True Love: Kyoya x Haruhi
Kyoya drabble because I should be cleaning my bathroom right now
What was true love, exactly?
Dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin. He could break it up into their chemical elements, divide each individual atom, and under a microscope could tell them apart. With his medical degree he could explain in detail what made love love, but he could never quite capture how it was formed.
What was true love, exactly?
A marketing gimmick he could sell. He had won awards in business school for his projects and pieces detailing how potent the use of attraction was to buyers. Love sells, no matter what you’re buying: you love an object enough to get it, or you love someone enough to get it for them. Either way, love put money in his pocket.
What was true love, exactly?
A concept Kyoya Ootori never fully grasped. Even more brilliant in his mid-thirties, he still looked at love at an arm’s length, squinting his eyes to study it rather than experience it.
But now he held the photograph in his hand, and the question confused him even more. When his young son had asked him the question earlier in the day, the first answer to pop into his head was that it was made of hard work. But as he looked at the picture, he wasn’t so sure.
Kyoya scanned the photo. He had seen it many times, gazed at it longingly, but something new spoke to him this time. He looked at her soft brown hair and the light in her brown eyes. Such a mysterious woman, a woman who had always challenged him and left him second-guessing everything he knew. The woman who had helped him come into his own, who had forced him to reconsider everything he thought he wanted. She probably knew what true love was.
She was a goddess, she was beauty, she was an imperfect woman who had tipped his world upside down with her wisdom and casual banter. She had snatched his heart before he even thought he had one. And she had infested a hole in his mind that, 17 years later, had never filled up.
Haruhi was at the same time everything he knew and could not understand. But he knew she was the answer to his question, a forbidden solution out of his reach.
His eyes shifted from Haruhi to the man standing beside her, her husband, his old best friend. Tamaki. They were so happy in that photo, and Kyoya wanted to believe they would reach out and take him and go back to high school and pick back up where it all started. Music Room 3. Before medical school, before business school, before he submitted to a loveless marriage his father had arranged. Before he realized Haruhi was the key to the question hanging over his mind.
Kyoya looked up to the woman standing in the doorway. She twisted the wedding band on her left hand, like it itched, like she felt something was wrong. His own ring felt heavy; it had since their wedding day.
She was a woman of merit, screened and approved by his father, and she provided him two heirs, all that she was required. But she couldn’t answer the question. She could never even begin to understand.
Kyoya nodded and watched as she walked away. As soon as she left he looked back at the photo, wondering if Haruhi and Tamaki even asked the question in high school, or if they just fell into it and discovered the answer without meaning to. In typical Tamaki fashion, they probably did. But Kyoya knew they had the answer. He wished he could have watched how they discovered it.
He set the picture down, giving one last glance to Haruhi. Printing the memories against the back of his eyelids, savoring the glimpse of love they so blatantly explained.
He wondered if he would ever feel the same.
