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

Chapter eight: What is suicide

The courts had opened; Karei was fighting for the right to adopt Kagome and Souta. Kagome and Souta really didn't have the energy to join the fight anymore. Both of them used to be so brash; every fight was a chance to exercise without caution. Karei tried to talk to Kagome and Souta, tried to get them to understand that she was an adult and had the legal right to adopt them.

But it was not Kagome who was strong in the face of so great an evil as her father's death. And it was not Souta who was physically complete after the death of his mother. Karei had lost just as much in the very same instant. In the very same way.

It was so simple that it was ironic. One moment the three had family; the next they did not and had only each other. Karei wasn't to become the 'property' of Soh-A-Tech because she was an adult; because adults didn't own other adults.

That was slavery.

But 'owning' a child wasn't considered slavery; a parent either 'had' or 'did not have' a child. One could not distinguish this in any other terms but these.

Or something like that.

Karei saw it all a different way, however. Karei was headstrong, resentful, beautiful, conceited. She was special, because in the face of hardship she could continue on. She was smart, kind, sexy, loving. She was special, because no matter what she would continue on.

If this wasn't a hardship, what was it?

Kagome and Souta stay each night in her room; the summer would be a long one. She refused to go to school and leave him. He refused to leave her side as well, but she was half supporting him on her shoulder half the time. If she left his side for more than a second, he grew paranoid and he would scream and panic, call out her name.

The sound of his petrified voice filled her and it made her feel like she was losing her mind. Her relationship with her friends didn't just slowly fade away, it just died instantly as she lost the will to be around or talk to anyone else.

Souta couldn't talk at all, except to scream her name, and 'mama', and 'dad'. The days flickered on and only Karei's will to keep them alive, and her hatred of them for their weakness and breaking, kept them eating. She would force them to sit at the table, their eyes growing ever duller, their souls shattering further. To Karei, it was torture to watch them fading.

The rapid decline wasn't healthy for them, she knew. But Karei made the two come to court every day as she worked on bringing them under her care. In the depths of her mind, she knew she wasn't qualified to take them in; they were broken now.

She also knew that it wasn't right; something was amiss. How likely was it that her parents had taken a road so far out in the middle of nowhere to get to the airport, when their home was just a mile away? Kali might have taken that road since it was somewhere between the airport and the shrine, just a milestone to cross over, but a usually deserted road anyway.

Kagome and Souta were not seeing this. They were not seeing that if they didn't start fighting, Karei would lose her remaining family to a system that was just wrong. Soh-A-Tech could not just take in all the orphaned children, especially if there was still family left who could take care of them.

Scratch that; Nokugami, Haru could not just have all that power. Something wasn't right with the world. Something had upset the balance of power that was supposed to remain intact.

And when Kagome and Souta's friends came over to give their regrets and condolences to the two neither would speak to the friends who cared so deeply for them. Kagome would not even talk to Kohaku, and he had ascended three enormous steps of stairs while refusing help from his sister to do so, just so he could be before Kagome and be rejected with a silence that ate away at his insides like a parasite.

Neither of them were even fighting for themselves or trying to preserve their well-being and sanity.

Karei was worried. She couldn't remember a time when she had been so scared for the two. Before she knew what had happened, Karei found that the time she was devoting to care for Kagome and Souta had cut severely into her social life. And even though she found this sacrifice to be a small one, there were others.

Her relationship with her boyfriend seemed to dim. They both attempted to keep up the pretense of their relationship, but soon the battle for Kagome and Souta's well-being and sanity and adoption and care became too great for the woman who only wanted to dance in the first place. She couldn't keep trying, trying to pretend that she and her boyfriend didn't have this giant rift between them, and that rift, that chasm as wide as the sea had two names: Kagome, Souta.

Even when she and her boyfriend broke away from each other, it was still perfectly okay with her, though it hurt a little. As long as she could continue to fight for custody of her cousins, she was okay with it. She poured money from her own savings, and from the money she'd inherited as her parent's only beneficiary.

She poured until the entire bank account was nearly air-dry in her hands. Before the summer had ended, Kagome and Souta would not speak at all and walked around like lost children, holding hands, holding each other, dying in a mute noise together. Their eyes did not speak of anything by the time fall came. They were as dead and dying as the rest of the bodies and minds.

Then, one day, Karei fell to her knees before her cousins and sobbed into her hands. Is there nothing I can do for them? She wondered. They stared blankly at the television screen that had collected dust, curled up together on the rocking chair as if they'd shrunk, or the chair grew.

Karei realized that the latter was impossible, and the former was terrible. The two had lost so much weight; their eyes dead, their faces gaunt, their limbs bony and the veins on their necks showing blue. Their clothes hung on their forms even more now than before, though not many would realize that since they'd always worn baggy clothes.

Again she wondered why she cared. She questioned herself like she had thousands upon thousands of times that summer. Why did she care? Why couldn't she just let Soh-A-Tech take them, if they wanted?

But no matter how deep Karei resented the two siblings, family did not abandon… it was something that could not be done. No matter the grievous hatred that broiled just beneath the surface of Karei's skin for Kagome and Souta, for the strength that they had always had and she never did, Karei could no longer find that hatred in her soul. She could not understand herself, but she did also not want to.

She wanted Kagome and Souta to wake up. She wanted to have her parents back, to have her Aunt and Uncle to not be dead. She wanted so much that she could not have, that watching Kagome and Souta kill themselves was breaking her as well, slowly killing her; roasting her in a dying fire. And she was fighting two losing battles; fighting for custody against the richest, most prosperous, most devilish man the world had ever seen, and fighting for their safety and sanity.

So the next day, Karei hugged the unresponsive Kagome, kissed the cheek of the detached Souta, and left them locked in Kagome's room. They would not leave it without prompting anyway, and she could not bring herself to inflict the final blow to ensure that no one, no one, could enslave them into another family's custody.

Perhaps they would just simply wane into non-existence if she left things that way? Perhaps if they did go to Soh-A-Tech, they would be happy. Perhaps slavery was too strong a word. Perhaps it would not be to abandon them if she gave up. But she could not live with herself, and she was sane. She knew this had to be done. She knew that if she did it, everything would be over.

She walked throughout the shrine, closing and locking every door. After all, it would not be right if she did not. It would not be right to leave doors open for anyone to walk in. Finally at the front of the house, at the gate, she closed and locked the heavy iron barred gates that had only ever been for decoration.

She walked up the stairs of the shrine, feeling her lips moving but not hearing what she was saying. She could hear the slow, comatose breaths that her cousins dragged in through their lungs, even though she was several hundred feet away at the entrance to the shrine, and they on the third floor in Kagome's room.

She could feel their statuesque eyes piercing her heart as she moved ever closer to impending doom. She could taste the lack of emotions that filled their soul on her tongue and it left a dry feeling in her mouth, yet made her feel like she were chewing on slimy, uncooked bread dough. She could see them holding each other tight, neither more sure of themselves than a dead newborn.

She could smell their state of unrest, fogging her nose and her senses, making her head reel and her heart pound wildly, yet with the sound of their breathing so loud in her ears as she drudged ever closer to the inner courtyard of the shrine, up the few steps to the shrine, she could not hear her heart pounding, and the feel of their dead stares kept her from feeling her heart as it begged to burst from her chest.

In… out… They breathed, and she stepped into the kitchen of the shrine. Kali used to have a maid, but Karei had dismissed her at the beginning of the summer, right after Kali's death. Now only Karei had seen the inside of the kitchen. In… out…

Then her feet carried her forward even further, through the kitchen to a servant's hall. After so much remodeling, and a burst of European influence, some of the design and décor of the shrine resembled more of a European castle than a real shrine. The walls were not made of paper, but instead sturdy stone.

Onward she went, through halls and corridors that blurred so much she could only wonder if she was running, though deep inside her she knew she was walking so slow that the dead would pass her by, laughing and waving.

A door opened before her, but she wasn't sure if she opened it. She couldn't feel or see herself do it. The impression of knowledge surrounded her and she knew she was in the giant, two-story library, filled with ancient texts, scrolls, tombs, and modern books and magazines.

The first spark of reds, oranges, blues, greens, violets… it started to rise; she couldn't smell the smoke.

She didn't know that, when things started crumbling, when the gasoline trail she wasn't aware she'd lain led to the rest of the shrine, going up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, when it started to light up and the wood walls of the shrine burned but the stone ones did not, she screamed. She couldn't feel, hear, taste, sense, or see her screaming. She couldn't feel, hear, taste, sense, or see herself, drenched in oils and gasoline and all things flammable that she didn't know she'd bathed in that she was on fire.

She thought only one thing, and this she knew with all of her heart as the world all around her razed to the ground, 'There is nothing I can do for them, except this…'

End.