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It tickled his pointed ear in… a very good way.

And that bothered him.

The girl had fallen asleep against him again, tangling his fur with her small hands and with her slowly flexing fingers. She'd started out lying against his knees and somehow, in his meditations, she had crept and wriggled upwards, bound up in Mokomoko, to now be puffing soft breaths in his ear.

He could ignore the way she sometimes looked at him during her frequent day-dreams. He could ignore the implications in her declarations of eternal companionship.

He could even look through her when she was showing off her ripening body, kimono folded and hiked above lengthening, softening legs – bending over in a flash to snare the last of Autumn's sweet fish and in turn flashing him the glimpse of sparse yet tight brown curls guarding a very secret place.

But he could not ignore her breath in his ear.

His awareness was highly trained to miniscule detail and he imagined the ningen's short puffs as a soft pink fog, curling slowly from her half-open mouth to drift quickly to his waiting ear, caressing the pointed, erect flesh. Licking tongues brushed and burrowing into the fleshy valleys, becoming so familiar with his body before drifting lazily into his head, into his mind.

His breathing was trying to speed up again and Sesshoumaru put down his body's rebellion with not a little reluctance.

She was still a child by human standards, but he smelled a change in her scent that spoke of ripeness, something akin to apples, or fall-crisp leaves. The inuyokai let his right eye drift down to sneak a morbidly curious peak. He should not even be entertaining such thoughts! She was disgustingly human.

Letting his eyes brush over Rin's sleeping form, he found himself dwelling on the spaces between. The asymmetry of her kimono's closure; he found himself thinking about the shadows play between her newly-made breasts where they were pressed into his thick ivory fur. Rolling the pelt under her sleeping body made the hairs tickle and twitch themselves against the small areas of peeking skin; the swell of her haphazardly covered breasts, the tops of her toes, the back of one still-pointy knee. When the rolling, twitching hairs reached her small nose, she blew them back instinctively, then rubbed her itchy self into the restless Mokomoko with a sleep-fuzzy murmur.

She had her face pressed to his body.

His cock twitched in response to the deep, warm feeling of her breath against his skin.

Unacceptable.

A moment latter she wriggled against his furry half and changed positions yet again. Unconscious in her sleep-struggles, Rin did the unthinkable. She lay down in his lap; head cradled within the lotus of his long legs and drew Mokomoko over her in instinctive love.

He knew it, did Lord Sesshoumaru and this warm and wholly fuzzy feeling was completely unacceptable.

His elegant claws drifted down to the ebony head blowing hot breath on his crotch. A moment's tension drew out thin like spun silk until his claws were softly stroking the girl's dark, shiny hair. The tiny, pulling sensations caused Rin to nuzzle his leg and let out the tiniest of yawns.

"I love you…" she murmured, sleep fuzzy and slurred with dreaming feeling.

Sesshoumaru was stunned, stunned enough to open his cold lips to shape his own confession, "I love you too, my…" his deep baritone purred down with his ever-tight yet irreversible devotion. The ningen had won his heart, in fair combat and it was a fight he was overjoyed to have finally lost.

"… Mommy." Rin finished, cutting his romantic thread short. A bird squawked for comic emphasis – the Kami loved their favored son, but their sense of humor was not his own.

"My brat." Sesshoumaru blew out in a disappointed huff, tucking his petting hand back into his sleeves. Feeling a chilly wind blow down the mountains at his back, the inugami drew his body's fur over his sleeping beloved and allowed himself the rare indulgence of a smile, settling his big, full heart down for a night's peaceful sleep.