A/N: Inspired by episode 24 like hell…I can't even express what it did to the KyouyaTamaki fan in me. This wasn't meant to be shippy :shifty eyes: I guess it could be interpreted as friendship? Super-devoted friendship? XD Nonetheless, I love these two (and Haruhi is still the hardest to write, I feared Kyouya would beat her but nope)! So yeah, second shot at Ouran. Tell me how it went!

Disclaimer: I don't own Ouran or either of these two though I adore them dearly.

x

x

x

Ohtori Kyouya didn't make friends.

Maybe it was because friendship never came with many merits, genuine friendship, anyway, or because he believed that it involved too much pointless emotion on one's part—one of many things he didn't believe in.

He didn't believe in one-way favours, he didn't believe in sympathy or empathy, and generally speaking, he didn't believe in anything outside the structural reality he had created for himself—no, that had been created for him. In that reality, things were black and if not black, then they were white. There were allies and enemies, family and strangers, summer and winter, winners and losers. There was no room for grey areas, so naturally, no room for what one would call 'friendship' of any sort that could not be exploited to one's advantage. There could be nothing and no one worth pursuing for which the pursuer did not have a profitable ulterior motive behind his or her back.

Along with this attitude came the invisible dark lenses the boy wore, those separate from his correction lenses though they often did the trick as well when the lighting was just right. They were lenses that allowed one to look out from the inside, but the world could not see in no matter how hard it tried. And really, most people didn't try much either or gave up after a while.

It sufficed to say that when someone could easily see through the boy without trying, it broke a great deal of composure, something that had taken over a decade in the making. Something, predictably, had snapped upon realizing that he, the third Ohtori son, had perhaps made a mistake somewhere in the process of making friends with the the offspring of his father's rival in an attempt to keep his enemies closer.

Maybe it was just a striking epiphany because it was the first time something like this had happened.

Without a doubt, Suou Tamaki had been the first person Kyouya had met who had turned out to be so incredibly stupid, oddly enough, the first he had tried to impress, the first to use his first name without consideration, and the first to twist his insides and upset him enough to make him rampage through his neat bedroom and cause Fuyumi-neesan to smirk like that.

And even if the clueless blue-eyed blond had been the first person that Kyouya had genuinely wanted to punch the living daylights out of for no reason in particular—and actually proceeded to act on that urge no less—another first, he was also the first to make the usually icy boy fall into fits of hysterical laughter, the first to make him cry and think outside his structured little box of a life. Tamaki had been the first to get into his head without even trying to and enough to make the bespectacled third Ohtori boy—who had absolutely no hope for himself or the destiny set in stone before him—paint outside the godforsaken canvas.

Suou Tamaki was the most ridiculous, bizarre, dramatic, and idiotic thing in this world, Kyouya had no doubt, but unfortunately he could not change the fact that Suou Tamaki was still the first person in this world he had sincerely considered a friend amidst all the madness. The first person, maybe even the first thing, he had come to believe in.

And when it came down to it, Suou Tamaki was probably the only person that Kyouya would laugh, cry, and die for…still…no, always…without the blond even needing to ask it of him.

Sometimes, even he couldn't figure out the mechanics of it all.

And maybe it was all disguised in the fact that Tamaki had been the first, would always be the first, and come first above all else.

x

x

x

fin