--Chapter 8:Sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris--

The weather was pleasantly warm as they walked down the path with the sun shining bright and high in the sky as it beat down on the travelers. Of course, this soured the blond's mood considerably more than it already was, tugging at his robes. "Fucking weather," he muttered under his breath in irritation, earning a chuckle from both his companion and his guide. Kougaiji was looking in much higher spirits since his daughter had arrived safely the night before, as though much of the silent tension he had been feeling had been lifted.

"At least the sun's out. It could be raining," the brunet pointed out pleasantly, smile widening when the derisive snort sounded behind him. They were alike in their dislike of the rain, but it amused Hakkai to nudge Sanzo in such a way occasionally. Surely no one could fault him for his slight indulgence at his reluctant friend's expense. "Remember to always count your blessings."

"Sound advice, coming from you." The words were clipped and curt, even as the blond's expression remained impassive. The conversation tapered off after that, giving Sanzo's mind the chance to wander once more. He found himself unable to keep his mind in one place for any length of time, trailing constantly back to the brat and his unusual circumstances. He still couldn't understand why he hadn't told Homura about the boy when he had the chance. When he had brought the subject up to Hakkai, the man had only smiled knowingly and said something ridiculous about how it was a strange occurrence indeed. Damn smug bastard.

The walk to the hospital seemed much shorter this time and the building seemed to give off a much cheerier air than they had encountered on their previous visit. The sunlight emphasized the near-blinding whiteness of the structure and giving it an almost ethereal appearance, in contrast to the dreariness that had been radiating from it during the rains. Despite the atmosphere surrounding the hospital, what they found inside was far from pleasant.

-----

Gojyo sat stoically in his chair, staring hard at the figure of his stepmother seated in the chair before him. She was on one of her crying jags, dabbing delicately at her face with a soggy handkerchief even as cruel words fell from her lips. It still amazed him how this waif-like woman managed to have such a overwhelming presence that never failed to shake him to his very core. Aria had unwittingly stepped out to gather his medication bottles, as per the woman's request, leaving the two of them alone and giving her the perfect opportunity to say what was on her mind.

"I think you're doing this to me on purpose, you ungrateful brat. You absolutely refuse to get better so that I have continue to take care of you. You're nothing but a worthless cur compared to your brother. Why can't you be more like Jien?" The thin lacy piece of cloth did nothing to hide the sneer on her pale face; nor did it manage to mask the glint of contempt in her own dark, drowning eyes. Her sandy brown hair was loose around the soft curves of her face, carrying the nastiest of expressions somewhere deep within that petal-like skin.

The redhead couldn't answer at first, struggling to find his voice and the words to say to her. Hearing her speak of him in such a way was nothing he hadn't heard before, but he wasn't able to defend himself. What sort of man disrespected his mother like that? "I…don't mean to, Mother. Honestly, I-" he started to say, sending the woman into malicious rage as she dug her nails into the pliant flesh of his arm.

"How dare you call me that?! Why would I want to be the mother of something like you!?" she fumed at him, raking his flesh so hard that deep it left gouges and brought blood pooling to the surface. He groaned deep in his throat, keeping his hand still as she yanked his hair and struck him in the face with her open palm. Blood dribbled slightly out of the corner of his mouth, his lip cut where it caught against one of his teeth in the blow. "You're an abomination to God! A worthless half-breed brat! Your existence is the reason for my unhappiness! I hate you!"

Blows continued to fall, but Gojyo didn't dare raise his hand against his mother. He clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut so he wouldn't have to see familiar tears rolling down her cheeks in pain and ire. She didn't have to tell him that he was all of those things; he knew them so instinctively that all he could do was apologize. "I'm sorry…I'm sorry I keep hurting you…."

Hearing the commotion coming from the other room, Goku immediately ran in and tried to stop the woman. "Stop hurting Gojyo! You leave him alone!" the boy growled as he tried to push her away, desperate to protect his friend. Times like this made him almost glad he was an orphan and made him forget that he often envied the fact that Gojyo had someone visit him at all. He was sure that she was the only person in the world that he truly hated, because she made his best friend so incredibly miserable. "Stop it now!"

The woman growled low at being tugged at, reaching out to slap the offending appendage away. Her swipe caught Goku the wrong way and sent the boy sprawling to the floor to crack his head against the nearby table. She still had a handful of crimson hair wound tightly between her fingers, reaching around again to strike out at the still cowering redhead. However, she let out a noise of surprise when delicate pale fingers were wrapped painfully around her wrist, causing her to turn to face a pair of very, very cold emerald eyes that made her freeze mid-motion.

"I think that it is time you take your leave, Mrs. Sha," the bearer of those eyes said in an quiet, polite voice, pointed and sharper than any knife could have been. He would have chuckled at the blatant surprise on the woman's face at the mention of her name, had he not been so angry. His grip tightened around her wrist, as he delighted in the feeling of her bones shifting under the pressure. "And I would think that it would be appropriate for you to not come to see your son for a while. After all, you wouldn't want him getting more ill, would you?"

Her own eyes narrowed into slits at that, as she jerked her wrist out of his now lax grip to grab her purse and handkerchief from where they had been laying on the table. "Of course." She stormed out of the room before any one had the chance to say anything in reply.

Hakkai immediately turned his attentions to Gojyo, who was struck with a fit of wracking coughs from all the excitement. His arm was bleeding freely, and it was hard to distinguish whether the blood on his hands was from that or from his lungs. He watched Goku lean down to rub the red-haired man's back gently, a blossoming bruise forming on the boy's own forehead in an ugly mix of purple and black. "Goku? What happened to you?"

"Gojyo's mom pushed me when I was trying to get him off of her. Don't worry…I won't bleed to death internally or anything. I'm not a hemophiliac, remember?" He smiled at the man once before turning back to his suffering friend. It was then that Aria chose to walk back into the room, the sound of pill bottles hitting the tile and rattling loudly filling the air as she rushed over.

"Gojyo?! Oh my God, what happened?" she asked frantically, the answer to her unintentional rhetorical question dawning on her after a moment. Tears began to streak down her cheeks as she joined Goku in trying to calm the stricken man down.

Sanzo stood silently in the corner, surveying the scene with a blank expression on his face even as his eyes remained trained on the ugly mark on the boy's forehead. "Why the hell would you leave him with her? It looks to me like this has happened before." Accusing eyes slid to her face at that, even as the inflection of his voice remained calm and impassive. He couldn't understand why he felt so angry about the mark marring Goku's features, or why he had gotten the sudden urge to punch that bitch squarely in her face for knowing she had hurt the younger man. 'What the hell is wrong with me?'

"I . . . only left for a moment. She said she wanted to see his medication, and I'm supposed to honor requests like that. I couldn't tell her no," she stammered, helping Gojyo to a nearby chair. By this time, his coughs had dwindled to wheezes and heaves of breath, his shirt stained nearly the same color as his hair and eyes. "I'm s-sorry, Gojyo. I-I didn't think."

Gojyo shook his head lightly, managing not to jar his body any more than was necessary to perform the action in the first place. "I-It's a-all right. I j-just pissed h-her o-off." He offered some semblance of an encouraging smile, finally able to get his breathing under control though his lungs burned painfully as though a small fire had been set beneath his ribcage. His chest ached and his throat was throbbing from all the blood and fluid that had come up. "Hey, monkey, fetch me some water, will you?"

The younger brunet nodded compliantly, surprised to see that the blond priest was following him out of the room. However, he was too preoccupied to think properly on it. He hurried to the sink and reached for a glass in the high cabinet, surprised again when the taller man got it for him. "Thank you," he said sheepishly, ducking his head so that the other wouldn't be able to see the blush that decided to color his cheeks.

"Whatever." The blond watched out of the corner of his eye as the smaller man hurried about his task, holding tanned fingers beneath the steady stream of water to check the temperature. It was then that he decided to say what had been bugging him since the strange incident with the wind several nights prior. "Hey brat…you can stop calling now."

Goku was so startled that he nearly dropped the glass into the sink. "What do you mean? I haven't been calling to anyone," he replied, bewilderment furrowing his brow as he looked at the blond. He wasn't sure of what the man meant, or if this was one of their testing tactics that he had been anticipating. How was he supposed to answer to that?

Sanzo snorted irritably at that, frowning hard to indicate that he thought the brunet was lying to him and he didn't believe a word of it. "Cut the shit, kid. I've been hearing your voice for the past two weeks or so, and it's fucking annoying. I'm here now, so you can stop calling," he commanded, feeling a bit foolish at the words that had left his mouth. He sounded like a complete moron.

"If you say so." A confused smile crossed the golden-eyed boy's face at that, as he filled the glass with the cold water from the running tap. He hurried back to the room where his friend was waiting, the strange blond right at his heels.

-----

Curious vermillion eyes followed the priest's hands as he worked, wondering why the verdant-eyed man had insisted on patching up his arm instead of letting Aria do it even despite the woman's protests. Instead, she had been sent to get bandages and some pain medication. Goku was told to go amuse himself so that he wasn't in the way, because Hakkai gently informed him that he couldn't patch Gojyo's arm up with him hovering as he was. Strangely, Sanzo had followed the boy out of the room again, leaving his companion to smirk almost privately to himself.

"These aren't too deep…they shouldn't scar," the brunet said conversationally, wiping a bit of gauze coated in alcohol gently across the wounds. The bleeding had slowed a bit, giving him a chance to inspect them better. He admired the musculature of the other man's arm, almost causing a bit of heat to flood onto his face.

The redhead snorted in derision. "So what? It's nothing new. It doesn't really matter if it scars or not." He tossed his head, crimson locks brushing aside to reveal the twin scars that traveled down the length of his cheek. Before either one could react, one of Hakkai's pale hands cupped the scarred flesh delicately in his hand, as though afraid it would bruise beneath his touch. Gojyo's body went rigid at the unexpected contact, waiting on bated breath for whatever the man was planning to do or at least explain.

"That doesn't make it right, Gojyo. A mother should never, ever hit her child, be it blood or otherwise," Hakkai murmured, offering the man a real, true smile. He was sure that the other wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the one on his lips at that moment or any other he wore, but it was a start. Vague amusement tainted it after a moment, when he watched a tanned hand rest where his own had been resting moments before. "And scars are a part of us, I'm afraid, whether we wish them to be or not." His own unoccupied hand strayed to his abdomen, trailing across his robes to where his own reminder of the past was forever etched into his skin.

The action didn't go as unnoticed as he previously thought, a light of understanding filling the crimson-haired man's eyes and accompanied with a brief nod of his head. "I guess so," was all he said, the two of them falling into an almost companionable silence as the priest went back to his task.

Aria walked in a moment or two later with the bandages, but she stood a moment and took in the sight before her instead of alerting them to her presence. A barely visible smile crossed her lips at the interaction, feeling as though everything was going to work out better than she had initially hoped. Perhaps Goku had been right, and these men weren't as bad as they had seemed.

"I noticed that Kougaiji wasn't here with you…did you walk alone?" she asked nonchalantly, as though she had indeed just walked in. Both men looked a bit startled at her 'sudden' entrance, but the brunet recovered quick enough to answer her question.

"No, he escorted us, but he hurried back. His daughter was born the other day, so I'm sure he would much rather say home with the child and Yaone. The path is much easier to find in the daylight." He noticed a faint glimmer of something cross her features at the mention and he was suddenly curious as to whatever it was he said that would have provoked such a reaction.

Instead, the nurse smiled warmly as she handed him the needed items to finish wrapping Gojyo's wounds. "I'm so glad to hear that. I was very afraid that something was going to happen this time," she answered vaguely, turning back towards the door before the brunette had a chance to say anything else. Instead, Hakkai turned his questioning glance toward the red-haired man, who looked away so their eyes wouldn't meet. Realization dawned on Hakkai that it was probably not his place to ask, even if his curiosity had been piqued.

"So…what are you here for?" Gojyo asked when he was finished, flexing his wrist experimentally and fighting off a wince that the action tried to produce. He tried to make the comment sound offhanded, but the nervous edge was obvious by the slight quiver in his voice that was barely noticeable.

Ever observant, Hakkai knew a tactic to change the subject when he saw one. "We're going to try hypnotizing Goku to see if that can bring back some of his repressed memories. Perhaps that could lend a bit more of a clue as to what is going on."

A nod was his reply as they walked to where the boy and the other priest were, until a curving smirk that glowed with mischief overtook the thoughtful expression Gojyo had been wearing. "So…you could make him cluck like a chicken or act like a monkey for real, couldn't you?" The question sounded innocent enough, but the look on his face said otherwise.

"Perhaps, but I don't think it would be conducive to what we're trying to achieve here," the brunet admonished gently, barely able to conceal his amusement at the prospect. It was impolite, he knew, but it was terribly funny to imagine the boy clucking like a chicken and strutting around the room. "So, I hardly think that I should answer that to prevent the spread of potentially dangerous ideas."

"Hey man, it was just an innocent question."

(Translations: As we forgive them that trespass against us)