Disclaimer: Hatori Bisco's. Borrowing.

Christmas Lights

dormant muses: Dear Santa: The December Anonymous Writing Challenge

request reads as: Holiday short fic/drabble: Umehito Nekozawa, Kirimi (Ouran High School Host Club) --NOT incest mind you

Prompt: "Christmas Lights"

Little Kirimi of the Nekozawa household was well-known to be not-so-fond of darkness. The nighttime outings that were occasionally held by the clan were thus sources of sheer, unholy terror. Despite appearances, her family was loving and flexible. They stopped including their poor little princess into such traditional rituals, instead allowing her to bask in a world saturated by light, laughter, and sweetness.

(And shoujo manga. Apparently, shoujo manga somehow went well with the aforesaid.)

Christmas was a particularly important holiday for Kirimi-chan. You see, Valentines and White Day were yet to be personally interesting for her, because she didn't really have any particular interest in boys, beyond occasional playmates. They were enjoyable enough to read in the inevitable scenes that any self-respecting mangaka would include in his/her work, but Christmas didn't seem to need to have a couple involved to make it interesting. Besides, Christmas had always promised delightful things for the blue-eyed little girl.

Kirimi-chan have come to greet Christmas morns with brimming cheerfulness, for she would usually find her lacy, white-coordinated room (the white tower as opposed to the black one in another distant wing of the mansion) overflowing with all manner of presents. Trinkets, sweets, pretty dresses, cosplay costumes. . . they were all wrapped with colorful, finely-textured, handmade paper, in an obviously loving manner, and laid out under a heavily-decorated Christmas tree.

Oniichama, her prince, was good with his hands, everyone around her said. Only recently had she met this sweet person, for she later learned that he was plagued by a serious affliction: he could only manifest in the cloak of night (or really, really thick drapes). In light of this, (no pun intended), Kirimi-chan came to communicate with her brother through correspondence. The little girl was doing quite well in writing, what with her massive consumption of comics enabling her to encounter a good variety of even kanji. Of course, Oniichama sometimes went into long, spiraling stories about dark armies and witches locked up in towers. Kirimi didn't really read a lot of dark fantasy stuff.

That Christmas, Kirimi decided she wanted to do something special for her brother. He wrote to ask what Oniichima wanted. Christmas dinner for the whole family, was the startling response he wrote back, with a promise that he would take care of the necessary arrangements.

Unknown to the little miss, it was not the young master Umehito who wrote such a thing, but one Suoh Tamaki, president of the Ouran High Host Club. Apparently, Nekozawa had gone to the Third Music Room to ask for advice, and it was given to him after merely a few seconds' consideration.

Nekozawa had goggled at the piece of paper in consternation, even Belzeneef momentarily forgotten.

"Ah, be not troubled, my man," the blond, toweringly confident club president assured him. "The fraternal stirring of your penumbral bosom shall fail not in conquering the apogee of the creative prowess of the human mind. Fear not, says I! Not one of the gracious muses shall abandon the sublime, immaculate designs of your desperate desire to please your beloved sibling. Why! Wasn't it the estimable Virgil who said that love conquers all? Omnia vincit Amor! Even the most crippling of phobias, dare I say—"

Luckily, Ohtori Kyouya had a more practical approach.

So it happened on Christmas Eve, the Nekozawa mansion glowed with festive incandescence. The brilliant sparkle of the overhead chandelier was decidedly missing from the dining hall, but it was ablaze with a prism of lights—beguiling indigo and enticing scarlet, a spattering of oddly toxic greens amidst the blithe giggling of blues, and of course, the familiar cheerful yellow—flickering and titillating little tongues of lights.

"Candles?" Kirimi ventured.

"They're not as bad on my eyes," her oniichama explained haltingly.

"Christmas lights!" Kirimi said, wide-eyed. "They don't dance the same was as the ones at school, but they're even prettier."

Now, the good thing about his obsession with the occult was his access to a great deal of wax and a number of chemicals from questionable sources. Young master Nekozawa Umehito handcrafted all those candles, with some help from his trusted Belzeneef, who woefully was now quite encrusted with wax. His life would have been easier of course, if Kyouya actually told him earlier that those candles could be acquired online—

"I love Oniichama!"

—but those wouldn't have been as priceless as these ones.

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