"Gohan?"
The words were clear and hazy all at the same time. He could make out the sounds well enough, but his mind could not assign meaning to them.
"Gohan, what's wrong?"
There it was again, that voice. What was it telling him? Was it just nonsense? No, no, the words were real. They were real, and they had a point. What was it they meant? It was all such a blur. There was pressure on his shoulder, a familiar one he could not identify. Why was it there? It was not a threat, was it? No, not a threat. His body reacted automatically to threats, and his body was not reacting at all. Therefore, there was no threat. But if his body was as unresponsive as his mind, could he trust it?
"Sit. I'm just going to get the door, then I'll be back."
Sit. He recognized that one. He could handle that. Who was talking to him again?
Something was in his hand. He could tell that much. It was cool and curved...a glass, that was it. Everything was still such a blur. Nothing seemed to make sense. A bit here, a piece there, but nothing was coming together wholly. What had happened? Everything was still such a blur.
"Drink."
Drink. An action. One that took more effort than 'sit' had. How was drinking done? Oh, right. Raise glass to mouth, bring liquid in, swallow, lower glass. Try not to breathe when swallowing is supposed to happen. Something bad happens. Something bad...what was it? Something bad, that was all he had. Don't breathe, swallow.
"Try a little more."
More? Oh, the drink. More from the drink. Okay, raise glass to mouth again, draw liquid in, swallow, lower glass. That was not so hard. It was simple. Easy. Controllable.
"Good. Good."
Good? That one was different. Not an action, no. Good was...good was...what was it? What was good?
"Gohan?"
Someone was talking to him. Who was it?
"Gohan, are you okay?"
Why did that seem so familiar? The words were there. What did they mean? Everything was hazy. Had he heard that before? Was he supposed to know what they meant? Was he supposed to be doing something? Yes, doing something. He was supposed to be doing something. Something important. Very important. He had to do it. He had to take action, had to get it done.
What was it?
Where was he?
"Gohan?"
Everything was such a blur...
Piccolo silently watched from the corner as Goten tried to get a reaction from his brother. His communications with his former pupil had been sparse in recent years, in part due to Gohan's ever crammed schedule and in part a genuine lack of interest the Namekian held for many of the things Gohan seemed interested in. He did not get particularly excited when his protégé talked about the human body, and simply staying remotely tuned in was near impossible when relationships were brought up. Having neither a human body, nor any inclination toward romance, Piccolo had just not seen the need to regularly go down for a chat.
As he stood there, though, he wondered how they had all missed the signs for so long. Gohan had seemed stressed, but it was Gohan. The boy had seemed stressed since the first time they had met over thirty years earlier. It simply seemed to be his natural state. And it was difficult to claim that Gohan had ever had a life that could have been called easy. After all, he had been forced to survive alone before his fifth birthday, and was a seasoned fighter before the age of six. As long as Gohan had been there, he had shouldered responsibilities that would have crushed someone twice his age and experience level.
Somehow that had always seemed somehow right. A burdened Gohan was the normal Gohan. It was expected by everyone that Gohan could deal with anything thrown at him. One way or another, he always had. And any time it had seemed like he needed help, they had seen it and helped him and he had been fine.
Up until that day, that was what they had all believed.
They had been dead wrong.
Goten had his brother try to take more water, but Gohan was no longer responding to the prompts. The glass went up, and with Goten's help it was tilted. Without Gohan responding, though, the liquid ended up sliding off his lips and down his face, tiny droplets running off his chin and down to his lap.
Goten cursed mildly as he pulled the glass back, trying in vain to catch the water. The glass was quickly put aside. "Okay, okay, that's enough for now."
Gohan offered no response, his unfocused gaze leaving all around him disturbed.
"Damn it, Dad, knock it off!" Bra grunted, ducking away from her father. "I told you, I'm fine!"
But Vegeta remained unconvinced. "If you truly are not injured," he growled, "then you would not be keeping me from seeing it. Now stand still!"
"No." The teenager tried to get out of the room, but she found herself very quickly caught between her father and her brother.
Trunks wrapped his arms around her torso, grunting as she thrashed. "Your jaw started bruising before we left the office and your speech has been slurring. You're hurt!"
Bra drove her heel backwards into her brother's knee, and took advantage of his loosened grip and flipped her way to temporary freedom. It was a fleeting victory, though, as her father grabbed her and pinned her to the floor.
"Stay. Still. Now."
Bra frowned, but she complied. That tone that the time for play and negotiation was long since over, and his temper was at its end. A part of her understood his mood. After all she was his child, she had been struck, and her attacker had been one of the few beings on the planet with the power to do real damage to her. She was a teenager, though, and a stubborn one at that. Her temper had a reputation all its own, and it took great resistance on her part to do as she was told.
As her father carefully inspected the damage, her brother glared down at her, his hands on his hips. "Just what the hell were you thinking?" He demanded. "Do you really have any idea at all what you just did?"
"Succeeded in pissing you off?" she snipped from the floor. Her father reprimanded her for speaking during inspection, and while unhappy about it, Bra did as she was told.
Trunks was far from amused. "You don't even get it, do you? You have no damn idea what you've done."
The teenager did not appreciate the tone. "You're the one who doesn't get it," she fought back.
"You pushed Gohan over the edge!" There was no holding back the fury in her big brother's voice, and Bra found herself finally keeping quiet as he yelled. "You pushed him that one god damned step too far! You actually made him snap! Damn it, Bra, you broke him!"
"He was already broken!" Her roar was powerful and dripped with defiance. Her father had already released her from inspection, but she ignored his frown as she pushed on. "He's been broken for a long time, but none of you could bother noticing!"
Trunks' entire stance changed. "What are you saying?"
Bra grazed a knuckle over her wound. "Goten's seen it for a while, but he couldn't think of anything he could do about it. I mean, it's friggin' Gohan. He can't hear you if you say you're worried about him."
"He never said anything..." Trunks could not stop that small feeling of betrayal as he realized what his best friend had not told him. "Why wouldn't he tell me?"
Bra rolled her eyes. "What would you have done?" She sincerely asked him. "You've been putting up with Gohan longer than I have. You know damn well that he has to pretend everything is okay. If Goten told you he was worried about Gohan, what would you have done?"
"I could have been there for him!" Her brother shot back. "I could have listened to him! And damn it, even if Gohan is stuck in his own head, I could have tried to get through to him!"
"And do you know how that would have ended?" the teen refuted. "You and Gohan would have gotten in a fist fight, you'd be ten times as injured as I am, and Gohan would have doubled up how hard he tried to keep us out."
"Speaking of injuries," their father interrupted, "I must say I am impressed that you are speaking with such clarity. You've definitely got a fractured jaw. Not a hard break, but enough of one where I would assume that the act of speaking would cause significant pain."
A tired chuckle came from the doorway. "You know you're a member of this family when a broken jaw isn't close to enough to shut you up," Bulma said as she entered.
Trunks took several steps toward his mother. "Any word?"
Another tired exhalation came from the heiress. "Nothing you're hoping for. Goten sent a message a minute ago. Apparently Piccolo and Dende are in there with him right now, but he's still largely unresponsive." She shook her head. "I wish there was something we could do, but we're all out of our league here."
No one argued with her.
/
"How's he doing?" Goten softly asked. He felt his heart sink as Piccolo shook his head. "I knew it was a long shot, but I hoped…" There was no need to finish the thought, though. Everyone was already there. It had been hours since the incident, but no one was any closer to helping Gohan than they had been before. "So what are our options?"
Dende sighed and took a seat, signaling for Goten to follow suit. The young man swallowed hard as he did so. In his experience, such things never meant anything good. "Goten," the young guardian softly explained, "this is not something any of us are well versed in. We can only theorize right now, and it sounds like our theories are similar to the ones you had when you were becoming concerned for him. We all know that Gohan takes on everyone else's burdens as though they were his own, and in all the years I've known him, he has never done well with reaching out for help."
Goten nodded along. It was nothing new to any of them, but he could formulate no other response.
"I think, as I'm fairly certain you do, that the stress and pressure of everything that has been building up caused him to push others away even more," Dende went on. "That ended up making Videl take action, which really was the final push."
"What about what Bra did?" Goten pushed. "I thought she was the one that pushed him at the end."
But Dende shook his head. "No, I don't think so," he disagreed. "If anything, Bra should be thanked for her actions. Goten, I think Gohan was on the verge of this break already. The only thing Bra really did was make sure that when the break happened, he was focused on someone who could take it. Imagine how ugly it could have been if the person who had said something that provoked him was entirely human."
The young man grimaced at the thought. Bra paled in comparison to Gohan in power to the point where it was almost laughable. But she had taken his blow, and the strength of her Saiyan structure held up enough for her to walk away. If one of the humans had taken the same shot, they would have been lucky to have been more than just a smear on the wall. "She did this on purpose?"
"More than likely," Dende agreed. "As strange as it may seem to say this, I believe that this was her controlling a situation before it became uncontrollable."
"Why the hell wouldn't she say anything about it to me, though?" a frustrated Goten shot back. "Why wouldn't she tell me about this?"
The guardian offered a simple shrug. "No one can say why exactly anyone does anything, and in my experience, it is even harder to predict anything from that particular family. But if forced to wager a guess, I would say it was probably an attempt to protect you. After all, what would you have said if you had known?"
Goten huffed and folded his arms over his chest. "Are you always this reasonable?"
"Usually," Dende affirmed. "Though it does seem to annoy people. Even on Namek…"
"Gee, you don't say?"
Dende smirked. "And are you usually a smart mouth?"
"Usually," the young man agreed. "Though I'm usually next to Trunks, so mine usually doesn't seem so bad."
With a laugh, Dende poured two glasses of water for them. "Speaking of Trunks," he asked, "why have you not confided in him about the troubles until now?"
Automatically Goten accepted the glass as it was pushed across the table to him. "I didn't think there was anything he could do about it."
"But you told his sister?" Dende asked, sipping his own drink.
Goten sighed. "I didn't think she could do anything about it either, but I thought she would be smart enough to not try anything. I knew damn well that if I told Trunks there was a problem, he would jump in head first to try to fix it, even if there wasn't a solution. I don't know, I guess I thought Bra had more common sense. Guessed wrong on that one, huh?"
"Perhaps," Dende agreed with a smirk. "It escapes me, though, why you would think that Bra would try to protect you any less than Trunks would. I have witnessed many things as the guardian of Earth, but rarely do I get to see the level of devotion that those two have for you."
Goten took another sip of water. "Are you aware of the difference between devotion and insanity?"
Softly chuckling, Dende replied, "Are you aware that sometimes there is only a thin line between those two things?"
"Yeah, yeah." The demi-Saiyan sighed again. "How can I help my brother, Dende?"
With the topic back on the issue, all sense of humor left the young guardian. "Goten," he quietly explained, "the type of help your brother needs right now is a kind that we might not be able to offer him here."
"Then where do I take him?" Goten asked quickly. "Who can help him? What can I do?"
Dende frowned. He reached out and gently placed a hand on Goten's. "There isn't anywhere that would be safe right now, Goten. There are people trained to help people like this, but they would not be safe with him as he is. I know you are looking for another answer, but right now, I do not have one."
That was not an answer Goten could accept. "So what do we do?"
"I don't know."
"Not good enough," Goten aggressively returned. "How do I help my brother?"
"Goten…"
"How do I help my brother?" A dark throat cleared behind him, and Goten did not need to turn to know who was standing there. "Everything's under control, Piccolo."
The older warrior sneered slightly. "Control is not the sentiment you are expressing right now."
"Piccolo, it's okay," Dende assured. "Goten might be a little high strung right now, but I promise you, neither of us is in danger."
"Forgive me for being alert to such things."
"Piccolo," Dende pressed again, "I understand why you are wary, and I understand you are far from at ease. You are in grief right now over Gohan. I do understand that. Please understand for me, then, that Goten is not in the same place as Gohan. Goten is reaching out. Yes, he is frustrated, just as we all are. Gohan is a dear friend and brother to us all. This is difficult for all of us to deal with. But please do not displace these frustrations onto Goten. He has done nothing wrong."
The seasoned warrior said nothing, opting to quietly back up slightly. He was not entirely convinced of Goten's stability.
Dende, however, had full confidence. "We are okay here. Please, go back to Gohan." It was not often that the young guardian dared to command Piccolo, but when he did he did not back down. Exuding traits not often displayed in him, he kept steely eyes on his mentor until completely out of line of sight. "I apologize, Goten."
The young man cringed slightly. "No, I'm sorry. I wasn't really keeping calm, was I?"
"Perhaps not," Dende agreed. "But really, why should you be? If anything, I am happy to see you emotionally invested at the level you are. It seems healthy to me."
"Thanks." Goten took a moment to drain the remaining liquid from his drink. "So now what?"
The other glass was pushed along the table as Dende lowered his eyes to it. "I wish I had something I could tell you," he admitted. "I really do. I am sorry, Goten, but right now, I am about as lost as you are."
