Author's Note: I am currently experiencing writer's block, so I played a Tumblr ask game and ended up with this. It may get repurposed for a larger work, but for now, have this one shot where I take a look at Goten's character.
Thank you for reading and thanks even more to those of you who review!
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
He was smaller and thinner than his father and his brother both were at his age, Piccolo thought, and he moved in sure, fluid motions that were more confident than Gohan's, but more elegant than Goku.
Goten finished out his cycle of kicks, and then immediately began another kata. His punches and strikes cut through the air accompanied by the same habitual grunts as those of his mother, and he struck like someone used to losing but unaccustomed to ever giving up, like Vegeta. The boy also favored his left side and struck harder with it without realizing it, but that was hardly surprising. After all, Goten was Trunks's steadfast left arm, and Gotenks was right-handed.
Piccolo knew everything that made Son Goten and everything that Son Goten could make, but he knew almost nothing about the boy himself.
Goten finished his kata with a final palm strike, and then bowed to Piccolo. "That's what I usually do to warm up without dad there to mix it up," he said.
Piccolo immediately aimed a kick squarely at Goten's body, which the boy blocked, eyebrows furrowed and mouth open in indignation. "Hey! I wasn't re-!"
Piccolo's fist cut him off. "In a fight for life and death, your opponent will not wait for you."
Goten staggered backwards with his cheek in his hand. "But this isn't a fight for life and death. That's not fair."
Piccolo tried not to acknowledge how much he sounded like Gohan, so many years ago. "Life isn't fair."
"That doesn't make any sense." Goten rubbed at his cheek.
"If you're under the impression that everything in this world- you, me, the gods, the monsters- are all treated inherently equally from the moment we are born to the moment we die, you are sorely mistaken. That's a childish thought. Put it out of your head, and think like a warrior. Nothing's fair, and you have to make sure it's in your favor." Piccolo stood even taller as his flat, deep voice pulsed through the mountainside. "You're fourteen. You aren't a child anymore."
Goten looked at Piccolo with dark, practical eyes. "Yeah, not what I'm getting at."
"Hn?"
"I said, that's not what I meant. This isn't life," Goten said. "This is just a spar."
Piccolo dove in and struck low with his left hand and then higher with his right. Goten caught both and kicked at Piccolo's legs, but the huge Namek jumped over the blow and used his own feet to push Goten away.
The boy released Piccolo and staggered backwards. "Fighting you is like fighting-," Goten clipped his words off as Piccolo rushed him again and delivered a hit from the side of his hand into Goten's neck.
But somehow, Goten caught it and put his other hand in Piccolo's face, filled with bright, glowing, blinding, warm, unfamiliar energy. "An eel," he finished, releasing the blast directly in front of Piccolo's eyes.
Sparks and coils of violet and green flickered over the sudden white coating Piccolo's vision, and he was coughing, and disoriented, and his ears were ringing and his antennae screaming from a burn. He thought he heard Kami say something in the back of his head, but the chaos in front of him bleached out his presence and then covered it over in black and deteriorating, shimmering red.
When the hulking warrior's head finally cleared of the smoke and his eyes readjusted to the light of day, he was on his back with Goten looking over him.
"Sorry," the boy said. "I knew your ears and those things on your head were sensitive, but I didn't think I was gonna get you that bad." He held out a bottle of water.
Piccolo grunted and sat up, accepting the water noncommittally. He drank deeply.
"I'm really sorry," Goten reiterated, bowing.
The sun was bright on Mount Paozu, and the grass was almost as green as Piccolo's own skin. The birds sang limericks about how idyllic a home they had while Goten stood in the middle of it all, a prince offering goodwill to his inherited subject.
Piccolo cleared his throat. "Who told you?"
"Huh?"
"Who told you about my ears and antennae?"
Goten scratched his head and sat seiza in front of Piccolo. "Um? I dunno. Gohan might've, but I don't remember anyone in particular telling me. I just... saw an opportunity and I took it." He bowed again. "But I'm really sorry!"
Piccolo grunted and took another swig of water. Everything in his mouth still tasted like smoke and acid. "It was a good move, but if I had recovered, you would've been left open to another attack."
Goten shifted out of the seiza his mother surely molded him into and his posture fell away and melted to crossed legs that he hunched his body over, like he could shrink into himself. "I thought I'd killed you," he said.
Piccolo thought about the pounding still in his head, in his ears, in his heart over on the opposite side of his body to Goten's. "Had you been serious, you might've," he said.
"Trunks and mom and dad and Uncle Vegeta and I have always been rough, but," Goten swallowed. "I've never killed anyone before." He looked at his hands. "Never. It didn't even occur to me that I," he shook his head.
"I get the feeling you don't know what you're capable of doing when left to your own devices," Piccolo said. His ears were still sensitive.
"No," Goten said, his voice quietly biting into Piccolo's head. "I don't."
Piccolo's ears throbbed, but they had throbbed from the voices of Goten's father and mother and brother before him, and so he figured he owed the newest lord of the mountain that much. "Does that scare you?"
Goten licked his lips, and his dark eyes searched the grass by his feet, combing the strands over for something Piccolo could not name. "Yes," he said. "What scares me more is that I don't want to find out." He peeked up at Piccolo. "Or really, I don't want to ever have to."
Piccolo took another drink of water and closed his eyes. "Sometimes, you don't get a choice."
In the distance, just beyond the nearest curtain of trees, a doe washed her fawn. Pairs of insects, some colored like the rainbow, some plain, and some with wings like glass slick with oil, circled one another and connected in the air in a dance that would last forever, until the day they died side by side.
"Gohan says everyone has a choice," Goten countered, belatedly. "He said you had a choice, about saving him. He said dad had a choice about dying. He said Vegeta had a choice about his whole life, every day." He nodded. "I've got choices. I just have to make the right ones."
"Not everyone makes the right ones all of the time," Piccolo said.
Goten's shoulders rose higher, and he gripped at his feet. "Pessimist," he said.
"Does your father know?" Piccolo asked.
"Why would he?"
Piccolo opened his mouth, and then closed it.
"I know Gohan knows. And Trunks knows. Bulma and Mom know, but I think they always knew. Vegeta might, too, because he knows Trunks, but I don't think he'll want to acknowledge it. Dad won't, either."
The birds sang on the beautiful mountain, still uninhibited.
"Gohan was not cut out to be a warrior, either," Piccolo said.
"Gohan never asked to be," Goten answered.
At that, Piccolo grunted. "Maybe so," he said. "But you're allowed to change your mind. We all get choices."