Disclaimer and Acknolwedgements: First and foremost, this first chapter goes out to EpsilonZero for outright requesting this! That isn't to ignore the rest of you; you too are all reasons I wrote any of this at all. Secondly, Ouran High School Host Club was created by Bisco Hatori and definitely not licensed by myself. Therefore, the following is a work of fiction using characters that are not my own, and no harm nor profit is meant or made by publishing this.
School wasn't easy nowadays and it was difficult to tell who had it worse. On the one hand, Tamaki was the more well-known of the pair — or at least the one who was more talked about — and especially being the superintendent's son, his privacy was continually invaded. Alternately, Kyouya simply didn't take this kind of stress very well. What made things worse was how very vigilant he remained for anyone or thing that might be able to trail its way back to his father. It pained Tamaki very much to see the great lengths to which Kyouya would go just to keep this student quiet or that picture undiscovered. And finally, one day, he'd had quite enough of it.
"Kyouya," he said softly, not wanting the others to overhear. The twins were pestering Haruhi, which was no problem, but Honey-senpai and Mori-senpai were eerily quiet and already prone to hearing all of the inner thoughts of the members. At present, the pairs were sitting plenty close enough to be able to listen in on each other's conversations if they weren't careful.
"What is it, Tamaki?" Kyouya sounded quite disinterested and that only further wounded Tamaki.
"I wanted to ask you about something."
"What is it, Tamaki." This repetition hadn't been a question, rather Kyouya urging him to just get on with things, seemingly so that he would go back to being silent.
"C'est important!" Tamaki shouted, slamming his hands on the table and drawing the attention of the entire room. "Faut-il vraiment que tu es trop difficile? Je voudrais parler à toi de quelque chose très importants et tu es simplement égoïste et froid! Je le déteste!" ["It is important!...Must you be so difficult? I would like to speak to you about something very important and you are simply selfish and cold! I hate it!"]
"Tamaki, you are making quite a scene."
The boy did something much more unexpected, then: he took the table in both hands, Kyouya's all-important notes and figures spread over the entirety of it, and flipped it sideways. Then Tamaki gave him the harshest of looks before storming out of the room entirely without another sound save the slamming of the door behind him.
The rest of the hosts watched Kyouya as Tamaki left but Tamaki could feel Kyouya watching him. It was the attention that he'd wanted, but not at all how he had wanted it. It hurt and by the time Tamaki reached the door he was leaving more out of embarrassment than anger. Not a single body tried to stop him.
He closed the door and leaned against it lightly, closing his eyes and staving off tears as he thought of a place he could go. He didn't want to leave school grounds on these terms, but he couldn't yet go back into the room to apologize for what he'd done. Of course he felt guilty for it, but immediately returning to grovel would completely undo everything he had been trying to achieve. Still, he wasn't altogether sure that Kyouya would even want to speak to him after such a show. After taking only a few more moments to compose himself, Tamaki decided that there really was only one place for him to go, and that was to see his father in his office. If nothing else, he could at least go there on the pretense of asking advice about a girl.
There certainly was no way that he could even begin to detail to his father the strains these past few months with Kyouya had caused him. It would come far too close to the fact that the two of them were working things out as a couple, and that wasn't something that Tamaki was yet ready to admit to his father. The words of advice still rang in his head from time to time, though it wasn't until very recently that he was thinking his father might have had a point. There were better ways to unite empires, and perhaps the Suou-Ootori empire was never meant to be in the first place. Besides, he was only barely a Suou to begin with...
"That is no way to be thinking, Tamaki," he told himself, shaking his head a little as he walked, heading down the stairs to return to the main hall so he could cut across the courtyard. "She may be the matriarch, but you are still an important person to everyone else."
"That's the spirit," a familiar voice said, and Tamaki turned to find that his father had sneaked up behind him.
"Father! I didn't even hear you come up!"
"Oh, never mind that!" Tamaki didn't argue because, quite frankly, he wasn't entirely keen on speaking about his grandmother at the moment anyway. "Why don't we take a walk through gardens? There is only a light snow on the grounds and from what I can see from my window, the scenery is breathtaking." Tamaki agreed with a nod, and the two set off outside into the chilly winter air.
The breath from their mouths and noses was visible immediately, and Tamaki knew it wouldn't be long before their faces were reddened from the cold. Still, his father had been right: the view was awesome. The hedges had shed their leaves and roses, which rendered the maze quite useless. However, the frost that clung to the branches turned them such a beautifully delicate shade of white that they blended in so neatly with the surroundings that one just might still be able to get lost within the center. Of course, one would truly only need to follow his or her own shallow footprints to find the way back again.
"Father..." Tamaki began quietly as the serenity of the gardens settled over them. He wasn't sure where they were headed, but supposed it didn't matter; it was too cold for them to stay outside for too long anyway. "How did you ever deal with the criticism?"
His father turned to look at him, smiling warmly but with a very visible sadness in his eyes that answered the question long before he opened his mouth to speak. "Eventually the rumors and the whispers will die out and the eyes will find something new to focus on. Until then, the only thing you can do is carry yourself proudly because you and you alone know the truth of the matter."
Tamaki found his father's response oddly vague, but didn't question it for fear of confirmation of his suspicions. He was sure that there were a fair number of people whose opinions and words on the matter of his relationship with Kyouya could be trusted, and that perhaps more than one of them had said something within earshot of his father. Tamaki knew that it was wrong to keep a secret like this, but he wasn't at all ready to admit it even to himself. Their love was still blossoming and it was still a very scary thing: he wasn't about to drag anyone else into it. And then he remembered the scene in the music room from what couldn't have been more than half an hour before.
"Doing something out of the pureness of emotion isn't always a bad thing, is it? If you truly mean what you say and do, then it can't be a bad thing."
"It would be nice if life worked that way. Unfortunately, not everyone shares that opinion. No matter what you do, your only goal should be to please who matters, not who is watching."
Tamaki took a breath in to ask another question but lost it at the last moment and let the breath out in a cloudy sigh. He watched it dissipate in front of him before stopping to again take in the sights. The garden was always so peaceful at this time of year, even more so than in the warmer months. It may only have been because there are always so few people willing to bear the cold for even a glimpse of this.
"Things will work themselves out as they will, Tamaki. Sometimes all we can do is let them take their course, even if we don't like the direction in which it is headed."
Tamaki gave his father a hopeless look, his blue eyes wide with a silent plea that he knew could never be answered. The look only lasted a moment before he gave in and dropped his eyes to the pristine snow surrounding two pairs of footprints. It was the first time that he'd noticed—
"Our footprints," Tamaki said unexpectedly, garnering a look of confusion from his father. Then he demonstrated, gingerly placing his own foot into one of the prints just left by his father. It was a near perfect fit.
"You haven't been a small boy for quite some time, Tamaki."
"Yes, but... Never mind." Tamaki smiled, laughing a little at himself, though he was just as careful in removing his foot as he'd been in placing it. "It's quite cold. We should head back inside."
"Would you like to come back to my office to warm up a little?"
Tamaki shook his head. "No, I have some things to attend to."
"Very well, then." His father gave him a knowing smile that Tamaki did his best to ignore as he turned and headed back the way they had come.
At the door, he kicked the snow from the soles of his shoes and dusted it from the tops before he set off to return to the music room. Regardless of pride, effect or emotion, an apology was in order.