whose melancholy made the sound of a boiling pot
IF YOU'VE SEEN THIS FIC BEFORE-- it's essentially the same. only it's been proofread and somehow made gayer- but by no fault of the proofreader!! THERE IT'S NOT MY TURN ANYMORE. GO TEAM HASIANS
Hello to everyone new, sorry we made you wait so long. Especially for something of such uh dubious quality. I promise bing and cathy writes the gems.
--
August ushers in the long proposed heat wave and in rebuttal the servants drag out curtains so thick they blot out the sun. Kyouya's vacation falls into a literal darkness. Since Tamaki always had the ability to wake up with the slightest hint of dawn, the eclipse knocks him out cold. Throughout the warm front, he's caught dozing in the middle of lunch, at the piano bench, curled by Kyouya's side with a handful of Rousseau. It was sweet at first, but like anything with Tamaki it quickly becomes tedious and wasteful. Skillfully, his friends learned to avoid each other during Tamaki's naps. Kyouya has spent a lot of his time with his Excel sheets and with the Tonnerre household employment records in the library.
While a few hours rest from Tamaki's chatter is always refreshing, by evening Kyouya double-checks the next day's forecast. He casually brings this up during an early breakfast. Kyouya was forced up at dawn from the steam rising from the pool, and Éclair says it is not in her nature to waste a perfectly good morning. She regrettably informs him that while they had good luck with the weather so far, it's likely the heat will hold out for the rest of the summer. She wonders aloud where Tamaki has gone off to- he wasn't in his room. Kyouya responds when she asks the maid if the blond is swimming ("non."). She ignores him and rises with a quiet apology, seeking out their third companion. Kyouya decides he'll spend the day working in his room and Éclair can hunt out Tamaki. The last time she found him in one of the other guest rooms and all dinner they talked about the paintings Kyouya never saw. Even if he found Tamaki before she does, it would only be a disappointment. Éclair and Tamaki are still very new to one another, and Tamaki's Japanese has become slower, his relative clauses sloppier. A new sense of anxiety is treading behind him as he heads upstairs.
Kyouya is glad he dressed after his shower, because when he returns from the bathroom there's a human sized lump under the blankets. He pulls the towel from his hair and watches it shift around, presumably trying to get comfortable or dig a hole to the center of the earth. Finally he lifts the duvet just enough to see a familiar expression.
"Kyouya!" Tamaki exclaims, blinking in the sunlight. "Your windows are wonderful aren't they? There's no breeze in my room." There's no breeze at all, Kyouya corrects, but Tamaki is deaf to his logic. He’s opened the balcony doors during Kyouya’s shower and the curtains are still as glass, as the water in the swimming pool- untouched for days. Kyouya leans back to close the bathroom door and bar back it's steam and humidity, to which Tamaki's ruefully replies, "I thought I would offer to wash your hair." Kyouya's only reaction to this is a swift, warning look. Tamaki is well suited for heavy temperatures and, between naps, hasn't changed from the annoyance he was under fair conditions. Kyouya however feels his own health is greatly agitated by the stuffy weather. It cuts his patience for Tamaki's antics very short.
"Éclair is looking for you," he informs him, taking a seat in one of the armchairs opposite of the bed and trying his best to ignore Tamaki. He opens up the latest email from his father and sets it aside, looking over the police division's findings for a certain maiden name in Morocco. Tamaki whimpers and kicks and slinks against the mattress so only his head and fingertips are completely visible. After enduring his thrashing about for a few minutes, Kyouya glances over the top of his laptop. "I'm sure you wouldn't be so warm if you got out from under the blankets." As way of an example, he pulls away the cover and sheets, revealing the languid prince curled underneath. Tamaki reaches for his hand and Kyouya, without reason, lets himself be pulled down. He only thinks to fight the moment before his head hits the pillow and his friend laughs indulgently but doesn't allows him to escape. This is fine, Kyouya thinks, face down in the Egyptian cotton. The shower has lowered his fever- he’s definitely feverish from this weather. He’s not much of a hypochondriac but this time he's certain. It’s not possible for the south of France to be this warm without his mind boiling and playing tricks on him. Since he's obviously ill, it will be all right to rest a few minutes before getting back to work. He needed to resume his search for a blonde-- not the idiot blond he found by accident.
In his exhaustion, Tamaki tries to whittle out some answers from him, "Would you like to go swimming?" It takes two tries for Tamaki to understand that Kyouya's movements were a refusal, not a nod. He mournfully tugs the blankets around Kyouya (who thrusts them back with a scowl). "Would you like to go to Paris?"
"Not today," he grumbles and rolls onto his side, facing the doors. With the drapes wide open the room’s too sunny for Tamaki to fall asleep. Instead the prince-type restlessly pulls his knees to his chest and back down again, and Kyouya, who by then is nursing a fever and a headache, tells him to sit still or leave. Tamaki apologizes under his breath and sits still, even closer to Kyouya's back than before. He tries to move out of the reach of Tamaki's fingers, but falls short when they start to brush through his damp hair. Tamaki's hand is at the base of his neck, the crown of his skull, and now he's humming what sounds like the waltz that was playing during last night's dinner- or maybe it was the night before? All their dinners have begun to blur together. The only exception is that lately they've been taking them indoors instead of in the garden. The temperatures don't drop in the evening but shudder on fiercely into the night. It makes them impossible to sleep through. Kyouya thinks his fatigue from the night before is the only reason he hasn't pushed Tamaki away.
That song is from the night before. We're running out of records, Éclair had said when they played it. It was just before they started dancing, and she was pulling a face at the sharp taste of the wine and the military march of a waltz that rose with the finale of their meal. Tamaki set his napkin on the table and strode to her. We'll have to buy more, he'd said blissfully, as if vinyl’s were still common fare in the twenty-first century, in France, in the middle of nowhere. Kyouya pushed his shards of bread through the oil as Tamaki slid effortlessly into their dance, Éclair drawn up tight against him. He rotated around the remains of their evening meal, all slow smiles and piano perfect hands drawn up around her wiry fingers. It went on forever, the same unimpressive measures rising to identical crescendos and Kyouya felt the table spinning underneath him. The memory comes in and out of Kyouya's mind, muffled by the other boy's humming and the hum of the fan. It had to have been the night before, because he vividly remembers lying awake and recalling the way Éclair tucked her face against Tamaki's collar bone, her eyes watching Kyouya. His recollection was muddled by the wine and thinks Éclair might’ve kissed Tamaki, or got very near to it. He doesn’t know for sure, it probably never happened. Tamaki - and with the thought he's surprised how bitter it sounds- probably doesn't think a Host should kiss. Kyouya fell asleep drunk and betrayed and the only comfort he got from his remaining rationality was that one of them could have kissed him and wouldn't that have been worse?
Awake now, with Tamaki so close he can feel his song through his vertebrae, Kyouya mind swims and boils. He wouldn’t have kissed her, it says sleepily and Kyouya fights it, the urge to tilt back into Tamaki’s touch. He grits his teeth to keep from turning to face him.
At some point Tamaki stops humming and his hand goes still. The earlier motion coupled with the warm air had already dried Kyouya's hair- though no doubt it's arranged embarrassing angles of Tamaki's well-intentioned design. With a small sigh (for what Kyouya has no idea- he has no right to be unhappy) Tamaki lies down as well, an added weight on the pillow. With his eyes closed so tight the light from the balcony is only a blur of purple behind his eyelids, Kyouya thinks he can see Tamaki behind him. Tamaki’s hand is in the limited space between them, palm down on the sheets and fingers splayed forward, and he's watching him. Kyouya waits for himself to ask Tamaki what he wants, or to finally figure out what it is he wants by letting it carry on this long. All he's aware of is that it can't go on like this, in this room that feels like the time Tamaki asked if they could sit under the kotatsu. The heat is getting to him, he tells himself furiously, hoping Tamaki will just get up and leave him alone. With the warm air pressing in from all sides, he can still feel Tamaki’s wet hair through his fingertips, the lull of his voice and the twisting muscles of his jaw if he slid his hands down and over Tamaki’s shoulders. That day wasn’t the beginning of this, Kyouya tells himself, sliding in and out of consciousness. Today won’t be the end of it. If anything else, he waits for Tamaki to say something about the noise, the echoing sound of Kyouya's heartbeat against the mattress.
The wind slams the balcony doors shut, jarring Kyouya awake. Instantly, Tamaki sits up and Kyouya stays down, because when his eyes flew open the room was dark. Did we sleep the whole day? he thinks and fills with a unfamiliar chill for the summer. The bed moves as Tamaki shifts around and turns on the lamp.
"Kyouya," he whispers and rests a hand on his shoulder. "It's almost time for dinner." The way his fingers curl over the shirt that's still damp with humidity and the quiet of his voice gives Tamaki away. If he really thought Kyouya was asleep, he wouldn’t be so gentle. Kyouya has a headache from keeping his eyes closed that tight for so long and when he opens them, Tamaki has bent over him with concern. Relieved, he smiles and reaches down to push Kyouya’s hair out of his eyes- Kyouya catches his wrist. There’s not enough distance between us, Kyouya wants to order. Stay on your side of the bed. Go back to her and let me have a different victory. He doesn’t end up saying any of this, because Tamaki’s looking at the fingers around his wrist like he's never see Kyouya's hand so close. He wouldn’t get the significance of anything you told him, anything you did to him. Kyouya pushes Tamaki away when he sits up. These aren't kissing games for a child, or a wife, or a mother, or whatever Tamaki has devised him to be in his thick, delusional way.
Tamaki easily recovers without an explanation. He tugs at the back of Kyouya's dress shirt, along his cuffs and nuzzles along the back of his neck until Kyouya comes out of his daze. When he tries to fix his hair in the dim light of the bathroom, he can see Tamaki sitting at the end of the bed in the reflection. He entertains the thought of skipping dinner entirely, of casting Tamaki out and sleeping under the cool breeze that’s finally pushing through. Or he could skip dinner and Tamaki could stay with him. The other boy scrapes his bare feet against the hard wood floors, casting a curious, cold water look over his shoulder. Kyouya pushes down on his fringe a final time (no use) and ushers them both out.
Éclair is sitting alone at the table when they arrive. She's opened the shutters on the window closest to her and squints through the soft garden lights. Tamaki, gasping apologetically for making her wait, spends the dinner clutching at her hands. "Put it out of your mind," she assures him, but watches Kyouya.
Hello to everyone new, sorry we made you wait so long. Especially for something of such uh dubious quality. I promise bing and cathy writes the gems.
--
August ushers in the long proposed heat wave and in rebuttal the servants drag out curtains so thick they blot out the sun. Kyouya's vacation falls into a literal darkness. Since Tamaki always had the ability to wake up with the slightest hint of dawn, the eclipse knocks him out cold. Throughout the warm front, he's caught dozing in the middle of lunch, at the piano bench, curled by Kyouya's side with a handful of Rousseau. It was sweet at first, but like anything with Tamaki it quickly becomes tedious and wasteful. Skillfully, his friends learned to avoid each other during Tamaki's naps. Kyouya has spent a lot of his time with his Excel sheets and with the Tonnerre household employment records in the library.
While a few hours rest from Tamaki's chatter is always refreshing, by evening Kyouya double-checks the next day's forecast. He casually brings this up during an early breakfast. Kyouya was forced up at dawn from the steam rising from the pool, and Éclair says it is not in her nature to waste a perfectly good morning. She regrettably informs him that while they had good luck with the weather so far, it's likely the heat will hold out for the rest of the summer. She wonders aloud where Tamaki has gone off to- he wasn't in his room. Kyouya responds when she asks the maid if the blond is swimming ("non."). She ignores him and rises with a quiet apology, seeking out their third companion. Kyouya decides he'll spend the day working in his room and Éclair can hunt out Tamaki. The last time she found him in one of the other guest rooms and all dinner they talked about the paintings Kyouya never saw. Even if he found Tamaki before she does, it would only be a disappointment. Éclair and Tamaki are still very new to one another, and Tamaki's Japanese has become slower, his relative clauses sloppier. A new sense of anxiety is treading behind him as he heads upstairs.
Kyouya is glad he dressed after his shower, because when he returns from the bathroom there's a human sized lump under the blankets. He pulls the towel from his hair and watches it shift around, presumably trying to get comfortable or dig a hole to the center of the earth. Finally he lifts the duvet just enough to see a familiar expression.
"Kyouya!" Tamaki exclaims, blinking in the sunlight. "Your windows are wonderful aren't they? There's no breeze in my room." There's no breeze at all, Kyouya corrects, but Tamaki is deaf to his logic. He’s opened the balcony doors during Kyouya’s shower and the curtains are still as glass, as the water in the swimming pool- untouched for days. Kyouya leans back to close the bathroom door and bar back it's steam and humidity, to which Tamaki's ruefully replies, "I thought I would offer to wash your hair." Kyouya's only reaction to this is a swift, warning look. Tamaki is well suited for heavy temperatures and, between naps, hasn't changed from the annoyance he was under fair conditions. Kyouya however feels his own health is greatly agitated by the stuffy weather. It cuts his patience for Tamaki's antics very short.
"Éclair is looking for you," he informs him, taking a seat in one of the armchairs opposite of the bed and trying his best to ignore Tamaki. He opens up the latest email from his father and sets it aside, looking over the police division's findings for a certain maiden name in Morocco. Tamaki whimpers and kicks and slinks against the mattress so only his head and fingertips are completely visible. After enduring his thrashing about for a few minutes, Kyouya glances over the top of his laptop. "I'm sure you wouldn't be so warm if you got out from under the blankets." As way of an example, he pulls away the cover and sheets, revealing the languid prince curled underneath. Tamaki reaches for his hand and Kyouya, without reason, lets himself be pulled down. He only thinks to fight the moment before his head hits the pillow and his friend laughs indulgently but doesn't allows him to escape. This is fine, Kyouya thinks, face down in the Egyptian cotton. The shower has lowered his fever- he’s definitely feverish from this weather. He’s not much of a hypochondriac but this time he's certain. It’s not possible for the south of France to be this warm without his mind boiling and playing tricks on him. Since he's obviously ill, it will be all right to rest a few minutes before getting back to work. He needed to resume his search for a blonde-- not the idiot blond he found by accident.
In his exhaustion, Tamaki tries to whittle out some answers from him, "Would you like to go swimming?" It takes two tries for Tamaki to understand that Kyouya's movements were a refusal, not a nod. He mournfully tugs the blankets around Kyouya (who thrusts them back with a scowl). "Would you like to go to Paris?"
"Not today," he grumbles and rolls onto his side, facing the doors. With the drapes wide open the room’s too sunny for Tamaki to fall asleep. Instead the prince-type restlessly pulls his knees to his chest and back down again, and Kyouya, who by then is nursing a fever and a headache, tells him to sit still or leave. Tamaki apologizes under his breath and sits still, even closer to Kyouya's back than before. He tries to move out of the reach of Tamaki's fingers, but falls short when they start to brush through his damp hair. Tamaki's hand is at the base of his neck, the crown of his skull, and now he's humming what sounds like the waltz that was playing during last night's dinner- or maybe it was the night before? All their dinners have begun to blur together. The only exception is that lately they've been taking them indoors instead of in the garden. The temperatures don't drop in the evening but shudder on fiercely into the night. It makes them impossible to sleep through. Kyouya thinks his fatigue from the night before is the only reason he hasn't pushed Tamaki away.
That song is from the night before. We're running out of records, Éclair had said when they played it. It was just before they started dancing, and she was pulling a face at the sharp taste of the wine and the military march of a waltz that rose with the finale of their meal. Tamaki set his napkin on the table and strode to her. We'll have to buy more, he'd said blissfully, as if vinyl’s were still common fare in the twenty-first century, in France, in the middle of nowhere. Kyouya pushed his shards of bread through the oil as Tamaki slid effortlessly into their dance, Éclair drawn up tight against him. He rotated around the remains of their evening meal, all slow smiles and piano perfect hands drawn up around her wiry fingers. It went on forever, the same unimpressive measures rising to identical crescendos and Kyouya felt the table spinning underneath him. The memory comes in and out of Kyouya's mind, muffled by the other boy's humming and the hum of the fan. It had to have been the night before, because he vividly remembers lying awake and recalling the way Éclair tucked her face against Tamaki's collar bone, her eyes watching Kyouya. His recollection was muddled by the wine and thinks Éclair might’ve kissed Tamaki, or got very near to it. He doesn’t know for sure, it probably never happened. Tamaki - and with the thought he's surprised how bitter it sounds- probably doesn't think a Host should kiss. Kyouya fell asleep drunk and betrayed and the only comfort he got from his remaining rationality was that one of them could have kissed him and wouldn't that have been worse?
Awake now, with Tamaki so close he can feel his song through his vertebrae, Kyouya mind swims and boils. He wouldn’t have kissed her, it says sleepily and Kyouya fights it, the urge to tilt back into Tamaki’s touch. He grits his teeth to keep from turning to face him.
At some point Tamaki stops humming and his hand goes still. The earlier motion coupled with the warm air had already dried Kyouya's hair- though no doubt it's arranged embarrassing angles of Tamaki's well-intentioned design. With a small sigh (for what Kyouya has no idea- he has no right to be unhappy) Tamaki lies down as well, an added weight on the pillow. With his eyes closed so tight the light from the balcony is only a blur of purple behind his eyelids, Kyouya thinks he can see Tamaki behind him. Tamaki’s hand is in the limited space between them, palm down on the sheets and fingers splayed forward, and he's watching him. Kyouya waits for himself to ask Tamaki what he wants, or to finally figure out what it is he wants by letting it carry on this long. All he's aware of is that it can't go on like this, in this room that feels like the time Tamaki asked if they could sit under the kotatsu. The heat is getting to him, he tells himself furiously, hoping Tamaki will just get up and leave him alone. With the warm air pressing in from all sides, he can still feel Tamaki’s wet hair through his fingertips, the lull of his voice and the twisting muscles of his jaw if he slid his hands down and over Tamaki’s shoulders. That day wasn’t the beginning of this, Kyouya tells himself, sliding in and out of consciousness. Today won’t be the end of it. If anything else, he waits for Tamaki to say something about the noise, the echoing sound of Kyouya's heartbeat against the mattress.
The wind slams the balcony doors shut, jarring Kyouya awake. Instantly, Tamaki sits up and Kyouya stays down, because when his eyes flew open the room was dark. Did we sleep the whole day? he thinks and fills with a unfamiliar chill for the summer. The bed moves as Tamaki shifts around and turns on the lamp.
"Kyouya," he whispers and rests a hand on his shoulder. "It's almost time for dinner." The way his fingers curl over the shirt that's still damp with humidity and the quiet of his voice gives Tamaki away. If he really thought Kyouya was asleep, he wouldn’t be so gentle. Kyouya has a headache from keeping his eyes closed that tight for so long and when he opens them, Tamaki has bent over him with concern. Relieved, he smiles and reaches down to push Kyouya’s hair out of his eyes- Kyouya catches his wrist. There’s not enough distance between us, Kyouya wants to order. Stay on your side of the bed. Go back to her and let me have a different victory. He doesn’t end up saying any of this, because Tamaki’s looking at the fingers around his wrist like he's never see Kyouya's hand so close. He wouldn’t get the significance of anything you told him, anything you did to him. Kyouya pushes Tamaki away when he sits up. These aren't kissing games for a child, or a wife, or a mother, or whatever Tamaki has devised him to be in his thick, delusional way.
Tamaki easily recovers without an explanation. He tugs at the back of Kyouya's dress shirt, along his cuffs and nuzzles along the back of his neck until Kyouya comes out of his daze. When he tries to fix his hair in the dim light of the bathroom, he can see Tamaki sitting at the end of the bed in the reflection. He entertains the thought of skipping dinner entirely, of casting Tamaki out and sleeping under the cool breeze that’s finally pushing through. Or he could skip dinner and Tamaki could stay with him. The other boy scrapes his bare feet against the hard wood floors, casting a curious, cold water look over his shoulder. Kyouya pushes down on his fringe a final time (no use) and ushers them both out.
Éclair is sitting alone at the table when they arrive. She's opened the shutters on the window closest to her and squints through the soft garden lights. Tamaki, gasping apologetically for making her wait, spends the dinner clutching at her hands. "Put it out of your mind," she assures him, but watches Kyouya.