Sorry. It's a little short. I'm going to finish up soon, so you can think of this as the big turning point in the fic.

Disclaimer: I would own Prince of Tennis in a world where pedophilia is considered a church dogma and Nishikato p*rn is served as a condiment.

"…another homeless? That's the ninth one we found in the park!"

"No. Doesn't seem like it. Look at her clothes. Some drunken high-schooler from an expensive party, my guess."

I woke up somewhere between sunset and sunrise, when the sky's all brown from the smog and pollution from the Tokyo skylines, in the glare of a giant, three-thousand-watt strobe light attacking my forehead. It probably lit my face on fire or something equally drastic, because I was up and cursing about two seconds after consciousness.

"She's awake…" there came a whisper from the heavens above.

"You're damn right. Now turn off that thing!" I groaned, rubbing my face. It was numb from the cold and there were deep red marks tracked across my cheek from pressing against the thick wooden boards of the park bench for the earlier part of the night.

"Not before you tell us who you are, miss," commanded a second voice. This one was deeper and gruffer, the timbre of weary middle-aged man. "We're from the local police department. I encourage you to provide some form of identification. Judging from your outfit, we have full right to assume that you might have been an accomplice or victim of a crime that took place here tonight."

I nodded grumpily, and thankfully, the two cops switched off the flashlight. I sighed, and fell back on the bench, but a pair of short, stocky arms had already wrapped around my shoulders and I was hauled to a standing position again. I felt my legs buckle beneath me, "Please let me sit down," and the hands forced me down onto the bench. I felt cold again and weak again.

"Your name?" he asked, not impolitely but not like he'd been serving tea at a five-star hotel, either.

"Mizutani Ma-Maruko," I forced the words through my teeth, trembling in the chilly night wind.

"Thank you," the gruff policeman straightened his jacket and seated himself on the bench, too.

"Remind me why we're stuck on night duty again?" the man behind me sighed, "my wife's already angry about the incident with the OL(1) and I don't want to be here long enough to attract the attention of another drunk case."

"Muto, keep it professional," the older one warned, "This isn't some sleazy dive somewhere. Besides, you're a trainee, and as of last night, I've become your commanding officer. So shut the hell up."

"Keeping it very professional," I smirked as quietly as I could, and then feeling the two policemen glaring at me in the darkness of the city park, stared at a piece of grass on the ground.

Both of them made an unspoken decision to pretend my side-comment was never voiced. "Yes, yes, buchou," Muto muttered with thinly-veiled mockery, and tightened his grip on my shoulders so that I started to feel sticky under his grasp, "I will shut the hell up."

"And if you've forgotten already, the ridiculous increase of drug crime in the area, code 342 from city law directed us over here," the man in front of me had already taken out a notebook and a pen, "And I'm sorry to detain you from your sleep –which is violating a city park rule, by the way– Mizutani-san, but you'll have to undergo a drug test."

"A drug test?" I shifted uncomfortably, "Why a drug test?"

"What did you expect, a spa treatment?" Muto snickered.

And without another word, I was dragged off to the police station.

--

The results of my drug test that night is the reason why I will forever hold a grudge against the Yokohama Municipal Police Department.

Unexpectedly (or maybe it had been expected, I'm still not quite sure to this day), the examinations did not come out clean. You'd think that, after being hurdled around all day and night, getting yelled at from a grouchy father, and then becoming the pinch-practice of a group of stuck-up girls, I'd get a break, but no. No, no, no. Of course I can't. It's completely Maruko's fault now, isn't it?

I'm not whining.

(And I'm certainly not the one who was forced to pee into a cup so they could test the possibility of my abuse of methamphetamine. That was the girl next to me.)

I did end up, however, with a stack of papers to sign, an angry parental unit waiting for me in the lobby, and a detailed vegetamin-analysis of the my blood sample levels, indicating the possibility of there being too-high of an amount of flammable narcotic and hormone concentration in my upper arm.

"What the hell are you talking about?" tou-san roared, upon receiving a heavy package of papers bearing the words TESTING POSITIVE, "My daughter isn't stoned! I'm her father! I would know if she'd been drugging herself! I WOULD KNOW, DAMMIT!"

"But mister, now see here," the harassed-looking inspector protested, having been pushed back into the wall, "the tests we took clearly state that she's been either injecting herself with vegetable juice or someone is drugging her without her knowledge. We have other references from this health report here…"

"VEGETABLE JUICE? THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! MARUKO, WE'RE GOING HOME!" Incensed, tou-san promptly tore the report to pieces. He made a mad swipe for my arm, but I froze. Vegetable juice? What was this about vegetable juice?

"W-wait," I stuttered, "you think someone might be drugging me?"

The inspector nodded, clutching at my question like a lifeline, "Our tests," he took a deep breath, "confirmed the fact that you may or may not have been injected or forced to drink a substance of vegetable nature, in the last twenty-four hours. Can you tell me what kind of drinks you've had since last night, Mizutani-san?"

"I-I…think I had a coffee." I rubbed my head, "and…and it kinda tasted like vegetables. I was with a friend of mine."

Then it clicked. Everything fell into place.

I had been with Inui, on that stalking mission.

Inui Sadaharu. Data master.

What was Inui Sadaharu famous for? Inui Juice.

And what had been Inui's newest development? Inui Love Juice.

"Inui Love Juice was based upon a separate-gender experiment…"

Kami-sama. I'm being drugged.

And it was almost as if, at that time, a veil had been lifted from my vision, and my head had been dunked into a pond of icy water. The events of the past month, what had happened last weekend at the math competition…it was so obvious and so disturbing, that I found myself disgusted with my thought processing.

Why didn't I figure it out sooner?

Inui had needed a test subject for his new love potion. And here was a girl who seemed both healthy and perfectly capable of intellectual thought—why not mess up her life by slipping a few shots of hormone and DNA into her coffee, once in a while? I probably collapsed at the NMC because of an overdose or something. In any case, Kaidoh had been giving the oddest looks. Maybe he had been let in on the secret? He was Inui's protégé, after all. And then I thought of something else. That night at the club…I remembered drinking something odd-tasting, and the next thing I knew, I had caught on fire. What could that be, but one of those odd side-effects Inui mentioned?

"I was explaining the side effects of Inui Love Juice, which include high-flammability and vegetable aftertaste."

And Fuji! What did Fuji Syuusuke know about this?

Had he realized my current disoriented mental state, and taken advantage of it by making me play the servant to his nasty little match-making game?

My head was spinning, but one thing was clear. It was all Inui's fault. And he was going to have to pay for his bit of tomfoolery with my heart. That data-man will be unable to move around without a walker for at least three years, after I'm through with him. I don't care if I'm shut away in the insanity ward for this and forced to eat meals out of a plastic straw for the rest of my days, but he will certainly not walk away free from any consequences. Inui abused his fangirl privileges, and he played around too much for his own good.

I need my revenge.

And I can't believe I ever admired him.

A/N: Ready to murder me yet?

(1)OL, pronounced oeru, is a commonly-used, shortened –and frankly, quite rude– name for a woman that works in the office. It's short for "office lady", and quite normally these ladies are paid to complete the most menial tasks, like fixing coffee and filing papers for the big office men. [See also, intern or bondage-slave. XD.] Like in Ryuusei no Kizuna, romances are liable to develop between OLs and the office men. That was what I was referring to, when mentioning the cop having an incident/affair with an OL and then staying late to stir further suspicion in his wife. And really, there was no point in having a cultural note like this one but to stoke my dying attempts at humor.

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