It's cold, and everything was so loud, but not the kind of loud the boy next to him had been before they had been put to sleep; it was loud without actually making a sound, and so there was nothing he could break or cover or do to make it stop. Also, something long and thin was shoved in the side of his mouth and down his throat. It was uncomfortable and awkward, and the frustration of it all made him want to scream! So he did, and then, when his voice alone was not enough, he flailed his body indiscriminately. The earth rumbled as he thrashed. He screeched louder and pulled at the thing in his mouth because it was uncomfortable, and he hated it, he hated it, he didn't know what was happening and he hated it, and when the annoying object snapped off in half his hands, he screamed louder and louder until he gagged and the rest of it came up.
It was a small and clear plastic tube. He screamed at it and slammed his fist into it. The resulting crater wasn't satisfying enough, and it was still cold, and that noise-but-not-noise was reverberating all over him and funnelling its way into his head to box his brain, so he slammed himself into the ground harder and harder to make it stop. Instead, pieces of rock from above him rained down and shattered on his shoulders. It didn't hurt- in fact, he barely felt it at all- but it wasn't what he wanted, and he was hungry and cranky and scared and everything is dark and he hated it, he hated it, he hated it, HE HATED IT!
He smashed his arms into the ground, and it opened around him in a network of narrow, jagged slits. A cavalcade of cracking assaulted his ears from all sides as the world began shaking even more violently than before.
He screamed and smashed and smashed and screamed until the ceiling caved in on him, and then he tore into the rubble until he drew hot, glowing, red-orange blood from the earth that burned him, and he hated it! He wailed into the night and thrashed until his voice failed him and he forgot why he was even screaming, just that he needed to keep screaming.
Eventually, the heat of his tantrum faded away and left him strewn about amongst the dirt and ash and icy, scattered stars in the sky above. The ground had stopped bleeding and was scanning over, and so now he was cold again. Worse, he didn't know where he was. He didn't know why he was there. He didn't know what that strange feeling of energy beating at him was, and he didn't know how to make it stop.
The wind was loud and laced with ice, and it assaulted his exposed body without mercy. He laid down, wrapped his arms, legs, and tail around himself, and shivered pitifully.
He curled into an even tighter ball and cried and cried and cried like the boy next to him used to do in the pod nursery until he felt something small and warm on his shoulder.
He jumped and twisted around to and find a puffy coat with a girl wrapped inside of it, her white hair almost as pale as her face and trembling hands.
Cautiously, she held out something covered in short fuzz towards him. He shrank away from it at first, but then, finally, he took it. Something about this girl was very soothing, even though he could see the whites of her eyes flaring out at him like the scientists on the outside of his pod's used to do when they were scared of him. He held the thing in front of his chest. It stopped the wind from blowing so hard on his hands. He decided he liked it.
When the girl took it back, he complained, but then she draped it around his shoulders and put the edges of it in his hands to hold. Like that, the cold was a little less. He pulled it tighter around himself.
Then, the girl took his hand and tugged on it. She wanted him to follow her. He tried, and then stumbled and fell. He had never walked before. He had never even stood up before.
So he tried again and again, and eventually, he got it.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Pieces of the palace fell away in chunks from the side of the mountain and into the mouth of the caldera like a star being sucked away into a black hole. A jet of fire shot out of the earth to punctuate its landing and herald more destruction like the cries of the damned as their judgement literally fell upon them.
Chi Chi scrambled up the other mountain far on the other side of the valley, still in her pajamas and with an elderly woman on her back. Close behind was Videl carrying an old man, and her father toting an elderly couple on his shoulders. Behind them was a stream of able-bodied villagers carrying whoever or whatever they could, and then Thalia bringing up the rear with her second load of miscellaneous odds and ends from the village strapped on her back and trailing behind her like a sled. Once they came to a level spot, Chi Chi took the opportunity to rest and take stock of the situation.
"How many're left down there?!" she cried, her voice dry and rough. "And where's Sevoya and Goten?"
" I don't know, and I don't know where Sevoya is, but Goten went back down to try and get his brother," Videl answered.
"What?!" Chi Chi pulled down the damp scarf covering her mouth and screeched. "And you didn't stop him?!"
"How exactly was I supposed to stop your superpowered son?!" Videl stood her ground and let the other villagers pass her. Chi Chi conceded that Videl definitely had a point, but she wasn't happy about it.
"What about Sevoya?!"
"I don't know!" Videl said. Sweat plastered her hair to her face and glistened from her forehead. "I'm not exactly all-powerful, you know! I can't even carry someone and fly at the same time yet! I'd try and sense her energy, but I can't tell who anyone is with that thing," she thrust her head towards the single glowing point sitting aloft above the cloud of smoke and ash settling over the mountain like the Red Boy himself watching as the Monkey King smothered in flame, "churning out energy like some kind of cataclysmic natural disaster made of ki! Gohan's the one to ask that question. Where is he?!"
In the sky, churning out energy like some kind of cataclysmic natural disaster made of ki, but this wasn't the time to tell Videl that.
If Chi Chi was being honest with herself, the poor girl didn't deserve to get roped into any of this. Neither of them did. Still, they were in it together, now.
Chi Chi replaced her scarf and soldiered higher up the mountain. "Get these folks at least to the top," she barked out. "Then, we can see if-" she turned around and, suddenly, a man descended from the air in front of her like a being from another world.
He had part of his shirt over his face and a rice hat tied around his neck, but his third eye gave him away. He wasn't exactly Chi Chi's idea of an angel sent from heaven to save her, but he'd have to do.
"What happened?!" Tienshinhan exclaimed. "Why is Gohan doing this?!"
That idiot. And people said Chi Chi was a blabbermouth.
"Gohan?!" Both Satans exclaimed. "That's Gohan?! And who are you?!"
"What?" said the old woman on Mark Satan's shoulder. "Go home? But we can't- it's on fire!"
Chi Chi ignored them. "Don't just startle me like that and then stand there and gawk!" she scolded Tienshinhan. "Go get the rest of the villagers and my youngest, before he does something stupid!"
"Youngest?" Tienshinhan blinked, all three eyes at once. "I thought you only had the one-!"
Chi Chi got in his face. "He looks just like Goku, spiky hair and everything. You can't miss him!" she said. "Now go, 'fore I lose my patience and make you do somethin' even more dangerous!"
"Take me, too!" Videl volunteered, setting down her passenger.
"VIdel!" Her father balked.
"I'm trained to evacuate people from fires," she said. "I can help you! Sevoya might still be stuck in the remaining part of the palace!"
Thalia caught up to them and paused in her ascent up the mountain. "She's not in there. There's nothing any of us can do about that." Then, oddly, she bowed to Tienshinhan. Why she would choose to bow to a musclebound, reclusive, hairless hermit she just met was anybody's guess. "I'm honored to meet you."
Mark Satan turned white and shook Thalia by her shoulders, much to the dismay of his two passengers, who were shaken as well. "Did she fall in?! Did you see her?!"
"No," said Thalia, pointing to the sky. "But I know she's there."
"In heaven?" Mark Satan started to tear up. "She was so young!"
"No, you afroed idiot! There!" Thalia pointed emphatically at the bright splotch of white-gold sitting above the ruined palace. "With the Sundr- with glowy thing!"
"Huh?" Said Mark Satan. His makeshift blue chiffon face mask rustled over his lips at least disguised his open-mouthed bewilderment to a more bearable level rather than leaving it exposed for the world to suffer through. "I thought that guy said that was Gohan?"
"It is Gohan," Thalia clarified. "He has Sevoya with him. Or, well, he did. I can't sense her anymore, but that could just be because of the situation. Although," she turned to Chi Chi, "he doesn't have full control of himself when he gets like this, right? That's what it sounded like when we spoke."
"What?" said Videl.
"What I mean is, he only transforms into a Sundrop Child when he's out for blood."
Videl gawked. "He…? Blood...?"
In that moment, the world was vivid and vague all at once. Son Chi Chi saw red. How dare this Thalia partake in her family's hospitality, after everything she had caused, and say something like that. How dare she imply that her son was a murderer. How dare-!
Tienshinhan stepped in front of Chi Chi. "You," he said to Thalia. "You will go with me to find Gohan's little brother, not the girl."
Thalia blinked. "Huh? And enter into the thick of Ground Zero?! Are you kidding?! The last time I was around Son Gohan when he transformed, he almost killed me in cold blood! He might be civil to me now, on the surface, but he hates me! I can't get near him while he's like this! I'll make it worse!"
Tienshinhan's three eyes betrayed no emotion. "Maybe. Maybe not. But unlike that girl, I don't think anybody here would miss you if anything did happen to you."
Thalia smiled, almost, and slowly replaced her Monkey King mask over her face. "You're probably right about that."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
The tunnel connecting the Circle complex to the sleeping Goliath's chamber had been utterly destroyed when the gargantuan man had awoken and split fissures into the earth, and most of the underground complex was likewise warped and caved in. However, the main meditation chamber remained mostly intact and structurally sound, and so the Circle hid inside of it like a hermit crab in the remnants of a shattered, sea-worn shell.
Every scrap of food and drink that the Circle could salvage from the aftermath of the disaster sat in a pile in the center of the room at the side of a bewildered, starved, human-shaped creature nearly twice the height of an average man and with long hair and eyes, both so dark that they did not actually have a color. His hands were large enough to hold a man's skull in their grip and powerful enough to crush it, and he squeezed a winter melon apart in his hand as if to prove it before holding it up to his face and cramming the contents into his mouth, rind and all. His odd, furry tail peeked out from under the blanket he had draped over his body and flicked back and forth with no real rhythm as he got on his hands and knees and crawled closer to the pile of food.
Calliope tapped out a signal to the frightened Circle members standing at attention around their strange guest. "Make sure you open all the bags and cans before he gets to them. Don't let him swallow any packaging by accident."
After some hesitation, the Circle members moved towards the food and began to do as she asked. The tailed man complained at first, but then quickly understood when one of the terrified Circle members- Kalamatianos, called Kala- fearfully thrust the opened food into his face and inadvertently ended up feeding him by hand.
"He's like a giant baby," another one of the Circle, a girl named Sirtaki, remarked. Sirtaki had brown skin and jet black hair that Calliope had always loved to braid. "Except he… he eats everything!"
Exactly like a baby, Calliope agreed. The giant could neither speak nor understand object permanence. Calliope had left him in the room alone when they had first arrived, and he had panicked until someone had entered his line of sight again.
Sirtaki handed Kala a cured ham, who then offered it at arm's length to their huge guest. The giant man sniffed it, and then took a bite out of the side of it with a guttural noise of pleased surprise. He snatched it out of Kalamatianos' hand and put the whole thing in his mouth, bone and all.
Sirtaki was quick to slap the giant on the back when he started choking, and luckily the crisis of his untimely suffocation by bone was averted.
Calliope's teacher stood on the outskirts of the scene with the stillness of a statue and the inner turmoil of an expressionist painting. "Calliope," he whispered from between the fingers clamped over his mouth. "Why did you do this? Why did you bring him here, of all places?!"
"He'll get aggravated if he senses your Inner Flame fluctuating like that," Calliope told him. "He can feel your fear."
Terpsichore closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and began reciting the same song he always did when he got like this.
Her teacher had wisely evacuated everyone prior to the collapse, but twenty Circle members had been injured by the destruction above ground, and three of them Calliope really thought might die without something more practiced than Terpsichore's offhand medical knowledge and muscle health expertise. Food was now an issue. Shelter was now an issue, too, and sacrificing either to a strange, unpredictable juggernaut was not the logical thing to do. But there was nothing they could really do about it right now, except hope that the town of Jingle was intact and friendly enough to offer any resources.
So, while her teacher had alternated between organizing a recovery effort and controlling his anxiety and wildly discharging Inner Flame when nobody was looking, Calliope had instead decided to find and silence the creature who had caused such destruction in the first place- at least, the creature closest to her. Son Gohan's malevolence still rang out from somewhere in the distance like a hateful siren echoing across a far away ocean, beckoning for something he could destroy. It prickled at her skin and made her hair stand on end, but at least she was not nauseous anymore.
What she had expected the giant in front of her to be like, she did not know, but obviously not like this. In retrospect, it was probably better this way- Calliope had no business killing anyone or anything, nor was she particularly keen on making it her business, either.
The giant snatched an unopened can of corn from Sirtaki and popped off the lid with his thumb and forefinger as easily as removing a piece from a chessboard, and then dumped the contents into his own mouth. Kala still had to show him how to open the following bag of potato chips, though.
What were they going to do if he was still hungry after he ate everything they had?
Terpsichore averted his face. "I'm going to check if the telephone lines are back up," he said. "I need to speak with Erato."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Gohan's eyes glowed like two twin moons to replace the one that was hiding from the sky, and burned with a hatred that was not focused on the outside world, but inside him, and in the past. He sought something to destroy, something to use to pull whatever was stabbed in his side out of himself and sacrifice it in the name of his wrath, but there was nothing to hit, nothing to mutilate, nothing there that was actually causing his anger. He so full, and he had nothing there to empty his pain into.
Or, that is what his emotions told Dende, who used Sevoya's mouth to try and talk him back to the present.
"Gohan," he said, "It's okay. Can you hear me?"
Gohan's cold, green-white eyes leered down at him like he was an uncaring and distant god, like the supreme rulers of the universe written about in Dende's scrolls that never spoke a word to him in his times of need.
"Gohan," Dende repeated. "If you can hear me, please tell me your name."
It took an eternity drenched in glowing gold, but eventually, he said, "Son Gohan." He growled it like it was an inconvenience.
"Good," said Dende.
"I'm not an idiot," snarled Gohan, his sharpened features even more predatory than before when the white bite of his incisors shone beneath his lips.
Dende smiled weakly, and realized that Sevoya had been crying just before he had taken over her body. He wanted to cry, too. Dende made up his mind to meet her someday, face-to-face, and apologize. "Of course not," he said to Gohan. "I would never think that. Do you know where we are?"
The light of his power flickered, for a moment. "...No."
"That is okay," said Dende, and he used Sevoya's hands to bury his fingers into the red of Gohan's clothing. The embroidery sparkled in the light like real flames, like the images of fire sewn across his body had become real. "We're in the air above Fire Mountain."
Gohan's eyes searched him, and then something that wasn't anger sparked behind them. "You aren't Sevoya."
Dende shook his head. "No. But this is her body. I am Dende. Is that familiar to you?"
Gohan, still caught up in the latent aftermath of his rage, took longer to answer than Dende would have liked. "Yes."
"I am glad," he said. "Can I touch you?"
"What are you going to do?"
"Touch your face," said Dende, "if that is okay."
"No," said Gohan. "I'm too angry for that."
Dende swallowed and nodded. "Alright. Alright. Do you think- that is, is it okay- if we go to that mountain over there and lower back on the ground? There shouldn't be any ash in the air over there, and it will not be so hot.
Slowly, carefully, Gohan looked between Dende and the mountain. "There are other people there. I don't want to talk to them."
"You do not have to," Dende soothed. "Not now."
Gohan thought about it, and then eventually did as Dende suggested. The heat clawing at their legs faded away and a cool breeze of the night took its place, playing with the edges of their robes and Sevoya's bare feet. The raw energy radiating off Gohan's body pulsed and passed through Dende like a heartbeat that could pierce his body.
Somewhere between the two mountains, Gohan remembered himself with a gasp and almost dropped Dende. The white-gold cast of his hair left him like an ember extinguishing from a stone, and the two of them fell down as if through water to the bottom of a lake- but Gohan caught them both in the air halfway and wrapped himself around Dende.
"What have I done?!" he cried. "I never meant- I never meant for any of this! Dende, what do I do?! How many people- how many people's lives have I managed to ruin?! I thought it was the right thing- I thought it was over, if I just did whatever it took to kill him!" He started to wail, and his energy returned, less than before, in an anguished yellow spiral before it snuffed back out again. "What do I do now?! I don't know what to do! I don't know how to exist with the rest of this world!" His hands buried into Dende's back, and he shuddered. "Dende, I thought I was doing the right thing but I've somehow managed to ruin absolutely everything! Why?! Why am I always such a failure?! Why?!"
"You are not a failure," said Dende, running Sevoya's fingers through his hair and pulling him closer. "You are not. You are doing your best." Then, "I believe in you absolutely, Gohan. I would not be here if I did not."
The two of them touched the ground gently, like a leaf hitting the ground in the fall, and with their arms still around one another. Gohan wept bitterly, his new tail trembling in the darkness in the absence of the moon like a newborn left to fend for itself in the wilderness.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Thank you for reading! This is technically the second half of the last chapter but, again, I can only upload about 3,000ish words at a time on mobile. I'm also in a hurry right now, so I'm not gonna worry about my italics and such.
...Yeah, so Broly is... essentially a child. Just like he canon Broly! Nyeh nyeh nyeh heh! As for transformed Gohan, if you've ever dealt with dissociation I think that scene might feel a little familiar. Anyway, until next time!