Chapter Four: The Difference A Year Makes

Sesshoumaru looked over at the sleeping girl; it had been a year since she first started traveling with him. Ai was now older, her beauty even more prominent at fifteen. He smiled, a year had felt like a lifetime, but it made all the difference. He walked over to her and brushed a stray hair out of her face, wanting to hold her even though his mind was telling him that in a year she would probably go to a human village and find a nice suitable human mate. His heart was telling him that she deserved better than that, that no one would ever be good enough. Sesshoumaru sighed, she was just a human afterall, why did he care.

Ai opened her eyes and sat up to find him staring at her she blushed, during the past few weeks she had started feeling differently towards sesshoumaru, almost as if she was in love. "I wasn't talking in my sleep again was I?" Sesshoumaru just smiled and stood up shaking his head no. "Go get dressed, today Jaken is taking you to buy a new kimono, there's a human village not too far from here". Ai stood up beaming, and hugged sesshoumaru out of thanks, he stiffened immediately and the girl quickly released him from her embrace. As she started off to the nearby hot springs, sesshoumaru was left with a thousand different feelings that all hit him at once. What was happening to him?