by
Resmiranda
And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
--Galway Kinnell, "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight"
When she opens her eyes, she thinks that she is still dreaming. This is the sight that greets her when she opens her eyes in dreams as well, the sight she revisits after the teeth – but no. Subtle differences – the armor, the slight hint of emotion so faint only she would see it, the clean and ordered hair and clothes – tell her that she is awake now, and no longer caught in wolf's jaws. Her breath rushes through her teeth; her heart beats its wings against the cage of her body.
She looks up into Sesshoumaru's pale face and golden eyes, like fireflies on the moon, and swallows hard.
"I didn't mean to wake you up, Sesshoumaru-sama," she says between pants, wishing that her dreams also did not cause her to leap from the land of sleep and into the world.
Sesshoumaru says nothing, and she becomes even more aware of the difference between remembrance and reality. He is not holding her, he is standing, and she can see the night sky all around.
He merely shakes his head, and she has to struggle to remember which of her words he is answering.
"Oh," is all she can think to say.
He doesn't move away. Instead he is still, pinning her to the ground with the weightless force of his gaze. Rin wishes she were small again, small enough to be scared, small enough to curl against his pelt, small enough to seek comfort, instead of this difficult size, half-girl, half-woman, that insists she is strong.
Beneath her back is the slow and steady rhythm of Aun's lungs, and the swathe of blankets around her smells like fresh grass. They are comforting things, each one stilling her heart and her fluttering breath, until he opens his mouth.
He has been sinking into silence as speaking becomes unnecessary, so the sudden sound dropped into the space between them crawls across her bones.
It calls up wisps of memory, of other men that she has known, although they are all but forgotten now. Each one has been erased by long white fingers, replaced with long white hair. He is so pale that he shines, yet his voice is dark. It is deep, vast, shadowed.
His voice has walls so high she wonders if she will ever scale them, if she will ever find her way over and into the place where voice and thought are one, into the place where words slumber.
"Stand," he says, and she does so, though something in her balks at the curt command. She does not need his coldness. Cold only numbs; it does nothing to heal. Rin clutches the blankets tighter around her shoulders and rises before him.
Her neck is stiff and she winces as tilts her head back to look him in the eye. The top of her head is level with his shoulder now, and it's funny, but he still seems as impossibly tall as he did when she was a little girl. They are motionless for a moment.
Then a breeze lifts his hair, and she is suddenly seized with the thought that she will be caught up and drift away, as light as a leaf, and he will still be standing here, still and smooth as glass. Fear fills her, and then she has drawn close enough that the space between them is the space of a breath, and her hand is gripping the end of his empty sleeve, the poorest of anchors and the crudest of gestures.
Childish, she thinks. Childish.
Rin makes as though to move away, and then his hand is in her hair, holding her in place. He looms, and she freezes.
Very slowly, as though not to frighten her, he releases her hair and places cold fingertips against her forehead. The touch is so feather-light that she would not have been aware of it but for the sudden shock of cold across her brow. It is as if he is bloodless, and she thinks, for a moment, that maybe he is.
Gently he trails his fingers down – claws, the tips of his claws chasing after – down the soft slope of her brow, brushing against the corners of her eyelids, slipping over the ridge of her eyebrows, and then the tips of his fingers are closing her eyes, stealing her warmth and her sight.
She notices, with a small flash of something purple and green and bitter, that he is sliding over the high bones of her cheeks, down and inward, never touching the scar just below. Perhaps he is wary of releasing the secrets sealed there.
She feels him lean in closer.
"Do not dream of wolves," he says. His words are soft as the wings of a butterfly, and rock her to the core.
"How?" she demands, harsh against him. Older, she is no longer able to slip into his will and let it carry her. "How?"
Sesshoumaru draws back. Rin opens her eyes in time to see him turn and walk away, up the little hill in front of them. At the crest he stops. Drawing Toukijin from its resting place, he stands against the sky.
She sinks to the ground, all her love and resentment mingling in her throat, and they taste sour. As she falls into sleep, she wonders when the day shall come when she can no longer tell one from the other.