Disclaimer: Until I develop the power to take over someone else's body, I will not own Dragon Ball Z. If that ever happens, Akira Toriyama had better watch out!

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Left Behind

Chi-Chi watched the door swing shut behind her husband.

It was like this every time. An invincible foe, months of training, a battle to the death. The fate of the world constantly fell upon the shoulders of her husband, her son, her friends.

She sank to the couch, trying, and failing, to halt the tremors running through her body.

Goku always won the fight. Even death had failed to stop him. He was Superman. When she married him, Chi-Chi knew that fighting was Goku's life. Whether it was his Saiyan blood or his martial arts upbringing she knew not.

He had dragged their son into it as well. Her precious Gohan was out struggling for his life against some monster. He should have been home, studying! Safe…

Chi-Chi suppressed the thought that she was the only mother in the world that had to deal with this sort of thing, along with the bitterness that came with it. This was her life and her family and, flawed as they were, she loved every bit of them.

She recalled, with a sad smile, her life with Goku. There had been laughter, of course. She had never met a man as sweet or as hopeless as her husband. There had been frustration, because of his antics and his inability to fit in.

There had been loneliness; not just the times when Goku and Gohan were out training in the wilderness, either. Sometimes, when Goku was with her, when they were surrounded by their friends, Chi-Chi felt the loneliest. She couldn't rush into battle, like Krillin or Yamcha; she couldn't invent some clever device to save the day, like Bulma. She did not fit in to their concept of the world, and they seemed alien to hers.

Still, she loved Goku with all of her heart. She could never stop him from flying off to save the day. When she was honest with herself, she could see that Goku cared about the world, about the whole human race, more than he cared about her. Deep down, in a fit of selfishness that she would never admit, Chi-Chi resented this. She had given him everything, her entire being, but he could never do the same.

There was always another villain to face, another crisis to avert. Every time that Goku left, a single thought surfaced unbidden in Chi-Chi's mind:

One of these times, he won't come back.