Kaoru wishes, sometimes, that her idiot freeloaders would appreciate how hard she works to keep them all fed. She'll never say anything, because she took them in and she wouldn't trade them for all the money in the world – nothing could replace coming home to a house full of voices and life again – but Yahiko and Sano eat enough for four between them, and it's hard sometimes not to break down in tears when they scarf up half her income and then complain about the quality of the food.
Not all the time, mind you. Just sometimes, when she's been sleeping badly. Most of the time she's too tired to dream: she closes her eyes and opens them to the bright dawn and the smell of breakfast, and she never feels alone. But sometimes she can't sleep, because the moon is too bright or someone gave her a sly sideways glance in the market (boy-in-a-kimono, failed kendo teacher, can't catch a man) or another student regretfully stopped their lessons because such things are a luxury now, an indulgence, something to be picked up and dropped as money and time permit and nevermind that she's not sure how she's going to pay the bills. Sometimes for all three reasons at once: bad thoughts and old fears breeding in the middle of the night while she lies in bed with her heart pounding shallow in her chest.
She's always exhausted the next day, short and snappish and barely holding back from actually hurting them – and that only makes her angrier, when she realizes that they really don't take her anger seriously, makes her want to sink a dagger into their most vulnerable spots and twist just so that they'll stop taking her for granted.
Except she doesn't. And she won't. Because they don't, not really, they're just idiot men who don't know any better.
She's just so tired, sometimes.
Kenshin finds her on the porch, leaning against a pillar with her eyes half-closed, and she straightens quickly and hopes that he won't notice the tears burning behind her eyes. She's always careful to hide the worst of it from him, in case he decides that he's a burden, that he should leave. Because as hard as it is sometimes, caring for her boys and for the man she loves so much that it hurts, she knows that it would be even harder without them.
He has a cup of buckwheat tea in one hand and the nutty fragrance makes it hard to pretend that she isn't exhausted. Her father always had a cup in the evenings, to help him sleep: the scent of buckwheat tea means home-safe-family-rest, and she wonders if it's the same for Kenshin or if he only made it because it's too late in the day for green tea.
He holds it out to her, smiling gently, and she can't quite see behind his mask.
She takes it and sips. It's beautifully made – it's really not fair for him to be so good at so many things; if he didn't have terrible handwriting she'd be inclined to think he was some sort of fox-trick conjured from her dreams and worry that she'd wake up lying in a gutter one of these days and realize that everything had been just an illusion.
Kenshin sits down on the porch next to her, not quite touching her, almost too close. He's warm and solid and she wants to curl up against him and go to sleep, but she doesn't because as unusual as their relationship already is (how many tenants would kill to save their landladies? And how many landladies would live to stop them?) she's completely sure that he'd shy and run if he knew how she really felt.
The moon is rising early, before the sun's gone completely below the horizon. It's a pale, almost transparent disk against the darkening blue. Not quite full, not yet: but give it a few more nights.
"Thank you," Kenshin says finally.
"Hmm?" She sips the tea again. It's neither sweet nor bitter: somewhere in the middle, soothing, like soil moistened by rain and warmed in the sun. "What for?"
He shrugs a little and smiles one of his real smiles, the small one he uses when he sees how the joke's on him. His gesture encompasses the yard and the training hall and the bathhouse; kitchen and bedrooms and dining room and fence and the sadly neglected vegetable garden he's trying to revive. It's badly overgrown, but he's making progress: she can see clean earth peering through, ready to be planted as soon as the weeds are out of the way.
"Oh." She can't help the small laugh. "Don't worry about it. It's nothing."
"…it's not."
He looks at her when he says it, uncommonly serious, and she smiles without quite knowing why. Then, carefully – because something in his eyes tells her it's alright – she rests her head on his shoulder. He's as warm up close as he feels from a distance, and his arm doesn't come around her waist but that's okay; this is far enough, for now.
"Thank you," he says again.
"You're welcome," she tells him, simply, and means it.
She dozes off at some point and wakes the next morning in her own bed, carefully tucked in and still wearing her kimono, and isn't tired at all.