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It was remarkable seeing the ease in which Rin returned to life in the wake of Kirinmaru’s passing. Sesshoumaru had rarely spent this long within the confines of the village, but beyond retreating to the forest to seek peace from the noises and smells of human civilization for a moment, he spent most of his time observing her. The world moved on without her for fourteen years and yet she slipped right back into it as if it were a familiar kimono and it embraced her, in kind. If not for the suffering caused by that lost time, one could easily forget.
But neither of them had that luxury- the proof was in their daughters, nearly grown and competent warriors who had no need of parental coddling. Sesshoumaru watched Rin to make sure she eased back into village life and was not shunted back out, but he took time for Towa and Setsuna, too.
They were taskless, awkward and uneasy. Towa’s decision to stay in this era left her adrift when the reality finally settled upon her shoulders that there would be no returning to the world that raised her. She danced around Rin and Sesshoumaru, uncertain about how best to go about interacting with them. It occurred to Sesshoumaru that outside of a crisis, the four of them had barely shared a single moment together.
Rin wouldn’t stand for it.
“Maybe we should travel with the girls,” she murmured, curled against his side. He was stripped of his armor, both literal and figurative, leaned against the wall of her modest home- their modest home. Though he so rarely stayed in it, Rin still insisted it was as much his as it was hers. “I miss traveling. It might be fun- you, me, Master Jaken, Ah and Un… and Towa and Setsuna. They can see the world just like I saw it with you.”
She fell asleep with a smile on her lips and Sesshoumaru considered her words. Towa and Setsuna had traveled a great deal, even with Towa only having been here for a short amount of time. Would the world seem different if it were viewed together? He couldn’t imagine it would. The world was unbearably small and rife with the familiar to a demon as great as himself, and he felt as if he’d paced the length of these lands hundreds of times in his years and never saw a single thing with anything resembling wonder. Wonder, he reserved for Rin. She was the only thing truly different and unbelievable in this place.
But Rin had always viewed everything she saw with eyes unclouded by pride and indifference. She had no reason to restrain her joy and therefore didn’t and he would never let Jaken or anyone else take that from her.
If nothing else, Rin would be pleased to see the world again with Towa and Setsuna. That was enough to agree to it.
—
While the offer, once extended by Rin, was accepted, they began their journey on awkward footing. Despite everything, Towa and Setsuna weren’t sure how to act around Rin, who had displayed characteristics more befitting of a lady than of the wild girl she had been before their marriage, and neither were entirely certain how formal they should act once the grace period of Rin needing to keep them in her arms like someone might slip away from her ended and she had returned to a sense of propriety. That choice had been her own and not his doing- she was his heart and soul regardless of how she comported herself- but she was clever enough to understand that the wife of a great demon should hold herself accordingly, and in the aftermath of her daughters’ heroic deeds and Sesshoumaru’s slow recovery time from his injuries, she had to stand tall and firm until he healed and she could finally rest properly.
Towa and Setsuna had watched their mother be as delicate as a flower right before the frost comes to crush it and then turn to silk hiding steel in a manner of moments. She contained multitudes, his Rin. A complex being the likes of which most demons would never be. In all of her beauty and complication, he saw the truth of humanity he had denied for years due to resentment and prejudice.
Not knowing how to approach such pure and unstructured chaos that could tear an empire down with a song and a smile was normal. He could not expect Setsuna and Towa to comprehend the gale that was Rin sweeping through their lives and changing everything in strange new ways when everything had been just so for so long.
They saw her fragile, they saw her steel, and then when the road rose to meet them and it was only the four of them, Jaken, and Ah-Un, they saw the rest of her. Freed from expectation and presentation and with all the strength she’d regained from a healthy lifestyle the past several weeks, she ran through the woods like a deer and it took Setsuna and Towa far too long to realize they should be giving chase until they reached an open field and Rin stopped, spun around and threw out her arms for the twins to fall into. They collapsed onto the grass in a tangled pile of limbs and Sesshoumaru saw in the slants of light from the dying sun a missed opportunity. Rin should have done this when they were small and could leap into her arms properly. Their rites of courage and cowardice, should they be needed at all, should have been made with the two of them nearby to keep watch through the barrier Jaken placed.
The missing years would not come back. There had been enough damaged time already without hoping for that which was gone. Rin was determined to take it back incrementally and Towa and Setsuna were tossed about in her current, trying to keep up with her.
It was a week on the road when they began to settle into her rhythm. Lady Rin was a bitter root to chew on, forcing Setsuna into attention and Towa to awkwardly shuffle to follow her lead. As he had never asked Rin to be his lady, only his wife, so did she never expect her daughters to be princesses. Like her, they had just reached a point where they felt anything less would be a dishonor. He assumed it would pass. He had certainly not done much to earn their respect, only what was necessary. Just Rin, however, was still wild and untamed, chucking sandals to the side and wading barefoot into the stream to catch fish, and Towa was the first to break the character of a dutiful princess (a role she had never fallen into to begin with until recently and it suit her ill) and follow her. Setsuna thawed slower, but she was faster to seek affection. The chaos was confusing. The affection, however, was desperately needed.
And, all the while, he was a shadow at the edge of their camp. Always twelve steps ahead of them or off to the side when the three of them broke off. He scouted ahead and came back to Rin sitting under the shade of a tree with Setsuna’s head in her lap and Towa resting on her shoulder, both girls fast asleep, and she’d put her fingers to her lips and he’d sit and watch them.
“You can hold them, Lord Sesshoumaru,” Rin murmured during their third week. The twins had taken off on Ah-Uh to settle some matter or another with Moroha and a bounty and promised to return before nightfall. Sesshoumaru kept his gaze up and his senses open for any sign of danger as the sun continued to run its course through the cloud-streaked sky, while Rin sat at the edge of a stream and cleaned fish for dinner.
People called her Lady Rin, as she deserved, for simply being a woman who commanded respect for being a defier of demons and a lover of the same, but would they flinch away from the scars on her hands and her blunted, dirty nails if they saw her now? Sesshoumaru kissed those scars in both dream and nightmare for fourteen years and kissed them again as soon as he could. He’d kiss them now, filthy with fish guts and scales, and even got close enough that she realized he was considering it before she hid them behind her back and presented her lips for kissing instead.
He obliged her, the kiss deep and sweetened with the berries she’d eaten as a snack between meals. He sucked the last of the clinging juice from her lips and tongue and she drew back, breathless, her fish forgotten.
But not what she had said before. “That won’t distract me, my lord,” she murmured, dragging her own tongue along her now-swollen and berry-red lips. “I don’t think they understand you as well as Master Jaken and I do. Not yet.” A wry cant to her head as she forced him to meet her eyes. “Is Lord Sesshoumaru frightened of his own children?”
Anyone else would have examined the pristine nature of his far from blunted claws from a painfully close distance for saying such a thing. From Rin, it only elicited a low chuckle. “Am I being cold?”
“Not cold. Distant, maybe.” Rin returned to her fish. Her movements were hypnotic, precise, and he could not tear his eyes away, even to watch the sky for the glint of brownish scales that said their daughters were returning on the dragon. “They need to approach you, but they’re nervous, so you should approach them first.”
He knew she was right, but it was far easier to focus on anything else than a tactic that spat in the face of who he was as a person and as a demon. “They are your daughters, Rin. You have never been afraid.”
She wiped her blood-splattered hands on the grass and clutched his hand tightly. “We both know that’s not true.”
—
By his own estimate, waiting three days after Rin’s suggestion to act upon it was a far faster response time that something that wasn’t dire warranted. With anyone else, they would be lucky if he took the suggestion at all, much less quickly. When he went to scout ahead, rather than leap into the sky and take flight without warning, he doubled back and joined Rin and the girls.
Setsuna and Towa, who had been laughing with their mother, went silent and Rin pouted at them. “You don’t have to stand so rigidly.”
They barely had when he was little more than a stranger. When the role of “father” became an actual mantle and not just a meaningless title, things shifted. Even Rin’s words only relaxed Towa into a puzzled slump- Setsuna remained ramrod straight.
He looked at both of them, making sure he had their attention. “There are demons up ahead. I would like you to accompany me, but it is up to you.”
Rin let out a tiny exhale that might have been her trying to hold back a laugh. It would never be enough and would be insincere for him to simply put his arms around his daughters and hold them to his chest. That was not how he gave affection on its own. Even with Rin, he was careful and moved slowly, and their public displays of love were in small gestures and glances. Had he been shown love in greater amounts, perhaps it would be different.
But fighting was, as Inuyasha’s woman put it in her ridiculous manner of speaking, something of a love language with him. What this Sesshoumaru would fight for, die for, or otherwise was a true sign of his affection and love. More than that, if this Sesshoumaru were inclined to allow someone to fight with him, that was the truest display of love there was.
It was also the one aspect of himself that Rin could only appreciate from a safe distance. She could gut a fish and take down a deer if she was patient enough, but she had chosen not to learn to fight. Not because she was a lady, but because she had no desire or need to cause more bloodshed. Her world was bloody enough without her spilling any, herself. She would, if she had to, but she would not prioritize it as a necessity.
Because the thrill of fighting side by side with him was denied her, Rin recognized the importance of the offer and nudged the girls towards him as if they were shy puppies. “Go on. I’ll be fine with Ah-Un and Master Jaken.”
No one could deny Rin anything, so when she asked, the twins went, both clinging to each other and to his shoulders as he took to the sky to follow the scent-trail of lesser demons he’d lit on.
—-
“Lord Sesshoumaru has brought his pups to us, himself,” the ogres growled, their tongues lolling over drooling mouths. Even from the copse of trees a good thirty feet away from the gathering of grey-skinned beasts, Sesshoumaru could smell their putrid breath.
He could end them in a swipe of Bakusaiga, but that would be a quick, precise death. They would fall into the netherworld to brag that the great Lord Sesshoumaru put them down with his blade and they were not felled by something lesser. “Towa. Setsuna.”
His daughters were not considered lesser, not in his eyes, but they had not yet built his reputation. He would not force them to vie for his love and birthrights. He would not abandon them to lives bereft of any warmth from him. But they were his daughters as well as Rin’s, and they would be respected on their own merits and not as extensions of himself, not the way that he and Inuyasha were his father’s left and right hands, left to fight and bleed and be stained by his legacy.
“Right,” Towa and Setsuna responded and lunged forwards, weapons out. The ogres took longer to defeat than a swing from his blade would have taken, but the girls were enjoying themselves, exploring tactics and figuring out how to handle a lower stakes battle that could be allowed to just be fun, and he found that captivating. Sesshoumaru only joined the fight at all to follow the one that slipped away and tried to run, and dispatch it.
When their battlefield was a series of shattered trees and ogre carcasses, Setsuna and Towa clasped hands and smiled, blood splashed on their faces and dripping from their blades. Sesshoumaru sheathed his sword and came within spitting distance of them, which turned their immediate attention to him.
He didn’t hesitate to nod at them, respectfully. “You did well. Soon, they will refer to you as Towa and Setsuna, and not Sesshoumaru’s daughters.”
Setsuna gave a stiff nod, but Towa, overwhelmed and just as generous as Rin with her emotions, stepped forwards, paused, and then took another step until she was close enough to throw her arms around his waist.
Sesshoumaru went rigid. He had been embraced before- by Rin and it had taken him a week to process it the first time it happened. “Towa…”
“Mom says we have to make the first move if we’re ever gonna stop dancing around each other. I was just… waiting for you to try a little more.”
Of course Rin realized that once the frost began to melt on her relationship with the girls that everything that followed involved ridding him of the ice clinging to his, and she would plan accordingly. She had turned to both the girls and him to push them closer together, rather than simply leave it wholly in his hands.
Rin, always throwing worlds into chaos- mostly his own, but apparently even their daughters were not immune to it.
Towa didn’t release him and he saw no reason to force her to do so. He looked over her head to Setsuna, blinking back a look of horror like she expected her twin to get her head bitten off. “Setsuna,” he said, knowing better than to not push this as far as it needed to go if they had already come as far as this. He lifted an arm and invited her into the embrace.
Setsuna didn’t hesitate. Her naginata fell from her hands and while Towa’s embrace had been a quick, decisive action, hers was a desperate, needy thing, all but staggering him when she grabbed hold of his fur and plunged her face into it, like she had been waiting for permission for so long. For a long moment, they stood there, wrapped in this embrace, and then Sesshoumaru carried them back to their mother.
—
That night in camp, Setsuna still slept with her head in her mother’s lap, but Towa dropped down next to him. They spoke- or Towa did and he listened. It was mostly about the other world, about her feelings about the Higurashi family, about her choice to stay in this era. She wanted this to work. She wanted to take those missing years back by force if she had to, but it was going to take time.
“Maybe not as much as I thought,” she smiled, as cheeky as her mother and when she smiled, he saw it mirrored in Rin’s across their campsite as she looked over at him, hands stroking Setsuna’s hair.
With Rin still watching him, he shifted to offer Towa a place against his side and she slid neatly into it, curled around him, clinging to his fur like it was a treasured toy. All through the night, he stayed awake and kept vigil and watched his family sleep.
The roads were theirs to travel by and the years would turn with them finally together, and while Sesshoumaru had never heard the human legends of love and loss and love again, Rin had and had told him that they usually ended happily when her own mother had told them to her.
So he supposed that meant this one was such a story.