Episode 2 - Loss of Hope

If you do not clearly see the words "to be continued" at the bottom of the page, then it hasn't loaded completely or properly.

Disclaimer: I do not own DBZ, its characters, story line, or any likeness of the characters. My name is not Akira Toriyama. However, this story line has been created by me to be used by me and to be written by me. You know that drill. Also, I do not own Mountain Dew, though I really wish I did. I am not endorsing any brand names I use here in any way either, along with the future topics of gangs, fighting, and the like. If you look carefully, you'll notice that I am strongly against those things and try to make that clear to you, the reader. Mirai Trunks: "Uh, SW? I think you're boyfriend is a bit P.O.ed with the happenings of the last episode..." **A clip of SW's boyfriend with steam coming out of his nose and ears** Erm, I guess... Hey, Superguy! Wasup? SW's BF: "Don't 'Wasup' me, SW! I saw him flirting with you, and you didn't even slap him silly!" Well, erm, that can be explained. You see, I'm his bestest best #1 fan, and he was forgiving me for what I do to him in this story, and... SW's BF: "SW!!!" Uh... We'll be back in a flash, folks! Looks like you'll be seeing a bit of a side story up here, "How Young Hearts Rip and Tear at Each Other Over SW!!!" **MT and SW's BF shake their heads exasperatedly** No? **The moment passes and SW's BF proceeds in kicking Mirai Trunks's butt** Sigh... Guys... Don't ask me to explain...

Enough of that, back to the story!

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A/N: Ooh! Now you get to find out what happened to Trunks! Is he ok? Is he alive? You'll find out! Again, I also love quoting my favorite songs and people, and often compose my own poetry and make up good quotes... But you'll find that out! Also beware my warped sense of humor (which doesn't show up fully manifested just yet in this story). It has been known to cause compulsive, contagious, chronic laughter in my readers. Beware!

Broken bodies, broken dreams.
All is lost, or so it seems...

"...By now I should know;
That in time things would change;
So it shouldn't be so bad;
So why do I feel so sad?..."
Alicia Keys, "Why do I Feel so Sad?"

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The light faded from Trunks and the device pushed itself over and fell smoking and fizzling to the ground. Trunks wasn't far behind it.

As soon as the light released him, the lavender-haired human-Saiyan hybrid collapsed to the bare ground, scarcely holding on to consciousness.

Trunks felt as though he had been run over by a steamroller. His whole body ached and he was completely disoriented, confused. Every little sound tormented his already pounding head. When his mother rushed over to him and foundered once more over his aching body, he barely noticed over the flood of pain signals overwhelming his mind. Then everything went black...

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It didn't make any sense to Bulma. What went wrong? What had she done that left her precious baby lying even more broken than before? First things first; she called out to one of her mechanical assistants (barely more than a voice controlled forklift) and instructed it to carry her beloved son to the sick room-again. Once there, she hooked him up to the many beeping and humming displays, all monitoring his various life functions.

His body temperature and oxygen levels were naturally far too high to be considered healthy in a human, so two alarms were already going off. She muted them and switched each display to "Saiyan mode". This was a collection of data taken from her son when he was healthy. She turned all the alarms back on and covered her ears, expecting to be immediately assaulted from all sides by scores of alarms and to have her ears nearly blown off.

But instead she was greeted with an eerie silence except for the steady "bleep, bleep" of the heart monitor, of course. She checked the displays, then checked them again. Impossible! Trunks was perfectly healthy, if one didn't count the extremely low blood sugar level (for a Saiyan). She quickly remedied this with a shot of pure glucose, then went back to observing her son.

He slept quite peacefully on the hospital bed, chest gently rising with each steady intake of breath. The ray had obviously thinned him out. His chest seemed to have lost some of his depth, but his muscles were as large and pronounced as ever. His face was thinner, skin softer, and he seemed almost younger...

"It doesn't seem anything too bad has happened." She thought to herself, then mumbled aloud, "Now to check on that ray..."

As soon as she walked out of the room, Trunks stirred and came to, eyes snapping open like wound rubber bands. He was breathing heavily and began to sweat. Obviously, he had expected some kind of danger to face him upon awakening, but upon finding none, he relaxed once more.

He sat up and immediately wished he hadn't. He felt as though someone was riding a jackhammer on top of his head, and so laid his forehead in his hands instinctively to be rid of the pain. It worked little, but enough for him to think.

"Where am I?" was his first thought, his first question. It was immediately answered by the Capsule Corp logo he recognized on everything in the room. "Alright. Next question. What happened?"

Immediately, he checked his watch. The nearly brand-new, black and neon green display clearly stated it to be 2:15 PM. That sounded about right to Trunks.

He thought a bit more. To his memory, he had just arrived back at the 'Corp after defeating Cell. He was getting ready for an impromptu visit to his friends in the Alternate Timeline to check on things there and inform them of his success when he discovered that a stray energy beam had passed by and melted the controls and engine of his time machine, but left the core untouched...

He stretched, his head feeling better, then suddenly stopped. The last thing he remembered wearing had been his elastic, perfectly form fitting traditional Saiyan armor. Now he wore a "Capsule Corp" T-shirt that seemed to be more than a few sizes too big.

"Ooo-kaaaaay..." he mumbled to himself, drawing out the syllables in confusion. "I'm definitely missing something here." Then he noticed the IV needle in his arm.

Saiyans are naturally afraid of needles, this being an instinct present in all the more or less animalistic species of the galaxy, and the realization that this foreign object was stuck in his arm activated a mild form of the panic state.

"IYIE!" He yelled and swiped it from its leech-like position in his arm, but was immediately assaulted by an alarm.

Bulma was walking down the hall, handling her machine carefully, and examining it even more meticulously. "Now what went wrong?" she asked herself. "Oh well. I'd better get to my workshop..."

Just then, the alarm sounded and she rushed into the sick room to discover her son sitting upright and looking perfectly fine, minus the fact that he was covering his sensitive Saiyan ears to avoid having the course, loud screech damage them.

Bulma shut the alarm off. "Oh, Trunksie! I'm glad you're awake! Now how do you feel? Do you have your ki back?"

Trunks was confused, but checked anyway by forming a ball of energy in his hand as perfectly shaped and pure as ever. "Yeah, of course, Mom. But..." he looked even more confused now, looking at her, "what happened to you? Your hair! It's really gray!"

Bulma checked herself in a mirror. "No more than before, dear." She assured him.

"What?" he stood up quickly. Trunks had always been a short man (thanks to his father's bloodline*), but Bulma noted he had lost an additional half foot or more...

*Old-Type Saiyans miss their 3rd spurt growth phase resulting in their average height being 5'10" fully grown in comparison to New-Type's who normally reach at least 7' or more, some having been recorded (in the anime series) at roughly 10'. The entire royal bloodline is made up exclusively of Old-Type Saiyans and 2nd class warriors on down are all New-Types (like Goku and Nappa and the like).

And his features seemed at least 30 years younger also...

"I'm definitely missing something here." Trunks sat back down quickly and massaged his head, trying to get his brain to decipher the impossible enigma set before him.

Something suddenly struck Bulma. The memory lapse, the loss of height, the young features...

Had Bulma accidentally shaved more than just the injury off of Trunks's personal clock?

She backed off, shocked, and placed her hand over her mouth (this was unnoticed by Trunks, of course, who was still massaging his head and staring at the floor). Immediately, the facts and figures she used in the device ran swiftly through her head until... she discovered the problem.

A quick check up to her records confirmed it. Bulma had hoped to use the core of Trunks's time machine to essentially turn back the time on his PNS-SNS connection to before the accident. All of the variables had been copied correctly, but she had forgotten to isolate one section of the final equation with parentheses (a common mistake) and so turned back his entire clock. This essentially gave Trunks back 30 years of his life, but at the same time erased all his memories from all those years.

In plain English, Trunks was 17 again.

Bulma nearly broke down and cried at this new realization. The resulting formula from her mistake only worked on the things "beneath the surface", namely, Trunks's memory, facial attributes, various internal systems (including his PNS connection, but not the overall PNS which runs along the entire body throughout the surface muscles and under the skin), and skeletal system. This made it so that all of Trunks's hard training during the past 30 years still showed up in his refined production of ki energy within his PNS and increased muscle mass and power. In addition, the part of the command that would have stopped the device once the desired effect had been achieved was incorporated into a different area of the instructions. If the machine hadn't broken, if it hadn't shorted out, there was no way to tell how many years Trunks might have lost. As it was, some inconsistency had most likely occurred between Trunks's new physical and mental ages, most likely his physical age being the variable most affected. This was good, meaning that about 30 more years had just been added to his already high life expectancy of 200+ years if he died of old age (humans can expect to live 80 years before dying of old age or other natural causes. Saiyans have been seen to live past 3 centuries before passing on in their sleep without any prior warning whatsoever and could possibly live longer, but most die earlier due to the dangerous life style they live. A Saiyan at age 70 is roughly equivalent to a human in his or her 30's and a full-blooded Saiyan keeps this amount of health and vigor well into their second century before their abilities begin to wane. A human-Saiyan hybrid could probably expect these numbers to drop proportionately, but this is still far greater than any human could hope to achieve).

At the same time, all the time his heart had to heal, all the wisdom he had gained through the years (though his troubled childhood had already taught him some hard-to-learn life lessons), every friend he had made, he didn't know existed anymore.

His physical attributes were closest to when he was 17, but she already knew that mind and body must have lost different amounts. "Where would that put him mentally?" Bulma asked herself silently. Of course, at age 17 he had just been getting ready to take his second trip to the past to try his hand at defeating the androids there... At 14 had been his trip to first warn the Earth warriors of the past and to bring medicine for Goku's heart virus, and at 21 he had defeated Cell in this timeline... But how much had his body and mind lost? Maybe he had mentality of age 25, or perhaps 12? Bulma hoped it wasn't the last one. Trunks had been nearly suicidal at age 12, threatening to slit his own wrists if the androids weren't defeated soon, but Gohan stopped him, gave him new direction, trained him to defeat the androids. Then Gohan was killed, and Trunks was no longer a hopeless shadow fighting for an impossible goal. His eyes were no longer dark and lost, but fierce and determined. She hoped he wasn't 12 again...

Bulma sighed and sat down next to Trunks, placing one arm around her son's shoulders to comfort him. This next part wasn't going to be easy, telling him what happened and all, but Bulma felt it was necessary.

"Trunks?" she began. "Let's go to the kitchen; we can talk about this over a cup of coffee, strong coffee, really strong coffee."

"Mom, I hate the stuff and it doesn't do anything to me, but I could go for a Mountain Dew right now." He replied so bluntly that it was funny.

"Oh, of course." Bulma thought. Trunks hadn't acquired a taste for coffee until he turned 30, and caffeine would never affect a Saiyan as much as sugar anyway. He also first began his serious Mountain Dew addiction at age 15, meaning he wasn't 12 again mentally. What a relief that was. "Alright. Mountain Dew for you, coffee for me."

Trunks followed his mother into the large kitchen and helped her get out the drinks, then sat down with her to talk.

"So, Trunks. How much do you remember?" was Bulma's first question.

"Well, didn't I just get back from defeating Cell? Or was I in a coma for what, 30 years?" he laughed at his own joke, then stopped abruptly upon noticing his mother's grave face. "Soooo..." he began tentatively. He knew that look all too well. "What happened?"

"I'm still not completely sure of everything, but with that last bit of information, it goes something like this..."

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"So." Trunks recapped. He was on his 12th can of Mountain Dew and almost back to his old, energetic self, discounting the tremendous weight again resting on his shoulders. "Basically, I lost my ki and you created a machine to fix that. You forgot to isolate a section of whatever equation you used and instead of just healing my injury, I'm now 17 again with my memory deleted only to when I was 21."

"Yes, that's putting it into the simplest terms possible." Bulma confirmed.

"Gee, I barely understand that much. I'd hate to have you throw the hard terms at me." Trunks placed one hand behind his head and grinned sheepishly.

Bulma smiled. "The fact that the machine overloaded and broke when it did saved you a good few more years of loss, but also created some conflicting numbers in your physical and mental age. You also haven't lost any muscle mass because the machine, basically, affected your 'inside'. It may seem you're much stronger than before, but that's only 30 years of off-and-on intense training alone and with your friends."

"I have friends now too?" he asked, still surprised at his mother's previous explanation, but wanting to continue on.

"Yes, but you won't remember them and they won't really recognize you." Bulma told him.

"Ouch, that smarts." He folded his arms across his chest and looked at the floor before opening another can of Mountain Dew.

"That stuff weakens your bones and rots your teeth, you know." Bulma scolded him, changing the subject.

"And coffee stunts my growth. At least this stuff keeps me awake." Trunks countered.

"He has a point there." Bulma thought as she stared at the bitter brown liquid in her cup. "We really should drink tea, but we both hate the taste..."

"So, what now?" Trunks asked suddenly, waking his mother from her thoughts.

Bulma could see despair in her son's eyes, despair she hadn't seen since she found him crying on her doorstep, cold and wet, after Gohan's death.

They both knew that 30 years is a long time to miss. 30 years of healing and tie making is a lot to lose. Now all of Trunks's ties were broken, all but one: her, and even that one was frayed significantly.

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"Can you imagine no love, pride, deep-fried chicken,
Your best friend always sticking up for you,
Even when I know you're wrong.
Can you imagine no first dance, freeze dried, romance, five-hour phone conversation,
The best soy latte that you ever had and... me."
Homesick, "Drops of Jupiter"

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The only problem is that one thread of rope can not hold a whole person for very long, especially someone already so emotionally damaged as Trunks.

"I... I think I need to be alone for a while." Trunks stood up silently from his chair and nearly floated down the hall and up the stairs to his room, the same place it had been for his entire life.

His retreat was like that of a ghost, a lonely phantom of his own past come to haunt a future where he, as the world knew him, no longer existed.

Now that her son had left, Bulma let loose whatever dam that had been holding back the torrential flood of tears which had welled up inside her since the horrible realization had first found its way to the front of her mind. In other words, Bulma cried. She felt as though she had failed her son. Oh sure, she accomplished her original dream, but that dream very quickly transformed into a nightmare when her cure turned out to be worse than her son's disease. Bulma cried. All the memories, all the time, all those years were lost, and the damage, this time, was really permanent.

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Trunks heard his mother's sobs all too well even from his room. With Saiyan ears, he would be able to hear a conversation (even if he couldn't make out quite what they were saying) in an open area over about 8 miles, 5 miles in a wooded area, so of course he could hear every sniffle, every pout, and each one ripped at his already torn soul.

He was far too much of a bleeding heart to ever be considered a true Saiyan, but the last of those died along with his father. Actually, his father had been the last one. Trunks was also still too much of a fighter, far too strong to be accepted in human society (having trouble not breaking things when in Super Saiyan mode, having to hold back almost all his strength when hugging his mother like trying not to squash an ant between your fingers), and now whatever mental progress he made had flown right out the window along with the possibility of more.

Trunks opened his window and flew out, circling around to land on the roof of the half-sphere Capsule Corp building, a place he had frequently gone to before to clear his head.

The night sky was absolutely beautiful. Only a few lights shone over the recuperating city, darkening the already clear sky to allow Trunks to see what he believed to be all the stars in the universe. The stars twinkled and danced like tongues of fire amidst the ebony, velvety robe of the heavens.

"Ooh, I'll have to write that down." Trunks thought to himself. With Saiyan-human eyes, he had the shape and movement distinction and tracking abilities of a full Saiyan with the added bonus of the ability to see more than just 4 changing hues and to distinguish beauty. Saiyans may have one up on humans in most things, but humans can see beauty, color, and have a much more balanced thinking pattern than their stronger look alikes. While full Saiyans fall back on instinct, intuition, and mood to solve problems, Trunks has a more intelligent, balanced approach. It's not like Saiyans are less intelligent than humans (they have 10 more IQ points than humans do on average); it's just that their strengths lie elsewhere. Trunks lucked out; he got the best of both species, but also all of their worst weaknesses. He thought about these things as he gazed at the stars.

Trunks knew he no longer had a place on Chikyu, Earth, his home, the one he had protected for so long and saved twice. After all, what use is a warrior to his people in peacetime?

Trunks couldn't get a job with his ki back now. Without the knowledge of how to control its increased level, he might still be able to work with metals, but he'd break wooden boards without meaning to.

He was a gentle giant of only 4'10" in height, a short Saiyan! Who ever heard of a short Saiyan? So what if it was his father's entire fault, being an Old-Type and that.

And another thing about Trunks: he has never uttered a cuss word in his life (even the part he doesn't remember, even right after Gohan died, even while fighting the androids).

"I guess I'm just a softie..." he mumbled aloud to himself before searching the stars for more answers.

"Maybe somewhere out there, there is a place I could start over, where I could forget about the androids, forget the hate, the hurt, the helplessness." He spoke out loud to himself. "I know there are still worlds out there in need of warriors, battles to be fought, lives to be saved. And maybe, just maybe, there's a place out there for me."

To be continued...

Woohoo! Episode 2 is finally up! How do you like it? **audience chants: "GREAT!!! AWESOME!!! KEEP IT COMMING!"** Well, I'm glad to hear that 'cuz I'm extending the suspension on "The Black Plague"! **Audience goes quiet** *Cricket, Cricket* **Eats the cricket** Eh em, where were we... Oh yeah, and it's only until I get to 5 episodes on this story. I think you can survive... Besides, until I re-draft it, "The Black Plague" really starts to fall apart anyway. Woo hoo! And it's only 8:03 PM here too! I still gots 30 min. to go read other stories! Yay! Remember, R&R! Read & Review! The more helpful, honest, nice, yet truthful reviews I get, the faster the next few episodes come out! And you don't want to miss these! Well, actually, we get into the really good stuff at around Ep. 8+... And Ep. 5 if you like a different kind of action... Well, bai bai for now! ;)