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Once upon a time on a cold spring morning, a young boy vowed to never grow up. Of course, he wasn’t a complete dummy -- he knew that his body would age as surely as the sun rose every morning, but that didn’t mean his mind needed to, too.
For his sickly maman, he’d smile and play and have fun every day of his life. She’d said that when he smiled, it made her happy. He’d do anything to make his maman happy.
He would often look at the pictures of his teacher’s gigantic family in awe. What he wouldn’t give to have a family like that! He loved his maman, his mémère, his pépère, but Christmas was always awfully quiet with just the four of them. Every Christmas Eve, he’d kneel beside his bed when his maman wasn’t looking and try to pray like he’d seen some of his staff do in the past.
“Dear God and Buddha,” he’d say, unsure of which he was supposed to pray to. Then for good measure, he’d add Santa’s name to the list. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but, if you’re listening, could you pretty-please make Grandmother un-hate me and maman? I really want all my family here for Christmas. Please and thank you. Amen?”
Even though his wish never came true, it never stopped him from trying up to the winter he turned fourteen. That was when he was sent to Japan, without his maman.
But that isn’t the story, here.
He once tried explaining to his best friend, sitting at the kotatsu he’d wanted so badly, that he never planned on growing up.
“That’s ridiculous,” his friend had said, rolling his eyes. “It’s scientifically impossible to stop growth at this --”
“No, Kyouya,” Tamaki sighed. “I don’t mean preserving my youthful good looks. I’m talking, you know, mentally.” He brandished a chocolate wafer to accentuate his point before taking a bite of it.
“Oh, I see. Peter Pan Syndrome.” Kyouya took a dignified sip of green tea.
“Peter Pan?” the blonde frowned. He felt like he’d heard the name somewhere before, but couldn’t pin it down in his memory. Kyouya stood with an air of great exasperation and walked up the stairs to his private bedroom area. At first Tamaki thought that his best friend had grown tired of him and decided that hiding until he went away was the best course of action -- it wouldn’t be the first time -- but Kyouya returned a few moments later with a small book in his hand.
“Here,” he said, tossing the story in Tamaki’s lap and sitting back down. “Hope you can read English, you great buffoon.”
Tamaki flipped through some of the illustrations, asking as he did so, “Who exactly is Peter Pan?”
“The boy who refused to grow up,” Kyouya said before turning all his attention back to his tea. He couldn’t have possibly guessed, then, that he would regret ever mentioning the name Peter Pan.
“Kyouya!” Tamaki was saying, huddled under the kotatsu with a huge grin. “I just had the most brilliant idea! Let’s start a club together!”
As he outlined the grandiose plans he had for this club, Kyouya grew steadily more suspicious. Tamaki could say whatever he liked. To him, it sounded an awful lot like the foreigner was trying to round up his own band of Lost Boys. He mused that this would be the point where he was meant to stop Tamaki’s idea in its tracks before it got too much steam, because it could only lead down a painful road for the pain in his neck.
Yet, he ended up agreeing to it. Why not, after all? The club would flounder soon after fruition. It would be a nice time-waster for a few weeks.
The success of the Ouran High School Host Club was unexpected, unprecedented, and unexplainable. The girls were entranced by the princes and kept coming back for more. The group of Lost Boys grew close, too. Close enough to be called friends, or even family if one were to stretch the boundaries of disbelief that far.
They may not have been poor or orphaned, but the travelling parents and overbearing siblings and sheer crushing expectations turned the abandoned third music room into another home for them.
It was the only place they could really be themselves, because none of the others cared about Kyouya’s grumpiness or Honey’s poor table manners or the twins’ self-imposed isolation. Well, actually, Tamaki cared about all three of those things, but they learned to ignore him within the first week or so. There was only so much pontificating they could take.
At first, they stayed in their little boxes. Hikaru-and-Kaoru. Honey-and-Mori. Kyouya-and-Tamaki. But as the weeks melted into months, the walls of the boxes slowly started to tear themselves down.
Honey invited them all to Germany for summer vacation. He was always the one trying to reach out to the other boys and form a stronger connection (not for business or his own personal fantasies, just because he liked them). That time, they reached back.
Beach volleyball was played nearly every day, and the teams started out solidly in their boxes. Then, Hikaru requested to be on Mori’s team, and it got all tangled up. Not that any of them minded, at this juncture, but they all felt it thrumming right underneath their skin; the strangeness of it all. For who had ever cared about these Lost Boys, aside from one another? They all understood each other and respected each other -- it only made sense to open their doors, or at least a window or two, for the others.
Once, Tamaki stayed in Mori’s room until very late into the night, babbling about everything he could possibly think of while the older boy practiced his kendo in silence.
“-- and have you ever heard of Peter Pan, Mori-sempai? I find he’s rather a lot like myself! Which would make you, and the rest of the Host Club, the Lost Boys -- and obviously the ladies are the mermaids, but who would be the pirates?”
Despite only half-listening and thinking the blonde was looking too hard into a children’s story, Mori grunted, “Football team?”
Tamaki’s eyes lit up, and he let out a peal of laughter with unnecessary force.
“Yeah,” he giggled, lying back on the floor to gaze at the ceiling. “Kuze-sempai must be Hook, then. Except that his grudge is with Kyouya, and I personally can’t imagine Kyouya as Tinkerbell --”
Thanks to that conversation, the first cosplay the club did after returning from the holidays involved tights and hooked hands and fairy wings on Honey. The club wasn’t too happy about it, but Kyouya shared with the rest of them what Mori had already found out -- that Tamaki was playing out a dream. They were his Lost Boys. (It frightened them, a bit, that nobody had a solid argument against the title.)
September faded too soon, and then October came, bringing with it orange leaves and midterms and the sound of a vase shattering as it hit the ground.
Kyouya had known who the intruder was from the moment she walked through the door. There weren’t many scholarship students at Ouran, after all, and the ones who did manage to get one were able to pay for a uniform. He bent and picked up a piece of the porcelain, turning it in his fingers so it caught the light.
“What do you propose we do, Tamaki?” he asked, trying to make his implications clear in his tone.
It’s a girl, Tamaki. A girl that stumbled upon us accidentally. Are you going to force her into being our Wendy?
If the fool would have clued in soon enough, he might have tried.
As it was, Haruhi fitted the role for herself. She would be neither the mother nor the caretaker of these boys, as the vice-president had that covered. She refused to entice mermaids or fight pirates, and when their Tiger Lily was in trouble, she got there before Peter even noticed something was wrong.
She was far from a damsel -- and if distress were about, she wouldn’t be one to screech about it so much as deal with it herself -- and the only one to see even a glimpse of her deep-seated maternal instinct was Honey.
So, in Tamaki’s opinion, she wasn’t quite Wendy. If anything, that role fell to Kyouya. Haruhi was certainly an important part of their lives now, though, and if this were a different fairy tale, if she was a princess (instead of a girl hiding in overlarge sweatshirts) or if he were a prince (instead of a scared boy playing make-believe), then, maybe, he’d fall for her.
If you asked anyone else, they’d tell you he already had. Denial’s quite a funny thing.
Despite her title of ‘daughter’ and lack of any motherly attributes, the club still regarded her as if she were their mother. She patched them up and scolded them and -- she loved them.
It wasn’t as if their own mothers didn’t love them, but it wasn’t quite the same. Because Haninozuka Nobuko ran a dojo of men twice her size and didn’t know how to soften her grip or her tone; and Morinozuka Sakura claimed to have a constant headache that kept her shut up in the quietest wing of the estate; and Ootori Miyaki died in the childbirth of her third son; and Hitachiin Yuzuha had never, not once, been able to tell her own sons apart. The boys were certain their mothers adored them, of course, but Haruhi was there in a way that they’d never known to want.
So when Tamaki and Haruhi admitted how they felt to each other and Hikaru started to cry, even Kyouya comforted him. They were a family, and while it wasn’t technically the mother-and-father of the group that were kissing on the roof of an airport, they still felt that sense of mom and dad are necking, ewww! to a certain degree.
Even Hikaru, who loved Haruhi. Even Mori, who seemed to have one foot out of their misadventures at all times. Even Kyouya, who somewhat didn’t want Haruhi around in the first place. (He knew the story, after all. Wendy may have saved Peter, but she destroyed the sanctity of the Lost Boys.)
Then, it was a blur. Exams were coming, life was approaching faster than they could prepare for, and suddenly their surrogate mother decided she was moving to America.
She was flying. Away from Neverland, from the mermaids and fairies and roses.
Peter Pan made what was simultaneously the easiest and most difficult decision of his life: he would grow up to follow her.
Because she is most important, he buys a plane ticket to Boston on the same flight as hers. The news certainly surprises Wendy, but he’d give up Neverland, and his Boys, and Tiger Lily with her horde of mermaids -- even his eternal youth -- for her.
When he’d told Kyouya his plan, his friend had simply sighed and adjusted his glasses. “Do what you feel you have to, Tamaki, but I’m not telling the club for you.”
So, Tamaki did. They were surprised, and upset -- “Wah, Tama-chan’s leaving too?” “What the hell, Tono, you can’t just follow her there like some pervert, she’ll freak!” -- but none of them really tried to stop him.
Really, they should’ve seen it coming.
Then Peter left, needing to make arrangements with his grandmother, and Kaoru immediately turned to Kyouya.
“Well?” he asked in a low voice, unheard over Honey’s wailing and Hikaru’s too-loud cursing. “What are we going to do, sempai?”
“You think I have a plan?”
The corners of Kaoru’s mouth turned upward. “I know you do.”
It was half-formed and absolutely idiotic, but Kyouya had long since lost the ability to keep secrets from these boys, so he spilled. The twins thought it was brilliant, Honey thought it was something Tamaki would appreciate even if Haruhi didn’t, and Mori said nothing.
So, it was put into action.
If Haruhi was surprised to hear that Tamaki had dropped everything to fly across the world with her, it was nothing compared to how she felt when she opened the door and the rest of them were on the threshold.
(Really, she should’ve seen it coming.)
Wendy had left Neverland, but that was all right, because Neverland would follow her.