Work Text:
the first pair opal and amber are
It went like this: always forward, and never backwards. There were rules, facts, unmitigated anchors, and every time he discovered a new one Ohtori Kyoya wrote it down in his little black notebook in an attempt to cure the only thing about him that wasn’t entirely logical. When he claimed to have tried everything, he meant it: thinking happy thoughts, working out more, working out less, drinking water before bed, eating only organic. He’d done juice cleanses and practiced feng shui and even tried therapy, although he’d lied to the therapist about approximately half of the information he’d given her, so perhaps that hadn’t been an entirely sincere attempt. It didn’t matter. Nothing changed, and everything changed, and Ohtori Kyoya had woken up in the future forty-two times.
When he realised preventing it was out of the picture, Kyoya had switched over to attempting to exploit it, in a desperate ploy for damage control. But that didn’t work either. His future self seemed keen to do anything but tell Kyoya the lottery numbers, or the odds on a merger, or whether he should stay at Ouran for university or travel elsewhere. And so Kyoya posed to himself this question each time he came back to his own time, shaking and jittery and nauseous: if you couldn’t change your present, and the past remained stagnant, what was the point in seeing the future?
agate sings in b-flat, the wolf avatar
He told Tamaki once, which had been interesting in the same way that car crashes and natural disasters were. A car crash, because Tamaki had looked as if all of his internal organs were about to explode and careen everywhere, like stuffed toys. A natural disaster, because emotion with Tamaki was never final; it crested in waves, a tsunami.
Kyoya usually had very good reasons for doing the things he did. He let Tamaki create the Host Club because it seemed profitable, never breathed a word of Fuyumi’s frequent home visits because it was leverage, took the shortest route home possible because time was money and money was power and he never knew when he’d take a shortcut five years forward, anyway. He’d had a reason for telling Tamaki, of that he was certain, but it always seemed to dissolve on his tongue, bittersweet.
He didn’t plan on telling anyone that anytime soon.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Tamaki asked with a pout, now entering the depression stage of the Suoh grief cycle. It was familiar in a way that soothed Kyoya more than any Ohtori-brand anxiety medication could. “Kyo, you could’ve told me, your best friend, the benevolent king to your dark prince-“
And this was normal Tamaki behaviour, and this was a normal day, and sometimes Kyoya wished that he could stay in Class 1-A forever. He didn’t know why, but there was always this great sense of foreboding about the future, like a character in a horror movie just waiting for the killer to get them next. 2-A felt like the opening of said horror movie. Kyoya had always despised them; he wasn’t much fond of cheap thrills.
“Oh, are you doing it now?” Tamaki clapped his hands together in glee, and Kyoya opened his mouth to retort that no, actually, that’s not how it works, when he felt the familiar gut-wrenching sensation that indicated two things: one, he was going to be in some other time very shortly, and, worse than that, that Tamaki was right. Perhaps his face gave this away, because Tamaki’s face shifted to sympathetic and delighted in one fell swoop.
“Be quiet,” Kyoya snapped, nausea making him crueler than necessary, and then his knees buckled under him and his hands grasped thin air.
Time travelling wasn’t like the movies, or the romance novels that Fuyumi fervently devoted herself to. There was no inconvenient nudity, no immediate recognition, no blinking neon sign that said Welcome to 2028! or whatever fake-sounding year he’d landed himself in. No, when Kyoya came to, he was sitting in an armchair - plush, embroidered with flowers, French - and gripping a glass of water so tightly that it made his hand hurt. He was fully clothed. The number of blaring signs remained at a zero.
Before him was himself, except not really; he was time-worn and softened in the way that most future versions of Kyoya were. Present Kyoya always felt like broken glass after seeing him. At twelve it’d seemed natural that his face would change, but at sixteen Kyoya found himself examining this future iteration closely, a spot-the-difference exercise where there should be none. He clenched the glass even tighter, and a smirk etched itself onto his other self’s features, sharp in a way that Kyoya finally recognised. Mid-twenties, he decided, if he had to guess - and Kyoya always had to guess, found it near-impossible not to. That’s where he’d put this one, where he put most of them. Perhaps it was an omen, a sign that he was doomed to kick the bucket before he hit thirty. As long as he was on the Forbes 100 by then, Kyoya didn’t much mind.
“It’s not funny,” Kyoya snapped to break the silence, setting the water down and pushing his glasses up to soothe himself. He was very much trying to constrain the habit in front of Tamaki, because Tamaki was obsessed with pointing it out to everyone (unaware of how it displayed Kyoya’s weaknesses), but future-Kyoya still hadn’t bowed down to the servitude of contacts, so it seemed safe. “You’re costing me nine thousand yen a minute.”
“And you’re costing me at least ten times that,” future-Kyoya replied, and took his own glasses off as if to assert his dominance. Perhaps not that softened after all, then, which meant that not all hope was lost. “So let’s not play that game.”
“You remember this conversation,” Kyoya narrowed his eyes into slits, and the older version of himself shrugged, caught in the act.
“Of course I do,” he said. “You are me. But I am not you. Do remember that, although I know you won’t.”
Fact: Kyoya hated time travel.
He hated it because it implied certain timelines and certain destinies were inevitable, when Kyoya had always tried to labour under the assumption that anything could change if you worked hard enough. He hated it because so far he’d missed half an English quiz and an important meeting to go spy on his future self. He hated it because, despite everything, Kyoya never saw the futures he wanted to see. He didn’t want to become this version of himself. He knew he would become him anyway, but wasn’t the whole defining trait of humanity free will? It seemed irreconcilable with predestination, or fate, or whatever the hell you wanted to call skipping out on your fifteenth birthday party to celebrate your twenty-fifth. Kyoya was going to be more than just his father’s third son.
But so far, the future didn’t feel like it was panning out that way.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” future-Kyoya asked, then lit a cigarette without pausing. Smoke curled itself between his fingers like a dragon’s mouth, each tendril denser than the next. “Of course you do. Terrible habit.”
“Why did you start?” Kyoya wondered, and a wry smile emerged from behind the screen of grey. Of course; no future version of Kyoya had ever become less shrewd.
“ I didn’t start,” future-Kyoya reasoned. “You did - that is to say, the person you’re going to be before you’re me did.” He raised his brow, then added, “I reserve it for special occasions.”
Because of course, for this Kyoya, time travel was a special occasion. For this Kyoya, time travel only ever occurred as a spectacle, something that happened before him and not to him - always forward, never back, and Kyoya was half-convinced he was going to die at thirty, such was this game of Chinese whispers . But for the present Kyoya, for the one who had just told Suoh Tamaki his deepest, darkest secret, this was an inconvenience, a mistake, an aberration, insert a million yen’s worth of more synonyms here. This was forty-two moments of his past lost, and forty-two stolen snatches of his future that he could never quite parse. Make that forty-three.
He felt sick, and not in the way that signalled he was about to return to his own time. He was maybe going to punch himself in the face. He hadn’t tried it before, but he was relatively certain from years of researching what made the Ohtori group so dominating in the medical sphere that he wasn’t going to accidentally kill his future self if he just roughened him up a little.
Future-Kyoya looked at present-Kyoya through the smoke and said, “My wife hates it.”
“What?”
“Smoking,” he clarified, tapping ash into what Kyoya knew was an antique ashtray. The decor was oddly soothing, his taste the same even if Kyoya wasn’t. Every mote of grey disturbed him, the acrid scent of smoke sticking to his Ouran uniform. Tamaki would be even more upset than Kyoya to learn that he’d end up a smoker. “Forbids me from it whenever she’s in the house. Says I’m too intelligent to indulge in such stupid habits, and she’s right, of course.”
“You sound fond,” Kyoya said. It wasn’t quite an accusation, though it felt like one.
Future-Kyoya exhaled sharply, and transferred the cigarette from one hand to the other in one deft movement. Sure enough, Kyoya noted the gold band nestled comfortably on his ring finger, winking in the dim light like a bad idea. A nice piece of jewellery, deliberately concealed in plain sight by the tobacco. Kyoya hated being near-sighted sometimes.
“Of course I sound fond,” the other Kyoya replied. “She’s my wife.”
Kyoya pressed his lips together in a thin line. His future self had the audacity to laugh at that - to throw his head back a little, and stub the cigarette out entirely.
“I forgot,” he said, “what a nightmare I was at sixteen.”
“I’m not the nightmare here,” Kyoya said coolly, fighting to regain his composure. The truth was, while Kyoya knew an arranged marriage was inevitable, he preferred not to dwell on the brutal reality of it. Fuyumi loved her husband, but only because he had given her children - and Kyoya had never been big on children, unless, of course, the Hitachiin twins from the middle school counted (and only for their profit-making potential, mind). He’d always imagined any marriage to be loveless, joyless, another duty to take on with the same kind of passion one would associate with watching paint dry. He wasn’t sure what was scarier, now: knowing that he was wrong, or knowing that there was a chance he might deviate from the pre-planned route laid out for him entirely. “You’re weak.”
“No, you are,” the future version of himself said, and Kyoya hated the knowing look in his own eyes. The other Kyoya folded his hands in his lap, unconsciously brushing his thumb against his wedding ring as he spoke. “So desperate for validation, yet so afraid to be loved. You don’t even know why you travel, do you?”
“You know?” Kyoya demanded, and he knew he sounded wild, totally unlike his normal self. “You know, and you haven’t been telling me? Tell me.”
“I think that breaks a fundamental rule, somewhere,” Future-Kyoya replied. He was so calm . Kyoya wasn’t like Tamaki, quick to anger and quick to love and quick to embrace any kind of feeling as it struck him. He was cold, calculating, slippery. His temper scarcely ever rose, save for the rare occasions where he was forced into an early morning rise. And yet future-Kyoya seemed to have a better handle on his disposition, even still. How? Why wouldn’t he help himself?
Faintly, there was the sound of a heavy door opening and closing.
“My wife,” future-Kyoya said, and rose in one smooth movement. “You’ve just told Tamaki, haven’t you? I suppose you’re making a step in the right direction already.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Kyoya replied. He restrained himself from spitting the words, but only barely.
“I’ll let her know you send your love,” future-Kyoya said with another acerbic smile, and then, as the man he’d become in some ten years time walked towards the door, Kyoya felt his stomach drop and he slipped back to when he belonged.
a duet - solutio! - with aquamarine
Kyoya would’ve rather willingly submitted to Tamaki’s most extravagant plans than admit it, but he liked Fujioka Haruhi.
Not - not like that , although he could see why Tamaki and the Host Club’s simpering guests did: she had pale, clear skin, and attentive brown eyes that had the unnerving habit of making you feel like you were the centre of the universe when fixed upon you, and she was serious enough that cracking a smile out of her felt like a rare achievement. No, Kyoya liked Haruhi because he saw himself in her, even though he knew she’d be offended if he said so. She was ambitious, no-nonsense, unwilling to soften a killing blow. Kyoya found it admirable, especially in a commoner. Especially in a girl, although, unlike Tamaki, Kyoya had enough self-awareness to not voice that particular thought out loud.
Maybe that was why, the first time he time travelled to someplace where he wasn’t, he travelled to her.
He didn’t realise it was her at first. He didn’t recognise who she was with, either, until Kaoru glanced up from his hand of cards - and who let him get a nose piercing, he looked like a degenerate - and nudged the man with ashy brown hair next to him who was...Hikaru? Perhaps they were in a fight again, or pulling some kind of prank. Kyoya couldn’t fathom another reason why the twins would willingly distinguish themselves from one another. He doubted they’d become self-aware enough to realise that their codependency harmed them far more than it protected them, especially as they couldn’t be more than a few years fresh out of Ouran.
“Makes me miss the uniform,” Kaoru sighed, itching the offending piercing with a sort of fondness. Neither of them, Kyoya noted, seemed particularly surprised by his sudden pop into existence. So in the future, he was going to tell the rest of the Host Club about his propensity for checking in on his older self. Kyoya couldn’t imagine what would possibly motivate him to willingly give up such compromising personal information. “Even though the lavender clashed with my hair.”
“Maybe you should go blond,” Hikaru suggested, and the pair of them snorted in tandem.
“Don’t tease,” a familiar voice said, and it was only when she gave Kyoya a hesitant smile of greeting that Kyoya realised that the woman with shoulder-length dark hair and an oversized Boston University sweater was Haruhi.
“Where am I?” Kyoya asked with a frown.
“Boston,” Kaoru answered, glancing back down at his cards. He had a terrible hand; Kyoya could tell from the tiny downcurl of his mouth. “If you wanna get precise, then-”
“No,” Kyoya interrupted. “I mean, where am I? My other self.”
“Fuck if we know,” Hikaru mumbled. Haruhi swatted him with the back of her hand, and he mimed a terrible injury, reminiscent of a member of the Ouran soccer team.
He was over Haruhi, Kyoya realised. Interesting.
“What Hikaru means to say,” and Haruhi shot him a glare that Hikaru shrugged off, “is that you’re still in Japan. I’m here on a foreign exchange, and the twins are visiting.”
“I don’t know,” Kaoru said skeptically, gesturing to Haruhi’s cramped dorm room. It was almost clinical in decor; the only signs of any personal effects were the framed photographs of what Kyoya recognised to be the members of the Host Club, all smiling for the camera, his future self included. “I like it here. Maybe I’ll transfer.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Haruhi threatened. “You just like Costco.”
“That’s impossible,” Kyoya said.
“What, liking Costco?” Hikaru, with his brown hair and sudden emotional maturity, asked.
“Me not being here,” Kyoya ignored him, something that came naturally after a solid eighteen months of running the Host Club. Kaoru looked as though he was going to make another stupid comment, and Kyoya continued, “I always travel forward to myself. Always. This is wrong.”
“That’s not true,” Haruhi said softly.
Kyoya started, indignant. “How would you-”
“You’ve travelled forward to me twice,” she said. “Not including today. And unless you live under my bed-”
“Do not give Milord ideas,” Hikaru mumbled.
“-there’s no way the other you was there,” Haruhi finished.
And of course - because God, or whatever the hell controlled Kyoya’s ability to zip through space and time against his will, hated him - it was at that precise moment that Kyoya popped back into the present.
One look at the clock showed him he was late for the Host Club. Usually, Kyoya abhorred tardiness; he penalised Haruhi for being late, and was unafraid to launch a particularly nasty death glare that left Tamaki cultivating mushrooms if he blew off his ‘king’ responsibilities to trail Haruhi around like a lost puppy. Today, however, he felt strange and off-kilter, more thrown by his trip to the future than he should’ve been. He was costing himself money, and yet Kyoya felt no need to hurry down the corridor to Music Room Three.
He should see a doctor, he thought.
After the session with the Host Club was over - and while Haruhi had raised her brows at Kyoya’s late entry, seemingly nobody else had noticed - it was Mori of all people who sidled over.
“You’re different,” the upperclassman observed. Mori didn’t know about the time travel, Kyoya reminded himself. Not yet, anyway, because apparently he would.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kyoya snapped, and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
He didn’t miss the way Haruhi peered over at them, expression contemplative.
mighty emerald next, with the lovely citrine
Kyoya wasn’t sure why he hadn’t expected this sooner.
Only forward, never back. Those were the rules; they’d never yet been broken, and today was no exception. It was a small mercy, one that ensured he at least didn’t have yet another problem to deal with whenever he slipped from his own time into someone else’s. Kyoya knew he should’ve expected this. He’d made enough notes of each trip to the future that he should’ve been able to anticipate it down to the very second that it happened.
At some point, the present had caught up with the future. That was how Kyoya rationalised the five year old version of himself sitting placidly in his bedroom.
“You can’t be here,” Kyoya hissed, resisting the temptation to run his hands through his immaculately styled hair. He glanced nervously at the door. “I’m expecting visitors.”
The entire Host Club would be descending upon the Ohtori mansion in the next ten minutes. It was not something that Kyoya had enthusiastically agreed to; instead, he’d volunteered his living space up to spare Haruhi from the horror of having to entertain all of them in her cramped commoner’s apartment for the third time in as many weeks. Nobody else seemed exactly keen to step in, so Kyoya had.
It wasn’t sentimental , Kyoya reminded himself. He simply couldn’t get any work done in such a small amount of space. This was more for his own benefit than it was Haruhi’s, and Kyoya was an excellent liar, so he almost believed it as he thought it.
“It’s not on purpose,” the younger version of himself said calmly. Even as a child, Kyoya had been grave and unmoved by emotion. Probably moreso, Kyoya thought, than his current self, because Tamaki had worn him soft over the years. “Do you remember this one?”
No, Kyoya thought, because he’d been five and he tried not to dwell too much on his trips to the future after having recorded them in his little black book. It wasn’t like he ever got anything useful out of them.
Well. The last two times had been different. Kyoya still wasn’t sure if he’d call wanting to beat his future, married self up ‘useful’, but different did cover it.
“No,” Kyoya replied, truthfully. He still hadn’t told anyone apart from Tamaki about the time travel; he wondered if it was rude to hope that the twins got into some kind of non-fatal car accident that prevented them from coming.
The thought of Haruhi finding out wasn’t actually as horrifying as it should’ve been. Possibly because her knowing was inevitable. The shock must’ve showed itself on his face, because past-Kyoya said, “You look upset.”
“I’m going to strangle you,” Kyoya said kindly.
“You can’t do that,” the child in front of him pointed out. “Then you’d die, too.”
Yes, Kyoya thought. That’s the whole point.
Then, because Kyoya’s life was one big cosmic joke, the doorknob turned. He didn’t have the energy to tell whoever it was to get lost, so that’s how Haruhi found them, past-Kyoya and present-Kyoya staring at one another as if it’d will the Kyoya from the past to go back to when he’d come from spontaneously.
“Am I interrupting?” Haruhi asked, wide-eyed as she glanced between the two of them. She needed a haircut, Kyoya noticed. The way her hair was framing her face, short as it still was, was decidedly feminine. That wouldn’t do, even if Kyoya himself didn’t hate it. He thought briefly of the version of Haruhi he’d seen in Boston, her hair curling over her shoulders, and quickly pushed his glasses up and turned away. “Your, uh, staff said it was okay-”
“It’s fine,” Kyoya said, with a confidence he didn’t entirely feel.
“You’re pretty,” traitorous, five-year-old Kyoya said. He said it like it was a statement of fact - which, Kyoya supposed, it was, wasn’t it - and Haruhi blinked back her surprise.
“Thank you,” she said, her discomfort clear by the way she gripped her satchel tighter. It was going to fall apart one day, Kyoya thought, and spill all her school books everywhere.
He’d have to come up with a solution for that. It’d be fairly easy to construct a scenario where there’d be a new, spare satchel that she could take without it feeling like charity. The twins could help.
“What’s your name?” Haruhi asked the child on the floor. She was awkward, but not bad with children like Kyoya was. Her voice wasn’t condescending. Past-Kyoya would appreciate that. And then, as Kyoya’s rational brain caught up with that thought and he opened his mouth to construct a lie, his five-year-old self gave her a shy smile and answered, “Kyoya.”
Haruhi was absolutely terrible at concealing her thought process. She spun back to stare open-mouthed at present, definitely not five-year-old Kyoya, and hissed, “You have a clone?”
Kyoya stared back at her. “What?”
Haruhi turned round again, as if to point back at past-Kyoya, but - thank God - he’d disappeared, presumably back to his own time where there were no pretty girls-disguised-as-boys interrogating him about clones. Because, Kyoya quickly rationalised, his juvenile self thought Haruhi was pretty. Not that-
“Where-” Haruhi began.
“Why did you assume he was a clone?” Kyoya blinked.
It wasn’t the most important question he should be asking. He should be doing damage control: telling Haruhi that she’d imagined the whole thing, or that he had a younger brother, or something, but he wasn’t. He wanted her to answer his question. Her answer felt like it would be important, somehow.
“Because,” Haruhi sputtered, staring at him, “you’re a rich bastard. And rich bastards are all about legacy -” she waved her hands around at Kyoya’s room, at the Ohtori family crest on the door, “-and a clone is the epitome of legacy. Plus,” she said, and she almost sounded shy now, as if she was confessing a sin, “you at least have the intelligence to find a way to clone yourself.”
“Oh,” Kyoya said.
“He’s not a clone, though, is he?” Haruhi asked. She’d calmed herself down after finishing her tirade. Her gaze was searching, gentle, and again, Kyoya had to look away. It was amusing when Haruhi got under Tamaki’s skin. It was decidedly not when she got under his . “What-”
The door opened again. It was Mori and Honey, the latter of which riding on the former’s shoulders, and Kyoya didn’t miss the look that Mori aimed his way upon seeing Haruhi and Kyoya alone in his room together. Kyoya considered telling them all about the time travel there and then, just so Mori didn’t get any ridiculous notions. There was absolutely nothing romantic about a girl hanging out with you and your five-year-old self, after all. Even Tamaki would be hard-pressed to find a way to fit that into his brain-theatre of delusion - although, what with his whole fixation on referring to the Host Club as his family, that wasn’t as much of a given as Kyoya would’ve liked it to be.
“Haru-chan!” Honey cried, seemingly oblivious to the tension in the room, and he jumped off Mori’s shoulder to corral Haruhi into a hug. Over his shoulder, Haruhi narrowed her eyes at Kyoya.
“We can resume our conversation later,” Kyoya told her, and while Haruhi appeared less than satisfied by that answer, Kyoya was already turning to his desk to find his spreadsheets on the Host Club’s spending over the last quarter.
number eight is digestio, her stone is jade fine
“Don’t you ever wonder why it happens?” Haruhi prodded him once.
It was spring break, Kyoya freshly graduated and Haruhi about to start her third year at Ouran. She’d once again refused his offer to vacation somewhere exotic (and everyone else’s, for that matter; the twins had been particularly put-out when she declined to join them in Venice), but hadn’t been able to find an excuse not to join him in a park in downtown Tokyo. Though the sky was overcast today, the temperature was still on the warm side, and Kyoya’s short-sleeved button-up and jeans was downright casual.
Tamaki was in France, visiting his mother. Neither of them had brought him up since Kyoya picked Haruhi up outside her apartment early in the morning. Neither of them seemed particularly keen to.
“I’m assuming you’re talking about my propensity to just…” Kyoya clicked his fingers, and Haruhi’s mouth curved up at the corners, not quite a smile but something that had the potential to become one. He didn’t like saying the words ‘time travel’ aloud. They sounded fanciful, dream-like, and Kyoya was willing to admit that he’d relaxed since Ouran, but not to that extent. He always skirted around the phrasing while explaining it - first to Tamaki, then to Haruhi, then extremely reluctantly to Kaoru (Kyoya needed to stop letting Kaoru get him drunk) - and Haruhi didn’t bother to push him. Maybe she’d gained a modicum of tact at Ouran. Maybe, and far more likely, she didn’t much care.
“There could be other people who do it,” Haruhi suggested. There was a faint breeze in the air, just enough to take the edge off the humidity, and it ruffled her haphazardly-cut bangs in a way that Kyoya was willing to admit, under duress, made his mouth dry. “It’d be presumptuous to assume it’s unique to just you.”
“And then what?” Kyoya asked, tilting his head at her in thinly-veiled amusement. “I track them down and we bond over our inability to stay put in one time period? Don’t be ridiculous, Haruhi.”
“I’m not saying that,” Haruhi rolled her eyes. In a shocking display of impropriety, she brought her knees up so her feet were propped up on the bench they were sitting on, and rested her chin on them. She was looking not at Kyoya, but at a fixed point on the horizon. “If it were me-”
“It’s not you,” Kyoya said flatly.
It would never be Haruhi, he thought. Whatever the reason was for Kyoya’s trips to the future, he had quietly come to the conclusion that Haruhi’s natural charm, her refusal to be bowed by convention or intimidation, excluded her from the possibility.
“Well, let’s say it is,” Haruhi said. “I’d want to know everything I can. If it’s genetic, if I can travel past my death - don’t look at me like that,” she said, when Kyoya goggled at her. “It’s not morbid, it’s intellectual curiosity. Do I shape the future? Or does the future shape me?”
“You should be glad it isn’t you,” Kyoya murmured. “You’d make yourself ill.”
“I think it’s strange you haven’t thought about it more,” Haruhi announced, finally glancing over at him. “You’re the Shadow King. You overthink everything.”
That much was true. But Kyoya didn’t want to admit that he’d spent far too long trying to stop his travelling for him to have had any time to devote to answering the other questions that arose from it - the ones that Haruhi herself had just rattled off. Did she think of him often? It was a dangerous line of enquiry, and Kyoya had to forcibly remove himself from it.
“I visited myself a few years ago,” Kyoya found himself saying. “When I was in 1-A. The other me appeared to know why it happens, but he wouldn’t tell me why. I suppose I will find out, in due course. It’s just not something I have time for at the moment.”
Haruhi’s eyes flickered with interest. “I thought you never got anything productive out of your visits.”
“It wasn’t productive,” Kyoya fought not to snap at her. “I still don’t know why it happens.”
“But there is a reason,” Haruhi argued. “That’s not nothing. There are things that have no reasoning behind them at all, and that’s worse than you and your little quirk.”
She was breathing heavily.
Kyoya realised that she was probably thinking about her mother.
“Besides,” Haruhi said, less angry this time. “You could start now. It’s spring break.”
“I have to prepare for my university enrollment,” was Kyoya’s neutral reply.
A future version of Haruhi had told him that he’d visited her twice before. He wondered when that would be. He wondered if it’d already happened, and he’d been asleep, and she’d chosen not to speak of it.
“Suit yourself,” Haruhi said at last. And then, in a terrible segue (because Haruhi, for all her Host Club training, had never quite mastered the art of polite conversation), she said, “What’s the business course at Ouran like, then?”
e-major’s the key of the black tourmaline
The closest call - as in, the shortest period of time between Kyoya’s present and the future he visited - was a week.
The look on his future-self’s face was unbearably smug. A stranger wouldn’t have noticed it, but Kyoya was by no means a stranger to himself , and so he shoved his glasses up with the sort of force usually reserved for slamming doors or stamping feet.
“What did you do? ” Kyoya demanded, clenching his fists.
“Calm down ,” future-Kyoya said, as Kyoya zipped back into the present.
A week later, with Haruhi’s hands in his hair and her mouth pressed flush against his, he came to the realisation that perhaps it had been an admission, and not an order.
sapphire sings in f-major, and bright is her sheen
It didn’t occur to him until his second year of college, when he was making his way back inside the hotel room he was sharing with Haruhi for the week - it was summer, and in a miracle of timetabling, they’d managed to find the time to go vacation in Karuizawa together while Haruhi was back from Boston - and she wrinkled her nose as he shut the door to the balcony behind him.
At first, he thought it was the blast of summer heat from outside. Karuizawa was cooler than most places, but they’d compromised on getting air-conditioning for their room, and the early afternoon was significantly hotter than their perfectly climate controlled suite. But Haruhi only wrinkled her nose further when he slipped back in bed beside her, and pulled his laptop back onto his lap.
He endured her scowl for a few moments as his fingers flew across the keyboard, and then he cracked, looking over at her and mirroring her disgruntled expression.
“What?” he asked.
Haruhi shook her head. Her hair was at the length it had been all those years ago, when Kyoya travelled forward into her dorm room in the States; now it was sleep-mussed and strewn across the pillows like a promise. “Nothing,” she rasped out. “I just hate it when you smoke. Smells like a bar.”
My wife hates it. Smoking.
Kyoya felt his breath catch in his throat. Haruhi, however, mistook his surprise as something else entirely.
“See?” she mumbled, reaching up to press her hands onto his chest. Under the thin fabric of his sleep shirt, he could feel the warmth of her skin. “You’re going to give yourself all sorts of health problems. I thought an Ohtori of all people would know that.”
“I’m sorry,” Kyoya said, still having an out-of-body experience.
“Mm,” Haruhi said, her eyes fluttering shut again. She was still jet-lagged from her flight two days earlier; she wouldn’t say as much, but the fact that she was willingly going back to sleep in the middle of the day was proof enough. “Make sure you brush your teeth before you kiss me, that’s all.”
She let her hand fall back onto the mattress, and her breathing became deep and even.
After watching her for several minutes - an indulgence that Kyoya hardly ever allowed himself, despite everything - Kyoya returned his attention back to the reports in front of him. It was a fruitless task, that he knew; he was too distracted, living in both the past and future all at once. It’d been eighteen months since he last travelled forward. He wasn’t sure why it’d stopped, but he was glad of it, and Haruhi hadn’t pushed him further on acquiring answers, so Kyoya had all but forgotten about his former ability. Now, however-
He looked back at Haruhi, and swore quietly.
Predictably, Tamaki picked up on the first ring.
“Kyoya!” he said pleasantly, apparently unbothered by Kyoya’s radio silence for the past month. He tried his best to keep in frequent contact with all the former Host Club members, particularly Tamaki and Kaoru, but they were all so busy that a single missed call could lead to weeks without contact. Tamaki had, thankfully, matured enough not to take it personally. The same could not be said of Kaoru, who still occasionally sent drunk emails threatening to break into Kyoya’s bedroom - the way he had when they were teenagers - in absence of a prompt reply. “It’s so great to hear from you! How’s Karuizawa? How’s Haruhi?”
Tamaki was perhaps worryingly invested in the relationship between his best friend and his high school ex-girlfriend. Hikaru kept making jokes about threesomes. Kyoya thought he’d stop making those jokes when he realised how close Tamaki probably was to making them a reality, should the opportunity ever arise. “She’s fine,” Kyoya said, casting a glance over to her. He shuffled back outside, conscious that this was not a conversation he was willing for her to overhear. “Do you have a few minutes?”
“Definitely,” Tamaki said, with a worrying amount of confidence after an even more worrying pause.
“Please tell me you didn’t just clear your schedule for this phone call,” Kyoya groaned. Tamaki had grown up since high school, yes, but they still fell into their roles with ease. The hapless prince. The Shadow King. “I can always ask Kaoru-”
“Don’t!” Tamaki begged. There was a distinct note of pleading in his voice.
“Kaoru doesn’t have a senior role in the international company he’s heir to,” Kyoya pointed out, which was perhaps unfair, but nonetheless true. Kyoya wasn’t actually sure what Kaoru was doing at the moment. More academic and thoughtful than his brother, Kyoya knew he’d toyed with the idea of eschewing his mother’s legacy in fashion and pursuing a career in architecture instead, but Haruhi had been very strict about Kyoya relinquishing his surveillance on all of the Host Club’s former members, and Kaoru always spoke about his university work in the vaguest of terms. He hadn’t given up quite the same amount of control when it came to, say, keeping an eye on Haruhi and her relatives, but that was unrelated to the Host Club and therefore not covered by the scope of her demands.
“It was only a teeny-tiny meeting,” Tamaki promised. Kyoya didn’t entirely believe him, but he wasn’t Tamaki’s keeper, so he pushed his glasses up and ignored the urge to light another cigarette to calm his nerves. “Hardly even relevant to the merger.”
Kyoya nearly burst a blood vessel. He knew about the merger between the Suoh Corporation and their second-biggest competitor, because of course he did, but he hadn’t realised that Tamaki was being let anywhere near it. “Tamaki-”
“It’s fine!” Tamaki said hurriedly. “Go on. Let me be your sage guru, your dispenser of advice, your shoulder to lean on…”
Next time Kyoya caught wind of an attempt to hurt the Suoh family business, he was just going to let it happen.
“I think I’m going to marry Haruhi,” he blurted out, cutting off Tamaki’s combination of preening and encouragement.
“Oh!” It was a cry of equal parts surprise and delight. Kyoya determinedly blocked out every recollection of Hikaru’s stupid throuple jokes from his mind. “Did you buy a ring? She doesn’t like flashy jewellery, you know. It has to be subtle, so as not to offend her delicate commoner sensibilities.”
Kyoya did know that, actually. He knew it better than Tamaki did, at least. “That’s not quite what I mean.”
Tamaki breathed down the line. “What do you mean, then?” Kyoya could practically hear his frown.
Kyoya told him, hurried and low because he didn’t trust the soundproofing of the balcony door, about the meeting between his teen self and his older self, about the declaration of his future wife’s hatred for smoking, about the fact that he hadn’t travelled for the longest stretch he could remember.
“Do you... want to marry her?” Tamaki asked, when all was said and done and Kyoya was watching the rest of Karuizawa come to life below him.
“I don’t know,” Kyoya said. He glanced over his shoulder. Through the glass balcony door, he could see that Haruhi had stirred in her sleep. She was wearing one of his Ouran University shirts, and it had ridden up, exposing a stretch of her ivory midriff. “I think so.”
“Then I don’t see what the problem is,” Tamaki said, gentle, and Kyoya hung up with a soft click.
projectio! time flows on, both present and past
He’d stopped travelling for good, now. It’d been years since his last jump forward, and he’d stopped expecting it, stopped fearing every wave of dizziness or feeling of nausea. A hangover was a hangover, not a portent. The little black book with all the details of his leaps into years unknown was locked away, untouched.
The problem now, if it could be called that, was that his teen and preteen self seemed to travel to this Kyoya near-exclusively. He spent the best part of half an hour every week locked into a confrontation with an angry child, one who he slowly watched grow from eight years old to a stubborn fourteen, the imperious jut of his chin getting worse every time. Sometimes Kyoya thought about smacking him.
“I think you should do it,” Haruhi had said when he’d said this to her at dinner, once. There’d been a wry note in her voice, and she’d spun her engagement ring round and round on her finger as she talked. “You needed a slap or two when I first met you.”
He’d pretended not to be impressed, but now that he had to deal with his former self, he was inclined to agree with her.
They were on their way home from a charity gala when she said it, not quite looking at him.
“Do you ever think,” she began, hesitant, “that he only comes to places he considers safe?”
Kyoya didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. They’d taken to referring to past-Kyoya in the third person; he was so different from the man that Kyoya had become that it seemed incongruous to talk as if Kyoya was still him .
“Safe?” he echoed.
“Safe,” she doubled down. She was fretting her engagement ring again, her nervous tic, and Kyoya leaned over in the back of the car to still her hands. At eighteen, she would’ve launched into a lecture about how what she was doing with her hands was none of his business. At twenty-four, she only sighed and laced her fingers in his. At some point, she’d shed her defensive outer layer - or she had in front of him, at least.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Kyoya said. She wasn’t the only one who’d gotten better at being vulnerable.
Haruhi’s eyes flickered from their driver back to Kyoya.
“The glass is soundproof,” he reminded her.
Her expression remained unimpressed.
“Haruhi,” he prompted, squeezing her hand.
“Emotionally safe,” she clarified at last, letting her head hit the back of her seat, showing the smooth white column of her throat. “Less turbulent. Without all the pressure.”
“Perhaps,” Kyoya allowed, and she nodded. The subject dropped, the silence between them comfortable and knowing.
ruby red is the first, and also the last
Kyoya knew how this one went.
He’d booked the day off especially; Haruhi had raised her eyebrows at that, made a brief remark about how he had the strangest priorities before she kissed him goodbye. She had trial prep today, which meant she couldn’t afford to take a break to catch up with the sixteen-year-old version of her husband.
“Probably for the best,” she’d mused on her way out. She resolutely refused to let any of the staff drive her to work, so she’d made the concession of allowing Tachibana to give her car a security sweep every morning. It’d been one of their more unpleasant arguments, Kyoya recalled. “I thought you were the worst of them, when you were that age.”
Kyoya had bit back his surprise at that. “Not Tamaki?”
“He was the most annoying,” she’d conceded, giving it some thought. “But you were by far the most morally corrupt. Tamaki, meanwhile, always had the best intentions. You did clean up your act a little, though,” she’d added cheerily. “Say hi to your past self for me.”
And she’d left him there, standing in the hall like she hadn’t just insulted him within an inch of his life. Some things, Kyoya thought, never changed.
It was a conversation that Kyoya knew well; as he spoke, and watched his angry, irritated, sixteen-year-old self react, it was if he was watching the final moments of a particularly tragic play. When it had become clear that Kyoya wouldn’t be bending the laws of space and time anymore, he’d cracked his little black book open and - with Haruhi’s help - constructed a timeline of every crossover between what was now the past and what had become the future. This was the final point on that timeline. Every other visit had already happened, if not to his past self, then to the man that Kyoya had eventually become.
Haruhi, so analytical and deft at essay-writing, liked to ruminate on the spiritual implications. Kyoya, a man of profit and calculation, was just pleased that years of interruption were finally drawing to a close.
“Go fuck yourself,” his sixteen-year-old self hissed, and Kyoya knew that he’d been trying for angry at the time, but now all he could see was envy. Longing, for a future he was yet to be a part of.
When Kyoya closed the door to his study behind him, he knew he was also closing a door on part of his life.
“You’re back early,” he said to Haruhi, who was trailing down the corridor, looking tired. It was early evening, but Haruhi had a bad habit of staying after hours during trial prep, and Kyoya would be a hypocrite if he called her out on it. “Prep went well?”
“Terrible,” she shook her head, pulling the pins out of the chignon that she put her hair up into for work. “I think I’m coming down with something; I can’t stop feeling nauseous. Ishikawa told me not to bother hanging around,” she sighed, and then frowned. “Kyoya, I can smell it on you. I thought you quit?”
“Special occasion,” he said. “He said hello.”
“Like hell he did,” she snorted, and reached up to kiss Kyoya on the cheek. She did feel clammy; he’d have to fight with her over seeing a doctor in the morning. “I’m almost sorry I missed him, come to think of it. He was so much easier to rile up than you are.”
Kyoya thought of the boy he had once been. So defensive, so callous.
“Do you miss him?” he asked his wife. Haruhi drew away, reached up to touch his cheek.
“No,” she decided. “I much prefer you .”
Kyoya swallowed.
“Yes,” he said. “Me too.”