Still Untitled

part four

by: EthanHaas

The following Saturday found the third Otori son and his wife with starbucks cups in hand as they sat on a shady bench at a local park. Kyoya had spent the better part of the morning harassing his wife as she refused to wake up when he did at his customary 5:30.

"The boy is a wild animal." His voice was level but couldn't quite conceal a bite of impatience. He sat on the edge of their bed, giving up in his attempt at making it with her in it after nearly suffering a blow to the head with a carefully aimed pillow.

"I'm asleep." Whatever happened to the Kyoya that melted diamonds with his eyes if you woke him up too early? Haruhi groaned and rolled over, jamming a pillow over her face.

"He is just like his father." His palm pilot, laptop, stack of notebooks, and blackberry were all scattered unceremoniously about his desk. Had Haruhi been doing anything other than try valiantly for another forty minutes of sleep, she might have been worried by her husband's idle hands.

"Hark who's talking. Do you want to be the pot or the kettle today?"

"I thought you were asleep?" He willed the irritability out of his voice.

"I am." Another pillow found its way into the air and missed his head by inches. When did she get such good aim?

"He pushed her down."

"She fell." Haruhi sighed. Loudly.

"When I kill him, you're helping me cover it up. Think of the time and effort we could save right here, right now."

"Die." This time the pillow did make contact with its intended target. Exhaling slowly, he felt around for his glasses on the bed.

He lay down beside her and under the pretense of brushing some stray locks of hair off her forehead, double-checked that she wasn't harboring any more pillow-missiles. Forcing his voice into a pleasant purr, he spoke quietly into her ear. "Did I mention we're completely out of coffee?"

"Die twice."

- -

As he maneuvered the Mercedes into a parking space, he glanced in his rearview mirror at the little boy in his backseat and made eye contact with a pair of all too familiar hazel eyes. Though he had inherited brown hair from his mother, his likeness to his father was unnerving. Or, rather, it unnerved Kyoya. He was rather pleased with himself for refraining from calling the little boy's father "an unruly doppelganger." In front of him, at least.

Despite his best efforts, the flowery, extravagant insults that his late friend had dreamed up hadn't died with him.

Kyoya realized his wife was smiling at him as he cut the engine. Despite the summer morning outside that greeted them as car doors opened and the hot coffee still in his hand, (not to mention a warm daze that always seemed to persist in the wake of her smile) he couldn't help but shiver a little he watched Haruhi take Ryouta and Saeka's hands and lead them toward the park.

It's warm. I probably imagined it. It had been several years since Kyoya had really approved of imagination but he thought that today, perhaps, warranted an exception.

--

Sitting on the park bench, Kyoya was regretting his choice not to bring his laptop with him. Haruhi forbade it and in an effort to get her out of bed before noon, he agreed. The clacking of keys would drown out the conversation of the children sitting in the sand some twenty feet away. He had distinctly heard something about a bug and a punishment game.

"I told Hikaru and Nanako that we'd babysit today. And now we're babysitting. Stop fidgeting," she said quietly. He sighed.

"I don't trust him."

"I gathered that much, Ranka." He arched an eyebrow as he took a sip of his coffee but showed no other signs that being compared to Haruhi's father was insult enough to stem the flow of his complaints about Hikaru's son. He longed once more for the soft whir and clicking of plastic that meant he could lose himself once more in his work. Truth be told, focusing on his annoyance with the boy was a welcome distraction from the thoughts that had been floating around the edges of his brain lately. For what felt like the hundredth time that day and the millionth time in the last few months, a scene from a few months past began to play in his mind.

--

"I'm so glad we could finally get together," Aurélie said, resting her chin on her hand, her warm green eyes sparkling.

"Thank you for having us," Kaoru added, reaching for his wife's hand.

Haruhi hitched on a smile that was almost perfectly genuine. "We're glad to have you."

The evening had been pleasant, the conversation was pleasant, and catching up had been pleasant. Haruhi's cooking was a smash hit and to her knowledge, her daughter had been a perfect angel, playing dress-up with a nanny until bedtime. (Kyoya, however, had bribed her into compliance for the evening. A few cavities worth of melon soda later, she had agreed to go to bed without the usual fanfare and Haruhi was, very pleasantly, none the wiser.)

Kyoya had been quiet for most of the evening, letting his wife enjoy a much deserved night with other adults. He was glad that Kaoru, always more observant than his brother, was so distracted by his new bride – otherwise he might have noticed that Haruhi kept lapsing into silence. Kaoru ran his thumb absently over the ring on his wife's left hand. Isn't being a newlywed great? The question hung in the air unspoken as though their matching, dreamy smiles had asked it.

Kyoya knew his wife's plastered on smile answered the mute call of the question: Yes, I suppose it is. I wouldn't really know.

"We'll have to have you over for tea sometime soon. And we'd love you to bring Saeka, too. I just love kids and from what I hear from her Uncle Hikaru, we're really missing out by not meeting her." Aurélie smiled warmly. Kaoru's smile faltered. Kyoya saved Haruhi from having to say anything.

"Do you have any plans for children in the future?" He tried for a pleasant smile and managed an odd sort of grimace. He masked his failure by taking a sip of his wine.

"If only," Aurélie smiled almost sadly and turned to face her husband. "Kaoru…you know wh-"

Kaoru choked. Aurélie smiled knowingly at Haruhi is if sharing in on some universal private joke. Kyoya sighed almost imperceptibly, patting his coughing friend on the back.

--

It was something he had been thinking about for a while. His friends and his business associates were perfectly polite, complimenting his lovely little family. Haruhi was disarming with her wit and involuntary charm, a welcome rarity in the social circles of trophy wives and trust fund babies. She had inadvertently carved herself a niche, accepting the duties of being an Otori without sacrificing her intelligence or goals. But it was his friends, moreso than the people who whispered behind discreet hands about Saeka that got him thinking. He had watched countless friends, from Ouran, college, and work go through the familiar process. They dated, they got married, they had children. Some courting, some cute stories, some meddling parents, some arranged marriages – the stories had some variation. But they all seemed to have the same core – the one that he and Haruhi lacked. And for all his complaints about Saeka spending time with the youngest Hitachiin, Kyoya didn't mind seeing the boy too much. Around Ryouta, he could take his observational skills down off the shelf and give them a stretch. He could see personality traits as well as physical features from each parent displayed in the little boy. And, as genotype codes for phenotype, the same was true of Saeka.

In the child he had helped to raise, he could see both of her parents as plain as day. She was dramatic, theatrical, and incredibly verbose for her age. Unlike her peers, she possessed a large and complicated vocabulary that no one attributed to an expensive pre-school. Giving up his intense study of the lid of his coffee cup, he looked up once more at the children on the playground. The sun was making her golden hair almost painful to look at but when she caught sight of him watching her game of tag, her big brown eyes lit up and she stopped to wave furiously – and forfeited the game accidentally.

Instinctively, his free hand found Haruhi's. She said nothing and linked her fingers with his, never taking her eyes off of their daughter.

A cold stab of guilt interrupted his thoughts. Or, rather, the thoughts he was beating into submission with the lead pipe of willpower. I have got to be out of my mind. But just as he was sure that he was a horrible person for thinking about it, another image danced in front of his mind. Another child, maybe with warm, brown eyes and jet black hair - or perhaps brown hair with gray eyes…

He tried to imagine bringing up the subject to her. He could see them that night, after dinner and baths and bedtimes, curling up on the couch to watch a movie or some mindless television. Maybe read a newspaper or a law book, sipping from teacups and sitting closer together than was strictly necessary.

"Haruhi?"

"Hmm?"

"Let's make a baby."

"You're sleeping on the couch."

--

With a start, he realized that she was tugging gently on his hand, trying to get him to stand. A glance at his watch told him almost two hours had passed and he tipped his proverbial hat to Haruhi; her innate knowledge of when snacks and naps were necessary dumbfounded him to this day.

He began to lead the procession back to the car, half-listening to Saeka's babbling and dimly aware that he still held the cold, unfinished coffee in his hand. He opened the door for Saeka and then her mother and bit back a sigh as he climbed once more into the driver's seat and stuck the key in the ignition. It was a silly idea. He knew it.

"Are you alright?" Her small, warm hand found his knee reassuringly. "You look odd."

"Never better," he answered, his voice quiet. He was awful at lying to her.

He couldn't decide what was worse – knowing that for the first time in his life, he couldn't have the thing he wanted most or knowing that polite society already thought he had it.

--

Hello there! I've never done author's notes before but I thought this chapter might need some.

I'll just start by saying that I hate OCs. With a passion. With the white hot intensity of a thousand suns. But in this chapter, there are OCs. There were some in one of the other chapters and only one reviewer mentioned them, which was a good sign because they're not the focus of the story. I don't subscribe to this "everyone in the host club is madly in love with Haruhi and whoever doesn't end up with her will surely become a monk and perish" idea. The OCs I have are just kind of the necessary ones because I assume that the other club members will get married and have lives after Ouran. So I googled popular names for Japanese girls (Hikaru's wife) and French girls (Kaoru's wife) and created my OCs. I googled popular Japanese boy names and made up a son for Hikaru. They just kind of exist to serve the plot when necessary and that's all. So, to the one reviewer who was curious about Ryouta, don't worry. The story is still Kyoya/Haruhi-centric.

I'm worried that this chapter is confusing and as I am sans a beta, I'll rely on you guys to keep my writing intelligible. I hope you enjoyed it and I'm sorry to keep you waiting so long! And, of course, thank you so much to anyone who has reviewed! It's been a long ass time since I just wrote something for fun and y'all make my day, seriously.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to hating my job with a passion, dreaming up elaborate ways to kill my cousins and make it look like an accident, and peeing a little every time I think about the 7th Harry Potter book.

Ellos son la manzana de mis ojos, EthanHaas