a/n: …and here's another chapter (much sooner than expected!) It's honestly amazing how much easier this story is to write now that I'm done with the Asano storyline. Big thanks to everyone who reviewed the last chapter; I noticed that I even managed to rope in some new readers. Hope you all enjoy this story, and I'm glad you all liked the lighthearted previous chapter. There will definitely be a lot more interaction between Rin and Sesshōmaru from here on out.

I honestly can't express how grateful I am that you all have decided to stick with this slowburn story. The good news is that Rin and Sesshōmaru are getting closer and closer to liking each other. I've been trying to stick to the same relationship arc beats as in canon but adjusted for the AU and in a different order.

Moving on – this chapter is one of the less lighthearted ones. Remember in the author's note of chapter one when I said this story would've eventually feature darker themes? (not to say that the concept of Rin being a survival sex worker isn't "dark" enough) Welp, I think we've reached that point. I'm still gonna use as much discretion as possible when it comes to depicting certain themes (believe it or not, I'm a total softie, too), but I've decided to bump the rating up to M on just in case (on Ao3 it's already rated Mature, so there's no real change).

WARNING: This particular chapter contains implied/referenced sexual assault.

SONG OF THE WEST

an Inuyasha fanfic

vix.

Two days later, Rin made a curious discovery.

She was fishing again for the quartet on the bank of the glassy, slow-moving river while Lord Tōga and Seiten tending to the horses and the fire, and Lord Sesshōmaru did who knows what. The catch she had brought back before were an unexpected hit among the older men. Tōga was pleasantly surprised to discover her skill; Seiten found a way to work the flavor into her kayu so that she could enjoy the fruits of her labor as well.

Rin was overjoyed to have finally found a way to make her continued presence in the consummate group worthwhile, so for the past few days, as they traveled along the winding path parallel to the tributary, Rin would leave during rest periods, roll up the hem of her yukata, and, with only a basket, her bare hands, great concentration, and a lot of splashing, secure dinner. She didn't mind her clothing too much – the water cooled her skin, and the summer heat always made quick work of drying her wet clothing and dampened hair.

That particular afternoon, Yua, who had made a habit of joining Rin by this point, ventured deeper into the woods than usual, leaving the young woman by her lonesome. Rin was out of the water and on the muddy embankment when the dog returned and dropped the thin, straight object she held in her mouth with her feet. It was an arrow with white-and-black feathers for fletching and what looked like animal bone as its point. The shaft was dark and wooden, much shorter than those of the arrows she'd seen Sesshōmaru carry around in his quiver. The blood she expected to find on it was absent—someone had, in all likelihood, dropped it or discharged it and missed their target. Without thinking, Rin shoved the arrow into her koshishimo and started her stroll back to the clearing, fish basket in hand. Tōga spied it on her as soon as she set foot in the camp.

"Where did you get that?" He stiffened, his deep voice laced with concern. Beneath his thick furrowed brows, his gold eyes were hard like amber.

Rin stopped short and blinked vacantly at his peculiar reaction. She knew by now he wasn't a threat, but…still. "Oh, Yua found it in the woods."

Calmly, Tōga beckoned her to step forward with hand. She obeyed, and he plucked the arrow from the young woman's waist belt. Rin watched as he turned the arrow over and over in his calloused hands.

"Is something wrong, Lord Tōga?"

Tōga's gaze flickered back to her. "It's nothing you need to worry about," he said warmly before tucking it into his belt.

Rin nodded but continued to regard him curiously. What was it about such a simple-looking arrow that made Lord Tōga, of all people, seem so concerned? With a shrug, she tuned to set her basket of fish near the firepit.

"Rin," Tōga called out.

The young woman glanced back at him.

"Try to stay closer to us from now on, alright?"

There was a strained quality to still-kind tone that let her know his words were a behest rather than a recommendation. Rin pursed her lips but nodded in acquiescence. "I will, Lord Tōga!"

Tōga smiled and went back to tending to Sai Hu.

The next night, after a long day of more travel and fishing and restless sleep, Rin opened her eyes. For once, it wasn't a night terror or her hypervigilant sense that disturbed her sound sleep. There was instead a dull pressure in her lower abdomen, one that had been mounting and mounting until finally her unconscious body could no longer brush it aside and her brain forced her awake.

She had to pee. Badly.

With a soft wine, Rin languorously stretched in the summer grass, pushed herself up into a sedentary position, and peered drowsily around the barely illuminated glade. Far away, the dogs had congealed into a slumbering mound of fur. A few paces to her left, Seiten snored softly, as she expected. He took first watch during the night; she must've been asleep for hours. On the other side of her, just at arm's length, Lord Tōga snored softly on his back, his arms crossed behind his head. She'd fallen asleep close by him during another lesson about how to use the stars and constellations to navigate. He took up the second watch, in the very middle of the night, which meant…

Her brown eyes darted across from her, over the dead pit where the fire for cooking and light once burned. Sesshōmaru sat wide awake, his pensive gaze lifted towards the night sky. The dim light from the crescent moon gently bathed his face in a pale glow, highlighting his strong cheekbones and jawline and glistening along his lashes and lovely hair.

Rin wasn't blind. She, like any other young woman her age, quite enjoyed his appearance—not enough to stab someone as Sara tried, but enough to let her gaze linger longer than it ought. He looked ethereal, like a luminary from the performances of epic songs she'd occasionally catch glimpses of while begging for food with her brother, or some alluring incubus, ready to strike if she dared gape at him too long.

His attitude towards her was still so irksome that he might as well have been the latter. Despite her kind-heartedness, they hadn't really spoken those past few days after their conversation in the woods—he didn't want to speak to her, and she didn't have too much to say to him, aside from well-mannered greetings in the morning or if they happened to bump into each other while she was fishing.

Wordlessly, Rin picked herself off the group and vigorously brushed the grass from her skirt with her hands. Sesshōmaru's golden eyes broke from the heavens and converged with hers. It felt a bit childish to come out and say she was going to use the bathroom, so she gave him a knowing awkward glance, which he hopefully understood through the darkness.

Sesshōmaru returned his disinterested gaze to nature, and Rin walked on into the forest to relieve herself of her burden. As usual, she didn't stray too far away from her guardians, placing only enough distance between herself and the camp as not to feel so self-conscious about the act. Her eyes scanned the darkness as she walked, wary of any nocturnal wild animals or bandits that could possibly harm her.

She'd been fixing the hem of her yukata when she noticed something strange in the nearby distance. From one of the trees, she could see what looked like the silhouette of an impossibly large cocoon swinging unhurriedly from a thick branch. Eyes narrowed, Rin walked further into the forest, the twigs and leaves snapping and crunching beneath her bare feet the only sound present.

The smell of the area took on a bizarre note—there was an overwhelming base smell of ordure, with a. hint of something oddly saccharine. Rin squinted to make out the shadowy thing in the dim light. To her astonishment, it was not some cocoon, or even a fallen branch as she had subsequently assumed. In the tree, surrounded by leaves and branches, a man was held in perpetual suspension over the ground like a ghastly phantasm; his head lolled lazily against the thick rope tied about his neck. His hands, bound together, dangled loosely before him, and the front of his tattered yukata was marred with the dark red of his blood. Two lifeless eyes, still wide open, remained fixed forever on the distant horizon.

Rin sucked in a startled breath and clamped her hand over her nose and mouth. This had clearly been done by human hands, and they could very well still be hidden amongst the trees…

I have to tell the others, she thought frantically, spinning on her heel to rush back to the clearing. But her foot collided with something fleshy, forcing her to steady herself against a nearby tree to avoid falling flat on her face in the foul-smelling dirt.

Rin glanced at the ground to see what she stumbled over. It was another human body, this time a woman, her eyes glassy and still. Blood had dried up in a frightful design around her exposed chest and shoulders, leading back to a long gash across her wan neck. Her kosode had been rolled up around her waist, and…

Despite her own earlier reasoning, Rin released a loud shriek and turned to flee the macabre scene, treading unguardedly over stones and branches and leaves. Halfway there, she slammed into another warm body in the darkness.

The cold blade of fear sliced through her heart, dragging its way done from her chest to her stomach. Rin thrashed her arms in an attempt to get away from the stranger. "Get off of me!"

Two strong hands grabbed her upper arms and forced them back to her sides. Eyes squeezed shut, Rin grabbed the stranger by their forearms and dug her nails through fabric into their skin.

"Calm down," a familiar voice hissed in displeasure.

Rin stopped. Sesshōmaru was standing before her, brows furrowed, golden eyes scanning the space around them. It seemed he had been summoned by her blood-curdling scream, though she had no idea how he'd gotten to her so fast.

To Sesshōmaru's surprise, once the young woman realized it was him and not some murderer, she rent herself from his steadying grasp and threw herself into him with a relieved but exhausted bawl. With her face buried in his chest, she trembled slightly against him, her lithe arms enveloping his torso. He couldn't help but tense from the unlooked-for physical contact.

"What the hell is going on?" Tōga's deep, brusque voice filled the silence as he entered their dark space in the woods. Seiten followed close behind with a lantern.

Now that the space had been illuminated, his vision answered his own question. He took in the sight of the bloody hanged man with a grimace.

"There's a girl, too," Rin said, her quavering voice muffled by the cloth of Sesshōmaru's robes. "She's in the bushes."

Sesshōmaru watched as the Imperial Lord and his attendant moved closer to the sight of the corpses. The young man hanging from the tree had most likely asphyxiated before he could bleed out from his suspiciously low wounds. One could only imagine the state of the woman hidden in the shrubbery. Based on his father's commiserative expression, it couldn't be good.

Tōga turned to face Sesshōmaru, who remained fixed to his spot by Rin's frightened embrace. "Take Rin back to the clearing. We'll deal with things here."

Sesshōmaru raised his chin slightly in assent, and his father turned to face the corpses once more. But when the young Lord attempted to prod the girl into motion, she did not move. Rin felt her legs were simultaneously jelly on account of her incessant trembling and heavy, immovable weights due to her fear. The young Lord released a slight grunt from this perceived inconvenience but finally reached down to touch her, settling his hands around her waist.

The touch was uncomfortably familiar to Rin, causing her to jerk her head to look up with a hint of fear. Quickly, Sesshōmaru lifted her into the air. Rin intuitively wrapped her arms around his shoulders and buried her face in the crook of his neck to avoid the sight and smell of the miasmal corpses.

He set her down on her feet at her old spot near the dead firepit.

"Rin," he said, not unkindly. He arched slightly to accommodate her short stature and waited patiently for her to release him.

Her head shifted against his neck. She could feel the slight vibration of his vocal cords as he spoke.

"We're back," he continued.

Some moments of restless nothingness passed before Rin finally released him from her grasp. Eerily quiet, she slowly slid to the ground and brought her knees close to her chest.

Sesshōmaru was surprised she hadn't burst into tears and swooned from distress yet. Instead, she held herself and breathed deeply, as if she were trying to soothe herself. There was an anguished look in her usually cheery dark brown eyes that seemed amiss after the days she had spent catching fish and riding Sai Hu about the clearing. It stirred something in him, albeit slight and unfamiliar.

Rin sat alone like that in the darkness until Lord Tōga and Seiten returned from the forest, whereupon the Imperial Lord sat down next to her, scooped her into his arms, and gently stroked her hair as he did in the inn. She did not fall asleep again.

Lord Tōga and Seiten unfastened the hanged man from the tree, fixed the woman's clothes, and gave the ill-omened pair a proper inhumation before returning to the clearing where Rin and Sesshōmaru waited. When the sun began its daily journey across the sky, so did the quartet.

Seiten took up the head of the small group, with Rin seated in front of him on his horse, just in case she fell asleep and needed to be supported. She was still awake but rode on unspeaking, choosing to drowsily observe the passing landscape at the base of the mountain path on which they were traveling. This silence was a bit awkward—each man had long grown used to her incessant curiosity and chipper attitude to the point where the voyage felt incomplete without her barrage of questions.

Sesshōmaru had never seen anyone so afraid before. His forearms still stung from where she had dug her nails into his skin earlier that morning. She hadn't been forceful enough to draw blood, but it would leave marks.

The young Lord and his father fell a few paces behind Seiten and Rin, riding side by side on the worn dirt path. Tōga held Sai Hu's black leather reins in one hand; in the other was the unbroken intertwinement of the noose he had cut from the hanged man.

"This technique is common amongst the unincorporated tribes to the North," Tōga explained, his voice low as to avoid potentially startling Rin again. "Yet it was so far away from their border."

"Surely non-tribesmen know this technique by now," Sesshōmaru mentioned. There had always been a degree of interaction between the tribesmen and Northern commoners, especially in terms of trade, despite their disparate statuses.

"They do. But the day before yesterday, Rin brought this back," Lord Tōga pulled the arrow out of his bag and held it out to his son.

The young Lord accepted it and turned it over in his hand. The fletching at the end was a black tailfeather of the tanchōzuru, a creature not found in this part of the country. "One of their arrows?"

"Rin said Yua found it somewhere out in the woods. Too close to the area to be a mere coincidence. It could mean that—"

"That Imperial Lord Katsushika is doing a poor job of maintaining the border," Sesshōmaru groused.

Since perhaps the country's founding, the northernmost island had been inhabited by a group of people who had built their culture around the treacherous terrain and climate in which they lived. Their language was similar, save for some regional variation in terms and pronunciation, but their way of life largely differed owing to the tremendous snowfall they received and the packs of wolves that prowled the area.

During the war, certain tribal communities had taken advantage of the situation and battled against the Lords of the North, usurping their control and stealing large swathes of land from the overall domain of the late emperor. Eventually, a tentative peace had been brokered between the Northern lords and the independent tribal communities, to be supervised by the Imperial Lord of the North. Either Katsushika had turned a blind eye to the border and allowed stragglers to slip through, or something much worse was happening.

Tōga huffed. "Perhaps – you never know with him. Yet another thing to discuss when we reach Hyōkusui, I suppose."

Up ahead, Rin continued to sit in silence, watching the far away milieu at the mountain's base and on the horizon pass by like man-made miniatures rather than tangible, livable structures. Her body painfully yearned to recover the hours of slumber she had lost from her early morning fright, but each time she attempted to drift off, she'd see the glassy eyes and ruined body of the young woman she'd stumbled across…

It was no wonder Lord Tōga instructed her to stay closer to the camp when he saw the arrow—though she wished he would've just explained his concerns instead of sparing her sensibilities. Not that her reaction demonstrated any sort of emotional fortitude. In just a few seconds, she had been reduced from a traveling companion of the Inu no Taishō to the frightened, foolish village whore she wanted to leave behind. Seeing that young woman was like an uncomfortable reminder of her past. She had, after all, nearly met the same fate as the young woman so many times before…

Rin sighed, perhaps the first sound she had made during their journey, and scanned the rolling landscape. Now in the distant plain was a great fortress, much like that of Lord Asano's, but slightly smaller, with deep green roofs and white walls, supported by large even heaps of multicolored stone. A moat encompassed the entire fortress, walls and all, with only a single bridge that allowed people to go in and out. The stronghold overlooked a multitude of organized, rich green paddy fields, accompanied by a small village presumably inhabited by the serfs who worked it. People of all ages walked to and fro in the summer heat, eager to finish their chores and enjoy the excellent weather.

Or, at least, that's what things should have looked like.

Rin's startled gasp was the first thing that let the party know something was amiss. Seiten signaled for his horse to stop; Sesshōmaru and Lord Tōga halted as well.

The fortress still in good condition, save for a few arrows now wedged into its white walls and floating in the moat, which was unobstructed by the drawn bridge. But rice paddy fields and village buildings had been scorched to varying degrees. At least, there were no bodies scattered about, no sickly smell to waft up the mountain and further offend Rin's nose.

Seiten seemed shocked. "That's…"

"Lord Yasutoki's manor," Sesshōmaru finished, ever the imperturbable force.

"Well, then," Lord Tōga said. "I guess it's safe to assume the worst."

a/n: This chapter was supposed to be longer, but I thought that was a pretty decent place to stop for now.

I'm pretty excited about this "arc" in the story. I'm still trying not to spoil everything (though I'm sure the direction this part is going in is rather predictable), but the next few chapters will be more Rin-centric.