Goku sighed as she looked up at the sky. The estimate of two to seven days to gather the dragon balls had not been as accurate as they had hoped. Nine days had come and gone, and they only had five of the orbs they needed. The first few days had gone well enough, all things considered, but each day brought more and more tension among her group. It also brought more and more boredom. In her original state, Goku would have rejoiced in the opportunity to train for days at a time without stopping, but her human form had cost her such legendary endurance. She could train for a few hours, but fatigue would set in, followed by boredom. Goku had really hoped that once everyone was outside of the spaceship, boredom would be a thing of the past. Apparently, that was not the case.

Quietly, Chi-Chi came over and sat next to her spouse. "How are you?"

"Bored and more bored," Goku sighed. "I'm too tired to keep training, I'm too tired to help with the farming, I'm too tired to do anything, but I'm not tired enough to sleep. The clouds were kind of cool when I started looking at them, but that stopped being fun about an hour ago."

The brunette shook her head. "How could you, of all people, be too tired to do anything?"

"Hey, cut me some slack!" Goku defended with a smile. "I'm human now!"

"Yeah, and so am I," her wife responded. "And so far, I really am surprised that you're so tired all the time."

The smile faded slightly. "I'm not just lying here all day. I've been training and helping out and stuff since they healed my ankle. I'm just tired now."

Another shake of the head. "I swear, if I didn't love you so much, I would be hitting you right now."

"Why?" Goku asked, sincerely confused.

"Because all that helping and training you've done today," she pointed out, "isn't even half of what I do every day. I'm just your little, human wife, Goku. I can't go to battle for days at a time. I can only be on my feet for about seventeen hours a day."

The color faded slightly from Goku's cheeks. "Seventeen?" she repeated, her surprise evident. "That can't possibly be right!"

"Oh, really?" Chi-Chi challenged. "I get up at four in the morning. As the water starts warming up for tea and breakfast, I start sewing all of your torn clothing together. Half an hour later, you come downstairs, tell me you're starving, and ask what's for breakfast. I get a little food ready for you, and I clean up what I used while you eat. Then you head outside, still mostly dark out, to start training. I get breakfast, round two, started by five so that when Gohan comes down at five thirty, I can have it ready for him. You come inside around six, after your 'warm up', get Goten out of bed, and we eat breakfast together. By seven in the morning I've made two meals for home, fixed an outfit, done two loads of dishes, and made Gohan's lunch for school. When Gohan takes off for his education, you and Goten go outside to play for a while. I have two to three hours to finish cleaning up from breakfast and get all of the laundry done. A little before ten, the two of you come in, and I make you something to eat. After that you start on your chores and I start giving Goten his lesson. We break at noon for lunch, then Goten gets to play for an hour while I get that load of dishes done and sweep the floors. At one thirty we resume the lesson, and continue until Gohan gets home around four. Goten takes a break with Gohan before Gohan gets started on his homework, and you are outside training. I take this opportunity to get dinner started. Goten does independent study as Gohan starts his homework, you train, and I get food ready. At six we eat, at six thirty we clean up from dinner, by seven thirty Goten is in bed and you're bathing as Gohan continues his homework and I finish the dinner clean up. After the clean-up is done, I begin to prepare Goten's lesson for the next day. Then I bathe, and try to be in bed by nine so that I can get up at four the next morning and start it all over again."

Goku's eyes were wide. She had always known that their family was on a bit of a strict schedule, and Chi-Chi had gotten fed up more than once when that schedule seemed to get broken, but to hear blow by blow what got done by their family every single day was an enormous shock. "Why didn't you ever tell me before?" she asked.

Chi-Chi rolled her eyes. "I tell you all the time," she pointed out.

"When?" Goku demanded.

"Every time I'm yelling at you to stop trying to help the birds find a new nest or that dinner's already been started, don't go fishing right now," Chi-Chi laughed. "I'm constantly telling you I'm busy. I just can't remember telling you everything in one enormous breath before."

Goku frowned. "When do you relax?"

A black eyebrow was raised as Chi-Chi looked over at her husband. "Relax?" she chuckled. "Going to Namek has been the most relaxing thing I've done in years, and that's considering the fact that I'm ready to kill most, if not all, of you right now. I take an hour to drink some tea on the weekends, and I sometimes get a chance to shop with Bulma or to just sit and talk with her for a while, but there isn't really time to do that very often. There's a lot of work to be done, Goku. You knew that."

Quietly, Goku lay back against the grass. "How do you do it?" she softly asked. "You have as much power as I have now, and I'm drained without doing half of that. How do you do it?"

Chi-Chi also lay back, snuggling against her spouse. "First of all, I'm pretty sure I could kick your butt right now," she confidently pointed out. "I might be a human woman, but I'm the strongest human woman who isn't part machine. I am a lot stronger than I look. And secondly, I have almost twenty years of practice building up to this. It was a lot simpler when we were eighteen and first married. The only person I had to take care of then was you, and other than laundry and cooking, you're fairly self-reliant."

"Hey, I can cook!" Goku defended.

Her wife giggled. "You can build a campfire and stick something over it," she countered. "So yes, if there is something that needs to be roasted over a fire, you are quite capable. But after being married to me for almost twenty years, how many times have you made me dinner that did not involve a fire?"

"Shut up, that's when."

Chi-Chi laughed. "Learned that from Krillen?" she guessed.

"Goten," Goku admitted. "And I'm pretty sure he got it from Trunks."

"Meaning he probably got it from Bulma," Chi-Chi reasoned, "who likely got it from Krillen."

With a smile, Goku said, "Wow, you're good."

"No, I'm just used to trying to figuring out the origins of certain phrases that come out of the mouths of our sons." A small scowl began to form. "I won't even tell you how easy it is to figure out what comes from Vegeta."

Goku laughed. "I've got a pretty good guess." She wrapped an arm around her wife. "I still don't know how you do it," she admitted. "How do you have the strength for it? And every single day?"

Chi-Chi shrugged slightly. "I told you," she calmly explained, "there is work that needs to be done. Your clothes don't clean and mend themselves by magic. The food does not appear on command. And I promise you, if I took a day off from cleaning the house, you and Goten would destroy it as Gohan panicked about the mess."

Goku gave her spouse a playful glare. "I am not that bad."

"Yes, you are," the wife strongly answered. "It's not that you're deliberately making a mess. It's that you're completely and totally oblivious that there is a mess until it hits your ankles. Admit it, sweetie. Unless you're training or thinking about food, you kind of have a hard time focusing."

"Oh, I so do not have a hard time…ooh, shiny thing!"

Chi-Chi laughed at her husband's joke while playfully slapping her shoulder. "You're a little oblivious from time to time, but I still love you."

"I love you too, sweetie," Goku answered, nuzzling the top of her wife's head. "And I know I don't say this enough, but thank you."

"You say that all the time," the smaller woman said, closing her eyes and settling in. "You say it every time I give you food, so I basically hear it all day long."

But Goku shook her head. "No, not like that," she softly corrected. "That's saying thank you for one thing. I want to say thank you for all the things you do. I had no idea it was so freaking hard, You work like there's no tomorrow, and you do it constantly. You keep everything going in that house. You take care of me and the boys, and I know we aren't all that easy. You take care of the food and the laundry. You take care of the real cleaning. You take care of the money and the bills and the farm work…everything you do is so amazing. And I just want to say thank you."

The smile on Chi-Chi's face was brighter than ever before as she contently sighed, "You are very, very welcome."

/

"Check."

Videl rolled her eyes. "If I write you one, can we stop playing this game now?"

Across from her, Gohan frowned. "I'm sorry."

"Stop apologizing!" the teenager exasperatedly told her significant other. "Geez, for a week now, every other sentence out of your mouth has been you saying that you're sorry for something!"

"I'm sorry."

It was hard to resist the urge to pull her own hair out. "Gohan, could you please, please, please stop apologizing for everything?"

Gohan gave it serious thought for a moment before honestly answering, "Probably not. It's kind of an automatic sensation of guilt. Sor…uh, nothing."

Videl put both of her hands on her face. "I have got to break you of that habit."

The former boy bit down on the inside of her cheek, physically forcing herself to not apologize for apologizing. "Good luck with that," she finally said. "And I can make us another game."

Her arms dropping down to her sides, Videl sat back down. "Frankly, I'm impressed that you built an entire chess set in two days. I can't build anything."

"It's pretty basic," Gohan humbly responded. "When I was younger, I would do some basic wood carving to try to focus myself. I was, well, a little moody when I entered my teen years. Stuff like this was therapeutic for me."

Videl frowned. "You never told me that before."

With a shrug, Gohan picked up a rook. "When would have been a good time for that?" she asked.

"Good point," Videl conceded. Compared to the other couples on the trip, their relationship was quite new. They had not known each other for all that long, and painful moments of childhood had barely been talked about. "What made you choose wood carving?"

A soft smile formed on Gohan's face. "My grandfather taught me," she answered as she remembered. "I actually learned the basics when I was about six when we were waiting for Dad to come back from space. I took a break after he came home, since the day he got back was the day we found out the androids were going to come and theoretically slaughter us all."

"That's Eighteen, right?" Videl asked, making sure she was remembering past stories correctly. "I mean, that's how she came to the group? As one of them?"

Gohan nodded. "Yeah. So since we were going up against something more powerful than a Super Saiyan, we all kind of stopped everything else going on in our lives to get ready for that. Except Vegeta and Bulma, who apparently picked up a new hobby and that's how we got Trunks." As Videl giggled, Gohan put the rook back down. "Anyway, I really didn't do anything but train and occasionally study for those years. Then the fight came and Dad…" Her eyes closed, and Gohan's hand fisted in her lap. "It was rough. Mom was pregnant. Dad was dead, and I still think it was largely my fault. And I found myself hitting puberty very hard very quickly. So yeah, I had some issues."

Videl stayed quiet, not entirely sure how to react. She had been aware of Goku's death and when Goten had come about, but she had never seen Gohan react in such a troubled way to it before.

But the look on Gohan's face shifted from upset to somewhat happy as she looked back at the chess board. "But like I said, I started carving again as a kind of therapy, and it really helped. This concludes our lecture on why I could build a chess board." With a flick of a finger, she knocked over her king. "However, we have been playing a lot lately, so we can definitely take a break if you want to."

"Please and thank you," the girlfriend quickly answered. "Sorry, but losing to you seventeen times in a row just loses its appeal after a while." Gohan opened her mouth to speak, but Videl rushed around the table quickly and planted a hand over the taller girl's mouth. "No apologizing! I mean it!" A mumble came from beneath her hand, and Videl sighed. "You just said 'sorry', didn't you?"

Sheepishly, Gohan shrugged and nodded. When the hand came down, she said, "Force of habit, remember?"

"So help me Gohan Son, I will break you of that habit," Videl swore.

"Good luck with that." Gohan stretched as she stood up. "Want to go for a walk?"

Videl smiled and grabbed Gohan's hand. "Now that sounds like fun." As they walked the perimeter of the village, Videl asked, "Are you excited about getting this wish made?"

"You have no idea," the tall girl answered. "It has been downright creepy being in a body that isn't mine at all. I miss being able to be me."

"It wasn't all terrible," Videl tried to say. "I mean, the entire time hasn't sucked."

"A lot of it has," Gohan countered. "I've completely lost who I was these last few months. Everything from the basic mechanics of how my body works to the way I get treated when I go to the grocery store has just changed so radically."

With a smirk, Videl squeezed Gohan's hand. "It's the price you pay for being a hot chick," she playfully told her. "Face it, you're tall, leggy, and gorgeous. Of course guys are going to hit on you. Hell, I'm surprised more women didn't hit on you. You really are that beautiful. Even though you're a full on human right now, you still apparently have Saiyan cheekbones."

"Well, I still don't like it," Gohan said. "It's like I've been treated like less of a person. I used to do errands for Mom and if someone said something to me it was just a greeting or asking how Mom and Goten were doing. Now, though…"

"Gohan," Videl interrupted, "I don't doubt that you had guys hitting on you and that it weirded you out. I know that if I was turned into a guy and suddenly had girls hitting on me, I'd probably feel the same way. But before you go too far down this road, I feel that it's important to point out that people hit on you when you were a boy."

Gohan frowned. "Yeah, you did."

But her girlfriend shook her head. "No, not just me. About a quarter of the girls at our school did. You just didn't notice before."

Rolling her eyes, Gohan said, "You are definitely exaggerating."

"You're right," her girlfriend pointed out. "After all, what could possibly be so attractive about a guy who's tall, brilliant, gorgeous, and unbelievably nice to everyone around him?" It was with a little laugh that she said, "Face it, you were everything most girls wanted in a boyfriend. You were pursued a lot. You just weren't aware of it because you weren't used to being around girls who weren't either your mother or Bulma. Although from what you've told me about Bulma on that spaceship, I'm surprised you know so little about women."

"Knowing Bulma is hardly an education on women as a whole," Gohan mentioned with an amused snort. "She's a little…different."

Videl laughed. "No fooling. Don't get me wrong, I really like and admire her, but…"

"She's nuts?"

"Yep."

With a tired sigh, Gohan gave her girlfriend's hand a gentle squeeze. "You have no idea. But then again, I don't suppose that any of us are particularly normal."

"Yeah," Videl sighed, "but knowing what's considered normal and knowing what you, your friends and your family are, is normal really something that you want to be?"

"It was," Gohan admitted. "You have no idea how badly I wanted it. I wanted to be a normal kid. I wanted to do normal things. I wanted a life where the biggest problems I dealt with were fighting over curfew and what I was going to do with my friends over the weekends. I wanted so, so badly to be able to walk into a room of people my own age and to be able to relate to them on any level at all. And I've got to be honest with you, there is a very large part of me that still wants that."

Quietly the smaller teenager listened.

"I know that I can do all these things that most people would see as amazing," she went on, "but it's hard. You know as well as I do that I really can't let people know the majority of what I can do. Cool as my skills might be, I'm still a freak."

"You are not a freak," Videl quickly defended. "I never want you to feel like you are."

"But I am, aren't I?" Gohan challenged. "I'm half alien, Videl. I fly, I have huge power, I eat more food than the average family…I am so far from normal that I can't even fake it."

Tenderly, Videl cupped Gohan's face. "You listen to me, Gohan Son," she firmly told him. "You aren't normal. You're right about that. But the things that you think make you a freak are actually that things that make you amazing. And I am not talking about the ability to vaporize large amounts of terrain at will or flying well beyond Mach three. I'm talking about who you are deep down. You're different because you see the world differently. You have seen the world stand on the brink of annihilation more than a handful of times. It's impossible to think something like the social lives of high schoolers even compares. So no, you don't know the ins and outs of blending in with average people. That's because you aren't average. You're not even above average. You are beyond it all. You are not a freak, Gohan. You're amazing."

Gohan looked down. "It's hard to think I'm not a freak when I look at what I'm going through right now."

"Aargh!" Videl called out. "I am so sick of listening to you complain about this! Yes, it sucks, but it's only a couple of damn days until it all goes back to normal!" When Gohan moped slightly and looked away, she added, "If I promise to let you get to second base after this is over, will you promise to stop complaining about it for the duration of this curse?"

Not another complaint was spoken.