and irritation building on irritation. This is just another salvo in Éclair's ammunition, and Kyouya sees it now, but it doesn't make it any better.
They don't eat much, and talk even less. Kyouya keeps his shoulders so stiff that his back starts to throb with the strain. He's determined to get through this dinner with as little fuss as possible, and as quickly as they can manage. If he can, he wants to talk to Tamaki before it's too late into the evening. He wants to ask if there's really no way for them to leave earlier, maybe catch the flight out of Munich straight to Tokyo. He's not above begging, if that's what it would take.
With each bite, though, Éclair's frame relaxes. By the time they are done with their soup, Éclair's face has lost all traces of their earlier argument. She spends most of the appetizers with her chin resting on her hand, looking out the window at the night view. It's almost like she's submerged herself completely in some well of serenity, and Kyouya, if possible, hates her even more for that.
Midway through the first course, Éclair reaches for Kyouya's hand. He draws it away quickly, clenching it around the napkin on his lap, and she sighs, taping her fingers against the tablecloth impatiently. "Let's stop this fighting," she says quietly, taking a drink of water. He can see the way the sip ripples down her white throat, and he's reminded, unhappily, of just how little he finds her attractive, how little he likes her company. "We both care about Tamaki. He cares deeply about both of us. There is no point in this tedious bickering."
"Are you perhaps implying this--" he gestures to the table, the dining room, the hotel-- "is all some sort of childish competition for Tamaki's affections?" Kyouya asks, his voice dangerously low.
Éclair tilts her eye at him playfully and then, in a light voice, asks, "Isn't it?"
"No," he hisses. "It is not, and I have no idea why you are under the impression that it is." He reaches for the butter, and doesn't even apologize when his hand knocks her silverware on the ground.
Her mood is disconcertingly cheerful for the rest of the meal. She even orders them dessert-- some sort of spiced hot cake with vanilla ice cream-- and hums along with the live band. More than once, Kyouya catches her glancing his way with something close to a smile on her face, and, fed up, he finally just throws his napkin down on his plate.
"Finished?" she asks him, eyebrow raised.
He eyes the napkin, which is currently soaking in his untouched melting ice cream. Then he looks up, nods curtly, and pushes back his chair.
As they rise from their table, the band strikes up a song with a sashaying beat and a familiar melody. Éclair slides her hand around his arm, and Kyouya remembers Western art history class, the snake whose body wound around a tree until it blossomed into the torso of a man. Her hand is slim, well-formed, and it feels like it is burning a hole through his skin. She smiles up at him, narrowing her eyes just slightly.
Éclair asks, "Would you like to dance, Monsieur Ootori?", and her body is an accommodating question mark around her frame.
Kyouya sneers. If this had been Japan, if they had been in the host club room, he might have schooled his expression and let cooler heads-- Mori, maybe-- prevail. But there is only him, and it's not even Provence, not even France. Éclair can't even give him that small mercy. Everything is foreign, and Kyouya is sick of Europe. With Tamaki resting up on a hobbled leg, there is no one to stop him.
"I'm not fond of dancing," he says. "Besides, we are badly paired."
"Oh, well, Monsieur Ootori," she replies, fluttering her lashes, coy now that she is in public, "we have danced together plenty of times, and with great fluidity."
Kyouya grunts, neither disagreeing or agreeing. He can't trust himself to answer. There is a tic starting where he has locked his jaws together. He doesn't want to think about the "plenty of times"-- terrible evenings with Tamaki watching them, eyes glittering, from the piano as they marched clumsily from one end of the room to another, hands clasped, evenings full of Kyouya drinking too much to chase away the anger or disappointment, Éclair smiling with only the edges of her mouth as she placed her hands on Tamaki's shoulder, telling him, this time, the one in A minor.
Éclair closes her eyes, tightening her grip. "I think, Ootori-kun, that you and I are better made for each other than you think," she murmurs in Japanese.
The whole concept makes Kyouya want to scream it was never my intention to come here at her. Instead, he leans his head so that his lips almost press against the curve of her ear. "Mademoiselle Tonnerre," he whispers. She bows her head as if in assent. "There is, and never will be, such a thing as 'you and I'," he tells her, and, gently, intimately, almost like a lover, brushes her hair away from her ear.
They are just now exiting the dining room, arms still entwined. A waiter acknowledges them with a nod and extends a hand to one side, as if to show them the obvious way out. Kyouya feels his pulse surge when they leave the music behind for the refined, ringing silence of the rest of the hotel, then patter away to a slow, steady heartbeat, almost lethargic. In the hallway, there is a small table, adorned with fresh flowers and a mirror on the wall. As they pass by, Éclair touches the cool marble of the tabletop, her fingernails clicking lightly like the sound of seashells falling back into the Mediterranean. It's a beautiful, feminine sound, one that neither Tamaki nor Kyouya will ever make in their lives.
Stalled in front of the table by Éclair, Kyouya glances at their shared image in the mirror, and discovers to his horror that they look well-matched. Éclair is at a perfect height so that she might, if she chose to do so, recline her head against his shoulder quite naturally. Her hair, a honeyed amber, seemed to make his hair and eyes darker and, pulled back in a low bun, revealed a strange asymmetric similarity in her and Kyouya's faces. She had chosen a blue ruffled shirt that matched the color of her eyes and set off nicely against his tastefully expensive button-down shirt and tie. With her hand still wrapped around his upper arm, his face frozen in a look of genial acceptance, they look nothing less like a young engaged couple learning to restrain their affection in public. Like they would be married in a few months, and had come to the Swiss Alps to acclimate their families with each other.
If we were to have children, Kyouya thinks distantly, they would be like Tamaki-- half-French and half-Japanese.
It takes half a minute for that thought to sink in. Then, revolted, Kyouya rips his gaze away.