Sorry, this is a draft version of the final chapter. My beta will come in and fix up a few bits soon enough! Sorry, readers! I know you've been waiting for a bit!

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bird on a wire

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chapter 11

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The white-painted walls of the work shop behind the florists's shop reflected intangible bouquets of sunlight reaching in through the gabled front windows. A long, but slightly frosted mirror above the cabinetry on the back wall picked up the image of a row of flowers, repeating it like a scene from a vividly recounted dream. A handful of stalks lay strewn across the white linoleum table in front of Rin, where the flower stems had been cut at precise angles, and beads of water pooled around their severed ends like untainted blood. Rin's fingers moved busily through a thick knot of tangled baby's breath, separating each plant from the other.

Her friends' voices were as light and conspiratorial as her bunches of the tiny flowers, filling the air around their shared table with a poignant whimsy that hinted at something more substantial than any words they spoke.

Rin didn't understand what it all meant, but thought it incredibly elegant all the same.

"…I just smiled at him, of course, and agreed," Kaho was saying. "But he doesn't know Right Bank from Left Bank. What good is it to buy a bottle of vintage Château Haut-Brion if he's just going to throw it back after the champagne?"

"I only drink champagne, myself," said Miori, touching the diamond-studded Chanelclip that held back her glossy maple-red hair.

"Sparkling, dear. Champagne is what you call sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France," Kaho corrected portentously.

"Don't think you can impress me. You can't even speak French."

"Neither can you," Kaho cut in with a placid, albeit knowing smile. "Though I'm sure that language hardly comes into play with pillow talk, though, does it?"

Miori colored. "That's none of your business. Find your own boy-toy, if you really want to know."

"I've got my hands full enough with my children. Don't need another, but thanks all the same," Kaho answered easily. Miori gave a dreamy sigh and pulled on th pea-green chiffon scarf gathered around her neck. Rin did the same thing, only with the ferns and foliage on the outside of her arrangement.

"I can't wait to have children with Grégoire," Miori breathed, "They're going to be so beautiful… You know, the french people have such tall noses…"

"You'll be sacrificing a few centimeters of your waist for each one of your babies' noses," Kaho warned.

"Miori's pregnant? Congratulations! Now you'll stop spending so much time staring at your waistline in the mirror!" Yukino had returned to the table with several pairs of scissors and a glass of murky white water. She blew a puff of air at her dark brown bangs as she took her seat, apparently enjoying the way they fluttered on her forehead. Rin liked the new haircut, and started to say something to that effect but was drowned out by Miori's outburst.

"I'm not pregnant! There's nothing wrong with having pride in my appearance, and at least I'm not married to a man too old to even give me babies!" she snapped. Yukino abruptly stopped laughing. Miori, however, appeared to take no pride in her accomplishment, instead shifting the source of her desperation from the conversation to the clashing arrangement in front of her. Her flowers stuck out in utter discord. She gave a sidelong glance to Rin, who had been quietly mixing in a few pieces of baby's breath to an assortment of pink carnations and white lilies."Oh, Rin," she cried out, "What am I doing wrong?"

Rin considered the pile of flowers in front of Miori and tried to visualize them as something other than a haphazard lump of pretty things, like a crow's nest composed of shiny objects without any purpose or design.

"I don't think the red anthurium goes well with pink baby's breath," she said after consideration. "Maybe try the white anthurium instead?"

"I don't want it to look plain…"

"Then you can tie it with a nice ribbon at the bottom."

"Or you could try some greenery, like ferns?" Kaho suggested. "See how nicely Rin put hers together?"

"I've already got ferns in mine, too," Miori complained, and bit her lip as she tried to imitate the cradle of branches. "They really just won't flow as nicely as Rin's."

"Well," Rin thought for a moment. "Maybe you could try thinking about how you put the flowers in? Try doing it a different way. Didn't sensei say that it's more about trying to make flowers look 'more natural,' as if you could just find them that way perfectly in the wild somewhere? That we should focus on the shapes and feelings of flowers instead of just their colors? I've always imagined that wildflowers grow something like sensei's bouquet did, except springing out of the ground instead of from a vase. I've never seen wildflowers before, but I've always wanted to- Always wondered what a field of sunflowers would look like, standing in the summer sun-"

Rin looked up to see the two younger women huddling at the edge of their chairs, closing in on her with wondrous expressions.

"What?" she asked, defensive.

"It's just that you're so precious, such a pure thing," said Yukino in amazement, touching the end of her hair like it were a doll's. Miori nodded in agreement, looking slightly jealous.

"It is such a shame you've never seen wildflowers." Kaho's eyes did not lift from her arrangement, even as she apparently broke her concentration to converse. "You should ask your man to take you to the country sometime."

"A man?" exclaimed Miori. She sat back in her chair. "She has a man?"

"Oh, him, was he your man?" Yukino added in the same beat.

"What are you talking about? I mean, who-"

"The man who brought you to the door today. He looked extremely pretty," Yukino produced a smile, and Rin realized that Yukino had it all wrong. Maybe she had misunderstood. Surely they weren't talking about Sesshoumaru-san?

Kaho rifled her hand through her widow's peak as she thought, and her wedding ring glinted in the light. "You mentioned his name before, didn't you? Sesshoumaru, was it?"

Rin nodded, only half aware of her body's movement. She felt her heart rate speeding up. "No, no. That's his name, but I think you misunderstood. Sesshoumaru-san, you see, he's-"

"You should've seen how he was looking at Rin when she came in," Yukino added, her voice flat but her eyes keen as a pair of red blades, ready to slice. "He looked extremely protective."

"Of course he does; he takes care of me. That's what I'm trying to say. He's not my… my anything… just my guardian," Rin explained, hoping that her words would be sufficient in the midst of the flirtatious banter, though she felt somehow like she was standing unarmed in the midst of a sword fight. It was as if her friends weren't interested in listening to her, they just wanted to sink in their teeth.

"So you're not related by blood?" Yukino pried.

"No. Not by blood."

Yukino's grin was feral. "There you have it," she said, making eye contact with Miori across the table. "Mmm-hmm."

Rin had, of course, looked at Sesshoumaru during their walk together over the past few days. But she hadn't been watching him. As far as she could remember, nothing in his disguise had been out of place. He'd looked perfectly human. The light crow's feet had returned to the corners of his eyes, as had a couple of light sun spots at the place where his chin met his ear. His cheeks had hollowed out somewhat. His eyes looked less dynamic, less alive. His ears had been round, almost to the point of being peculiar. But if Yukino and Miori were acting like this, maybe they had picked up on something else that Rin hadn't. Something more peculiar, pointing to his true identity. She had to get them off-track…

She looked down at her bouquet uncomfortably. It was almost finished. Perhaps if she twined in two more bunches of baby's breath, then went to the bathroom for a few minutes, they would move on to another conversation in her absence. She reached for the flowers.

"So this Sesshoumaru of yours," asked Miori. "All this time, and not a single word from you! Tell me, what's he like? Is he foreign?"

"No, but he lived abroad for a number of years," said Rin. She recounted her conversation with Jaken and added, hoping to get them off track, "He's a lot older than I am."

"Compared to you, we're all just shriveling under the sun," said Yukino. Rin remembered belatedly that Yukino had married a much, much older man.

"Does he have a good personality?" Miori pushed.

"Oh, he does. He's really… loyal, but maybe not very nice. Well, he's nice to me, but not to one of his servants. And he can be a bit aloof."

"Typical rich man. But at least he's good looking," said Yukino. "Tell me, does he have some sort of raw, magnetic animalism? He seems like the type that would be really wild. No talk, but all action. A man defined by what he does rather than what he says he is, you know?"

"I don't really know," said Rin, genuinely confused. Yukino had used words that might've described a youkai, but if she guessed that Sesshoumaru was a youkai, than what had that last part meant? "What do you mean by 'what he does?'"

"His actions, of course. A person can say one thing, and usually give the impression that they're a certain type of person, but their actions might give away the fact that they're really different. That's what I mean by 'what he does.' For example, a girl might say she likes sports, and even own a couple of jerseys for her favorite player or whatever, but then you put her in front of a television screen and she doesn't know the captain of the football team from the goalkeeper. So, as for your Sesshoumaru-san, he may look silent and aloof, but does he act that way? I bet he doesn't. I bet he does anything you ever ask."

"I don't know about that," said Rin. "I don't ask for a lot of things."

"But has he refused you of anything? Ever?"

"Besides telling me stuff, you mean?" Rin shook her head. "No… Not really."

"Yeah. See, I told you," Yukino crowed to Miori.

"Told her what?" Rin nonchalantly picked up her baby's breath and tried to wedge it in past the other stems in her vase.

"That he's seducing you."

"What?" Rin accidentally crushed the stalk of her flower between her fingers, and the blush of blossoms bent their heads down. "He's what?"

Miori laughed, pitchy like the a cacophony of tiny bells. "What did you think I was getting at? Do you agree with me, Kaho-san?"

Kaho-san's elegant fingers rifled through a few flowers laying on the table. "I think that Sesshoumaru and Rin are both already very important to each other," she demurred.

"So he's infatuated with you already, and rich to boot," Yukino concluded. "You're probably the best kept 14-year old in Japan. The princess of Japan doesn't look half as well-dressed as you. And I know that bracelet on your wrist costs at least ten thousand yen."

Rin ducked her hand under the table.

"Look, this kind of conversation… It's not …" Appropriate, she wanted to say, or sophisticated. And it should have been. The girls Rika had known in high school used to talk like this. Girls who had been hungry and poor like her, not adult women with more money than either friends or happiness.

And besides, those girls had been talking about actual prospects and marriages arranged for need, not for love. Rin wasn't thinking about either of those things, and neither Sesshoumaru nor Jaken had given her reason to think otherwise. Yukino, Miori, even Kaho just didn't know the whole story. "You really have the wrong idea…" she tried.

Yukino simply tsk'ed at her. "You're among women here, and you need to know what men are like. We certainly do. How do you think we got here? With the exception of Kaho, we all married into it. I bet at least half of the women in this room did."

"But I'm not marrying into anything," said Rin. "I'm only fourteen."

"And I was only a couple years older than you when Edgar first took me on a date. Being young gives you a head start, if anything," said Miori. Her bouquet had improved marginally. The colors now blended better than before, no longer looking at first glance like randomly spilled buckets of paint, but the flowers were clearly overworked and becoming limpid.

"Lay off of little Rin," Kaho warned half-heartedly. "I know this is fun for you two, but she's an innocent. If I found out you were talking to my girls like this, I'd call the police."

"Lighten up. We wouldn't talk to them for another ten years, anyway," Yukino replied frostily. "And it's a shame, that's all I'm saying. I like Rin- I like you, Rin - so I want to see good things happen to you. You could have the world if you wanted it."

Rin's eyes widened. "What do you mean, 'the world'?"

"I'm saying that if you made a move, I bet your man would have you. And then he'd give you whatever you wanted. 'The world.'"

Rin fiddled feebly with her bouquet, but couldn't distract herself from the shocking words around her. Was she talking about prostitution? Only to one man, but still, that's what it was, wasn't it?

When Miori offered an opinion on Yukino's side of the argument, it shocked her more than anything. "Think about what you can offer a man. A girl who is still young and pliable and pure is more rare than anything." Miori demonstrated with one of her flowers, craning its' neck until it emerged from a bundle of magnolia leaves. "He can bend her into whatever shape he wants her to be. He can build her into his perfect woman."

"That's terrible," said Rin, and she believed it. The idea of that kind of pressure, that claustrophobic sort of molding of the human spirit, wasn't the kind of thing that built a person but destroyed them. Just like walls closing in until there was no space left to breathe, it left a person with nowhere to escape to. No freedom anymore. No future.

Kaho inserted her own mild dissent. "Ah, but that's too shallow, Miori. Just because he can have you doesn't mean he holds all the power in the relationship at all. Quite the opposite. A man can never say no to a woman, and the more rare she is, the more that it's true," she said, sliding her fingers down the stalk of an iris and pressing it deeply into the mold. "They say that men want power more than anything. And that, ultimately, they just want it to get a woman and to keep her. So what if a man has the power to get the woman? Here's the secret: all that power is a woman's as soon as she has the man. He'll do whatever she asks. A dog may wag its' tail, but if you grab the tail you can wag the dog, as they say."

"And by tail, they mean penis!" said Yukino, making an obscene gesture with her vase and her flower.

"Stop it!" Kaho exclaimed, though her head was thrown back as she laughed. Miori laughed so hard that she got some pollen into her nose and began to sneeze.

Rin stared in mortification. Her eyes were trained on the motion of the flower and the vase, the stalk that was being plunged in and out of the crystal hole. She understood the metaphor well enough, and couldn't keep an image from forming in her head for just a moment, just long enough to grasp the word Sesshoumaru, and for heat to pool at the bottom of her belly, and then she banished the thought and shook her head fiercely. It wasn't sane to listen to this talk. Her friends just didn't get it. Her lord wasn't using her, not like that. And she wasn't using him, either. Why did power have to come into talks about love or affection? And why was she spending any time thinking about this at all? There wasn't anything going on between her and her guardian anyway. This didn't matter to her at all.

"Sesshoumaru-san and I don't have that type of relationship," she told the women firmly.

Yukino looked her in the eye, and Rin bravely stared back, conviction building with every inhaled breath.

"Fine," Yukino conceded at last, still breathless from her laughter. "You don't have that kind of a relationship now, but I saw how he was looking at you in the window. You will, mark my words. All men are the same, Rin. They may look tough and think they are something special, but all it takes is a woman and they are powerless. They'll give up everything for her."

"Sesshoumaru-sama would do that for Rin anyway," she asserted.

Yukino sat back in her chair, her back held tall. "Just don't make me say 'I told you so.' I hate that."

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March 30, 2006Late evening

Rin

After the conversation at the flower shop, Rin had spent the afternoon feeling uncomfortable and off-balance. She'd managed to chase away the older women's words for the most part, discounting them and focusing her attention away to other things, like a squabble with Jaken over the television remote. But now it was late at night - past the point when she usually would be sleeping, and all she could do was toss, turn, toss and repeat as minute bled into minute, as minute bled into quarter-hour.

When she saw the green light from her alarm clock blink past midnight, she decided that enough was enough, pulled back her covers and walked into her attached bathroom. She bent over her sink, and splashed lukewarm water on her face. The water felt peculiar against her skin, somehow; it seemed to bring each of her pores into awareness, made the texture of her skin gritty even though she knew it was smooth. She turned off the faucet, watched the last of the water slide down into the hole in the sink, and made her way back to her room. She ran her fingers over her unmade bedspread and the soft under sheet - she had never known that some people slept with an extra sheet between themselves and the blanket - and drew back her hand. She found a book on her bedside table instead. She took it and left the room.

She forewent the outdoors slippers to feel the cool tile of the terrace against her toes. It wasn't as cold as it had been a few weeks ago, even a few days ago. It almost felt nice outside, wearing just a long-sleeved night shirt and a coat, the cold nipping at the water droplets that still clung to the edges of her face. And there weren't walls around her, or blankets ensconcing her, holding her in a mold.

"Rin. Are you well?"

"Sesshoumaru-sama." Rin turned around, startled to see the white haired, yukata-clad figure at the edge of her door. In the dim lighting that came off more from the city below than the cloud sky above, she could just make out the color of the cloth. It matched the moon above his eyes. Her heart pounded in her chest, but she dismissed it. She was surprised to see him.

"Are you well?" Sesshoumaru repeated.

"I couldn't sleep."

"I see."

"I thought coming out here would calm me down, but it's not really working. I'm just feeling confused," She explained further, and sighed. She let her arms drop over the edge of the guardrail, and rested her chin on the top of the cool upper bar, which she sighed against for a second time, feeling excessively melancholy.

Her guardian joined her at the edge, as she knew he would. Fine strands of his hair lifted up and shimmered around his face even after he had stilled.

"Why are you upset?"

Rin wasn't sure how to respond. After all, she could hardly tell him everything. He'd probably be embarrassed to hear it, she reasoned. She was better off just keeping it to herself.

Settling on an air of enigma, she answered, "It's just girl stuff."

"Ah. Yet you are not…" Sesshoumaru's voice trailed off. "That is, to say, your menses…"

Rin shot up, flushing. "No! It's not that, but how could you tell, even if I was?!"

He pointed to his nose as if it were very obvious.

Rin grimaced. She'd had no idea that his nose was that sensitive. "That's horrible. That's horrible. Oh, that's horrible." Rin decided that she was going to start using tampons, no matter how awkward they were. It couldn't be worse than knowing that Sesshoumaru could smell the old and musty blood that leaked between her legs.

Eager to change the conversation, away from both her period and her friends' conversation in the flower shop, Rin flipped the corner pages of her book idly with her thumb and tried to turn the conversation away from herself. "What do you do when you can't sleep, Sesshoumaru-sama?" she asked. "I bet you meditate. I feel too tired to meditate, though. Does that make sense?"

"It does. I meditate, sometimes. Other times, I come out here."

"Is that what happened tonight?" Rin asked. She sought the answer in his face. She was only mildly surprised with how easily she found it before he had opened his mouth; before he had even changed his expression. She had learned how to read him on the night he'd revealed himself in the park. And the answer to her question had been there since before he'd greeted her from the terrace door. Tonight, he had come outside for her.

"I was concerned," he acknowledged.

She smiled up at him, grateful for the tender admission. And she ignored just how good it felt when the corners of his mouth turned up at hers in answer.

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'I saw how he was looking at you. He gives you everything you want.'

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April 2, 2006

Morning

Jaken

Jaken woke up with a crick in his neck from sleeping against the wheel. The indentions in the calf-leather grip were plastered, for the moment, on his face and his wrist as well. His skin was stinging where the buttons of his Rolex had dug in. The repercussions of sleeping in the driver's seat was never pleasant, even as luxurious as his master's car was. Jaken gave his old body a cursory check: his head was light, his bottom sore, his right foot felt heavy and distant. It seemed as if, were he to try to move it, the appendage would seize up in its sleep. He settled, for the moment, on recollecting his breath and awaiting his blood to flow at a normal rate; for his mind to even out and balance all the sensations around him. He blinked water into his eyes and stared out through the windshield. There, in apparent silence, the familiar tread of worn images passed in and out of life, like water lapping at the edge of a bank. In. Out. In.

In front of him there hung a traffic light, half-obscured by telephone and cable wires. The lines hissed like snakes coiled in a nest, wanting to writhe but kept down by a strange force against their will. Low and heavy concrete walls stretched around homes around his car around him. There were a few bushes, tall and trim, and poles that reached tall and proud, but no trees. No place for trees.

It was familiar. Or perhaps it was just deja vu. He couldn't say if he had been here in another life, in another time, before the sweet scent of ethanol featured in the notes of his sweat, before the city was trapped in a constant haze, before the city.

Humans slagged onward outside the window, too. There bodies were as light as bubbles in a spray of foam, their feet not even strong enough to leave prints on the ground where they walked. And it wasn't ground. It wasn't even their feet. Shoes and pavement got in the way. The real world still waited beneath the asphalt, beneath the pipes that were filled with waste, beneath the new rivers made in metal casings. Too many layers, too many layers… nothing left of the world…

"Why am I here?"

Jaken moved. He felt so languid that it ached. He ran his hands over his face, finding out that it was his human face. A face that used to be so pure.

A couple of girls narrowly walked around the hood of the car, preoccupied with their conversation. In one of the girl's hands, she held a metallic pink cellular phone with a small herd of keychains dangling from its head: a plastic banana, an anime character's figurine, a souvenir of Hello Kitty from Hokkaido, a beaten-up plush teddy-bear that overshadowed the size of the phone itself. They swung around as she walked, hitting the back of her hand as she laughed.

As if in accord with nothing, his hand reached into his pocket and grasped his phone. The device felt warm around the battery pack, so very warm against his hands; warm like winter. He dialed quickly, his fingers jamming the keys. And he waited. No sooner did the line pick up, and he cried, "Where are you, Rin?" with anxious abandon, remembering just in that moment that she was missing.

The reply was not immediate, but it jarred him when it came.

"Stay where you are," said Sesshoumaru's voice. "I'm on my way."

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