Title: A Time for Action
Disclaimer: I own nothing except for the crappy pun in my title.
Rating: PG-13 ( T ) – For brief mentions of nudity and some good ol' fashioned Videl-on-Gohan ass kicking.
Spoilers: Psst...Mr. Satan didn't actually defeat Cell, Gohan did. Don't tell anybody!
Summary: OneShot. "Videl-chan found a watch kind of like that in class today. I think she took it home with her for safekeeping." Pre-Buu, GhVi.
Check out ShadowMajin's new fic "Dragon Quest Z"...good old fashioned love story with a fairytale backdrop. You can also find a lot of fanart related to this story on my DeviantArt profile (link provided in my ff .net bio).
With a surprised snort, Gohan found himself awake. "Wuh...?"
"Geeze, maybe he does live in the library," a snide voice commented. "Let me guess; you organize your closet by the Dewey decimal system?"
Lifting his face to take a better look around, Gohan impatiently waited for the disorientation of sleep to fade away so that he could properly gain his bearings. He was...where, exactly?
"Shut up, Sharpener," said another rude person. This one, however, leaned down to show him her face and smiled. It was Erasa. "Good morning, sleepyhead. Or should I say 'good afternoon'?"
The warm, numbing fuzz that seemed to be surrounding his brain was finally starting to dissipate and Gohan's senses were returning to him. The reference book before him and the stacks of shelves in the surrounding vicinity told the studious demi-Saiyan that he was in the library. Come to think of it, he remembered going to the library after class to get a bit of reading done for his anatomy paper on the human reproductive system (which ChiChi, oddly enough, had no materials about at home), which meant...
"Oh, shoot!" Gohan shouted, standing up so fast that his chair was knocked over backwards. "What time is it?"
"Hey, watch it!" Sharpener complained, limping away from the spot the chair had landed on his foot. "Some of us have big games coming up, dweeb!"
"They always bench you, anyway," Erasa countered, sticking a mature tongue out at her flaxen-haired classmate.
Ignoring their petty squabble, Gohan raised his hand to check the time on his wrist. To his utter horror, his watch was missing!
Getting back to Gohan's original query, Erasa checked her own timepiece and answered, "It's 5:57. Are you late for something, Gohan-kun?"
The fact that Gohan was supposed to have been home hours beforehand (nearly three, actually) seemed secondary to his new problem. The watch he had been wearing that day, just like every other since starting school in Satan City, was the one that transformed him into Saiyaman! If anyone picked it up and discovered what it did, the Capsule Corp logo on the face would lead them directly to Bulma! Even assuming that this wouldn't out him to the entire world, the affair would prove more than troublesome...Gohan could just picture Vegeta "dealing with" all the reporters that would come knocking on his wife's door, demanding to know what her link was to Satan City's resident superhero. Visions of their mangled and dismembered bodies sent a shiver climbing up his spine...
Distracted from his panic by a hand waving back and forth in front of his face, Gohan returned his attention to Erasa, who was calling out to him. "Hellooo! Gohan-kun, are you okay?"
Though it wasn't really his forte, Gohan lied and said, "Uh...yeah! Yeah, fine...hey, do you see my watch laying around here, by any chance?"
Swiveling her head in search of the missing item, Erasa scanned the library with her eyes. "Nope...are you sure you were wearing it today?"
Gohan nodded fervently in response.
"Come on, Erasa!" Sharpener demanded, tugging on the girl's wrist. "I wanna get out of here before they realize I'm not coming back from the bathroom."
Erasa shook the long-haired jock off and glared at him. "Hey, I'm doing you a favor helping you skip detention! A little gratitude might be nice."
"If I get caught, you won't have been much help, you ditz!"
"So you can find your own ride home, then?"
"You know that's not what I meant!"
"Yeah, well, you can hitchhike home now for all the hell I – "
"Guys," Gohan finally interrupted, forcing his two classmates to cease their squabbling. Temporarily, at least. "Seriously, have either of you seen my watch? It's kind of important."
Sharpener snorted a laugh at Gohan's expense. "What's so great about that stupid watch, poindexter? Does it have your favorite Sailor Scout on it, or something?"
Gohan wasn't quite sure what a "Sailor Scout" was, but he figured Sharpener had insulted him all the same. Knowing his classmate, it was probably either some jab at his nerdy qualities or his masculinity. Either way, Gohan could feel an embarrassed blush rising in his face. "No, it's a black digital watch with the Capsule Corp logo on it. It has a red button on the left side of the face."
"Come to think of it...," Erasa began, tapping a manicured nail against her chin, clearly deep in thought. "Videl-chan found a watch kind of like that in class today. I think she took it home with her for safekeeping."
Gohan had briefly considered and rejected the notion of this situation getting any worse after discovering his watch missing, but suddenly found himself wrong. Horribly wrong.
"V-Videl-san has it?" he repeated, silently praying to any god or gods listening that Erasa had been mistaken.
Sadly, she hadn't. "Yeah. She said she was going to bring it back tomorrow and ask around to see if she could find the owner. If she'd known it was yours, I'm sure she would have tried to find you."
"I – I've got to go!" Gohan declared, simultaneously scooping all of his books and papers into his bag. As soon as this task was completed, he bolted for the double library doors, shouting over his shoulder as he went, "See you tomorrow!"
— — —
"Maybe I should have asked Erasa-san where Videl-san lives...," Gohan muttered to himself, staring out over the cityscape with a hand shielding his eyes from the intense sunlight of dusk. Even from his position upon Kinto'un ( 1 ), he was having no luck spotting his crime-fighting stalker.
Normally it would have been easy enough to detect her chi signature against the multitude of comparatively smaller ones throughout the city, but Videl seemed to have been finished with fighting for the day and powered down. Apparently, when relaxed, Videl blended in just fine with the populace.
Come to think of it, this was the first instance in which Gohan had ever been unable to latch onto her chi signature. She really needed to take it easy more often...
Suddenly and miraculously, Videl's wild energy made itself known to Gohan. Calling Kinto'un to a halt mid-air, Gohan swiveled around and looked behind him, stretching out his senses to pin down her location before the energy dissipated.
She was...just south of his current location! On the outskirts of town.
"Let's go, Kinto'un!" Gohan shouted, feeling victorious. Assuming she hadn't had enough time to investigate the watch between crime fighting and...whatever she had been doing after that, he still had a chance to escape from this situation with his secret in tact!
Urging the cloud to move faster, Gohan steeled himself for whatever was to come next.
— — —
Unsurprisingly, Videl lived in a mansion. Not an average mansion, mind you, but one of those gigantic, disgustingly ornate ones that proved to every onlooker that the people inside were richer than god (not that Dende was particularly wealthy, or anything, it was just an expression).
Even Gohan, who was hardly ever impressed by anything material, had to whistle in awe at the grandiose structure as he flew over it on Kinto'un. The thing had to have been ten thousand square feet, at least. And all of it had been made possible by Mr. Satan's claims of defeating Cell...
Gohan made a conscious decision never to tell his mother about it.
Now that Gohan was closer to her, Videl's chi was one of the more obvious signatures around, despite it having lowered back down to its resting state. It easily stood out against the other power levels, – of which there were many; staff, Gohan assumed – which made locking onto it perfectly simple.
Mr. Satan, it seemed, was also at home. His chi signature was considerably weaker than his daughter's, which almost made Gohan laugh aloud. He, too, seemed to be relaxing after...whatever it was he did all day, making the differences between their signatures all the more obvious.
Well, either way, Gohan wouldn't be distracted from his mission by comparing the strengths of the two human fighters. Both were far weaker than any of his father's friends, anyway.
Locking back onto Videl's chi, Gohan guided Kinto'un in her direction.
As they closed in on her, it became apparent that the source of chi was a third-story room with an attached balcony. Two double glass doors with the curtains drawn back seemed to lead inside what Gohan presumed was Videl's bedroom. Well, that made surveillance a cinch, then.
When they were hovering directly over the balcony, Gohan bid Kinto'un a quick goodbye and lowered himself down onto it slowly and silently with his own chi. Quickly dodging into the shadows, Gohan pressed his back against the stone outer wall of the house and waited for any sign that he had been seen. When none came, he ventured closer to the glass doors to take a peek inside...
Perfect. No one in sight.
Assuming that Videl must have wandered off elsewhere in the house, or something, Gohan quietly let himself in, feeling very much like one of the criminals he helped the room's owner put away daily. Reminding himself that retrieving his watch would enable him to continue to help her, he felt a little better.
The room was, unpredictably, pink. Gohan would never have guessed such a color scheme for Videl's bedroom, but that's exactly what it was. Walls, bedspread, carpeting – all of it was some variant of the color pink. How...girly of her.
Gohan couldn't help but smile at the thought that, for once, he seemed to know one of Videl's secrets (not that it was anything worth taking to the press).
As the demi-Saiyan searched the bedroom, more of Videl's secrets began to surface. He learned, for instance, that she had (or at least used to have) an affinity for multi-colored little...pony things with designs imprinted on their hindquarters. These, however, were buried deep in her closet, so he figured that this phase of hers must have been over for quite some time.
He also colored himself surprised about how neat Videl was. He hadn't really expected her to be messy, exactly, but few people were as meticulous as he was, preferring to drop things where they fell as opposed to putting them in their proper places. This girl, however, seemed to like her life in order. All of her books were on their shelf, – listed alphabetically, too – her clothes were hung in her closet with care, and even her backpack had its own little wall peg that it dangled from. Of course, Gohan rather had to wonder how much of Videl's cleanliness was her own and how much of it was the maid's.
Not all of his findings were surprising, however. She was obviously an avid fan of martial arts (if the posters and newspaper clippings about the Budokai tournaments were anything to go by) and supremely dedicated to her own training in them. In a small room adjacent to the larger bedchamber, Gohan found what appeared to be a personal gym complete with treadmill, weights and punching bag. There was also a lot of sand on the floor and a brand new sheen to the leather bag, suggesting that she went through them often.
The strangest (and possibly most disturbing) of all of Videl's secret obsessions, however, was her detailed file on Saiyaman. She had newspaper articles, police reports, witness interviews, criminal testimonies, personal photographs...even a paper napkin in a clear plastic baggie labeled "DNA SAMPLE?" He couldn't be completely certain, but it looked like the kind they used in the school cafeteria. Hey, was that a clump of his hair...?
Well, that was...unsettling.
Gohan flipped through some of the material, curious as to how much she had collected. He rather doubted that she had anything that concretely linked him to Saiyaman (yet), but it never hurt to check. If there was any evidence within the file that was too incriminating, he could discretely "borrow" it while he was there...
Midway through the file, he paused to smile indulgently. On a pink sticky note, scribbled in loopy handwriting, was a simple statement written in shorthand:
Gold Fighter = Saiyaman?
"Clever girl," he praised warmly. There were times he almost wanted her to figure out his secret. She practically deserved to.
"Put your hands on your head and turn around. Slowly."
Gohan felt his muscles tense up instantly at the sound of a familiar voice. The voice that struck fear into the hearts of evildoers and secret holders the world over. He was so dead.
"Well? What are you waiting for, scumbag?"
As the demi-Saiyan raised his shaking hands to comply with her orders, he stammered, "V-Videl-san...I...I can ex...plain..."
Gohan's words trailed off when he'd finally turned around enough to get a good view of Videl. There she was, halfway across the room, draped in nothing but a fluffy yellow bath towel. Wet tendrils of hair clung to her neck and practically dripped down her chest in skinny black rivers. The rest of the dark mass was clumped on the top of her head in a gigantic, tangled knot, possibly suggesting that she'd heard her intruder while towel drying it.
The demi-Saiyan stared shamefully at his classmate until a steady dripping on the collar of his shirt distracted him. He dropped his eyes away from the semi-naked Videl just long enough to investigate; when he pulled his fingertips away from his lower lip, they were coated in thick, shiny blood.
"Well?" demanded Videl, bringing Gohan's attention back to her. This time, the demi-Saiyan had the decency and good sense to keep his eyes on her face while she spoke. Her own periwinkle orbs glared back suspiciously, framed by a light pink flush that may or may not have been symptomatic of a hot shower. "I'm waiting."
"Uh..." What had they been talking about, again? Oh, right. Excuses. "I...um...y-you have my watch."
Videl's pupils flitted to her school bag against the wall for a brief moment before refocusing on Gohan. "So...you came all the way out here, climbed up to the third floor and broke into my room while I was taking a shower just because I found your stupid watch?"
Gohan pondered the suspicious implications of his actions and realized that she'd backed him into a corner. If he admitted the truth, she'd naturally wonder what was so special about his timepiece. If he lied and changed his story, he had no good reason for being there. Dare he risk his secret? Or should he plan on calling his mother from jail?
"Ummm..."
Videl's bare foot was tapping an annoyed rhythm against the carpet while a dark spot of moisture was forming beneath it. "Well?" she pressed, rogue beads of water sliding down her inner thigh, calf and ankle. "I'm waiting here. Or are you going to wait until I've dripped dry?"
Okay, pushing him so hard for answers while his brain was working only at half capacity was a little unfair. It was taking him twice as long to turn the questions over in his mind and piece together the answers it was safe to give her and, in the meantime, he felt like a gibbering idiot. "Um...I, uh...really need it?"
"You don't have any clocks at your house?" Videl asked, arching an eyebrow skeptically.
"W-Well, I do...b-but...," Gohan stuttered, urging his distracted thoughts to refocus on the more pressing matter at hand. When his damp classmate shifted her weight onto her other foot, thus causing everything beneath the top portion of the towel to jiggle, and the demi-Saiyan was momentarily thrown off course again.
Videl, clearly noticing the new direction his eyes were pointing in, readjusted her towel and coughed pointedly. Gohan dimly noted how red her chest was turning as she scolded, "You were saying?"
"Oh! Um...right," he replied, jerking his gaze back up to where it belonged. Though intimidating, he kept his eyes locked on hers. "It's...important to me."
"Important how?"
"Just...," he paused. "Important."
"Look, if you can't give me a good freaking reason for breaking into my house for your crappy-looking watch, I'm going to call the police. They can be here in three minutes flat," Videl informed him testily.
The threat of a criminal record cleared a bit of the distraction from his muddled brain and a halfway decent excuse floated to the surface of his thoughts. "It – It belongs to someone else. A friend." Good one, Gohan! Not only would that explain his trespassing, but if she happened to figure out what the watch was for, then he would be off the hook as Saiyaman! Man, sometimes he really was a genius...
Videl raised a skeptical eyebrow in his direction. A moment later, she moved her bare feet in the direction of her dangling backpack and, with the hand that wasn't holding up her towel, unzipped the small front pocket. She dipped the same hand into said pocket and withdrew Gohan's reason for being there. After examining it for a few brief seconds, Videl shifted her blue gaze to fix on her trespasser. "This watch?"
"Yep, that's it," Gohan agreed eagerly, taking a couple steps forward with his hand outstretched. "Thanks for keeping it for me! My friend Krillen-san will be so relieved to see it..."
Videl took a step backwards with the watch held high above her. He wasn't sure what she hoped to accomplish by this move considering that, even with her extended reach, it still wasn't above his head, but Gohan stopped moving toward her anyway. "This belongs to your friend 'Krillen,' then?"
Gohan nodded fervently. "Yeah, he loaned it to me a couple weeks ago."
"Then why does it have your name on the back?" Videl asked, a slow, suspicious smile creeping onto her face.
Gohan stared in disbelief at the evidence Videl held up before him. With the band of the watch dangling from her dainty fingertips, the back of the face was exposed to his scrutiny. Right there, in soft, feminine script, was his full name: Son Gohan.
Curses! Foiled by his mom's incessant need to label.
"Since this watch clearly belongs to you, I rather wonder what's so special about it," Videl commented, turning the device around to examine it for herself. She tilted it back and forth, held it up to the light and squinted fiercely at it. "Seems pretty normal to me, but then again I can't see you breaking and entering for anything less than the key to your secret. Am I right?"
Gohan didn't know how to respond to her on-the-mark query. She was entirely right and they both knew it.
"Not gonna say anything, huh?" Videl commented, practically laughing aloud at him. "Fine. I'll just start pressing buttons until I figure out the secret. Starting with this big red one..."
"Videl-san, no! I can exp – " Before Gohan could stop her, the button was pressed and his fate was sealed. He could feel a deep sense of doom sinking to the pit of his stomach and waited, frozen in dread, for the inevitable.
"Chi signature invalid." Videl stared at the watch in wide-eyed surprise as it spoke to her in a crackling mechanical voice. "Security measures activated."
While both teens stared at the device in awe, the face split apart and withdrew into the sides. Seconds later, a green cloud of smoke rose from the watch and engulfed the upper half of Videl's body.
At first, Gohan couldn't detect any effects of the smoke on Videl. He rather wondered if it was supposed to be some kind of distraction meant to give him time to escape...
As he was inching slowly toward the balcony doors, Gohan heard the soft flump of fabric crumpling to the floor. When he turned to investigate, he realized that Videl's hand, now dangling limply by her side, had allowed her towel to slip and fall away from her body. The only cover she now had was the cloud of acidic green smoke that was still hovering around her.
It was only Gohan's super human/Saiyan speed that enabled him to catch Videl before she collided bonelessly with the floor. "Videl-san!" the demi-Saiyan cried, turning her face toward him so that he could gauge her condition. Her eyes were still open in awed surprise and stared up at him unblinkingly.
With awkward, trembling fingers, Gohan checked her pulse at her throat. Her heartbeat was steady and strong with no sign of damage that he could discern. Lowering his ear down to her mouth, the demi-Saiyan also took stock of her breathing; it was deep and even, just like in sleep. Insofar as he could tell, Videl was simply unconscious.
"Threat neutralized." Gohan jumped as the watch spoke again. He stared at the device, laying so innocuously in Videl's open palm, in wonder. He was going to have to talk to Bulma about this creepy (and potentially dangerous) security feature...
In the meantime, he had an unconscious – and stark naked – Videl to worry about. He couldn't discern anything wrong with her (and, heck, after seeing her naked he might postulate that she was simply perfect) so he was undecided as to whether or not he should take her to the hospital. But what if she had some kind of bad reaction to the chemical Bulma had used? What if she had a seizure, or something? Could he really just leave her there without being absolutely sure that she was okay?
Knowing full well that his mother had raised him better than that, Gohan sighed heavily and slumped his shoulders forward in defeat. He would have a lot of explaining to do when Videl woke up...
Doing his best to bundle her up warmly in her towel without getting "fresh" (as his mother would say), Gohan carried her out onto the balcony. For a moment, he felt like a prince rescuing a sleeping damsel from a tower; a lordly knight with a beautiful princess safely ensconced in his arms. That would, of course, make him the hero of his own personal fairytale and Videl his helpless love interest.
Fighting back a small grin, Gohan took to the sky at full speed and propelled them both toward West City. With any luck, Bulma would have an antidote.
— — —
Author's Notes:
Started writing this soooooooooooooooo long ago. I always liked this story, however, and ultimately decided to finish it without further delay.
HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY
Footnotes:
( 1 ) Kinto'un – the Flying Nimbus, for all you dub-watchers. The manga has indoctrinated me, lolz.
. ( . Ms Videl Son . ) .