Disclaimer: I do not own gravitation etc. etc.

Author's note: some sinister Tohma at last. hehe.

Four years ago...
It was Autumn. The weather on the turn. Nittle Grasper had split up. Mika had left. The first time Mika left. Tohma wasn't too bothered. He knew it wasn't going to be permanent. Noriko was right – she always went for bastards. They never talked about the boyfriends, but Tohma knew about them. He knew when she was on the prowl. When she had a bloke lined up: new clothes; almost neurotic attention to make up; half whispered girly conversations with her friends. He knew when she was mid affair: the sudden new interests; a fondness for bands she hadn't previously heard of; books she wouldn't normally read on her bedside table; the gossip of people he'd never heard about before. Post affair: when he'd been a bastard after all and Mika would look sullen for a week, eat ice cream and cry on the phone to her girlfriends.

One time she went away for the weekend - "off to Kyoto". She came back with a bruise across her cheek. She'd covered it with make up, but she kept looking in the mirror and touching it.

"How did that happen?"

"Fell down ice skating Tohma love. Does it look too terrible?"

That's when he knew for certain what had happened. Mika never called him love. She was feeling guilty.

It took him a while to track the bastard down. He'd always been so careful not to know. He'd felt bad about it at first. Then he swallowed the guilt. He went through her things slowly and methodically. She was careful. She was very careful. He'd found her diary almost immediately. She was good at covering her tracks, but she obviously trusted Tohma enough to know he'd never read her diary. He didn't want to read it, he didn't want to know what Mika wrote in there, he didn't want to know what she wrote about him, he just didn't want to know.
He paid her phone bill every month. The payment itself was a standing order, when the envelopes came in he never even opened them. He left them in the rack for a few days in case there was something Mika needed to check, then put them through the shredder.
He called the phone company and asked for an itemised bill covering the last six months through to the last call she'd made that morning. It cost him a small fortune. Extra to have it hand delivered to his office.

Then he went through it carefully and with his usual competence. He made a spread sheet. He was looking for a number that Mika had started calling, or started calling more often, about two months ago, probably one that she rang at odd hours. It took him a while, but in the end there was only one real candidate. He called it right away.
A woman answered.

"Hello?" An upmarket voice, mid twenties, sounded like most of Mika's friends.

Tohma didn't know what to say. He didn't even have The Bastard's name. He paused for a second to gather his thoughts. The pause grew.

"Hello? Hello? I know you're still there. Look I don't know who you are, but can you stop calling me? I'm getting kinda fed up of this. I'm going to report it to the..."

Tohma hung up.

That's when he read Mika's diary. In the end he was glad he had. The man was a total shit. Tohma wished she'd tell him things, he could have sorted some of it out weeks ago. It wasn't the first time he'd hit her either. Tohma's first instinct was to kill him. Then he realised that was a bit of an over reaction, you don't kill your wife's boyfriend even if he deserves it. She still had feelings for the arsehole for some reason. She'd probably get upset. He settled for the next best thing.
He had the name, he had the number, all it took was pulling in one favour and he had an address. He called in a few other favours in case things went wrong.

He went round there the following evening - according to Mika's diary, The Bastard's wife had a night class.
The woman was there when arrived, he could see her through the window. He waited for her to leave, he waited and waited. He was about to give up and go home when she finally left. He gave it five minutes than he knocked on the door.
Tohma knew people who could have dealt with this for him. He didn't call them, this was personal. He wanted to make sure The Bastard got the message, and knew exactly who it was from.

The Bastard was well built, a little taller than Tohma, but not particularly physically fit.
Tohma had gone to stage school, although the piano had always been his main intersest, he'd also trained as a dancer. Nittle Grasper had split up, but he still went to dance practice three times a week - for the exercise. His legs were pure muscle. He didn't smoke, hardly drank and was in peak physical condition. Mika had obviously also portrayed him as being a bit of a wus. The Bastard obviously wasn't expecting him to be any kind of a threat.

"Hello Mr. Seguichi san."

"Can I come in, please? I would like a word."

"Certainly Mr. Seguichi san." The Bastard smirked.

Tohma had never thought of himself as a violent person, he'd never thought violence solved things. In New York it had passed through his mind that he would have killed Kitazawa if Eiri hadn't already done so, but when it came down to it, he didn't think he could have brought himself to do it. Not in cold blood. He was not a violent person. The thought kept him awake at nights. If Eiri hadn't found that gun, would he - Tohma - have tracked the man down and killed him. It was what he should have done, he knew that, but could he have actually gone through with it? Would he have done the same thing if he had been in Eiri's shoes? He wasn't sure about that either. He didn't think he'd ever have the strength to hurt someone – not physically. It had been worrying him as he drove there in the car. What if he lost his nerve, what if he couldn't go through with it?

Then The Bastard smirked, and that really wasn't an issue anymore.
Tohma kicked him in the stomach as an opening statement. Then he kicked him in the face.
The Bastard didn't put up much of a fight, he was too surprised. Then he really didn't get a chance.
Tohma made plain the penalties of upsetting Mika any further. The penalties of taking things to the papers. Explained exactly what would occur if he told the police who had done this, and exactly how it was going to happen. He explained what he knew, how he knew it, and who else was going to know it too.
Then he left. He felt he had made his position quite clear.

The Bastard was in hospital for a week. Mika certainly knew about that, but he wasn't sure if she knew why or how. He caught her giving him odd looks a few times, but she never directly mentioned it. Nor of course did he.

Tohma decided he wasn't ever going to go through all that again. He bankrolled a private detective, a nice girl, hard as nails of course, but nice. He'd wanted a woman, didn't want some strange man spying on his wife. The girl hadn't wanted to take the job on at first - said she didn't do maritals. Tohma explained what the problem was; why he wanted the information, and she had relented. Paying her three times her normal fee probably helped as well. She was good at what she did - worth the money. Anytime Mika looked like she was going to stray, he got sent a detailed dossier on the man and his background. Tohma never actually read the reports. He didn't want to know, and it seemed too much like prying. He gave them to his PA, she read them for him - just to check Mika wasn't seeing any arseholes, and to plug any potential media leaks. Hiromi didn't like reading them at first, then it merely became routine. She'd flagged a few that were potentially problematic – one journalist, who was almost certainly playing Mika for a story (he'd lied about his age and background), and a guy with a history of mistreating women. Tohma had dealt with those, but far less directly than he had the first time. He just didn't want to be involved.

Four years ago...
Mika had been gone for eight days so far. She'd had the decency to tell him why. Tohma had half been expecting it, she'd been seeing this one for over six months. As Mika had told him about the guy, Tohma felt less bad about reading his dossier. She'd given him all the details he would have needed to compile the report without having her followed. That made it seem better somehow. Though it was twisted logic. This one seemed quite nice – wasn't married for a change (not currently anyway), wrote children's books (she'd met him through Eiri - of all people), smoked, but didn't drink, was relatively successful. Tohma almost hoped things would work out for her.

"Yet another bastard," said Hiromi.

"He seems quite nice?"

"Nah. He's just got divorced. He's hung up on his ex-wife and he doesn't want any kind of long term commitment. He'll be having the screaming heebie-jeebies now Uesuigi-san has moved in on him. He's easily bullied, which is why he didn't stop her, but he'll start resenting it soon."

"Really? Why do you think that?"

"It's in the file."

Tohma read that damn file six times over, and he still couldn't see it.

Mika hadn't really taken much of her stuff with her. Most of her clothes were still in her wardrobe, she'd left her books, most of her CDs.

"I'll come back for them Tohma. As soon as I've got things settled, really I will. Sorry, I'm not being a bit more organised"

"Mika take as long as you need."

He helped her take her suitcases to her car.
Then there an uncomfortable silence.
She was leaving, and neither of them had a clue what to say.
He knew what he should have said. Knew what he wanted to say. Tohma was really very bad with words. He'd always expressed what he really meant through his music. Sometimes when he was a kid, he'd find himself bursting with ideas, so many things he wanted to say that they'd all rush out of his mouth at once and trip him up. He'd end up saying something he didn't mean at all, because he couldn't say all those words all at once. You could say the words all at once with music, Tohma had realised that as he got older. As he grew older he tried to say the "all at once" things less and less. It was easier that way. He planned the important words before hand, rehearsed them in his head, and then he said them. He'd been trying to think of the important words all afternoon as he helped Mika pack. They hadn't materialised.
There wasn't any point anyway. Mika was going to leave regardless. All asking her to stay was going to do was make him look needy, and Mika feel bad. It was better this way.
She suddenly threw her arms round him. There was an uncomfortable kiss.
Ask her to stay, see what happens. But the words didn't come out, like that.

"Mika love, if it doesn't work out you don't have to stay with him. You don't have to worry about having a place to live. You know you can come back here. Don't you?"

She looked boiled. Would she have preferred it if he'd pulled the jealous husband act? Would she have stayed?

Eight days later and he was sitting in an empty house, listening to a clock. It was the first day he'd taken off since she'd left. It was the first time that he'd really noticed that she wasn't there. A lot of her stuff was still lying round: a book left on the coffee table (one of her brother's with a rude haiku and his trademark squiggle signature across the dust jacket – he always did that when he gave Mika a copy of one of his books. Tohma had no idea why, he'd asked Mika once and she'd just laughed and told him it was a private joke. Knowing Eiri it was something complicated, nasty and rather cynical); the expensive earphones for her disc man (which she'd obviously forgotten); a small pile of orphaned CDs (Tohma always put them back in their cases, Mika never did); one of her earrings beside the phone (she often took her left earring out when she was talking on the phone for any length of time); a box of Tampax in the bathroom; chocolate ice cream he didn't like and wouldn't eat in the freezer. Eight days and he missed the bitch already. He'd grown accustomed to her face.

He looked out of the window and watched the rain fall.