by
Resmiranda
What fish feel,
birds feel, I don't know--
the year ending.
--Matsuo Basho
"I don't know," he says, or would say if he ever admitted to ignorance. Because he never shows weakness, Sesshoumaru remains silent.
In the back of her throat, Rin makes that strange noise, half-grunt, half-whine, that she employs on the rare occasions when he frustrates her. She can tell he doesn't have an answer for her. Idly, she wishes he would just say it instead of attempting to remain distant and inscrutable, ice cold and above all her petty questions, and petty questions are only petty, of course, if he has no answer for them.
She wonders how long it takes for demons to grow up.
The fish in front of her is flopping against the grass and gasping its last, because, for the first time, she doesn't think she can eat it. She'd never thought about it before, but it is dying in front of her and suddenly suffering seems like something that crosses species, that it is the same for everyone like it is for her, and now that she's thought it she cannot unthink it again.
Her stomach is twisting in on itself, but Rin can't quite bring herself to do the final honors. It seems cruel, or unnecessary, as if there were something else she could eat that wouldn't suffer the agonies of dying that she still remembers in dreams.
She is still steeling her nerve when suddenly the fish is without a head and without any more pain, and only the slightest gleam on the tips of his claws belie the action she could not see.
Sesshoumaru moves so quickly sometimes that she thinks perhaps she imagined the world before the motion - that the fish has always been without a head and she just didn't notice. It is as if the world has always been the way he wanted it to be, and she simply could not see until he swept away the dust, brushed the cobwebs from her eyes, parted the veil that had obscured it from her until now. He moves as quickly as revelation.
"Sesshoumaru-sama..." she begins, because just his name is sometimes enough to make him speak.
"Ask Jaken," he tells her, which is what he says when he is... not annoyed, or bothered, or tired of her, but rather... manipulative. As if he unconsciously rearranges the world into what he desires. She cannot defy it. He's had far more practice at the art of arranging the universe than she.
Rin turns to the dozing toad next to her. "Jaken-sama, do all animals feel pain the way we do?"
Without even cracking an eye, he grunts and says, "That is not something you should care about. It is yourself you should be concerned with." It is his usual casual lesson in callousness, and doesn't answer her question at all.
Impatient, Rin gives his shoulder a shake. "Jaken-sama," she wheedles.
He was always so easy to excite. In seconds, he is on his feet and hopping up and down in front of her. "Foolish child! I don't care and it doesn't matter! Stop pestering me with your stupid questions!"
Rin frowns. The days are long gone when she was almost Jaken-sized. Now, if Sesshoumaru were to embrace her - and he never will again - the top of her head would brush the underside of the cold metal spikes on his armor. "I'm not a foolish child any more," she begins to say, but he cuts her off.
"You are! You are young and you know nothing, and I am trying to sleep!"
Sighing inwardly, Rin picks up the sharp stick she had prepared for the fish and pokes Jaken with it instead. "Does this hurt?" she asks, genuinely curious.
With his staff, Jaken knocks the stick out of her hand. She watches it whirl away and into the grass as he continues. "Of course it doesn't!" he cries. "I'm not as weak as that! Now let me sleep!" With a noise that sounds distinctly like, "Humph!" he stalks a little ways away and slides down into the shade of the trees. Within seconds he is gently snoring, though she can't tell if he's faking it or not.
Rin sighs again before pushing herself to her feet and retrieving her stick. When she returns, she kneels down next to her headless fish but hesitates before preparing it.
Deliberately and carefully, she holds her arm in front of her and stabs at the soft white underside.
"Ow!" She is surprised, although she doesn't know why, to find that it hurts her. She should have guessed; after all, Jaken is always saying that she is a weak human, but she never really thought about it like this until now. She hurts. Absently her fingers brush the silver scar on her cheek before she detects a movement from the corner of her eye and turns abruptly to face it.
Sesshoumaru is gazing at her with eyes so clear she thinks she might fall into them.
He is still and white, and the world moves around him. Only the gentle swell and fall of his hair, the slight movement of his fine clothes tells her that he is not a statue, that he is flesh, that he moves through time as well instead of standing still while all around him flows.
She thinks that it is perhaps true, that not all pain is equal, for he does not stir or act injured even when he is bleeding. He does not feel sensations the same way she does.
And then she thinks that he doesn't feel the same way she does, that all her love and devotion, all her girlish dreams and yearnings are being poured into a great chasm, dark and empty, lost forever and never to be returned.
Or maybe not even that. Perhaps it is as if she is loving him, and he cannot recognize it. Or even worse, that he is not the right shape to receive it, and the distance between them, human girl and demon lord, can never be crossed. An accident - no more or less - of birth.
He is still staring, clear-eyed. He would never let anything harm her, never let anything touch her, and yet he has not moved to take the stick away. He seems curious. He appears to be waiting for something.
But then again, who knows what a demon feels?