InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Patchwork Family ❯ An Uneasy Homecoming, and No Vanilla ( Chapter 10 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Empty cupboards are eternally frustrating for a cook, and sometimes it takes a while to feel like you have a place to belong.

Anime/Manga: InuYasha Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Angst / Supernatural / Romance / Psychological / Drama / Action | Type: Alternate Universe | Uploaded On: 07.19.2014 | Updated On: 06.05.2016 | Pages: 5 | Words: 3.2K | Visits: 595 | Status: Completed

A/N: All Inuyasha characters and references belong to the creator of Inuyasha, Rumiko Takahashi and published by Shogakukan. Any other characters are more than likely my own creation. If I borrow from another story I will do my best to make sure I give credit where credit is due.

***

It was still dark when Rosalind woke. All that could be heard was the quiet of early morning settled over the house. She closed her eyes and curled into the thick, warm blankets. She tried to go back to sleep; but she was normally at work already by this hour. The blinking blue numerals of the digital clock said it was half past five in the morning.

Exhaling a long sigh, she slid out of bed and made her way to the dark wooden dresser. She pulled an oversized turtleneck sweater over the camisole and sports bra she’d slept in; both of which had once been white, but were now an unappealing, worn out gray. Socks followed, along with a pair of much-mended blue jeans with patches on the hip and thigh, as well as a tear in one knee. They were well used, but still served their purpose well enough.

Rosalind opened the curtains, appreciating the gray glint of approaching dawn on the rolling breakers as they curled into the shore. Turning back to the mirror over the dresser, she pulled her thick, deep red, slightly curly hair into a knot low on the back of her head. Second-guessing her work, she flipped on the lamp and inspected herself. A small, exasperated groan broke the quiet as she saw the dark circles on her face from lack of sleep.

It had been late when everyone had finally wound down for the night. She’d stayed up, listening to make sure Inuyasha and the girl he’d taken in made it back safely after the night’s events. She opened the small pouch of makeup on the dresser and dabbed a little concealer and powder on, trying to smooth out the slightly zombified look she was getting. Finally, she flicked on a little eye liner and decided that was as good as it was going to get.

Quietly, she opened her bedroom door and padded down the hallway. It didn’t look like Koga and Ayame were back from their patrol yet. Judging by the faint tint of daylight visible through the living room window, they would be coming soon and would likely be ravenous. She’d heard Gabriel the night before when he was speaking to Inuyasha in the hallway and knew two more would be heading out for a morning patrol. Having been with the Wardens for a decade, she knew they’d need serious fuel before they left. This was one of the things she enjoyed about her strange patchwork family. It made her feel good to be able to feed people, to give them strength; and the demons especially were enough to keep her busy. And busy was best; she’d learned that a long time ago.

Padding into the kitchen, she flipped on the small light over the stove and looked around. She took a moment to appreciate being back in the kitchen where she’d taught herself to cook. Sesshomaru had re-built this house in a fit of grief, she knew. She’d been there to see its construction. But he had good taste and hadn’t done anything half way.

The interior of the property had been put together with an eye to the original Spanish architecture. The warm terra cotta tiled counters gleamed in the dim light, the wide sink was scrubbed clean, the smooth, matching terra cotta floors swept spotless. A big gas stove with six burners was built into a long working counter in the center, not far from a huge, brushed metal refrigerator.

Rosalind wandered through the room, peering into all the cupboards and the pantry, taking stock and mentally configuring her options. She found the place pretty bare, with only the most basic staple ingredients to be found; even some of those were running low. She knew Sesshomaru paid someone to come in once a week or so and cook, making enough leftovers to last for several days. She sighed heavily. There were no herbs and no spices, aside from some salt and pepper, a small container of something called shichimi, and a little dried parsley left in an abandoned container at the back of the pantry. She would have to make due.

She pulled all the ingredients to make scrambled eggs, sausage and pancakes. Once she had everything arranged on the counter she stood for a moment and frowned. Where had all her pans gone? Well they weren’t technically her pans. Sesshomaru had bought them for the kitchen when she was a teenager and had begun doing most of the cooking. He’d caught her ogling them on the internet one afternoon and the full set of beautiful stainless steel cookware was waiting for her on the counter the next week without a word from him. She smiled a little at the memory and began searching.

Eventually she found them, piled haphazardly in a cabinet that was so high, she could barely reach up to get the doors open. She scowled. Why would the cook he hired have shoved them up there like that? There was no foot stool to be found, excepting the small wooden one the kids used to wash her hands at the sink.

With a sigh, she pulled a chair from the long scrubbed wooden table and stood it with its back against the counter. Carefully, she climbed onto the chair, pulled herself onto the counter top and straightened slowly. The smooth tiles of the counter were a little slippery in stocking feet. When she stood upright she looked at her pans and smiled, a warm fuzzy feeling settling around her like a hug from an old friend. She didn’t feel the least bit silly as she pulled out her large sauce pan, whispering, “there you are, I missed you.”

Slowly and carefully, she pulled the pieces out and stacked them on the counter at her feet. Just as she was removing the largest frying pan, there was the sound of someone clearing their throat behind her and she turned in surprise. She cried out as she felt her socks loose purchase on the tile. Immediately she curled into herself as she began to fall, anticipating a long drop and the hard impact of the sink, and then the floor. There was a clanging cacophony as her foot hit the stack of pans and they scattered.

It took her a second to realize that she’d stopped falling, and that there’d been no painful impact. She opened her eyes to find a pair of sharp gold ones looking back at her. The normally straight plains of Sesshomaru’s face were creased a little with surprise and concern for a moment before his expression smoothed itself out again. She blinked a few times, realizing both that he was holding her in his arms, and that she was pressed against a hard chest… that was warm… and bare. Rosalind bit her lip and mentally ordered herself to breath, looking away from him as her cheeks reddened.

After a moment, he set her on her feet, making sure she was steady before he let go. She looked up at him and opened her mouth to say something and then, realizing she couldn’t quite make any words come out yet, closed her lips again. It felt as if she’d been shocked in a way that left her skin buzzing. She bent and began picking up the pans, hands shaking a little as she set them back on the counter.

She picked up a skillet and was surprised when clawed hands with long, almost graceful fingers, grasped the large soup pot just beyond her reach. When she set her pan on the counter, he put the pot next to it. A glance out of the corner of her eye told her he stood, shoulders stiff, hands moving to rest on his hips, which were clad in a pair of gray workout pants. She noted with curious interest that he had magenta colored markings along the sides of his hips, similar to the ones on his wrists and cheek bones. The slashes of color started high and disappeared beneath the elastic band. Her eyes rose up a well-muscled torso and caught on a scar wrapped around one bicep. She frowned. It was clearly an old scar and somehow she’d never seen it. She met his eyes again and, without thinking, asked, “what happened to your arm?”

Sesshomaru’s expression didn’t lift in the slightest. His eyes flicked to his arm briefly and then back to her. “Mark of an old injury, it will disappear eventually, unlike a broken human neck.”

Rosalind pursed her lips and took the pot from him, murmured her thanks, and made her hands busy, arranging her workspace to get started with breakfast. It had been a long time since she’d seen or spoken with Sesshomaru alone like this. She hadn’t been avoiding him. Their paths just hadn’t crossed often in such a way since she’d moved out and gotten the job at the bakery in downtown Arcata.

She’d been 17 then, and three years had passed. Mostly, they’d just communicated as necessary on the phone or through the other Wardens. However, just because it had been a while since she’d spent any real time around him didn’t mean she didn’t remember that set of his shoulders. Was he upset with her?

Finally she took a stab at conversation. “I thought you guys might need breakfast. I heard Gabriel say you and he were running a patrol this-morning. If I understood him, Koga and Ayame will be coming back in any minute now, and they’ll be starving. I found the stuff to make eggs, sausage and pancakes, if that’s agreeable? I looked but I couldn’t find any bread for toast. And there isn’t any baking powder so I can’t make quick bread, not to mention the pancakes won’t be quite right without it.”

She stopped rambling and looked up at him, her nerves humming in his silence. The severe look on his face made her wonder if maybe she’d overstepped some line by starting breakfast-- by moving back into this kitchen as if she’d never left it. He looked down at her, which was easy to do, as he stood a full foot taller than her own five feet and seven inches.

Sesshomaru listened to the red head as she floundered, smelling her increasing discomfort. When a faint tinge of panic crept over her scent on top of it, he forced himself to relax his muscles a little. It was only because of his increased senses he knew any of this. Rosalind was very good at internalizing any visible signs of distress. He’d forgotten how automatically sensitive she was to body language-- really in much the way many demons were.

When he’d first brought her from Chicago at the age of ten years old, she’d been silently terrified, even distrustful of him until he’d learned to consciously relax his posture when he was in her presence. Over time, he’d developed the habit of communicating with her in this way and in some ways, it pleased him. She was one of a rare few humans who were even halfway capable of such intercommunication.

Growing up in a home where adults were apt to be angry, and then abusive had made her good at reading people, whether she realized she did it or not. It seemed that much hadn’t changed. He tried to limit the severity of his tone as he said, “may I ask what you thought you were doing on the counter? You might have done yourself real injury.”

Rosalind’s cheeks stained pink again and he found himself thinking absently that with her red hair and blazing green eyes, the color looked charming on her. She turned a little, so she was facing him more directly and said with some hesitation, “I was just getting the pans.” She looked up a little resentfully at the high cupboard and said, “whoever’s been cooking for you shoved all the good ones way up there.”

Sesshomaru had to make an effort to keep the amusement from his face. She almost sounded upset, as if the cookware he’d bought her years ago were personal friends that had been treated poorly in her absence. He rubbed his jaw for a moment and said, “you should have asked someone taller to get them if you couldn’t reach.”

She shrugged and turned back to the nearly empty bin of flour. “I didn’t want to wake anyone up yet.” He watched her dither a little with the things she’d pulled out, as if she wasn’t sure whether or not she was allowed to start cooking. His sigh was barely audible as he stepped around to the other side of the work counter, grabbing a slicing knife and a cutting board on his way. Before she could protest, he pulled the onions across to him and asked simply, “sliced, chopped, or minced?” When she didn’t say anything, he looked up to see her biting her lip again. Without his realizing it, the sight made him lick his own dry lips. She went even more red in the cheeks and muttered, “chopped is fine, unless we have any picky eaters.”

He lowered his eyes again and began the task, allowing silence to fall. As she began to work she seemed more comfortable. Her hands moved deftly, as if with little instruction on her part. They knew what to do. She had the pancake batter mixed up before he was done chopping the onions, and had wandered over to the pantry closet. After she spent a long moment looking into it, she closed it with a small frown and began looking through the cupboards around the stove. When she didn’t seem to be finding what she was looking for, Sesshomaru finally asked, “what are you after?”

She closed a cabinet and sighed, shrugging her shoulders. “There isn’t any vanilla. Who doesn’t have vanilla?” His lips twitched a little, as if to smile at the faint indignation in her tone. She had definitely calmed and was in her element here. Letting some of his amusement leak into his voice he said, “the man I hired doesn’t do much besides the basic.”

She snorted, cutting some butter into the pancake mix. “Vanilla IS basic.”

Now he did smile. “I expect you’ll be here for some time. This afternoon we can go into town and get some groceries. It’s time to do so in any case. You can stock anything you need that we don’t have.” He sensed her pause and withdraw a little, as if she hadn’t fully intended to say half of what she had out loud. She set a large flat pan over the biggest burner and turned the heat on low, warming it and melting some butter to coat the surface. She conflicted for a second before she said, “I don’t need much. I can make due mostly with what’s here. Just… a few things.”

She began to drop heaping spoon-fulls of batter onto the heating metal where it emitted a satisfying hiss. Automatically, she pulled a glass bowl in front of him for the onions and he dumped the chopped bulbs into it. She swept it away and replaced it with an empty one for the small amount of mushrooms she’d found left in the fridge. As she cracked an entire carton and a half of eggs into a larger mixing bowl, he watched her add salt, the last of the pepper and milk. She picked up the mostly empty container of parsley flakes and grimaced a little with apparent despair. As she rinsed the container’s lid free of dust at the sink he said, “we can stock up on those too.”

Rosalind returned to the bowl of eggs, wiping the wet jar with a dish cloth and looking confused.

Sesshomaru nodded to the pathetic dusting of dry parsley. “Herbs. We can purchase whatever you’re accustomed to working with.”

She shook her head. “That’s really not necessary. There isn’t anything here anymore, and to build a spice cupboard up from nothing would get pricy. I can make due as long as you guys are happy with simple plain stuff.”

Sesshomaru’s eyes narrowed a little, remembering what Inuyasha had told him about the girl’s apartment. He looked her up and down inconspicuously. On closer inspection, she did look thinner than he thought was right, though not anything like the state Inuyasha’s Kagome was in. He also met the unexpectedly strong realization that she was definitely not a girl any longer, but a young woman. Gruffly, he said, “I’ve let the pantry go recently. I’m planning on restocking it anyway. As you will likely be using it more than the rest of us, you might as well select the inventory. You haven’t been here 24 hours and you’re already preparing breakfast for nearly a dozen people. I’m pulling the inner circle of Wardens home for now; there will be plenty of mouths to feed.”

He knew instantly that he’d said the right words. She was more at ease as she flipped pancakes and scrambled the eggs. Her mouth relaxed into an unconscious smile as she tossed the large package of frozen sausages into a huge pan with some of the onions, moving everything around with a sizzle. As he watched, something in him resolved to do what he could to keep that smile in place. He found there was some satisfaction to be found in seeing her like this. It had taken time before she’d been comfortable with him when she had come here as a child. A lot had happened since then and it seemed-- though he wasn’t starting from square one, he would have to work on making her feel as if this was her home again.