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sakon76I had a plotbunny today. Kind of a OHHC story as if it were set in a universe more like Koko wa Greenwood or Please Save My Earth. Or even Lady Killer. Um. A warning for twincest, and this is very drafty and probably not where the story will end up being broken, but it's bedtime and I wanted to post this tonight.
The twins wondered sometimes what would happen if they stopped acting and let people know that they really did sleep together. They'd never actually tell, of course, because it was one thing to be scandalous and quite another thing to have that kind of stigma attached to you. It was one of those brands that would never really go away, and it would end up with them seeing a psychologist to boot.
Hikaru and Kaoru didn't like psychologists. They didn't think they have psycholophobia (they also didn't think that was the right word, but it was the one they'd coined for themselves to use) so much as a healthy paranoia. They also believed that it wan't paranoia if they really were out to get you. They'd read everything they could get their hands on about multiple births and arranged to meet and talk with as many other twins and triplets and quadruplets as they could. They were more interested in the identicals like themselves, but they'd researched fraternal births as well. And thus far into their data collection, they were fairly sure their situation was unique.
The first time they saw a Venn diagram, it was like Buddha's own moment of enlightenment to them. There was Hikaru. There was Kaoru. Then there was that vast overlapping portion in which they really were the same person. Being together was easiest because that way neither of them had to try to explain away why they'd suddenly laughed at the joke some had just cracked three rooms over, where the other twin was.
Their parents knew, of course, and in their more compassionate moments the twins felt sorry for them, having given birth not just to twin hellions, but legitimate freaks of nature as well. They'd been overprotected from the moment their parents had figured it out when they were three, taking Kaoru into one room and Hikaru into another and quizzing them on a set of cards with colors and shapes. They hadn't known then that other people didn't see through their siblings' eyes, and they still didn't know what the conversation their parents had had that night had been about. But they remembered what their father had told them the next morning, the four of them in the twins' bedroom with the door shut and window shades closed: "You must never, ever let anyone know. It will make you different, and people don't like what's different."
They thought they'd grown up that day, catching onto the fear in their father's eyes, their mother's arms as she hugged them tight. They thought they'd been acting ever since.
My Brother, My Secret, Myself (part one)
by K. Stonham
prereleased June 6th, 2006
When they'd gotten out of kindergarten and started in on real school, the twins had realized that being freaks actually gave them an advantage of sorts. If Hikaru worked harder on the math and science and Kaoru worked harder on art and literature, they could each know more with less individual effort. Their grades were persistantly at the top of the class, scores deadlocked, tests identical. It amused them to have their teachers suspect they were cheating off one another and change desk arrangements for exams so they were in opposite corners. It didn't work. They were quite proud of themselves, actually, for sending three teachers to psychologists before they even got out of primary school.
"You're /proud/ of making your teachers need shrinks?" Haruhi asked them.
"Oh, poor soul," Kaoru said dramatically, "who does not know the joy of a challenge, of mischief achieved!"
"You know," she grated, "I think I read a book or two with characters like you two in it...."
"We know!" the twins said, grinning manically as they looked at her. "We read them too. All of them!"
She looked at them curiously, first Hikaru then Kaoru. "How do you do that?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"The unison thing. You always know what each other are going to do. Is that an act, or...?"
"It's a twin thing," they said dismissively.
"Besides, we don't always talk together," Hikaru said, leaning back and waving his hand.
"Even when you don't, you finish one another's sentences," Haruhi replied. She propped her chin on a fist. "Sometimes I wish I had a brother or sister. It'd be nice to be close to someone like that."
They thought sometimes that they might be able to tell Haruhi and she wouldn't stop liking them because they were different and in one another's minds all the time. She was the only one aside from their parents who could consistently tell them apart, after all, even when they sometimes woke up in the wrong body. There were the bodies that were Hikaru and Kaoru, and the two overlapping people within who were Hikaru and Kaoru and ever since they'd hit puberty, they'd been getting tangled up in one another's dreams and once in a while getting up in the morning and finding they were in the wrong body. After the first few panicked hours the first time, they'd decided to just go with the flow, and they always ended up switched back within a few days. Haruhi, they thought, might be able to accept that. But they didn't want to risk it. Hikaru liked her, and Kaoru did as well, though not quite in the same way, and until they were sure that she could accept that they were the same person as well as different people, they didn't want to risk it. So they kept her at arm's length too.
*
They'd once asked a nine-year-old girl how she knew which twin she was and which one was her sister. She'd thought about it for a minute, then answered "I'm always here, but sometimes she goes away." That answer had made the both of them feel very sad, though they didn't quite understand why.
"I'm not scared to die," Kaoru once said.
"I'm scared that you'll die," Hikaru had finished for him, understanding. They had no concept of being alone, not even the fact that they'd always been alone, isolated from everyone they met because they aren't us and won't understand.
*
Somehow, they'd never expected it to be Kyouya who called them on it first.
"Your hair's parted on the wrong side," he commented to them after the club had closed operations for the day. "Is there any reason why?"
The brothers looked at one another. They'd switched again the night before and were currently Hikaru-in-Kaoru and Kaoru-in-Hikaru, hair parts going as always with bodies not souls because they were mirrors and their natural parts fell that way. "How can you tell?" they asked, looking back at the Vice-President.
"I hadn't noticed it before Haruhi pointed it out, but you do have some distinct mannerisms," Kyouya replied, tallying sums in his ever-present laptop. "Once you know what to look for, you're actually fairly different."
"What mannerisms?" they demanded.
"Hikaru drums his fingers when he's bored. Kaoru just daydreams," Kyouya listed implacably, continuing to type. "There are others, of course. But when someone watches the two of you, the hair parts match the person eighty-five percent of the time. It's the other fifteen percent that interests me."
Hikaru and Kaoru looked at one another and sat down at the table. The rest of the host club ignored them, being inveigled by Hunny into eating cake with him.
"What would your guess be?" Kaoru asked, resting his elbows on the tabletop and lacing his fingers together.
Kyouya stopped typing and looked up at the two of them. "After consideration, I don't know."
"Explain," Hikaru requested, posture and positioning identical to his brother's.
"Ordinarily I would say you switch on a whim," Kyouya answered. "That doesn't explain how the two of you have been getting absolutely identical test scores your entire lives, or how you fleece Tamaki at card games."
"So what alternate conclusions might you make?" Hikaru asked softly. They were treading on dangerous ground and they knew it, but he wanted to go just one step further.
"I can postulate that the two of you do share some kind of psychic link," the rational shadow king replied. "It's not unheard of for identical twins."
"We know," they said together.
"We've done rather a lot of research on twins," Kaoru expanded. "Being rather intimate with the subject, as it were."
"You're not ordinary, are you?" Kyouya inquired softly. "Not even for psychic twins."
"What would you do if we said 'yes'?" they asked together. He was one, they were two... and even the reach of the Ootori family could only extend so far if they had to run.
They weren't expecting him to smile. "Nothing. Except continue to avoid playing cards with you."
"Not subject us to tests, to charts and graphs and needles and doctors?" asked Hikaru.
"Not turn us over to the government or try to make us into some kind of psychic espionage force?" asked Kaoru.
"Have you ever considered," Kyouya asked in reply, fingers returning to his keyboard, "that the two of you may read too much manga?"
They looked at one another. They liked Kyouya, respected him even. "I'm always me," Kaoru said softly, "and Hikaru is always Hikaru."
"But even when we're apart, we're always together," Hikaru said quietly. It was more than they'd ever told anyone.
"Thank you for telling me," Kyouya said. He still hadn't started typing again. "I will keep the information in confidence."
"Sometimes when we wake up, we're each other," Hikaru continued boldly, testing limits.
Kyouya's eyes widened slightly. "That must be... confusing."
"Not really," Kaoru replied. "Not anymore."
"How can you tell when you've switched?" Kyouya asked, then caught himself. "The hair parts. Of course."
They nodded together. "We haven't found anyone else like us yet."
"But we haven't met all the twins in the world yet either."
*
It was strange and somehow frightening to have someone know their secret. They slept curled around one another that night, trying not to worry. If Kyouya did anything, they could run. They could lie through their teeth (they were good at that). They could take revenge. Plots ranging from tossing his beloved laptop into a fountain to shipping him to South America in a crate filled with wood ants danced through their minds until they finally fell asleep. The last, and best, possibility involved social humiliation on a grand scale, but figuring out just what would kill Kyouya's pride was tricky. They resolved to work on the problem in the morning, and woke up switched back.
*
That Kyouya had been the first person to figure it out, the twins could understand. He was methodical, rational, and apparently his perceptiveness might give Haruhi's a run for the money. That worked out, they would have expected Haruhi to figure things out next.
Not Tamaki.
"You know," he told them privately over tea some weeks later, "I'd always wondered where you came up with the idea for your 'brotherly love' act. It is brilliant, after all, and the ladies seem to adore it." His tone was solemn, his head tilted slightly to the right. "I honestly can't believe that it took me so long to realize that before one can offer love to the ladies, one must love oneself first."
His sentence was obscure enough that it took them a moment to work through the implications. And it was generous of their Lord to phrase it in such a way that they could laugh it off. He was that way, after all, when he wasn't being a total flake. The brothers exchanged a glance.
"Milord, have you been talking with Kyouya-sempai?" Hikaru asked, fingers tight on the handle of his teacup.
"Kyouya? Yes. But not about this. Why?" Tamaki was guileless, and unlike themselves, he didn't fake such things. He was like Audrey Hepburn's character in that movie they'd watched, a phoney but a real phoney because he honestly believed what he said and did. It was the part of his charm that the host club's customers never understood. It was the part that the other club members loved the most.
"Have you told anyone?" Kaoru asked quietly, wanting to be angry, to be hurt. When had they started slipping up so that two people had pegged them in one month?
"Told anyone? No." Tamaki toyed with the gold-painted handle of his own teacup. "It didn't seem like something you'd want anyone to know. To be honest, I'm surprised you told Kyouya."
"We didn't," they said together, then sighed and separated themselves again.
Tamaki's eyes were wide. "He figured it out himself?"
"We were surprised too," Hikaru agreed. "He agreed to not tell anyone, though."
"Heh." Tamaki looked down at his hands. "I won't either. I just thought you should know that I knew. In case there's anything you need."
They looked at one another again, surprised. "Thank you for the offer, sempai," Kaoru replied gently, "but there's really nothing we need right now."
"We've always been like this," Hikaru explained. "Even if there was a way to separate us... we wouldn't know how to live apart. If we even could."
"Heh." Tamaki's smile was warm and a little wistful. "It must be wonderful, to have someone always with you like that, someone you can always depend on...."
Hikaru's hand found Kaoru's beneath the table. "Yes," he agreed with a look at his brother.
*
They did have sex together, but if it was a taboo they broke, it wasn't the one their customers thought. It wasn't too uncommon for twins to know when each other were hurt, or safe, or happy. When you were a twin who spent fifteen percent of your time in your brother's body and a hundred percent of your time in a Saimese mind link with him, though, sex with each other ended up being something more akin to two-body masturbation. Sometimes they ended up laughing as they each lost track of whose hands were doing what, or caught the blurred edges of the fantasies that drove one another on. More often, though, it was just pleasure and heat and release and feeling better afterwards. They both knew that they should be more disturbed about it, but (point one) they were both healthy red-blooded young men, and (point two) there was really no way for them to sneak around the other's attention, which (point three) made trying to hide or not share sex absolutely ridiculous. They talked about it sometimes afterward, about how a girlfriend or wife (in the abstract) would and couldn't change things. If they got lucky, they concluded, they'd end up either in a threesome or a foursome. If they didn't get lucky, they supposed, they'd be working their way through a series of girlfriends for the rest of their lives. The issue of (potential, theoretical, way down the line) offspring didn't bother them much either. They were genetically identical, so how did it matter which of them actually fathered a child anyway?
The twins wondered sometimes what would happen if they stopped acting and let people know that they really did sleep together. They'd never actually tell, of course, because it was one thing to be scandalous and quite another thing to have that kind of stigma attached to you. It was one of those brands that would never really go away, and it would end up with them seeing a psychologist to boot.
Hikaru and Kaoru didn't like psychologists. They didn't think they have psycholophobia (they also didn't think that was the right word, but it was the one they'd coined for themselves to use) so much as a healthy paranoia. They also believed that it wan't paranoia if they really were out to get you. They'd read everything they could get their hands on about multiple births and arranged to meet and talk with as many other twins and triplets and quadruplets as they could. They were more interested in the identicals like themselves, but they'd researched fraternal births as well. And thus far into their data collection, they were fairly sure their situation was unique.
The first time they saw a Venn diagram, it was like Buddha's own moment of enlightenment to them. There was Hikaru. There was Kaoru. Then there was that vast overlapping portion in which they really were the same person. Being together was easiest because that way neither of them had to try to explain away why they'd suddenly laughed at the joke some had just cracked three rooms over, where the other twin was.
Their parents knew, of course, and in their more compassionate moments the twins felt sorry for them, having given birth not just to twin hellions, but legitimate freaks of nature as well. They'd been overprotected from the moment their parents had figured it out when they were three, taking Kaoru into one room and Hikaru into another and quizzing them on a set of cards with colors and shapes. They hadn't known then that other people didn't see through their siblings' eyes, and they still didn't know what the conversation their parents had had that night had been about. But they remembered what their father had told them the next morning, the four of them in the twins' bedroom with the door shut and window shades closed: "You must never, ever let anyone know. It will make you different, and people don't like what's different."
They thought they'd grown up that day, catching onto the fear in their father's eyes, their mother's arms as she hugged them tight. They thought they'd been acting ever since.
My Brother, My Secret, Myself (part one)
by K. Stonham
prereleased June 6th, 2006
When they'd gotten out of kindergarten and started in on real school, the twins had realized that being freaks actually gave them an advantage of sorts. If Hikaru worked harder on the math and science and Kaoru worked harder on art and literature, they could each know more with less individual effort. Their grades were persistantly at the top of the class, scores deadlocked, tests identical. It amused them to have their teachers suspect they were cheating off one another and change desk arrangements for exams so they were in opposite corners. It didn't work. They were quite proud of themselves, actually, for sending three teachers to psychologists before they even got out of primary school.
"You're /proud/ of making your teachers need shrinks?" Haruhi asked them.
"Oh, poor soul," Kaoru said dramatically, "who does not know the joy of a challenge, of mischief achieved!"
"You know," she grated, "I think I read a book or two with characters like you two in it...."
"We know!" the twins said, grinning manically as they looked at her. "We read them too. All of them!"
She looked at them curiously, first Hikaru then Kaoru. "How do you do that?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"The unison thing. You always know what each other are going to do. Is that an act, or...?"
"It's a twin thing," they said dismissively.
"Besides, we don't always talk together," Hikaru said, leaning back and waving his hand.
"Even when you don't, you finish one another's sentences," Haruhi replied. She propped her chin on a fist. "Sometimes I wish I had a brother or sister. It'd be nice to be close to someone like that."
They thought sometimes that they might be able to tell Haruhi and she wouldn't stop liking them because they were different and in one another's minds all the time. She was the only one aside from their parents who could consistently tell them apart, after all, even when they sometimes woke up in the wrong body. There were the bodies that were Hikaru and Kaoru, and the two overlapping people within who were Hikaru and Kaoru and ever since they'd hit puberty, they'd been getting tangled up in one another's dreams and once in a while getting up in the morning and finding they were in the wrong body. After the first few panicked hours the first time, they'd decided to just go with the flow, and they always ended up switched back within a few days. Haruhi, they thought, might be able to accept that. But they didn't want to risk it. Hikaru liked her, and Kaoru did as well, though not quite in the same way, and until they were sure that she could accept that they were the same person as well as different people, they didn't want to risk it. So they kept her at arm's length too.
They'd once asked a nine-year-old girl how she knew which twin she was and which one was her sister. She'd thought about it for a minute, then answered "I'm always here, but sometimes she goes away." That answer had made the both of them feel very sad, though they didn't quite understand why.
"I'm not scared to die," Kaoru once said.
"I'm scared that you'll die," Hikaru had finished for him, understanding. They had no concept of being alone, not even the fact that they'd always been alone, isolated from everyone they met because they aren't us and won't understand.
Somehow, they'd never expected it to be Kyouya who called them on it first.
"Your hair's parted on the wrong side," he commented to them after the club had closed operations for the day. "Is there any reason why?"
The brothers looked at one another. They'd switched again the night before and were currently Hikaru-in-Kaoru and Kaoru-in-Hikaru, hair parts going as always with bodies not souls because they were mirrors and their natural parts fell that way. "How can you tell?" they asked, looking back at the Vice-President.
"I hadn't noticed it before Haruhi pointed it out, but you do have some distinct mannerisms," Kyouya replied, tallying sums in his ever-present laptop. "Once you know what to look for, you're actually fairly different."
"What mannerisms?" they demanded.
"Hikaru drums his fingers when he's bored. Kaoru just daydreams," Kyouya listed implacably, continuing to type. "There are others, of course. But when someone watches the two of you, the hair parts match the person eighty-five percent of the time. It's the other fifteen percent that interests me."
Hikaru and Kaoru looked at one another and sat down at the table. The rest of the host club ignored them, being inveigled by Hunny into eating cake with him.
"What would your guess be?" Kaoru asked, resting his elbows on the tabletop and lacing his fingers together.
Kyouya stopped typing and looked up at the two of them. "After consideration, I don't know."
"Explain," Hikaru requested, posture and positioning identical to his brother's.
"Ordinarily I would say you switch on a whim," Kyouya answered. "That doesn't explain how the two of you have been getting absolutely identical test scores your entire lives, or how you fleece Tamaki at card games."
"So what alternate conclusions might you make?" Hikaru asked softly. They were treading on dangerous ground and they knew it, but he wanted to go just one step further.
"I can postulate that the two of you do share some kind of psychic link," the rational shadow king replied. "It's not unheard of for identical twins."
"We know," they said together.
"We've done rather a lot of research on twins," Kaoru expanded. "Being rather intimate with the subject, as it were."
"You're not ordinary, are you?" Kyouya inquired softly. "Not even for psychic twins."
"What would you do if we said 'yes'?" they asked together. He was one, they were two... and even the reach of the Ootori family could only extend so far if they had to run.
They weren't expecting him to smile. "Nothing. Except continue to avoid playing cards with you."
"Not subject us to tests, to charts and graphs and needles and doctors?" asked Hikaru.
"Not turn us over to the government or try to make us into some kind of psychic espionage force?" asked Kaoru.
"Have you ever considered," Kyouya asked in reply, fingers returning to his keyboard, "that the two of you may read too much manga?"
They looked at one another. They liked Kyouya, respected him even. "I'm always me," Kaoru said softly, "and Hikaru is always Hikaru."
"But even when we're apart, we're always together," Hikaru said quietly. It was more than they'd ever told anyone.
"Thank you for telling me," Kyouya said. He still hadn't started typing again. "I will keep the information in confidence."
"Sometimes when we wake up, we're each other," Hikaru continued boldly, testing limits.
Kyouya's eyes widened slightly. "That must be... confusing."
"Not really," Kaoru replied. "Not anymore."
"How can you tell when you've switched?" Kyouya asked, then caught himself. "The hair parts. Of course."
They nodded together. "We haven't found anyone else like us yet."
"But we haven't met all the twins in the world yet either."
It was strange and somehow frightening to have someone know their secret. They slept curled around one another that night, trying not to worry. If Kyouya did anything, they could run. They could lie through their teeth (they were good at that). They could take revenge. Plots ranging from tossing his beloved laptop into a fountain to shipping him to South America in a crate filled with wood ants danced through their minds until they finally fell asleep. The last, and best, possibility involved social humiliation on a grand scale, but figuring out just what would kill Kyouya's pride was tricky. They resolved to work on the problem in the morning, and woke up switched back.
That Kyouya had been the first person to figure it out, the twins could understand. He was methodical, rational, and apparently his perceptiveness might give Haruhi's a run for the money. That worked out, they would have expected Haruhi to figure things out next.
Not Tamaki.
"You know," he told them privately over tea some weeks later, "I'd always wondered where you came up with the idea for your 'brotherly love' act. It is brilliant, after all, and the ladies seem to adore it." His tone was solemn, his head tilted slightly to the right. "I honestly can't believe that it took me so long to realize that before one can offer love to the ladies, one must love oneself first."
His sentence was obscure enough that it took them a moment to work through the implications. And it was generous of their Lord to phrase it in such a way that they could laugh it off. He was that way, after all, when he wasn't being a total flake. The brothers exchanged a glance.
"Milord, have you been talking with Kyouya-sempai?" Hikaru asked, fingers tight on the handle of his teacup.
"Kyouya? Yes. But not about this. Why?" Tamaki was guileless, and unlike themselves, he didn't fake such things. He was like Audrey Hepburn's character in that movie they'd watched, a phoney but a real phoney because he honestly believed what he said and did. It was the part of his charm that the host club's customers never understood. It was the part that the other club members loved the most.
"Have you told anyone?" Kaoru asked quietly, wanting to be angry, to be hurt. When had they started slipping up so that two people had pegged them in one month?
"Told anyone? No." Tamaki toyed with the gold-painted handle of his own teacup. "It didn't seem like something you'd want anyone to know. To be honest, I'm surprised you told Kyouya."
"We didn't," they said together, then sighed and separated themselves again.
Tamaki's eyes were wide. "He figured it out himself?"
"We were surprised too," Hikaru agreed. "He agreed to not tell anyone, though."
"Heh." Tamaki looked down at his hands. "I won't either. I just thought you should know that I knew. In case there's anything you need."
They looked at one another again, surprised. "Thank you for the offer, sempai," Kaoru replied gently, "but there's really nothing we need right now."
"We've always been like this," Hikaru explained. "Even if there was a way to separate us... we wouldn't know how to live apart. If we even could."
"Heh." Tamaki's smile was warm and a little wistful. "It must be wonderful, to have someone always with you like that, someone you can always depend on...."
Hikaru's hand found Kaoru's beneath the table. "Yes," he agreed with a look at his brother.
They did have sex together, but if it was a taboo they broke, it wasn't the one their customers thought. It wasn't too uncommon for twins to know when each other were hurt, or safe, or happy. When you were a twin who spent fifteen percent of your time in your brother's body and a hundred percent of your time in a Saimese mind link with him, though, sex with each other ended up being something more akin to two-body masturbation. Sometimes they ended up laughing as they each lost track of whose hands were doing what, or caught the blurred edges of the fantasies that drove one another on. More often, though, it was just pleasure and heat and release and feeling better afterwards. They both knew that they should be more disturbed about it, but (point one) they were both healthy red-blooded young men, and (point two) there was really no way for them to sneak around the other's attention, which (point three) made trying to hide or not share sex absolutely ridiculous. They talked about it sometimes afterward, about how a girlfriend or wife (in the abstract) would and couldn't change things. If they got lucky, they concluded, they'd end up either in a threesome or a foursome. If they didn't get lucky, they supposed, they'd be working their way through a series of girlfriends for the rest of their lives. The issue of (potential, theoretical, way down the line) offspring didn't bother them much either. They were genetically identical, so how did it matter which of them actually fathered a child anyway?
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-07 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-07 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-07 12:45 pm (UTC)PS: "Siamese"
no subject
Date: 2006-07-07 02:38 pm (UTC)Hmm.
No, no, I can't really use "Maine Coon" as a Weissfic codename, can I? :)
no subject
Date: 2006-07-07 04:04 pm (UTC)i'm only on Ep. 12 but I hope to remedy that immediately tonight. ^_^
I really like the way you've approached how the twins behave and the way they think.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-08 12:27 am (UTC)(I'd been wondering who that icon was attached to in the ops crew. ^_^)
Glad you like the story; more to come soon (probably tomorrow). And, BTW, it's entirely your fault I've started digging around for our fansubs of Junni Kokki.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-08 02:49 am (UTC)yay for more fic!!!!
and I finished the series and it is beautiful and enlightening. *_* It's definately one of my favorites despite the slow story. It's really a very beautiful.