day 16 - morning routine

Mary woke up slowly, comfortable and calm and surprisingly warm. Sunlight was filtering through the curtains and leaving glowing shapes on the floor, and as she drifted awake she realized it must be quite late. That struck her as strange, because there was an arm wrapped around her shoulders, and a chin digging into the top of her head.

Squirming, because the offending chin was really very uncomfortable, she managed to roll over and identify the sleeping person as Seto. It would make sense. This was his bed.

She yawned, a sleepy haze still over her mind, and wondered how on earth she was going to get up. Usually she didn't have to worry about this; he was almost always long gone by the time she woke up. She tried to wriggle down and under his arm, but that didn't seem to be working out. After several more minutes of escape attempts, she sighed. She was going to have to wake him up.

Mary shook his shoulder. "Hey, Seto. I think it's noon or something."

His face changed, his eyes squeezing tighter shut with determination, and he very clearly said, "Mary, no."

Well, okay, maybe they didn't have a clock in here. But it was definitely late, and she still didn't know why he wasn't at work already. "It's time to get up," she replied, shaking his shoulder again.

This time he rolled over and away from her, raising his arm to shield his eyes. "No," he insisted, "it's not."

Oh, well. He'd let go of her anyway, and she sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, stretching to work aches and pains out of her spine. She bounced once, and then stood up, turning to go. A voice from the bed stopped her.

"'s my day off," Seto clarified sleepily.

Mary understood that most humans worked Monday through Friday, with weekends off, but Seto's schedule was always more erratic than that. He usually was gone ridiculously early in the morning, and got back in early evening, in time to spend part of the day with them. Sometimes he was gone all day though, or all night. She thought it was probably because he was always changing jobs, since most of them seemed to be temporary opportunities. Anyway, it was a rare day that he didn't work at all, and it came maybe once a month. She understood now why he didn't want to wake up.

Trying to be quiet, she tiptoed down the stairs and to the kitchen. Kano was doing something with his phone at the table, and she stepped around him to get breakfast.

"Will you look at that? It's sleeping beauty returning to the land of the living," he exclaimed when he noticed her, grinning. She stuck her tongue out at him and shouldered past.

She managed to ignore him mostly during breakfast. It helped that he was pretty engrossed in whatever game he was playing on his phone. Mary wasn't sure what it was, but there sure was a lot of screaming coming from the tiny device. Breakfast done with, she headed back upstairs and into the bathroom. She brushed her teeth (a thing the others told her was Very Important, though she'd never done so before living with them and her teeth looked fine,) and picked up her poor battered hairbrush, frowning at herself in the mirror. It could take her almost an hour some days to work the tangles from her hair, and as she made eye contact with herself the white curls seemed almost to grow bushier.

Nope, not today. She set the brush down and went back to the boys' bedroom, not bothering to knock as she let herself in. Seto was still asleep, an unmoving lump under the covers, and she rocked in place for a second, considering shutting the door and going back downstairs. She didn't want to bother him on his one day of peace, after all. As she stood in the doorway debating with herself, however, he stirred and turned over, squinting at her.

Her hair was a mess, but his was laughable as well, with a persistent lock on one side that seemed to think if it tried hard enough it could be a cowlick. She supposed that's what you got when you stayed in bed all day.

"Comin' back?" he asked, yawning hugely, and she made her decision, shutting the door again and crawling into bed next to him. As always, he was so much warmer than her, and she felt him jump when her cold feet brushed his ankle.

"Are you really gonna spend your day off sleeping?" she asked, skeptical. If it were her, she'd probably do something exciting. Well, if she had anything exciting she liked doing, that is.

"Gonna spend my day off with you," he corrected with another yawn, looping an arm around her again. She guessed that was pretty exciting after all.