And if you come softly,

Like the wind within the trees,

You may hear what I hear,

See what sorrow sees...



She sat alone, gazing at the forlorn city. Satan City, once so tall and proud, lay crumbled and broken.

The horizon line was dotted with buildings half standing, an ever present reminder of the monsters destruction.

She watched the tiny movements of the few people still alive, scurrying and glancing cautiously behind their shoulders, a

habit hard to break after the 4 years of constant use.

She ran her hand through her fine black hair, getting used to the feel of it being cropped so short. Her mouth turned

upward in a disgusted grimace. The streets were home to some of the dirtiest creatures, willing to hurt anyone and

everyone


to satisfy their own "urges." Children, 13 years old walked around with pregnant bellies. The wrongness of it all

sickened

her. Four years of her existence, had been spent scrounging for food, fighting to survive and hiding from the Androids,

for

what? Had no lessons been learned? The humans were on the brink of extinction, and yet the ones remaining were

slowly

destroying themselves with their own selfishness.

She thought of her mother. After being raped and impregnated, she had died giving birth to a child who never lived.

The girl clenched her teeth in agony. At the time she had been only 8, and she had rocked her mother's body and cried,

alone and terrified. Something wrong had happened to her mother, she had understood at the time, and she couldn't fix it.

A tear dripped onto her bracelet, her mother's bracelet.

"From high school." Her mother had said " So that we will always remember life...before."

She sensed now her mother's "before" had been more than the Androids, but perhaps someone

she had cared for...loved. Her mother had never talked about her father. Father? What was that? The concept alone was all

too much for her to grasp.

Her mother had given her all she had, her name. She traced the inscribed letters carefully:

"Pan Videl."


She smiled faintly, heart lightened to hear the familiar names. She turned the silver bracelet around her arm, reading

the rest of the message. She had never really figured out what they meant. " Bulma &Veg. Breifs, Chichi & Goku Son." She

assumed they were names. Vegetables? Underwear? Boobies? Who would have names like that?

She shrugged reading some other names unpaired. " Trunks, Piccolo, Krillin, Tien." More nonsense about underwear and

woodwind instruments.

Turning the bracelet back to her and her mother's names, she smiled, but then frowned abruptly. There was a third name

beside her mothers. It had always looked separated before. "Gohan Son." She sounded out slowly, puzzling. She looked at

the names, small and graceful, and noticed that lying between the two names...

Was a faded out heart.

Videl loves Gohan Son.

And the world she had so carefully constructed, fell down.


By Kureeji! www.geocities.com/fushigi_mirai_pan

Poem by Jacqueline Woodson