Disclaimer: I don't own DBZ, and sadly none of the characters from it are mine either.

Warnings: Implied death and violence.

Summary: In our hearts we are all immortals. (If you haven't read Immortality by Milan Kundera… go do it... right NAW)

Drabbles from Mirai Time

Immortality:

It's funny, the feeling you get when the world comes crashing down around you. It's an amazing and complex mix, and it's easy to see why denial is the first stage of grief.

We go around marching for our mortality, proclaiming life is short and unique, and yet every day we choose not to listen to that ever-present clock ticking in the background.

In the face of death we don't understand how it could have happened. In the bottom of our hearts we believe we are going to live forever.

Philosophizing about it is easy, but being faced with our own mortality never is. Even worse is when it's about someone else's. Someone we love. Then their pain becomes our own and is amplified by the thousand echoes product of our emotional imagination.

Bulma is well aware of this. But having come into contact with magic balls and aliens that defy destiny has skewed her sense of reality. It is not after Goku has fallen, powerless to overcome his heart disease, that it starts to chip at her.

And from then on it's all a huge domino effect around her.

Two monsters emerge from the confines of a sick mind, and all of the sudden the world is on fire, and Yamcha, Krillin, Tien are nothing more than rotting corpses on the battlefield.

The carnage is all consuming, and it's not long before she finds herself in the middle of it. An unconscious Gohan behind her, little Trunks in her arms and a shower of blood drenching them.

His blood.

The proud, ever distant Prince of all Sayans has a hole in his chest, right were his heart used to be, and so he dies for his family.

Not far away Piccolo takes his last breath, and with it the world as she knew it ends.

The monsters lay their eyes on her, and she thinks she makes for a pretty pathetic sight. Covered in her lover's blood, silver tears trailing down her face and two lives she has no way of protecting in her hands.

They have a cruel brand of humour, and with twin smirks of disdain they call her boring and announce they're coming back when the little bastards are ready to play.

She pulls strength from some hidden place in her soul and gets the boys to what's left of C.C.

Gohan wakes up and words aren't needed, he feels it. The void they left.

Wordlessly she handles him her baby and goes back to where her loved ones died.

It's not easy, but she pulls their broken bodies together and gives them a proper place to rest.

When she is done she goes home and walks numbly by the boys. She steps dressed into the shower and curls into a tight ball. Blood, grime and tears wash down the drain and as the cry of her baby and the choked sobs of a young boy pierce the night, she breaks down for all they lost and is never coming back.

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