Curiosity Killed the Cat
When he looked down at her sleeping form Sesshoumaru felt, as he always did, curiosity.
It was the same curiosity that had stirred when she had first come to him, bringing him useless food and water, coming time and time again, and saying not a word. She had been in his dreams that night, as an oddity, something that he did not understand.
Sesshoumaru did not like being in ignorance.
He had felt curiosity when he had smelt her blood, and seen her broken form, so different from the one that had been shyly alive earlier. Usually he felt satisfaction at a human's death, but then their deaths had always been at his hand. Instead he felt… well, curiosity was one of the things he felt. The other things were emotions he could not identify, for he had never known the words to fit the emotion. Pity, perhaps. Distain for whoever was running the world. It was not pleasing that someone who had been so alive and bright should be lying so still, that insects should be already crawling towards her. Although she had been a useless benefactor, the fact that she had engaged his interest meant she was too important to be left in the dirt, to be consumed by the lowest of the low.
So, in an attempt to understand, he had brought her back, only to become even more lost.
He could not discern why she followed him, nor why she was pleased when he said she had done well at some simple task. He did not know why she liked flowers, or why she fashioned weeds for him to wear, anymore than he knew why he accepted these unusual ornaments. He did not wear them, obviously, but he accepted them with the grace he had been lacking when he had refused her first offerings of food.
She chased butterflies, and danced wildly with the wind, stared at the clouds for hours and laughed with sheer joy at living, whilst her silent guardian watched on, rife with curiosity, and the need to understand.
And slowly, so slow he did not know it was lurking until it was upon him, he started to enjoy her, and revel in what he did not comprehend.
He too was watched with interest. Rin would stare at him as one would look upon a God: to her he was an other-worldly beast, one she had been blessed with the allowance to follow. But he was also her Sesshoumaru-sama, and so she would roll up in his mysterious furs, twine her fingers through his silky hair, and gape in amazement as it slid through her grasp. And sometimes, when she was feeling particularly daring, she would trace his crescent moon with a finger still blunted by childhood, and smile at him with glee and wonderment.
It was that smile that always confused him.
He'd watched her playing, swimming, dancing, jumping, running, singing, and he watched her now, sleeping. Wistful curiosity faded, and he was content to simply sit and watch as the rarity before him slept, protected from the harms of the world by her god.
And all was well.