(no subject)

[kitsunerei88]

It's been a long time since I posted any fanfiction. Whoohoo me. Apparently impending French and Classical Mechanics exams inspire me to not-sleep and write fanfiction instead.

Fandom: Ouran High School Host Club
Title: Wildflowers
Summary: Tamaki reminisces about France. Rating: G
Genre: Introspective, Nostalgia?
Word Count: 1151
Warnings: Lots and lots of French. Not beta'ed. Written in the matter of a few hours. Mild TamaHaru.

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestui-là conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge!

Quand reverrai-je, hélas! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison,
Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup advantage?

Plus me plaît le séjour qu’ont bâti mes aïeux
Que des palais romains le front audacieux;
Plus que le marble dur me plaît l’ardoise fine,

Plus mon Loire gaulois que le Tibre latine,
Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin,
Et plus que l’air marin la douceur angevine.

-Joachim du Bellay, 1558

Bells chimed softly, announcing the entrance of a tall blondish boy, his bag carried under his arm. His blue jacket was a little warm for the weather, but it was still early in spring, and mornings and evenings were still cool. His violet eyes cast around the shop curiously, taking in the diverse range of flowers in the shop, before crinkling into a smile for the girl behind the counter. His looks were unusual for Japan – normally, strangers would stare at this light-haired, pale-skinned European on the streets. Even in bustling metropolitan Tokyo, his looks would be remarked upon.

“Salut,” he greeted the girl, approaching the counter. “Vous êtes aussi belles aujourd’hui. Ça va bien?”

“Ouais, ouais,” she replied, her brown eyes dancing, her fingers casually spinning a pen over a Japanese school book. Probably her homework, the boy supposed. She spoke her French a little more slowly, a little more carefully than he did. Her face hinted at some European ancestry, but not so clearly as his. “Il y a longtemps, Suoh-san. Qu’est-ce vous cherchez?”

“C’est printemps,” he replied, almost shyly. “Est qu’il y a des cistes cotonneux ou des aphyllanthes de Montpelier, peut-être?”

“Hmm,” she murmured, tapping a pencil against her lips. “Je sais pas. Donne-moi un moment – je les chercherai.” She dropped her pencil on top of the book and left.

Tamaki sighed, leaning against the counter. The shop, though small, was one of his favourites. It didn’t carry any of the fancy flowers that Kyouya or the Hitachiins would look for, and their arrangements didn’t come with the same hefty price tags. Sometimes he thought that this would be the kind of shop that Haruhi would like, but he had never found the courage to find out. What made this shop special, out of dozens or hundreds of others, were two things: the owners, and the inventory. He’d never bothered to find out why, but the owners spoke French almost fluently, and they carried the sorts of flowers that he missed most.

It wasn’t something that he talked about a lot, or indeed thought about a lot. He did what he had to do, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t like Japan. Certainly he did, and certainly he would never trade his friendships today for anything in the world. He loved the Japanese festivals, and Japanese history and Japanese snacks and anime. But sometimes, especially on early spring days where the sun shone its warm heat onto his face and the cherry blossoms were beginning to sprout, before the June rains began, sometimes he missed home.

He missed the warm, sunny days of his home Provence, he missed the hot, dry heat of summer. Summer started early there, with short, mild winters and plenty of sunshine year-round. He missed the red-tiled roofs of Marseilles, where he used to climb long ago. Once he had fallen off, rolling into the cobbled streets below. He still remembered the warmth of the hardened clay on his hands and knees, the rush of adrenaline as he’d slipped, and the short, breathless fall onto hard stones. He’d cried, he remembered; his mother had picked him up, asking him in her panicked voice if he was okay, if he had hurt himself, if they needed to go to the hospital right away. He only sustained a few bruises in the end, but it was enough to keep him from climbing those roofs ever again.

He missed the old castles and aqueducts and forts of the city, living within a different history, maybe a dreamier history. Many castles and fortifications came from the Middle Ages, the time of knights and dames and chivalry; some lasted from the Merovingians and Carolingians, those glorious days under the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. A few dated all the way back to Roman Provincia Nostra, and here and there, perhaps even one or two to the Greek Massalia. He missed the smell of history as he wandered down narrow streets, into old Catholic cathedrals and the Vieux-Port and La Vielle Charité.

He had never been very religious at home. Like every French child, he had of course been baptised and certainly he had studied the catechism and been confirmed. Still, it had taken a move halfway around the world for him to truly embrace it, when it was impossible to attend Mass every Sunday, and where his religion set him apart from others. It was another thing he kept to himself; Kyouya was, of course, a staunch atheist and rationalist, and who knew what the Hitachiins believed. Both Honey-senpai and Mori-senpai were Buddhists, but he and he alone was Catholic. He thought, maybe, that this was something that connected him to his mother in France. He made an effort now to go to Mass when he could, and prayed often for her health and safety and happiness.

He wondered, offhand, what Haruhi would think of that.

He missed the smells of home, the salty brine taste of the air near the ocean and the warm, desert-like scent of the garrigue, laced with gentle wafts of lavender, rosemary, sage and thyme in the highlands, closer to the mountains of Italy. He missed the smell, too, of his house; warm and welcoming, the scent of bouillabaisse streaming from the kitchens, the smell of old paper and old wood in the music room, and when she felt good enough to play, the smell of rosin from his mother’s violin. He remembered the echo of sweet melodies of Saint-Saens and the wild dances of Vivaldi she would play for him, and the sonatas of Beethoven or Mozart or Chopin they would play together.

Sometimes, or maybe a part of him all the time, missed his native France with all of his heart.

“Nous n’avons pas des cistes cotonneux ou des aphyllanthes de Montpelier,” the girl returned, apologetic, but holding before her a small plant, with very round, white leaves and a daffodil-yellow centre. “Mais j’ai cherché un ciste à feuilles de sauge. Est-ce que ça va bien?”

“Ouais, ça va,” Tamaki agreed instantly, reaching for his wallet. “Je l’achèterai. Merci beaucoup.”

“Rien fait,” the girl replied, smiling and carefully placing the flower into a paper bag and presenting it to him with both hands. “Merci.”

As he exited the shop, Tamaki took a deep breath and tasted the warm, but slightly damp smell of the Japanese spring, mixed in with the slightly acidic taste of pollutants. There were times to remember, and times to be nostalgic and times to miss home with everything he had, and for now, that time was over. It was time to return to the hustle of Japanese life, time to return to the often political game of the Japanese elite. He sighed once more, softly, glanced down at the wildflower that meant so much to him, before pulling out his cell phone and calling his chauffeur.

---

Translations

The conversation between Tamaki and the store-keeper goes roughly like this, in order, where T is Tamaki and G is the girl. Of course these aren’t really exact translations – they sound weird here but they make sense in French, and my translations are somewhere between the two.

T: Hello. You’re beautiful today as always. Is it going well?
G: Yes, yes. It’s been a long time, Mr. Suoh. What are you looking for?”
T: It’s spring. Are there any orchid rockroses or Montpelier aphyllanthuses (Both of these are wildflowers found in southern France, in Provence)
G: I don’t know. Give me a moment and I will look.”

G: We don’t have any orchid rockroses or Monpelier aphyllanthuses, but we have a white cistus (white rockrose). Is that okay?
T: Yes, that is good. I will buy it. Thank you very much.
G: I did nothing. Thank you.

---

One of the things that always bothered me about Tamaki’s character was his one-dimensional-ness, particularly in fanfiction. Often we treat him as nothing but a flailing idiot, and while this is how he often acts in canon, I always thought there was more to him than that. I always wanted to write a Tamaki that was really, really French – down to the perfect unaccented French (you have NO IDEA how much I flinched in the anime), the Catholicism, and everything else. I’m not sure how well I conveyed that, but I wanted to write a Tamaki that was serious and nostalgic about everything in France he missed, all the things that he took for granted there and miss today. I took a lot of inspiration from Joachim du Bellay’s poems in Les Regrets for this, and cited one of his sonnets at the beginning – at the time du Bellay wrote it, he was serving as secretary to a cardinal in Rome, and he was writing about how much he missed France. He died two years after he published Les Regrets.

If anyone speaks French fluently here, feel free to correct my grammar – I’m not fluent writing, but I read French and understand French very well (having studied it for about eleven years, two of those at university level). This was an idea I spent a long time toying with; initially, in fact, it was Haruhi and Tamaki speaking in a Catholic cathedral, but in the end I think Tamaki alone in a flower shop works better.