(II)
It was the oldest and most powerful courting gift of all, the granting of a life, or of a death. Once, he had given her life as she lay in her own blood and filth, a wretched, worthless peasant girl; once, he had spread a bundle of wolf pelts at her feet.
Once, he had destroyed anyone and anything who had ever dared to harm her.
"Rin wants to stay with her Sesshoumaru-sama forever…!"
"Why?" the woman asked, her face very white, her pulse jumping with barely restrained panic. "You could have stopped them easily. You didn't have to rip them apart."
She was afraid of him, of his capacity for violence.
"They were going to rape and kill you," he said, watching her, seeing understanding dawn in her dark, familiar eyes. "No one will ever harm you, Rin."
She turned away, deliberately looking over the torn, shredded ruins of her attackers. When she spoke, it was so softly that he almost didn't hear it.
"No one except you."
The difference between taiyoukai and mindless, animalistic lesser youkai, his father had once told him, is not our greater power level, nor our ability to take human shape, but the gift of reason, of thought, and the difference – the all-important difference, Sesshoumaru – between impulse and action, desire and fulfilment. There is an animal in all of us, but we need not give in to it…
He escorted her to her apartment as if by right, his hand on her back a courtesy and a reminder. She had seen his claws, witnessed his strength – she knew what he could do to her in just a fraction of a second, if he so wished.
The scent of her fear was maddening, her fluttering pulse a siren call to his animal nature.
When she reached her door, the key in the lock and ready to turn, she stopped, hesitated, and looked up into his eyes. Here, in the light, he withheld no secrets from her –
And yet he allowed her the choice.
A/N – The Inu no Taishou's words of wisdom are mine. The ideas are not new.
