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Prompt 1 (Diamond Dust): This time of year, snow is common. What’s uncommon is the single, strange snowfall where each snowflake that fell glistened like tiny diamonds. For the most part, the snow seems fairly normal—it’s cold, wet, and melts just like any other snow, it just also happens to look like tiny little gems are falling from the sky. Depending on who you’re with, it’s either incredibly strange, or incredibly romantic.
When the snow is coming down at its strongest, crystalized snowflakes trickle down with the rest of the snow. These are roughly the size of a quarter and are light and hollow. They are fragile, like glass, but glisten like a fine cut gem. No one can explain this anomaly, but these small snowflakes won't melt. And they are all over Destiny City. You can find them gently falling to the ground, or lying in the fresh fallen snow. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly magical about them, but they are beautiful and make pretty keepsakes.
When the snow is coming down at its strongest, crystalized snowflakes trickle down with the rest of the snow. These are roughly the size of a quarter and are light and hollow. They are fragile, like glass, but glisten like a fine cut gem. No one can explain this anomaly, but these small snowflakes won't melt. And they are all over Destiny City. You can find them gently falling to the ground, or lying in the fresh fallen snow. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly magical about them, but they are beautiful and make pretty keepsakes.
Hinami Rokugin, handsome, clever, and loud, did not particularly like to think of herself as a nosy, prying, or invasive person, nor as somebody who failed to have a functional sense of boundaries. She definitely didn’t like to think of herself as somebody who could’ve potentially been, in any way, annoying. Maybe she didn’t perfectly adhere to all the tedious, limiting social conventions that had been forced on her all the time—such as, for example, when she decided to stand on her toes to peer at somebody over different racks of Saturday flea market resale items her niichan was perusing for spare fabric or whatever—but that didn’t mean that Hinami Rokugin had no manners whatsoever.
It meant that she sometimes made careful and deliberate choices to eschew manners. Which was, in her opinion, a Very Important Semantic Difference.
Right now, she could concede that semantics didn’t much matter. Not when somebody else at the flea market had so thoroughly captured her attention. Had it been a pretty girl, that might not have made niichan do his exasperated sighing bullshit while making the nauseated-looking, pursed lips faces that he always made when he felt like Hinami was fixing to get them kicked out of wherever they were at any given time (which was really stupid today, since who the Hell had ever gotten kicked out of a Saturday morning flea market at the end of December?)……but, like, whatever. If niichan didn’t want to help her in her Very Important Task of peering over this rack of sweaters at the very tall, dark-skinned somebody with the bright pink hair, then Hinami would have to do all the difficult work herself.
She was pretty sure that niichan had multiple dresses, blouses, and miscellaneous lolita separates that would’ve matched the pink in the very tall, dark-skinned somebody’s hair quite nicely. Not that this was the point, but the idea occurred to Hinami regardless.
Sighing at his sister was a pretty regular occurrence for Reiki, especially when she inexplicably decided to set her mind on acting like their parents, grandparents, godfathers, and aunts hadn’t raised her right. Falling all over herself for pretty girls was one thing and Reiki had no quarrel with her over it (would’ve been hypocritical of him, frankly, given how much of a certified disaster he could turn into over pretty boys). But the whole time they were at this little stall in the flea market—where he’d stopped so he could look at some of the garments they had on offer and decide if he could use any of the fabric somehow—it seemed like every time he glanced over at her, Hina was on her tiptoes, peering over the rack of sweaters at some poor stranger, who definitely didn’t deserve to be ogled like this.
Considering the pink hair and how tall they were, Reiki felt pretty certain this guy got more than enough stares without Hina compounding the issue by being so weird (derogatory). As he made his rounds and dug through the racks, Reiki tossed her more than a few disapproving glances—which she couldn’t claim not to have seen, since she’d taken the time to tug down on her lower eyelid and stick out her tongue at him.… And Mom and Dad trusted her to fly all over the damn world to kick her sportsball around without a ******** babysitter to keep her in-line? Oh, Reiki did not think.
When he decided there wasn’t anything he could work with at this stall, he swooped in at Hina’s side and gently thwapped her shoulder. He hissed, “Hey, are you done acting like a total creep or what?”
“No, niichan, I am not done!” Which had sounded perfectly fine in her head, but immediately after saying it, Hinami remembered that Reiki had said something else as well: “Because I am not acting like a creep!”
“Au contraire, mon cease-taire,” Reiki drawled, throwing in a silly, neologistic mispronunciation of “sister” for the sake of making a funny rhyme when he knew damn well that the correct word in French would have been sœur. “Not only are you acting like a total creep right now, but you are also acting like a total creep with no class and no manners.”
As she turned, Hinami could’ve sworn she heard the folds in her leather jacket creaking. Or maybe her mind was playing tricks on her because of the unnecessarily heavy snow crystals that had started falling. Irregardless, she glanced away from the person she’d been watching, Hinami glowered at her stupidly tall, idiot-faced brother with his ******** glasses and his no-celebrity-gossip-knowledge mouth.
“b***h,” she deadpanned, “I am from Chicago.”
The fourteen-year-old Rupaul’s Drag Race quote-turned-meme made Reiki pinch the bridge of his nose and groan. “We were born in the same hospital, Hina,” he told her, which did exactly nothing to stop her from turning back to the rack like a ******** gremlin. “It’s only a few blocks away, actually. Which is good, because I’m gonna have to carry you there when you knock that rack over, and fall, and hit your gay little head on the cement, and get a ******** concussion.”
He paused long enough to cross his arms over his chest and pointedly arch an eyebrow at her. “Is that what you want to do to me, Hina? Force the big brother who loves and indulges you to carry you, your major head-trauma, and your massive, bleeding skull-wound to the ER at Destiny City Memorial Hospital? In this skirt and these cute little pumps? Because that’s what you’re gonna end up doing to me if you keep climbing on that rack like a ******** creep koala with no sense of personal boundaries.”
In case she had somehow missed the point of all this, Reiki added, point-blank, “Get down already, would you?”
“Ugh, shut uuuuuuuuupppppp,” Hinami told him back, whining more than she really wanted to admit. “How can you be acting like you’re so over it when Zotsholo Mjoli might be standing right there??”
Letting his shoulders slump, Reiki found his eyebrow arching again—this time, in confusion. “Who the ******** is Zotsholo Mjoli?”
—well, the aggrieved gasp that earned him out of Hina………certainly answered exactly nothing of the question he had asked her. But if they’d had any ability to justify Hina’s particularly creepy brand of silliness with “at least we’re being quiet,” they’d swiftly lost it. Her gasp made several other shoppers turn to look and hopefully, it made her painfully aware of what she looked like right now, crawling all over garment racks at her very big age of twenty-four, staring at a total stranger in the middle of the flea market.
“I’m sorry for my sister,” Reiki deadpanned at some guy who stared at her a bit too long. “Sometimes, she wakes up and decides to be too gay to function like an adult in polite society.”
Seiana_ZI
