AN: DBZ and all its respective characters are not my property; they're owned by Toei Animation and by Akira Toriyama.

Much thanks goes to Mirai Veggie for volunteering to look this over before it saw the light of day. I can only imagine the horrors she had to suffer while slogging through this to make it readable for you fine folks.

"Damnit woman, I am not your personal messenger boy!"

A flare of energy crackled through the air as Vegeta let out a growl of frustration. With a sudden twist, he thrust his arm out to the wall, a pulse running through it before a small ki blast shot out and impacted the metal, causing it to shudder as it was absorbed. It was immature, it was childish, it was beneath him, but the saiyan Prince felt a sense of calm wash over him as the moment passed. Smoke cleared and the wall was fine, though singed from the heat of the energy ball.

Pansy Briefs stood next to him, her cool demeanor unfazed by the sudden outburst. The smile that was always gracing her lips was still there as she nodded sympathetically, blue eyes filled to the brim with sickeningly sweet understanding. "I know Vegeta," she said, "but Bulma said it was urgent."

"Bulma can run her own errands."

"But she had to go to Trunks' school to pick him up."

Vegeta tensed again, whipping about to glare at her furiously. She met his gaze and smiled back, used to these snap changes in mood after all the years spent with the full-blooded saiyan. "Why would that woman need to pick my son up?" he asked slowly, putting extra emphasis on the words 'woman' and 'my'. "I thought we gave him firm instructions to behave himself at school."

"Yes, but the school nurse called and said he was feeling ill. Something about causing a disrupting in class and then complaining about stomach pains."

He frowned at that and crossed his arms. "Well then, why aren't you running the errand for her? She is your daughter," Vegeta pointed out, deflecting the conversation from his son for the moment. It wouldn't do to show concern over such things in front of others. Pansy's smile, if it was possible, widened.

"I would, but I need to go down to the hospital to pick up your other son."

"My other-? Just what in the hell were they out doing?!" Bulma had told him of her ridiculous plan to take Trunks – the future Trunks – and the woman Mumei out 'shopping' so that they were prepared to return to 'school'. He had snorted and pretended to ignore her; it was the best way to let things like this slide by without getting him involved. How such a mundane and dull task could possibly result in one being sent to an infirmary…

"Well, she was in a bit of a hurry and didn't really have time to explain, but I think she said something about Mei." Pansy pressed a finger to her lips, the smile disappearing for a moment as she looked rather contemplative. "I think that's why you need to go find her."

The 'errand' was suddenly making more sense. Everyone else had such a blind hero's worship for the girl that they wouldn't regard her with the amount of distrust that was obviously necessary. Why anyone trusted her to begin with was beyond him; she appeared without any reasonable explanation for her fighting ability and was incredibly reluctant to give any real details about her past, save that she had been found and trained, somehow, by his son and Kakarrot's. Since neither his son nor the half-bred runt had ever showed particular skill in leading or working well with others, no part of the story ever added up for him. "Hmph. I will go perform this task for her, then," he said gruffly, arms crossed as he stalked out of the Gravity Room.

Pansy smiled again as he left, though this time there was a definite mischievous edge to it. The demure and quiet housewife would never let on to it, but she knew just what to say and how to act to manipulate the volatile saiyan into doing what she needed him to do. It was easy when you knew what buttons to push.

-----

"What… what do you mean, you're…?" Gohan gestured vaguely at Mei – Goten? – and stared, eyes wide and mouth agape. "I mean, how is that even possible? He's a boy, and you're a… a… you are a…"

"Yes I'm a girl," she snapped, hand slamming down on the table as she glared at him. He winced and she sighed, lifting it back up to rub at the space between her eyes. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be… I know you have questions."

"How is it possible? Gohan, genetics aren't exactly predetermined. It's always a random shuffle, random chance of what you're going to get from your mom and what you get from your dad. You always get an X from mommy, but half the time you get an X from dad or a Y. And the thing is also that what you get from him is also affected by the state your mom's health. I think it's some sort of evolutionary survival thing, though I never had too much time to read into it. But basically… Random chance that in my timeline I was born with the working parts I have and not the way your little brother is."

Gohan stared, the information that had just been poured down his throat causing a bit of a mental block. "… So you're just… you're Goten," he repeated, trying to wrap his head around the situation. "Why did you…? I mean, why did you try to hide it from us? The fake name and story?"

"I didn't want to interfere with Goten's birth, so I just pretended I was someone else. Trunks and I had worked out my backstory before hand so we both would be on the same page when asked."

"Okay, but when you came back the second time-"

"You never really gave me a chance to go 'Oh, surprise, it's me!'" Mei let out a heavy sigh. "I mean, I honestly expected that you would take one look at me and just realize that wait, hold on, she looks fucking familiar and not in the whole 'oh she saved the day all those years ago' sort of way, but you didn't. And then you said those few little words, your 'little brother Goten', and I knew that everything was fucked. There was no way I was telling you then. Except…"

Gohan wanted to ask her what had happened to push her over the edge, to make her so upset that she broke after one day. That was the absurd part; she hadn't even been here for that long and already her 'vow' was cracked to hell but he didn't see her as being weak. Maybe it was just because he was Gohan, he was her brother, and after spending a year accepting that he was dead coming back to face him was more than she could handle.

He wanted to ask her, but the sudden shrieks from outside interrupted their conversation. They both craned their necks, glancing out the window, and police cars raced by, sirens blaring and lights flashing. Mei was up in a flash, a stunned waitress shoved into an empty booth as she ran for the door, and he followed suit. Whatever was happening couldn't have been that severe – there were no energy signatures, none that were anything close to being remarkable, and the civilian task force was already heading to the scene of the crime. Of course they needed to check it out, but it was going to end up being nothing more than a petty criminal trying to hold up another bank or a purse snatcher or a mugging or something that would be laughable for either of them.

-----

The hospital room was quiet and Trunks sighed as he tried to relax. Next to him the clock radio was flashing 1:37 and he couldn't keep his eyes off the slowing ticking numbers. It was obsessive and compulsive and the time dragged on slower and slower, but with every passing minute he was closer to someone coming to take him 'home'.

His shoulder still throbbed painfully; the doctors said he was lucky no nerve damage was done but surgery was a must, definitively, what had happened, they had never heard of someone being able to do something like this. He had smiled and nodded and all the forms were signed but he knew he would be gone long before they finished scheduling the operating room. He wasn't going under the knife. He wasn't going to be knocked out and put to sleep and trust someone he didn't know to cut into him and put him back together and sew him up and just hope that everything turned out okay. The pain, he could live with the pain if there was no other way to take care of it. But surgery wasn't an option.

Trunks closed his eyes, breathing out slowly as the room shifted and spun. It had been a fight getting the IV line in, a fight over the medication dosage, a fight that had nearly resulted with him strapped down to the bed. It wouldn't have done much good, Mrs. Briefs had known that ( though she had managed to remain amazingly calm when the nurse had pressed down on his shoulder the wrong way and he had snarled, all animal instincts and pain crazy ), but he needed to play nice and normal out in public. And the public thought that a shattered shoulder deserved a shitload of painkillers. A shitload of painkillers that had been subsequently spat out and burned out of his body with a ki flare, leaving him alert and pain-riddled.

So why do I feel so disconnected?

Footsteps sounded distressingly loudly in the room and he blinked his eyes open. Twisting to the side, he clawed out with one hand to grasp at the clock. 2:13. He grimaced and allowed it to slip from his hands, clattering loudly on the bedside table, and struggled to sit up in the hospital bed.

"Mr. Briefs, you should be resting." A nurse scolded him, stepping up to the side of his bed to check and change his IV line. He glanced over at her and she caught his gaze, smiling back. Red hair, blue eyes, and barely a waif of a girl. Why did he feel like he had just been caught in the spider's web? "You're not going anywhere for quite some time. Just lie back down."

"Where's the doctor?" She ignored him, moving around the bed and out of sight. For a moment he breathed easy, eyes starting to slip shut again, when a rush of something cold and metallic burned into veins. All ability to move was slowly robbed from him, fingers, hands, and arms lying uselessly on the bed as it spread across his torso and through the rest of him.

Something crackled and ripped and he could feel his arm being pulled to the side, though there was no pain when his shoulder was torqued out of position. Trunks glanced over and watched, feeling strangely detached, as the nurse strapped his wrist to the bed, humming softly as she did so. "I need to go." The words came out slurred and heavy. He frowned, head rolling to the side, and she smiled wider before reaching out to stroke his cheek. Nails scrapped against his skin, rubbing him raw, but he stared up at her, eyes bleak with defiance. "I'm going," he said again, forcing each word out.

"Yes you are," she agreed, slipping about to the other side to secure his other wrist. Something fluttered above him, tickling his exposed flesh, and he realized that she was spreading out a blanket to cover up the restraints. After a moment she reached back up, hand resting on his cheek while the other wound about the IV line, yanking hard. The bag ripped, clear liquid splashing and staining her white coat, but he was suddenly unattached. "You're leaving Trunks," she said slowly, and fear bloomed in his stomach her eyes pooled red. "And you're coming with me."

A whine escaped him as she wheeled him out of the room, picture perfect pair of patient and nurse. He could barely move, limbs filled with lead and mind frozen with terror. Doctors and orderlies passed them in the hall, smiling and waving and his eyes pleaded for someone to notice, but she gave everyone such a sweet look and nod and they didn't even glance down to check on him.

The elevator doors chimed softly before sliding open and the bed bounced when she pushed him in, turning so that she was pressed back against the wall. "We're going to have fun now, aren't we Trunks?" she said, glancing down and smiling and he wanted to scream for someone notice he was missing before the doors slid shut and he was gone.

-----

"Gohan, be careful."

Mei wasn't sure why she was warning him – he certainly gave her an exasperated roll of the eyes as the words spilled out of her mouth. It was her own twisted and malformed mind that kept on allowing the ghosts and ghouls to creep around the corners and claw at the fringes of reality. Whatever it was they were chasing after wasn't some horrible monster out of a storybook nightmare.

A man was standing in the street, hand stretched out and wrapped out the neck of a panicking woman. Her hands were wrapped around his wrist, nails drawing blood as she tried desperately to get away. As they neared, Mumei saw that they weren't the only ones to respond to the screams; a few police cars were pulling up, though the officers seemed unsure what to do.

"Mei, can you go super saiyan?" Gohan whispered, pulling on her sleeve and yanking her back. She glanced sharply at him before shaking her head. "Look, then I'll just deal with this. It's better that they-"

"Let her go!"

Both of them froze. A third cruiser pulled up and out stepped a girl with black pigtails, black shorts and a white t-shirt. Gohan paled and Mei looked at him curiously while he mouthed a word silently. Videl. If that was her name, she seemed to be part of the police force and someone whom the officers respected and were glad to see. She didn't know her, or of her, in her own time but that wasn't surprising. "Friend of yours?"

"Friend isn't the word I would use…"

The woman's struggles increased as the man tightened his hold, lifting her up off the ground. The pig-tailed girl slipped into a fighting stance, arms held at the ready as she stood behind him, and the hairs on Mei's arms rose as she felt him grin. "You want her?" he sneered, and she felt like someone had punched her with the sound of his voice. "Then catch."

The street had fallen silent and the sudden 'crack' carried nicely as he twisted his hand, snapping her neck. Pig-tails made a choking noise and he turned about, tossing the body effortlessly toward her. It landed in a heap on a ground and she covered her mouth, gagging, and Mei stepped forward, running alongside Gohan to stop the fear-frozen woman before she did something she would regret.

Mei was going to confront the man. Gohan was going to help the woman.

Behind her, she heard Gohan saying something to the girl, words about how 'it was all right', 'it was going to be okay', 'they were here to help now'. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him holding her, arms wrapped gently around her thin frame to keep her upright while she trembled at the violence. Part of her mourned for the girl, cried out at the innocence that had so cruelly been ripped away, but a far angrier part laughed and hissed at the weakness that the girl showed. She was foolish to come, foolish to think she was a fighter if she couldn't handle this.

"I knew I would find you here." Deep. Grating. His voice vibrated unnaturally and she shuddered, mouth stretched wide to stop the gag reflex. Death had not been kind to him and it showed with the crude stitching over his nose and cheek to hold his face together, the skin surrounding it a vibrant purple fading into gray. It was pulled thin down over his neck, translucent and streaked with blue-green veins, and edging the black shirt was the start of a black tattoo. Her marking. "Little bitch ran off to hide again. So fucking typical."

"Why are you doing this?" Her words came out weak and she cringed while he laughed. "Please… I'm sorry, I didn't… I didn't know…"

"Oh, baby sister," he purred, and she could feel Gohan's heart skip at those words. "It doesn't matter what you didn't know. You're going to pay in blood just the same."