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Love doesn't happen all at once... and neither do relationships.
It was a messy, haphazard process of realizations and awkwardness and feelings and misunderstandings and so much time -too much time- wasted in denying what seemed so very obvious in retrospect.
And, if not for the year they'd spent in Boston, theirs might not have happened at all.
Not that they would not always have been close, they'd probably always have been in each other's lives in some fashion. Their bonds were strong enough to withstand the passage of time no matter how different their lives had become or how far apart they were, so they'd still have ended up sharing smiles and raucous laughter even in their twilight years no matter what passed in the years between.
But without that year in Boston - that year they had spent living in each other's pockets, testing each other's boundaries in new and exciting ways, learning who they were and what they wanted and how to live lives apart from their families and obligations - if not for that year they might have still had room in their hearts for others. Probably still would have been able and willing to allow for lives where alliances and bloodlines and class and their families’ wishes would have been allowed to completely supersede their own wants and needs.
Probably.
But she would never know for sure, because they had had that year in Boston.
They'd had a whole year of days and nights spent in each other's company, weeks and months to slowly erode the spaces that had still lingered between them at Ouran. Spaces they’d filled with girls and tea and distractions, with all those clever adventures that they’d managed to fit in between classes and homework and obligations. Ouran had been fun, the Host Club had been fun, but Boston... Boston had been different, special.
In Boston, living so close together, having more time to themselves, had opened the door to a thousand new adventures for just the seven of them. Small, mundane, intimate adventures that had allowed them get to know themselves and each other in entirely new ways. It hadn't been like they'd become different people there or acted all that much different than they ever had before, but no one cared who they were or who their families were, or at least the people they saw from day to day didn't.
In a way they were all commoners there and it was...nice.
+++
The first time he stepped onto the street alone to go to the market had felt like a revelation.
No Haruhi to be his guide to commoner life and no Kyouya to make sure he didn't get into trouble.
Of course, he'd gotten lost and had to call Haruhi to help him find his way back, but she'd had to hand the phone off to Kyouya as she didn't know the city any better than he and Kyouya had hesitated the briefest moment before telling him to hold on and then a couple of large men he hadn't noticed tailing him appeared beside him to give him directions and a map, but he'd definitely made an effort and it had felt really nice for the first hour he'd been out and about.
He got lost in the city so often that by the end of their time there, he was certain he’d known the curves of every narrow, winding road and all the stops the trains and buses made along them.
At first he’d undertaken these adventures alone, though he’d had an inkling that Kyouya still always had someone tailing him, just out of sight, but with time he was able to coax and cajole the others into accompanying him.
”This... is this even Boston anymore?” Hikaru asked, incredulous, his face pressed against the glass as the train rattled down the tracks.
”Nope!” He replied cheerily, tossing an arm across Hikaru’s shoulders. “We’re going to Salem.”
”Are there witches?”
”Probably. We should bring back a souvenir for Nekozawa, don’t you think?”
”I heard there’s a haunted house in Gloucester based on Dario Argento’s films,” Kaoru commented, smiling broadly.
”Mario Argento?” He repeated, frowning at the unfamiliar name. Had he said that right?
”Oh? You don’t know his work, Tamaki?” Hikaru replied, his smile echoing Kaoru’s and he could practically smell sulfur in the air. “We should definitely go. You’ll like it.”
He did not, in fact, like it.
In point of fact, he’d spent most of their walk through the creepy castle museum haunted house screaming and clinging to one Hitachiin or the other as they laughed and looped their arms around his waist to propel him ever onward past one terrifying display after another.
"I hate you both," he grumbled when they finally stumbled down the last flight of stairs and out into the chill autumn night.
"Ah, don't be that way," Kaoru commented, steering him over to the kettle corn stand out front. "You did really well so you deserve a treat."
Hikaru had bought the kettle corn for them to share and Kaoru had bought him a cup of warm cider and he'd taken it grudgingly as they steered him onto a cold stone bench to drink it as they wedged him between them as had become their habit during movie nights and outings. Even thought the night had been cold, sitting between them, it seemed warm enough and even if his heart was still beating a little faster than it probably should be, he was glad he'd agreed to come along when they'd suggested making this detour. It would have been better if Haruhi had been there too, of course, but nights like these were nice too.
Cider gone, they took their half-consumed bag of kettle corn and made their way back to the shuttle bus that had taken them up the hill. Hikaru had pulled him into the seat beside him near the back of the bus and Kaoru had dropped, laughing into his lap as the bus went dark.
The trip down the hill to the parking lot had been long and winding and the bus and rattled and jostled them gently as the dark was filled with loud cheerful music and spooky sounds and the mumbled conversations of the dozen other passengers scattered throughout.
He’d held their half-eaten bag of warm kettle corn loosely in one hand while he used the other to hold Kaoru steady and keep him from falling when the bus took a turn too quickly or hit a large bump.
“This was fun,” Hikaru muttered, his head touching down almost reluctantly against Tamaki’s shoulder. “I’m gonna miss doing stuff like this when we go back to Ouran.”
He’d wanted to declare that things didn’t have to change at Ouran, but it had been so much easier to breathe since they arrived in Boston. He’d never felt that old pressure to be something, someone, other than who he was and he knew it had been the same for all of them. Had seen it in the way the tension in Kyouya’s shoulders had eased. In the way Mori and Honey lingered closer together than ever. The way Haruhi’s smiles had become more and more common, how relentless she was in the pursuit of her studies while still always taking the time to spend with him, with them. In the way the Hiitchin brothers pursued their own interests, sketches and half-formed ideas and designs on napkins and the back of bills and across a dozen sketchbooks scattered across all their apartments.
Their time in Boston had been the freedom of the Host Club taken to extremes and lacking all the trappings and duties that had come with being themselves in service to others and, if he were honest, he didn't want it to end.
+++
Haruhi loved their time in Boston.
Loved all the little changes it had made in them. All the surprising ways it brought them together.
Other people might have found moving to another country daunting, but Tamaki had approached it with the same enthusiasm with which he approached everything. He insisted on doing the shopping for all of them and spent hours puzzling out the public transit system, insisting that he wants to do it on his own, completely oblivious initially to the bodyguards Kyouya assigned to him who followed at a discreet distance and glared down anyone who seemed like they might be a threat. She'd once gone shopping with him and had seen one of those bodyguards bodycheck a man who had grumbled something rude about how long Tamaki had stood at the station map examining the train routes.
How Tamaki had worked so earnestly to learn to cook and how he'd invited them all for dinner the moment he'd become fairly confident in his skills. How Kyouya had slipped into the kitchen beside him to help chop vegetables and sear fish, falling into step with Tamaki as effortlessly as if he’d been assisting him for years.
Honey and Kaoru slipping in, windswept and red-cheeked with boxes of cupcakes from the bakery down the road balanced in their arms, Mori at their heels with even more boxes.
The way Tamaki sometimes fallen asleep on the couch bookended by the twins, who would so often make a point of coming over to keep him company while Haruhi worked late on a paper. She’d get up for school in the morning and find them there still, Kaoru’s face buried against Tamaki’s throat and Tamaki’s arm slung around Hikaru’s waist and the twins’ hands linked together over him, their fingers intertwined and seeing them like that would make her smile so wide her face and chest both ached and she’d tuck a blanket over them before slipping out the door to class.
How sometimes she'd fallen asleep at her desk and woke to Mori’s or Kyoya’s hand on her shoulder, guiding her to bed. How sometimes... sometimes some mad impulse made her want to pull them into bed beside her where she could burrow beneath the covers and hold them close and safe and pretend that those days where they were all together would never end.
Tamaki’s kisses, brief and tentative and earnest, as she pressed him down on that same couch during those rare nights when they were alone and how those nights were always nice, but often too quiet.
The nights where they were all together were her very favorite nights. Nights where they had dinner together and then, afterwards, she’d squeeze onto the couch between Tamaki and Kyouya. Honey would spill across their laps with Usa-chan tucked against his chest and Mori would flop down on the floor, leaning back against their knees with Hikaru and Kaoru on either side of him and they’d all argue, loudly, about what movie or show to watch.
Well, Mori wouldn’t, but everyone else would and eventually Mori would just steal the controller from whoever was waving it around and put something on.
No matter what they picked, Honey was already half asleep by the time it started, his sticky, fingers combing through Mori’s hair absently.
Hikaru usually fell asleep a few minutes in, his head leaning against Haruhi’s knee.
Kyouya never drifted off like the others, when he sat with them like that, not at first, it had seemed during those first weeks as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to relax entirely even as he dragged carefully manicured fingers through Honey’s soft blond curls.
Unsure how to help, she'd usually just leaned into his shoulder and hoped that would be enough.
And when Tamaki mirrored her on his other side and she’d felt some of the tension ease from Kyouya’s spine as he let himself relax just a bit more, she’d known it’d all be okay.
+++
“I love you,” Tamaki murmured, carding fingers through Haruhi's hair late one hot spring evening as they sat in the dark, letting the fan cool the fine sheen of sweat on their skin as he leaned close to press the occasional kiss against her temple.
She’d beamed back at him and given his fingers a gentle squeeze, “I love you too.”
It had gotten so much easier to say with time and practice.
"Aw, we love you too," Kaoru had crooned from where they laid sprawled out across the floor of the living room as if lying as low to the ground as possible would keep the worst of the heat away.
Tamaki pitched a pillow at his head, missed, and hit Honey instead, startling him awake.
She wasn't sure she'd ever seen any of them move quite as fast as they did that night.
Kyouya, who'd been at the dining table working on something on the computer, had heaved a sigh and gone to fetch a cake from the emergency stash she knew he kept in a code-locked cabinet beneath the counter.
+++
"Takashi, look!"
"Hm?" Takashi glanced back at Mitsukuni who had stopped dead in front of a store display filled with piles of tiny cakes decorated with fancy candies and twinkling lights. "It's nice."
"Do you think I could do that?" The question is quiet and serious and he leaned forward, fingertips pressed gently against the glass.
He so rarely spoke of the future, what he wished to do beyond Ouran and college. It didn't surprise him that Mitsukuni would want to do something that involved sweets and cute things since those were his passions, but it was nice to see him voicing that desire.
"Yes," he replied, reaching out to take his hand. "But no Usa-chan in the kitchen."
+++
“What’s that?” Haruhi asked as she watched Tamaki tack the bundle of leaves to the ceiling during their second Christmas in Boston.
“Mistletoe.”
“Oh. Do you have someone you want to kiss?”
“Yes! Stand here please.”
“You know you don’t need mistletoe to kiss me, right?”
“Please? It’s tradition!”
“Whose tradition?”
“Our tradition! Or at least it will be.” Tamaki replied, gesturing grandly around the apartment where Christmas was already beginning to creep in in the form of glittery garlands and twinkling lights and... really ugly handmade ornaments that he’d probably let the old man who lived on the first floor bully him into buying.
If the twins had seen any of it, they’d probably have accidentally lit the garish garlands on fire or tossed the ornaments out a window.
Maybe she should call and ask when they were coming for dinner and see if they might be willing to come early.
“No!” Tamaki hollered, wagging a finger at her as if he’d been able to hear the plan forming. “I like them. The Hatachiin brothers aren’t allowed anywhere near them.”
“Fine,” she agreed reluctantly. It wasn’t as if Kyouya wouldn’t have someone discreetly re-position them behind a more tasteful display within minutes of his arrival, after all. She could put up with them for a few more hours.
"Haruhi, we're a family now. We need traditions! Traditions are very important here."
"I'm pretty sure traditions are very important everywhere, but this seems less like a tradition and more like a nice convenient excuse to kiss everyone."
"It might also be that," Tamaki replied, his smile a little shy as he flicked his gaze down to meet hers. "Is that okay?"
She sucked her lip between her teeth, chewing nervously. She didn’t want to ruin what they had, but at the same time....
“Are you sure?”
Tamaki nodded, quickly, but he looked as nervous as she felt, “I don’t want to waste anymore time.”
“Okay, then let’s do it. What’s the plan called?”
”What makes you think I gave it a name?”
”You always give your plans names.”
”Operation: Kiss Kiss, Fall in Love.”
”Never tell them that.”
”It’s a good name!”
”It’s a terrible name and Kaoru and Hikaru are going to make fun of you for it.”
”Fine,” he sighed dramatically. “I won’t tell them, but I think it’s a great name. Come, help me hang the rest of this mistletoe so we can go get a yule log before the others get here.”
"What's a yule log?"
"It's a type of rolled cake. Honey will love it."
"Will he though? You remember the time you made him a fruitcake?"
Tamaki looked vaguely stricken, which was understandable, Honey had refused to speak to him for a week for insulting cake that way.
"Well, that was different. I'm sure he'll like this one. Also, we’re going to need more mistletoe.”
“I really don't think we will,” she replied, eyeing the shoebox overflowing with red-berried greenery.
“You think it would be too obvious?”
“If you hang mistletoe in every door and entryway? Maybe a bit."
Tamaki smiled brilliantly as he climbed up on a chair and tacked a bunch over the front door, “Well, I wasn’t really aiming for subtle anyway.”
+++
Tamaki had announced he was going to attend university in America the same day she had. He'd had a laundry list of reasons why, but in the end she imagined it boiled down to the exact same reason she wanted to attend school there. It was... home.
Kyouya had been the first to voice his approval of their plans, indicating that he had himself already decided to attend University while taking over the management of several of his family's under-performing interests in Boston. He'd even arranged for them to retain the housing they'd lived in during their previous stay. She was relatively certain he had known this was what they were going to decide to do with their future before they had.
Tamaki's Grandmother hadn't initially been thrilled to discover his plans, but she'd seemed to grudgingly approved for one reason or another. Still, Tamaki had insisted that he wanted to learn to survive in a commoner’s world and so he took great pride in clipping coupons from the market ads that came in the mail and making shopping lists and had started visiting secondhand shops. She was very grateful for Kyouya and the men he has assigned to Tamaki that keep him from getting hit in the face by the burly men who didn’t seem to appreciate Tamaki’s loud, excitable remarks about how quaint everything was or what a bargain things were as he poked through the stores.
“Christmas is coming!” Tamaki declared, dropping his armful of grocery bags onto the counter as he returned home from a trip to the market.
“Yes,” Kyouya remarked dryly from where he sat at the kitchen table, the soft tap-tap of his fingertips against the keyboard a comforting constant as she worked through several hefty library books in search of precedent to support her argument. “That would seem to be what all the garish decor and inescapable music is alluding to.”
“We should get a tree! Don’t you want to get a tree?”
Kyouya frowned thoughtfully, his fingers never missing a stroke as he mulled the prospect over, “I suppose we have the space and the cash to fund such an endeavor. I assume you’re going to want to have a holiday party as well?”
She could practically hear him tallying funds and expenditures against what he’d be able to charge for the inevitable keepsakes and commemorative photos that could be sold to the no doubt lengthy list of invitees.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Tamaki replied, waving the idea off. “We’re in America now. I just thought it might be nice if we celebrated the holiday together... as a family.”
Kyouya’s fingers stilled on the keys at the same moment her breath caught in her throat.
They hadn’t talked about it.
Not is those terms.
Family certainly wasn’t a dirty word for any of them, not exactly, but it came with different baggage for each of them. Maybe that was why they’d always avoided putting that label on what they were to each other. Perhaps it would have been natural for them to drift apart as they all pursued their own goals, but they hadn’t. Every time their paths had diverged, they’d found their way back to each other before long.
Sometimes it was just she and Tamaki for months on end and then, inevitably, they would return to Japan for a visit at the same time as all the others. Or Kyouya would come to town on some family venture or Hikaru and Kaoru would stop in because their university was just a train ride away or Mori and Honey would arrive for a long vacation.
In her second year at Harvard, they’d begun remodeling it a piece at a time, breaking down the walls and floors and reshaping the space between them inches at a time. The twins curated the art on their walls and Mori quietly dictated the specifications for the quiet spaces they would practice in when they felt like practicing and helped them set up a study room where Haruhi could lock herself away when necessary. Honey updated their kitchen until it was cheerful and cozy and cute as could be and always filled with cakes and Kyouya set up an office and the three of them worked together to curate their library.
The apartment became large enough for seven, all the edges of what they were as individuals worn away until they all fit together so seamlessly that it was difficult to remember a time when those spaces had been separate. A time before they had become a they, a we, slowly leaving behind the idea that they’d ever been anything else.
There hadn’t been any one moment that had led them to realizing they were better together than apart, that what they felt for each other was something more than friendship. Instead it had been thousands of conversations and hundreds of subtle intimacies shared over the course of years.
”I suppose family is a good word for it,” Kyouya commented finally, his voice deep and level his fingers resuming their tip-tap against the keys. “But we’ll hire a car and to you are not driving.”
”Kyouya,” Tamaki began and Kyouya gave him a hard look over the rims of his glasses.
”Absolutely not. The last time you parked a fifty-four thousand dollar town car in our neighbor’s yard.”
”It was icy!”
”Do you think it’s less icy today?”
“Fine,” Tamaki pouted, huffing and setting about unpacking the groceries. “But I get to cut down the tree.”
”Whatever you want, dear.”