Note: Heya, lovelies. ❤️ Howdy? Hope everyone's holding up just fine. (Oh yeah, and… I'm back~~ sorta, mehehe.) I didn't try for this to make sense. I just went with an offhand directionless "plot" and swung with it. Wasn't supposed to publish this yet either, but I wanted to cheer up a fellow die-hard HanP fan. 😘 Hope this makes you smile at the very least, my dear friend!

Warnings/Tags: Ideologically Sensitive, Mature Audiences Only, Angst, Drama, Hurt & Comfort(?), Sexual Content Porn With A Twinge of Plot, Offhand Plot, Somewhat Alpha-Omega Dynamics, Dubious Consent, Auto-Eroticism, Mutual Masturbation, Too Innocent Omega Piccolo, Alpha Male Assertive Confident Gohan, Mild Piccolo!Whump, Uke Piccolo, Canon Male-Hermaphroditic Piccolo, NSFW, Unbeta'd, 飯Ｐ, 腐向け

Disclaimer: Dragon Ball/Z/GT/Xenoverse/Super/etc. belong to their respective owners. I own nothing except this derivative fanwork which I do not profit from.

Story #260:

Anyone But You

"Piccolo-san!"

Piccolo couldn't concentrate on anything else. He couldn't meditate, couldn't even think. He stared at his steeply angled reflection in the water's rippling surface; the undulations whited out and began to fade out his surroundings…

…

… …

"Piccolo-san!"

The boy's clear, youthful voice echoed in slow motion and bounced off the invisible boundaries of whatever dreamscape he had been whisked of to.

"You're hurt!"

Gohan's big brown eyes and lightly tanned face slid up into view directly in his line of vision: bursting with life, all rosy cheeks and sunny smiles. To him, the boy always looked like a surreal painting.

"It's nothing, I was—"

The sound of ripping fabric was startling enough. The sensation of gentle dabbing below his lips effectively quelled the words in his throat. For his part, the halfbreed was intent on the task at hand, not even the truncated speech broke his focus.

It wasn't anything extraordinary. Gohan fussed over him all the time. The boy knew well that an advanced hybrid class Namek like him could heal himself in no time at all (if he simply willed it). But that knowledge didn't stop his ward from wiping the blood from his injuries with scraps of his own gi and applying a more Earthling style of healing using medicinal herbs and leaves, something the boy called "first aid". No, that wasn't the problem here. Not exactly, at least.

Time. Piccolo often thought it was not a matter of consequence—not to a Namek who could live for hundreds of years of they really wanted to. But he never understood why when it came to the boy, time was like a knife to his heart… slicing and entrenching itself deeper into his being. Making him feel like he was a slave to it as much as every other weaker, less resilient being on the planet…

That knife had been twisting and digging even deeper as the years rolled by. He never knew how to pull it out, not when it was not him who had buried it there in the first place. That same knife was slicing into him all over again now… Because Gohan was here. Doing the same things he always used to do. Except that…

The last time he had done it, his hands were tiny.

The giggles that bubbled forth whenever he tried to wiggle away were shrill and giddy.

Those eyes, attentive, and those smiles – heart-warming in its pure joy whenever he sat still and indulged the boy in his silly little Earthling rituals.

How long has it been?

Too long. Because even this present reality felt like a dream from the past. That's how he knew… The knife was in so deep now that he was almost sure it was impossible to extract—already a part of him he could not separate from, because…

He had been repeatedly stabbed and impaled in it for almost ten years. Some ten years ago when they started falling apart… When the only soul he had deigned to grow a heart for, became aloof and distant. But Piccolo didn't—couldn't demand anything more. He had already always been given far more than he deserved. He had attributed the change to the losses his dearest friend suffered in their fateful battle with Cell. Gohan was hurt, betrayed, in shock… and grieving. And as much as he wanted to offer comfort, he knew it wasn't his place; they were friends, but… that was it. How do you console a little boy who was forced to grow too fast and lost his father because he was forced to fight a fight that was never his?

Repeatedly, fate had been cruel to him, forcing him to mature faster, way more than any boy of his years has ever had to. Piccolo, more than anyone, knew that the struggles that entailed were hard. He had no words to offer—not when he too was still nursing wounds of his past; not even sure if he had the gumption to offer comfort, not when he himself, deep down, constantly craved comfort too—a need he did not know he had. A need fulfilled by only one person who always offered it freely to him without him ever having to ask. A dark, selfish secret he harboured that he could not find it in himself to accept.

He did not trust his intentions to be pure whenever he wanted to see Gohan back to his "normal" self – the Gohan who was always by his side, who sought his company first and foremost above all, always.

As time would have it, the visits lessened until they stopped altogether. He gladly allowed the knife to cut him—make him bleed from the inside, knowing that his heart was an anomaly in the first place, something that should have never come into existence. Something that no longer had a reason to beat, not anymore…

Now that Gohan had forgotten him.

Occasionally, Gokuu's friends would get together for whatever reasons they saw fit, but he never participated in it. There were ever only two people who treated him like he was part of the group. One was no longer in this side of the world, while the other had left to do what normal Earthling teenagers did and hasn't been back for many years. He wanted to ask them about Gohan and if he was ever going to be back. But he didn't think he had a right to, not when he wasn't even spared a decent good-bye.

Those moments that he and Gohan used to share when they were younger, they were but distant dreams now, too faraway to touch and too faded to feel real. So he told himself that it was a dream, and that none of it mattered anymore, and there was nothing left for him now but to accept it and move on…

Until a week ago, when he had been in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber training with his doubles…

To say that he was shocked stupid would not have justified his true feelings then, when a young man suddenly walked in… A young man claiming to be Gohan. There was an old familiarity in him, yet also a curious alienation…

This time, it was a soft handkerchief that dabbed at the claw lacerations all over his torso… This time, the youth was tall enough to reach up to his shoulders before he simpered and asked the Namek to sit on the bed so he could attend to the "injuries" on his face. This time, when their faces aligned, it was no longer chubby cheeks and big innocent eyes—no more of the light-headed and carefree chuckles.

He could see the boy he knew in there somewhere, and yet… This was no longer a boy, but a grown-up teenager, halfway to becoming the man his father was. The planes of his face had smoothed out to finely sculpted lines and plateaus. The once cute and tiny and slightly turned up nose was now a prominent, sophisticated arch; his brows thicker and more defined it made his eyes stand out even more, darker and more arresting in their intensity somehow, and striking with the weight of the experiences it held. The once perpetually effervescent tenor had levelled out to a low, modulated whisper, and every time those lips slightly pulled up at the corners whenever smouldering burnt umber eyes lifted to meet azure, Piccolo felt a thundering in his chest that he wasn't so sure belonged to him…

Because he was convinced that part of him had died a long time ago… With his false heart that could no longer afford to beat.

"I missed you," the 'new' Gohan before him mumbled, his cheeks colouring slightly, painfully reminiscent of the boy he knew.

The changes in his appearance were glaring, but Piccolo could sense that everything else about him was still the same: his ki signature, his aura, his mannerisms; if all not slightly more tamed and refined.

Piccolo could not comprehend the feelings swirling within him. No doubt about it, this was the same boy he knew from his past… Why then, did he feel so different towards him all of a sudden? He desperately tried to pin rationality to it, but he was drowning and suffocating in it faster than his mind could grope for answers. True, Gohan always had a way of making him feel helpless and vulnerable. But the emotions and sensations those coffee-brown eyes evoked in him as they peered deep into his soul, made him feel powerless and breakable in ways that defied known rationale.

Perhaps time was more powerful than he had given it credit…

When that young man's gaze lowered to fixate on his mouth, Piccolo began to doubt his own assessment. Something in Gohan had changed definitively, not just in body but in spirit. When he leaned in close… closer… too close, and soft lips suddenly pinned and encompassed his own, moving in gentle caresses– he knew it for a fact:

This Gohan was not the same shy and timid little boy he knew… Even if he essentially still was.

It was like a lightning strike up his spine. Whiteness flashed under the veil of his half-lidded eyes and that blinding light continued to bleed in all directions inside his skull until it engulfed everything.

… …

…

Piccolo swayed for a moment but managed to catch himself on a nearby protruding rock. He was back in the lake by the waterfalls—back to the present "reality", or at least, that's what he told himself. He still could not reconcile what happened that day with what he knew of his current world.

What did happen anyway…? Piccolo wondered blearily, only half conscious of his fingers automatically going to his lips, as if checking if they were still attached. It had been oddly numb and tingling, and it hasn't stopped doing so since whatever it was that Gohan did… That… "lip embrace" of sorts…

There was light pressing and nudging at first… And then licking, and more… Piccolo shuddered for the umpteenth time now—he had lost count. It felt almost like Gohan was tasting him, even like… like he wanted to eat him… A notion which he, to his further stupor, found himself having no immediate nor vehement objections to, as aberrant and preposterous as that may sound…

Piccolo mentally smacked himself. What a absurd thing to think!

All this time, Gohan had been his only window to the "outside" world, the only one who taught him things about the Earth and beyond that he didn't care to know about. While he may have had Kami's wisdom and knowledge inside of him for quite some time now, he never bothered to go inside his paternal figure and twin's head—he had never been curious enough. He wasn't a fan of clutter, particularly to do with his own mind. He was and always has been a minimalist through and through. He didn't want junk polluting his thoughts, therefore, he didn't need to know what he didn't need to know. And with Gohan being out of the picture for so long, isolating himself from humanity and their humdrum affairs almost completely had not been difficult to achieve, it seemed, in fact, like the most natural progression.

Yet, if welcoming the idea of Gohan consuming him alive served any purpose, it was to prove once again that he had underestimated his devotion to the boy and the lengths he was willing to go through to perpetuate it. (Either that, or he was most surely afflicted with some brand of a most peculiar of madnesses.) The giant gap that time had wedged between them had not degraded his attachment to Gohan, nor even dented it the slightest as he had—rather ambivalently—hoped. He wasn't keen on being eaten in general, a quick assessment affirmed as much. If it were anyone else who did the eating (any other Saiyajin: Son Gokuu and Vegeta being the most obvious candidates), the whole premise instantly shifted his perspective to a resounding 'NO'.

While it did cross the Namek's mind that original Saiyajins did eat anything indiscriminately—sentient beings of other planets included, which put his race on the menu, Gohan had never showed that same inordinate appetite for food as his more savage forerunners; in fact, he was so conservative in his eating habits that it almost felt sometimes like the boy was half Namekian instead of half Saiyajin. Unfortunately, he knew even less about his own race than he did about Earthlings and Saiyajins; Earthlings in themselves had more than their fair share of strange activities and weird rituals, most of which he was hard-pressed to understand despite Gohan's best efforts to enlighten him time and again.

No matter how much their friendship may have declined all these years, there was no question about it in his mind: Gohan would not want to eat him. It was laughable how he had even got lost in that avenue of thought in the first place. Truly, he was grasping at straws to puzzle this out. All because the one true force of nature that always brought a tempest of tumult and confusion to his sails was once again in his midst. Once again, as had always, he was being swept off his feet and dragged along by that indomitably spirited gale to uncharted lotuslands far, far away from his comfort zone.

Gohan had done… something… to him. Something the boy didn't feel the need to explain (when he would always find every opportunity to converse with him before about any topic available under the sun, no matter how mundane). Piccolo stared at the curious anomaly that was his bandaged hand. Could it have something to with the strange ways that Earthlings tended to their wounds?

Some creatures of Planet Earth use their saliva to promote healing of wounds – that much, he was aware of… (He's seen animals such as cats lick their wounds to clean, disinfect, and make it heal faster; some Earthlings used their mouths to suck blood from cuts and to provide air to another who has ceased breathing, so…) Perhaps, it was a type of more advanced first-aid? He supposed he should pity them for, unlike Nameks, they didn't have the simpler and more sensible option to use magic to do everything… Mage class Nameks such as himself could use ki to heal, without necessitating tedious roundabout rituals or physical contact—certainly not such cumbrous things such as bandages either.

If that was the case, then Gohan was simply being Gohan. Yet if that was all there was to it, why did the action bother him so much? Why did it awaken strange feelings and sensations in his body that made him feel like something else was ailing him? Was it an unexpected side effect of a Namek ingesting Earthling saliva?

Piccolo sighed heavily. The sun was setting, Gohan was at home now. Or at least, he said he would be. Why was that even important anymore?

…

When he landed a short distance outside his former pupil's window, it was already night time. Oddly, there were no lights on inside the boy's room; it was only half past seven. With a twinge of disappointment, he reasoned that Gohan was probably tired from his activities during the daytime… Again, he found himself wondering why it mattered. It hadn't for many years, it shouldn't now.

He had not meant to fly over and spy on his former pupil. But to his consternation, he realized only too late that he had just given in to an old habit – one he had thought he had managed to extinguish. With a disgruntled growl, he pivoted on his heel, resolute on leaving when…

A hand suddenly gripping his arm stopped his retreat.

Startled, the Namek's fist shot out with the force and speed of a bullet. But to his further bewilderment, his defensive attack was expertly blocked: the shock waves of his superhuman punch efficiently absorbed and tamped down by a perfectly timed ki-cushioned palm. His knuckles are then tenderly squeezed and pushed down to reveal alert dark orbs, arresting him intently.

"G-Gohan," Piccolo stammered, jumping back instinctually, aghast and flustered at how easily he was snuck up on.

"You're here," the halfbreed teenager said simply. "I thought I just imagined smelling you."

"I… I'm sorry to wake you…"

"I wasn't asleep."

"Oh, I…"

"You came to see me, right?"

Piccolo hesitated. Suddenly, he felt incredibly silly being caught in an act he deemed sentimental and childish. "It's nothing… I was just passing by so I…"

"Stay for a little while?"

Piccolo blinked down at the teenager who had a strange, unfamiliar predatory gleam in his eyes… The hand was back on his arm, and it was like steel.

To be continued…

End Notes:

The end part is already written, but I thought it'd be exciting to let you salivate for it a little. Just kidding! I'm not intentionally mean, the concluding part is indeed written, but it needs polishing up, so it won't be a very long wait (I hope). 😉 Although… I may be forced to post it only on AO3 since FFnet doesn't allow MA-rated works.

(2021/04/22-2021/11/04)