Note: The characters depicted below are not mine, nor am I in any way legally associated with Dragonball Z, Akira Toriyama or their respective companies' shareholders.
Once in a Lifetime
by Lady Eldaelen
Time travel is lonely.
He never knows what to do with himself when he sits down at those controls. Starting the journey doesn't take any thought at all, not after all the years he spent helping to put the machine together. Gohan knows its entire layout inside and out like his favorite kata, like the back of his remaining hand. But after the ship starts moving --or not moving, he and Bulma still aren't completely sure how everything actually works-- and the time machine skips or jumps or slides through time, that's when Gohan feels lost.
That is when he feels most alone.
The ironic thing was, he should have been dead. And Trunks should have lived.
Bulma had thought she had thought of everything. And Gohan had thought he had rethought all of her thoughts as backup. Their plan should have been flawless. They'd built in so many backups and fail-safes, the troubleshooting manual was three times as thick as the completed user guide. Gohan was so sure they were as prepared as they were ever going to be for a journey to the past, he even gave into Trunks' not-so-subtle requests and began training him in the fighting skills of their fathers.
They should have seen it coming when Gohan lost his arm. They should have known better than to think nothing unexpected would creep into their plan. They did know better. But the plan, the mere idea, had brought them so much hope. So much hope after such a long winter of devastating loss. To play devil's advocate would be killing those they lost all over again.
He should have knocked Trunks out harder. If only the kid had slept just a couple more hours. Maybe the androids would have tired of the area by then. But Gohan had no practice in the art of Knocking Students Out. First and foremost he'd been trained in defense. Of himself, those around him, his world. And then, if his opponent still wouldn't step down, he'd been trained to kill. Swift, clean, and efficiently. He'd done his best calculating how much force it'd take to render Trunks temporarily unconscious and not dead. But even then he was too soft with the kid, still erring on the side of caution. And so, when he faced the androids and lost again, when he lay half drowning in a rising mud puddle with a broken neck, when he closed his eyes to feel death because his ki sense was stronger than his darkening vision, that's when Gohan felt him.
He prayed to the Kami they no longer had that Trunks would overlook him. That he would die before he'd have to watch Trunks lose someone else.
When Trunks did find him, Gohan prayed the kid would realize he wasn't completely gone yet. But there had been no time to teach him how to read ki signatures, not when their enemies didn't have any. And even though the kid had some latent abilities, he was too worked up to recognize what he was feeling. Gohan hadn't been much help a handful of heartbeats away from Death. How long had the gap between his breaths been then? How would Trunks have seen the draining life in his eyes when he couldn't focus on what he no longer had the strength to see?
Then Gohan prayed Trunks wouldn't do anything rash. He knew it was a long stretch, but he still held out hope. But when Trunks' power burst forth and he stood resplendent as a full Super Saiyan, amidst the pride and exhilaration for his student's achievement, Gohan also felt fear. He prayed the androids wouldn't notice.
And when the twin pillars of destruction descended upon his student, his friend, the brother and son he never had, Gohan prayed the end would be quick. Kami had a funny way of answering prayers. Maybe because the guardian himself was no longer living. Gohan exhaled his last breath as he felt Trunks slip away. He wondered if his father would be as disappointed with him as he was with himself.
He opened his eyes to his father's face. Only… it wasn't his father, Gohan realized a split second later. The hair was too long, its length weighing down the characteristic spikes in the back. The eyes were too round, with a brooding depth Gohan had never seen in his father. The ki was different too, like his sixth sense was looking into a mirror.
Gohan was almost afraid to speak, such was the uncertainty he felt. But the young man --who wasn't his father but looked so much like him that it hurt-- was starting to cry.
"Am I dead?" Gohan queried softly.
The young man's eyes brimmed over, splashing Gohan's face with hot liquid drops of emotion. He gathered Gohan into his arms in a crushing hug, sobbing into his shoulder with relief. Gohan's arm wrapped around him automatically, making the kid cry even harder. It was then that Gohan realized he had to be dead, because he could feel and move and breathe again.
But if this was the afterlife, why was the broken landscape still the same? Why were they both still covered in mud and grime and rain? Why was Trunks' lifeless body still in front of him?
Gohan broke away from the stranger roughly, stumbling over to Trunks' fallen form and shedding a few tears of his own. From behind him, the stranger called out, "It's too late, Gohan. He's already gone."
"Don't you think I know that?" Gohan shouted back. He picked up the cooling body with ease, simultaneously marveling at his new near-death strength even as he mourned the passing of his friend.
"How do you feel?" The stranger asked as he drew up next to Gohan. He fingered a small leather pouch tied onto the strap of the broadsword slung over his back. "Do you want another Senzu?"
Gohan paused at the stranger's words. Senzu. He should have known.
But wait. Gohan had given Trunks the last bean he had the day he lost his arm. Between recuperating and working on the time machine with Bulma, training Trunks and surviving scuffles with the androids, Gohan hadn't been up to checking back with Korin to see if he had any more.
"Here, let me help."
The stranger offered to take Trunks, but Gohan stepped back, tightening his grip on the boy's body.
"Who are you?" he demanded none too softly.
The stranger blinked in surprise and quickly bowed his head, failing in his efforts to hide how much Gohan's words had stung. His too-round eyes peeked out from behind a shock of heavy bangs searching for acceptance, for trust.
"My name is Son Goten. In another time and another place, I'm your brother."
Gohan brings along books and manuals to read on every trip. And every journey ends with them untouched under his seat. Studying is not enough to keep his mind occupied, not when vivid memories and the importance of his brother's quest are so much more distracting. He decides once more that they need to replace the clear-domed cockpit with something less clear. Maybe Bulma can black it out completely when he returns. It's not like visual markers are needed to pilot a vehicle flown entirely by instruments. It probably isn't too healthy to look out across the abyss between timelines as often as he does. They tried timing the journey once, but the clocks stopped functioning properly the moment he started the engines. So for now, Gohan spends the duration of each trip, however long it is, mesmerized by the infinite spread of nothing outside the ship. Outside of Hope.
But even the emptiest, darkest voids dance with life if he looks hard enough.
Author's Note: This was a belated Christmas present for ~Skadu. Took the 12/31/05 prompt from the livejournal community 31_days as inspiration. Started out Mirai Trunks until I remembered Skadu wanted Gohan. Didn't really mean for it to be so AU, but the whole thing just sort of plopped out of my head all at once. As for the mysterious Goten, he comes from the past. More specifically from the main timeline we see in the show. So would that make him Present Goten? Or since he visited the Mirai world from a point in time ahead of theirs, could he be called Future Goten? My head asplode. Agewise he's post-Buu, pre-GT, possibly even pre-Pan. His quest? The reason for his appearance? If Gohan's not telling, neither am I.
1/3/2006