Disclaimer: Jack is mine. Hands off.
A/N: For those of you with great memories like mine (ok, mine ain't so great, :P thpp.), you'll remember me mentioning how I wasn't fond of the title Petrified Tears, and how I was going to change it. I ain't never gonna change it now. This chapter only proves that my mind works faster then I can even dream. (Or type for that matter, and I can type fast.) It seems kinda monotonous at first, I'm sure. But you'll understand what it's building to, if not by the end of this chapter, then by the end of the next few.
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Petrified Tears
chapter 55
"I don't care how old you are. You're the same age I am."
Trunks laughed as they drove down the scenic route, taking their time now as they followed the old highway through the forest that lead to the city. "I don't think I follow that."
Pan laughed, resting her cheek against the side of his shoulder, enjoying herself as they cruised down the road. "When I was little, before I started school and before Grandma ChiChi went crazy with my education, you and Uncle Goten would take me almost everywhere with you. The only place you didn't take me was on dates."
Trunks laughed. "Not true and you know it."
She hesitated, then laughed, remembering the incident involving Trunks and Goten's senior prom, when they had been desperate to go but had been stuck baby-sitting her. They had talked her into one of Bra's dresses, and taken her as their joint date, renting a limo and going to dinner, the whole thing. They'd been stared at like they were crazy as soon as they'd entered the dance, and had lived it up by fighting over who got to have the first dance with her. Marron, who'd been a freshman at the time, had been Goten's official date, since she and Trunks were on the rocks again, had played along by pretending that Pan was her kid sister. It had ended with Goten getting an angry call on his cellphone from Gohan, after which Trunks and Goten and Marron departed the prom two hours before it was to end, and dropping off their "date", the two high school seniors gathered her in a hug between them and tag-teamed her with a kiss to each cheek. Both had suffered terribly the next morning at Gohan's wrath, but all had admitted it was completely worth it.
"Ok, so maybe you did take me everywhere," she chuckled, smiling at the memory. "But that's not what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is that you and Uncle Goten treated me like a little sister when I was little, looking out for me, taunting and teasing me, doing whatever you could to make me laugh or to scream. And you still do that, you just don't treat me like a little sister anymore."
Trunks smirked into the wind, seeing the skyline of the cityscape up ahead, part of him wishing that he could just veer down a side road and keep driving all day, following the arc of the sun until it brought them back to Pan's house. And while he knew Pan was all for it, he knew that Gohan's conclusions would prove his death warrant. He was on borrowed time with the older half saiyan as it was. Not to mention his mother would catch on and kill him and Pan.
As if he wasn't already in for an earful about his choice of clothing that morning.
"Yeah, you're going to explain that sister thing to me sometime today," he called over his shoulder, slowing the bike to take the off-ramp from the old scenic highway into the city.
"Sure, but it'll have to wait until tonight, before you drop me off at home. It's not something I want one of Bulma's lackeys walking in on."
He nodded. "So long as you tell me."
She smiled, the memory of being a four year old prom date lingering in her heart. Marron had taken a picture of Goten and Trunks tag-teaming her, and she still had it hanging on her wall, both boys pale from trying not to laugh, Pan as red as the borrowed dress as they both pressed a kiss to one of her cheeks, their arms crossing over each other as they held her up, each holding a side as they let her sit on the "throne" of their crossed arms behind her.
The smile faltered as something tugged at the back of her mind, and she frowned, trying to grab ahold of the little nagging inkling, wondering why the memory had triggered it.
"Pan?" Trunks called back as he slowed to a stop in traffic, her sudden silence worrying him. There's no way we'll make it to the office on time, he thought, looking down the boulevard at the thousands of red lights and the traffic that was backed up at every one of them.
"Yeah?"
"What's on your mind?"
"Nothing," she replied absently, standing up and holding his shoulder for support, looking at the traffic with a scowl. "Trunks, when the light turns green, just drive along side the other drivers. We'll get to the office on time, and besides, it's perfectly legal. Molly, Jack and I did it all the time in Cali."
Trunks looked up at her, reaching up and sweeping her windblown hair out of her eyes. "That's because it's legal in California, Pan. Not here."
She blushed, sitting down as the light turned green and they inched forward. "Oh, yeah. Forgot."
He laughed, but his mind was whirling.
I'm going back to California with summer's end… I have a guy friend out there who I'm close to…who understands enough to accept me…
"Pan?"
"Yeah? What is it?"
"Who's Molly? And Jack?"
"Oh…Molly and Jack." She paused, thinking quietly, her mind still trying to capture the little twig of memory that was poking the back of her brain. "I told you about them, remember?"
"I vaguely remember something about Molly," he agreed, "but not very clearly. And I have no memory of you ever mentioning a guy named Jack."
"Molly? 'The Revenge of PanKake Girl'?" she prodded. Trunks admitted that it sounded a little familiar. "Molly was my roommate back at college after I moved from the dorms into the frat house. She's pretty quirky. You and Uncle Goten would like her. She played therapist for me over there, and I taught her the basics of fighting. Tell you one thing, for a purebred human, she can punch."
Trunks nodded, resisting the urge to point out the fact that Pan was more human then she was Saiyan, so that might have been the reason she felt Molly could punch, but knew better. He didn't feel like getting sucker-punched in the kidneys.
"Explain that pancake thing to me again?"
She laughed. "Molly's quirky. She doesn't sleep either. Every night at eleven pm or so, she'd dig out her camcorder and we'd either film the other's in the house while they slept, or would sneak down to the kitchen, and we'd do odd things with food, pretend we had a cooking show or something. Most of the time, action figures would be involved. She waited until eleven, only because that was when the house was dead, everyone either out partying, out studying, or just out. The first time I realized she even had a camcorder was when I was making myself a midnight snack and sensed her sneaking up on me from the hall.
"After she'd finally seen my raw and inherited eating habits, she blackmailed me into being her partner in crime. So she'd film and come up with the quote-unquote scripts (that we never bothered to read), and I'd manipulate the action figures to harass our sleeping housemates, both of us supplying the voices.
"A couple weeks later, we were out in one of the state parks where I worked, in one of the little-known meadows near a cliff with a spectacular view of the Pacific. She lost her balance and her concentration and put too much effort into hitting me, that when I dodged, she kinda…went over the cliff. Without a second thought, I dove down after her, grabbed her by the back of her shirt and flew back up to the top of the cliff with her. Upon learning that I could manipulate object with ki (and since I wasn't dumb enough to teach her how), our little home 'movies' got a little more interesting, because there were no longer any jerky starts and stops, nor was there this huge hand moving the action figure."
"Seems like a pretty long explanation to me," Trunks laughed as they finally crossed the first intersection and got back in line for the next. "So when do you actually get to the pancake thing?"
"Just a little background, that's all. Anyways, her nickname for me was PanKake, because I refuse to let her know that my actual nickname is Panny. I'll let people who have known me forever get away with it. But drinking buddies and partners in crime? No. Anyways, after a bout with the 'popular' crowd who had grown up around there and that were always giving me hell in all of my classes, she got this idea. She'd gone home the next weekend and stole about three Barbies and four G.I. Joes from her little brother, and came back with this plan for me to extract my revenge on the 'crew' (as they called themselves) on the dolls. Basically, it's seven little eight-inch-tall dolls against me, and they're winning until I (as Molly put it in 'the script') 'whip out my mad cooking skills and turn them into pancakes'. It ended with me pouring maple syrup on the pancakes, each one with a fried and slightly grilled doll embedded in each, because there way no way she was going to get me to eat those things."
Trunks laughed, pulling forward again, looking down at his watch.
Hey, if things keep up like this, maybe we'll get there just in time.
"So who's this Jack dude?" he asked, feeling some sort of objection to her having socialized with other guys.
"Jack? Jack was the guy who's dad owned the tattoo parlor."
"Huh?" Trunks mumbled as the light turned red, turning around and looking back at her.
Pan laughed, shrugging the jacket and sweatshirt off of her right shoulder, rolling the shoulder forward for him to see the tattoo that her father had nearly crapped his pants upon seeing.
"Jack was the first real friend I made over there, and the entire reason I survived, not to mention move into the frat house."
"Survived?"
Pan covered her shoulder back up, nodding ahead at the now green light, leaning forward against his back, her mind still grasping at the niggling little nag, her brain trying to stay awake.
"Remember me telling my dad that I was lost my first few weeks over there, that I'd been really depressed and all?"
"Yeah. Kinda, actually. I think I was busy trying to avoid my mother's concern and my father's temper at the time, but yeah. I remember."
She laughed. "Well, Jack's room was right across from mine in the dorms. My roommate (who I couldn't stand at all), was banging his every chance she got, so four nights out of six she was in their room, leaving him with a pillow and a change of clothes in the hall, and the other two nights he was in ours, and I was left to go downstairs and sleep in the cafeteria."
"But there are seven days in a week. What about the other night?"
"She was highly religious—her father was Mormon and her mother was Catholic. Sunday's the day of rest in both religions."
Trunks nearly fell off the bike at the explanation he was laughing so hard.
"Well, that's the only explanation that Jack and I could come up with. I mean, she did go to the Mormon church every Sunday morning with her father, and then to Catholic mass every Sunday evening with her mother."
Regaining his composure, Trunks rolled the bike forward.
"Not the point though. On my second week there, after I'd discovered that I had the room to myself four nights a week, shared it one, and was in the cafeteria or the campus library the other two, I got back late and found this blond kid with glasses lying on his back in the hallway, staring dejectedly up at the ceiling. After asking him what he was doing out there, I discovered he was the roommate of my roommate's obsession, and I invited him in to crash on the couch. He was in my psych class at the time, and so we basically stayed up all night badmouthing the whores (as was his nickname for them) across the hall and studying for a test the next day. A few days later, he discovered me sleeping on a table in the cafeteria. After that, he and I each gave each other our spare key and made a pact that whoever wasn't homeless at night had to house the other.
"He was just as depressed as I was at the time because he'd caught his girlfriend cheating on him, and we grew really close. Things got awkward sometimes, but he'd usually just say some random off the wall thing that would make absolutely no sense to anyone who hadn't grown up around Uncle Goten, and we'd changed the subject, and things would be fine. He was the only soul over there who I took flying with me when I couldn't stand to stay on the ground any longer, and he was sacred enough to me to trust with the history of everything; Grandpa, Vegeta, fighting, Marron, Bra, you, Uncle Goten, the dragonballs, everything. Everything I'd locked up inside and refused to think about. He was the one who told me to forget, but to still remember. It took me about a week to figure out what he'd meant. He and I both worked at the same park, and one day after work, he and I lay out in the field where Molly and I would eventually train, and I found the star I can't help but believe is Grandpa Goku. That's when it came to me. He told me about his father's tattoo parlor, and how for his eighteenth birthday, he was going to get a chicken tattooed on his butt. I told him I wouldn't mind getting a tattoo but was terrified of needles, and he explained that if I ever wanted to, he'd get his dad to do it, and then went on to explain how clean his dad's parlor was and everything."
Pan paused as Trunks revved the engine out of boredom. They hadn't moved in about five minutes, and they were late for work for sure. He looked back at her. "Then how did you get the tattoo? I'd completely forgotten your fear of needles."
She laughed. "Jack's birthday was two days later as I found out, and he invited me to go out drinking with him and Molly that night, since Molly is three years older then either of us, and we could legally go into the bar and she'd buy our drinks for us. (Which is how I met her by the ways.) Anyways, I got drunk off my rocker (for the second time in my life), and told Jack that I wanted that tattoo, and that before the buzz wore off was the only time I'd be sedated enough to get it. He nodded and Molly and I went down to the shop his dad owned. His dad was surprised that his son trusted my judgment enough to allow me to get a tattoo, and to pay for it himself, that he didn't even ask when I drew him the sketch of what I wanted, and just tattooed it on."
Trunks nodded, ears red at the comment of her being drunk. "Figured it was something like that." Dejectedly, he leaned forward, crossing his arms on the front of the bike, shifting his position until Pan's form rested in the small of his back, her face in the small between his shoulder blades.
"Took me a few days to forget, but remembering was easy. After that, life was looking up for me because I'd felt like I'd finally found myself. I helped Jack get back on his feet, and he helped me show myself to the world. I owe him everything."
"He's the guy, isn't he."
Pan sat up at the venom in his voice, as his entire body stiffened beneath her.
"What guy? Trunks, what's wrong?"
He shook his head. "Monday, when you broke down, you told me that when summer ends next weekend, you're going back to California. For good. Because there was some guy out there that understands you enough to accept you," he growled, eyes piercing the back of the white freight trunk ahead of them.
"Ye…yeah. Jack's the guy. But, Trunks, I didn't mean it like that," she protested, sensing his protectiveness over her—the same protectiveness that hadn't wanted her to go to California, and that had looked after her their entire year in space—flicker into possessionism. The only other time she'd known him to get possessive over her was when the one time she'd dared date seriously in high school, and the guy had tried to get down her pants without her consent. Trunks and Goten had felt the unreasonable panic in her ki and had come to her rescue, beating the guy within inches of his life while Gohan had held her against what the guy had tried to do.
"He's a really good friend, who told me I could come live with him if things didn't work out back here. He understands that even though I could really care less about what the world thinks of me, being respected among the people who I'd grown up with is still a necessity. He had the same problem with his parents, and they didn't accept him; he hasn't spoken to them since he got that chicken tattoo. He can also read the dark and twisted depths of my soul without me saying a word. He and I both moved into the frat house after our first year of college because we could no longer stand 'the whores', and if I came home from work or from school, he could tell exactly what kind of mood I was in before I'd even gotten in the front door. It's weird though; he can't read ki for the life of him, yet he can read me well enough that it's almost as if he can."
Trunks nodded stiffly.
The nagging in the back of her mind got stronger, and her mental hands grasped it and ripped it into her mind's eye. Part of her dream registered, and Pan couldn't help but realize that it was the same dream she'd had that night on the beach after they had kissed.
"Pan?" Trunks said quietly as the traffic began to clear out and he was able to drive down the streets freely. "Pan…are you going back?"
"Huh?" she mumbled distractedly, her eyes full of everything she'd dreamed, and everything that had happened that night a few days in the past.
"You said that you'd go back to California if things didn't work out," he explained, his voice quiet. "Are you going back?"
"Huh? Oh…I don't know yet. It depends on how Bra's party goes. Right now, yeah, I might stay, if I can find a job that doesn't drive me insane. But there's still a week left. And the only people to accept who I am right now are you, Grandma, and my parents. Bra's gotten the hang of me, but is still pissed at me for slapping her last weekend. If Bulma would stop harping to me about you having kids, I might actually stay regardless of what everyone else thinks."
Trunks laughed, his bitter possessiveness fading away. "She harps to you about that?"
"Yep. I think she's trying to hint to me that 'you're single', 'I'm single', 'we're both saiyan' (partly or mostly), and that 'she really wants to be a grandmother'."
Trunks laughed at his mother's blatant subliminal messages.
"She gave up with trying to talk me into finding a wife a few years ago. I'm happy, that's all that matters as far as I'm concerned. And seeing as how Father hasn't aged at all, and is still as active as he was when everyone learned he existed, I probably have another twenty years (judging by your father's aging) until my face starts to show any wear."
Pan laughed at the hint of conceit and vanity in the statement.
"The last time she tried with me was in the limo…and uh…well…I think she's given up all hope of me settling down in her lifetime."
"Yeah well, she's trying to talk me into offering to bear your children. Every time you disappear into the bathroom or for a conference or to go out and get food or whatever, she magically appears and starts telling me that she's not getting any younger and how I should talk you into finding a wife."
Trunks laughed.
Pan would have, but her mind was turning back to the nagging that was no longer a nagging sensation in the back of her head, but now a plague over her mind.
"Pan? What's wrong?"
She smiled into his shoulder, shifting to rest her cheek against the side of it, the wind tossing her hair and his, whipping around them.
"Nothing. I'm just thinking about a dream I had last night…actually, this morning…"
He glanced back at her as they cruised down the boulevard, slowing to a stop at the next red light.
"Want to talk about it?"
She shook her head, looking up to meet his eyes for a moment, noticing how blue they were. They weren't back to their normal color, but they were still blue, especially when compared to the near blackness they'd been a few days before.
"It's nothing important. I'm just trying to remember how it ended, that's all."
He smiled as the light turned green and he pulled into the intersection, turning right towards the Capsule Corps high rise.
"You know, it's pretty cliché, but dreams are usually subconscious wishes," he told her, the wind pushing his hair back from his eyes, pressing the old tee-shirt across his chest.
"Thank you, Cinderella," she laughed quietly. She grew quiet again, and when she next spoke, she didn't address his statement, but didn't stray far from the topic.
"You know that gunk in the corners of your eyes that's there when you wake up?"
"Sleep? Yeah."
"Well…have you ever really noticed that whenever you have an impossible dream, whether or not you can remember it, there always seems to be more of it?"
Trunks considered this for a moment, then nodded uncertainly. "Sometimes, yeah."
Pan got quiet, then smiled privately to herself.
"It's not 'sleep' that's in your eyes. It's really tears—petrified tears cried over impossible dreams, impossible wishes. Dreams and wishes that you know can never come true," she whispered. "You can't cry them because you're not awake, and you don't know that you're crying. But they have to come out. So they become petrified, fossilized, and gather in your eyes, where they blind you from the hopelessness of reality so that you won't stop dreaming those dreams, or wishing those wishes. When they're wiped away, they fall and become sand, one grain of sand for every impossible dream and hopeless wish, and the dream fades into a restless and half remembered memory."
Trunks parked the motorcycle and climbed off the seat, turning and facing her with wonder and solemnity as she swung both legs onto one side.
"I haven't heard that before."
"I've never told anyone that before."
He smiled, slipping his hand beneath the curtain of her hair, sliding his fingers between the strands and against her scalp. "But you're wrong, I think."
She blinked, looked up at him with startled wonder.
"How? I—I don't understand."
"Maybe, they're not petrified because the dream is an impossible wish," he whispered, tilting her head up to look at him, smiling down at her. "Maybe they're petrified because the dream is so beautiful that the dreamer can't believe it possible. And when they turn to sand, they're not there to remind the world of the fruitlessness of dreaming, because without dreams, there is no hope. And without hope, happiness can't exist, and no one is ever really alive. Maybe, just maybe, they turn to sand so that they can show the world just how beautiful one single person can be, no matter how ugly they are on the outside; that they can show just how many beautiful and wonderful dreams that there have been in the world, no matter how hopeless they really seem."
Pan blinked back tears at his words, lowering her face, determined not to let him see her cry. His thumb glissed across her cheek, smudging away a tear, lifting her face again so that he could look into her eyes.
"Never give up on your dreams, Panny. Because no matter how dark the world can be, no matter how dismal or dreary, they light up the darkness. Because when the world turns its back on you, they'll still be there for you, until you turn your back on them, giving yourself up to the monotony of it all and the nightmares that lurk in the shadows that those dreams keep at bay. Dreams are hope, Panny. And without hope, what purpose is there in living?"
Her eyes clouded over, and she threw herself into him, clinging to him, sobbing silently. His arms gathered her to him, and he murmured into her hair, soothing her even though they were already half an hour late.
"No dream is hopeless, Panny. Real tears fall and fade away forever, joining the oceans and rivers into one writhing mass that eats away at the world. But petrified tears stay forever, for all the world to see, each tear individual of all the others, for any one person to stumble upon and pick up, and cherish forever."
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A/N: Well? I'd love to know what you guys think about the whole thing about dreams and tears; have I hit something, or am I just insane? Anyways, I need to be going now. Sorry this took so long to post, it'll be a while before any more chapters come too.
-Panabelle ;P
Shrine of the Saiyan Squirt