All of it had happened a long time ago, Trunks reasoned, and Goten surely felt differently by now.
His theory was that Goten had not come home because he was embarrassed about having left in the first place, and that this problem would only worsen the longer it went on. All they needed to do was find him and tell him all was forgiven, and he would admit he missed his mother and that the ramen in space was sub-par, and he would come back with them.
An iron taste in his mouth made him realise he had been biting down on his lip for several minutes. He wiped a smudge of blood away and listened to the voices in the garden.
He was wedged under the belly of the spaceship, holding it up at an angle with one knee while he worked. Four resisters needed replacing to get the backup comms panel working reliably. He currently had two. He wiped his hands on his overalls and listened for his mother or grandfather.
He was fairly sure he'd heard Marron go back inside the ship. She might not appreciate him suddenly setting the whole thing down.
The conversations were prickly, the tones of disagreement between old friends. The whole thing was a waste of time, according to some of them. Vegeta clearly thought so, but he'd kept his opinion to himself for once.
He and Goku had gone looking for Goten in the days after he'd vanished, whizzing around the galaxies in search of his energy signature. Once or twice they'd caught wind of him, but it soon became clear he was doing his best to avoid them. And that he must have help, judging by how well he was managing to evade them.
Goku had ruled that sometimes boys liked to go on adventures, and Goten would no doubt come home on his own when he was ready. Vegeta had countered by asserting that the universe was in fact a fairly nasty place, that teenagers were eminently corruptible, and that it wasn't a good idea to leave him out here. But he wasn't the boy's father and if Kakarot wanted to stop looking and go home to train, he wouldn't argue. Besides, he had his own children to raise (read: train), and after two months alone with him in space he was a hair's breadth from murdering Kakarot in his sleep.
Two years later, Trunks had finally been old enough to go himself. He and Gohan had tried then, and met with even less success than Goku and Vegeta. They hadn't been able to locate him at all.
Some months after that, when they summoned up an exasperated Shenron for yet another go with the dragon balls, there was palpable relief when Goten refused — because at least he was alive to do the refusing.
He really did need those resisters for the comms panel. Bulma was deep in discussion with Chi-Chi. He was trying not to listen. He generally avoided Chi-Chi if he could, because she had a bad habit of overwhelming him with questions about Goten that he didn't know how to answer.
He pulled himself gingerly from underneath the ship — hearing a thunk from inside that was probably Marron falling off her chair when the angle changed — and to his surprise, detected Pan and Gohan arriving.
Gohan joined the gaggle around Chi-Chi, while Pan stood off to the side, apparently not keen to look at or speak to anyone.
They didn't really have time for this. Trunks strode up to her. "So, are you coming?"
She held up her hand against the glare of the sun. "I'm here, aren't I?"
He thought it best to let the attitude slide, for now.
"There are some things you should know. We're likely to be out there for a while. We're not going to wish ourselves into the middle of wherever he is, because we don't know what we'd be walking into. So we'll go nearby, work on sensing him. It could take time. A lot of waiting around probably."
"Okay." Pan sounded bored already.
His irritation climbed.
"There's a condition," he went on, "If you're coming, you'll need to learn to fight. I'll teach you."
He considered it quite a generous offer.
Pan's face spelled out her disagreement. "That wasn't part of the deal."
"We didn't make a deal."
Her face reddened.
"Just some basic stuff, Pan. Come on. This doesn't need to be as hard as you're making it."
"I know basic stuff. I can fly, I can teleport. I can throw a bit of ki around if the situation calls for it."
"I haven't seen you spar in years."
Pan said nothing, and he suspected this was because she hadn't, in fact, sparred for years.
"I've been teaching Marron," he added.
"Oh, you've been planning this for a while without me, huh?"
He looked beyond Pan to the trees behind her, and counted to three internally. It helped, a little.
"I don't think this is going to be dangerous but I need to be able to leave the two of you alone for short periods and know you can handle yourselves if something comes up."
"Why are you even bringing me if you think I'm that useless?"
Marron emerged, her timing impeccable.
"Pan! Are you coming after all? Haven't seen you since that weird-ass party 17 threw. Or was it Bulla's birthday dinner? Anyway," She was holding a scuffed-up motherboard, which she threw to Trunks. "You look mad."
"No, I don't." Pan's teeth were gritted.
Marron smirked.
Trunks took the opportunity to step away. Bulla sidled up to him. She had been listening in. He began to walk towards the buildings, and she fell into step beside him.
"It should be me going with you."
Trunks looked exasperated and gestured at Vegeta, who stood leaning against the nearest tree with a stony expression.
"Does that look like the face of a man who's about to change his mind about his teenage daughter going to space?"
Bulla glanced over at their father and snorted. "I suppose not. But I'm not happy about this, on any level. And I want that on the record."
"It's on the record."
"Good." Her face grew suddenly serious. "You'll be careful, won't you?"
"Me and two girls who don't know how to fight, what could possibly go wrong?"
She punched his arm, hard.
He yelped. "Bulla!"
Her face was thunderous.
"I will be very careful on this probably not very dangerous venture, yes." He rubbed his arm where she'd connected.
"She's been coddled," Bulla had turned to observe Pan, closing one eye against the sun. "She was allowed to stop training when she was twelve, and nobody made a peep. But it was reasonable to assume we might someday need her to be able to fight. Her father shouldn't have allowed it."
"You sound like dad."
Bulla's eyes narrowed, but she continued to watch Pan.
"I'm going to train her," Trunks said.
"Should be me going with you."
"I have nothing to teach you," he quipped.
"That's not what I meant."
"I know."
Krillin was remonstrating with Chi-Chi as Gohan approached. "C'mon, I don't see what harm it would do if one of us went with them to keep an eye on things."
"We've tried that, Krillin," Gohan said, "I have to agree with my mom here. He did his best to avoid us. Maybe he'll feel differently about them."
He looked over to where Pan and Trunks appeared to be having a blazing row.
"And we didn't really run into any problems. Sure, they'll be a long way from home, but the chances seem slim that they'll run into anything Trunks can't handle."
Krillin shot a suspicious look at Gohan. "Is there something you're not saying?"
Gohan glanced at Chi-Chi, who was now animatedly explaining to Bulma for a third time that she was certain Goten would feel differently if it was his friends who showed up to retrieve him instead of his father or older brother. He took a few steps back and motioned for Krillin to follow.
"It's going to work."
"What? It's going to — oh! She had a dream?"
"Keep your voice down," Gohan said, but he was nodding. "I don't want to tell my mom — Pan's never been wrong before, but there's been the occasional misinterpretation that we've realised only after the fact. I don't think my mom could handle the disappointment if she thought it was a dead cert and then he didn't come back."
Krillin thought for a moment. "But you trust it enough to let Pan go?"
"She's an adult, I can't stop her."
Krillin looked unimpressed.
"And" Gohan was sheepish, "she pointed out it was a bit rich of me to object to her going to space when I was out there at the age of five."
"Those were different times."
"Yes, more dangerous times than we live in now." Gohan was watching Pan, who appeared to have finished arguing with Trunks and had moved on to arguing with Marron.
Krillin seemed deflated. "I don't like it."
"I don't love it either," Gohan had to admit. "But given the dream — it looks like this is happening one way or another. And I'd rather know where they are, wouldn't you?"
"Yes."
"We don't need any more of them lost in space."
Krillin looked ashen at the thought. They turned together to look at their daughters, who seemed to have made up. Marron's black boilersuit, knotted at the waist, was covered in dust and she was trying without success to pat some of it away. Then, together, laughing, they rolled a barrel of something up the ramp and onto the ship.
"What is the plan here? You're going to gymnastics them to death?"
Pan looked back at him, sullen. She was wearing an old green gi he'd brought for her — it hadn't fitted since he was a teenager but his mother had inexplicably squirrelled it away in a cupboard.
"You're asking a lot of me," Pan said.
They were in the training room of the ship, which was parked on a remarkably uninteresting and remarkably distant planet. He had been trying to sense Goten's ki in the nearest systems for two weeks, without success.
It was unlikely Shenron had sent them to the wrong place, but he couldn't help but feel disheartened. He was trying not to take it out on Pan, with limited effect.
"In what sense?" he asked.
"I don't know how to do most of this stuff any more. Of course my body is going to revert to what it knows. It's muscle memory."
He sighed. "That's fair. It's ... I mean it's not really the flips or the rolls that are the problem. You can use those, they're pretty handy for evasion, or for when you get wrong- footed by your opponent and you just need to get right-side up again as soon as possible. But every time you run through a sequence, you grind to a halt, and anyone with half a brain cell is going to hit you hard."
"So keep flipping, is that it?"
He couldn't help but laugh at the image of her continuously flipping around the battlefield without pause. It would certainly confound the enemy.
"I mean," he cleared his throat and tried to suppress his amusement, though she was now smiling too, "yes and no — vary your movements, use what you know but break it up and make it less predictable. Think about what happens at the end of your chain of movement. You could, for example, launch an attack?"
"Fine."
They went again, and then again with slightly higher gravity. There was progress, he could see it, but she was clearly irritated by the time they finished. When he caught sight of his own broad frame reflected in the windows of the training room, and her slight, gangly figure behind him, he wondered whether he'd put her on the ground too many times during the session.
They had a new plan now. They knew (or at least hoped) Goten was still nearby, and since they had brought the best Capsule Corp comms technology that Trunks had been able to wrestle out of his grandfather's arms, there was the potential to use it to listen in on some of the conversations happening in this system and see whether they could find clues as to his whereabouts.
Trunks and Marron were together in the control room section, getting some maintenance in before dinner. Trunks was fighting with some wiring as if it had recently insulted him.
"If we can get this working, it'll run thousands of key combinations per second. We'll be elbowing our way in and it's not quiet, but ... whatever works, right?"
Marron took some of the cables and hooked them up to a tablet. "I think they want to be connected a different way."
Trunks watched her with interest. She had an uncanny gift with computers. She seemed to be able to troubleshoot almost anything. He was the one with the engineering degree, but during the time they'd been on the ship together, he'd often sought her out when he found himself getting frustrated with the electronics onboard.
"What will you say to him, if we find him?" Marron asked quietly, her hair obscuring her face as she leaned down to examine the diagnostics blinking across the screen.
He exhaled, long and hard. "Honestly, I don't know."
He looked up at the ceiling of the ship. "Maybe I'll be mad. Maybe I'll tell him it's all good. Or that I'm sorry."
"What are you sorry for?"
"Whatever part I had in it. Whatever made him feel like he couldn't talk to me about ... whatever it was that drove him to go with them."
She nodded, thoughtful.
"There was a lot going on for him."
"What was happening at school?" he asked, curious.
"I wasn't in his year group, so I don't know exactly."
"Ah, yes." Marron and Goten had gone to the local school, unlike Trunks and his sister Bulla, who'd been sent to the most obnoxiously expensive academy their mother could find. But he had forgotten they'd not been in the same year.
"But he did seem different, he wasn't really goofing around at lunch like he would normally, he went kind of quiet. I think he was failing some subjects."
Trunks heaved a sigh, thinking of Goten's older brother and his exemplary academic achievements. "There was a lot of pressure at home, too. Chi-Chi was never exactly sympathetic to the idea that there was more to life than school."
Marron cringed, and Trunks realised Pan had stepped into the room a few moments ago, her black hair wet from the shower.
"Oh, go ahead, blame my grandmother. I'm sure you repeatedly crushing him unnecessarily while sparring had no effect." Pan sat down at the table and crossed her arms.
Trunks found himself speechless. It was a novel sensation.
Pan carried on. "Not everybody has your confidence, wonderboy. There was no need to cut him down the way you did."
"Are you serious? We never cared about stuff like that. You get beaten, you get back up, you go again."
"And again and again until you're obsessed and insane enough to get on a spaceship with some band of cretins who promise you you'll be stronger than everyone if you just come away with them."
He gaped at her.
"You're a piece of work sometimes, Pan, do you know that? You weren't even there for any of this! You're parroting what you've heard. This is Chi-Chi's nonsense. Try forming your own opinion for once."
Pan got up, clearly intending to storm off. A sob from Marron stopped her in her tracks. Pan hovered, halfway out of her chair.
"Marron?"
"Stop it, both of you! It wasn't any of that. It's my fault he left." Marron's face was covered by her hands.
Trunks saw Pan close her mouth and put aside whatever she had been about to say.
This was one of the wildest things Trunks had ever heard.
Pan sat back down, and they exchanged bewildered looks as they waited for Marron to regain some composure.
Finally, she spoke, looking down at her hands in her lap. "We ... had a bit of a thing going on. We ... That summer we were fooling around, sort of dating but not really."
Trunks looked at Pan to see whether this was also news to her. Her eyes were wide with surprise.
"Just ... teenage stuff, you know? Summer romance. I took it a little too far, probably. He was besotted with me. I liked the attention." She hugged herself tightly.
"The day before he left, he called me and I told him ... when we went back to school, I didn't want to carry on. And I didn't want people to know."
"Yikes," said Pan, earning a sharp look from Trunks. She slid down in her chair, chastened.
"As time went on I realised how good he'd been. How kind in all sorts of ways. And, let me tell you," she looked at Pan, a little conspiratorial even through the tears, "it was a shock to realise not all guys are that respectful and willing to learn what you like … unbeknownst to us both, he set a high bar. And you know how rubbish most guys are in bed …"
Judging by Pan's mystified expression, she didn't appear to know anything of the sort, Trunks thought. He'd never heard tell of her dating anyone. But she nodded in an uncertain sort of way and Marron didn't seem to notice.
When Trunks addressed Marron he sounded pained. "You were really young, Marron. Sure, that wasn't very good, but teenagers do that sort of stuff. I don't think you're responsible."
He was tugging absent- mindedly on the tangle of wires in his lap.
"I think, if anything, Pan is right, I was his best friend and I was giving him the hardest time imaginable. He fell a little bit behind me, and I never let him forget it." He closed his eyes against the feeling rising up inside him. "Honestly, I was practically bullying him about it by the end."
He felt a hand on his arm. Pan was there, looking bereft.
"No, Trunks. I don't think so. Please, don't … what I said before, I don't think it's true. I was so horrible to him. He was always so nice to me and I was such an ungrateful little wretch. I looked down on him. Imagine, your twelve-year-old niece thinking she's somehow above giving you the time of day. I can't even imagine how shitty it must have felt. How shitty I must have made him feel, all the time."
They sat together for a long while, Pan's warm hand on Trunks's arm, and Marron looking at both of them with relief, her breathing even and calm.
"We all blame ourselves," Trunks said.
"It looks that way," Marron answered with a small laugh, wiping her tear-stained face on her sleeve.
"You never asked me why I changed my mind, why I decided to come," Pan said suddenly.
They looked at her.
"I had a dream," she said, turning to face Marron with a soft expression. "I had a dream and I saw you with him. And you looked so happy."
"This is great." Pan was chewing heartily.
"One of my mom's contributions," Marron said.
Marron had wept again when Pan had described the dream in more detail, and Trunks had decided it was time for dinner and gone to pull one of the capsulised meals out of their store.
"Your mom's a whizz in kitchen, huh?" Trunks asked, helping himself to more of the dumpling soup.
"Well, she doesn't need to eat, so everything she makes is purely for enjoyment."
"I don't think I knew that," Trunks said.
Pan was refilling everyone's water glasses.
"But you need to eat, right?" He asked.
"Yes." Marron paused. "I'm ... reasonably sure I do."
Pan's fork was halfway to her mouth. "Reasonably?"
"I've never really thought about it, so I've never tested it. I get hungry, so I assume ..." She looked a little embarrassed.
"I'm sorry," Trunks said, "I didn't mean to make you self-conscious, I wasn't really thinking."
"It's okay. I seem to be mostly human but I confuse doctors and my body doesn't always react the way other people's do. Sometimes I just feel a bit ... different, if that makes sense."
"I'd say that does make sense to the two alien-human hybrids joining you at the table, yes," Trunks grinned.
They laughed.
Afterwards, Marron sat in the control room reconnecting everything they'd unplugged earlier while they worked. She sent a couple of brief messages of reassurance to all three sets of parents ("All good, mom and dad! Space is kinda boring actually. Miss you!" — copied and pasted thrice). Even a simple piece of text would take almost 2 days to cross the distances involved, once she added the sort of security she wanted. They were very far from home.
"I think we should run this round the clock if we can," Trunks said, coming up behind her and gesturing at the device they'd hooked up to try and listen in on the conversations happening between the many ships and planets in the system.
"Agreed," said Marron.
"I'll take over in a few hours?"
"Perfect," she turned around in the chair.
When he woke her some time later, slumped in the chair where he had left her, he was smiling. He pointed at the screen, where a long string of numbers indicated that the comms tech was working, rapidly slicing through the web of communication traffic in the system. It had searched millions of transmissions and it had returned three possible mentions of Goten from the last forty-eight hours.
