Author's Note: WARNINGS FOR IMPLICATIONS AND THE DISCUSSION OF SUICIDE, IN CASE IT WAS NOT ALREADY INHERENTLY OBVIOUS IN SEVOYA'S CHARACTER.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The basement was homey and finished, and it filled Sevoya's heart with dread to behold it. She sat on the couch in front of the television, her knees pulled to her chest, and stared at the blank screen.

Seven years ago, it had shown the face of a monster, and of men with golden hair, and of a strange boy who had finished the broadcast with a decisive, horrific scream.

"Sometimes," Sevoya's mother had said to her as she latched an emerald necklace around her daughter's neck, "our death is all we have. We can choose to die by our own hand instead of letting a monster have the satisfaction of sealing our fate. You and I have the power to choose how we will die, so consider yourself blessed, and make your choice wisely, Sevoya."

Sevoya opened the compartment in the pendant of that same necklace- the one that matched the earrings her father gave her, the one she almost never wore- and smoothed her fingers over the tablet inside.

She considered the carpet on the floor. It was that off-white color that covered the floor of her room, and of her parent's room, where her mother and her baby sister had laid like they were sleeping once the boy on the television had stopped screaming.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The sun sat low over the Ox Kingdom's horizon when Gohan and his brother could finally make out its borders from the mess of mountains and dried trees of the sprawling landscape in front of them.

Gohan could not say if he was relieved or disheartened by the sight of it, really.

Beside him, Goten was pressing his fingers into the fluffy golden mass of the Nimbus cloud and picking out bits of it like blades of grass from the dirt. They had not spoken to one another for the entire journey from Capsule Corporation, and Gohan had taken the opportunity to get lost in his thoughts.

"Hey, Gohan?" Goten asked, and the rest of his mumbling was lost to the roar of the air whizzing by their ears. In fact, his older brother almost did not realize he was being addressed at all.

"What?" Gohan asked, landing on the back of the Nimbus cloud and pulling his little brother into his lap so he could hear him over the wind.

"I was asking if Dende was mad at you," Goten said. "You didn't say much when you came back down from the Lookout, and Korin said something weird when Piccolo mentioned that you two were talking."

"Oh," Gohan said. He ruffled his brother's hair. "No. He's not mad."

"Then, are you mad?" Goten asked. "Mad at Dende?"

"No, Goten," Gohan told him.

"Oh," the little boy said. "Well, that's good, because best friends aren't s'posed to be mad at each other. Trunks was mad at me two weeks ago, and I was mad at Trunks, and it was awful."

Gohan ran his fingers through his brother's locks and straightened them back out. "Yeah."

"Hey, Gohan?" Goten asked.

"Mm-hmm?"

Goten turned around and peered into his brother's face, like he was trying to look through it and see inside of Gohan's mind. He screwed his mouth into a twisted line and focused, and then finally shook his head. "Never mind," he said.

"What?" Gohan pried.

"Nothin'."

"C'mon, what?"

Goten started talking with his hands, and then laced them together when he realized that they were not saying anything. "You got that look on your face. The one you get where you say one thing, but you're thinking about saying something else."

"I…" Gohan licked his lips. "What do you mean?"

"You were wearing it a second ago," Goten said. "You said Dende wasn't mad at you and you weren't mad at Dende, but you had a look like there's more to it than just that."

"Well, Goten, there is, but that doesn't mean we're mad at each other. I didn't think it was something you needed to be concerned with."

The little boy sat up straighter. "But I'm your brother and I don't want you to be sad, so you should tell me!"

Gohan sized up the child in his lap, and then smiled. "Thank you, squirt." He mussed Goten's hair again.

The little boy brightened. "So tell me!"

"Huh?"

"Tell me what's bothering you. You gotta tell me so I can tell you how to fix it, like you and mom always do for me!"

Gohan laughed despite himself. "I appreciate that, but I don't really have much to say. It's just that a lot has been happening lately, and I need some time to, um, take it all in."

His little brother pouted at him. "Really?"

"Really really." Gohan said.

Goten's eyes bore holes into his brother at first, but then he abandoned his prying and turned around to face forwards again. He slowly relaxed against his brother's stomach.

Gohan was not lying- he was not mad at Dende. No, he was angry at himself for how little he really understood about the situation he found himself in, and how selfish his frame of mind had been for the past seven years. As Goten had inadvertently pointed out, Dende was Gohan's best friend- and in all this time, he had never even known why the Namek became Guardian in the first place!

Gohan barely knew anything about anything!

He wondered if, by returning to the Ox Kingdom and leaving the Lookout, he was running away from an obligation to stay with Dende. Or, if he returned to the Lookout, would he be running away from the responsibilities of his family and inheritance? Had leaving school been a necessity, either, or cowardice? Gohan could not tell. Obligations and expectations, both falsely perceived and legitimately confirmed, swirled together in a mess inside his skull.

The sun settled lower behind the horizon. Goten yawned.

Truth be told, Gohan was most frightened by the prospect of an inevitable marriage. The whole idea was strange- he was royalty, legally sixteen, not human, and had no clue how to attract or take care of someone else in the first place, or share his life with them when he was already trying to break it up between his brother and his mother and everyone else he knew.

Perhaps he could talk his mother out of imposing that upon him, at least until he was older.

In his lap, Goten stirred. "I want Trunks to be okay, and for Uncle Vegeta to be okay."

"Me too," Gohan said.

Gohan nodded off a little more deeply. "Maybe he'll give that Senzu bean to his dad tonight."

"Yeah, maybe he-" Gohan sat his brother up and whirled him around to face him. "Senzu bean? Trunks took a Senzu bean from Korin?"

His little brother groggily nodded. "Yeah. Why?"

Gohan felt himself pale. "Goten, I'm gonna drop you off and then go back to the Briefs', so I probably won't be here in the morning. Okay?"

"Do you not want Uncle Vegeta to get up, either? Is it because of the things you said he used to do?"

Gohan realized he did not know how to answer that. "I just want to be there when he does wake up," he decided. "Everything will be okay."

Goten frowned. "Well, I wanna come, too!"

"No," his big brother said. "Not this time."

"But-!"

"I said no, Goten. Don't argue with me."

"Gohan!" His brother begged.

"Goten!" The voice that came out of Gohan's mouth reminded him of his father's from long, long ago, on the eve of Namek's destruction. It was full of something ugly, something that slept in Gohan's core that he himself tried to pretend was not there.

The little boy cowered.

Gohan dropped back down to a softer tone. "I said no."

His little brother nodded, and then made his new seat on the front of the Nimbus and out of Gohan's lap.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"Wear white," Sevoya's father had said, tears falling down his face. "Your mother always loved seeing you in white, and you and I are still alive. The world has gone on another day. And black is hardly the color for a celebration, you know?"

The citizens of Orange Star City could care less that Sevoya and her father were carrying the corpse of a woman and child through the streets- the dead were rising all over the world, or so the news said. Soon, it would be the Anillo family's turn to see their dear departed arise anew.

Mysteriously, though, this was not the case. Mana and Juna Anillo stayed as dead as they had been since the moment Sevoya had found them in the bedroom.

She burst out of the funeral home in a fit of despair after a day and a half of waiting for a miracle that never came. Her father followed after her, panicked, but she eluded him by throwing herself headlong into the crowds celebrating Hercule Satan's victory.

The throngs of people outside in the throes of celebration swallowed her whole and pushed her through their ranks until she was even more lost than she had ever hoped to be.

A drunken man tried to grab her, and then threw her down when he realized she was not who he thought she was. Someone else tried to hoist her over their shoulders despite her protests, and when she finally escaped from them and the parade of painted, overly enthusiastic faces that followed after, she came face to face with a replica of Cell being burst apart by a blindfolded woman with a bat in her hands. More people shoved into Sevoya, and suddenly rain was coming down hard instead of just candy.

Two figures got into a fight over whatever was in the piñata's head. One of them slipped and bowled into the other, and the ensuing chaos between the two of them developed into a full-scale brawl.

Sevoya scrambled away, in search of somewhere dry and without so many people. Suddenly, she slipped on the water-slicked ground and fell onto her face. As she struggled to her feet, her vision blurred and with something wet running down her temple, she became more and more frantic to find an escape from the swirl of indiscernible color and sound blocking her path in every direction. People reached out to touch her in ways she knew were not accidental. Some screamed at her, probably out of joy at the festivities, but sounded like banshees to her ears. Liquor and bodily fluid covered the streets and splashed on her shoes and hair along with confetti and the torrential rain. A woman pulled her hair for looking so gloomy. Another man vomited on her.

Sevoya finally, finally fell headlong into an island of sanity amidst the sea of people. She pulled herself up off her hands and knees and marveled at how, in this one spot, it was somehow dry.

Then she looked up, and realized that she was not alone.

A boy about her age- with hair deeper than the night and eyes to match- held a black umbrella over both of their heads.

He shifted the bouquet of white lilies he held in his other hand so that it rested in the crook of his arm. Then, he helped Sevoya to her feet.

The two of them stood there, side by side, and watched the people of Orange Star throw themselves wholeheartedly at the task of making merriment because of a postponed apocalypse.

Sevoya examined her savior a little closer. His suit was pressed to perfection and fit for a funeral, unlike her soiled white dress, and he even held a snowy bouquet in his hands.

"Where do you live?" The boy asked.

"The..." Sevoya found that words could not come easy to her right now. "The Lucky Egg. On the perimeter of the city's commercial district."

The boy nodded. "Can you show me the way?"

Sevoya peeked out from the edge of the umbrella and tried to orient herself. "Uh… yeah," she said, "I think… I think I know how to go."

"If you'll lead, I'll follow with the umbrella," he offered.

She took the mourning boy's hand more to steady herself than anything else, and clumsily lead them both in the direction of her home. The umbrella worked wonders at deflecting people and parting the crowds large enough for two children to slip through, and Sevoya was intensely grateful.

The walk was long. How long, Sevoya could not say, but she and the mourning boy said nothing as they braved the crowded streets and finally stood before the Lucky Egg, which looked just as drenched and soiled by human overenthusiasm as Sevoya herself did. The words "unbelieving heretics" and other, uglier words were sprayed upon the facade, accompanied by signatures and gang tags in an urban rainbow of spray paint colors.

"Are you okay to go in by yourself?" The boy asked.

Sevoya nodded stupidly and headed towards the door. "Do… you want to come in?" She asked him.

The boy shook his head. "I need to go," he said. "These flowers are a gift for someone, and I need to make sure they get delivered." The boy in black quietly bowed and began to take his leave once Sevoya had opened the front door to her home.

"Hey," he said suddenly, turning to face her. "Please don't look so sad." He smiled. "Don't let all of this scare you. Tomorrow's a brand new day. Nobody can take that away from you anymore, or ever again. And yesterday never comes twice, either, you know."

Sevoya nodded dumbly.

The boy smiled again, and left just as suddenly as he had appeared.

That had been Sevoya's first meeting with Son Gohan.

He was like a ghost- a specter of hope and goodwill she never realized she had needed- and Sevoya had resigned herself to never seeing him again, until she saw him two years later in her restaurant, with a baby boy slung on his shoulders, and then again in the classroom across from her own.

She wanted to know who he mourned for, and what he thought about the world after the Apocalypse, and how it made him feel. Sevoya wanted to know what kind of person could even try to comfort someone else about death when it already surrounded them, wholly and fully.

Sevoya closed her locket shut again. She was going to find Gohan before he was pulled away forever, and she was going to ask him all the things she had been unable to broach with him before. What came after that, she did not know, but she at least wanted to do that much.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Author's Note:

For whatever reason, my phone can only upload about 3,000 words per document. Chapters will sometimes be in shorter parts for space reasons. As always, thank you for reading and than you even more to those of you who leave feedback. :)