Fit For Dogs

"WHERE are all my T-shirts?" Inuyasha demanded, stomping out to the living room in a temper.

"Your T-shirts are neatly folded in a colour-coordinated stack on the middle shelf of your wardrobe," Sesshomaru replied, not looking up from his newspaper.

"I'm not referring to those absurdly new things so fresh from the shop that I can still smell the department store's air-conditioning on them," Inuyasha growled. "I'm talking about the T-shirts I like to lounge around the house in – the comfortable ones."

"You mean the ones completely pulled out of shape, with holes in them, threadbare seams, overstretched necklines and discoloured fabric?" Sesshomaru asked. "I've sent those rags to the recycling centre – which found them almost beyond recycling, incidentally."

"WHAT?"

"They were pieces of junk. I will not have my brother lounging around in scraps fit for the garbage pile, even when he is at home. I've bought you some very nice replacements, so that you will look presentable at home whenever you are clothed. When you are unclothed, of course, I never have complaints about your appearance."

"You had no right to give away my favourite clothes!" Inuyasha yelled.

"I have the right not to injure my eyes by having to look upon such aesthetically offensive clothing daily."

"I've had it with you!" the half-demon shouted before stomping back to the bedroom, where he selected a red T-shirt from the new pile and began stretching, pulling, stomping on and rolling about in it until he felt that it was reasonably subdued into his idea of what a T-shirt ought to feel like.

Even so, he was mightily displeased, and set about showing it.

Sesshomaru knew better than to think that all would be well, or that there would be no repercussions.

He imagined that Inuyasha might move back into the guest room, or perhaps to their waterfront property, whose rebuilding after being destroyed in a hailstorm of adamant shards was almost complete. Or that he would try to beat him up or shred his designer pyjamas in retaliation.

What his half-demon sibling really did, however, was nothing he had foreseen.

It started the very next day, with phone calls to his personal mobile phone from complete strangers asking odd questions about something "fluffy", with several of the callers ranting and raving, accusing him of all sorts of acts of abuse. He growled at every one of the callers and told them they had the wrong number, finally switching off the phone when the calls kept coming.

At the end of the day, he walked home. As his regular office was not far from their city apartment, he did not usually drive to or from the place where he oversaw his sprawling business empire under the name of Daitaro Souga. It was the latest in a chain of assumed identities, each of which willed everything he owned to the next identity on the line, after a decent interval within the space of a normal human lifespan.

So as usual, he strode along the street towards their apartment block that evening, but stopped dead in his tracks when he saw exactly what Inuyasha had done.

The brat had put up a notice on just about every lamppost along that street, and even the next street, going by what Sesshomaru's dog-demon vision could see hundreds of metres away.

The notice read:

The notice even included an unclear photograph of Sesshomaru in his full-dog form, but with the background photoshopped into a blur so that one had no point of reference for what size he really was, and printed out in black and white so you couldn't see that his blazing eyes were a glowing red.

Sesshomaru ripped the notice off the lamppost he had stopped at, and crumpled it into a ball in his fist. He stalked up and down two streets, ripping every one of those notices off every lamppost he passed.

He then stormed into their apartment building, glowered and growled all the way up in the lift, and threw open their penthouse front door to find that Inuyasha was out.

Well.

Fine.

If the overgrown child wanted to play this way, he could bite right back.

Inuyasha had anticipated that Sesshomaru might make a tit-for-tat move, and was ready with a host of smart comeback lines for any callers that might ring his phone asking to adopt him. But no calls came during the two days that he spent in a five-star hotel room, having a ball of a time with endless room service – all charged to his brother's platinum credit card – and grinding everyone into the dust at the gym.

Eventually, he stole back towards the apartment early on the third morning, keeping his eyes peeled for notices pasted up on lampposts – although such a hands-on, unsophisticated method was not really Sesshomaru's style.

Unless, of course, he had paid someone else to put up the notices for him.

No. Nothing. Not a flyer in sight.

As he walked up the road, however, his phone rang. Ah-ha. This had to be it.

Not bothering to check the caller's identity on the screen, since he was fully expecting it to be a stranger, Inuyasha flipped his phone open and answered with a cheery "Hello", only to be greeted by Shippo's familiar cackle – although it was now a grown-up version of the high-pitched shrieks of laughter that he had emitted as a child.

"Ha ha ha ha ha HA!" the fox demon roared. "You guys are a SCREAM!"

"Shippo?" he asked. "What are you cackling about?"

But all his foxy friend could manage was a "Hehehehehe!" before ending the call.

"All right, what's he done?" Inuyasha muttered aloud to himself.

Before he could get halfway down the street, his phone rang again. This time, he checked the screen and saw that it was Koga.

"What?" he snapped by way of answering the call.

"AhahahahahaHA!" Koga laughed. "The two of you kill me. You really kill me! So can I have the beef? I'd love the beef!"

"HUH?" Inuyasha demanded. "What are you going on about, you hollow-skulled moron?"

Koga wouldn't tell him either, and Inuyasha was starting to worry.

By the time he was almost at the main entrance to their apartment complex, another call came in.

"Yes, Jinenji?" Inuyasha sighed with resignation, pretty much expecting what was coming.

The enormous, gentle half-demon, who would have had nothing but a lonely life to look forward to from the time his human mother had died, had been taken into Inuyasha's circle and protected over the centuries. As the times moved on, and humans completely dominated the earth, life became easier for him once he learnt from Sesshomaru's mother spells that would disguise him as a human being whenever he was out in public – albeit with a rather hulking and Neanderthalish appearance. He was no less gentle now, and no less inarticulate, but even he was ringing Inuyasha up with a deep, soft "Heh heh heh heh heh".

"Jinenji, if you have ever treasured our friendship, you will tell me now what that asshole brother of mine has done!" Inuyasha growled.

And Jinenji was nice enough to drop a big hint in his kind voice: "Have you opened a newspaper today? Any newspaper."

Scowling deeply and whipping around in the middle of the street to head for the nearest newsstand, Inuyasha was almost at the shops when yet another call came in.

"Yes, Mother?" he said weakly. That was what Sesshomaru's mother had encouraged Inuyasha to call her ever since she had decided a few centuries ago that he was a darling and a more than good enough partner for her son.

"Oh Inuyasha," came her tinkling, silky tones over the line. "Have you two had another fight?"

"Yes, Mother. And yes, I know I really should open a newspaper right now."

"You certainly should," she replied lightly, signing off with a "Goodbye" that turned into what sounded suspiciously like a giggle.

Inuyasha reached the newsstand, bought the broadsheet that Sesshomaru normally read, and flipped through it until he found what he was supposed to be looking for. His face reddened, and his magic spell to conceal his ears almost dissipated under the force of his growing fury and embarrassment, till he had to control himself before those furry triangles popped out of his hair.

That bloody Sesshomaru had spent tens of thousands of dollars taking out a full-page, full-colour advertisement dominated by a large picture of Inuyasha shot from the back, and only from the head up, so that all one could see was the silky mane of silver hair capped by that prominent pair of dog ears. It looked for all the world like the head of a real dog, viewed from behind.

The large headline and the rest of the copy read:

Inuyasha's phone rang once he had finished reading the ad, crushed up the newspaper and stomped up and down on the sheets on the pavement.

"Well?" came a deep, silky smooth voice over the phone.

"Bastard," he snapped.

"Your juvenile idea of revenge was just as cheeky."

"I don't know why I bother with you."

"Neither do I. I'm already doing the equivalent of whistling for you, so what is it to be?"

"I'm thinking about it."

"While you're thinking, you may wish to know that I didn't throw away all your T-shirts."

"Oh?"

"The one with the blue kitty pawprints all over it is still concealed in a location I will reveal to you if you come back at once."

"No neutering."

"No neutering."

"Koga gets no beef."

"Koga gets no beef. It's all yours."

"And you won't cut off my balls even though I shredded your new Brooks Brothers suit after I collected it from the dry cleaner's last evening."

There was a silence over the line, finally broken after a few tense seconds by a low growl: "Inuyasha…"

"Oooh, I should have mentioned that after I ate the beef, shouldn't I? So… ooooo-kay… erm… I guess it's bye for now! Be back in another century or so…"

The line went dead, and the missing puppy hot-footed it up the street, already feeling the breath of the designer-clad hound from hell on the hairs of his neck.