Chaneru - After an awkward experience of trying to eat a can of cold ravioli with only my fingers, I would never find it odd that you would be clever enough to have a spare plastic spoon in your purse. Good thinking! It's like leaving napkins from a fast food restaurant in the glove box of the car. :) Many uses, lol.
...
Master groaned as he woke up, his muscles in distorted agony. At some time during the night he had fallen out of the two chairs that he had tried to prop up together to work as a makeshift bed. Everything ached. He limped painfully to the bathroom and relieved himself, washed his face, and blearily put his contact lenses back in. Squinting, Master regarded his five o'clock shadow, and scowled. He grabbed for his electric razor.
...
The sound of soft buzzing woke Kaito, and he got up from the bed, tried to smooth his very rumpled clothes. He had slept very poorly, and Meiko practically kicking him in his sleep, jolting him into a fear response, as she turned over every now and then, had not helped any. Neither had the cold spring, night air.
His bladdar complaining, Kaito unhappily went to wait his turn outside of the bathroom. Master appeared as the door opened a few moments later, and grunted a semblance of a crusty "good morning" to Kaito. Kaito mumbled an exhausted response and slipped into the bathroom, relieved to be able to take care of his morning routine.
Unwilling to take up the bathroom for too long before Meiko got up, mostly for the sake of self-preservation learned from experience, Kaito left the bathroom door ajar.
"Oh, noooo," Master's voice moaned from the kitchen. Kaito's eyes opened in anxious alarm and he half-jogged to find out what was wrong.
"Master! What's-" Kaito's eyes took in the scene as Master half-turned, the frying pan in his hand. The pan was again covered in the orange rust Kaito had worked so hard to remove just the night before. "...Ohh."
Master scrubbed his face with his hand, holding the pan out for Kaito to take it. Kaito did so very reluctantly, looking utterly despondant.
The bedroom door banged open and a grumpy, rumpled Meiko with bedhead appeared in the kitchen. "Beer!" She demanded unreasonably, and Master jumped back out of the way until she had cracked open a can and taken a long swig. "Mmph," Meiko muttered after a moment, and her cranky expression softened, her exhausted eyes focused on Master and Kaito. "Ohayo."
"O-ohayo," Kaito offered nervously. Meiko first thing in the morning was a force to be feared. Her brown eyes narrowed as she took in the sight of the orange pan in Kaito's hands. She sighed and took another long swig of her lukewarm beer.
"Well, Master, it's your socks' turn this time," Meiko announced.
"Wa.. wait, what?!" Master yelped. "Why my socks?"
"Because I only brought four pairs of everybody's stockings, and you've already used up two pairs of Kaito's. It's your turn," Meiko said, giving such a hairy look, as if daring him to complain further, that Master gulped, before bravely trying one last time to argue.
"But my socks are Smart Wool, they're not even cotton. And do you know how much more they cost than Kaito's socks? Why don't we use /your/ socks, Meiko?" Master blurted out, tiredness making him stupid. Meiko stared back, then cracked a sort of unpleasant smile. She stalked away and returned a moment later.
"Here ya go," Meiko said, almost cheerfully as she tossed a pair of nylons at Master's chest. "Help yourself, Master."
"I thought you said you packed reasonable, practical clothes for us," Master exclaimed, holding the pair of sheer nylons in his hands and almost yelling in outrage and consternation. Meiko smiled that unpleasant sort of smile again and responded.
"For me, this /is/ reasonable and practical. Don't you even ever notice what my clothes are usually like, Master? But if you'd rather use my socks than yours..." she trailed off, knowing she had won the arguement as a defeated, disgruntled look passed over Master's face.
Master glanced over at Kaito, and the bluenette intelligently lifted his hands up in the "I surrender" pose, and physically backed away from the arguement a step. Master sighed loudly and handed the pantyhose back to Meiko. "Go get a pair of my socks from the living room," Master allowed, displeased, cranky, and frustrated.
"Yessir," Meiko saluted with her beer can. Kaito released his held breath as she did as she was bade, and Master watched as Meiko handed over a pair of Master's socks to Kaito.
Master's scowl was not pretty as he realized that there was no way they could afford to waste another pair of socks should the pan grow yet another layer of new rust tomorrow morning. Master yanked the cell phone from his pocket and mashed the numbers in frustation, an irritating "Your call could not be connected, please try again" answering him.
Punching in a text message instead and sending it, Master hoped that his sister knew offhand what the solution to the rust problem would be.
...
It wasn't even 15 minutes later when Master's phone chimed that a new message had arrived. Master opened it impatiently.
'Did you season the pan? If it's cast iron...' was the cryptic reply. Master gnashed his teeth together. Season?! He typed back a quick reply.
'No. What kind of spice do you need to use to prevent rust?' Master hit send.
A minute went by, and Master tried to ignore the soft sound of Kaito ruining his wool socks in the background as he stared at the screen and willed it to answer.
'LOL no, not that kind of seasoning. You have to coat it in oil or crisco, and bake it for about an hour. It's called seasoning the pan.'
Another text quickly came after the first text:
'I would pay to see you rummaging through your spice rack right about now'
Master facepalmed in gratitude and sheer annoyance. 'Thanks' he typed curtly back. Master sighed and put the phone back away.
...
Master rinsed his jar of mung beans with the leftover, clean, boiled water that he had saved from last night, draining them again and replacing the dry sock as a sort of airy cover on top again. This type of bean didn't require anything special to get it to sprout, beyond a rinse a couple times a day for a few days, and it felt good to Master to get /something/ done right.
Breakfast was more brown rice, rehydrated TVP, celery, two of the apples, 'chopped' roughly into pieces with the scissors, and several pinches of nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, and curry powder, cooked together in the pan, once Kaito had cleaned it back out again. While it cooked, and with Master's okay, Kaito had gone outside and successfully broken off a few relatively straight sticks from a tree he knew was a pine, and spent several minutes looking for an appropriately sharp rock, before working to carefully scrape the bark from them.
The resulting, vaguely sticky chopsticks were mostly the same uniform size and length, and smelled green, of fresh pine, when Kaito came back inside to wash them off.
"Use the leftover boiled water from last night, just to be on the safe side, since we're putting them in our mouths, Kaito. We don't know whether the water here is safe to drink or not," Master directed and indicated the mason jar half full of clear water on the counter. Kaito nodded, and used a very sparing amount of the liquid soap to clean their new utensils with.
Master's aching body creaked as he returned to the living room to wait for the meal to complete cooking, and he groaned in pain as his muscles protested lowering himself to the floor to sit. Meiko joined him, her wet hair glistening from the shower, and blinked in surprise that Master hadn't chosen one of the chairs to sit in. She sank down in one of the said chairs and flicked the TV set on, scanning for the news.
...
"Once the water boils, pour as much of it into the jars as will fit and let it cool down. Sigh... I wish I had thought to bring /anything/ that could hold a larger quantity of fluid. It's going to get annoying fast if we have to replenish our drinking water after every single meal," Master bemoaned from his spot on the floor.
It seemed like Master had been doing nothing but whining about one thing or another since he'd gotten up this morning, and Meiko wanted to roll her eyes, tired of it by now. Satisfied that her own job, washing up the dishes this time, had already been thoroughly covered, she left Kaito to fend for himself.
The bluenette joined her a few minutes later, as Master's tangent about how to 'season' the iron fry pan finally petered out, and Meiko exchanged a look of sympathy with Kaito. He looked a little harried, and more than a little exhausted, even though it was still only morning.
"Tag. You're it," Meiko said, putting a friendly hand on Kaito's shoulder briefly and passing the still-dripping pan back over to him. Kaito dried the bottom of the pan with the sock from the bean jar, reasoning that a little extra moisture wouldn't hurt the beans' growth as Meiko left him to his own devices.
Kaito's eyes took in the growing collection of beer cans on the counter top, and tilted his head, thinking, as he filled the pan with fresh water and placed it back on the stove, turning the burner on. Kaito grabbed the scissors.
