So he paced.
And paced some more.
And did his laps around the small place.
Byakko was sitting on the couch, TV running, tail twitching now and then as his red eyes followed the Shadow Master's progress around the room.
"Sit," the wind god finally said softly.
Tatsumi stopped, stared at him, then continued his pacing.
A sigh was the answer to his actions.
"You're making me dizzy, Tatsumi."
"Fine!" he snapped, feeling the energies coil inside him.
He needed to find out what was going on. He needed to see Watari.
No, he couldn't.
He was the one who had assaulted him. He had hurt him. Badly.
He had... had...
Tatsumi's mind drew a blank, a painful blank, and he felt his body starting to tremble.
He had... sexually assaulted him.
Oh gods...
He wasn't aware that he had stopped, was standing like rooted to the spot, breathing hard, until someone touched him.
Tatsumi's reaction was one of instinct as he tried to fend off the attacker, but he never had a chance against the deceptively slender and lithe body. Hands grabbed his wrists and he tugged helplessly, feeling the first twitches of his shadows.
"Tatsumi!" a voice whispered softly. "Snap out of it!"
He blinked, suddenly aware of those strange, red eyes so very close by, framed by silvery white hair.
"What...?"
Byakko let go of him, shooting him slightly worried looks. "You okay?"
"I... yes..."
A tilt of the head begged to argue with that answer, but the white tiger let it slide.
Tatsumi inhaled deeply, then suddenly made a beeline for the door. He had to get out of here, do something, work, whatever... - and again he was stopped, this time with a bit more force.
"Where do you think you're going?" Byakko asked.
"Out!"
"You're staying."
He glared angrily at the shikigami. "I'm not a prisoner!"
"No, you're not. But you're in no condition to work, either."
The glare intensified.
"Tsuzuki asked me to keep an eye on you," Byakko continued. "In here, in this apartment, and you will stay here until he comes back."
"I can't stay here any longer!"
"Why?"
Tatsumi's teeth gnashed, but he refused to talk.
"Because you assaulted your partner?" the shikigami went on calmly. "That's exactly the reason why you'll stay here with me. Tsuzuki wants to know what happened, what made you do this, and he can't do that with you running around, maybe making things worse."
"Worse? How much worse can it get?" Tatsumi cried, trying to push past Byakko again. "Let me go!"
"No." And this time there was more power behind the word, the aura of the wind god rising. "You're staying, Tatsumi Seiichiro. I'll enforce Tsuzuki's orders, whether you like it or not."
"What if it were you?" Tatsumi yelled, feeling all reason slip away as his emotions rose. "What if you had assaulted the one you loved? What if you couldn't remember what happened? All you can see... all I can see is his face, the horror, the pain, the injuries! I can see it in my mind, but I don't know what happened! I hurt my partner, Byakko! I sexually assaulted and took him against his will! I raped Yutaka!"
The last was a desperate cry. The shadows hissed around him, striking at the wall, but never touching the wind god. Tatsumi wrapped his arms around himself, feeling sick enough to throw up, and the bile was rising in his throat.
"I raped him," he whispered. "I raped the man I love. I did such an unspeakable thing to him. He hates me. He hates me. He..." Tears began to slide. "What if it were you, Byakko? Wouldn't you want to know? Because I can't remember..."
His words repeated themselves, like his thoughts, now running in stumbling circles around his fracturing mind.
Someone touched him. Byakko. Leading him to the couch, making him sit down. Gentle hands ran over his shaking form.
"Yes," the tiger's soft voice whispered. "Yes, I would want to know. I would be in pain, like you. I would be desperate. I would scream and tear at everything to be let out, to find the reason. I know I would do the same as you. But, Tatsumi, you can't do anything at the moment. All you can do is trust in your friends."
He gazed into the blood red eyes, saw the sincerity and trust in Tsuzuki in there.
"Tsuzuki will find out what happened. Trust him. Let him do his work."
Tatsumi groaned softly, closing his eyes as more tremors raced through him. He felt so utterly sick.
"How would you feel if you were in my shoes?" he moaned again.
Byakko sat down next to him, his warm hand describing calming circles over his tense back, and Tatsumi, despite his emotional upheaval, found himself relaxing a little bit at a time.
"Aside from the fact that I wouldn't have a chance against Touda? Hypothetically, I'd probably feel the same. No, let's say I would feel the same. I would want to know. So I sympathize with you, Tatsumi, but I have my orders, and they tell me to keep you here. If I were in your place, if I had attacked Touda and taken him by force, suffering a total blackout, I'd have someone sitting on me while the others tried to find a reason why."
"I need to know what happened!" Tatsumi whimpered desperately.
"As does Watari, as do the others. We all want to know what made you attack your partner."
He was sliding away, feeling less and less coherent. The outbreak was taking its toll on him. The gentle touch was still there, and suddenly Tatsumi felt a likewise gentle aura envelop him. He fought, but only for a moment, then surrendered to the darkness, and the feeling of protection.
° ° °
"Okay," Tsuzuki put the assorted boxes they had collected in the lab onto the table. "The only thing both incidents have in common and we have identified so far is tea."
"Tea?" Watari blinked, looking at the several boxes that were lined up in front of him.
"Yes. Both times you prepared some tea for Tatsumi."
"Yes, but ... it's only tea, Tsuzuki. We had tea before, both of us and it never ... I mean, I drank this stuff before."
Tsuzuki nodded his agreement. "Maybe we're on the totally wrong track here, Watari, but it's at least worth a try. Which is the one you prepared?"
Watari wordlessly pointed at a little red, metal box with screwed-on lid which label said 'Green Surprise' and Tsuzuki took the box.
"We'll take it to the lab... errr, office. Get the ingredients figured out."
"It's only tea," Watari repeated, bewildered. "Granted, I've had it for a long time now, but tea doesn't turn into something of a... drug during the time. All it is are dried leaves and some additions to that. Flavors. Maybe fruits and bark and whatnot. It's nothing like a drug!"
"Some do turn into something else," Hisoka told him levelly. "Fermentation not necessarily stops after the drying process. You should know about the chemical reactions involved, Watari."
Huge golden eyes regarded them, confused, and Tsuzuki wrapped his arms around his friend instinctively, hugging Watari. The lithe form sagged in his embrace, little tremors running over the body.
"It can't be the tea," the scientist whispered.
"Let's not jump to conclusions, Watari. Whatever the reason, we will find out. And then it will never happen again."
The blond nodded, hands still clutching Tsuzuki's coat.
Glancing over Watari's shoulder Tsuzuki saw determination written in the green eyes of his partner. They would help their friends get through this, whole and secure. It was a silent promise he made to Watari- and Hisoka.
°
The tests took a while. The lab had been thoroughly trashed by the shadows and the little back-up unit just wasn't equipped to deal with fast processing. Watari did the initial preparations. Tsuzuki was always with him, hoping that his presence wasn't a bother but more of a safety net for the still very easily rattled scientist. Watari had insisted on doing the tests, refusing to let anyone else handle it.
"I'm doing a presumptive test first," he explained as he worked.
At Tsuzuki's questioning look, Watari smiled and launched into a brief explanation.
"Presumptive tests are used for the initial screening. They're rather easy to do. If we get a negative, it means there aren't any drugs or toxins present. We then don't have to do the whole thing. If they're positive, well, then we look more closely because then we get a list of possible toxins. Not that I don't expect any anyway. Tea is toxic."
"It is?"
"Poison is present wherever we go, whatever we breathe. It's in the air, in coffee, in alcohol... so I'll find toxins. I just have to exclude what's naturally found in tea."
Watari gave him that so well-known bright smile of a scientist after a puzzle. For the moment he was forgetting what he was testing. He was simply in his element.
So he began. Adding solutions to the leaves, letting machines separate the components, analyze the substances, and printers produced sheets of colorful charts with spikes and interesting looking lines. There were numbers and very... complicated names, Latin or English, for the components. Toxicology was just one of the many tests, and while Tsuzuki had never heard of thin-layer chromatography, ultraviolet spectroscopy and gas chromatography, he knew that those machines did their magic, too.
And even after the first results, Watari went back and confirmed everything. In the end there was a single sheet that gave them the solution to the problem.
And it wasn't good.
"The tea?" Hisoka asked.
He had joined them throughout the last tests and had quietly waited with Tsuzuki, keeping an eye on their friend.
Tsuzuki looked at the lab report, shaking his head in sheer amazement. The tea. The tea had really been the poison.
I don't believe it...
Watari's hands were shaking and his golden eyes were huge and swimming with tears. Since he had done the tests himself, there was no doubt in his mind about the truth of the results. It was just a matter of accepting what science told him in such clear, cold words and numbers.
"I didn't know," he whispered. "I had found the tea while cleaning the lab. It was from a small shop in Kyoto and... there was nothing bad about it."
Tsuzuki swallowed. No, there hadn't been anything bad about the green tea as such, but another substance had been mixed into it. A substance that had caused the tea to have such an intense effect. A substance that had been in the box before Watari had poured the tea leaves into it.
The results spoke for themselves. The complicated name of the chemical, as well as its high concentration, had been found by the tests. It was irrefutably there. Tsuzuki had no idea what it was, or had been, just that together with the tealeaves it had been ingested by Tatsumi, and it had changed his behavior.
It had been a drug... a poison to the system... and it hadn't just made Tatsumi hyper or sleepy or something like that. It had made him someone else.
Jekyll and Hyde anyone? he thought dimly.
"I kept an experimental powder in there," Watari went on, voice so flat, so lifeless, it was like someone talking in his dream. "I don't even know what it was for anymore. It was a stupid idea and I mixed it up, then forgot about it. I had no other container, so I emptied it and put the tea inside. I didn't know... I didn't... think... Oh Gods... It was my fault... my fault...again ..."
Now the tears were falling and Tsuzuki stepped forward, pulling the man toward him. Watari fell into his arms, sobbing. He simply held him, aware that there was nothing he could say or do. The facts were clear.
Now they had to live with them and rearrange their lives.
tbc...
