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"You look troubled. Are you still thinking about Haruhi?"
Tamaki arches his neck to look straight back, letting the heated rush to his face answer for him. Kyouya doesn't need words from him, anyhow; he has a bad habit of reading Tamaki's mind, which means that he usually knows the answer even before he asks the question.
After a moment, Tamaki rolls onto his stomach and props himself up to watch Kyouya's pen traverse his notebook for a while. Finally he says, "I didn't know she was a girl at first."
Kyouya smiles without looking up. "Yes, I know."
"No, no." Tamaki rests his weight on his elbows as his hands wave off Kyouya's facile response. He leaves them in the air, draping off his wrists, palms up as he elucidates, "I mean, even when I thought she was a boy, I really thought she was cute. I thought he was cute."
"So you said at the time," Kyouya observes, and something in his eyes when he glances at Tamaki makesTamaki think that Kyouya is winding him up—but Kyouya is fixed on his pages again before Tamaki can get a good enough look. "As I recall," Kyouya goes on conversationally, pushing his glasses up his nose, causing the sun to glint off one lens and then the other as he angles his head, "you were more than ready to service 'him' in your host capacity."
"Well, of course!" Indignation briefly furrows Tamaki's brow, and just as quickly smooths it out. "I am a consummate professional, after all," he declares with a proud upturn of his chin. "We all are; you wouldn't have done any differently. None of you would." Before Kyouya can offer comment, Tamaki turns over, still propped up, looking out over the immaculately manicured grounds. "But this was different," he goes on. "It was..." At a loss for words, he flops back onto the grass, shielding his eyes as he gazes up to seek meaningful shapes in the clouds.
"Unprofessional?" Kyouya suggests.
"Yes, that." Tamaki sighs. "And something else... Is it wrong, do you think? I mean, I know she's a girl. But if she truly had been a boy?"
"'Wrong'?" Kyouya repeats.
Tamaki can hear the arched brow in Kyouya's tone. "Wrong," he says, and then tries to clarify: "Disgusting. Am I—would it have been disgusting?"
"Do you think Honey and Mori are disgusting?"
Tamaki rolls without propping up to stare again at Kyouya. He has never been able to differentiate between Kyouya's sarcasm and sincerity, and so he has decided always to interpret Kyouya as sincere. One of these days, he believes, Kyouya will be. He almost thinks this is the day but he can't escape the feeling he's being played.
He braces himself on his forearms as he reasons it out. "I think they're friends," he says carefully, uncertainty creeping in at the edges as Kyouya meets his gaze unblinking. "And cousins. Even lacking the blood-bond, they have a covenant that goes back generations... They love each other, of course," he concludes, raising his hands so the fan of his fingers can confirm the surety of his logic, "but they aren't in love with each other."
His confidence falls at Kyouya's next words, however: "Is that what you really think?" Kyouya glances up but doesn't keep looking long enough to see Tamaki's face color again. "And then there are Kaoru and Hikaru," he goes on blithely, eyes traversing the page he's on. When Tamaki laughs, Kyouya shoots him that look accompanied by the arched brow and Tamaki stops mid-chuckle, mouth agape.
"You're having me on now," he says. Kyouya merely gives him a shrug, the one that can mean yes or no or both at the same time. "That's just an act," Tamaki says, "for the Club..."
"If that's what you choose to believe, My Lord."
At a loss for a comeback, Tamaki shuts his mouth after opening it and falls back to the grass in silence. He watches the clouds for some time but they stubbornly decline to form themselves into anything recognizable.
"Do you think it means anything?" he asks quietly after a while, uncharacteristically subdued by the formless, open sky. "About Haruhi, I mean?" His hands remain folded on his torso. "And me?"
There's no response from Kyouya. When Tamaki arches his head back on the grass to say that he's serious, that he wants to know, he sees that Kyouya has put down his book. As he watches, Kyouya removes his glasses, folding them neatly and tucking them into his breast pocket. Then he leans upside-down over Tamaki and touched his lips to Tamaki's. Tamaki opens his mouth to ask what Kyouya is doing, and finds himself full of Kyouya's breath and tongue.
Kyouya's fingers brush Tamaki's brow as he sits up, smoothing over the furrow, and Tamaki feels his skin ease. Kyouya's touch does nothing about the hot flush just beneath Tamaki's skin, however, and Tamaki lies quietly for long moments after, letting his blood return to normal.
Then he arches his neck to look upside-down at Kyouya again: "Seriously," he says. "What do you think?"
Kyouya only smiles. Tamaki knows he's thinking something; Kyouya is always thinking something. If only Tamaki could read his mind the way Kyouya can read Tamaki's. Maybe someday, Tamaki sighs to himself, gazing up into the sky.