Disclaimer: Dragon Ball Z and all its affiliations are not owned by me.
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Generic Brand
Rated -R- for language, violence, sexual content and mature themes.
Chapter One
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"You are an asshole. You don't even have to open your mouth and you are an asshole. You were just naturally born that way." She said in a calm, level tone over the telephone, making small, precise hand gestures on her side even though he couldn't see them.
Silence was her only answer on the other end of the line.
"Trunks?" She asked, her tone changing to one of concern, wondering if he was still there or if he had left the phone off the hook and walked off. It wasn't below him to partake in such an action.
"Have you been talking to Uubu recently?" came his sudden reply.
"Not in a couple days, why?"
"That's exactly what he told me. Exactly. I didn't talk to him for like a month after he did it."
"Oh," the raven-haired child answered back, suddenly regretting what she had said despite the fact that he had deserved it. "He said that we got along so well because even though we come from two different worlds and have two different types of intelligence, we thought the exact same thing and would say just about the same things. I'm guessing though, that you don't want to speak to me right now?"
"Just about." He answered in a clear cut voice.
Always emotional, if Pan was speaking with no range of pitches, then something was wrong. Also, raised by her father, she rarely spoke any explicative unless she was angry, and it was always calmly spoken, as if there was indeed nothing wrong.
Trunks weren't the same. He wasn't fond of using foul language, but he did when he was passionate about something, angry or overjoyed, it didn't matter.
"Oh." She said again, repeating the one syllable word as an awkward quiet fell over the pair, neither saying a word through the wires connecting them. Her father's bed squeaked beneath her as she rolled over and sat up to go to the kitchen to get some grape juice and snapped Trunks back to attention.
"Pan?" He asked, the first to break the silence.
"Uh huh," she answered back automatically as she poured her drink into a delicate china cup her Grandma Chichi had given her.
"Were you serious about the asshole thing?" His voice was now lighter and more questioning, and she detected a trace of hope hidden in there; hope that she wasn't serious and that it was just a strike out at him for being so difficult. Was she serious? After all he had put her through, especially as of late, how could she not be?
Running her hand through her midnight locks, she let her breath out slowly.
"No, Trunks. I was just a little bit aggravated. That's all. I'm sorry." The lie was said to please him and save him. Some things, after all, are better left unsaid, a lesson she had to repeatedly learn and yet it never seemed to stick.
"It's okay..." He said his relief evident in his response.
"Can you just please try to not be so difficult? You know that I want to, but I just can't. This whole relationship or whatever you may call it is eating at me and I just don't know what to do anymore. You say you love me, that that alone makes our actions okay, but I was raised differently than that. To me, it's not okay, and no one I know would support this, especially not Marron..." she pleaded.
Immediately, his eyes narrowed.
The lavender haired prince sighed deeply, his tone accusing at first and then changing to sounding tired, worn out. "Why are you still friends with that bitch? It would be so much easier if you weren't. Just so much."
"She is my best friend, Trunks, I am not going to just up and abandon her because you don't like her and because you and she broke up. She and I were friends first. You took little to no interest in me until you two started having problems, way back in the beginning. I don't think I would pick, and if I had to, I'm sorry to say, I would have to pick her. It's the right thing to do."
She felt horrible, telling him that. Probably the only reason she really would pick Maroon over Trunks was because they were friends first, because that would be the last of her supposed female friends and because it would be the correct thing to do.
Yet, she ached to tell him that she thought he was so much more fun, so much more entertaining to be around and she felt so much closer to him, despite the short duration of their friendship, and she felt like she could trust him, no matter what, and that he would never think less of her.
"Because you were friends first? That's your reason? You could have least taken the time to come up with a good lie. Isn't that what you told me?" He snapped back and she could almost imagine his slitted eyes over the phone.
She didn't answer, only frowned slightly.
"That's what I thought. Pan, I just don't get you. I don't even know who you are lying to anymore, if it's just me, or your family, or yourself. I just don't get you. Why can't you just explain to me how you felt when it happened? Come on. It isn't that difficult, is it?"
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. Gosh. Stop apologizing so much."
Pan rolled her eyes as their conversation quickly turned to lighter subjects, such as grape juice and fishing. She was off the hook for now, but so was Trunks, and for that, the pair was thankful, though they didn't tell their respective half that.
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The ringing echoed through the house as the second generation of the Son family sat around the table, Marron joining them for the evening. Shooting up out of her chair, Pan dashed for the phone, grabbing it midway through the second ring.
"Howdy!" came her cheerful greeting, especially since she already knew who it was on the opposite line. Only he and Marron called on this number, everyone else choosing their main line, and since Marron was here, it could only be Trunks.
"Hey hon'."
"I thought I told you not to call me that." She playfully snapped back.
In the background, Trunks could hear Marron ask who it was that was calling. Immediately he frowned.
"She's over?" He asked, adding a sour emphasis on 'she'.
"Yes, she is."
"So you can't talk at the moment?"
"Not exactly. I've got to eat and Marron is over, you know."
"Oh. When does the bitch leave?"
"Tomorrow morning, Trunks." Pan continued to answer his questions in a condescending tone, as if she was speaking to a child rather than to the CEO of Capsule Corporation. "Call me tomorrow?"
"Yea. I will."
"'Night love!
"Bye..."
Pan hung the phone up with a soft click, turning around to come face to face with Marron. A guilty blush stained her cheeks.
"Uh, hi, Marron."
"It was Trunks?"
"Yup. How'd you guess?"
Marron rolled her eyes and ignored Pan's impish retort, instead asking, " So, what'd he say about me this time?"
"Not much... He only called you a bitch like once but he was rather rude about you being over. You know, it really irritates me that he hates you so much. Why can't ya'll just be friends, I mean, ya'll dated, right? So then you could at least try and get along. It just doesn't make any sense to me that you two could date for like 8 months and then up and decide you hate each other. Seems odd."
"We just never got along. I told you that. I mean, I only went out with him because he liked me so much, you know? And I had been trying to get him to dump me from the second month, but he just didn't get it."
"Uh huh..." Pan replied to her friend, trying not to sound as sarcastic as she felt. She did, after all, have to keep her loyalty to her last remaining girl-friend. Boys will come and go and she didn't want to lose Marron just because she had always had a slight crush on the lavender haired god and now he was paying attention to her.
Right now, she was his life.
Life was good.
Grabbing the blonde by the wrist and dragging her out of the nosey eye of her parents, Pan immediately dropped the subject, hoping that her friend would take the hint.
She didn't.
"So, what've ya'll two been up to? I mean, you've gotten pretty close to him as of late. I call and you're on the phone with him, that is, if I can even reach you. If you aren't talking on the phone to him, you are over at Capsule hanging out. I'm starting to get a little jealous."
Rolling her eyes, she just laughed, brushing it off and telling her that she had nothing to be jealous of.
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Trunks frowned. This was going to be a battle that he would win, at any cost.
He never thought he would be fighting over Pan, though. Little Panny. It was just absurd. She was so immature only a year ago and it baffled him to see how much she'd changed.
At first, she'd hung all over him, obviously displaying her affections for the whole world to see and she gave him a power he just couldn't pass up, so he toyed with her emotions, all the while secretly trying to get to Marron through her.
Eventually Pan figured it out, dated a couple other guys instead and let the two of them get together, giving her best friend the guy she really had wanted. After all, he didn't want her.
And Pan backed off, becoming incredibly good friends with Uubu, one of the Saiya-jin Prince's best friends, gaining his affections. Trunks never knew exactly what went on between the two of them, but whatever it was it had made it impossible for the two to date. And Pan, supposedly, moved on.
He and Marron had a lot of fights and Marron grew more and more distant, slowly breaking his heart, until finally, they broke up for good. For a while, they were very close friends, acting almost as if they were still dating, yet soon, that fell apart too.
They tried, over and over again, to become friends, but it never worked, Pan always there to try and help.
She always did help too, but not enough. Nothing could save him and her anyhow. Consequentially, Pan became good friends with him through this, and they would talk for hours on the phone, her relationship with Marron suffering.
During this time, Pan matured in his eyes, always with the right advice and always there for support and consolation, even if he knew that she still had some affection for him and even if he knew that she really didn't want the two together.
She had become a woman, playing hard to get, but in a good way.
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Trunks never gave up on his friendship with the blonde, though, and kept, unsuccessfully trying to revive it, and finally, after one catastrophic incident, it totally burned. The ex-lovers never tried again. That incident also almost lost him Pan. She was ready to end their 'friendship, relationship, whatever', as she called it.
Pan patched up her friendship with Marron and started hanging out with her more, something which grated on his nerves. He wanted nothing to do with the ditz and wanted Pan to feel the same way, yet for some reason, she stayed with her.
This time, though, he would get her away from her for good, if it was the last thing he did.
Pan would belong to him and him alone.
He had no idea where this jealousy of his came from.
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She pulled the taller man into a tight embrace, a smile spread across her youthful features. Somewhere over the summer she had gained a couple of freckles across the bridge of her nose and she hated it with a passion.
"Do you see this?!" she exclaimed in mock anger, scrunching up her nose and looking at it cross eyed, trying to view the offending spots on her own, all the while pointing at it with her slender finger.
He just laughed in response as she continued her tirade.
One would never know she had just lost her mother a couple of weeks ago. She had recovered so quickly. Even Gohan had seemed to move on. They both seemed fine.
Things aren't always as they seem, though, and Trunks could see that this would come back and bite him in the ass any day now. Everyone would see the repercussions of the fiery woman's death.
Totally unexpected, the freak accident took the entire Z Gang by surprise. Slowly but surely, Trunks watched as everyone grew distant from each other.
Gohan, despite his supposed acceptance, threw himself into his work. He had lost so many people that were close to him in his life that it was amazing he could deal with all the loss. By now Trunks would have collapsed if he were in that man's shoes. Thank Kami he wasn't.
Chichi was too old to get anywhere and only Pan and Gohan visited her now. No one else had time. Bulma wasn't up to making the trip out there and it was just too much hassle.
Bra and the rest of the next generation never really clicked so she stayed with her friends in the city and pursued her own interests. Her father didn't care about anything but a good fight and his family anyhow, so the parting didn't bother him in the least.
Uubu was distracted by his girlfriend and work so he didn't have time for anyone else.
The Chestnuts, 18 and Krillen, kept to themselves for the most part.
It left only Trunks, Goten, Marron and Pan. They were the only ones who still made the effort to keep up with each other, Goten not doing such a good job.
However, Trunks didn't think of this as he watched the young girl, unaware of her beauty, as she exasperated herself over seven small brown dots adorning her nose.
He thought they made her look cute, but would never tell her so. Hell, he couldn't even admit it to himself.
Instead, he just laughed and wrapped his arm around her waist, stopping her complaints and led her over to the ticket counter at West Capitol City's new theatre. It was supposed to be so much nicer than the old one and they wanted to find out for sure.
He watched her still wrinkling up her nose and peering down at her freckles, resting in his embrace as they waited in the impossibly long line for tickets to the movie, and his thoughts wandered to exactly how he went from loving Marron and hating her to the exact opposite.
And that's where this story begins...
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Generic Brand
Rated -R- for language, violence, sexual content and mature themes.
Chapter One
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"You are an asshole. You don't even have to open your mouth and you are an asshole. You were just naturally born that way." She said in a calm, level tone over the telephone, making small, precise hand gestures on her side even though he couldn't see them.
Silence was her only answer on the other end of the line.
"Trunks?" She asked, her tone changing to one of concern, wondering if he was still there or if he had left the phone off the hook and walked off. It wasn't below him to partake in such an action.
"Have you been talking to Uubu recently?" came his sudden reply.
"Not in a couple days, why?"
"That's exactly what he told me. Exactly. I didn't talk to him for like a month after he did it."
"Oh," the raven-haired child answered back, suddenly regretting what she had said despite the fact that he had deserved it. "He said that we got along so well because even though we come from two different worlds and have two different types of intelligence, we thought the exact same thing and would say just about the same things. I'm guessing though, that you don't want to speak to me right now?"
"Just about." He answered in a clear cut voice.
Always emotional, if Pan was speaking with no range of pitches, then something was wrong. Also, raised by her father, she rarely spoke any explicative unless she was angry, and it was always calmly spoken, as if there was indeed nothing wrong.
Trunks weren't the same. He wasn't fond of using foul language, but he did when he was passionate about something, angry or overjoyed, it didn't matter.
"Oh." She said again, repeating the one syllable word as an awkward quiet fell over the pair, neither saying a word through the wires connecting them. Her father's bed squeaked beneath her as she rolled over and sat up to go to the kitchen to get some grape juice and snapped Trunks back to attention.
"Pan?" He asked, the first to break the silence.
"Uh huh," she answered back automatically as she poured her drink into a delicate china cup her Grandma Chichi had given her.
"Were you serious about the asshole thing?" His voice was now lighter and more questioning, and she detected a trace of hope hidden in there; hope that she wasn't serious and that it was just a strike out at him for being so difficult. Was she serious? After all he had put her through, especially as of late, how could she not be?
Running her hand through her midnight locks, she let her breath out slowly.
"No, Trunks. I was just a little bit aggravated. That's all. I'm sorry." The lie was said to please him and save him. Some things, after all, are better left unsaid, a lesson she had to repeatedly learn and yet it never seemed to stick.
"It's okay..." He said his relief evident in his response.
"Can you just please try to not be so difficult? You know that I want to, but I just can't. This whole relationship or whatever you may call it is eating at me and I just don't know what to do anymore. You say you love me, that that alone makes our actions okay, but I was raised differently than that. To me, it's not okay, and no one I know would support this, especially not Marron..." she pleaded.
Immediately, his eyes narrowed.
The lavender haired prince sighed deeply, his tone accusing at first and then changing to sounding tired, worn out. "Why are you still friends with that bitch? It would be so much easier if you weren't. Just so much."
"She is my best friend, Trunks, I am not going to just up and abandon her because you don't like her and because you and she broke up. She and I were friends first. You took little to no interest in me until you two started having problems, way back in the beginning. I don't think I would pick, and if I had to, I'm sorry to say, I would have to pick her. It's the right thing to do."
She felt horrible, telling him that. Probably the only reason she really would pick Maroon over Trunks was because they were friends first, because that would be the last of her supposed female friends and because it would be the correct thing to do.
Yet, she ached to tell him that she thought he was so much more fun, so much more entertaining to be around and she felt so much closer to him, despite the short duration of their friendship, and she felt like she could trust him, no matter what, and that he would never think less of her.
"Because you were friends first? That's your reason? You could have least taken the time to come up with a good lie. Isn't that what you told me?" He snapped back and she could almost imagine his slitted eyes over the phone.
She didn't answer, only frowned slightly.
"That's what I thought. Pan, I just don't get you. I don't even know who you are lying to anymore, if it's just me, or your family, or yourself. I just don't get you. Why can't you just explain to me how you felt when it happened? Come on. It isn't that difficult, is it?"
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. Gosh. Stop apologizing so much."
Pan rolled her eyes as their conversation quickly turned to lighter subjects, such as grape juice and fishing. She was off the hook for now, but so was Trunks, and for that, the pair was thankful, though they didn't tell their respective half that.
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The ringing echoed through the house as the second generation of the Son family sat around the table, Marron joining them for the evening. Shooting up out of her chair, Pan dashed for the phone, grabbing it midway through the second ring.
"Howdy!" came her cheerful greeting, especially since she already knew who it was on the opposite line. Only he and Marron called on this number, everyone else choosing their main line, and since Marron was here, it could only be Trunks.
"Hey hon'."
"I thought I told you not to call me that." She playfully snapped back.
In the background, Trunks could hear Marron ask who it was that was calling. Immediately he frowned.
"She's over?" He asked, adding a sour emphasis on 'she'.
"Yes, she is."
"So you can't talk at the moment?"
"Not exactly. I've got to eat and Marron is over, you know."
"Oh. When does the bitch leave?"
"Tomorrow morning, Trunks." Pan continued to answer his questions in a condescending tone, as if she was speaking to a child rather than to the CEO of Capsule Corporation. "Call me tomorrow?"
"Yea. I will."
"'Night love!
"Bye..."
Pan hung the phone up with a soft click, turning around to come face to face with Marron. A guilty blush stained her cheeks.
"Uh, hi, Marron."
"It was Trunks?"
"Yup. How'd you guess?"
Marron rolled her eyes and ignored Pan's impish retort, instead asking, " So, what'd he say about me this time?"
"Not much... He only called you a bitch like once but he was rather rude about you being over. You know, it really irritates me that he hates you so much. Why can't ya'll just be friends, I mean, ya'll dated, right? So then you could at least try and get along. It just doesn't make any sense to me that you two could date for like 8 months and then up and decide you hate each other. Seems odd."
"We just never got along. I told you that. I mean, I only went out with him because he liked me so much, you know? And I had been trying to get him to dump me from the second month, but he just didn't get it."
"Uh huh..." Pan replied to her friend, trying not to sound as sarcastic as she felt. She did, after all, have to keep her loyalty to her last remaining girl-friend. Boys will come and go and she didn't want to lose Marron just because she had always had a slight crush on the lavender haired god and now he was paying attention to her.
Right now, she was his life.
Life was good.
Grabbing the blonde by the wrist and dragging her out of the nosey eye of her parents, Pan immediately dropped the subject, hoping that her friend would take the hint.
She didn't.
"So, what've ya'll two been up to? I mean, you've gotten pretty close to him as of late. I call and you're on the phone with him, that is, if I can even reach you. If you aren't talking on the phone to him, you are over at Capsule hanging out. I'm starting to get a little jealous."
Rolling her eyes, she just laughed, brushing it off and telling her that she had nothing to be jealous of.
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Trunks frowned. This was going to be a battle that he would win, at any cost.
He never thought he would be fighting over Pan, though. Little Panny. It was just absurd. She was so immature only a year ago and it baffled him to see how much she'd changed.
At first, she'd hung all over him, obviously displaying her affections for the whole world to see and she gave him a power he just couldn't pass up, so he toyed with her emotions, all the while secretly trying to get to Marron through her.
Eventually Pan figured it out, dated a couple other guys instead and let the two of them get together, giving her best friend the guy she really had wanted. After all, he didn't want her.
And Pan backed off, becoming incredibly good friends with Uubu, one of the Saiya-jin Prince's best friends, gaining his affections. Trunks never knew exactly what went on between the two of them, but whatever it was it had made it impossible for the two to date. And Pan, supposedly, moved on.
He and Marron had a lot of fights and Marron grew more and more distant, slowly breaking his heart, until finally, they broke up for good. For a while, they were very close friends, acting almost as if they were still dating, yet soon, that fell apart too.
They tried, over and over again, to become friends, but it never worked, Pan always there to try and help.
She always did help too, but not enough. Nothing could save him and her anyhow. Consequentially, Pan became good friends with him through this, and they would talk for hours on the phone, her relationship with Marron suffering.
During this time, Pan matured in his eyes, always with the right advice and always there for support and consolation, even if he knew that she still had some affection for him and even if he knew that she really didn't want the two together.
She had become a woman, playing hard to get, but in a good way.
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Trunks never gave up on his friendship with the blonde, though, and kept, unsuccessfully trying to revive it, and finally, after one catastrophic incident, it totally burned. The ex-lovers never tried again. That incident also almost lost him Pan. She was ready to end their 'friendship, relationship, whatever', as she called it.
Pan patched up her friendship with Marron and started hanging out with her more, something which grated on his nerves. He wanted nothing to do with the ditz and wanted Pan to feel the same way, yet for some reason, she stayed with her.
This time, though, he would get her away from her for good, if it was the last thing he did.
Pan would belong to him and him alone.
He had no idea where this jealousy of his came from.
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She pulled the taller man into a tight embrace, a smile spread across her youthful features. Somewhere over the summer she had gained a couple of freckles across the bridge of her nose and she hated it with a passion.
"Do you see this?!" she exclaimed in mock anger, scrunching up her nose and looking at it cross eyed, trying to view the offending spots on her own, all the while pointing at it with her slender finger.
He just laughed in response as she continued her tirade.
One would never know she had just lost her mother a couple of weeks ago. She had recovered so quickly. Even Gohan had seemed to move on. They both seemed fine.
Things aren't always as they seem, though, and Trunks could see that this would come back and bite him in the ass any day now. Everyone would see the repercussions of the fiery woman's death.
Totally unexpected, the freak accident took the entire Z Gang by surprise. Slowly but surely, Trunks watched as everyone grew distant from each other.
Gohan, despite his supposed acceptance, threw himself into his work. He had lost so many people that were close to him in his life that it was amazing he could deal with all the loss. By now Trunks would have collapsed if he were in that man's shoes. Thank Kami he wasn't.
Chichi was too old to get anywhere and only Pan and Gohan visited her now. No one else had time. Bulma wasn't up to making the trip out there and it was just too much hassle.
Bra and the rest of the next generation never really clicked so she stayed with her friends in the city and pursued her own interests. Her father didn't care about anything but a good fight and his family anyhow, so the parting didn't bother him in the least.
Uubu was distracted by his girlfriend and work so he didn't have time for anyone else.
The Chestnuts, 18 and Krillen, kept to themselves for the most part.
It left only Trunks, Goten, Marron and Pan. They were the only ones who still made the effort to keep up with each other, Goten not doing such a good job.
However, Trunks didn't think of this as he watched the young girl, unaware of her beauty, as she exasperated herself over seven small brown dots adorning her nose.
He thought they made her look cute, but would never tell her so. Hell, he couldn't even admit it to himself.
Instead, he just laughed and wrapped his arm around her waist, stopping her complaints and led her over to the ticket counter at West Capitol City's new theatre. It was supposed to be so much nicer than the old one and they wanted to find out for sure.
He watched her still wrinkling up her nose and peering down at her freckles, resting in his embrace as they waited in the impossibly long line for tickets to the movie, and his thoughts wandered to exactly how he went from loving Marron and hating her to the exact opposite.
And that's where this story begins...