Lady Luck never smiles
So lend your love to me, awhile
Do with me what you will
Break the spell take your fill
- Foolin', Def Leppard
Pancakes
A low moan drew out from Kagome. Her chest heaved a deep sigh. She rolled over in her futon, her sleeping face meeting his.
Sesshoumaru watched beside her carefully. A tiny stream of drool was trickling from the corner of her mouth and his hand twitched. He was severely tempted to wipe it off.
"Hmmm," another sound emerged again from her lips. "Pan … Pan … keki ..."
Sesshoumaru lifted his head, his elfin ears perking. Pan-keki? Could it be… Pancakes ? The miko to whom his spirit was fused to, whose blood he sought for his only nourishment, and the one he had risked a second chance with in order to live again, wanted pancakes?
"Thick…fluffy … pankeki …"
He trained his ear closer to make sure he was hearing her right. Suddenly there came a great "Unf!" and her hand swatted violently across his face. Sesshoumaru swore —and he rarely swore about anything throughout his life— that he felt an electrifying surge of reiki shoot from under her touch.
Kagome woke up slowly, just in time to see Sesshoumaru's white figure on the floor backing away from her. His petrified body was lunged away, his constricted eyes fixated on her, shocked, hurt even, like a dog whose tail had been stepped upon by its own master. It had been a disturbing sight to wake up to but later on while eating breakfast, Kagome recalled it had been somewhat comical, to think of it.
Her mind still steeped in post-sleep fogginess, she wondered what had overcome him.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
Sesshoumaru did not answer, his hand still glued to his cheek.
Kagome narrowed her eyes over his strange behaviour in the early morning. Then her face softened as she remembered something.
"You know it's already mid-spring," she said more kindly this time. "Is the cold still getting to you?"
At last a subtle shift ran through his features. He seemed to frown as he gathered himself on his feet and stood up.
"Who said I was cold?"
With a slightly raised eyebrow, Kagome watched as he left for the door. She was all alone in her room now, just as the sun's soft rays were filtering in through the window, warming her thick blanket. Someone's definitely cranky in the morning, she thought as she tossed in bed, and slowly fell back into a dreamless sleep. When she woke up again the sun was almost high up in the blue sky, but it was her off day from work so it did not really matter. What mattered was that the house was filled with an unmistakable aroma of pancakes.
"Morning. Ah, I mean afternoon," Kagome greeted as she stepped into her kitchen, stretching out a few kinks in her back. She bent over the hot stove open-mouthed, as Sesshoumaru poured a ladleful of batter into the saucepan. The edges of the milky mixture hissed and bubbled into a brown crispiness.
"This is weird. I don't remember any pancake recipes in the cookbooks I gave you. And look! You're wearing the pink Hello Kitty apron I bought for you! Dang, it fits you to a T—looks even better on you than I imagined."
Sesshoumaru gave her the side eye. She had displayed the apron one day and with a strange giggle, succinctly mentioned it was for him. Of course he would wear it. Why was she filled with so much glee over him wearing a particular piece of clothing?
He had been staying with her for a considerable amount of time and her mood shifts were still beyond his comprehension. One minute she would be yelling her head off to "bloody switch off the telly before I really pull the plug on you", and the next moment she would be gushing over how clean the bathroom sparkled—"just like a five-star hotel." Sesshoumaru had no idea what a five-star hotel was, but she was appreciative of his work, that bit he could understand.
He observed as Kagome walked towards the coffee machine to make herself a cup of—macchiato, he was going to guess, and indeed she pressed the button for it— and then she turned and pressed her back against the curved edge of the countertop.
"No need for cookbooks," he then told her, as he scraped the edges of the forming pancake with a spatula. "When required, I am able to tap into any branch of knowledge there is from the four corners of the world."
Kagome blew on her cup and sipped from it. "For real? But the world doesn't have four corners, you know."
Sesshoumaru looked at her. "It does not?"
"But I guess it did occur to me that you've never actually held a spatula before in your life, or use a washing machine." She sat down at the kitchen table and suddenly let out a sigh in the most dejected manner possible. "Buuuuut what's the point if you can't even summon your own memories when you need it?"
Sesshoumaru flipped the pancake.
"You require me to remember paltry incidences that hold absolutely no value whatsoever."
"Paltry? No value? Those moments were the best times of my life! Look at me now, I'm twenty-five and barely going anywhere!"
Sesshoumaru shrugged, and Kagome cupped her chin into her hand. What does he know about struggling in your mid-twenties? She stared at a blank spot on the robin-egg blue wall over the counter, at the space between her rice cooker and electric kettle. For a while no one spoke, as the air sizzled and wafted with that warm, comforting fragrance.
"But you remembered me, didn't you?" Kagome finally asked. She did not like the way the question had formed when it left her. It was not in her own voice. As if it was someone else who was concerned. Someone else who wanted to know if Sesshoumaru had accepted her on a whim, and she had been nothing but a complete stranger to his eyes on that fateful day.
"The tale of the gaikoku no miko ," Sesshoumaru spoke at last, as he topped up another layer to his rising stack of pancakes. He glanced at her over his shoulder, swiftly catching her eyes in attention and held her there.
"After your mysterious disappearance following Naraku's defeat, you became quite a figure of myth. The birds were singing and the crickets chirped, along with the wind, spinning tales of a miko from another world sent by the gods to vanquish a great evil."
A bottle of maple syrup appeared from nowhere in his hand and he squeezed it. The thick liquid oozed over the pancakes. It dripped over the edges of the pancake tower, slowly in sweet, cloying indulgence. He sprayed some cream from a can. He topped two halves of a strawberry. "But the details had been nothing but outlandish. In one version you were supposedly twenty feet tall and stooped like a crane. Yes, I remember you quite a bit."
Kagome shot up from her chair. "You mean I became a legend in the feudal era?! Me, sweet ole Kagome Higurashi?"
"Myth . Not many have actually seen you. This Sesshoumaru did, and he dismissed the tales as hogwash."
"No Sesshoumaru, tell me more!" Kagome scrambled over to him, tugging his apron front. He backed away against the counter, warily reminded of the sharp spike of reiki her touch had rewarded him this morning.
"Come on, don't leave me on a lurch! Did they say I was from the future? That I crept out from the well like Sadako? That I could shoot magical arrows from my bow despite no training whatsoever?"
A frown knitted between Sesshoumaru's eyebrows. "No longer about your comrades now, is it?"
"Please tell me! Sesshoumaru!"
He managed to worm away, grabbing the plate quickly and setting it down on the table.
"Eat first," he said.
Kagome landed back on her chair, pouting as she grabbed her fork. Sullenly she tucked into her thick and fluffy breakfast, just like the way she had dreamed of it, except that the dream was now lost on her.
"Itadakimasu," she muttered, like a child denied of her toys.
Sesshoumaru sat across her. He mimicked her earlier pose, hand propped on his chin, and studied the miko as she chewed through her food.
Yes, if there was something that his heart was certain, and his heart was no longer with him but buried in the deep layers of the murky swamp, it was that nothing pleased him more than to see her eat, and he could sit for hours if needed to, just watching her, just watching her eat a stack of pancakes.
"Hey, it has some crunchy bacon bits in it! Where did that come from?"
"Hush. 'Tis a secret recipe of mine."
A corner of his lips pulled, subtle as a feather and it felt like he had finally understood the meaning of his new existence, sitting in Kagome's warm kitchen, in a new Hello Kitty apron…
"Bon appétit," Sesshoumaru said, and suddenly those words did not sound so foreign anymore.
To be continued...
[A/N: Gaikoku no Miko: basically means foreign priestess. And how I wish in hell I could wake up to someone flipping pancakes for me… *cries in silence]
Credits: Foolin' lyrics Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., BMGbr /
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