Chapter 3
"Hey Kiddo, any chance of a Toto sandwich?" asked the large creamy cat as he wandered into her kitchen.
"He'd give you indigestion, how about a tuna casserole, just for you?" she answered, taking a pot off the stove and pouring its contents into a large mixing bowl, which she put on the floor for Muta to eat from.
"I'd rather see the end of old Birdbrain," he answered between mouthfuls.
"Not gonna happen, Lard-Ball," croaked Toto from his perch on the top cupboard.
"No fighting inside," Haru said sternly, glaring at the crow and cat in turn. "I've told Hoshi and Yin, and now I'm telling you. There are consequences to fighting."
"Don't worry love, they'll behave themselves," a voice whispered from just behind her ear.
Haru felt a pair of strong arms wrapping around her, and a velvety nose and furred face brushing against her cheek. She was just about to relax into his hold when the timer went off on the oven. It wouldn't stop either.
Haru blinked, the world was grey with pre-dawn light, and it was her alarm going off, not the timer on the oven. Groaning – she still wasn't a morning person – she rolled over to turn it off. It was still possible to get back to that dream, surely. It had been such a nice, warm, cozy dream – despite Toto and Muta having a go at each other.
Before she had extricated her arm from the folds of her thick woollen quilt, the beeping stopped, causing her to blink a couple of times. Okay, the alarm stopped itself when it had been going for a whole minute, but she didn't think it had been going that long. The woman looked again – Baron was sliding away from the timepiece back onto his pillow. It was easy to put two and two together and figure out that he had stopped the thoughtless machine.
She sighed and "mm"ed and stretched a little as she looked up at him.
"Good morning Baron," she said, curling up in a different position on her bed. "How did you sleep? Or were you too asleep to notice?" Morning person though she wasn't, it was never too early to smile about something.
"Why do you make yourself wake up this early Haru?" the cat asked, also curling up on his pillow again.
"So that I have time to shower and dress before the children start charging around. It's Saturday, so soon we shall hear the pounding of many feet going downstairs to watch the morning cartoons. Not all of them are so awake in the mornings, but most of them will make the effort for their favourite animated heroes," Haru explained, closing her eyes softly. The woman took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out again. Thus prepared for the day, she slipped out from between her sheets, grabbed some clothes, and headed for her bathroom.
The sound of softly pounding water and muted singing drifted under the door to Baron's ears as he lay there still.
The water stopped, the singing didn't. For a while it was pure and entrancing, then it was over taken by muffled humming. At last there was a sigh and the door opened again, revealing a clean woman of almost thirty with waist-length brown hair flowing over her shoulder as she braided it, and eyes the colour of dark amber. She was humming again too.
The attic/tower room started to shake. The sound of many pairs of small feet thundering down the stairs was reverberated up. Haru ignored it and continued braiding her hair, sitting down on her window-box-seat and smiling to herself as she watched the sun rise.
"Not going down yet, I take it?"
"No. One of the older children will turn on the TV, they'll all settle down and be hypnotised by the glowing screen for a couple of hours. Then the ones who prefer sleep will wander down and join them and they'll watch TV for another hour or so, then they'll be ready for breakfast and come looking for me to help with their first daily meal."
Baron went over what Haru had said in his mind, calculating how long that meant.
"About three hours of peace then," he said, rolling over in a very cat-like way on his pillow.
"Relative peace," Haru corrected absently. "Certainly, it's a great deal quieter than meal times, when they're all scrambling for seats and yelling at me about how their days at school were."
It was a terrifying prospect to most people, and at first Haru had been overwhelmed by it, the same as anyone else, but she had gotten used to it and now only answered to the quiet enquiries that were made during the silence of so many children eating busily. If she tried to keep track of what they were all yelling at her, she would go mad. The older children, and the ones who had been under her care longer, understood this.
"I don't know how you do it Haru," Baron said quietly, the sincere awe and pride warm in his voice.
"I don't know how you got me to dance all those years ago," Haru returned, looking back at him as she tied off her long brown tresses. "I couldn't before, and I haven't been able to since. I stopped altogether about ten years ago – pain has a way of demoralising."
The half-dressed cat-gentleman nodded his understanding. For Baron, half dressed meant wearing only his cream shirt and grey slacks. Other views would be that he was still over-dressed for a regular feline.