Washed Away
By C.S. Hayden
All characters are the property of Akira Toriyama, DragonBall Z and Toei Animation.
Author's note: All names have their English spellings for continuity. The story will start taking a lemony turn towards the end of this chapter so you've been warned.
Washed Away
It had been tempting to blow it all off and go to the mall but Eighteen forced herself to circle in for a landing amidst the rounded domes of the Capsule Corporation. She frowned - from the air, the complex looked like an enormous anthill with people milling about as they went about their duties. Krillin had always been here with her before and she wasn't exactly sure which building to aim for. A garden area within the quad looked familiar and she decided to land there.
A guttural chanting was coming behind some flowering bushes. Eighteen raised an eyebrow. It almost sounded like --- she shook her head. That would be ridiculous. She slipped quietly around to see.
A blanket was spread on the grass with a basket and some empty plates and cups scattered about. Vegeta was sitting cross-legged in the center of it with Trunks standing before him. The Saiyan prince nodded and clapped his hands three times as his son did the same.
"Sai-ya-ho! Hao-hao-hao! Sai-ya-hah! Hao-hao-hao!" With each syllable, Vegeta reached out to touch one's of his son's hands, sometimes crosswise, sometimes straight, sometimes with the palms, and sometimes with the backs, all time clapping between the beats. Trunks' eyes were focused on his father's hands and every time he managed to anticipate a move, he grinned like a gleeful imp.
Eighteen managed to keep a straight face as she stepped out onto the garden path and approached them. Vegeta, of course, stopped what he was doing immediately and glared at her. Trunks was not so easily dissuaded.
"Da!!" the lavender-haired toddler demanded imperiously. "Hao-hao-hao!"
"Quiet, brat." Vegeta crossed his arms. "What do you want, robot?"
"I was looking for Bulma," Eighteen said bluntly. "Any idea where she might be?"
Trunks had pushed his way into Vegeta's lap and was trying to un-cross his father's arms. "HAO-HAO-HAO!!!" He scowled at Eighteen for spoiling his fun.
Eighteen smirked. "Trunks really seems to like playing games with you."
"It's not a game," Vegeta said gruffly as he allowed Trunks to pry some fingers loose. "It's an beginner training exercise. All Saiyan children start this way." He lifted his arm with Trunks hanging on it and pointed. "Bulma is in the main lab, the large building over there. Get out of my sight, woman, before the brat starts screaming."
Eighteen found Bulma down in the maze-like confines of the main lab building. The blue-haired woman was wearing goggles and a white lab coat as she concentrated on soldering connections on some sort of electronics equipment. She looked up briefly.
"Hey there! Be with you in just a minute!"
It was actually several minutes but soon they were both sitting in the tiny lab office, sipping iced tea. Bulma regarded the android curiously across the desk. "So, Eighteen? What can I do you for?"
"It's--" Eighteen hesitated, not sure how to start. "It's probably nothing but I - no one at the Kame House wouldn't understand. Krillin would only worry and Master Roshi and Oolong--"
"-have their filthy minds in the gutter." Bulma nodded. "You needed to have some girl talk."
"That's part of it." Eighteen studied the ice in her glass. "How would I know if I've ever been pregnant?"
"WHAT?" Bulma nearly fell out of her chair. "Whoa! What brought this on? Why do you want to know?"
"This is going to sound stupid, but when I held Goten at the party, I had the strangest feeling that I'd held a baby before. I started having these dreams that the baby in my arms turns into a horrible monster. I wake up just as it turns into Cell and starts to absorb me."
"Eeeeeuw, gross. That's disturbing all right, but it's just a nightmare, Eighteen. It's just your subconscious playing tricks with you."
"It's more than that. I think I know why I've been having these dreams," she replied. "I've never told anyone, not even my brother, but I remember Dr. Gero bringing me out of stasis for a brief period. He gave me some kind of drugs and kept me restrained. After two or three weeks, he did this procedure - I don't know what exactly. I was strapped to a table with my legs up and there was a sheet in the way. Whatever he did, it hurt me and then he put me back in stasis." She closed her eyes. "The next time I woke up was when Dr. Gero activated us to fight the Z-fighters and to save his miserable life. That's why I didn't object when Seventeen decided to kill him."
"Damn." The stunned look on Bulma's face said it all. "It sounds like some kind of gynecological procedure. I can see why you wouldn't want Krillin to know about this."
"At first I thought I was malfunctioning but then I started to wonder if my dreams were trying to tell me something. Maybe the two things are connected - Dr. Gero's procedure and the feeling that I held a baby before." Eighteen's eyes were haunted. "Could he have used me to give birth to a monster?"
Bulma pursed her lips and stared into space for a few minutes. "That's a toughie, all right. I've been to Gero's lab and there's not much there. I doubt even the blueprints we recovered would mention anything like that." She snapped her fingers. "I could run a full diagnostic scan series on you. It wouldn't be a bad thing to have on hand, just in case your cybernetics need repair someday."
"Very well," Eighteen agreed. "Proceed."
The scanner turned out to be housed in an entirely different building, in the Capsule Corporation's medical research division. The clinical environment made Eighteen jumpy; it was a little too much like Dr. Gero's lab. Bulma sent away the staff and returned with a flimsy paper gown.
"Here - you'll need to put this on. I want a good clean scan so I can check them against the original blueprints and your clothes have too many metal fasteners."
"There's a considerable amount of metal inside me too," Eighteen said wryly as she started to undress. "Would you like me to remove that as well?"
Bulma gave a little laugh as she fooled with the control panel. "No, I'll set the machine to compensate for that."
Holding her gown closed, Eighteen walked over to the scanner. It made her think of a mausoleum; a slab-like table going into a round opening in a small enclosed room. Banks of lights filled the interior.
"Just lay down on the table," Bulma called as she hurried over. "It's a little intimidating, but just close your eyes and pretend you're in a tanning booth, you know, like at some really great spa."
"In that case, I'd like to have a manicure and a facial."
"I'll see what I can do." Bulma arranged some pads to keep Eighteen in place. "Now don't move - here we go." The table began to move.
As the lights started going on, one after the other, Eighteen tried to think of any place other than here. She hated labs. The decision to come to Bulma with her problem had not come easily because whenever she was at the Capsule Corporation, she either wanted to get far, far away from it or to blast it into so much rubble. Laboratories affected her that much. The bad dreams, however, had bothered her even more.
It wasn't too difficult to imagine the glowing lights behind her eyelids to be the sun as she lay on her special spot on the beach, away from Roshi and Oolong's prying eyes. Her pale skin didn't tan but she loved to soak up its radiance. Krillin, she knew, watched her from time to time as she sunbathed, but she didn't mind so much any more. She smiled, thinking about the way Krillin would blush when she returned to the house, even as his eyes thirsted after her. It affected her in strange and pleasant ways. She didn't understand it but she liked the way he made her feel and she wished -
"Well," Bulma called out, interrupting Eighteen's pleasant daydreams, "I'm no gynecologist but I do know about being pregnant. There's no signs of postnatal uterine stress whatsoever."
"Meaning?"
"When you're pregnant, your uterus stretches as the baby grows. Minute rips and striations form, leaving scars and tiny deviations in the muscle tissue." Bulma walked over and pressed the button to move the platform out of the scan chamber. As soon as Eighteen was in view, Bulma smiled. "It means you have never been pregnant."
"You're... sure?" Eighteen asked hopefully.
"The evidence points that way, but if you like, I can make an appointment for you with my doctor." The blue-haired woman pulled a palmpad from her pocket. "I looked up some things on the Internet while the scans were running and I think what Dr. Gero was doing, based on your description of the procedure, was harvesting some of your eggs. Without getting into the gory details, I think that maybe he used those ova as the building blocks to make Cell."
"Then," Eighteen sat up on the edge of the table, hands cradled in the lap of the paper gown. "I am the mother of a monster." An icy stillness ran through her.
"No, no!" Bulma put her hands on Eighteen's shoulders. "You can't think that way. What Dr. Gero did was ethically and morally WRONG. You couldn't help what happened to you and you are not responsible for what happened with Cell because of it. He was grown artificially, not inside you." She nodded encouragingly as the android slowly met her eyes. "Your past is your past. You've got a brand new start with a great guy that loves you. What's better than that?"
"Do you think a life together is possible for Krillin and me?" Eighteen asked, looking preoccupied. "I've been so obsessed with my own problems that it's probably turned him away from me. I can be a real bitch at times."
"Nonsense. Krillin would never give up on you now." Bulma leaned her hip against the table. "It's really none of my business, but from the way Krillin kept blushing about the topic at the party, I thought you guys are doing all right, just taking it slow and easy, you know, no S-E-X."
"Sometimes I think we're taking it too slow." Eighteen shrugged. "I know Krillin would like more from our relationship but you know how he is - almost too nice."
"Yeah, well, he was a monk for a long time. Combine that lifestyle with his looks and that explains why Krillin has probably always been a bit inhibited around women. Being nice is just his way of dealing with it. Question is, how do you feel about it? Do you want to things to get more intimate? To go to the next level?"
"I don't know." The cyborg frowned. "Sometimes when Krillin and I are alone together, the feeling inside me is so intense that I don't know what to do. I'm drawn to him - I want to love him, but I also want to pull away. I've done so many horrible things, I could easily lose control and hurt him."
"Sometimes love is about losing yourself. It's a risk that can change you for the better." Bulma glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the gravity chamber and laughed. "Prince Pain-in-the-Pants over there is a real pussycat when if you know what buttons to push. It took forever to get him to realize that it was okay let his guard down and that loving me wasn't a weakness."
Eighteen lifted a disbelieving eyebrow. That was a little more information about Vegeta than she cared to know.
"My advice to you is to not worry so much about it and take control over what you really want. Krillin is one of the strongest warriors that I know - he used to spar with Goku after all. Anything that you can dish out, I'll bet that he'll be able to take it," Bulma said firmly. "Act on your feelings. There's nothing wrong in letting yourself be human." She grinned. "And all the fun that goes with it."
The thought had some appeal. Krillin wanted her, he said it in everything he did for her, but he was sometimes too much of gentleman for Eighteen's tastes. "If we do become.... intimate," she said slowly, "there's the risk of having a child, isn't there?"
"Being a mom is not that bad, trust me. From what I've seen on the scans, I'd say, biologically, your chances are pretty good. There seems to have been no modifications to your reproductive systems. At least, you and Krillin are both human - that'll make things a lot easier." Bulma smirked. "Lucky for me, Saiyans are only fertile when their ki energy is totally balanced with the planetary constant, otherwise Vegeta'd have me up to my ears with little house apes."
Eighteen shuddered at the thought of dozens of tiny Vegetas running around, but Bulma mistook it for something else.
"Hey, you must be cold! Go ahead and change while I retrieve the data."
A few minutes later, warmly dressed, Eighteen prepared to go. "Bulma, I -" She wanted to say how much it meant to her to know that her worries were over and that she was grateful but words didn't seem enough. In frustration, she settled for something simple. "Thank you."
Bulma merely winked. "Anytime, Eighteen. We girls have to stick together."
The first clue Krillin had to the passing of time was when he realized the sun was now shining on the other side of the island. He squinted at it, and shook his head. "Geez, where did the day go?" he said to himself. After Turtle had shuffled off into the shade to nap, Krillin had decided to spend some time training. It wasn't nearly as interesting as when Eighteen sparred with him, but it had fewer injuries.
He went into the Kame House and checked the answering machine, not that Eighteen would think to call. There was, however, a blinking light to indicate an incoming message.
/BLEEP/ "Hello, Krillin? Hi, it's Bulma. I just wanted to let you know that Eighteen just left and she's on her way home." She laughed. "So stop pacing, already!! We had a nice little chat, just us girls, and everything's okay. She can tell you more later, if she wants to, so don't be a pest. You guys really ought to come visit more often." There was an imperious bellow in the background. "Whoops, there's my big baby now. If he wakes up Trunks, I'm going shoot him. Talk to you later!!"/BLEEP/
Letting out a deep breath, Krillin slumped against the arm of the sofa. "Well, she's okay, that's something." He had been worried that he might have said or done something to upset her but he'd been so careful. She'd even forgiven him for the misunderstanding over wanting to move out of the Kame House. If she'd been still been angry with him, there was no way she would have let him sleep with her last night. Krillin couldn't help smiling - nothing had happened between them but just knowing that Eighteen trusted him that much was wonderful.
He looked down at his workout gi, sweat-stained and covered in sand. "Even with no nose, I can tell that I must smell awful." He got up and headed upstairs, stripping off his clothes as he went.
All was quiet as Eighteen approached the island, flying low over the water and casting rooster tails in her wake. A blunt-nosed dolphin leapt up and laughed at her, smiling a bit like Krillin in his bald days. She smiled back at it. It was hard to explain, but her mood was much lighter since leaving Bulma's lab.
There were signs that Krillin had spent the day training again, from the patterns his feet had made in the sand. Eighteen shook her head. He was determined to continue to better himself and she had to admit that he had made progress, just in the way he fought her when they sparred. She landed neatly on the deck and let herself in.
"Krillin?"
Late afternoon sunlight filtered in through the picture window, lighting dust motes in the air and glittering sand on the floor. Eighteen sighed. She followed the trickle of sand with her eyes from the pile on the carpet next to the sofa and on up the stairs. The pipes rattled and she heard the shower come on.
"No guessing as to where he is," Eighteen commented to herself. "This mess can wait until he can clean it up." She headed up the stairs after him.
Krillin's muffled voice began singing some off-key song, distorted by the acoustics of the bathroom. He'd left the door ajar and Eighteen couldn't help peering in at him. The glass door of the shower was steamed up but she could see him with his hands in his hair, shampoo bubbles slowly sliding down his body. He turned around to rinse the back of his head and her eyes widened slightly.
"Well, well," she commented, "so that's where the missing bit from his nose wound up. Huh."
Eighteen felt strange as she watched him, but it was a pleasant sensation. She hadn't realized just how much she'd missed Krillin in the few hours she'd been gone or how attractive he'd become to her. He wasn't just that funny little bald man that she'd kissed on a whim; funny and short, he would always be but she'd learned to love him for his caring heart and the depth of his soul. There was a peculiar ache inside her as she looked at him, a warm, anxious need and Bulma's words came back to her: Act on your feelings.
As Krillin turned away to face the shower, Eighteen was shimmying out of her jeans.
To be continued ---
Author's note: Yes, the next chapter is for Mature Readers Only!!
