He should have known that puberty was going to be a problem.
Now, as Sumeragi Subaru picked up the shards of one of his grandmother's nicer looking vases (he hadn't even touched it), he could only hope that it wasn't one of her favourites. At least it wouldn't cut him; the breaks were as smooth as though the vase had originally been made in pieces.
Raising an adolescent boy in a house full of antiques was a bad idea and best avoided at all costs. Triply so if he happened to be an onmyouji whose powers, it seemed, blossomed violently when he hit his teens. Subaru, at fourteen (fifteen in February), was breaking a lot of vases. All it took was forgetting that the potentional victim was in the room.
He also tore a lot of paper screens just by getting flustered, and blew out a lot of lightbulbs just by touching them. Just thinking the wrong things seemed to do damage. His grandmother encouraged mental control and meditation, but he had a terrible suspicion that she was laughing as soon as one of them left the room. It wasn't fair.
His twin sister, by comparison, seemed to be dancing her way through her youth as effortlessly as the butterflies she had sewn onto her sneakers. Someday she would figure out how to constuct shoes from scratch, and the world would never be safe again. People used to think that Subaru and Hokuto were close enough to identical as to make no real difference; nobody thought that anymore. Boys had already begun to hesitantly flirt with her, drawn toward her vibrancy as though she were a sun.
Subaru wasn't sure how he felt about that.
He walked through the house, cradling the dead vase in hands that seemed much bigger than they had been just last week (his gloves were getting too small again), heading toward the kitchen. Maybe Hokuto could fix it. It would be New Year's in a few days, and breaking something so pretty and valuable now seemed ominous.
She was in the dining room, kneeling at the table, surrounded by a small ocean of mangled white paper. He eyed this with a certain amount of dread. "I broke a vase."
"Again?" Hokuto put down the sheet of paper she was currently struggling with and glared up at him. "Grandma's gonna explode someday. Lemme see."
Subaru set the pieces down on table after sweeping away paper that, on closer inspection, bore a lot of tell-tale creases. "It broke pretty cleanly. None of the pieces fell or anything. Um..."
"Hm?" Hokuto picked up a shard and squinted at it.
"... What are you doing?"
She sighed dramatically and started to work out where the vase's pieces fit together. "I'm trying to make cranes. It's so hard." She pouted up at him cutely, and he wondered vaguely if he could reproduce that expression if he even tried.
"New Year's is in a week. We're supposed to be cleaning the house, not...." He trailed off as her pout grew momentarily more intense. "...Why are you trying to make cranes?"
"Because," she said, "it's Christmas tomorrow. I need them for the tree. Could you go get the glue? It's in the kitchen."
Subaru blinked at her. "... We have a tree?"
"A little one. I bought it this morning, it's so cute. It has little lights and a little star at the top." She beamed. "I got a Christmas cake, too. We can eat it tomorrow morning. I'm so excited!"
He sighed a little and knelt next to her, picking up one of the sheets of paper. "A Christmas cake, huh?" He pressed it flat on the table to straighten it a little.
"All of the bakeries are selling them. Haven't you noticed? It's traditional."
"Hm." He began to refold the white paper against lines that were slightly off from his sister's attempt. "Only here. They don't eat them in Europe or anything."
Hokuto blinked. "They don't?"
He shrugged. "It doesn't have much to do with the holiday, after all."
She snorted. "Well, they have trees, right? Don't spoil this for me, Subaru, I'm having fun."
"I know." He didn't look up as he concentrated on the little paper bird. "Yeah, they have trees, but they don't have much to do with anything, either. Christmas just celebrates the birth of Christ, though nobody even really knows when he was born. Just another excuse to sell jewelery and cakes."
"Subaru! Jeez, I'm going to fix this stupid vase, so stop being Mr. I-Know-Everything-About-Every-Religion-Ever-Because-I'm-A-Clanhead. It's annoying."
Subaru set a small paper crane on the table and sighed softly. "Sorry."
She picked it up again and squinted at it. "It's okay. Could you do that again? I wasn't watching."
Another discarded piece of paper was selected and unfolded, and this time Hokuto leaned in to watch closely. "When did you learn to do origami?"
Subaru shrugged again. "I don't remember when. Grandma showed me."
Hokuto picked up a paper from the neat little pile of fresh sheets on the floor. "Are you okay? You seem awfully grumpy."
"I'm fine."
"It was just a silly vase. She won't care. She probably broke a bunch when she was our age."
The mental image that inspired made Subaru smile. "Maybe."
"So cheer up! It's Christmas! Or, ah, New Year's, if you want to be a big scrooge." Hokuto bounced in place a little and began to mangle her paper with enthusiasm.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye. "Hokuto?"
"Hmm?"
"There's... um... something I wanted to talk to you about."
Hokuto looked up, her green eyes still sparkling. "Eh?"
Subaru scowled as he folded the head the wrong way. Folding paper that had already been folded in another direction was hard. "Just that... um... I'm moving to Tokyo this year. After our birthday."
She bounded to her feet, her face as brightly lit as her little lights. "We are?!"
He winced. "I am."
She scowled. "We are. Uh... why?"
This was not, honestly, what he had planned to talk about. Having found himself too shy to bring up his real concern, his side of the conversation turned a little flatfooted. He wasn't supposed to talk about this with Hokuto until he and their grandmother had worked out details. "Because... because Grandma is getting old, and she says she's tired of traveling when when our clients up there need somebody. So, that way, she can take care of Kyoto, and I can handle Tokyo."
She hopped on her toes, beaming down at him. "Oh, that will be wonderful! I can't wait!"
"Hokuto... if you come with me, Grandma will be all alone."
"Nonsense, she has her servants, and there are the cousins in town. She'll be fine. I'm not going to let you go alone, who knows what sort of trouble you'll get yourself into." She winked. "There are a lot of dangerous men in Tokyo."
His little paper crane suddenly seemed fascinating. "There are dangerous people everywhere."
"And that's why you need your big sister to look out for you!" She sat down again with flourish. "Oh, we'll have so much fun. It will just be us! No curfews, nobody looking over our shoulders all the time, no one to give us a bad time about... anything." She giggled. "We have to wait for two whole months?"
"Yeah." Subaru fiddled with the crane.
"Some freedom will be really nice." He could tell she was looking at him, speaking pointedly. He frowned a little.
"It won't be that different from before."
Hokuto took his crane away, piching it by its pointed beak and spinning it between her fingers. "You know, Subaru... there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about."
He looked up and blinked. "Huh?"
She smiled. "Do you remember... oh, we must have been what, eight? It was before you started wearing gloves... remember when you knocked into Grandma's chess set and one of the rooks fell? And you didn't notice?"
"Um... yeah, kind of." So, perhaps his clumsiness wasn't entirely the fault of puberty. It was a little comforting to believe that it was.
Hokuto beamed. "And I knew where it had rolled to before you even knew it was missing?"
"Oh... yes. Grandma made a big deal out of that."
She shook her head. "I don't care what she thinks, it doesn't matter. Onmyoujitsu doesn't matter, the chess set doesn't matter. All that matters is you." Her eyes were as bright and intense as they always were, but they seemed more so for all that they had focused on a single point. "I know everything about you, Subaru. I know things that maybe you don't know. I know things sometimes without knowing I know them. It doesn't matter why."
Subaru felt oddly transfixed, and stared back into her brilliant green gaze.
"What I'm saying is... when you say you have something to talk to me about, and then you lose your nerve... it's okay, because I know. I know, Subaru. And I know that you need me, a lot more than you think you do." She tapped the side of her nose and winked. "Because there are dangerous men in Tokyo, Subaru. And I know more about that sort of thing than you do, because you've been too scared to find out for yourself."
He stared at her, eyes wide. He could feel himself beginning to blush.
She smiled. "I love you, Subaru. Merry Christmas." She reached up and balanced the crane on his head. "And yeah, yeah, a happy new year."
The crane fell off his head and hit his nose on the way down.
"And I told you to go find the glue. It's still sitting next to the last vase you broke. If you make me get up, you'll be sorry."
