A stupid human would have heard no inflection in his voice, but Rin knew all about communicating without using words—and about how someone's body could convey hidden intentions. Despite Sesshomaru's apparent iciness, she read an open invitation to approach in the absolute stillness of his sword hand. Not even Jaken could get this close to him without those long fingers curling in at least slightly toward Tensaiga's handle.
Immensely honored by his attention, Rin made her statement short: "Sesshomaru-sama, I had a dream."
He sniffed the air slightly and said, "You smell as if you've been running."
Rin raised her hand instinctively to the still-dampened front of her kimono and said, "Yes." Too young to be embarrassed about smelling of sweat, she was simply impressed that he could sniff out the contents of her dreams.
He turned away toward the empty sea of grass, and his profile was in shadow once more. "Always the same one, isn't it?"
"No—this time it was different," she said. She'd been mute for so long after her family's murder that sometimes words pushed and shoved to get out of her, and they got all jumbled up. Her description of the dream came out in a confused rush: "It was like before, when the bandits came, only this time you were there, and you had Tensaiga, and you cut up all the bad people and brought the good ones back to life if they were killed, and you saved us all."
Silence. Other than a slight bending forward of his head that might have meant anything, he gave no indication that he had heard her barrage of words at all. As the quiet stretched on, she had ample time to hear her own words echo in her ears. Now they sounded babyish and silly, and she began to wish she'd never mentioned any of it. She could almost hear Jaken mocking her for even dreaming such a ridiculous thing about Lord Sesshomaru, who didn't like humans, and was not in the habit of rushing into battle to rescue them.
Except for her. He had come to rescue her.
She balled her little hands into fists as she fought to believe. He would have saved her family and neighbors, if only he'd been there. He would have.
She heard him release a long breath, and when the light shifted with the windblown tree branches, she got a look at his face. He had that far-away expression again, only this time there was a glint of something hard and bitter in his eyes. It was, perhaps, the look of a man who knows the world, and knows himself, and finds neither as he would like them to be.
"It was just a dream, Rin." His voice was soft, but offered no sweet deceptions.
Rin's tears had dried up along with her voice on the morning she'd found her mother's corpse lying a short way from their village, the body only recognizable by the unstained patches of her overskirt and the fallen wrap that had been around her hair. Now, however, she felt unfamiliar burning prickles in her eyes. She blamed Jaken for cruelly inventing the idea that there could have ever been a time when Lord Sesshomaru would not have helped her. Sesshomaru-sama was just saying that her dreams were not the same as what was real. That was all. He had saved her so many times . . . it was stupid to believe that he wouldn't have intervened on that terrible night.
"Yes, but I wish . . ." she began, but the imaginary, choking hand around her voicebox squeezed closed again, preventing her from speaking of what lay behind the steel screen that divided her life into "before" and "after." Blocked in that direction by her self-imposed vow of silence, she tried expressing her yearning in another way. "I just wish . . . that everybody hadn't had to die before I could be with you."
Sesshomaru's face was in shadow once more, but this time she thought she heard a definite softening in his voice. "Everybody dies, Rin. Even the greatest of the diayokai passes out of this life eventually."
Rin knew that his father was dead—killed in a terrible whirlwind of fire and the sword, like Rin's own parents—and that Sesshomaru missed him. The Demon Lord never openly expressed his feelings on the matter, of course, but then, Rin never said more than the bare minimum about her family either. Really, she and Sesshomaru-sama understood each other best when they didn't use words.
Even in silence, they didn't always agree on everything, however. He seemed truly unconcerned by the fact that everyone and everything died, while the thought of losing anyone else to the greedy pallbearers of the next world made Rin's stomach contract into a tight knot of fear.
"But you won't die," she told Sesshomaru. "Not for a long, long, long time—will you?"
He turned to look at her again, and she was relieved to see the hint of determined wickedness in his eyes. "I wasn't planning on it." As if to underscore that statement, his long fingers curled slightly around Tensaiga's handle.
By rights, that should not at all have been a comforting gesture at all, but some of the panicky tightness in Rin's insides relaxed at his implied eagerness to cut down anything that crossed him, including death itself. Lord Sesshomaru might be little loved in the Western Lands, but to Rin, he was the answer to uncounted desperate prayers. He was a guardian who was a hundred times a match for any bandit—even for any yokai wolf pack—and who, almost, could not die.
Overcome with adoration and gratitude, it was all she could do not to throw herself immediately into his embrace. Not even Rin was allowed to touch Lord Sesshomaru without his permission, however. Sudden moves in his direction inevitably made him go for his weapon. Instead of rushing him, she asked with polite wistfulness, "Sesshomaru-sama, may I come sit with you?"
He was extremely wary of having anything interfere with his lone sword arm—and grew even more hostile if someone crowded him to his left, next to Tensaiga's saia--but he did sometimes let Rin sit close when things were quiet. His only response to her question was to lift his elbow enough to allow her to duck under and through, which she quickly and happily did. This left her pressed up against his side, wrapped in the same circle of protection that ended at Tensaiga's handle.
The chestplate he wore made him hard to curl up against, but Rin was able rest her head in the hollow of his shoulder, where the furry pelt he wore slung over that arm acted as a makeshift pillow. The trailing fur lay on the grass beside him as well, and Rin burrowed beneath it so that it half-spilled over her drawn-up knees. Someone who spotted the Demon Lord sitting in the shadow of the tree might have entirely missed the dark head of the child leaning up against his chest. The rest of her was almost completely covered by fur and the long bell of his sleeve.
One did not hold onto Lord Sesshomaru under normal circumstances—it unnecessarily restricted his freedom of movement. He didn't seem to object if Rin lightly gripped the top of his chestplate, however. She did this, and allowed the backs of her fingers to press against his outer garments. The warmth of his skin was faintly detectable through the fabric, and it felt . . . normal. Nothing about him was especially soft or yielding, and the arm that was wrapped around her felt more like an encircling guard rail than a type of embrace, but up close Sesshomaru-sama felt like anybody else. He didn't seem at all like the terrifying yokai made out of snow or dust or ash that she'd heard stories about in her village.
She buried her face in the fur at his shoulder, and decided that demons were more like people than people were. If only her demon family could stay like this always, and nobody ever had to go away or die!
Perhaps noting how fiercely she was pressing herself against him—uninviting armor or no—Sesshomaru seemed to shift his attention from whatever lay beyond the fields to the girl at his side. Rin could feel his body turn slightly as he looked down at the top of her head, and she hoped he wasn't deciding that she was becoming a pest. There was a kind of deliberative stillness about him, as if he were a bit surprised by her behavior, and was trying to decide how to respond. Silently, she pleaded with him not to shoo her away.