WINDSTORMchapter4
Acknowledgements: thank you very much to the Mirai Shock Team ( Marron, Juuhachigou and Bulma ) for their beautiful fanfiction, Dragon Ball Super Z, which inspired me to write mine.
So if you like this story, you know who to thank.
______________________________________________________________________________
Videl and Trunks socialized much more in the following weeks. It was like if discovering to have such a painful thing in common opened up, in both of them, a mysterious source of feelings they didn't know they had. They sparred together, talked a lot, went around doing little choirs for Bulma and Amrita, such as going to town for supplies, or simply wandered around in the fields.
Bulma didn't say anything and watched in silence, but as she saw the two youths become more and more intimate she started giving sign of enjoying the developments of the situation, and sometimes on her life-marked features spread a smile not too often seen even since the end of the hard times.
Despite all this, the two did never mate. Something stopped their relationship from crossing that line that separated a deep and affectionate friendship - plus the shoulder to rely on it meant - from that other thing that brings two people to make their lives one and plan the future only in the perspective of being together.
Bulma knew well what the reason was. It was called fear, fear to lose the ones you love, and she had no doubt about it for feeling like that herself.
Before her son was born, many years ago, she had met a man.
He was from a distant planet, but no longer had a home, he was a prince, but had lost his reign and all his subjects, and was doomed to never become king.
What Bulma felt in the beginning was mere curiosity. She just wanted to know more about the otherwise stand-offish Saiyajin no Ouji, Vegeta, as if inviting him to live in her house gave her the right to pry into his particular life.
He looked so lonely seen from closer. And so melancholic also, even fragile sometimes, never letting down the perpetual scowl carved on his angular features, like if he was trying to drive everyone else away from his real thoughts.
But he couldn't drive away Bulma.
She went closer and closer, little by little, never frightened by the man's reactions, that could vary from cold indifference to abrupt bursts of rage that would have scared the daylights off of anyone else, and slowly began making her own way to his true self.
She was stubborn and clever, and was perfectly aware that what she was trying to do was comparable to carve a stone with her bare hands. But if he was a stone, then she was a little stream of water, and as time went by, she realized she was actually doing something to him, perhaps she was even drilling a tiny hole in his hard surface, although she could never be sure until...until...well, until it happened.
She felt so ashamed after that, and so happy. She had gradually grew fond of that man, who turned his back at her, but always looked behind with the corner of the eye, who told her she was ugly, but spent hours staring at her concealed in a shadow - like she didn't know he was there.
So fond she forever stopped thinking about substituting him with anyone else.
He never showed his care or attention, because he was too proud for that, as Bulma had soon sensed, but for a reason she alone seemed to know she was sure he felt some kind of love for her and for their child, who was born less than three years after their first encounter.
She'd caught him more than once standing by the cradle, looking down at his tiny son who was sleeping safe and sound, never saying anything or making a single move to reach out and touch him, face completely expressionless...then as the minutes passed something happened to him, the corner of his mouth bent unnoticeably upwards, and for just a second what was on his face could be called a smile. It was in those moments that Bulma knew he was thinking about the child as of his heir, the future Prince of the Saiyajin, and not as he would once have seen him - a half-breed conceived with a worthless human female. Yes. Unbelievable but true, he was proud.
Bulma let out a heavy sigh.
"Still thinking about Vegeta" she murmured sadly. "I know I should have stopped a long time ago."
"What's up, Bulma-sama? Sorry, I wasn't listening." Amrita had turned her head away from her work to look at her.
"Iie. Nani mo..." she replied wearily. "Nothing. I was just...thinking. But it's nothing important, believe me."
Amrita looked back at her, a puzzled look on her face. She really seemed to be concerned about what was going on in Bulma's mind, but didn't dare to ask; she understood that something was wrong with her, but couldn't quite imagine what it was. She reflected for a while, thinking about what to decide for, then suddenly her face lit up as she was about to come up with an idea.
"Take this" she said playfully, and the next moment Bulma was brushing her nose against something warm and furry that in addiction meowed deliciously and started purring full engine. Amrita had picked up RoboKoNeko from her desktop, on which the cybernetic cat was used to sleep, and just lifted it towards her mistress' face with a large grin.
"Owwww" Bulma giggled, delighted by the unexpected joke. Amrita always knew how to make someone smile when he was down. "Come to me, kitty-kitty..." she laughed while she cradled it in her arms, forgetting for a moment her memories of grief. RoboKoNeko was as lovable as its creator, she thought, and just as charming; as the days went by it had assumed the appearance of a beautiful, large, long-haired brown tabby cat, with the air of dignity and the natural elegance all real cats have.
"Hey, you've gained some more weight since last week! I'll bet you are at least thirteen pounds! Amrita, you had told me that tiny thingie could actually grow, but I never thought that it would do so fast!!"
"Well, as nanomachines can actually turn food into new tissues a certain growth was natural...but maybe I should have installed a limiting device...it was supposed to be a cat, but it is becoming as plump as a piglet!" she burst, and the two women simultaneously broke into laughter.
"You know, I wouldn't like to find myself with a puma or something like that...what about bathing it then? Guess what claw marks it could leave!" and the two laughed some more. "Oh, Kami , no, I wouldn't like to get the crap clawed out of me...and we're lucky it still haven't had some genial ideas like going rolling in the wet soil!..."
"C'mon" said Bulma, recovering herself. "Let's get back to work. We have a lot to do today, and Trunks isn't even around to help us."
"Out again with Videl?"
"No. Not today."
~ * ~
She was alone, completely alone. Debris and ruins scattered all around her and no one in sight.
Somewhere near a car lay upside down, the memory of an event happened a very long time ago. A black-haired boy...an old man shooting with a gun...a blonde girl and her evil laugh...then another boy, and then nothing at all.
She sat with her back against a wall, looking wearily at the ruined landscape in front of her. A warm wind blew across the rubble, raising little whirlpools and clouds of dust. This was one of the many places where reconstruction hadn't yet begun, and everything was still like the cyborgs had left it, which meant, a battlefield of devastation.
It was such a mess, it could take her weeks to find out what she was looking for. But, as usual, she was very determined, and she had all the time in the world. Or so she believed.
She was absolutely sure that nobody else in the world knew about its existence. And if he did, well, then he would know no more. Nobody would go between her and her goal, the wish of a whole lifetime...if you could call it "life", she intended.
She got up slowly, without forcing her moves. The wind run in her face and across her hair, bringing in her nostrils the smell of earth and cement dust, along with something else that she couldn't recognize. That should perhaps make her suspicious, but it didn't. She was too intensely concentrated on whatever was bothering her now to get acknowledged about the existence of anything else that didn't have to do with it.
"Maybe I should use the metal detector" she thought.
No, what a silly idea...the objects were probably made of some material of relatively recent discover, impossible to detect like it was metal. Damn. That was really going to last a long time.
She'd better start scanning the area straight away, if she wanted to have a chance to ever get that job finished.
Her thoughts often runned to the times before what she called "my little death". Those were good times: she would go to school, flirt and have fun. She acted like all of that was going to last forever and firmly believed that nothing would ever change her world, like most of the girls her age did. She had nothing but clouds in her head. Clever, but not willing enough, a dreamer, but not doing enough to make her dreams come true, she was a normal person, a little bit crazy sometimes, but normal all the same.
Things had changed a lot since.
And when she went home, after school was over, she would sometimes meet her father, who because of his work was often away: he was a regular soldier.
So it was almost no surprise when they were told he had died in battle.
"Your father is a hero. A real hero" her mother told her, and holding one another, they cried the whole night away.
Something twisted the corners of her mouth slightly upwards, giving her a bitter expression that contrasted harshly with her sweet childish features.
"Father. Mother. Look at what your daughter has become, digging in the garbage for the remainings of an assassin. You wouldn't be proud of me."
~ * ~
Trunks was out on one of his wanderings, alone as usual.
He would abitually set off like that when he was in a bad mood (which happened rather often), when memories overwhelmed him, or simply whenever he felt uneasy at Capsule Corporation.
Gohan. It was so incredible. Why didn't he tell him he had a girlfriend? And they'd been together for almost five years! It must have been hard for him to hide something like that.
Maybe he was looking forward to the day he'd defeat the cyborgs to introduce Videl to everyone in times of peace. Or maybe he didn't want anybody to know because he was afraid the cyborgs would try to harm Videl just for the hate they felt towards him...Who knew, now? He was dead, and all of his secrets with him. He was forever gone, like all the others, like his beloved sensei, Piccolo, whose death had caused the Dragon Balls to disappear, making the losses irretrievable.
But Videl, Videl was still there...lucky girl, he thought with a smile.
There was a problem that troubled Trunks a great deal: some material had disappeared from the laboratory and, when he and Bulma had realized, such a long time had passed it proved almost impossible to estabilish the exact time of the theft, who had committed it, or its purpose, even though Trunks had started forming an idea about it.
That could happen because the lab was always stuffed up with all kinds of items, part stored in capsules, part piled on shelves, and part simply scattered around where they happened to be, to the point that in certain corners it was impossible to make a move without stepping over something fragile or making it fall from a shelf. The result was that nobody had ever dared to make a list of all the stuff that was there, at least until the day Bulma spent a whole afternoon looking unsuccessfully for a container of cell culture liquid that she was sure she'd left in the refrigerator.
That made her so mad she decided all of a sudden to turn the whole lab upside down until it came out, and finally a stock was taken.
The range of stolen objects varied from a common precision balance to various mixtures of dangerous rare chemicals, through cables, computer parts, plugs of every kind and dimension, project papers - including a copy of the precious project for Number Seventeen - and whatsoever.
Making a complete list was pratically impossible.
Suspecting Amrita would be the most natural thing, but for some reason both him and his mother were prevented from doing so. Amrita could simply ask for any of those things, she would be given, without any problem and free of charge; she was trusted a lot by Bulma, even though her son didn't agree much with this attitude of easily giving her confidence away that was so typical of his mother's.
Moreover, the theft looked everything but recent: it could have occurred any day between one year and three months before the discover, for what they could guess.
What made it most incredible was the extreme strictness of the safety measures around the lab. No unauthorized stranger could enter it without being immediately signaled and blocked, Bulma had been overcautious about that.
Unless it was some kind of superhuman being...which was exactly the thing they were afraid of now.
It was almost impossible not to link the facts with the accident his mother had had and the hyper girl who had caused it. Faster than cars, stronger than any common human , and possibly heading
towards Capsule Corporation, if she really was going the same direction as his mother, as Bulma reported.
And there also was a time when she could have committed the theft most easily: while Trunks was running to the hospital to see his mother, so upset for her and in such a hurry that it was possible he had forgotten to turn on the alarms.
Was it hers the feminine voice with which he had spoken on the phone? Was she deliberately trying to send him away from the house?
Luckily he had told his mother to dismantle the time machine...who knew what a criminal could do with it. It was gone forever now, and never to be reconstructed, for he had carefully made the projects disappear.
But the real reason why he had done so was another. He wanted to push away from himself the temptation to undertake any other trip in the past.
The desire was strong, and it hurt so much that sometimes he bitterly regretted going back to the past for the first time to give Goku the miraculous medicine that saved his life.
When he had gone a second time, to tell everybody there that he had defeated the jinzouningen and Cell, his departure had been almost intolerable.
How sharp was the contrast between that world, where Gohan and the other warriors-except Goku- were alive and his newborn counterpart would grow up in times of peace, at his father's side, and the world he was going back to! What would he give to stay forever and never return to his future! But, sad as it was to admitt, he was perfectly aware that that wasn't his time. Not only it was the past, but it was also a past he had never belonged to. Someone else was there to take it and it was to that child that it should be given.
So he forced himself to go, and said goodbye forever to that would-be happyness.
He was so deeply immersed in his thoughts and so apart from reality that when he finally snapped awake he couldn't tell how far or in which direction he'd been walking.
He was feeling completely lost. That was a rather strange occurrence, because he had an excellent sense of direction, which he thought to have inherited from his father as a Saiyajin instinct, and he could recognize any place he'd been to even after years and even if he'd been there only once.
But this time his sense of direction didn't help him much. It was like his brain was refusing to collaborate.
"Where the hell am I?" he wondered aloud. No clue could give him an idea of the place he was.
He took a look around him. The tall, grey, ruined buildings, the puddles of water on the cracked asphalt, a mail box that once had been probably painted red, a broken street-lamp...everything gave an idea of death and neglect. It was a really sad, ugly place.
And it made him feel uncomfortable, too. He couldn't help a sense of frightened deja-vù, like he suddenly found himself in a landscape from one of his nightmares.
And it was.
Down there, in a puddle larger than the others, a young man lay face-down in the water.But there was no danger for him to smother; he was already dead. A scar running across his left eye and a missing upper limb testimonied a life of fight and stuggle, spent in the vain attempt to protect his city, his family and his best friend, the only one he had left, from the worst murderers that had ever rampaged Earth, cyborgs Juunanagou and Juuhachigou.
Next to him the boy stood, unable to believe what had just happened.
"That can't be true" he murmured. "That can't be true..."
He knew that it was just a nightmare, the reappearing of a memory that he had pushed hard down in his deepest self, but that didn't prevent him from feeling the same he did that day. He could try to escape, to run somewhere else, but he knew that wouldn't help at all so he let it happen.
The child that he once had been tore his way out to the surface,crying desperately, yelling just like then, when he knocked his fists to the ground so hard that they bled and reached Super Saiyajin for the first time.
Gohan. He had let him die. He was unconscious while Gohan was giving his life away for him...
he was such a coward after all.What was destroying the cyborgs for, when his friend remained dead, when all the people they killed remained dead? Where to find the answers, if there were any?
Where?
~ * ~
She sniffed him coming like an animal. His smell was in the air, brought by the molecules that the wind carried along blowing towards her. She could detect various combination of chemicals mixed to form different smells: human sweat - of a male, probably, but with some weird note in it - freshly washed cotton clothes and leather boots, plus some less intense odours, like the scent of the soap that was on his skin, or the traces of dust he'd taken along from somewhere else.
He was dangerously close, but she had been too absorbed in her quest to pay attention to anything else: especially now that she'd just found one of the two things she was looking for.
What if they didn't work, she hadn't thought of yet. They had to. Or she would be forced to risk her life again.
She didn't fear the woman, whose deep blue eyes told of a character spicy but friendly and kind , nor her assistant with her bizarre clothes, the both of whom she well knew to be ordinary humans with no particular powers. Nor she was afraid of the security measures and the alarms, which she had already once successfully disactivated thanks to her hacking abilities.
No - the thing she feared most was the damn purple-haired half-breed that used to live there. Saiyajin half-breed, to be sure. And as if it weren't enough, the son of Prince Vegeta himself. Could he be of a worse race? Maybe if he came from Hell, she thought with an angry smirk. It was him the real danger: him, the former enemy of the jinzouningen, their executionist, the avenger of a tortured Earth, the one who had cleaned up the world from its scum, or at least so he believed. And if he could destroy Juunanagou and Juuhachigou, so he could do with her, and she had no doubts he'd do it without regrets, for he had shown he could be very merciless when it came to cyborgs.
And that was so very much like his smell.
Why, she wondered, why haven't I felt it before? She realized she was in great danger now, more than she would ever like to be. And she was afraid. The situation had suddenly become tense.
"Damn" she thought. "Damn damn damn damn. Now I know what people felt when they knew the Jinzouningen were coming."
She held her precious discovery tighter in her small hand and crouched down in a corner, hoping not to be found. She hated having a ki so small it was almost impossible to detect, but she had to admitt that it was of undeniable utility in a moment like that.
He was coming closer and closer. It was too late to run and hide now: he could be round every corner and spot her most easily.
"And I also am supposed to have a power radar! Damn, I knew that stupid thing didn't work right. That's what happens when you let down your guard. And if he ki-blasts me into pieces now, I'll have deserved it."
She felt like an idiot. A complete, undeniable idiot that couldn't even watch after herself. And she hated it! Being always in trouble, she meant. Seemed like it was impossible for her to stay out of it : whatever she tried, they kept coming. And this was the biggest one she'd ever been through in her whole life! No, wait. There was another one that was even bigger...and the ironic side of it was that she was trying to do something to fix it right now! Wonderful. To solve a problem, what's better than arising another problem? she scoffed herself.
Maybe he only finds me if I move. So I have to lie all rolled up in this corner completely motionless not daring to breathe...
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Woops! Sorry this one took me so long to update! I wanted to get a good job made, so I re-started writing it for three times. But now it's here! The more you review it, the harder I'll try to make it as good as possible. So please take three minutes of your time and...!
Acknowledgements: thank you very much to the Mirai Shock Team ( Marron, Juuhachigou and Bulma ) for their beautiful fanfiction, Dragon Ball Super Z, which inspired me to write mine.
So if you like this story, you know who to thank.
______________________________________________________________________________
Videl and Trunks socialized much more in the following weeks. It was like if discovering to have such a painful thing in common opened up, in both of them, a mysterious source of feelings they didn't know they had. They sparred together, talked a lot, went around doing little choirs for Bulma and Amrita, such as going to town for supplies, or simply wandered around in the fields.
Bulma didn't say anything and watched in silence, but as she saw the two youths become more and more intimate she started giving sign of enjoying the developments of the situation, and sometimes on her life-marked features spread a smile not too often seen even since the end of the hard times.
Despite all this, the two did never mate. Something stopped their relationship from crossing that line that separated a deep and affectionate friendship - plus the shoulder to rely on it meant - from that other thing that brings two people to make their lives one and plan the future only in the perspective of being together.
Bulma knew well what the reason was. It was called fear, fear to lose the ones you love, and she had no doubt about it for feeling like that herself.
Before her son was born, many years ago, she had met a man.
He was from a distant planet, but no longer had a home, he was a prince, but had lost his reign and all his subjects, and was doomed to never become king.
What Bulma felt in the beginning was mere curiosity. She just wanted to know more about the otherwise stand-offish Saiyajin no Ouji, Vegeta, as if inviting him to live in her house gave her the right to pry into his particular life.
He looked so lonely seen from closer. And so melancholic also, even fragile sometimes, never letting down the perpetual scowl carved on his angular features, like if he was trying to drive everyone else away from his real thoughts.
But he couldn't drive away Bulma.
She went closer and closer, little by little, never frightened by the man's reactions, that could vary from cold indifference to abrupt bursts of rage that would have scared the daylights off of anyone else, and slowly began making her own way to his true self.
She was stubborn and clever, and was perfectly aware that what she was trying to do was comparable to carve a stone with her bare hands. But if he was a stone, then she was a little stream of water, and as time went by, she realized she was actually doing something to him, perhaps she was even drilling a tiny hole in his hard surface, although she could never be sure until...until...well, until it happened.
She felt so ashamed after that, and so happy. She had gradually grew fond of that man, who turned his back at her, but always looked behind with the corner of the eye, who told her she was ugly, but spent hours staring at her concealed in a shadow - like she didn't know he was there.
So fond she forever stopped thinking about substituting him with anyone else.
He never showed his care or attention, because he was too proud for that, as Bulma had soon sensed, but for a reason she alone seemed to know she was sure he felt some kind of love for her and for their child, who was born less than three years after their first encounter.
She'd caught him more than once standing by the cradle, looking down at his tiny son who was sleeping safe and sound, never saying anything or making a single move to reach out and touch him, face completely expressionless...then as the minutes passed something happened to him, the corner of his mouth bent unnoticeably upwards, and for just a second what was on his face could be called a smile. It was in those moments that Bulma knew he was thinking about the child as of his heir, the future Prince of the Saiyajin, and not as he would once have seen him - a half-breed conceived with a worthless human female. Yes. Unbelievable but true, he was proud.
Bulma let out a heavy sigh.
"Still thinking about Vegeta" she murmured sadly. "I know I should have stopped a long time ago."
"What's up, Bulma-sama? Sorry, I wasn't listening." Amrita had turned her head away from her work to look at her.
"Iie. Nani mo..." she replied wearily. "Nothing. I was just...thinking. But it's nothing important, believe me."
Amrita looked back at her, a puzzled look on her face. She really seemed to be concerned about what was going on in Bulma's mind, but didn't dare to ask; she understood that something was wrong with her, but couldn't quite imagine what it was. She reflected for a while, thinking about what to decide for, then suddenly her face lit up as she was about to come up with an idea.
"Take this" she said playfully, and the next moment Bulma was brushing her nose against something warm and furry that in addiction meowed deliciously and started purring full engine. Amrita had picked up RoboKoNeko from her desktop, on which the cybernetic cat was used to sleep, and just lifted it towards her mistress' face with a large grin.
"Owwww" Bulma giggled, delighted by the unexpected joke. Amrita always knew how to make someone smile when he was down. "Come to me, kitty-kitty..." she laughed while she cradled it in her arms, forgetting for a moment her memories of grief. RoboKoNeko was as lovable as its creator, she thought, and just as charming; as the days went by it had assumed the appearance of a beautiful, large, long-haired brown tabby cat, with the air of dignity and the natural elegance all real cats have.
"Hey, you've gained some more weight since last week! I'll bet you are at least thirteen pounds! Amrita, you had told me that tiny thingie could actually grow, but I never thought that it would do so fast!!"
"Well, as nanomachines can actually turn food into new tissues a certain growth was natural...but maybe I should have installed a limiting device...it was supposed to be a cat, but it is becoming as plump as a piglet!" she burst, and the two women simultaneously broke into laughter.
"You know, I wouldn't like to find myself with a puma or something like that...what about bathing it then? Guess what claw marks it could leave!" and the two laughed some more. "Oh, Kami , no, I wouldn't like to get the crap clawed out of me...and we're lucky it still haven't had some genial ideas like going rolling in the wet soil!..."
"C'mon" said Bulma, recovering herself. "Let's get back to work. We have a lot to do today, and Trunks isn't even around to help us."
"Out again with Videl?"
"No. Not today."
~ * ~
She was alone, completely alone. Debris and ruins scattered all around her and no one in sight.
Somewhere near a car lay upside down, the memory of an event happened a very long time ago. A black-haired boy...an old man shooting with a gun...a blonde girl and her evil laugh...then another boy, and then nothing at all.
She sat with her back against a wall, looking wearily at the ruined landscape in front of her. A warm wind blew across the rubble, raising little whirlpools and clouds of dust. This was one of the many places where reconstruction hadn't yet begun, and everything was still like the cyborgs had left it, which meant, a battlefield of devastation.
It was such a mess, it could take her weeks to find out what she was looking for. But, as usual, she was very determined, and she had all the time in the world. Or so she believed.
She was absolutely sure that nobody else in the world knew about its existence. And if he did, well, then he would know no more. Nobody would go between her and her goal, the wish of a whole lifetime...if you could call it "life", she intended.
She got up slowly, without forcing her moves. The wind run in her face and across her hair, bringing in her nostrils the smell of earth and cement dust, along with something else that she couldn't recognize. That should perhaps make her suspicious, but it didn't. She was too intensely concentrated on whatever was bothering her now to get acknowledged about the existence of anything else that didn't have to do with it.
"Maybe I should use the metal detector" she thought.
No, what a silly idea...the objects were probably made of some material of relatively recent discover, impossible to detect like it was metal. Damn. That was really going to last a long time.
She'd better start scanning the area straight away, if she wanted to have a chance to ever get that job finished.
Her thoughts often runned to the times before what she called "my little death". Those were good times: she would go to school, flirt and have fun. She acted like all of that was going to last forever and firmly believed that nothing would ever change her world, like most of the girls her age did. She had nothing but clouds in her head. Clever, but not willing enough, a dreamer, but not doing enough to make her dreams come true, she was a normal person, a little bit crazy sometimes, but normal all the same.
Things had changed a lot since.
And when she went home, after school was over, she would sometimes meet her father, who because of his work was often away: he was a regular soldier.
So it was almost no surprise when they were told he had died in battle.
"Your father is a hero. A real hero" her mother told her, and holding one another, they cried the whole night away.
Something twisted the corners of her mouth slightly upwards, giving her a bitter expression that contrasted harshly with her sweet childish features.
"Father. Mother. Look at what your daughter has become, digging in the garbage for the remainings of an assassin. You wouldn't be proud of me."
~ * ~
Trunks was out on one of his wanderings, alone as usual.
He would abitually set off like that when he was in a bad mood (which happened rather often), when memories overwhelmed him, or simply whenever he felt uneasy at Capsule Corporation.
Gohan. It was so incredible. Why didn't he tell him he had a girlfriend? And they'd been together for almost five years! It must have been hard for him to hide something like that.
Maybe he was looking forward to the day he'd defeat the cyborgs to introduce Videl to everyone in times of peace. Or maybe he didn't want anybody to know because he was afraid the cyborgs would try to harm Videl just for the hate they felt towards him...Who knew, now? He was dead, and all of his secrets with him. He was forever gone, like all the others, like his beloved sensei, Piccolo, whose death had caused the Dragon Balls to disappear, making the losses irretrievable.
But Videl, Videl was still there...lucky girl, he thought with a smile.
There was a problem that troubled Trunks a great deal: some material had disappeared from the laboratory and, when he and Bulma had realized, such a long time had passed it proved almost impossible to estabilish the exact time of the theft, who had committed it, or its purpose, even though Trunks had started forming an idea about it.
That could happen because the lab was always stuffed up with all kinds of items, part stored in capsules, part piled on shelves, and part simply scattered around where they happened to be, to the point that in certain corners it was impossible to make a move without stepping over something fragile or making it fall from a shelf. The result was that nobody had ever dared to make a list of all the stuff that was there, at least until the day Bulma spent a whole afternoon looking unsuccessfully for a container of cell culture liquid that she was sure she'd left in the refrigerator.
That made her so mad she decided all of a sudden to turn the whole lab upside down until it came out, and finally a stock was taken.
The range of stolen objects varied from a common precision balance to various mixtures of dangerous rare chemicals, through cables, computer parts, plugs of every kind and dimension, project papers - including a copy of the precious project for Number Seventeen - and whatsoever.
Making a complete list was pratically impossible.
Suspecting Amrita would be the most natural thing, but for some reason both him and his mother were prevented from doing so. Amrita could simply ask for any of those things, she would be given, without any problem and free of charge; she was trusted a lot by Bulma, even though her son didn't agree much with this attitude of easily giving her confidence away that was so typical of his mother's.
Moreover, the theft looked everything but recent: it could have occurred any day between one year and three months before the discover, for what they could guess.
What made it most incredible was the extreme strictness of the safety measures around the lab. No unauthorized stranger could enter it without being immediately signaled and blocked, Bulma had been overcautious about that.
Unless it was some kind of superhuman being...which was exactly the thing they were afraid of now.
It was almost impossible not to link the facts with the accident his mother had had and the hyper girl who had caused it. Faster than cars, stronger than any common human , and possibly heading
towards Capsule Corporation, if she really was going the same direction as his mother, as Bulma reported.
And there also was a time when she could have committed the theft most easily: while Trunks was running to the hospital to see his mother, so upset for her and in such a hurry that it was possible he had forgotten to turn on the alarms.
Was it hers the feminine voice with which he had spoken on the phone? Was she deliberately trying to send him away from the house?
Luckily he had told his mother to dismantle the time machine...who knew what a criminal could do with it. It was gone forever now, and never to be reconstructed, for he had carefully made the projects disappear.
But the real reason why he had done so was another. He wanted to push away from himself the temptation to undertake any other trip in the past.
The desire was strong, and it hurt so much that sometimes he bitterly regretted going back to the past for the first time to give Goku the miraculous medicine that saved his life.
When he had gone a second time, to tell everybody there that he had defeated the jinzouningen and Cell, his departure had been almost intolerable.
How sharp was the contrast between that world, where Gohan and the other warriors-except Goku- were alive and his newborn counterpart would grow up in times of peace, at his father's side, and the world he was going back to! What would he give to stay forever and never return to his future! But, sad as it was to admitt, he was perfectly aware that that wasn't his time. Not only it was the past, but it was also a past he had never belonged to. Someone else was there to take it and it was to that child that it should be given.
So he forced himself to go, and said goodbye forever to that would-be happyness.
He was so deeply immersed in his thoughts and so apart from reality that when he finally snapped awake he couldn't tell how far or in which direction he'd been walking.
He was feeling completely lost. That was a rather strange occurrence, because he had an excellent sense of direction, which he thought to have inherited from his father as a Saiyajin instinct, and he could recognize any place he'd been to even after years and even if he'd been there only once.
But this time his sense of direction didn't help him much. It was like his brain was refusing to collaborate.
"Where the hell am I?" he wondered aloud. No clue could give him an idea of the place he was.
He took a look around him. The tall, grey, ruined buildings, the puddles of water on the cracked asphalt, a mail box that once had been probably painted red, a broken street-lamp...everything gave an idea of death and neglect. It was a really sad, ugly place.
And it made him feel uncomfortable, too. He couldn't help a sense of frightened deja-vù, like he suddenly found himself in a landscape from one of his nightmares.
And it was.
Down there, in a puddle larger than the others, a young man lay face-down in the water.But there was no danger for him to smother; he was already dead. A scar running across his left eye and a missing upper limb testimonied a life of fight and stuggle, spent in the vain attempt to protect his city, his family and his best friend, the only one he had left, from the worst murderers that had ever rampaged Earth, cyborgs Juunanagou and Juuhachigou.
Next to him the boy stood, unable to believe what had just happened.
"That can't be true" he murmured. "That can't be true..."
He knew that it was just a nightmare, the reappearing of a memory that he had pushed hard down in his deepest self, but that didn't prevent him from feeling the same he did that day. He could try to escape, to run somewhere else, but he knew that wouldn't help at all so he let it happen.
The child that he once had been tore his way out to the surface,crying desperately, yelling just like then, when he knocked his fists to the ground so hard that they bled and reached Super Saiyajin for the first time.
Gohan. He had let him die. He was unconscious while Gohan was giving his life away for him...
he was such a coward after all.What was destroying the cyborgs for, when his friend remained dead, when all the people they killed remained dead? Where to find the answers, if there were any?
Where?
~ * ~
She sniffed him coming like an animal. His smell was in the air, brought by the molecules that the wind carried along blowing towards her. She could detect various combination of chemicals mixed to form different smells: human sweat - of a male, probably, but with some weird note in it - freshly washed cotton clothes and leather boots, plus some less intense odours, like the scent of the soap that was on his skin, or the traces of dust he'd taken along from somewhere else.
He was dangerously close, but she had been too absorbed in her quest to pay attention to anything else: especially now that she'd just found one of the two things she was looking for.
What if they didn't work, she hadn't thought of yet. They had to. Or she would be forced to risk her life again.
She didn't fear the woman, whose deep blue eyes told of a character spicy but friendly and kind , nor her assistant with her bizarre clothes, the both of whom she well knew to be ordinary humans with no particular powers. Nor she was afraid of the security measures and the alarms, which she had already once successfully disactivated thanks to her hacking abilities.
No - the thing she feared most was the damn purple-haired half-breed that used to live there. Saiyajin half-breed, to be sure. And as if it weren't enough, the son of Prince Vegeta himself. Could he be of a worse race? Maybe if he came from Hell, she thought with an angry smirk. It was him the real danger: him, the former enemy of the jinzouningen, their executionist, the avenger of a tortured Earth, the one who had cleaned up the world from its scum, or at least so he believed. And if he could destroy Juunanagou and Juuhachigou, so he could do with her, and she had no doubts he'd do it without regrets, for he had shown he could be very merciless when it came to cyborgs.
And that was so very much like his smell.
Why, she wondered, why haven't I felt it before? She realized she was in great danger now, more than she would ever like to be. And she was afraid. The situation had suddenly become tense.
"Damn" she thought. "Damn damn damn damn. Now I know what people felt when they knew the Jinzouningen were coming."
She held her precious discovery tighter in her small hand and crouched down in a corner, hoping not to be found. She hated having a ki so small it was almost impossible to detect, but she had to admitt that it was of undeniable utility in a moment like that.
He was coming closer and closer. It was too late to run and hide now: he could be round every corner and spot her most easily.
"And I also am supposed to have a power radar! Damn, I knew that stupid thing didn't work right. That's what happens when you let down your guard. And if he ki-blasts me into pieces now, I'll have deserved it."
She felt like an idiot. A complete, undeniable idiot that couldn't even watch after herself. And she hated it! Being always in trouble, she meant. Seemed like it was impossible for her to stay out of it : whatever she tried, they kept coming. And this was the biggest one she'd ever been through in her whole life! No, wait. There was another one that was even bigger...and the ironic side of it was that she was trying to do something to fix it right now! Wonderful. To solve a problem, what's better than arising another problem? she scoffed herself.
Maybe he only finds me if I move. So I have to lie all rolled up in this corner completely motionless not daring to breathe...
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Woops! Sorry this one took me so long to update! I wanted to get a good job made, so I re-started writing it for three times. But now it's here! The more you review it, the harder I'll try to make it as good as possible. So please take three minutes of your time and...!