This is how it was in the early days, after Goku left us; Juuhachigou, sitting on Kame house's sandy beach, her shoulder resting against the palm tree's trunk, staring out across the sea and scowling. One leg pulled up, the knee almost brushing her chest. Her arm, draped languidly over the leg, hand holding a beer. So mellow and easy-looking, that leg, that arm, that hand with the beer. But her other hand - resting down by her thigh and nearly hidden under the sand - was always clenched in a fist, and the scowl never went away. Juuhachigou - Beautiful; fierce; too much for a guy like me to even dream about.
Too much to hope for, yeah, having her like me even a little bit - but if I fed her, if there was beer, and if I didn't bug her too much, lots of times she'd stay around. Looking bored as hell and mad enough to spit, but still hanging around. I figured it had to mean something.
She didn't talk much; when she did it was almost always to snap at me. Baiting insults, comments calculated to drag me down, small dismissive sounds, and her eyes - narrowed, intent - watching me, waiting to see if I'd throw it back at her or blow up, trying to figure out if there was something she could do to make me stop being a nice guy. She didn't have any reason to believe in nice guys, I guess, so she was trying to figure out what my angle was. I just had to wait it out, show her that I didn't want anything that she wasn't willing to give, and that was what I had decided that I was going to do.
This is what you've gotta get: She was awful scared, back then. She acted so mean, but it was mostly a front to hide how scared she was.
It was sad, if you thought about it. During the thing with Cell - busting the remote control, wishing the bombs out of her and her brother - I didn't do nothing that any half-way decent guy wouldn't have done. But it seemed to have shocked her. She didn't know what to do with it. It sent her coming back again and again, trying to figure out why I'd tried to help her. It was sad that she'd never seen anything like that before, that she didn't realize that I wasn't anything special.
Nothing felt entirely real that summer, not with Goku dead - dead forever and always, we all thought back then. Not when there was a pretty girl sitting on the beach and drinking beer with me, fuming silently as she watched the sun go down.
When she finally did say something important - something that actually seemed to matter to her - it was this: "My brother thinks I'm using you."
I looked around at the beach. At the empty cans that littered the sand around her, the over-turned, half-empty box of take out noodles. Well, yeah, I guess… I thought. But I don't mind.
I didn't want to say the wrong thing and have her lock down again. So I just shrugged.
"He's got a dirty mind, my brother does," she went on. "He thinks there's something going on between us."
"He shouldn't worry," I said, trying to make my smile look easy. "We're just hanging out and having some drinks, right? Just for fun. Anyway, it's just common sense that a girl like you would never be interested in someone like me -"
"Oh, shut up," she said.
"Okay…"
"Don't act like you know what I would or wouldn't do. You don't know me."
"Okay," I said again, trying to keep the hope that gave me from creeping into my voice. It didn't work, and when she turned and stared at me I cringed apologetically, trying to make a joke of it.
"God, you're transparent," she said, turning her head back toward the ocean with a disgusted little jerk that flicked her hair into her eyes. She reached up to brush it back behind her ear. "My brother thinks everyone's just out to screw everyone else. No exceptions."
She glanced back at me. "I wasn't being literal about the 'screw' part, you know. You can stop blushing."
"I really wish I could," I said, then added quickly, "Stop blushing, I mean."
Her hair had fallen into her eyes again, and she blew it out of the way with an annoyed little twist of her lips. She was looking out to sea again, studiously avoiding eye-contact, and I wondered if that was a good or bad sign.
The silence dragged on for a long time, but eventually she spoke again. "My brother's been getting really weird lately," she said, in a tone I couldn't quite read.
That kind of worried me. I'd never been entirely sure about Juunanagou; from what little I'd seen of him, he didn't seem all there. "Oh," I said. "Like, weird how?" And when she didn't answer, I pressed, "Like, maybe the sort of weird someone should keep an eye on?"
She scoffed, too quickly and too empathically. "No. I didn't say anything like that, so don't go thinking that I did, you got that?"
"Okay."
"I'm serious. Do not go messing with him. He'd love for you to give him an excuse."
"Okay. I get it."
"I think it's because Son Goku died like he did. That wasn't what was supposed to happen. We were supposed to be the ones to kill him."
"Hey. That's my friend you're talking about. That's my best friend in the world."
"Oh, it's not like I care."
"Maybe you should leave, then. Maybe you just shouldn't come back." Kame house wasn't much shelter from someone like her, but I turned by back on her, wanting to make it inside before she saw how badly it cut. Her voice stopped me.
"Wait."
I turned back, saw something like panic in her eyes, and my hand dropping from the doorknob. I couldn't suppress the thrill; I mattered. "I meant - I never really cared about killing Son Goku. But my brother was counting on it. It was the only goal he really had for himself. Now that he can't do that… he's getting sort of fuzzy around the edges, you know? Sort of spacey. I can't even talk to him anymore, seems like.
"I think it'd get better if Goku would come back to life."
"A lot of stuff would, I guess."
"Come back over here."
I stopped by the cooler on the way over, grabbed a couple more beers. When I handed her hers, she smiled up at me - for the first time, she smiled at me, wan and ragged, yeah, but a smile.
I sat down in the sand beside her. A crab was scuttling around inside the half-empty noodle box by her foot. When it came out, it was trailing a strand of udon in its claw. I watched it dragged the noodle down into the surf, smiling at the way it waved its claws in the air like a World Tournament champion.
"Hm," I heard Juuhachigou say, a soft and introspective sound. When I looked up at her, she was watching me. I turned my eyes toward the ocean quickly, feeling myself growing red, but not before I'd seen pink creep into her own cheeks. "Hm," she said again, and I was sure that there was consideration in the sound, if not approval.
I settled back, pulled the tab on my beer. Beside me, Juuhachigou did the same. We sat there, watching as the sun went down into the sea, colors bleeding into the water as the shadows came down over us. Wishing that we could fix the past, wondering about the prospects for the future.