InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ A Tale of Ever After ❯ Chapter 333

Chapter 333

I do not own InuYasha or any of the characters created by Rumiko Takahashi


Up on the hill, determined to have everything ready before the weather broke, InuYasha checked his water buckets. After calculating for a moment, he did a quick run to his watering spot to fill the buckets for their bath. Off in the far distance, he saw a flash of lightning.  It wasn’t near them yet, but was a harbinger of what the evening would bring. Coming back to the house, he lifted the bath tub off its hook on the verandah, and dragged the tub inside, then went out for another armful of wood, just to be sure.  It wasn’t that late, but the sky was darkening ominously, with heavy, bulbous forms, much darker than when Rin had left the house.

“Weather’s moving in fast,” InuYasha told Kagome. “It might be time to close the shutters again.”

Kagome settled the rice pot on its tripod to start cooking.  She looked up.  “I thought it was getting kind of dark. You want to do it before you start grilling the fish?”  She lidded the pot then asked, “Maybe we should light the lamp, too?”

“Good idea,” he said.

He lowered the shutters, and with a sliver of wood, lit the lamp and moved it to the food preparation area. While Kagome measured out the ingredients for a sauce to eat with dinner, InuYasha began to prepare the fish for grilling. He had just skewered the first fish when unexpectedly, there was a knock on the door.

Both of them looked at the door and then each other.  

“Who would that be this time of day?” Kagome asked.

InuYasha shrugged, and placed his fish on a platter. “Don’t know.  Better not be Miroku.  He should be home with Sango after everything that’s been going on.” Wiping his hand on a towel, he got up to answer  it.

As he lifted the door flap, his ear twitched as he saw the smiling face on the other side of the entryway.

“Bet you thought you had enough of me yesterday,” said a familiar voice.

The hanyou crossed his arms. “Old man, what are you doing still running around? Hope your old bull didn’t get out. Look at the sky! Don’t tell me you’re here to ask me to get caught in the rain helping to round him up.”

Daitaro stood there, a large bundle in his hand, and began to laugh.  “No, no.  Amazingly, he’s been no trouble today.  Or so my sons tell me.  It’s a good thing, too, because that wife of mine has been keeping me too busy today to deal with Okuro.”

InuYasha didn’t know whether to scowl or laugh, so he did neither. “So then you must be out to tempt the rain kami,” the hanyou said.  “I know you know the weather signs.  I can’t think of any other reason for you to be out now.”

“Not really.  I have tempted them more times than I want to admit, and they have proved to me to find it amusing to rain on my head.  But maybe they’ll have mercy on my old bones today.  It’s not my fault, after all. All day long, I’ve been tramping across the village as my wife’s pack animal, keeping an eye on them, but they’ve been kind so far, and they know I’ll give them a drink of sake when I get home if they stay kind.”  

InuYasha looked up at the sky beyond Daitaro.  “Don’t know how much longer they’ll wait for that, Old Man.  Looks like they’re getting impatient.”

“I know, I know.” Daitaro sighed and lifted up a bundle tied into a bright red and blue cloth.  “Amazing how many people she had us visit today, passing out second day gifts, but that’s my Chime for you.  Cooked enough food to feed an army for the wedding yesterday, and then today we gave away the leftovers.  She even took time to visit Haname-chan and her daughter.”

That made InuYasha’s eyebrows rise.

“Don’t look so shocked, son,” Daitaro said.  “My Chime is just that way, trying to heal all the hurts and lift people up.  Why’d you think she let me take Aki-kun in?”

“I was wondering how you got her to agree to that, Old Man,” the hanyou said.  “I was surprised she didn’t make you sleep with Okuro for suggesting it.”

Daitaro chuckled.  “After raising our boys, and maybe me, too, I think she think’s Aki will be easy.”  Off in the distance there was a faint rumble of thunder.  He turned and looked over his shoulder.  “You have to let a man do what a man has to do,” he told the sky.  Turning back to InuYasha, he continued his story.

“After visiting more people at their own homes than I ever did in one day before, even more places than after Genjo’s wedding, I thought I was home for the night.  My two daughters in law made the house smell wonderful with whatever they were cooking, Genjo and Shinjiro had the bath water getting hot, and Aki was watching my grandchild.”

Kagome, curious, stood up from her place at the fire pit.  Wiping her hands, she began to walk over towards the door.  

The old farmer noticed her drawing close, giving her a nod as he continued his spiel.  “But just as I was about to sit down, I was told I had to come make this final stop.”  He sighed dramatically.  “Chime-chan wanted to come with me, too, but she did too much today.  She hates to admit it when she gets tired, but she still hasn’t recovered from everything the wedding took out of her, and today was busy enough. My sons and daughters-in-law saw it too, and sat on her long enough so I could get away by myself, so here I am.  She wanted you to have this.  I know you were at the wedding, and ate more than even you could believe, but my wife, she seems to think you need to eat even more.”

Kagome reached the two men and stood next to InuYasha, and saw the big bundle the old farmer was handing to her husband.  “Daitaro-ojisan, what is this?”

“Oh, just your share of the second day gifts,” Daitaro said, almost apologetically.  He gave Kagome a big grin. “I know you were at the wedding, and normally, second day gifts are for those who weren’t invited, but my woman insisted. Hope you enjoy them.”  He handed InuYasha the brightly wrapped bundle.  InuYasha in turned, handed it back to Kagome.

There was a flash of lightning off in the distance, far enough away that neither of the humans could hear the thunder, although InuYasha’s ear flicked at the sound.

“Well, that’s my call home, I suspect.  Come by tomorrow if you get a chance, Kagome-chan.  I think Chime’s plotting something, but she didn’t tell me just what.  But it may involve something with that new daughter-in-law of mine.”

Kagome gave Daitaro a bright smile.  “I’ll try!”

With that, he  waved and hurried down the road at a surprising speed.  “Storm, you just wait  a few more minutes. You know what I promised you!” he said to the sky, then disappeared around the bend.

InuYasha, bemused by all of this, said nothing, but watched as Kagome brought the bundle back to the fire pit area and put it down.  “I don’t understand,” he finally said.

“Ah, they don’t do that where my mother lives, but I heard about it from some of the older people who grew up in the country,” Kagome explained.  “It seems that because the wedding was for family only, after the wedding, it used to be the custom to share the wedding food out to people who didn’t come.  It was a way of having everybody celebrate the new couple.  The custom where I grew up wasn’t like that.  Instead, you invited everybody you could think of and fed them all at once.  But I think this way may be even nicer.”

“Feeding everybody at once, like at a festival? Must have been a lot of work,” InuYasha said, shaking his head.

“They hired people to do it,” Kagome said.  “It was way too much work for either the bride or the groom’s family to do on their own.”

His ear flicked as he tried to imagine it, then shrugging, he looked at Chime’s bundle.  “But we were at the wedding.  Why did she do this?”

Kagome rested her head on her husband’s shoulder. “Oh, Chime’s trying to let us know how much she cares, I suspect.  I think she’s pretty much adopted us.” Kagome lifted the bundle up. “Oh, this is heavy! Well, let’s see what’s in it, shall we?”

He carefully untied the knot and pulled the fabric free. Inside there was a jar, a bowl wrapped in another cloth, and a box.

Kagome carefully opened the box.  In it were a selection of rice cakes, some soft, some hard.  InuYasha reached for one, but Kagome slapped at his hand.  “After dinner.”

She unwrapped the bowl.  In it was a healthy portion of red rice.  “Chime’s recipe for this is so good.  If I had known she was going to send us this, I would have waited on making rice for dinner.”

InuYasha hefted the jar. He could feel it slosh a little as he moved it.  “Let me guess.  It’s not miso, right?”

Kagome giggled at that.  The top of the jar was sealed with some sort of waxed cloth held in place with a wooden plug.  She lifted it out, and peered into the jar.  The smell of pickles wafted out, and although InuYasha thought he could never even look at another pickle after the eating challenge of the night before, he found his mouth watering.

Kagome reached for a pair of chopsticks, and picked a slice out of the jar.  “I wonder who made these?” she asked.

“I don’t care,” the hanyou said.  “They were all good.”

She, noting the look on her husband’s face, grinned.  “You can have this one if you get the fish ready to grill,” and handed it to him, then got up and went to light the lamp.  “It’s really getting dark.  I hope Daitaro gets home before the storm breaks.”

While she was doing that, InuYasha fished another pickle out of the jar.

The weather he had been expecting hit just about the time that the rice Kagome had been fixing for dinner was done.  She had just emptied the rice pot into a wooden rice tub and had begun to stir vinegar into it when a loud clap of thunder shook the house, making her drop her rice paddle at the surprise of it.

“That one was a loud one,” she said, fishing the paddle back out of the rice.

“Yeah,” he said, as he took the fish off of the fire, putting one on each of their trays. He gave her a toothy smile.  “Daitaro must have got home and the rain kami came to collect his sake.  It was plenty enough time for him to get down the hill.”

“Well, they didn’t have to be so noisy about it while they were at it,” she said, looking up, as if she could see the sky through the roof of her house.

“They must have been excited over getting some,” the hanyou said chuckling. “We know that at least some of the kami like his brew.”  

He watched as Kagome deftly made onigiri out of her prepared rice that she wrapped in bamboo leaves for later. Instead of eating the rice she had just made, she had heated up the red rice that Chime had sent their way, and spooned it into bowls after she finished making the rice balls.  She set a small amount of sauce in each tray for the fish, and added pickles.

“Looks like dinner,” InuYasha said.  Another crash of thunder rumbled through the house.

“Sounds like the rain kami agree,” she said, handing InuYasha his tray.

“They can get their own fish,” the hanyou said.  “And they better not even look at my pickles.”

Kagome thought for a moment, then deftly snagged one off of his tray. “To make up for the extra one you took out of the jar.”

“You saw that?” he asked.

“I just know you,” she said, and plopped it back in the jar.