Chapter Text
EPHEMERA
an Inuyasha fanfic
i.
Without thinking, Rin had accidentally scheduled two dates in one evening.
The first was with a boy she had known from high school. He was athletic, cute, and generally pleasant to be around. The other was with a guy who had initiated a conversation with her on a dating app she had forgotten she’d made an account for a year and a half ago. They’d meet up in a casual spot – in public, of course, for maximum safety – only 15 minutes after her scheduled meeting with the other guy on the opposite side of the city.
In truth, she wasn’t too excited about either of the dates or her companions. She had agreed out of boredom, mostly. The city was still relatively new to her, and she was far away from any and all family members with only a handful of people she could call friends. These were all sleek professionals with cool day jobs and professional-people schedules or smart graduate students who stayed in their rooms and wrote caffeine-fueled papers. So, oftentimes, Rin was lonely – but not necessarily lonely enough to stress out about two random people she had accidentally double-booked on her calendar.
But she couldn’t just bail on them without a word or expose herself as flippant enough to have scheduled two dates at the same time. And, above all, she couldn’t lie. She needed decent advice and a good excuse.
Who better to ask than her incredibly smart and practical boss/friend/crush Sesshōmaru?
He fell in the middle of the strange categories of friends she had found herself with. Sesshōmaru was a sleek professional, well-dressed and handsome and young but still in a relatively powerful position within the company. Like a graduate student, he was a bit of a workaholic, which meant he stayed behind in his office a lot. As his assistant, she also worked similar long hours. She didn’t mind much, though: the pay was better than she had ever hoped for, and, in her opinion, they had become rather well-acquainted with each other over the six months she had worked there. He even allowed her to call him by his first name when they were alone now.
They were sitting across from each other at the wide desk in his office reviewing paperwork. At the moment, her duty was to highlight the important parts of a very long, business-jargon-filled document and pass it over to him, upon which he would re-review it to make sure that she was properly highlighting things. Lightwork, but terrible for an evening where she desperately needed an excuse to get out of two events that were now slowly creeping up on her.
“I accidentally scheduled two dates this evening,” Rin said gently, putting another finished page down on the table.
Sesshōmaru picked it up but didn’t glance at her. “And?”
Rin bit her lip. “I need to get out of them.”
“Then get out of them,” Sesshōmaru said monotonously.
“I need an excuse!”
“Make one up.”
Rin pouted. “You know I can’t just lie.”
Sesshōmaru knew she was a horrible liar. One day he'd told her to lie to his father about his whereabouts during a lunch break only to see the man strolling into the restaurant he was at a few minutes later.
He huffed. “Do you not have any friends to go to with your personal problems?”
A few seconds of silence floated past. Rin cocked her head slightly and blinked her brown doe-eyes at him. “…Are we not friends?” she lilted innocently.
Sesshōmaru glanced at her. “I’m your employer.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends,” Rin muttered. “It just means we can’t—”
Sesshōmaru brows raised. Rin silenced herself and looked around the room to avoid his piercing gold eyes.
Quietly, Sesshōmaru reached into his desk, whereupon he dropped yet another stack of papers off to the side.
“Here’s more work,” Sesshōmaru offered. “That should suffice.”
It did. With a small smile on her face, Rin typed up her message. Sorry, something came up at work! Let’s reschedule later. Copy, paste, send.
“Wanna order food?” Rin asked gently.
He didn’t say no.