DISCLAIMER: One Piece belongs to Eiichiro Oda.
~ Big Brother, Tiny Sister ~
The oldest of the Charlotte siblings were chatting happily with one another while keeping half an eye on the youngest of their brothers and sisters during teatime.
Smoothie trailed off in the middle of her sentence suddenly, frowning.
"Where's Anana?" she asked.
"Mama sent her to her room for knocking over a plate of cookies a while ago," replied Compote.
While their mother was usually tolerant of her children's bratty behavior, wasting food was not something Big Mom tolerated under any circumstances.
"Someone should probably go check on her, to make sure she isn't playing with knives again," Katakuri put forth.
His siblings looked at him expectantly. He glared back at them.
"Well, since you're the one who brought it up..." Perospero said slowly.
"Fine," Katakuri snapped. And without another word, he went to his little sister's room to check on her.
Standing outside the closed door of the child's bedroom, he noticed that there didn't seem to be any sounds coming from inside. That was never a good sign. When children were being quiet, they were either asleep or up to something they shouldn't be doing.
He knocked on the door.
"Who's there?" Anana called out, her tone an odd mix of suspicious and sulky.
"It's Katakuri."
The door flew open, and the small child attached herself to his leg with a happy cry of "Big Brother!"
"Tiny Sister," he returned, smirking behind the fluffy scarf that covered half his face.
She pouted up at him for a moment, before asking hopefully, "Did Mama say I can come back to the tea party?"
"No, I just came to see what you were doing."
"Oh..."
After clinging to him for a moment more, Anana detached herself from her brother's leg and led him into her room.
"I'm making a picture of the night sky," she said, pointing to the so-called 'picture' on the low table in the center of the bedroom, which was normally used for holding imaginary tea parties with whatever dolls and stuffed animals had managed to survive the child's usual rough treatment of them.
Katakuri frowned as he knelt down to get a closer look at his little sister's artwork.
"You didn't even draw anything," he said as he took hold of the paper by one corner. "You just glued a bunch of glitter to a piece of paper."
"I didn't glue it."
But the warning came too late, for even as she was saying it, Katakuri had lifted the paper up from the table and now glitter rained down from it, coating his head and shoulders liberally in multicolored metallic sparkles.
Leaving his little sister to her own devices, Katakuri went to his own room and did what he could to clean himself off. No matter what he did, however, it seemed that there were always more of the little sparkles stuck to his skin somewhere, which seemed to migrate randomly and would not go away no matter how much he scrubbed.
The situation with his scarf was worse. The stubborn metallic particles clung to the fibers of his scarf with much more tenacity than they did to his skin, and after the initial dusting-down that had gotten excesses of loose glitter out of the garment, it was still covered in a ridiculous amount of sparkles. He tried washing it in the sink, but all that did was turn it from being very glittery to being wet and very glittery.
But he couldn't rejoin the tea party without his scarf. And he didn't have a spare one to wear.
With a heavy sigh, Katakuri left his room and slipped into Smoothie's room next door, to borrow her hair dryer. Once the scarf was dry, he wound it around his neck and shoulders, flinching at the unpleasant itchy texture of the glitter and the heat it retained from being blown dry.
He would receive no end of teasing from his siblings either way, and he figured he would prefer glitter jokes over jokes about him actually showing up without his beloved scarf on for once.
~end~
