01
Videl's not afraid of her father, thank you for asking. She barely knows him. He's just another face on a cereal box, frozen in staged photographs depicting his victory over Cell. Occasionally she sees him running training exercises at one of his gyms, or lost behind a sea of reporters, or he'll happen to be eating dinner at the same time as her and he'll ask about boyfriends and black belts. For the most part he's an enigma, as unknown to her as the first of many ex-wives.
(Videl's fine with that. The servants are kind, and she knows all of their names by heart, and she's pretty strong - she's done a fine job of raising herself. Who needs a dad? Not her, that's for sure.)
It's another Friday afternoon, hot as all hell, when the principal walks in during an algebra test and whispers something to her teacher. He clears his throat.
"Videl, your father wants to see you," he says. Everyone turns to stare. She puts down her pencil, trying to seem bored, but her heart is hammering in her chest. From her vantage point halfway up the classroom she can only see a belt and legs and boots; he's standing outside the doorway, too tall to enter the room without ducking.
(But sometimes, sometimes, she misses him, the dad she had before Cell. Back in that little apartment above the dojo, when she slept on the couch and he and her mother in the bedroom.)
"Hey, Dad," she says, after she closes the door behind her. It's just her and her dad and the obviously very nervous principal, and it turns out that he needs her for a photo op.
(He used to take her to his matches - "Remember, Videl, if Mom asks we were at the museum -" and had his allies and enemies, men and women like birds in colourful masks and costumes, hold her on their laps while he was fighting in the ring. Ringside seats, every Tuesday night.)
It appears on the cover of Martial Artists Monthly, the father-daughter special. He's giving the v-for-victory and she's sitting on his shoulder, her hand on her hip. They look so happy, whoever they are.
(It's a Tuesday when her father takes her to a bunker, below the palace that would soon become their home. "Daddy's off to be a hero," he says, his voice cracking.)
02
Trunks isn't afraid of a lot of things. He gathers thoughts on his father like pebbles, keeps them polished on his nightstand.
"I heard that this guy who was me came from the future when I was little," he says to Goten while they play on the park. The monkey bars never lost their lustre even after the both of them learned to fly. "A different future. Like, before you were born, just before your brother beat that Cell guy. Mom was yelling at my dad this morning about the other me. She was saying that my dad loved that guy more than he loves me."
Goten sticks his thumb in his mouth. It's getting late, and his mom will be mad if he's not home in time for dinner. She says he looks like his dad and it makes her sad sometimes, and when his mom talks about his dad his brother gets all quiet, and Goten doesn't understand why. Something happened when everyone fought Cell that nobody talks about, at least not to Trunks and Goten.
Shadows, the both of them: the Saiyan prince, the spitting image of Goku, sitting on monkey bars on a planet that was never meant to be theirs.
03
Yardrati means 'star-wanderer' in their own language. Theirs is a technique that embodies the Yardrat's philosophy of nemesh, 'here-not here' or 'death-undeath', as the sense of self slowly becomes lost in wandering. They teach light-walking as a gift at adolescence, and they are very long-lived; the longer a Yardrati lives, the less they know, and the less present they are in anyone's life, until they are simply forgotten. The Yardrat do not mourn death, for they do not even know what it is.
Some of Gohan's earliest memories are of his father - his strong back, his outstretched arms, his easy ways of speaking. They're jumbled up with images of Piccolo and the woods, the endless expanses of dark trees where he raised himself while waiting for the Saiyans to come back. He must have turned six on Namek because that's where all the narrative in him begins. There's panic and indecision, the looming shadow of Vegeta in an eleventh-hour alliance, the hope that his father would arrive soon, and the endless, ever-present fear of a thing called Frieza. That's Gohan's childhood: fear, and waiting for his father.
But when he emerges from his pod after a year in space, precisely when the strange man with violet hair said he would, there's something off about him, something that doesn't quite align with Gohan's memories. Maybe it's all that space and time in him, or maybe it's guilt, for letting Frieza go. Regardless, his father is home -
His father is many things but he is not a wanderer. ("He got it out of him when he was a kid," Chi-Chi mutters, dishes clattering against the side of the sink. "He wandered away from me for three years.") Perhaps it's something about Saiyans and perhaps it's just the way he is, but he's too purpose-driven, too intentional in the way he moves. He goes places, and he does not mince words.
He spends three years with them Goku and Piccolo both, three glorious, wonderful years. They teach Gohan lessons that were aborted when Vegeta and Nappa came screaming through the skies: bravery, hope, and the freedom to leave. He finds it easier to talk with Piccolo but is more fascinated with his father, trying to tease out what happened after Namek, to give some sort of resolution to his nightmares. Will someone write a book about him? Gohan feels obligated to the luck and the misery of his birth. Goku smells like the planets he's been to, of sweat and space-dust and electrical burns.
"Let's go," he says, taking Gohan by the hand, and Gohan sees black and pink and gold and all the stars of the north quadrant several hundred times and then they're there, wherever there is.
(Years later, among his other, more academically-inclined works, he publishes a book of poems called death is a place. His father lives there, where the clouds taste faintly of plums.)
04
Bra can be kind of a princess sometimes but Marron loves her anyways, because who really gets her? Pan's fun but she's still a baby, and Goten's too old, and Trunks went all corporate when he finished school, briefcase, glasses, the whole nine yards. She and Bra get each other. Plus Bra's always on top of the latest trends - heck, she's kind of a big deal in the fashion world herself - and she's always good about letting Marron shop with her credit card.
One afternoon they're sitting on a bench by a fountain in the West City Mall sipping iced coffee and waving to paparazzi every now and then, and Bra puts a hand on her knee.
"Hey," she says. "You seemed kinda down today. Something up?"
Marron sighs. Lots is up. "Mom brought me over to your place, yeah? Not just to drop me off. She needed your mom and your grandpa to do repairs on her. Like, major repairs. She's, um." How do you say, the old guy who built her never meant for her to have me? "She's always saying she's fine, and, I mean, she probably is, but dad's totally freaking out."
Bra swings her legs back and forth, back and forth. "My dad freaks out sometimes, too." On nights when the moon is full. Marron's dad once pulled her aside and looked her in the eye and said, if Pan's dad, or grandpa, or Bra's dad somehow get a tail and it's a full moon, I want you to run, Marron. Run and hide. "He'll look at me and I feel like part of him really loves me, like, ew? But not that ew. But part of him wants to go, like, punch a planet in half or something. Leave. Y'know? I feel a little bad for him, I guess."
Marron knows. "I think, I think my dad, he always wanted to be strong, you know? He told me once he got bullied a lot growing up, so he ran away from the dojo he was training at, or whatever, to go find that Turtle Hermit guy. And he and Pan's grandpa were, like, always trying to beat each other, until Pan's grandpa just - got better than him." It's in the way he carries himself, not even second best, not even in the spread. A back-page ad for lip gloss. "And, like, he tried to do everything he could to help out, and, like, then there was mom, and she liked him because he tried so hard, and didn't even care that he wasn't as strong as your dad."
Someone with a camera shouts to them, asks them what they're wearing. They pose for the camera and wave to the fans. There's little in Bra that suggests a prince stolen from his stars, nor anything in Marron that speaks to a monk caught between the teachings of selflessness, and the dichotomy of strong-not strong. But it's there, the endlessly harrowing sense of not enough.
05
Long before the invention of lying the Saiyans knew only war, and you can hardly blame someone for following the creed of their people. Goku likes to stroll around heaven on occasion, and one day he finds an oddly familiar face among the newly pardoned souls.
"Kakkarot," Bardock says. It's without emotion, a statement of fact. "My son." He's neither proud, nor ashamed; neither happy, nor sad. They greet each other as strangers.
06
Ask a Namekian how many Namekians there are. Go on! That's a trick question: there are three. There is Guru, and his countless reincarnations; Slug, who died on Earth; and the Nameless Namekian, mostly the son of the son of Katas. Fusion in this case is less of an assimilation and more a re-assimilation, a remembering of the thing you used to be, or could have been. Nail recognized that the fusion of two Namekians of unlike parentage was forbidden, and volatile. Well, Frieza was worse than both of those things, and you know how these things go.
Piccolo is one man, and two men, and seven men; a collection of limbs lost and regrown; his own father and grandfather; brother to at least four monsters. Nail's voice is long gone, and Kami's is a faint whisper, so many years after Cell, but so is the other half of the son of Katas, whispering softly some place behind his left ear.
Are sons expected to repeat the mistakes of their fathers, endlessly? He's tired of being reborn, so tired.
07
Quietly, so quietly nobody sees it coming until it's already there, a religion pops up around those strange men who appeared at the World Tournament: worshippers call themselves Shinsei, the children of Shin. He's confused with the few scattered memories Shenron forgot to take of Buu, and with Shenron itself, and so Shin became, to his children, the creator-destroyer, the giver and taker of life, the All-father, the beginning and the end.
Kibito-Kai sips tea in the Son house. He's grown fond of Earth and its people, so varied, so hopeful, and so sturdy. "I don't mind," he says. "Though I wish, sometimes, that I could spend a little more time exploring your planet, it's a small price to pay for hope."
Hope? "Hope, indeed. Faith is the wellspring of hope." He's lived so long that they trust him implicitly; he, to whom, Frieza was nothing much, a dark spot in a tunnel of light. He takes another sip. It tastes of the earth's dreams, the Earth's dreams.
It is said that at the centre of the universes there is a tree, and the tree bore four golden fruit. "And there is no tragedy as grave as the loss of hope." For millions of years after Buu wandered into their lives he was stranded, alone, the sole survivor, sitting by that tree waiting for a flower that he knew would never bloom.
Videl nurses Pan in the quiet of another day gone. Gohan does dishes. The All-Father raises an eyebrow, then smiles, softly. "Do not feel shame for your piece of grief. The universes are only as large as you are, and if your father wandered away, well, so did mine."
(But always, always, always, he wanders home.)