Work Text:
1: on being in france
Tamaki isn’t a fool. He knows what people think of him. He knows that there’s a place between right and wrong and half and whole and heir and bastard, and that’s the place that Tamaki lives in. He’s French and Japanese, honorable and out of wedlock. He knows the words for himself in several languages, and he knows that they aren’t words he likes.
It’s not that he’s not proud— no, Tamaki is perfectly proud of being mixed race, thank you very much. He loves his mother and his life in France, and he’ll never be ashamed of that. He’s perfectly proud of being Japanese in a country of white people. He may be only half of what their skin is, but he’s perfectly proud—
Only, it hurts, too.
If he’s being honest, it hurts to be the one that sticks out as other. However much he looks like the other boys in middle school, it hurts to be the one that people can single out as not quite all the way white. Not quite all there. Not quite what they are. Not quite seems to define him.
At the same time, though, Tamaki knows how to charm people into loving someone not quite. He knows when to smile, and how to kiss a girl’s hand when he meets her for the first time. He knows how to use his heritage as a weapon— no, not a weapon. As a guard. He knows how to use both of his cultures as a guard to cover up the swirling pot of DNA that his mother and father had given him.
He’s perfectly proud, but it’s still hard. He knows, in France, to emphasize his whiteness. He knows how to talk in French perfectly, and only vaguely in Japanese. He knows that he needs to keep his hair light, to keep his mouth smiling with his eyes still wide, he knows that blue colored contacts are the trend. In France, being Japanese is a footnote in who he is.
It’s a footnote that haunts him, the kind of poem that keeps running in your head long after you close the book. It’s a footnote that Tamaki can never forget, can never let go of. There are other Japanese people in France, of course there are, but he can’t fit in with them. He’s not the same as they are. He is French through and through, whatever his father does. He can’t afford to be Japanese, not in a middle school of racist boys. He can’t afford to be Japanese, not when it comes at the cost of the French identity he’s found over the years.
He’s proud of being Japanese, but no one else needs to know that. He can be loud and boisterous and energetic, but there are some things that he doesn’t need to advertise. Oh, he’s not going to deny it if someone asks, but he’s not going to go around telling everyone.
Instead, he tells it to himself. He gives himself stories— when his father sends little pieces of media for him to look at, he teaches himself Japanese. He gives himself permission to learn those little parts of the country, of the culture that should be his but instead alienates him. When I get to Japan, he tells himself, I’m going to see all of this. I’m going to be everything I’m supposed to be. Everything I can’t be here.
Then he actually moves to Japan. He leaves behind his mother, and goes to live with a family that doesn’t quite know what to do with him. Sitting on the airplane, he stares out the window and wonders what he is, and will be, when he gets to Japan. He has no plans to change who he is, but he still needs to change his tongue and his clothes and his smile. As a child, he had told himself that he’d be everything he couldn’t be in France, that he’d learn everything about his culture and be a part of it for the first time, rather than an onlooker. When the plane lands, though, it’s all different.
It’s lonely, it’s isolating. He thought that this would mean he would get to spend time with his father, that he would get to know this side of his family, but that isn’t how it turns out. His father isn’t ever around, and Tamaki is set up in the second estate and hidden away from his grandmother. There are servants around, but he doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t have anything.
Not only is he lonely, he also doesn’t know the ins and outs of the language, and he doesn’t know anything about the school system, and he doesn’t know who he’s supposed to be. He doesn’t know what to do in this second estate that’s bigger than any house he’s ever seen before. He doesn’t know what to do when his grandmother glares at him and calls him words that Tamaki doesn’t want to know the translation of.
But he learns quickly. He has to. Half of that, Tamaki guesses, is because he meets Kyoya. Because he meets this boy who doesn’t know what to do with him, but is trying so hard to please him. Who takes him around the country for no reason other than that Tamaki asks, who shows him places that Tamaki has only read about and wanted to connect to. Tamaki isn’t stupid, he knows why Kyoya is doing it, but he also knows that at some point, those reasons change.
Being around Kyoya, the first friend he’s ever really had, teaches him a lot. Being around the rest of the students in middle school helps too. They’re young and malleable and Tamaki knows how to smile. He discovers that smiling is the same in every country.
He learns how to speak, though the language doesn’t fit naturally on his tongue. It doesn’t take long before Tamaki knows how to make businessmen and his peers love him, and knows how to make them say things like how they “never would have known” he’s less than Japanese.
By high school, Tamaki is as fluent in Japanese as he’ll ever get, he knows, but it’s still more work than the rest of the students have to do. Listening comprehension is still harder than everyone else finds it to be. He knows the things that they know, but he still has trouble saying them in the right way. Sometimes he finds himself at a loss for words, not because he has no thoughts to give, but because he has no words to say them.
He memorizes certain phrases that make it easier to survive a loss of words— it’s easier, in the host club, to make the girls believe him when he messes up. He learns “you’re so beautiful, I forgot what I was going to say,” and he learns “you leave me speechless, princess.” That’s Tamaki’s favorite phrase. He knows it in Japanese, in French, in English, in Spanish, in Mandarin. He’s not fluent in all of those languages, but he knows how to say “princess,” and he’s proud of that much.
When they talk about the host club, they talk about how Tamaki is the princely type. But he’s as manipulative as Kyoya, just in a slightly different sense. While Kyoya knows how to get people to do what he wants, Tamaki can get them to see what he wants. He can make people see himself as what he wants to be. Whole.
In the silence between hours of host club lovers and rambling conversations with Kyoya, though, Tamaki is hungry for a home. For a country to call his own. For a language to call his own. For a family to call his own. In the silence between confidence, he’s looking for a heritage that is not split between two worlds which cannot reconcile themselves inside one body. He wants to be seen and known, and he wants to be known by someone who knows he is whole. That’s a hard, an impossible bar, though, because Tamaki isn’t sure that even he himself knows that.
2: on appearances and first impressions
His name is René Tamaki Richard de Grantaine Suoh. His name is René Richard de Grantaine. His name is Tamaki Suoh. His full name is unsayable. He is unsayable.
The entire school knows that he’s a new student, a foreigner. The whole school knows that he’s the Suoh bastard who will inherit the estates. The whole school knows that he’s half Japanese and half white. The whole school knows that he’s both less than they are and more than they will ever be. They all know his name. Tamaki doesn’t know which one, but he knows that they know it.
Tamaki reaches high school, starts the host club, begins his own little world of people, and he forgets his name. He knows it, and he thinks about saying it every time he introduces himself, but he never does. He is Tamaki Suoh, here, and that’s all. Full story. René does not exist anymore.
He sacrifices his name, but he allows himself other things in Japan. He lets himself make friends with people, letting them get close enough for smiles and party invitations and group projects. He makes everyone love him as much as he can— Tamaki has so much love to give to the world, and he gives it away carelessly.
But he doesn’t allow himself this: to be whole in front of the world. He doesn’t allow himself to get close enough to desire something he cannot have. He’s halved in every direction, and the school only knows about one of those directions. He is half Japanese and half straight, half white and half gay. He is mixed race, and he is bisexual— those are the words he wants to use, but those are not the words that the world will indulge him in. The world will tell him half instead of one.
He allows himself the indulgence of friends, but does not give himself the gift of being whole. He does not allow himself the gift of saying he is whole. There are some desires that are too enormous, there are some wants that are too grand. Being everything he can be is not the option he wants it to be.
Except then again, there’s Kyoya.
Kyoya, who is something other— not in the same way that Tamaki is, Tamaki is other in many ways that Kyoya is not. But still, Kyoya is something that doesn’t fit in quite right. He makes himself fit in, turns himself into a carefully maintained image that his father can be proud of, if he ever bothers to look. He makes himself kind and generous and welcome, but he’s not what the mask says he is. He doesn’t fit into the box he has put himself into. Tamaki can understand that.
Sometimes, though, Tamaki thinks that he’s the only one who knows this. Maybe he’s the only one that Kyoya has shown this vulnerability to. Maybe because he’s the only one who has seen Kyoya’s real, uncontrolled laugh. Maybe because he’s the only one who has seen Kyoya flustered and unhinged and broken and ambitious. Whatever the reason, Tamaki thinks that he’s the only person who can see Kyoya’s otherness.
Tamaki is the only one who bothers to look, after all. While the rest of the school accepts Kyoya for who he appears to be, Tamaki looks for what he actually is. He looks for the name underneath the mask, something that no one has ever done for himself.
It’s because of that that he’s become so accustomed to looking. He’s good at it, he can read people like a book in a language that he’s fluent in. He doesn’t see sentence fragments when he looks at Kyoya, he sees the blood heating in his veins as he speaks quietly, and he sees the boxes bursting at the seams.
Kyoya and Tamaki are both something that people don’t understand— the two of them as individuals and the two of them as friends. Sometimes Tamaki himself doesn’t understand how they can be friends, how they have managed to slot themselves together in the way they have. But between where he is restless and energetic and where Kyoya is restrained and high strung, they find a middle ground.
Tamaki is getting very good at finding the middle ground.
There’s something else, too. Tamaki doesn’t know if it’s because Kyoya is, at first, only there on strict orders from his father; or if it’s because Kyoya is so repressed that he can’t blurt out the things that everyone else can; or because Kyoya is made up of silent, unfinished sentences for no one else to hear; but that something is there. Kyoya is the only one who doesn’t outright say it.
He’s the only one who, upon meeting Tamaki, didn’t single out the blonde hair and the violet eyes and the sharpness of his face and the French conjunctions. He’s the only one who didn’t say, “Oh, so you’re from France?” and he’s the only one who didn’t say, “I would never have guessed that you’re white!” and he’s the only one who didn’t say, “I would have never guessed that you’re Japanese!”
Tamaki knows that Kyoya knows— it’s not a secret. Again, Tamaki is proud. He’s not ashamed of being half white. But he is ashamed when people say he is only white. Every time that he thinks he’s managed to pull his two halves together, someone will go and say something like that, and Tamaki will silently break again.
But Kyoya never says it. They’ll talk about France and Tamaki’s life there, but Kyoya makes no halving comments. In a hotel in Okinawa, Tamaki tells Kyoya about his struggle with Japanese as a language and lays his soul bare on the bed they’re sharing. When they wake up, Tamaki thinks about how Kyoya could have afforded two rooms, and he thinks about the infinity of desire, and he thinks about how Kyoya makes him feel whole. They talk in uncharted territories, and when Tamaki falls into French as he gets more and more exhausted or excited, Kyoya does nothing more than roll his eyes and remind Tamaki that he doesn’t know French.
Even with those reminders, Kyoya says nothing about how Tamaki is a mix of something that Kyoya is a whole of. No matter how often Tamaki falls into French, no matter how much he talks about his white mother, no matter how clear he makes it that he’s mixed, Kyoya never says anything that makes Tamaki break. Maybe it’s intentional, or maybe it’s a hazard of politeness, or maybe it's a habit of Kyoya’s manipulative variation of honesty, but whatever the reason, it doesn’t happen.
There are many things that Tamaki is grateful for, when he talks to Kyoya. There’s a list of things that Kyoya does for Tamaki that he’ll never stop thanking him for, but this is at the top of the list. It’s never a big deal to Kyoya that he’s half white. Kyoya makes him feel seen— seen not as only, but as total. Not as half, but as two.
This is just one thing that Kyoya gives him, and Tamaki takes it hungrily. He thrives on it. It makes Tamaki feel at home in Japan, in a second tongue. Tamaki is proud he’s mixed race, but he’s never met someone who doesn’t fight against that pride.
Oh, he’s met curiosity and fetishes and cruelty, but an acceptance is new. Kyoya doesn’t guess or argue or insult. He seems to be trying to understand, trying to see under whatever mask Tamaki is wearing that day. And knowing Tamaki, truly knowing him, is to know that he is made with something dual and still he is whole.
Only, however hard they try, no one else seems to be able to figure that out.
3: on dictionaries and transliteration
Tamaki knows enough languages to travel the world without a translator or a dictionary. Language learning comes to him like learning to ride a bike for the first time— hard but not impossible. He knows grammar and punctuation and vocabulary and conjugations. He knows French and Japanese best, closely followed by English, and then some fractured Spanish and Mandarin.
People ask him for help in their English classes— “How do you say wakarimasen?”
“I don’t know.”
Oh, the irony.
He’s good at translating for people, at saying all of the random phrases that they throw at him. He does it plenty in the host club, telling girls what they want to hear in both French and Japanese. He’s good at it, it’s part of the appeal. But it’s not fair— it’s not fair to ask him to say things in French just so that people can hear his accent. It’s not fair to ask him to say things just so that they can giggle and call it romantic. Sometimes he says nonsense words to the girls just to see if they’ll catch him.
They never do.
It’s not until Renge that someone catches his French antics. He’s talking to a girl, telling her she has the most beautiful eyes, but meaning that he’s really damn hungry and hopes that he and Kyoya can get something to eat later. Renge, luckily, doesn’t say anything, but she catches his eye.
With that shock of eye contact, he remembers that she’s from France too. She’s not Japanese, and she’s more foreign than Tamaki is, but her Japanese is at the same level as his was when he came, and her French is just as perfect. The realization brings a smile to his face, a genuine one, and he grins at her before turning back to the girls and saying things with actual meaning.
They laugh at his words, blushing and smiling at him. There’s something alluring about the foreign, about the different. It’s attractive, it gets him guests, but for Tamaki, it’s just frustrating. It’s another fracture in his spine that separates white from Asian.
When he speaks in French, he is white. This is what they see, this is what they will always see. He does not belong here, he belongs to a different language, a different tongue, a different race. He will never fit in, not in the way that he wants to. He will never assimilate fully.
He’s Japanese. He is. Biologically and physically and emotionally and—
It’s still not enough. It will never be enough, he knows. He will always be something other, rather than something both. He tells the girls that the weather is really nice today and they laugh, entertained by this French boy, rather than loved by their Japanese peer. Their equal.
It’s not like it was better in France, though. If anything, it was worse. It was slurs carved into a desk. It was rolled eyes, or squinted eyes, or taped eyes, or—
“Can you say blue? Or sky? Or… oh! Can you say, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog?”
In France, it was never about respect. It was never about learning. It was about being something other, something that a person wouldn’t say out loud. The French don’t talk about these things. They don’t like listening to it when Tamaki talks about his father in Japan, or the books that get mailed to him. They don’t like thinking about it, not unless it can be used.
That, Tamaki thinks, is a universal fracture. He is, all at once, the outcast and the fetishized and the exotic and the craved. Tamaki, who wants nothing more than to be whole, wants to be made up of none of those things. He wants to be known and he wants to be seen as he is.
During his time in France, he was exotic. A walking fetish. During host club hours, he is wanted. During school hours, he is, again, not quite.
With the host club— with this family that he’s made, the real one, the one before they start the show— he’s something different. Tamaki doesn’t know the word for it, and maybe there is no word for it, but he’s something apart from all of those. To Honey and Mori, he’s a brother. To the twins, he’s a partner in crime. To Kyoya, he’s…
Tamaki doesn’t have the word for that either. He doesn’t really want to name it, what Kyoya means to him. That draws him back to the desire he was avoiding when he moved to Japan and became the welcomed of the unwelcome.
He’s already half enough, he doesn’t need to be half of a pair, another half that gets excluded from what is “right.” But if half of a part of himself lived outside of his body (the Japanese side, his mind unhelpfully growls), it would be in Kyoya’s heart.
Kyoya doesn’t ever ask him to say things, at least nothing that Tamaki doesn’t want to say. No, Kyoya listens. Kyoya will lie with him on a bed with their arms behind their heads and staring at the ceiling, talking about nonsense. Kyoya never asks him to translate a word just to hear the sound on Tamaki’s lips, instead he takes the words he gets and he swallows them and he remembers them.
Tamaki doesn’t know if Kyoya likes listening to him talk in French, or if he cares all that much, but he doesn’t stop him. He doesn’t make Tamaki feel small, feel like nothing, feel like a foreigner when he messes up his Japanese.
Language is a strange thing. Tamaki loves languages, loves learning them, loves speaking them, loves teaching them, but language is also another thing that splits him down the middle. He knows about an equal amount of French and Japanese by now, and when he talks to his father, they can switch as they please, as words fall away or the conjunctions turn into sentences or an idiom makes a conversation.
But that’s not the kind of activity that anyone else gets to know, or gets to be a part of. Too many languages is too many splits in his heart, and he thinks that if he splits too many times, then he becomes something empty. If he is too French or too Japanese, then he becomes one or the other, never both. If he is both, then he can fit in nowhere.
It’s about the reminders, about the coding. It’s a careful line, and the line is a weapon that hits both against him and for him. He’s proud of being mixed race, but he knows that way that the world works. He knows how he’s supposed to be: one or the other or neither. To be both is not an option. If you are both, neither side wants you.
If Tamaki knows French outside of when French is romance, then it is a reminder that he is half white. If he knows Japanese outside of Japan, then it’s a reminder that he’s Asian, and, when he’s in France, that’s not what he wants to be. If he knows both, if he lives in Japan and has a French accent, or if he lives in France and looks Asian, then those are reminders that he’s mixed, half and half, asiatique, and answer this, Tamaki, how do you say “nothing at all?”
He walks a fine line. René is one side, Tamaki is the other. The line is too thin to grasp, too thin to love. But each side is an enormity of culture and pride and love, an enormity too big to hold. You cannot have two infinities. Tamaki, can you say “endless,” and can you say “empty?”
4: on being a pretty little halfer
It’s strange that Haruhi didn’t know. Everyone else in the host club knows, everyone in the school knows, and Tamaki just kind of figured she had either guessed or heard someone mention it. She’s smart enough to figure it out, he thought. But maybe she just wasn’t looking. Tamaki is good at making people forget to look at the things about himself that aren’t Japanese. He’s good at making people look for other things, rather than the two languages he slips between and the cuisines he wanders through and the two races he absorbs.
He kind of just figured that she knew. But this— hearing it from Benibara, some random girl from some random high school who shouldn’t have even known him in the first place— isn’t how he would have wanted Haruhi to find out. When Benibara said it, it was an accusation. If Tamaki had his choice, it would be a fact. There’s a world of difference between the two.
It was nice that she tried to defend him, but if anything, that just made it worse. If anything it just proved what she probably thinks of him now— surprise, surprise and confusion that a mixed race haafu could be what Tamaki is. Someone like that couldn’t possibly look or talk or seem like he does. It’s always surprise that he’s met with.
After Haruhi groans and yells some more, and Tamaki groans and yells some more, he leaves. He makes his plan and then he leaves. They’ll pull it together tomorrow; Kyoya will find the costumes and Kaoru will do the makeup and Tamaki will approve everything, and then they’ll convince Haruhi to stay with the club. It’s a great plan.
But as Tamaki leaves, Benibara is echoing in his head. Thinking about it, he can feel his face burn, heating up with something that he can’t explain in any language— shame or jealousy or anger or fear or pride. There’s no one word to cover up the way his face has turned bright red and his eyes have squinted up to cover a well of salty tears when he leaves the room. The other hosts don’t seem to notice, as excited and talkative as they are when they plan a new cosplay, and they don’t see him disappear down the hallway and out of the school.
Tamaki calls the driver and goes home. To the second estate he lives in. Living is a strange word for what is practically banishment. His grandmother doesn’t want him to be anywhere near her, and he knows it. He knows because she never fails to make it known, and she never fails in reminding him that he’s a half-race bastard.
He might be the Suoh heir, but he doesn’t deserve it. Not because he isn’t smart enough when he’s second in the class and beaten only by Kyoya, which Tamaki doesn’t mind; and it’s not because he isn’t well liked enough when he can get any businessman to love him without even trying; and it’s not because he doesn’t have talent when he can make anyone cry when he sits at the piano.
None of that makes up for his blood. His pretty little halfer blood. His pretty little blonde hair and violet eyes. His pretty little accent. His pretty little exoticism.
Tamaki is a prideful person. If he has one sin— the kind of cardinal one that they fear in France and don’t bother with in Japan— it’s pride. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have doubts sometimes. Most of his doubts are related to being half of something. Most of his doubts are related to blonde hair and monolids. Most of his doubts are related to being exactly what Benibara accused him of and Haruhi innocently tried to deny.
It always comes back to this.
Tamaki finds himself pacing around his room that night, Benibara still running around his mind. He needs Haruhi to stay with the club, he needs this plan to work, he needs to feel good at something, he needs to feel like he’s better than Benibara in some way, that he’s won something that she can’t, and he doesn’t know why he feels so strongly that he needs to prove himself— it’s not because she’s a girl, he couldn’t care less about that. He goes round and round in his head, and he thinks about the way that Haruhi stepped in front of the club to defend the boys from Benibara.
She really does love the boys in the club, Tamaki knows, she really does want to be there, however much she tries to deny it. But the idea of her leaving still terrifies him. More than that, the idea of her with Benibara terrifies him. Even more than that, Benibara rubs him in the wrong direction and Tamaki hates her.
Then it hits him again, what she said. What she called him, what she said in front of the entire club, in front of the people he loves the most, who have never rejected him before. They’ve said stupid things and they’ve made fun of him for his antics and they’ve fought with each other, but they’re family. They stick together, defend each other. That’s what family does, right?
He knows that the club wouldn’t reject him. But still, though they all know about his heritage, no one has ever bluntly said it out loud. Halfer.
He’s not going to fall apart, not because of this. Not because of the humiliation of Benibara pointing her finger and calling him out, isolating him, reminding him that he’s culturally separate from everyone else in the room. Not because she’s trying to take Haruhi away. Not because of any of that.
But he cries that night. And he’s alone while he does it.
The next day, they put Tamaki’s plan into motion and Haruhi joins the club again. She had no plans on leaving and so Tamaki’s plan didn’t really do anything special, but he likes to think that it was an added bonus that helped solidify the decision. Whatever effect the plan had, Haruhi is a part of their group again.
Still, though, Tamaki doesn’t quite feel like he’s finished with everything. He doesn’t quite feel like this has all been enough. The Lobelia girls have left, and the club is on their own, taking off their costumes, while Tamaki is just sitting in the corner and staring out of the window. It’s not like him, especially after this kind of victory, but he doesn’t care until someone else notices.
“Tamaki.” Kyoya is standing there, something slightly sad in his expression. There’s still remnants of makeup around his eyes, and maybe that’s what’s making the normal bags under his eyes so exaggerated. “Are you alright?”
Tamaki smiles at him. It’s a weak smile, but it’s there. “But of course.”
“Okay,” Kyoya says, slow, unbelieving. “If you need something…”
Tamaki nods. “Thanks, Kyoya.”
There’s a pause, and then Kyoya just nods, once, sharp. He turns around to go, probably to wash the rest of the makeup off of his face, but Tamaki catches his wrist just before he moves out of arm's reach. Kyoya stops and turns around, tilting his head slightly, just enough for Tamaki to understand the question. What’s wrong?
“You know I love you?” Tamaki asks quietly. “Tu sais que je t’aime?”
It’s not an admission, not really, not when they’ve spent so long doing whatever this is, whatever these quiet moments of love mean. This time, though, there’s a weight to it that wasn’t there before. This time, his Japanese isn’t videotaped and practiced, it’s honest. This time, his French isn’t textbook perfect, it’s loving. He’s giving Kyoya another piece of language, another piece of himself, another world. His two infinities, all in ten words.
Kyoya smiles, not doubting him for a second. “Yeah, Tamaki. I know you, mon amour.”