Title: Beautifully Imperfect
Author: Tsubasa Kya
Disclaimer: I do not own.

Chapter six: What is confidential

"I take it you don't like your father very much?" Kali asked softly. Both boys—whether or not they were twenty-five and nineteen didn't matter, they would always be boys to her—shrugged as though it didn't really matter anyway. She tried another approach to coerce them into speaking. "What is it about him that you do not like the most?"

When they still didn't talk, Kali pursed her lips in thought. She would have to split them up to find out, undoubtedly. Sometimes to get siblings to talk, they needed to be separated from one another. So she looked at the younger one. "Inuyasha," she started, and then looked at the elder one, "and Sesshoumaru. How about we try something? I would like you, Inuyasha, to go into the next room while I talk to Sesshoumaru. Then we can switch afterwards."

Inuyasha stood and huffed as he left. He shut the door behind him perhaps a little too roughly, but she heard it latch so knew Inuyasha would not be able to eavesdrop unnoticeably. "Sesshoumaru?" Kali inquired and saw her straight-backed patient slump in the chair. Yes, he was an intriguing patient with a façade for everyone.

"This is confidential, correct?" Sesshoumaru asked and Kali nodded. "Then I shall talk..."

"Hey baby. You look tired." She felt it being said even as she heard it. She looked up at Kohaku for a moment to find his brown eyes staring down at her with worry. Kohaku was one year younger than her exactly, born on the same day as she was, only a year later. He was one of her closest friends and her boyfriend. They had been 'going out' since pretty near elementary school.

Since he had been born, Kohaku had never had the strongest body. He was sick a lot and had to take an array of medication just to keep his body alive. On top of all his illnesses, he had a slight immune deficiency—though not enough to put him in a bubble for life—and was born with a hole in his heart that made breathing come difficult. He had only one lung after an accident when he was a child.

Kohaku was a miracle. He probably should have died, but there he stood with his strong arms around her. She felt like a million dollars in his arms. Never before had she kept a secret from him, even when she had gotten drunk and ended up in the sack with another man. She had always told Kohaku whether or not she wanted to.

So even now, she felt the words bubbling up. "Kohaku, my dad got fired today." She buried her face in his neck even as he led her to the bed in her room where they sat together, just holding one another. "And you should be at home, resting." She pointed out, not about to miss the fact that his breathing was slightly labored, probably from coming to see her. Kohaku used to go to private school with her, but his constant being sick made it so his father had him home schooled.

Kohaku chuckled warmly, running a hand through her bangs. "Baby, my home is with you," he told her, sounding so honest and sincere that she only wanted to curl up next to him and never leave his side for anything. This was what she loved about him. Even though he had some health issues that could be terrible, he still risked everything to see her.

On a good day, she could be expected to get into at least three arguments about how he shouldn't be risking himself for her from her alone. This was discounting all the reaming he received from other people around him who disagreed with his dating her, saying she was bad for his health. Kohaku insisted she was the only thing he had that was good for him.

"How tired are you?" she asked him, lifting her head to look at him again. The sweat that marred his upper lip and forehead told her he was less-than ready. He needed to rest, and so whether or not he wanted to, she was going to make him. Now for sure she wouldn't be going to meet Miroku to go to the Rave.

Kohaku waved her off, casting an annoyed look at her before shifting so he was more comfortable. His eyes seemed to droop of their own will, giving him a sleepy look. "I'm fine, baby." He told her, though she wasn't falling for it at all. Even his arms weren't holding her as tight as they had initially.

She pulled away from him and looked at him sternly. "Lay down. You need rest."

He chuckled at her, but did as told and shifted until he was lying down on her pillow. "There. Now, will you lay by me? I might die if you don't."

She moved to lay by him, saying, "Don't even joke like that. I don't want to know what I would do if I lost you."

"Sorry," he apologized, but she knew he would do it again. It was something he did. It might not have bothered her so much when he said it if there weren't such a great chance that he would die.

"Yuri and I were six when the first of a series of disgusting events began. Haru began beating our mother—" He stopped when he saw her pencil skimming across the paper in front of her, writing down the short-hand version of what he was saying. For him, it was very distracting, but he frowned and just continued. "Yuri is my twin. Half a year after that, our father began cheating on our mother."

"I see." Kali set down her pencil. "Go on..."

Sesshoumaru leaned his head back, his arms moving his hair so it wasn't behind his back still. He really had long hair. "Inuyasha came into the picture and my mother couldn't take it. In the middle of the night, she came to the room I shared with my sister and woke us up. She said, 'We're going on a vacation. But we need to be quiet. Don't make any noise, okay?'"

Kali remained silent, writing the short hand of what he was saying. He spoke at an even pace, so keeping up was not difficult. He had paused, and so she looked at him. His face was again unreadable.

"So we were leaving... Mother shoved a piece of paper in my hand and told me to hang on to it. As we were leaving, Haru stopped us and had mother arrested..."

End.