Chapter 1: Prelude to War

Trunks stood alone in his room. His room had grown dark in his absence. Objects lay scattered about. It was chaos, much like the last year of his life. After greeting everyone – including his weeping mother – night had fallen, and everyone had gone to sleep. He closed his door behind him, and switched on the light. He looked around his room. His desk was empty since he had not yet unloaded any of his belongings from the spaceship. It could wait for tomorrow. He dragged a folding chair over to his desk and sat down. His Saiyan Armor had dirt and dried blood in the cracks still. He grimaced as he pulled the armor plate and joint pads off. He hadn't changed clothes since he'd met Avien. While he hadn't paid it much mind before, being back in a clean civilization made him realize just how awful his clothes had come to smell. He undressed and found a pair of shorts to wear. He left his room for a quick shower and then returned and climbed into bed.

It felt as though he had laid there for hours, but only perhaps fifteen minutes had passed. As tired as he had become, he couldn't understand why sleep would be something so hard to embrace. But despite the fact his body was exhausted, his mind was still fresh with the thought of seeing Shell again. From the few moments he had spent with her on the Kai planet, he could still hear her soft voice and smell her scented skin. The contrast of her dark hair against her light toned skin and white dress made her shine even in the darkness of his room.

"…We'll be together soon…" she had said to him, her voice still echoing in his ears.

He prayed that it was so. But it would be at least a year. He frowned. His wish had brought back his friend – his brother – Gohan. But for another battle… He was growing tired of battle. It was beginning to seem like the battles would just keep going… Until what? Until he, himself was killed? And, then what? The thought frustrated him. As the frustration of his race to revive Shell played over in his mind, eventually his brain followed the path of his exhausted body and sleep overtook him.

Trunks suddenly was awake again, but he awoke to a quite different setting. He stood in the middle of a war-torn city, as light precipitation rained down around him. Few buildings still stood, as most had been reduced to rubble and broken concrete strewn about the city. The streets were cracked and broken, creating small tidal pools among the lowest points in the cement. The gravesite of a once bustling city was quiet and empty. He could not sense life forces anywhere, only a burning rage. He sensed a hatred that was not quite like anything he had felt in a long time, yet familiar. It was an irrational, inconsolable hate, not evil like Majin Buu or empty like the Cybernetic brother of Frieza. This feeling was of pure, indiscriminate hate. It consumed the city. All around, he felt the weight of it suffocating him. It was piercing, and caused a slight hint of fear to run through his spine.

"What is this?" Trunks asked himself silently. "It feels… so heavy…"

Suddenly the overwhelming weight lifted, then focused to a single point. He could sense it; feel it materializing. The hatred he felt all around seemed to manifest itself physically. As he looked where he felt the rage congregating, there was a flash of bright, yellow light, and then nothing. Everything was gone, and he was alone in the darkness. He couldn't breathe. The hatred he felt, along with the city graveyard and any sign of life all dissolved into a void, and he felt himself lightly floating through a sea of emptiness. He felt the voluntary notion to breathe, but couldn't. He tried to move his fingers and even to move his eyes, but he couldn't. Everything had stopped around him, and every sense he once had of the world around him was gone.

Trunks snapped awake and sat, gasping for air, in his bed. Had he died? It felt as though he'd not taken a breath in several minutes. He sat for several moments trying to catch his breath and let the adrenaline in his veins subside. As he calmed, Trunks glanced at the digital face of the clock on the table. It read 03:00 AM. He frowned, and wiped the small beads of sweat from his brow. He wanted to get some sleep because he knew it would be a long day come sunrise. But as he sat there, Trunks could feel that sleep wasn't something that would come easily that night.

Getting out of bed, he dressed in gym pants and a t-shirt and left his room as silently as he could manage. As he left the mansion, he made his way to the garage hangar that housed the spaceship he had used to travel to New Namek. Small patches of microorganisms that had latched to the hull while at distant planets had now thawed from their icy space-cocoons and glistened against the steel hull in the fluorescent lighting of the hangar bay. It briefly crossed his mind that the exposure of such foreign organisms could potentially alter the existence of life on Earth; but as they had already begun reproducing, he concluded that any damage had already been done. Clearing away the remains could wait.

Trunks entered the ship and made his way to the navigation room just below the cockpit space. He cleared away maps and charts for space navigation from his desk. Under the corner of one such chart was a leather bound book. It was his journal. Trunks smiled to himself as he pushed the charts aside causing some to fall to the floor like leaves. He picked up his journal and brushed off the dust it had collected. He sat down and began to read back over the entries he had made. Ever since he had returned from the alternate past he and Cell had created, he had chronicled his life in his journal. He smiled sarcastically for a moment at the thought of what a sick joke it would be to travel back in time and plant his chronicle in a place that he knew his past self would find it. It would be somewhat interesting to see how many alternate dimensional planes of time sequencing he could create.

Suddenly he felt a rush of anxiety and adrenaline flush through his body. He felt as though there was another person in the room, but he couldn't sense a life force. At first it was a flash of fear, much like the sensation one feels when momentarily losing one's balance, but then it began to subside into the familiar, penetrating feeling of anger in the room with him. He felt the weight of the invisible rage bearing down again on him from all sides. As he bolted to his feet, the small chair in which he had sat flew across the room and crashed into the far wall.

"What the hell is that?!" Trunks thought. "It's everywhere, and yet there's nothing here!"

After a moment, he could sense the same rage from his dreams materializing in one spot. It was onboard the ship! Trunks began to feel panic gripping him. If his dream had been any indication of what would follow, he suddenly felt as though he was staring mortality in the invisible, livid face. Cold sweat droplets formed at his brow as he frantically tried to sense the epicenter of the mysterious force that weighed on him like a train resting on flea. Then, Trunks felt it; but it wasn't in the Navigation room. However, it was in the ship. He ran to the next space, then to the next. A level lower! He ran to the stairwell and slid down the ladder well, his gym pants almost snagging on an edge. It was in his living quarters, and, as he neared the door, Trunks began to glow as he shifted into his Super Saiyan form. Not sure what was inside, he readied himself, then bolted through the door.

The room was empty, but the looming weight in the air persisted. Confused, Trunks looked around the room. Then slowly, the weight began to retract and isolate itself in the far edge of the space. Trunks followed it with his eyes as he increased his power, ready for a fight. But, nothing happened. There was no explosion, no villain leaped to attack. It was silent, save the steady breathing of a Super Saiyan and the overwhelming weight of a nameless rage that lurked in the room. The epicenter of what Trunks felt seemed to come from the locker storage against the far wall. Filled with a combination of fear, confusion, and anxiety, Trunks edged closer, cautiously and slowly. Every instinct and muscle in his body was poised to attack, as he carefully approached the storage locker.

He reached out one hand to lift the small metal latch, and as the bolt cleared the frame, Trunks could feel the weight difference lunge as the door of the locker was thrown open from the inside. Instinctively, he jumped backwards taking a strong defensive posture for a counter attack. The door to the locker flew open with a bang as it hit the metal frame, and a short thin object fell to floor with a heavy thump that rocked the ship slightly. The weight immediately lifted from the room, and the looming anger Trunks had felt surrounding him suddenly vanished. As he began to relax his arms and legs from his fighting stance, his gold hair darkened to its normal shade of purple. He sighed heavily letting all the air leave his lungs and drew in another large breath. On his face was a solemn look of bewilderment and disbelief. He once again wiped the sweat from his brow as he stared at the article on the floor in front of him, trying to make any measurable amount of sense from the events of that early morning. With no logical explanation within grasp, he silently walked over and shut the locker door. He hesitated, then knelt down and picked up the Z Sword and left the room.

Sword in one hand, he returned to the Navigation room to retrieve his journal.

"What the hell is going on?" he asked himself.

After retrieving his journal, he left the ship and flew quietly up to a balcony on one of the higher floors of the mansion. He propped the sword against the balcony ledge and sat down in a nearby lawn chair with his journal. Before opening his journal, Trunks stared into the hilt of his Z Sword for several minutes pondering the events that had taken place.

"That feeling…" he thought, "…Where have I felt it before? It's familiar, yet I just can't place it."

Trunks continued to reflect for several more minutes before abandoning the thought. He opened his journal and continued where he had left off before he was interrupted. It was soothing to read back over his adventures and remember all the times when things seemed hopeless, but there was always Goku and Gohan to give him faith that things would be okay. His mother had been right about Goku. Before he had traveled back in time, she had always talked about how no matter how terrible things got, Goku would find a way to make things right. He remembered all the stories she had told him as a boy about her adventures with Goku on Planet Namek. It made him smile even as he read.

A steady wind blew past as Trunks sat reading. It made a faint howl as it flowed around the edges of the balcony's outside walls. As the breeze hit Trunks, his hair lightly danced in the wind's wake. But as he read, the gentle howling became a quiet voice. His eyes broke from the pages and he stared into the gleaming hilt of the Z Sword. He looked around the balcony for a moment. He was alone. The wind tossed lightly, increasing and decreasing in strength; never becoming powerful, but never diminishing completely.

As Trunks waved off his concern as paranoia, he started to open his journal again, and then he stopped. It was unmistakable. As the wind blew, the soft howling and whipping faintly covered a voice. He could hear it… couldn't he? He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair. Perhaps he was becoming delusional from lack of sleep.

The wind again whispered a name as it blew.

Trunks dropped his journal. It rolled as it hit the ground and opened to no particular page, and the pages began to dance in the wind as they turned. He stood and walked to the edge of the balcony, leaning over the ledge trying to hear the wind's words.

He strained hard to listen to the name he thought he had heard.

"What?" he asked himself. "What is that?"

The wind picked up slightly, and between the sound of turning pages, he could swear the voice became louder.

"Kakarot," it whispered, the clarity displaced by the sound of the pages of his journal.

"What?" Trunks asked aloud, not comprehending the word exactly.

Irritated by the sound of the turning pages in his journal, Trunks intended to stop the distraction; but as he turned and reached for his journal, he lightly clipped the edge of the Z Sword and it crashed to the floor. Following the train wreck of noise, one unmistakable word cut through the wind in the night: Kakarot. Still bent sideways, reaching vainly for the sword that had already fallen out of reach, Trunks' focus faded on the sword and centered on the journal in his hand. The wind still gently fought to turn the page, but Trunks' finger held firmly on the page in front of him. Too many senses to describe overcame him at once. The inevitable answer stared back at him just as the weight of hatred had tried to suffocate him earlier. The journal entry in front of him was his account of his fight with Broly.