Disclaimer: See Part I.

Spoilers: Still the same; see Part I

Warnings: Still the same; see Part I. However, here the writing becomes slightly more disjointed (as if that's possible).

II. Fait Accompli

What thou lovest well remains,
The rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
Or is it of none?
First came the seen, then the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee.

"Pisan Cantos, LXXXI," Ezra Pound

Bite you lip. Close your eyes. Ignore the living ghost sitting at the table behind you. What do you want for dinner?

Anything. It's fine.

Pretend that your lover isn't dead, and that your love isn't dead, and that there aren't two of the horsemen gallivanting around the world. Pretend that the world is still whole and you son is still small and pretend that this is still you and everything that you've lost is not gone. Spaghetti it is then.

What? Again?

Ah Trunks, don't you know that your mother makes the best spaghetti this side of the moon?

If you listen hard enough you can almost pretend that the boy behind you is him and that you are sixteen again. If you work long enough, you may be able to sleep tonight and not search for your dead lover's hand in the dark. It's cheap. And there's lots of pasta lying around.

Well I like it.

Suck-up.

Yup.

If you don't turn around you can maintain the illusion that the boy is his father, and that he's waiting for Vegita to come out to train. If you just try hard enough--

Except, you know it isn't him. And part of you is glad for it, and that's why you can never really pretend.

There are differences now. No arguing.

We're not arguing. We're agreeing that I'm sucking-up so I can get a bigger helping than the brat here.

And it breaks your heart because you think you might love him more than you'd loved his father and you know that shouldn't be possible for too many reasons to count.

And that is massively fucked up.

She can count the similarities between father and son on one hand. But even so when she looks at him all she can see are his dark eyes and his warm smile and she wants to cry. That or wrap herself up in his arms and curl-up and die.

She realizes, even while she drowns in the dark gaze and the melancholy smile, that this youth is not him. Will never be him, and even though she knows this she still longs for him.

He makes her think of hearth-fires, and family, and baking bread, and death.

It suffocates her.

It's the similitude that undoes her.

Everything is just slightly off-kilter.

She see it in how she wakes every morning to find a sky that's just a shade too green, and a sun that's a tad less bright and to see that face, but with just a few too many imperfections.

Her son is a comfort to her at these times because he is a constant; he remains with her day in and day out, and he is always the same. He's a younger, softer version of his father--the flame-haired, hard-eyed prince--and she thanks god every fucking day that he hasn't taken him away too.

Out of everything lost, not everything is lost. This is what she convinces herself of in the morning when it's all she can do just to get up.

Not everything is lost.

Trunks. Gohan.

Out of everything lost--

Vegita. Gokou.

Once she thought that losing him was the worst thing that would ever happen to her. As she grows older (and much older), she learns that there is no such thing as rock bottom; that there is always something worse. So she learns to take pleasure in the small things that they are granted. She begins to appreciate the fact that her home was spared, and that her son lives to sleep in the room across the hall, and that every day the familiar vestige of Gohan graces her domicile.

Even if his smile is as rare as clean rain now.

How does someone who looks so much like Gokou become so unhappy? When she gazes at him she wants to hold him and wipe the sadness from his cheeks and tell him it's okay, because no one ever told him that enough.

It's the aching slide of their mouths that destroys her even as it rebuilds her.

She's never thought in a million years that she would be kissing him, the most mature of boys, and not the innocent man who was his father. She knows that she shouldn't be doing this because, well, for one thing she is old enough to be his mother. Older even, as she'd been older than his father.

Fuck, she knows she shouldn't be doing this simply for the reason that she's not sure that she loves him the way she knows he wants.

He wants a girlfriend, a wife.

He looks at her with his soul in his dark eyes, and she nearly chokes because it should be someone else he's looking at like that.

Because part of her still thinks she wanted to be his mother.

But there is no one else, some other part of her insists, some other part that throbs for this. They are someone else, and they are it. They are now the alpha and the omega. They are the last of the circle and they must hold it.

Even though she is sometimes so tired that she dreams of calm and quiet and an endlessly blue-clouded sky and not waking up.

I had a crush on you.

I think everyone knew it; I mean, I was scared of you, right, but that was because you were so ferocious and bright and pretty. You made me think of, well, everything good that I wanted to protect.

So yeah, I had a crush on you.

And now, well, I still think that you are the bravest, brightest, loveliest girl in the world. And I don't care if you laugh at me because I know that it's only us left. But I don't think that even if there were a hundred thousand girls left I would have loved any of them more than you.

I just thought you should know.

He loses his arm because she is too stupid and too slow.

But he doesn't die.

And just for that she is able to live with her guilt because goddammit she isn't ready to lose another one. So she's grateful that those stupid killing dolls are busy destroying another city, and that the area he fell in was just hot enough to solder his wound and melt the ends of his bleeding arteries together, and that the acid rain that had been hovering ominously decided to hold off until she found him--she is grateful that she found him unconscious because she did not want him to see what an utter wreck he'd made her into.

And this is how it happens; she finds him mostly ruined but half-alive and she grits her teeth and manages to ward off the ferryman for another catastrophe. She saves him and refuses to think that there is even a part of him that might not want to be saved. After all, that was how she lost Vegita. And Gokou. And herself. And she is not going to let this boy give up. She saves him, and she puts him in the room down the hall.

Sometimes she will sit and watch him, just to make sure that he is still breathing. Because some irrational part of her believes (maybe not so irrationally) that if he could he'd make himself stop breathing and just fade away. And the idea of his loss scares her like nothing has done in decades.

So she saves him, and not his arm and not the world; but she saves him and that is a start.

When she wakes up and finds him curled around her in her--in their--bed, she thinks that she may have a problem with younger men.

Trunks either doesn't know or doesn't care that she is sleeping with his sempai, and that's another thing she's grateful for. 'Cause, it would be too much for her too handle if he wasn't okay with it. It would be too much like trying to face her husband (had he been? At the moment, she doesn't know or care) because for all the good in her son, he is still far too much his father's boy.

And she had loved his father.

Now that he is gone, she can freely admit that even if she hadn't particularly liked the man she'd loved him. Maybe not as much as Gokou, and not as much as he might have deserved, but she had loved him regardless and she regrets his death with an pain that stings a brand on her heart.

She wishes sometimes that she could tell him.

And when she looks into Gohan's eyes she can't help but quail sometimes because she feels that, in some strange way, she is betraying the only man that had even attempted to stay with her. Then of course she'll see Trunks, bless his heart, and she nearly has a heart attack because Gohan isn't the only living ghost in her home. The only blessing is that Trunks doesn't take to dressing in his father's old uniform as Gohan does with his father's sienna gi. If he did, well, she might not survive to see sunrise.

What bothers her most is just how much she actually wants the younger man. Sometimes when she's tracing her eyes over his finely scarred face, or running her fingers though the thick tuffs of his butchered black hair, or resting her ear against his thrumming heart, she'll be consumed with a want that seeps into her bones and blood and she just aches for his arms to crush her to him. She'll want to sink into him because anything else would be too far away. And it's in those moments that she'll remember how Gokou had inspired emotion somewhat similar and how Vegita had been the one to crush the breath from her with his grip.

Even when they aren't there anymore, they're still there and she hates them for it because--despite all the poignant backwash--she loves Gohan too. She loves him so much sometimes that she can't even remember a time she didn't and suddenly she's a teenager again and everything is bright and scary and new and she just wants to hide and be hidden.

And Gohan is more than happy to hide her.

She has a vision of Gohan's death.

She keeps it close to her heart because she knows that it's only really a matter of time and this is the reminder because no one stays and he's going to die because he's too much like his father, and his father had left--

So she imagines his death at least three times a day.

While she's in her lab she thinks he'll die from an infection because she can't get to him in time. Or because he's stupid and doesn't tell her until it's too far gone and she's not a fucking doctor and she needs to know before it gets to that point--

While she's making dinner she'll think that he dies of internal injuries. She imagines ribs and lungs and heart collapsing inward from a hit, twisting and twining and pushing together like currents in a whirlpool, and killing him as they crumple.

While she kisses him and draws him into the space between her arms and her thighs, she envisions his last breath rattling into her mouth and his last warmth sinking into her blood. This is how it will end, she tells herself. So remember and don't get too attached because you know you won't survive this time.

But she can't help but become attached. She can't help but fall a little more in love with the slopes of his scared cheeks, and with the tiny valley at the curve of his hip, and with the stretch of kissable skin between his knee and his groin. She can't help but fall a more little in love with these things every day and in the process falls just a little more in love with Gohan because these things are all him. The idea that he can vanish from her life like--Vegita, Gokou--everything else has, well, it makes her dizzy.

Remember, she tells herself desperately even though she knows it's already too late, remember and don't--fall more in love? Tell him that you can't breathlivethink when he's not there--that the thought of his loss unmakes her?

It does.

So she kisses him and hopes that he understands the words her beating heart speaks because she will never be able to voice them.

She feels the pressure of his looming end most keenly when she's doing something silly and domestic.

She chokes then because there is a long-buried part in her that still wants to believe in wishes and dragons and wants to believe that this will all turn out in their favour and that she will have the happily ever after that she's always understood existed. It's that same part of her protests her pessimism even though the rest of her soul knows that his death is inevitable. He is too much like his father, in that respect.

So in this twilight world of burning sun and wasted land she watches for the day when he will go out and not come back because this revelation of his demise is also a prophesy of her own death.

And she has so much to do before then.

Her son is an intelligent boy: eerily so. Had there still been a world left, she is sure that he would be in the top three-percent or so of all the minds in society. But sometimes she wishes he were less curious.

He has questions, of course, about his father and about the other warriors that the androids had killed. And she tries to answer his questions freely but there are still things too sore for her to touch on.

Like, what was my father like?

He was an arrogant, noble man who died just the way he wanted.

He was a mean, nasty sonuvabitch who didn't give a crap that he just upped and died when she told him that they were too strong for him.

He was a sarcastic, sardonic, funny man who knew just what she wanted even when she didn't.

He was ... well loved. Just not well liked.

What was your father like?

But she can never verbalize it. When she looks into her son's blue eyes--blue eyes that only differentiate from a dead man's by colour, she just can't find the right words even when they are already in her throat.

So instead she just says, he was your father and I cared about him and then he died.

What she doesn't add is, he died just like every other man I've cared for, because she doesn't want to jinx her son who she might very well love the most openly out of any man she has ever loved. But this seems to be enough for Trunks and he will drift of into a daydream of how he and his father and his Gohan defeat the horrible robots and save the world and his mother.

As he grows older he starts to ask about Gokou too, because Gohan is really closer to a father than any of them will admit, and naturally the boy is curious about who could have created such a man. When he first asks her what he was like, it all rushes back and she nearly falls.

Thank god Gohan is there to catch her.

It came to her like a blow to the head, which is sort of fitting because Trunks had hit her and she had passed out and--well--then, when she regained herself, she'd snapped at him and he'd (being the cheeky little bastard he is) retorted that he was sorry but he couldn't turn back time now, could he?

(If you could make one wish, what would you wish for?

I'd wish for time.)

That's it.

It starts out simple enough and she can see in her head all the silly movies she has ever seen about time travel and parallel universes and Grandfather paradoxes and she knows it's a long shot. But she also knows if anyone can do it she can because she has survived the end of the world.

She doesn't tell any one of this idea. Not yet, not quite yet, because she knows that if she does tell them, tell Gohan, he'll get this look on his face because he'll be thinking she wants to turn it all back because I'm not good enough, I'm not strong enough, I'm not who she wants; because I am not my father. Because for all that he may be one of the strongest men on earth, he is still so naive and can get so hurt by things.

So she just makes the blue prints.

And she hides them in a drawer.

And it's just a theory anyway. And it probably wouldn't work. Maybe. Most likely.

And she knows she's just lying to herself.

She will not work on the time machine while Gohan is alive. She will not make him think that she loves him any less than she does because she'd played that game with his father and see how well that turned out.

You loved him, didn't you?

Oh god. Yes, Yes. A million times yes. I don't want to talk about it. I can't talk to you about it. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I ... cared about him, a lot.

He talked about you. I guess you'd know that. But he really thought the world of you.

Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this? He's dead and I was stupid and, and--Really?

Yeah. I can still remember when he was first bringing me to meet you all. He was so excited to see you again.

I miss him. I miss them all. I don't want to remember them anymore. I was so surprised to see you; he hadn't told anybody that he was married. Or that he had a kid.

Well, actually, he had. He just hadn't told--

I want to die. Why is this so familiar? Me.

He loved you. Please don't get upset.

How can I not? When I was so fucking stupid; I thought he'd always be there and I never thought that I'd lose him. I'm not.

You are. And I know why he did, loved you that is. Because ... I do too.

Why do I let these Son men do this to me? Why can't you see that you just want comfort because you can't really care about me--I'm too old. And I'm too hard. And you make me think of your father, sometimes. Gohan ...

Don't do that.

Only ... Do what?

That.

Only, when I look at you ... That what?

Treat me like a fucking child. I am not my father. I'm not stupid. I know what I'm doing.

You don't. If you did we wouldn't be having this conversation. But when you hold me ... I know you do.

But you don't. And I don't know how to explain it to you so that you understand.

Only, when you look at me and when you hold me the only man I can see is you, you silly boy.

There is a fine line between living and surviving and when Gohan dies (stupid, stupid, stupid fucking boy!) she feels that she has teetered off the knife-edge she'd lived on and can now be classified as a walking corpse. Everything is irrelevant now and so she just sits stoically at the bedside of her sleeping son, the last living man on earth. Well, that's hyperbole, she knows, but it feels that way.

And who the fuck is going to argue with her? No one, that's who--no one because there is no one left and she is alone and--

And this is ten times worse than when Gokou died because unrequited love, for all that it's love, is still unrequited. It's hard to miss something that she never had, and she manages that well enough.

But Gohan's loss is different.

Gohan is not unrequited. Gohan is--was--very, very much requited and now it just hurts so bloody much that she feels like a bag of glass; all jagged and sharp-edged and sticking out of her skin because this is something too big to hold in. Because this--this is having the insides of her body burned to ash. This is trying to take a breath when she's not able to breathe. This is--

Loss.

Grief.

Death. This is going to be the end of her.

She remembers her Greek myths and she remembers Cassandra the most.

She feels a kinship with the fabled seer because, like Cassandra, she too is not able to save her Troy. She saw what would happen and she ignored it; she let Gokou die and then there was nothing, no one, who could ever save her or the world.

Unlike Cassandra, however, she is going to do something about it.

It was the third death that ruined them all.

She knows that--if Gokou had lived--none of this would have happened. She knows that Gohan wouldn't have died and Vegita wouldn't have gotten himself killed and the world would still be whole and there would still be life and she wouldn't have fallen in love with Gohan.

God. She would never have fallen in love with Gohan.

This is the real reason that she never started the machine during his life, and she won't hesitate to admit it now. She wants to have loved him. She doesn't even want to imagine a universe were she had not loved him and been loved by him.

But that's exactly what she's going to do.

If she could turn back the clock and fix the world even if it meant destroying all she holds dear, would she?

Yes.

She makes her decision while she searches for her son and her lover in the shattered cities, praying that they are still alive without the hope that they actually are. She sees the blinding light of an explosion and she knows right then and there that the androids are back and that, somehow, Trunks and Gohan are involved because she has always known when something was wrong. It is something she can feel in the air.

So she makes her choice as she speeds to find them, and she chooses to raze this reality in order to remake the one that should have been. The one in which she doesn't fall in love with Gohan, and where Gokou doesn't die, and she lives with her son and her sort-of husband. She can't imagine living in a world were she doesn't love Gohan, but she sure as hell will if it means that he lives.

If she can save her son and this wonderful dark youth, she will move heaven and hell. If she can save them, then that has got to be worth any cost.

When she finds them, when she sees those dark eyes still as ice and that slack unsmiling mouth, she dies for a moment. And it's a different death than the ones she'd died for his father. It's the start of a silent countdown, ticking away the minutes left of her life.

Son Gohan has died.

Son Gohan is dead.

Son Gohan is--God, it doesn't matter how she tries to put it; it just sounds wrong.

She looks into her son's watery blue gaze and sees grief so heavy and familiar that she gathers him in her arms as he weeps for the loss of the only father he has ever known. And it is only for his sake that she doesn't reprise her performance from an eon ago and try to drown herself with tears. Trunks exhausts himself and as she packs him into her truck, he asks her the question that she has been dreading; he asks her how they can ever survive now, without such an integral part of their life.

She doesn't fucking know.

But she isn't going to tell this child that. So she lies. And he believes her.

It'll be okay, she whispers because if she were to raise her voice she is sure that she'd breakdown weeping right there.

It will not be okay. It will never be okay. But she might be able to make it right.

It takes three years because she is rusty and there is other work to do besides, and of course, her plans are only theory so it takes some time and testing to finally get them right. It takes three years, and in those three years she still hasn't forgotten.

And that's all right because she shouldn't forget. She shouldn't forget that she has loved and lost that love and loved again only to lose that joy as well. If she forgets then it devalues everything. So she will not forget, but she will remake the world so that it never happened.

But now it is ready, this ugly, cumbersome machine that will slip between the corridors of now and then and take her back to the place, the time that twisted it all up.

Seventeen years is a lot to erase.

And she doesn't really want to erase it anyway.

It has taken her a lifetime and a half to figure this out. It's taken her a wasted existence to realize that even when something hurts so damn much it leaves her with a gut full of glass and tears, she still wants it. She wants to keep this soursweet memory of the boy she loved and the man she never could and the husband who knew her inside out. She wants to live out the rest of her few years in this twilight wasteland, waiting for the moment when the sickle swings for her.

But she won't.

It has taken three years plus seventeen more and three deaths to finally get it into her head that she can't always do what she wants.

Even a day ago she was still hesitant--still unsure if she was unselfish enough to do what she knew was right, instead of what she wanted. However now as she holds the hand of her son (her stupid, wonderful son who pitted himself against their friendly neighbourhood demons and lost like she knew he would because he just can't compete without someone he respects to measure himself against), she eradicates any indecision and steels herself for the only option. Because otherwise he will lose and lose and lose again because without someone--Gokou--else one boy alone can not hope to win this war.

She must unmake this reality, regardless of what it costs her.

I don't know how I made it home alive ... (1)

Once awake, Trunks is humbled and he turns unhappy eyes to her. You're lucky, that's how. Just like me. Except it had nothing to do with luck and everything to do with the fact that she'd raced after him in one of her still working trucks and gotten there in time to make sure he didn't die on her. Like Vegita had. And Gohan.

Trunks is a smart boy and he has none of his father's ego--for which she is eternally grateful--so he does not argue now and simply agrees to try the blasted machine as soon as he can move.

Thank God.

The relief that floods her is unfamiliar and she releases a breath that has been lodged in her throat since he'd rejected her idea (I think I'm strong enough to beat the androids now. We don't have to go study them in the past!) and bolted towards the last-reported location of the dolls. If it came down to it, she'd go herself, but that is her absolute last resort. Because she wants her son to be safe, even if only for a little while. And because she wants him to see what the world should be like, and not what it is. Because she wants to give him a chance to see the people that he never got to know.

They must do this. It hadn't occurred to her that Trunks would rebel against the plan because it she'd forgotten that Trunks, brilliant boy that he is, would also realize in rewriting their past that they'd have to decimate his future, or at least the only one he'd ever known, and it certainly hadn't crossed her mind that he might not want to.

First you'll go back and give Gohan's dad his medicine. Everything starts there. And dies there. Because she still can't come out and just say Gokou's name because of the ache that bloomed in her chest. Because saying Gohan's name even now, three years later, still hurts like it did the morning after he died. Because she knows that, like Gokou's death and Vegita's death, she will hurt from it until the day she dies. Because once that medication is in his hands, all of this will never have happened. She isn't certain whether she wants to laugh or cry. I don't think the world would've turned out this way if he hadn't died ...

Was he that powerful?

It's a valid question especially considering that neither she nor Gohan had every really given him any details. But it still makes her ache with remembrances. Yeah, he was ... (But that's not it at all. How can she explain this to him?) But that's not all. He was the kind of guy who made you believe that he could make things right, no matter how terrible the situation seemed ...

... Because he cared more about everyone else then about himself.

Because she loved him.

She doesn't say it so it goes unsaid, but her son seems to understand and smiles softly at her anyway. She knows they will fix this.

Even if it destroys them both.

She has only lived for near half a century and yet she is older than Methuselah

She has lost her son to the canals of time. She has lost her husband to war and dust. She has lost her boyish lover to a miscalculation and she has lost his father, the man she adored, to a sort of instantaneous mistake.

She has lost her youth, and her home, and her world.

This is what it feels like to have nothing left. She has lost everything now.

And she would do it again in a heartbeat.

(1) The resulting italicized text/conversation between Buruma and Trunks is taken directly from the manga short story Trunks the story: The Lone Warrior written by Akira Toriyama