A/N: Did I say I was going to update the other story? I'm bad. What I meant was that I would stare blankly at the other story and write a few lines, but certainly not enough to publish. Haha. I did work on it today, and I may work on it some more tonight but let me not guarantee that I will post more of it too soon, it's coming upon the close and I want to make sure it ends right. But back to this story, hope you enjoy the chapter and please R&R. I'm not going to promise you that you will feel like this chapter really accomplished anything special, but I'm pretty sure the next chapter will. But before I can get to all the fun that will one day ensue with this story, I gotta create some structure first. Kthxbye!
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It had been two moons ago now, since Sesshomaru silently accepted Rin's request, his face an un-telling mask of wildly twirling thoughts as he dissected all she said, fitting it to everything that occurred since long before she was unfortunate enough to stumble across his path.
The yellow sun now shined brightly in the sky of the place where they made their first stop; the mouth of a cave forged into the side of a jagged mountain's sloping tip, overlooking a grouping of small human settlements. It was there that Rin had gone to acquire nourishment while Sesshomaru sat upon the cave's dirty floor; his armor removed so that only his white blouse remained to cover his pale chests, his head bowed in what any unwise onlooker would wrongly believe to be sleep.
"…Spare me now, great dog demon, and my curse will not be dealt your hand. But kill me, and all that is of you will rot from the inside."
He had destroyed the Gateway King a century ago; it being the demon that reserved the power to open the door between this world and the dead-land in which the bones of his father were harbored. All a part of his plight to obtain a sword he no longer had any concern for.
He had not hesitated, on that day, to perform the action that would lead him to the very place in which he resided today, awaiting the return of a girl whose painful death he was helping her recommit.
The foolish human girl who was dying because of a curse he had embraced…would he have hesitated if he had known then, the future outcome of his actions?
No.
These questions, these curiosities, only formed themselves in his mind because she had been correct. On the day he saved her life, something inside of him changed; linking him to her in a way he had never satisfactorily been able to explain.
Her life had, in a way, given him the use of both swords he now carried with him, it gave him something to protect; and now her unavoidable death would give him full usage of them as the all-powerful being he once was. In death she would serve her last and only purpose to him; he would feel no remorse as he watched her torn apart by sharp teeth and vicious claws and Death at last released to him the part of him it stole, he would no longer even be capable of doing so.
He remembered the day he first met the young, at the time mute, human girl. His back against a tree as he lay in the forest badly injured from the Wind-Scar of the mutt hanyou, quite as she had been two days ago when they crossed paths once more, except there had been no man nor beast foolish enough to disturb his rest but her.
He would have slain her instantly, a quick, easy death. But he smelled no reason for alarm in her youthful scent, and already weakened from his injuries, he saw no point in drawing his sword once more, content to instead ignore the human creature. Had she already begun to love him then? As she forged the ridiculous notion in her head that he was somehow a friend to her, simply because he of no one else hadn't lashed out at her…?
Days later, he smelled her blood on the air, and upon seeing her small, mauled face covered in dirt and wetness with what were perhaps her tears, he decided to revive her. Not out of kindness. Kindness would have been to allow her sleep forevermore with no more fear of harm in this cruel world her kind had created for her. But out of curiosity; to test his father's final gift to him.
It was useless.
His father's gift was useless. To what end had the Great Dog Demon imagined there would be anything in Sesshomaru's life that he would need to, or for that matter want to, revive once it had passed on? It figured that the pitiful demon who found himself a human mate would want a way to revive it once its life span came upon its quick, inevitable end.
He allowed Rin to follow him from that point onward, if only so that his saving the pointless life of a human girl meant he had not merely wasted his time as she died yet again, unable to fend for herself with no other humans to care for her. It was this guise that allowed him to protect and save the girl on several more occasions without feeling the need to question his own motives. He easily accepted that the girl was not his ward because of concern nor compassion for her life, but because he would ensure she lived long enough to appreciate his gift.
But that answer had not been enough to sustain that concept once more, two moons ago, when he interfered with her life after years of having been separated from her; stabbing a sword which he had used to sleigh great and powerful demons into the flesh of a human who was not even worth his effort, and not even to save the girl from death, but from being improperly handled.
If her death meant he would never be compelled to behave in such a way again, he saw it as a worthy cause.
Her scent wafted over to him. He heard a huff of air escape through her mouth as she grunted quietly, shuffling her way back into the cave, momentarily blocking the sunlight as she appeared in the mouth of it. A cloth sack was slung over her shoulder and a handle of ale was tucked under a slender arm. She dropped her findings onto the stone floor between them, the sack unfurled and an assortment of bread and fruit was revealed.
She drunkenly collapsed in front of it, her legs splayed beneath her in a way that would seem unnatural and uncomfortable if she had been properly sober. After a palm-full of seedy, dusty grapes and several large sips of ale she looked up at him, a new flush in her cheeks, her breathing retaining the common unevenness of one who had taken in too much drink too quickly.
"Aren't you going to eat?" She asked. He lifted his eyes away from his lap for the first time, watching with no small amount of dissatisfaction as her crooked smirk returned, that singular dimple indenting itself upon the apple of her pink cheek. It seemed to only come when she knew what she said would affect him in one unappealing way or another. He did not like it. And so why he adjusted himself to see what he had already known would be there was a mystery to him.
He plucked a grape from the pile using the tips of two long, thin fingers that ended in sharp yellow nails and popped it into his mouth to spite her; he did not eat what human's ate. She was well aware of the fact. Her lopsided smile fell, her lips soon recovered by the ale, a drop of which slid down her neck, crawling over the old scars upon it. That dimple dissolved back into her sickly cheek.
Sesshomaru's slim throat visibly constricted as he swallowed the grape, his angular face now pointed upward so that he could see every line upon the cave's cracked and pockmarked ceiling. He had been unaware, up until the point that he met with Rin once more, that humans changed; that at some point in their short lives they managed to find time to stop being one way and become entirely another. Rin had done so.
He closed his eyes, recalling the time he left her to be in the village where the Bone Eater's Well resided, she had asked him to wait. He did not. He kept walking with strides so wide that even as she ran behind him she could not keep up, and soon he had walked out of her life all together. Was that where the old Rin ended and the new Rin began? In the seconds in-between when he was there and when he simply was not?
Sesshomaru exhaled, allowing sleep to come at last.
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Rin raised her knee to her chin, kneeling her head upon it. She had to steal the food she retrieved today, she vaguely recognized the fact that she no longer had any fear of the retribution she'd received as only a small child for doing the exact same thing. With no one to care now just where she would have received her bruises. She looked at Sesshomaru, whose eyes were closed, several strands of sleek silver hair hanging over them.
In death, she would no longer concern herself over the fact that he felt nothing for her, even deep in the pits of his cold, frozen heart. She placed her hand to her own heart, feeling an unfamiliar thump which threatened to destroy every barricade she had created within herself. She pressed the ale back to her lips, drowning the last half of it, but unable to numb the feeling gnawing steadily at her insides. She looked away from his face, turning her eyes sharply downward and forcing them closed, begging sleep to envelope her as well.