Title: Get Your Dirty Butt Off My Counter

Author: Omnicat

Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Darker Than Black

Warnings: None.

Characters & Relationships: Amber x Hei

Summary: Cats, Contractors, tomaytoes, tomahtoes. / 412 words

Author's Note: Set either during a quiet period in South America or in some manner of My Ship Didn't Sink AU. Enjoy!

II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II

Get Your Dirty Butt Off My Counter

She was sitting on the counter when he came home. Smiling that smile of hers.

Hei set down his grocery bags next to her, one on each side, half on top of her hands, and said: "Get off."

"No," she said. Because what else would she say? It was Amber. A day she didn't inconvenience him was a day wasted.

"Why not?"

"I'm good here."

He gave her a pointed once-over. "What did you do today, blow up a fertilizer bomb a few steps early?"

Her smile widened. "We dug up a body."

Hei gave her a flat stare.

The smile split into a grin. "Relax, it was over a hundred years old."

"You're still getting it all over the counter I'm supposed to prepare our food on."

Clumps of dirt dislodged from her boots as she banged her heels into the kitchen cabinet beneath her and leaned forward. A lock of pale green hair that had come loose from her messy braid fell across her shoulder.

"I can think of something better to do than making dinner. Something we can do right here on this counter, even."

As if on cue, Hei's stomach growled. At least he could always count on his stomach.

"Outvoted. Poo." But instead of sliding off the counter and giving him space to work, she leaned to the side to grab a cutting board and, pressing her knees together and bracing her heels against the cabinet to create a stable horizontal surface, placed it in her lap. "Alright, go ahead."

"What?"

She looked at him with an blithely expectant smile. "I washed my hands when I got home, don't worry."

You had time to do that but not to take a quick shower? Hei thought.

With Amber, there always came a point at which the more logical and less troublesome solution was to just go with her nonsense. Somehow, that point kept coming sooner and sooner. And he was beginning to enjoy reaching it.

Without another word, he collected his kitchen knives, grabbed a bundle of scallions from the left grocery bag, and started chopping.

They didn't break eye contact until she stuck a carrot down the front of her shirt and he gave her exactly what she'd wanted all along by burying his face between her breasts to get it back.

(Afterwards, they went out to eat. He didn't have a lot of un-erodible standards, but the sanctity of his own kitchen was one of them.)