Work Text:
Haruhi understands style.
She walked in the doors of Ouran in a misshapen sweater, oblivious to her own face in the mirror, and walked out dressed in impeccably tailored Hitachiin menswear (a gift, one she really tried not to accept), and somewhere in the middle she must have learned something about style. Because she understands it, more and more with each passing day - and more importantly, she understands how to manipulate it. She’s mastered the subtleties of gender, the art of playing with perception, the way the slightest hint can prompt a man to shake her hand firmly on their first meeting and lean in to kiss her knuckles on the second.
Around the house, when it’s the five of them and no prying eyes and nobody to sway or fool, she wears loose tunics and old jeans and headbands to keep her hair from falling in her eyes. But her closet is an arsenal - evening gowns that turn more heads for their elegance than for hers, suits of every cut and shape and color, silk ties hanging in neat rows next to silk scarves, skirts that reveal and skirts that hide, trousers that cling and trousers that just hang off her hips. An earring here, a swipe of lipstick there, one quirk of her eyebrow, and she could be anybody or anything. Some days she’s nothing, a carefully neutral amalgamation of traits; and every puzzled stare just makes her smirk a little bigger, straightening her shoulders and meeting their eyes and daring them to take a guess.
Sometimes they forget. Sometimes Tamaki leans in low, a hand on the small of her back, and almost causes an international incident. Sometimes Hikaru can’t quite detect her intentions, talks too quickly and uses the wrong pronouns, and she can feel the illusion falling flat around her feet. They have the way they interact at home, and the way they interact for the world, but sometimes things get just a little blurry - and Haruhi knows, knows in a way that she can’t quite touch, that she’s at the center of this blur. She’s where everything blurs, and her boys blur out around her, and the five of them are a tangle of limbs and expensive fabrics and bright, bright eyes that nobody can ever quite pin down and study.
It wasn’t like this in high school. They used to tiptoe around each other, eyes hard on each other’s backs, trying to define, trying to categorize, trying to predict. But with time and experience and a little experimenting they started to realize that they weren’t predictable, that they never could be - and then, only then, did they really start to understand each other.
“You work out every morning,” Hikaru whined once, long fingers sleepily wrapping around her wrist as she tried to slip out from between the twins. ”What’s so urgent? Come back to bed.”
Haruhi can’t. She would, if she could - she would spend every morning she could curled up soft in bed, breathing in the scent of sheets clinging to the memories of all of them. But she pulls her wrist away and pulls a discarded t-shirt over her head as she walks away from the bed, because every moment lying prone feels like another moment closer to change. She can feel her hips widening, finally curving into the shape that pretty girls dream of possessing. She can feel her breasts pulling at the buttons of her favorite suit. She isn’t sixteen anymore, hasn’t been for years - and every moment spent replacing softness with wiry muscle is one more moment she can spend without anything having to change.
It’s all so tenuous sometimes, the understanding without defining, the blurred-up world in which she lives, the place where she has puzzled and dreamed and loved for longer than she really wants to admit. It could crack and come falling on their heads the moment she looks unmistakably like a woman. It could fall apart at any time, with every kiss Hikaru and Kaoru share, with every time Kyoya stares dark and electric at Tamaki’s face, with every minute they spend as a unit in the public eye.
Ambiguity is a luxury, a careful construct, and part of Haruhi feels like maybe it can’t last forever. But then, it’s lasted this long. Hasn’t it?
So she runs another mile, lifts another weight, then washes her hair and pulls on a blazer - and she steps out, secure in nothing but the illusions on her back and the arms around her waist.