Chapter Text
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“So, that’s the plan. What do you think?”
Hikaru checks his watch. It’s flashy even for him; an obnoxiously bejewelled gold Rolex that glimmers under the disco ball rotating over his head. He thinks it matches the two party hats he’s wearing, as if they were devil horns. It’s fifteen minutes until midnight, according to the anachronistic hands on his watch face. Twenty minutes ago, Kaoru had popped his hat on Hikaru’s head and scurried off to some secluded corner of the function room with Kyoya, giggling breathlessly. Hikaru doesn’t want to go find them. Partly because he feels his brother has earned a first New Year’s kiss with his toy of choice, and partly because he’s starting to think maybe he should start knocking before following Kaoru into rooms.
Which is bullshit, FYI. Maybe Kyoya should stop pawing his brother like a coyote and keep it in his pants for ten minutes.
As it stands, Hikaru has three options. Go find his brother and at least ring in the New Year in his vicinity, as he has done for the previous 22 years. Alternatively, he could find Haruhi and Tamaki, who have already enjoyed enough private New Year’s kisses over the years and owe him at least one year of conciliatory entertainment.
Alternatively again, he could keep talking to whoever the hell this schmuck is.
“How did you get in our house?” Hikaru drawls, resting his chin in his hand.
Whatshisface, Cowboy VonHamburger, ignores the question and keeps prattling on about horses and Kyoya and the prospects of Kyoya on a horse, which admittedly sounds funny as hell. Thinking about firing the door staff, Hikaru leans back and fixes his stare on the ceiling as he disengages.
The disco ball had been a great purchase. Kudos, mother dearest. Hikaru never had a problem with the woman and her exquisite taste and anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely mistaken. The New Year’s party is always a hit and increasingly more fun the less of mother dearest’s friends show up and kill the vibe. Or gatecrashers.
“So, I was saying to Bucky– Bucky, buddy, you have got to stop kicking our customers. Our patients, if you will. And it got me thinking. What if ole Buckaroo is just deficient in something too? So, I loaded up enough vitamin A to kill a much larger animal and–”
“Excuse me.”
Yankee Doodle turns around as Hikaru looks around him, following the voice.
Nanako stands a foot or so away, waggling her fingers effortlessly. Her hair is tied back in a styled ponytail, fluttering down her back with the loose strands framing her temples on either side. She’s wearing a glittering eye shadow that Hikaru hasn’t seen her wear before, that seems to contrast her usual older, professional style. The sequin skirt she wears is also different enough to draw his attention, like it draws the reflected light from the disco ball overhead.
Hikaru had invited her to the party, had assumed she wouldn’t come, and then had caught glimpses of her like a mirage across the room several times throughout the night. It’s salve to his ego that she still wants to hang out with him, even when their scheme is over.
Not that she’s been hanging out with him tonight, but it’s the idea that counts. It’s the idea that makes something swell in the core of his chest.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” she says, uncharacteristically demure as she gently touches her hand to Woodchuck McDouchecanoe’s upper arm. “The bartender over there told me that the Yomiuri Giants have the Yankees's winning streak beaten this season. Is that true?"
Like a moth to a flame, several emotions pass over Uncle Sam's face before he stands up, sputters a few things, and then faux-politely tells them that he'll be right back before racing over to the bartender to embroil him in an undoubtedly enlightening argument about baseball fixtures. Once he's out of sight, Nanako smirks, fixes her skirt, and takes his seat.
“I thought he’d never get lost,” Hikaru gripes, leaning back in his chair as the sight of Ronald McDonald’s disappearing back allows relief back into his system.
“The word is ‘thanks,’” Nanako corrects. A nail taps carefully where it rests on the crook of her elbow.
He sits back up. “Thanks.”
She raises a brow. “I’m kidding.”
“I know,” he lies.
The thing about Nanako perhaps dressing younger than she usually has is that it just serves to make Hikaru feel younger by comparison. Nanako dressing appropriately for a college house party– which, this effectively has been for some years but is rapidly ageing out of– simply makes Hikaru feel like he’s transported back to high school and he’s stumbled in here somehow. When he’s not counting sequins on her skirt, he loathes to think of how she could wear some childish pinafore ensemble and send him careening back into sharing a womb.
He shifts. When she looks away, he rips off one of the party hats and throws it away. Then, he adjusts the remaining one so it sits more maturely on his head.
If she notices, she doesn't comment when she looks back, her long ponytail swishing. "It can't have been that bad," she muses, leaning forward.
"What?"
"The conversation. I came over here to save you and now that I'm talking to you, you look just as glum. I'm offended."
Hikaru prickles. "I'm not glum," he argues.
"You look like I spat in your champagne," she says. She gestures with her glass towards his, which he has left balanced on the side table.
"It's lemonade," he argues, now just for the sake of arguing. He realises this and closes his mouth, but she smirks like he's fallen into some petulant trap and it makes his face burn.
"I know what your problem is," she says, and her voice takes a teasing lilt that makes his face burn harder despite himself.
It's kind of infuriating. He has no idea what she's going to say and he's pre-emptively embarrassed about it. Hikaru has never considered himself much of an open book. Kaoru can read him because they practically share a consciousness or whatever, and Haruhi can read him because she's weird or special or something. But otherwise, he's more than used to having a facade, a surface level array of personality attributes that women mistake for the entire picture. He's pre-emptively embarrassed about something she doesn't even know. After all, he doesn't even really know why he feels weird and irritable. How could she?
She smirks, and bats her lashes. "You're jealous your baby brother is getting laid and you're not," she says simply.
Case in point! That is so not what's wrong with him!
He sputters. "He's not my baby anything," he eventually gets out, as if that point of contention was the most pressing, "We're twins."
Undeterred, she tips her head, her ponytail falling to her other shoulder. "You're older though, right?"
"How do you know that? Did Kyoya tell you that?"
Nanako's lips thin into an expression that's too sympathetic to be a smirk and too insincere to do any good. "No, you can just definitely tell."
Somehow, Hikaru doesn't think it's because he's so mature for his age. Especially the way he can still see himself glowering in his reflection in her glass as she tips it back against her lips, his hands fisted by his side like a petulant toddler. He forces himself to un-ball them, flexing his fingers by his hips.
"You're kind of neurotic," she clarifies, and there go his fingers again, balling up into fists. "Takashi-kun doesn't act this way about his little brother."
"That's different," Hikaru retorts.
"I'm an only child, what would I know," she muses.
She drains the last of her champagne, letting the topic of conversation lull to a natural close. She's given him an out, Hikaru realises. He just has to repress his defensive urge to make her see his side. After all, there's no real way to do that without appearing even more neurotic. He knows from experience that there's no better way to make it clear that he couldn't care less than perfecting the unbothered affect.
"It's literally not like that," he says instead, all flustered and hot-tempered as it comes out in a rush. Holding it in for all of a single minute makes everything rush out, like air out of a quickly deflating balloon. "I don't care that they're together. I'm happy."
Nanako reaches for another champagne flute off a passing waiter.
"You know that," Hikaru continues, strained. "We literally helped them get together. I want Kaoru to be happy."
"I know," Nanako says. She sounds amused, which is worse somehow.
"It's just weird!" he says. He withers to a stop, the balloon landing on the ground like a shitty, overblown piece of plastic.
Nanako stares at him, spinning her champagne flute so the liquid moves this way and that, bubbling just on the surface. Hikaru doesn't know why he's letting her wind him up. As previously stated, she doesn't get it. Nobody gets it. He's a mature adult, a grown man, and he is utterly, entirely, completely happy for Kaoru! This is the best outcome imaginable for his brother and Kaoru deserves it, inside and out. Hikaru did a lot of rather unsavoury and perhaps immoral things to make sure his brother got what he wanted, and he'd do it again in a heartbeat. He'd do more. He'd do worse. Sometimes, he still has nightmares where Kaoru gets hurt again and he has to do something drastic to make everything right, like a Liam Neeson movie.
And Kyoya is like, also one of his best friends. So he guesses he's happy that he's happy too or whatever.
It's just weird. It's weird in a way Nanako cannot possibly understand. She doesn't have a brother. She doesn't have a twin. Not that other people with brothers or twins seem to get it either. Something about Mei's blasé, disconnected relationship with her sister gives Hikaru the heebie jeebies, makes him want to hold Kaoru's hand on the drive home again after hanging out with her and hearing about some stupid, pointless squabble she's having. Nobody gets it.
Hikaru, honestly, doesn't really get this one himself.
It doesn't make sense, logically. Kaoru is in love and he's happy and he's a full grown man too! If he wants to do whatever with Kyoya morning, noon, and night– well, Hikaru just tries not to walk in on it. After all, how many times over the last few years has he joked that if Kyoya and Kaoru just– and he used to say it easily, and now it just feels weird weird weird to think– they'd be way more normal?
Maybe he just doesn't want to have to knock. He used to just walk right in.
"I get it," Nanako says, a little softer. She leans forward, putting her champagne glass next to Hikaru's on the side table, and rests her chin in her hand.
He scoffs, more at himself for losing his cool than her. "No, you don't."
"No, I do." She tips her head and he has to look away as she surveys him, feeling the skin on his face grow prickly. "Kyoya's your friend too."
Hikaru blinks. Then he turns and looks at her, surprised. "Yeah," he says, swallowing.
"He was your friend, and now he's dating your twin brother," she continues, coaxingly.
Nodding, Hikaru leans in. "And it's weird."
"Of course it's weird." She shrugs. "Anyone would find that weird. And Kaoru is your twin brother, and he's dating your friend. I'd feel weird about it too."
Hikaru's chest feels tight and his mouth feels dry. It is weird. It's weird and that's fine. "He's my twin brother," he echoes.
Nanako smiles. "That must be very hard for you."
Her eyes are really dark. Hikaru doesn't usually pay much attention to people's eyes. He knows the amber toned hazel of his own only because he's spent most of his life looking at Kaoru and losing staring contests when they were well and truly bored. Tamaki has freakish blue eyes, like an ocean or a badly bred designer dog. Haruhi's brown eyes feel too big for her head, like she's a tanuki or a mouse or one of those European cows with the insane eyelashes. Kyoya probably has some behind his glasses– or maybe when you take them off, there's just eyes painted on to the glass and there's just hollows where his eyes should be.
Nanako's eyes though are brown, but such a dark brown that they border on black. In this lighting, it's hard to even tell where her irises stop and her pupils begin; the way the light reflects off the disco ball and hits her eyes makes the borders all blurry. Her eyelashes are long too, flicking up over her swooping eyeliner and her glittered eyeshadow, like if the music was turned down he'd be able to hear them brush off her cheek with every blink.
He's trying so hard not to look down her top. He'd already moved closer before he'd realised that doing so would put him in this position where it would be worryingly easy to look down. He does not look down. He does not look down. She has really nice eyes and her smile is reaching them as they crinkle up at the corners–
"I mean, Kyoya knows what you look like naked."
It's like she's dropped a bucket of ice water over him. He stands so quickly, his blood rushing in his veins, that the chair he was sitting on screeches back and teeters, catching the concerned attention of a couple of people nearby.
She casually retrieves her champagne flute. "I mean, that's how it works, I assume," she says, taking a sip.
She's laughing at him. Maybe not physically, but definitely on the inside! His face is burning so much it's hard to sputter anything out except, "I wasn't thinking about that!"
"Well," she says, grimacing, "you are now."
Hikaru squeezes his eyes shut. No, actually, he's not going to think about that! He's not going to think about all the horrible, exploitative things Kyoya could have put in the Host Club magazine with this kind of knowledge. He's not going to think about anything that this might imply whatsoever. In fact, he's going to make good on his years of meditation training with Mori and repress all of these negative feelings; let them slide right off him like water cascading down the face of a mountain. It would be really good to have a waterfall or a hot spring or even a shower right now to seal the deal, but he has a great imagination. He should put it to use for something positive.
"Are you still with me," Nanako asks, because he's not blocking his ears. It raises his hackles a little again. His soggy, waterfall-doused, metaphorical hackles.
"No, I'm under a waterfall," he says, calmly, with his teeth definitely not gritted.
She's silent for a moment longer, but there's a shifting noise as she crosses her legs the other way and Hikaru can tell she's smiling at him even though he's under a waterfall and is being totally fucking serene right now. "Has anyone told you lately that you need to get laid?" she asks.
He cracks an eye open. "No."
She rests her head on her hand, pursing her lips. "I mean, it's that or you see a shrink."
"I already do therapy," Hikaru says. By which he means he's read seven anger management books and three relationship self-help guides over the last six years, and has allowed Kaoru to psychoanalyse him about their mother.
Her eyes narrow. They're so dark but they're glimmering, shrewd like a cat now. Her eyeliner is almost straightening as she picks him apart. With one finger, she gestures at him to sit back down and he drops back down into the chair with a thud. Then, she curves the same finger towards herself and Hikaru thinks it would have been easier to move his chair closer before sitting down but he does so anyway, lifting it behind himself and shuffling forward awkwardly. Their knees touch and he swallows, trying to shift his limbs somewhere out of the way.
"Are you nervous?" she asks.
Hikaru doesn't get nervous usually. Not talking to girls, at least. Since he got his first love letter, hand delivered to Kaoru by mistake, aged eleven, he hasn't lost much sleep over talking to girls. He knows now that it's misogynistic to say so, but he can't help but still think from experience that it's rather formulaic. Girls ask him surface level questions he always knows how to answer or brush off, and then giggle when he answers. The only difference is now that he can't circumvent his brusque responses by falling into the act with Kaoru.
(He found out that does not work with girls in semi-private school in Boston, nor did it give him much luck in public university.)
Girls don't make him nervous. They make him occasionally uncomfortable, sometimes agitated, or they make him feel nothing at all. Sometimes, girls are friendly but not giggly and touchy and he can be friends with those girls. And sometimes girls are standoffish or disinterested and he can win them over. After all, women are not a hivemind! But when it all comes down to it and some girl tells him that she likes him, or asks if he'll take her to dinner, or tells him she wants to see him again, there's always some part of him asking– why? you don't even know me.
Sometimes Hikaru thinks he had one chance and he blew it. And he can be happy about that, and happy everyone else is happy, and know everything happened as it should– and still feel a little bummed about it.
"No," he lies. Girls don't make him nervous. Nanako makes him nervous, but that's a separate issue. The problem with Nanako is that he doesn't even know her that well, but he wants to more than what would be considered strictly cool to want.
"You know, Americans aren't that different," she says. "I mean, culturally speaking, yes, but not so much that you need to be nervous."
American girls aren't that different. Hikaru knows that. His class is small and mostly self-directed and there's only about four girls in it, but he has spoken to American girls before. Between them and his former Ouran classmates, the only real difference has been how they skip the love letters step before asking him out, and their lack of propensity towards incest fetishism.
"Have you been going out?" she asks.
He has a regular coffee shop. The guys in his course asked him to their flat share a few times to play some nerdy card game that set off his competitive streak. Tamaki and Haruhi visited and he took them on a two day tour around New York City and felt so homesick he could have thrown up the night they left, if Kaoru hadn't come to sleep in his bed. Sometimes, Kaoru and him go to Whole Foods.
"Yes," he says.
Nanako doesn't look convinced for some reason. "Okay," she says. "You probably just need to get out more. Boost your confidence again. Why are you sitting here by yourself anyway?"
"It's Kaoru's first New Year with Kyoya," he answers, because duh? And what else is he supposed to do?
She rolls her eyes. Standing up, she turns and props herself up on the arm of Hikaru's chair. He feels himself stiffen, the heat from her arm almost touching his making his skin feel tingly. He shifts away, just to give her a bit more space as she settles.
Leaning in, she whispers covertly. "Okay, the clock strikes midnight in five minutes. Do you see any cute boys?"
"Uh." He swallows. "I'm not, uh."
If he got offended every time a girl thought he was gay, he'd have made the Host Club far less money and he'd probably lose at least some of his aesthetic appeal. Hell, he usually doesn't even bother correcting people. But it feels imperative that he sets the record straight this time.
Nanako simply waves him off. "For me then. And I'll find a cute girl for you." Hikaru stares up at her as she scours the crowd a moment before pointing. "Her."
"Engaged."
"Okay. Her?"
"Also engaged."
"Her?"
"Married last year."
"She can't be older than twenty," Nanako says, with a tinge of revulsion. "I reckon you can still make her see sense."
Hikaru grimaces. "I wouldn't do that."
"How noble." She sighs, looking out into the crowd again. "I think we're running out of time."
It's three minutes to midnight, but Hikaru feels it deeper than that. He knows Nanako doesn't feel it, would rather die than feel it, would think he's utterly ridiculous for feeling it– but he does. He thinks about his former classmates, married off or engaged to each other and often rather content about it. He thinks about how more than half of his own friend group fell in love in high school. He thinks about the humungous, expensive, stupidly perfect rock on Kaoru's left ring finger. And he thinks maybe it's never going to be easy again. He wasted years of his life holding everyone outside of his circle in utter contempt, years more being paranoid that nobody would ever understand him, and years more falling in love exactly once. Most people, from his limited pool of information, fall in love exactly once.
Nanako flicks his forehead. He draws back, rubbing the spot accusingly. She's giving him a look that's utterly inscrutable to him.
"You need to get out more," she repeats. "I moved to Spain the first chance I got and I know I made it look easy, but it really wasn't. It's different. It's a good different, and it's not as different as you think– but it's different and it's hard. And you'll be miserable for the next year and a half if you don't deal with that."
Hikaru stops rubbing his head, pulling his hand away cautiously to look at her. "I'm not miserable," he says and he's not lying, not really, because New York is great and his course is cool and Kaoru is right across the hall. He's really happy, most of the time.
"Listen, if you need me to help you get out of your head, just call me. I'll never say no to a free trip to New York." She smirks, but it's more of a smile this time. Hikaru feels his own mouth twitch up at the corners to match. "Tell you what. I'll take you out to this place I know next time I'm there and I'll be your personal wing-woman." She presses her hand to her chest, facetiously dedicated. "You'll see for yourself then. You just need to dip your toe in the water. You don't have girl trouble here. You just need to see that New York is no different."
Some way through this discussion, Hikaru becomes thinly aware that perhaps Nanako has misjudged his relative success in attracting women as something perhaps more deliberate or acted upon. It would absolutely be embarrassing as hell to correct her, so he most certainly does not do that and just privately hopes it never comes up again.
"Okay," he says. "Sure, we can do that next time you visit."
She grins. She looks like she might say something else and Hikaru feels himself stop breathing in anticipation for it– but then the music cuts out and someone is chanting a hurried jumble of numbers, and Hikaru realises that he and Kaoru usually take the mic for the countdown. He goes to stand up, see if Kaoru has come back into the room or if he can spy a corner he and Kyoya are hidden away in; and if not, find where the rest of his friends are. But before he can, Nanako leans closer to him and takes his face in the cup of one hand and makes him look back at her.
It happens before Hikaru can register her hand touching his shoulder or her breath on his face. She kisses him. Her lips are on his and everything else falls out of orbit. All the voices around him muffle in static and his ears ring and then burn. Her lips are soft but the gloss leaves a coating that rubs off on his own lips as she moves her mouth and–
Her tongue darts just so between his parted lips and he feels his heart rate spike so dangerously that he thinks it might explode in his ribcage, so distractingly that he doesn't notice the elastic growing tight around his chin until she snaps his hat back to his head and brings him plummeting back down to earth.
"Ow!" he says, wrenching back.
"Happy New Year," Nanako says. Her lipstick is smudged and Hikaru knows that it's smudged on his own mouth and he can't breathe all over again. "Call me if you need me."
She straightens, smooths down the front of her skirt, and winks. Then, she moves back into the crowd. Hikaru watches until the bob of her ponytail disappears between friends and lovers and annual reunions, before slumping back into his chair and trying to catch his breath.
He touches his mouth, feeling his face burn all over again. Turns out, it's as easy as that.
Then he goes to find Kaoru.
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