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The night before graduation, the twins luxuriate in the rare honour of actually being invited into the Fujioka household; with it comes not having to pound down the front door, and eternal, inexorable bragging rights in front of Tamaki. Ranka-san is at work, but left them a bottle of sake that the twins eventually coax and cajole Haruhi into cracking open with far less effort than either of them expected - but then it is a special occasion. Together, they drink it while flipping through their Ouran yearbooks and scribbling inside jokes in the margins until, eventually, Haruhi’s cheeks glow cherry red with rice wine and she falls asleep on Hikaru’s shoulder. Kaoru draws a smiley face on her left cheek, and Hikaru counters it with a frown on her right.
Kaoru flips through Haruhi’s limited list of TV channels while Hikaru half-drags, half-carries her to bed. He settles for BBC World News, his mouth following the shape of every English word with a half-second delay: emergency tastes like sour milk, and crisis is unseasoned motsu , intestine taste unfettered and foul. The news stories blend into each other, foreign faces turning his brain into mush. Kaoru has always liked telling stories, but he never can stick the ending.
“She’s heavier than she looks,” Hikaru announced his re-entry into the main room with a classical lack of tact. His hair is still ash-brown, but his roots bleed auburn; Kaoru can almost imagine what it would be like to step forward and allow himself to be absorbed, picking up Hikaru’s bad habits and grudges as he goes. “We’ve been feeding her too much fancy tuna.”
“Mhmm,” Kaoru hums noncommittally. His lips trace unprecedented financial crash and he doesn’t feel a thing. He feels rather than sees Hikaru’s responding frown.
“We can skip,” Hikaru suggests. Kaoru feels traitorously surprised at how quickly his brother grasps onto his train of thought. “There’ll be other graduations. Y'know, college.”
“It’s not that,” Kaoru says; the saying goodbye isn’t the problem. It’s the actual goodbye itself, the act of departure. His high school years have been a lot like hurtling up a cliff, and now the three of them are all about to take a step into the place where their feet will meet only with air. Sometimes it felt like running up the damn cliff was enough work in the first place. And now he has to build a bridge to what feels like nowhere. “I want to go.”
“No you don’t,” Hikaru says easily. He grabs the TV remote and turns the volume way down so that Kaoru can’t pretend not to hear him, and folds his arms bossily across his chest. The judgement sort of feels like damnation; it's not often that Hikaru is the reflective one.
“I want to go, but,” Kaoru amends, “I’m not going to like it.”
There is a part of Kaoru that is really fucking scared that he and Hikaru are going to regress into the people they once were - that, without Haruhi, there is nothing to keep Hikaru and Kaoru from morphing back into Hikaru-and-Kaoru. And that’s not fair, he knows. The solution to his initial lack of personhood was never to force somebody else to create it for him. But he’s enjoyed being
Kaoru
too much to ever want to so much as risk letting it go.
“I know,” Hikaru says, “but you’ve never been easy to please. Asshole.” He bumps Kaoru with his shoulder. “We got through a year of Host Club without Haruhi. Gotta cut through the crap to get to the good stuff.”
“I guess,” Kaoru half-smiles. He looks around the Fujioka’s sitting room, at the little remnants of Haruhi and the Host Club scattered around - the bookbag Kyoya bought her for her last birthday hung up neatly by the door, a photograph of her and the twins on the wall, the wonky tea set made by Tamaki in his first-year college pottery class safely stowed on one of the highest shelves. The room smells like sake and Haruhi, like three too-long too-short years. It is ridiculous, he knows, to assume that this will all disappear as soon as the clock strikes midnight - that the carriage will really turn back into a pumpkin without any of them noticing. “Do you really think it’ll get better from here?”
“Who even knows if we’re the ones who get to decide,” Hikaru grins, the glint of his smile the brightest thing in the darkening room. It’s funny; usually Kaoru is the one breaking the fourth wall. “But, hey. Why the hell not?”
He picks up his empty
sake
glass and raises an imaginary toast. Kaoru remembers Haruhi’s red mouth wrapped around a bottleneck, and laughs.