Harry Potter and The Host Club

Chapter 8

Warnings: Slash, book spoilers, manga spoilers, angst, clichés, brooding, chocolate abuse, reflected-upon child abuse, trauma, crude language, mentioned character death, Ron bashing, Ginny bashing, Dumbles bashing, eventual mild sexual situations, AU for books 5, 6, and 7 of Harry Potter, FILLER CHAPTER

Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling and her affiliates. Ouran High School Host Club belongs to Bisco Hatori and her (it is her, right?) affiliates.

Features: Independent!Brooding!Isolationist!Harry, Clingy!Paternal!Sirius, and the host-bu guys being themselves

Chapter 8

It had about three weeks since the game of hide and seek, and Harry was rather annoyed. Nothing bad had happened; it wasn't like someone had revealed his claustrophobia to the school, and the twins weren't taunting him or anything. In fact, the matter was never even brought up by the Hosts. Well, they hadn't had time to anyway because of the festival where the school was basically going into hyper show-off mode, the Host Club in particular because they had been made the main event (after some pointless race that had been rigged against them; the Black Magic Club hadn't participated in it, so Harry hadn't paid any attention).

No, what annoyed him had nothing to do with their behavior, or even the Hosts in general. He was more annoyed with himself. Harry had been even worse about focusing than before the summer vacation, and had taken even more to people watching. Mostly Host watching. In fact, whenever he snuck into the main area of the Third Music Room under his invisibility cloak, Harry found himself watching a certain Host and feeling terribly guilty.

Mori had been spending a lot more time sitting in the window than he usually did, his presence a heavy feeling on the entire room but generally unnoticeable. It was annoying that he even noticed, but Harry did, and he knew that whatever was going on to make the stoic senior so morose was probably his own fault because of the stupid closet thing. It was Harry who owed Mori a life debt, not the other way around! Harry had even gone so far as to inform the other boy that, even if he had done something wrong, the whole saving-his-life thing would have absolved it about a dozen times over at the very least. It hadn't helped at all.

Admittedly, Harry was ahead in magical study compared to his Hogwarts peers, but he had found out that the "oldest and best school of magic in the world" was really just in the top ten when it came to education, and was the twentieth oldest school of magic after several in Asia, a little known Italian (once Roman) school, another in Greece, and one in Egypt that had been around for several millenia. They were also very much inefficient because of the way the school was run. Overall, Harry wasn't even up to pace with the average fourteen-year-old Japanese wizard.

The fact that it was his sixteenth birthday didn't make him feel any better.

Sighing in frustration, Harry arranged his notes for the festival. As the third student in the class (how he managed it, even Harry didn't know), he was going to be spending a portion of his time working as an investigator to help visitors for the 1-A part of the festival; Le Agence de Détectives Privés. Or, as Harry called it, the Private Detective Agency. Hikaru had whapped him on the head for it, but he didn't much care. At least his method made sense.

"Harry-kun," Harry glanced up from his desk. A name plate had been set in front of him so that introductions to parents wouldn't be necessary, but he had no idea who this woman was. The fact that she assumed familiarity was annoying, but he let it pass; rich people were strange, in ways different than Harry was used to, but he was used to dealing with strange people and things.

"Yes ma'am," He stood and bowed, straightening his vest as he stood. "How may I help you?"

She was about the same height as him, so a bit tall for a Japanese woman, and slim. It was her hair that clued him in to who she might be though; it was the exact same color as the Hitachiin twins', and in a similar style. Her coat and dress didn't disabuse the notion, as it just screamed ritzy... not that everyone else's didn't. The fact that her looks combined with those of the man standing over her shoulder could very well have made the hellish boys cemented the idea in his mind.