Piccolo realized dimly that he was dreaming…but only dimly. Not enough to
change what was going on. Not enough to wake himself up, not enough to cast
off the increasingly disturbing images that were settling like layers of
dust on his subconscious. He had heard Tambourine say once that most humans
dreamed about things that had never happened and never would happen – he
hadn't thought to question how exactly his brother knew this.
Demons, though, were different. They always dreamed either about the past or the future…according to his brother. And Piccolo's dreams were of the past. Always.
* * *
The child had matured very quickly. Six months ago he had been an infant, discovering the newness of the world around him with excusable wonder…and a shadow of remembrance. He had heard battlecries in the back of his mind before he discovered that air was breathable. When he had looked at water for the first time, the first thought to enter his mind had been, "It's a lot like blood…"
As his body grew, so did the memories. He had known all along with a strange, child-like intuition, that the pictures in his mind were not his. He had the vague notion that he had borrowed them from somewhere. Someone. Someone that he couldn't quite remember. He had an old memory – one that was his – about struggling free of something white and leathery, something he later recognized as an eggshell. Of emerging next to a body that was coated in purple – that was torn through the center….
He had known, without knowing how he knew, that this was a being to whom he owed a great deal. He had remembered parts of this person, whom he had never met. He remembered a pair of strange eyes. He remembered sensing things from this being through the leathery wall – anger, but also an untapped, unbelievable disappointment, as if he had been promised something grand, but had never received it.
And then the body had disappeared in a soundless, forceless explosion that left only smoke and a feeling that the young demon later knew as loss. Piccolo also knew now who that being had been. His earlier memories pained him like a poorly knitted bone in rainy weather – a dull ache that never really left.
Not even when every other part of his body ached from pushing himself to his limits and beyond, learning the techniques that were imbedded in those floating strands of secondhand knowledge.
It didn't matter to Piccolo that the memory he had of Son – he would never give that human the honor of calling him by his given – was not his, but his father's. All he cared about was that one day, when he had looked up at the sun to determine his direction, the brilliant orange had flipped some kind of switch in his mind, and he had been able to fully remember…
Orange. Like a gi. Like a gi that a particular little boy had worn in one of the memories-that-weren't.
Son Goku had been dressed in orange on The Day. His aura had been the sun's rays come down to earth. Remembered pain, pain that made the scrapes, bruises, and even the occasional broken bone acquired from his blind attempts at survival seem like nothing, drove him on. He also knew, with an intuition that was anything but childish, that any chance at happiness or innocence a demonspawn might have had had been crushed by that same pain.
That, and the occasional encounter with local humans. Thinking of those people, Piccolo felt his lips tighten into a straight, angry line. Animals. All of them. And too ignorant to know any better. He supposed it wasn't their fault they were so foolish – he would just have to avoid them.
He was jolted out of his reverie by a rush of air that caused his campfire to shudder, throwing up a warding cloud of sparks. He narrowed his eyes – he knew enough about wind to know what wasn't natural…
Beside him, dangerously close, someone cleared his throat reproachfully.
Piccolo twisted to his feet so quickly he thought he might have left his skin behind, automatically shifting into a fighting stance. And he saw who his visitor was.
A being who didn't look even remotely human. A point in his favor, as far as Piccolo was concerned. He was sitting comfortably against a rock, a definite smirk on his face. His skin was green, like Piccolo's…he had the same ears, the same general face structure. Muscles rippled like knotted chords across his arms and shoulders – more than anything, he looked like the body that Piccolo had seen on The Day. And this being did not seem the least bit surprised at the way Piccolo looked…
He had never met anyone who did not quail at his appearance…or scream at him in shrill voices that hurt his young ears.
It should have been reassuring. Instead, something in the newcomer's expression made Piccolo wonder if maybe he should break with what his sire's memories had been teaching him about pride…and run.
"So, the brat thinks it's a warrior," the newcomer remarked in a shallow, baritone voice that fairly danced with amusement. The voice sounded as his sire's had, in those memories…
It was definitely too good to be true.
"Where did you learn that stance, boy?" he continued, tilting his head.
"Who are you?" Piccolo snarled in return, automatically taking a step back to give himself room to maneuver.
The older…demon?…stood unhurriedly, obviously not worried. He glanced at the shadows outside the campfire, a faint upward twist to his lips. "He looks like Daimao...has his temperament, too. I'll give you that much. But isn't he a little small?"
Another voice crept from the shadows to answer – one that sounded as though it would have been right at home in the throat of a serpent. Piccolo felt the skin on the back of his neck rise in gooseflesh. "For twelve moons? Hardly."
"We didn't take so long…" the first being continued loftily.
"We weren't reincarnated," the voice rejoined, unflustered.
The first being rolled his eyes. "As if Daimao would spend so much time in that frail little body…"
"As if he would allow himself to fade completely from the world…"
This seemed to take the visible speaker by surprise – his eyes widened, tinted red by the firelight. But that surprise faded quickly as he shrugged. "Whatever you say, Tambourine. It hardly matters."
At this point, the previously-unseen speaker strode into the circle of firelight. He was as tall as the first, though far slighter…like a willow planted beside an oak. His gi was black, not maroon, and it hung loosely from his shoulders like the robes of a monk. His eyes were downcast as if in a show of humility…however, his tone was reproving. "Everything matters, Cymbal."
"Was there a point to that, besides a chance to throw my own words back at me again?" The first being – Cymbal – snapped.
"I always have a point…even when my audience is too thick for it to penetrate."
Cymbal waved a hand dismissively. "Enough – you're wasting time. As usual."
Piccolo, meanwhile, had been trying to place these strangers…or were they strangers at all? They seemed so familiar…but not from his memories.It must be his sire's recollection tugging at him. These were…his sons…no, his brothers.
This knowledge brought the young demon no comfort at all.
Just then, another rush of wind alerted him to still more new arrivals…even before Cymbal spoke.
"What kept you two?" he snapped reflexively, as if he were used to reproaching whoever-it-was.
Another new voice as two more beings stepped into the firelight – two demons who could, by the look of them, have been twins. If Cymbal was large, these two were immense…and Cymbal would have towered over most humans. Their shoulders must have been all of four feet wide, their arms were like the trunks of trees…Piccolo felt a distinct, nervous twitch in his gut. Gods, this just gets better and better, doesn't it?
"Did you have to fly so fast?" One…Drum, Piccolo thought…complained in a husky bass. "We already know you can run us into the ground – no need to go proving' it every chance you get."
Cymbal crossed his arms. His expression was amused…but to Piccolo's eyes, it seemed a dangerous kind of amusement. "You expect me to dawdle like you two oafs?"
"It's not that," The other – Piano, if Piccolo's memory was serving him right, added placatingly. "It's just…well, nobody could keep up with that. That's all."
At this, Cymbal's smirk grew a bit wider…a bit more frightening. "He did," he said, indicating Tambourine with a tilt of his head.
"Well, yeah…" Piano said, sounding confused.
"So how's this. The next time the bloody bookworm gets where we're going before you two, I'm going to personally see to it that you learn to move a little faster. Fair?"
The two nodded – Piano, as if he didn't really understand the threat but knew better than to ask about it. Drum – as if he knew what had been said and resented it.
And then, Cymbal turned his attention to him. Piccolo stared directly back into the eyes that reminded him so much of his father's, doing his best to project an outward appearance of calm. No emotion would be safe…but if he could manage not to show anything, there was a chance…
"Now, on to you, hatchling. You obviously know something about fighting…let's see how much."
Alright, so maybe there wasn't a chance.
"Our first session will last for fifteen minutes," Cymbal continued, pulling an hourglass from the loose folds of his gi. "Your goal is to last against Drum, Piano, and myself for that long. Are you up to it, hatchling?"
Piccolo felt his lips moving almost of their own accord, mirroring Cymbal's half-mocking expression. An idea was beginning to sprout in the back recesses of his mind… "Is three on one enough? Or do you need more help?"
Cymbal's entire mannerism shifted instantaneously – from noncommittal to furious. "Are you implying that I'm afraid? Of a little halfwit like you, no less…" he hissed, eyes sparking like the sputtering fire.
The youngest son of the Demon King lowered his gaze submissively. "Forgive me, brother, I didn't mean to imply that at all."
"Good," Cymbal snarled, relaxing a little. "I didn't think that Daimao would have left us a suicidal...Uhn!" Without warning, the wiry young demon had leaped across the fire and delivered a high roundhouse to Cymbal's jaw. The force of the kick sent the older fighter flying. Piccolo flipped out of the maneuver, rebounding from his brother's jaw, and landed in a defensive stance. He grinned in satisfaction as Cymbal stood, spitting out blood.
"I meant to say it straight out," Piccolo finished. That was going to cost him…but it had been worth it. Oh yes, it had been worth it.
For a moment, there was silence. Then, Drum laughed. The sound, which was like rocks being ground together, echoed blatantly in the stagnant desert air.
The elder demon turned his deadly glare to the most recent offender of his dignity. "Are you so eager to die?" he asked with frightening calm.
Drum's laughter cut off abruptly, though there was obvious discontent lurking within his too-small eyes.
A quiet voice broke the stillness. "The hatchling has first blood."
All eyes turned to Tambourine. He was hanging back from the others, leaning causally against the sandstone wall. The muted yellow contrasted well with his skin tone, which was darker than Cymbal's, closer to Piccolo's own.
"And your point?" Cymbal asked, still dangerously calm.
"Only that, nothing more. It was enough if you were listening." Tambourine's eyes were closed to mere slits, his expression was unreadable.
"You and your dumb word games," Piano snapped in annoyance. "One of these days, it's gonna land you in serious trouble."
"Which day will that be?" Tambourine asked, one eye opening. He made no threatening move, showed no indication to attack, but the single eye that he had opened was like a well: soullessly, glitteringly empty.
Piano dropped his eyes, muttering something about "next time."
"Speaking of word games..." Cymbal growled, directing his attention back to Piccolo. "Now, we begin."
The fight went by in a blur to the young demon. He knew, in a detached way, that he was losing; he took two blows for each one he landed, and when he did manage to connect, the blows stung his knuckles and jarred his wrists. His arm twisted painfully behind his back, a punch turned his head sideways, some kind of blow sent him flying into a cliff. He could hear the crunch of a breaking bone. He sank to his knees, tried to stand, and fell again.
"Time," a low voice hissed.
The other three froze. Cymbal straightened, brushing dirt from his gi. "Not bad, brat. At the very least, we've learned that you can take a great deal of punishment. Very constructive lesson, wouldn't you agree?"
Piccolo shot Cymbal the most withering glare he could manage.
It didn't seem to bother Cymbal – the elder demon was apparently in a far better mood. He turned his head a bit, speaking to one of the larger ones…Drum, Piccolo guessed. It was hard to tell with blood in his eyes, though.
"Strange," Cymbal was saying. "He seems to have run out of one-liners."
Drum said nothing, He only wiped away some of the blood that ran freely down his face; he had learned the hard way that Piccolo knew how to use his claws.
"Expect us back here sometime next week. By then, you'd better be able to last twenty minutes." Ki energy flashed up around them, sudden and bright enough to blind Piccolo for several seconds. He shielded his dazzled eyes for a long moment, waiting for the stars to clear. The first thing he saw when the flashes disappeared was the fourth one, the one called Tambourine, striding up to him. Piccolo bared bloodstained teeth.
"Little fool, " Tambourine hissed, smiling like a crocodile. "I'm not going to hurt you just yet."
"Why...not?" Piccolo asked, looking directly into his older brother's eyes for the first time. It was disorienting, frightening – as if those eyes were thirsty and were drinking a part of him. He wanted desperately to look away and, because he wanted to, because those eyes chilled him to the bone, he held firm. He would not break the stare. He would not.
Tambourine chuckled, a surprisingly ominous sound. "You'll never follow him, will you?"
Piccolo fought the temptation to moisten his lips."No."
"You really should, you know. Less trouble for all of us."
Piccolo snarled, still not looking away. The eyes were more bearable now – the first shock had been the worst of it, like jumping into icy water. Very deep, dark, lifeless, hungry water. "He's an idiot," the demon snapped, the words splashing out onto the sand. "And arrogant. And…I hate to be repetitive, but he's a coward."
"True enough," the other demon agreed. Tambourine closed his eyes. He obviously wasn't the least bit troubled by Piccolo's glare, had merely grown tired of the game. "But he's a predictable coward, and he can be useful…or used. Which depends entirely on whom you are." The eyes opened again.
"Is that why you follow him?" Piccolo demanded.
Tambourine's eyes grew darker. "I don't follow him, hatchling. The two of us just happen to be going in the same direction."
* * *
Goku watched in some concern as his "patient" growled softly. Piccolo was caught in the throes of some dream or, more likely, some nightmare. It was funny to think that someone like Piccolo could have bad dreams like anyone else. "Hey," he said softly, placing a hand on the demon's arm. "Wake up. You're dreaming."
Even in sleep, Piccolo moved as if to pull away from him, his brow darkening in anger.
The human withdrew his hand slowly, feeling confusion and an odd kind of sadness. How could he help someone who wouldn't have anything to do with him…or anyone else? He sighed – he seemed to be doing a lot of that lately – and rocked back on his heels, drumming his fingers on the floor of the cave. "I wish you could tell me what to do for you, Pic. I don't even know where to start."
The cave was relatively cool, but crystal beads of sweat were beginning to stand out on the demon's forehead, which, Son decided, could not possibly be good. Then again, the demon had been out for what, a day and a half? That probably wasn't real healthy either. "Hey, you aren't gonna give up now, are you?" he asked, nervousness an anchor to his usually light voice. He brushed the back of his hand over Piccolo's forehead – it stood out like a dove against the darker face. Hot, Goku thought worriedly, glancing at his hand to see if it had actually been burned. Very hot.
Yet another fact to add to the growing "not good" category.
"I'd better do something about that," he muttered, dipping a cloth in a bowl that had been confiscated from his kitchen. Hoping fervently that Chichi wouldn't notice that the bit of pottery was gone before he could put it back, he wrung the excess moisture from the rag and placed the cloth over the demon's eyes. Piccolo seemed to relax a bit, which was the first encouraging thing that had happened so far. "Grandpa Gohan did this for me once when I was really little – you know, right after I hit my head. I don't know whether it'll help or not, but I guess it can't hurt."
The human regarded the demon's injuries with a critical eye – wow, he'd done a real number on the guy. The softhearted man's oversized conscience, already made restless by his failure to check on his rival sooner, began to make a nuisance of itself. It migrated from the back of his mind to the pit of his stomach, where it lobbied admirably for more attention. Externally, Son could pick out two or three serious-looking wounds. The hole that went through Piccolo's left shoulder looked like the worst of them. If that hole had not been made by a ki blast, which had partially cauterized even as it cut, then he might very well have bled to death. From the look of it, he almost had anyway.
"There's not much I can do about something like that," Goku thought aloud, one hand going behind his head, "but I think I should try to keep you from losing any more of it. I'm gonna go back home to get something to use for bandages. I think Chichi has some sheets out on the closeline – she'll never miss one, we've got lots of 'em. Of course, if she catches me, I might end up in worse shape than you are," he joked, but even to his own ears it was obviously flat. "Yeah, I guess there really isn't anything to laugh about, is there?" he said, standing slowly. Then, he left the cave, preparing to become a sheet-bandit or a convict, depending upon his wife's degree of watchfulness.
* * *
Piccolo expected the dreams to stop then… he never slept for long. Before, he had always managed to wake up before things got too bad…but not this time. The scenery seemed to dissolve around him, though the pain stayed – translating easily to another time, another memory…
* * *
"Brother," a voice, a familiar voice…Tambourine? "Are you ever going to get up?"
Funny, wasn't it? He had just been wondering the same thing.
"Or should I simply bury you?"
Being buried didn't sound so bad, really – not if it meant an end to the terrible, throbbing pain that was crouching in his side, taking a swipe at his internals any time he moved.
"After all, I have seen livelier corpses."
He was cognizant enough to note the emphasized scorn in the voice, though it failed to raise anything remotely close to anger in his dulled mind. Go away. Just go away, leave me alone. Let me sleep.
"What, so little pride as that? You should have been up and at my throat by now."
Piccolo forced one of his lids to open, if only to confirm his suspicion as to who his unwelcome guest was. The whole world was an ocean filled with bleary, washed-out colors. Predominately green and purple. "Still here?" he asked, or tried to ask. His voice came out thick and bruised.
"Of course. As slowly as you are moving, I fully expect to grow old and whiter like a dried date before I have occasion to leave."
By then, he could see well enough. "I hate you," he said matter-of-factly, flattening out the syllables to crush any emotion that might have leaked from his still-bleeding mouth.
A low chuckle. "Naturally. Now get up – I've something that I wish to show you."
Piccolo started to protest but quickly thought better of it. No sense arguing with Tambourine when he was at anything less than his optimum. That would be begging for a verbal skewering. "What?" he asked instead, trying without much success to figure out exactly where his arms and legs were. He certainly couldn't feel them at the moment.
Placidly, "A thing far easier shown than explained. Otherwise, I would have said that I had something to tell you."
Bastard. Piccolo winced when he felt the circulation returning to his much- abused limbs – ye gods, they were made of needles – and sat up gingerly. The whole world spun for a rather interesting moment, and the youngest of the demons was forced to delay his next words for a few short breaths, during which he decided not to faint. "Alright," he grumbled. "Let's get this over with."
Tambourine's thin-lipped moue of impatience transposed seamlessly into a smirk.
With much swaying, the younger demon managed to gain his feet. He glanced at his brother to see if he was ready to go and, in so doing, saw himself reflected in Tambourine's otherwise empty eyes. Piccolo could see gray, nondescript mud splattered across his body, entwined with the slightest trace of deep blue. His clothing, which could only loosely be described as a gi now (and then only with apologies to other garments in that category) dangled from his battered frame like willow leaves around the trunk.
Tambourine did not nod or acknowledge him in any way; he simply began walking. Piccolo growled to himself and set to stumbling after his brother, wondering how the elder demon managed to tread through such thick mud without slipping. While he was wondering, how was it that Tambourine didn't have so much as a single spatter of mud on him? Piccolo suspected a chi shield, although he wasn't about to ask.
It began to rain.
* * *
Piccolo was soaked to the skin. Beads of rainwater scurried down his drooping antennae, plummeting from the tips to burst on his nose or trickle into the clashing white of his eyes. He shook his head occasionally to clear the water from his elvish ears – not that there was anything to hear but the steady sloshing of their footsteps.
He had long since stopped wondering where they were going.
Keeping up with his much taller brother had been a challenge from the beginning. The elder demon strode through muck that came up to Piccolo's knees with no apparent difficulty, while his counterpart was forced to flounder along in his wake. Piccolo no longer studied their route, but was instead content to fasten his eyes firmly on his brother's feet. As the rain increased, he ceased even to follow his brother. He was plodding behind a specter that never tired, a grayish spirit veiled by sheet upon sheet of water.
He didn't even notice that the specter had stopped until he crashed into the backs of Tambourine's legs.
The elder demon glanced over his shoulder, the faintest glimmer of amusement flickering, then dying in his midnight eyes. "We're here," he announced, a wry smile alighting for a brief moment on his face.
Piccolo looked up obligingly. Charcoal skeletons of houses rose as if to puncture the clouds with their jagged, wicked looking edges. Spirals of oily smoke rose from here and there like carrion crows that were spreading unnaturally long wings. Incredibly, embers still glowed in defiance of the rain, casting a reddish sheen over the wet remains of the village. "Did you do this?" Piccolo asked, a trace of reluctant awe festering in his voice.
"I? No."
"Then why bring me here?" Piccolo looked up at his brother and, for the space of a heartbeat, he was only a curious child – the killer he was meant to be was all but gone from his widened eyes.
Tambourine smiled absently, his own eyes still drinking deeply of the sprawling destruction before them. Whether or not they found the draught bitter was impossible to tell. "Because you have questions."
"I. . .what?" How did he know?!
"About humans," the elder demon continued coolly. "You are not Daimao's reincarnation, in spite of what I told Cymbal. That simple-minded fool will never understand the difference anyway," he finished, half under his breath. Then, more loudly, "Oh, I've no doubt that he bequeathed you his memories, perhaps even a few of his more. . . interesting skills, but understanding is not a gift to be given." Tambourine shrugged. "Knowledge without understanding is useless. He as much as gave you a locked chest, but not the key."
Piccolo swallowed once, managing not to make it sound like a gulp.
"He knew," Tambourine added, perhaps sensing his brother's unspoken question. "He was many things, youngling, but not stupid. Now, come."
The two of them wove between once-buildings like worms through a decaying apple. Bodies, many horribly mutilated, lay in the street, scraggly hair and rigid limbs all intertwined, colors muted by mud, accented with edges of red. Men, women, even the occasional child, Tambourine stepped over them all indiscriminately, his aloof expression never slipping. Piccolo, after one glance at the grotesquely twisted visage of what had once been a terrified young man, kept his eyes firmly on the back of his brother's gi, trying to ignore the clenching feeling in his stomach. He pointedly did not think.
He just as pointedly did not inhale through his nose. One whiff of charcoal, mixed with the sickening (if surreally familiar, alluring) smells of burned hair and singed flesh, had set off a tempest of reactions that he was not prepared to face. It was disgusting. . .nauseating, even. . . but so very, very intense. . . horrifying, but. . . so beautiful. . .
Quailing inside, he squashed that thought. Beautiful? THIS?! In spite of his better judgement, he glanced down at the road, at the tangle of spent humanity beneath him. For some reason that he did not understand, his chest hurt. He averted his eyes quickly, unsure if he wanted more to laugh out loud, to huddle in a corner, or to run from this place as far and as fast as his legs would carry him.
He didn't realize until they had threaded through several streets that Tambourine was looking for something. His impassive gaze was covering ground more quickly than they were, prying into every crack with detached intensity. "Come now, surely there must be one, at least," he muttered every now and then.
The sound of water splattering onto the gorged earth was beginning to unnerve the young demon. It sounded too much like – no, don't think about that. "If you didn't do this," he asked softly, "then who did?"
"They did it to themselves," his brother answered absently.
"WHAT?" Piccolo barely kept from wincing at the volume of his own voice. Tambourine rounded on him sharply, and somehow the grim amusement on his elder's face rubbed him the wrong way. "That's ridiculous. Why would anyone do this," a sweeping gesture to indicate the graveyard that had once been a bustling dirt road, "to himself? Aren't humans supposed to value family?"
Tambourine actually laughed. Piccolo had never heard his laugh before, and he fervently hoped that he would not hear it again. It was an awful sound, a harsh, rattling noise that rebounded from every battered building. Piccolo squared his shoulders, drawing up to his full height (all four feet of it) and glaring at his brother with all the fury he could bluster. He thought that he did a fairly clean job of disguising the internal quaking set off by that laughter.
The elder demon cut off the sound of his mirth abruptly, tilting his head to one side, birdlike. "A human values his own family," he corrected casually. "Which does not mean that he holds anyone else's in particular regard. What happened here is nothing unusual."
"What was it?"
Tambourine shrugged again. "I really don't know. They have many names for the same thing. Suffice it to say that someone wanted what someone else already had. It may have been a different town, believing that this one had better land for crops. It may simply have been a riot, perhaps a religious disagreement. In any event, I doubt that much will be growing here now." The demon crouched, somehow making the movement graceful, and lowered a finger to the ground. He drew it back with a drop of what was obviously human blood darkening the tip. "Salt," he said simply.
Piccolo shook his head. "If what you say is true, then these people are insane."
A slow smirk spread across his brother's face, but it was quickly banished as he stood. He closed his eyes as if listening very closely for a barely audible sound – but Piccolo could hear nothing, and he knew that his ears were every bit as sharp as his brother's. In his father's memories, he'd found reference to chi sensing…perhaps that was what his brother was doing. Piccolo made a mental note to learn that as quickly as possible.
Tambourine's dead eyes opened with alarming suddenness. "Ah! I knew there had to be one."
"One what?" Piccolo snarled, nearing the end of his endurance.
A wink. "You'll have to come find out." They were off again, but much faster. Tambourine's long strides ate ground, and Piccolo was forced to nearly jog to keep up – an activity that every part of his young body protested in its own way. They turned several sharp turns in succession, and Piccolo was just admitting to himself that he wasn't quite sure whether or not they were going around in circles…when they stopped.
Or rather, Tambourine stopped. Piccolo skidded, nearly falling in the slippery footing. "Here," the elder demon announced flatly. Piccolo raised his eyes hesitantly, half-afraid to do so. He didn't think that he could deal with any more surprises.
A little girl – she couldn't have been more than six – was kneeling in the remnants of what had once been a house. Her mud-streaked face was buried in equally grimy hands, her nightgown – once dove white - was blotched with crimson, brown, and ebony. Hair, raven black, tumbled in a damp cascade down her back, clinging to her like a ragged shawl. She was rocking back and forth, wracked with silent sobs, heedless of the rain. A more perfect picture of misery Piccolo could never have designed.
He needed not to be told where her parents were. If he looked carefully enough, he was confident that he would find them in the blanket of corpses lining the town.
"This," Tambourine began, his tone that of a lecturing professor, "is a human. Their lives are painfully short and unfulfilling, but they cling to them all the same."
The little girl looked up, the dark, gaping holes beneath her bangs reflecting sudden, desperate hope coupled with fear. "Help me! Please, Mommy was in the kitchen."
Now that Piccolo looked, he could see that a massive section of the roof had come down on a portion of the bottom floor. A corner of red seeped out from beneath the beams. Not for the first time, he wondered if he was going to be sick. "We aren't. . . going to leave it here, are we?" he asked, subdued.
"Of course not," Tambourine hissed darkly. "What kind of monster do you take me for?"
Piccolo barely checked a sigh of relief. He didn't know why – perhaps because he had seen a touch of himself in her frantic, desperate eyes.
"Come here, little girl," the elder demon called, his voice almost kind. "I believe we can help you."
The child stood, tear-streaked face shining with obvious trust. She took several quick, halting steps toward the two of them. Tambourine extended a hand, palm up, expression blank. Eagerly, the girl reached toward it with chubby, muddy fingers.
The red beam that shot from the green talons was too fast for her eyes, although Piccolo could see it easily enough. The small, thin chi blast went cleanly through her forehead, and she crumpled like a melting snowflake at the demons' feet. "Far kinder this way," Tambourine noted detachedly. "No point in letting it suffer."
Piccolo bit down hard on his cheek, barely checking a cry of outright shock. He had seen the corpses in the street, but this was somehow different. The little human had been alive not so long ago. . .walking, thinking, feeling. . .
Hurting. . .
"It hurts no longer," the elder continued, and if Piccolo had not been so distracted, he would have wondered at the way Tambourine always seemed to guess his mind. "I have done it a service. Do you disagree?"
Looking down at the form sprawled in the mire, one rebellious lock of hair still dancing in the wind, face still aglow with trust and joy, he involuntarily memorized every detail. How wonderfully the pallor of her cheeks accented the cherry red streaming down her forehead. The way her eyes were no darker or more restive than they had been when someone used them to look out of.
"Let us take this opportunity to study death."
The way her narrow chest no longer lifted.
"No two things are born equal – but good, evil, right, wrong, all become as one in death. Could you tell which of those bodies back there belonged to a "good" person? Which were the liars? The saints? No. No one can."
The way the water around her face was not disturbed because no air exited her nose or mouth.
"A beautiful concept, is it not?"
Piccolo cringed visibly, unprepared for the return of his thoughts, less ready for the part of him that voiced its assent.
A hand rested briefly on his shoulder, but he did not look up. "You are overwhelmed, no doubt. I. . . had not intended this. I merely wished to see how much of him had. . . well, never mind." Piccolo blinked numbly. Had that been an apology? He looked up at his brother and saw, or thought he saw, a glimmer of understanding struggling within those soulless eyes, but it was too quickly gone. They were like dead seas – nothing could live there for long. "I will leave you to mull this over."
His brother flew away.
When he was certain that Tambourine was gone, Piccolo fell to his knees – he hadn't the control to kneel properly – beside the girl. He reached forth a trembling hand, brushing it against her arm. Still warm. He could still see the hot, pinkish glow of her aura, shimmering around her like a butterfly hovering over its cocoon.
He crouched there with her until long after the body had grown cold.
And once she had, he merely closed his eyes, bowed his head. Oddly, in his mind's eye he could see … or thought he could see…A lithe, angular form was perched lightly on one of the turrets of the old stone fortress, long legs dangling over the battlements. It looked like Tambourine… And he could hear thoughts… Mission status: accomplished, the figure was thinking, the faintest trace of satisfaction writing itself in the lines around his mouth.
He is no Daimao.
Demons, though, were different. They always dreamed either about the past or the future…according to his brother. And Piccolo's dreams were of the past. Always.
* * *
The child had matured very quickly. Six months ago he had been an infant, discovering the newness of the world around him with excusable wonder…and a shadow of remembrance. He had heard battlecries in the back of his mind before he discovered that air was breathable. When he had looked at water for the first time, the first thought to enter his mind had been, "It's a lot like blood…"
As his body grew, so did the memories. He had known all along with a strange, child-like intuition, that the pictures in his mind were not his. He had the vague notion that he had borrowed them from somewhere. Someone. Someone that he couldn't quite remember. He had an old memory – one that was his – about struggling free of something white and leathery, something he later recognized as an eggshell. Of emerging next to a body that was coated in purple – that was torn through the center….
He had known, without knowing how he knew, that this was a being to whom he owed a great deal. He had remembered parts of this person, whom he had never met. He remembered a pair of strange eyes. He remembered sensing things from this being through the leathery wall – anger, but also an untapped, unbelievable disappointment, as if he had been promised something grand, but had never received it.
And then the body had disappeared in a soundless, forceless explosion that left only smoke and a feeling that the young demon later knew as loss. Piccolo also knew now who that being had been. His earlier memories pained him like a poorly knitted bone in rainy weather – a dull ache that never really left.
Not even when every other part of his body ached from pushing himself to his limits and beyond, learning the techniques that were imbedded in those floating strands of secondhand knowledge.
It didn't matter to Piccolo that the memory he had of Son – he would never give that human the honor of calling him by his given – was not his, but his father's. All he cared about was that one day, when he had looked up at the sun to determine his direction, the brilliant orange had flipped some kind of switch in his mind, and he had been able to fully remember…
Orange. Like a gi. Like a gi that a particular little boy had worn in one of the memories-that-weren't.
Son Goku had been dressed in orange on The Day. His aura had been the sun's rays come down to earth. Remembered pain, pain that made the scrapes, bruises, and even the occasional broken bone acquired from his blind attempts at survival seem like nothing, drove him on. He also knew, with an intuition that was anything but childish, that any chance at happiness or innocence a demonspawn might have had had been crushed by that same pain.
That, and the occasional encounter with local humans. Thinking of those people, Piccolo felt his lips tighten into a straight, angry line. Animals. All of them. And too ignorant to know any better. He supposed it wasn't their fault they were so foolish – he would just have to avoid them.
He was jolted out of his reverie by a rush of air that caused his campfire to shudder, throwing up a warding cloud of sparks. He narrowed his eyes – he knew enough about wind to know what wasn't natural…
Beside him, dangerously close, someone cleared his throat reproachfully.
Piccolo twisted to his feet so quickly he thought he might have left his skin behind, automatically shifting into a fighting stance. And he saw who his visitor was.
A being who didn't look even remotely human. A point in his favor, as far as Piccolo was concerned. He was sitting comfortably against a rock, a definite smirk on his face. His skin was green, like Piccolo's…he had the same ears, the same general face structure. Muscles rippled like knotted chords across his arms and shoulders – more than anything, he looked like the body that Piccolo had seen on The Day. And this being did not seem the least bit surprised at the way Piccolo looked…
He had never met anyone who did not quail at his appearance…or scream at him in shrill voices that hurt his young ears.
It should have been reassuring. Instead, something in the newcomer's expression made Piccolo wonder if maybe he should break with what his sire's memories had been teaching him about pride…and run.
"So, the brat thinks it's a warrior," the newcomer remarked in a shallow, baritone voice that fairly danced with amusement. The voice sounded as his sire's had, in those memories…
It was definitely too good to be true.
"Where did you learn that stance, boy?" he continued, tilting his head.
"Who are you?" Piccolo snarled in return, automatically taking a step back to give himself room to maneuver.
The older…demon?…stood unhurriedly, obviously not worried. He glanced at the shadows outside the campfire, a faint upward twist to his lips. "He looks like Daimao...has his temperament, too. I'll give you that much. But isn't he a little small?"
Another voice crept from the shadows to answer – one that sounded as though it would have been right at home in the throat of a serpent. Piccolo felt the skin on the back of his neck rise in gooseflesh. "For twelve moons? Hardly."
"We didn't take so long…" the first being continued loftily.
"We weren't reincarnated," the voice rejoined, unflustered.
The first being rolled his eyes. "As if Daimao would spend so much time in that frail little body…"
"As if he would allow himself to fade completely from the world…"
This seemed to take the visible speaker by surprise – his eyes widened, tinted red by the firelight. But that surprise faded quickly as he shrugged. "Whatever you say, Tambourine. It hardly matters."
At this point, the previously-unseen speaker strode into the circle of firelight. He was as tall as the first, though far slighter…like a willow planted beside an oak. His gi was black, not maroon, and it hung loosely from his shoulders like the robes of a monk. His eyes were downcast as if in a show of humility…however, his tone was reproving. "Everything matters, Cymbal."
"Was there a point to that, besides a chance to throw my own words back at me again?" The first being – Cymbal – snapped.
"I always have a point…even when my audience is too thick for it to penetrate."
Cymbal waved a hand dismissively. "Enough – you're wasting time. As usual."
Piccolo, meanwhile, had been trying to place these strangers…or were they strangers at all? They seemed so familiar…but not from his memories.It must be his sire's recollection tugging at him. These were…his sons…no, his brothers.
This knowledge brought the young demon no comfort at all.
Just then, another rush of wind alerted him to still more new arrivals…even before Cymbal spoke.
"What kept you two?" he snapped reflexively, as if he were used to reproaching whoever-it-was.
Another new voice as two more beings stepped into the firelight – two demons who could, by the look of them, have been twins. If Cymbal was large, these two were immense…and Cymbal would have towered over most humans. Their shoulders must have been all of four feet wide, their arms were like the trunks of trees…Piccolo felt a distinct, nervous twitch in his gut. Gods, this just gets better and better, doesn't it?
"Did you have to fly so fast?" One…Drum, Piccolo thought…complained in a husky bass. "We already know you can run us into the ground – no need to go proving' it every chance you get."
Cymbal crossed his arms. His expression was amused…but to Piccolo's eyes, it seemed a dangerous kind of amusement. "You expect me to dawdle like you two oafs?"
"It's not that," The other – Piano, if Piccolo's memory was serving him right, added placatingly. "It's just…well, nobody could keep up with that. That's all."
At this, Cymbal's smirk grew a bit wider…a bit more frightening. "He did," he said, indicating Tambourine with a tilt of his head.
"Well, yeah…" Piano said, sounding confused.
"So how's this. The next time the bloody bookworm gets where we're going before you two, I'm going to personally see to it that you learn to move a little faster. Fair?"
The two nodded – Piano, as if he didn't really understand the threat but knew better than to ask about it. Drum – as if he knew what had been said and resented it.
And then, Cymbal turned his attention to him. Piccolo stared directly back into the eyes that reminded him so much of his father's, doing his best to project an outward appearance of calm. No emotion would be safe…but if he could manage not to show anything, there was a chance…
"Now, on to you, hatchling. You obviously know something about fighting…let's see how much."
Alright, so maybe there wasn't a chance.
"Our first session will last for fifteen minutes," Cymbal continued, pulling an hourglass from the loose folds of his gi. "Your goal is to last against Drum, Piano, and myself for that long. Are you up to it, hatchling?"
Piccolo felt his lips moving almost of their own accord, mirroring Cymbal's half-mocking expression. An idea was beginning to sprout in the back recesses of his mind… "Is three on one enough? Or do you need more help?"
Cymbal's entire mannerism shifted instantaneously – from noncommittal to furious. "Are you implying that I'm afraid? Of a little halfwit like you, no less…" he hissed, eyes sparking like the sputtering fire.
The youngest son of the Demon King lowered his gaze submissively. "Forgive me, brother, I didn't mean to imply that at all."
"Good," Cymbal snarled, relaxing a little. "I didn't think that Daimao would have left us a suicidal...Uhn!" Without warning, the wiry young demon had leaped across the fire and delivered a high roundhouse to Cymbal's jaw. The force of the kick sent the older fighter flying. Piccolo flipped out of the maneuver, rebounding from his brother's jaw, and landed in a defensive stance. He grinned in satisfaction as Cymbal stood, spitting out blood.
"I meant to say it straight out," Piccolo finished. That was going to cost him…but it had been worth it. Oh yes, it had been worth it.
For a moment, there was silence. Then, Drum laughed. The sound, which was like rocks being ground together, echoed blatantly in the stagnant desert air.
The elder demon turned his deadly glare to the most recent offender of his dignity. "Are you so eager to die?" he asked with frightening calm.
Drum's laughter cut off abruptly, though there was obvious discontent lurking within his too-small eyes.
A quiet voice broke the stillness. "The hatchling has first blood."
All eyes turned to Tambourine. He was hanging back from the others, leaning causally against the sandstone wall. The muted yellow contrasted well with his skin tone, which was darker than Cymbal's, closer to Piccolo's own.
"And your point?" Cymbal asked, still dangerously calm.
"Only that, nothing more. It was enough if you were listening." Tambourine's eyes were closed to mere slits, his expression was unreadable.
"You and your dumb word games," Piano snapped in annoyance. "One of these days, it's gonna land you in serious trouble."
"Which day will that be?" Tambourine asked, one eye opening. He made no threatening move, showed no indication to attack, but the single eye that he had opened was like a well: soullessly, glitteringly empty.
Piano dropped his eyes, muttering something about "next time."
"Speaking of word games..." Cymbal growled, directing his attention back to Piccolo. "Now, we begin."
The fight went by in a blur to the young demon. He knew, in a detached way, that he was losing; he took two blows for each one he landed, and when he did manage to connect, the blows stung his knuckles and jarred his wrists. His arm twisted painfully behind his back, a punch turned his head sideways, some kind of blow sent him flying into a cliff. He could hear the crunch of a breaking bone. He sank to his knees, tried to stand, and fell again.
"Time," a low voice hissed.
The other three froze. Cymbal straightened, brushing dirt from his gi. "Not bad, brat. At the very least, we've learned that you can take a great deal of punishment. Very constructive lesson, wouldn't you agree?"
Piccolo shot Cymbal the most withering glare he could manage.
It didn't seem to bother Cymbal – the elder demon was apparently in a far better mood. He turned his head a bit, speaking to one of the larger ones…Drum, Piccolo guessed. It was hard to tell with blood in his eyes, though.
"Strange," Cymbal was saying. "He seems to have run out of one-liners."
Drum said nothing, He only wiped away some of the blood that ran freely down his face; he had learned the hard way that Piccolo knew how to use his claws.
"Expect us back here sometime next week. By then, you'd better be able to last twenty minutes." Ki energy flashed up around them, sudden and bright enough to blind Piccolo for several seconds. He shielded his dazzled eyes for a long moment, waiting for the stars to clear. The first thing he saw when the flashes disappeared was the fourth one, the one called Tambourine, striding up to him. Piccolo bared bloodstained teeth.
"Little fool, " Tambourine hissed, smiling like a crocodile. "I'm not going to hurt you just yet."
"Why...not?" Piccolo asked, looking directly into his older brother's eyes for the first time. It was disorienting, frightening – as if those eyes were thirsty and were drinking a part of him. He wanted desperately to look away and, because he wanted to, because those eyes chilled him to the bone, he held firm. He would not break the stare. He would not.
Tambourine chuckled, a surprisingly ominous sound. "You'll never follow him, will you?"
Piccolo fought the temptation to moisten his lips."No."
"You really should, you know. Less trouble for all of us."
Piccolo snarled, still not looking away. The eyes were more bearable now – the first shock had been the worst of it, like jumping into icy water. Very deep, dark, lifeless, hungry water. "He's an idiot," the demon snapped, the words splashing out onto the sand. "And arrogant. And…I hate to be repetitive, but he's a coward."
"True enough," the other demon agreed. Tambourine closed his eyes. He obviously wasn't the least bit troubled by Piccolo's glare, had merely grown tired of the game. "But he's a predictable coward, and he can be useful…or used. Which depends entirely on whom you are." The eyes opened again.
"Is that why you follow him?" Piccolo demanded.
Tambourine's eyes grew darker. "I don't follow him, hatchling. The two of us just happen to be going in the same direction."
* * *
Goku watched in some concern as his "patient" growled softly. Piccolo was caught in the throes of some dream or, more likely, some nightmare. It was funny to think that someone like Piccolo could have bad dreams like anyone else. "Hey," he said softly, placing a hand on the demon's arm. "Wake up. You're dreaming."
Even in sleep, Piccolo moved as if to pull away from him, his brow darkening in anger.
The human withdrew his hand slowly, feeling confusion and an odd kind of sadness. How could he help someone who wouldn't have anything to do with him…or anyone else? He sighed – he seemed to be doing a lot of that lately – and rocked back on his heels, drumming his fingers on the floor of the cave. "I wish you could tell me what to do for you, Pic. I don't even know where to start."
The cave was relatively cool, but crystal beads of sweat were beginning to stand out on the demon's forehead, which, Son decided, could not possibly be good. Then again, the demon had been out for what, a day and a half? That probably wasn't real healthy either. "Hey, you aren't gonna give up now, are you?" he asked, nervousness an anchor to his usually light voice. He brushed the back of his hand over Piccolo's forehead – it stood out like a dove against the darker face. Hot, Goku thought worriedly, glancing at his hand to see if it had actually been burned. Very hot.
Yet another fact to add to the growing "not good" category.
"I'd better do something about that," he muttered, dipping a cloth in a bowl that had been confiscated from his kitchen. Hoping fervently that Chichi wouldn't notice that the bit of pottery was gone before he could put it back, he wrung the excess moisture from the rag and placed the cloth over the demon's eyes. Piccolo seemed to relax a bit, which was the first encouraging thing that had happened so far. "Grandpa Gohan did this for me once when I was really little – you know, right after I hit my head. I don't know whether it'll help or not, but I guess it can't hurt."
The human regarded the demon's injuries with a critical eye – wow, he'd done a real number on the guy. The softhearted man's oversized conscience, already made restless by his failure to check on his rival sooner, began to make a nuisance of itself. It migrated from the back of his mind to the pit of his stomach, where it lobbied admirably for more attention. Externally, Son could pick out two or three serious-looking wounds. The hole that went through Piccolo's left shoulder looked like the worst of them. If that hole had not been made by a ki blast, which had partially cauterized even as it cut, then he might very well have bled to death. From the look of it, he almost had anyway.
"There's not much I can do about something like that," Goku thought aloud, one hand going behind his head, "but I think I should try to keep you from losing any more of it. I'm gonna go back home to get something to use for bandages. I think Chichi has some sheets out on the closeline – she'll never miss one, we've got lots of 'em. Of course, if she catches me, I might end up in worse shape than you are," he joked, but even to his own ears it was obviously flat. "Yeah, I guess there really isn't anything to laugh about, is there?" he said, standing slowly. Then, he left the cave, preparing to become a sheet-bandit or a convict, depending upon his wife's degree of watchfulness.
* * *
Piccolo expected the dreams to stop then… he never slept for long. Before, he had always managed to wake up before things got too bad…but not this time. The scenery seemed to dissolve around him, though the pain stayed – translating easily to another time, another memory…
* * *
"Brother," a voice, a familiar voice…Tambourine? "Are you ever going to get up?"
Funny, wasn't it? He had just been wondering the same thing.
"Or should I simply bury you?"
Being buried didn't sound so bad, really – not if it meant an end to the terrible, throbbing pain that was crouching in his side, taking a swipe at his internals any time he moved.
"After all, I have seen livelier corpses."
He was cognizant enough to note the emphasized scorn in the voice, though it failed to raise anything remotely close to anger in his dulled mind. Go away. Just go away, leave me alone. Let me sleep.
"What, so little pride as that? You should have been up and at my throat by now."
Piccolo forced one of his lids to open, if only to confirm his suspicion as to who his unwelcome guest was. The whole world was an ocean filled with bleary, washed-out colors. Predominately green and purple. "Still here?" he asked, or tried to ask. His voice came out thick and bruised.
"Of course. As slowly as you are moving, I fully expect to grow old and whiter like a dried date before I have occasion to leave."
By then, he could see well enough. "I hate you," he said matter-of-factly, flattening out the syllables to crush any emotion that might have leaked from his still-bleeding mouth.
A low chuckle. "Naturally. Now get up – I've something that I wish to show you."
Piccolo started to protest but quickly thought better of it. No sense arguing with Tambourine when he was at anything less than his optimum. That would be begging for a verbal skewering. "What?" he asked instead, trying without much success to figure out exactly where his arms and legs were. He certainly couldn't feel them at the moment.
Placidly, "A thing far easier shown than explained. Otherwise, I would have said that I had something to tell you."
Bastard. Piccolo winced when he felt the circulation returning to his much- abused limbs – ye gods, they were made of needles – and sat up gingerly. The whole world spun for a rather interesting moment, and the youngest of the demons was forced to delay his next words for a few short breaths, during which he decided not to faint. "Alright," he grumbled. "Let's get this over with."
Tambourine's thin-lipped moue of impatience transposed seamlessly into a smirk.
With much swaying, the younger demon managed to gain his feet. He glanced at his brother to see if he was ready to go and, in so doing, saw himself reflected in Tambourine's otherwise empty eyes. Piccolo could see gray, nondescript mud splattered across his body, entwined with the slightest trace of deep blue. His clothing, which could only loosely be described as a gi now (and then only with apologies to other garments in that category) dangled from his battered frame like willow leaves around the trunk.
Tambourine did not nod or acknowledge him in any way; he simply began walking. Piccolo growled to himself and set to stumbling after his brother, wondering how the elder demon managed to tread through such thick mud without slipping. While he was wondering, how was it that Tambourine didn't have so much as a single spatter of mud on him? Piccolo suspected a chi shield, although he wasn't about to ask.
It began to rain.
* * *
Piccolo was soaked to the skin. Beads of rainwater scurried down his drooping antennae, plummeting from the tips to burst on his nose or trickle into the clashing white of his eyes. He shook his head occasionally to clear the water from his elvish ears – not that there was anything to hear but the steady sloshing of their footsteps.
He had long since stopped wondering where they were going.
Keeping up with his much taller brother had been a challenge from the beginning. The elder demon strode through muck that came up to Piccolo's knees with no apparent difficulty, while his counterpart was forced to flounder along in his wake. Piccolo no longer studied their route, but was instead content to fasten his eyes firmly on his brother's feet. As the rain increased, he ceased even to follow his brother. He was plodding behind a specter that never tired, a grayish spirit veiled by sheet upon sheet of water.
He didn't even notice that the specter had stopped until he crashed into the backs of Tambourine's legs.
The elder demon glanced over his shoulder, the faintest glimmer of amusement flickering, then dying in his midnight eyes. "We're here," he announced, a wry smile alighting for a brief moment on his face.
Piccolo looked up obligingly. Charcoal skeletons of houses rose as if to puncture the clouds with their jagged, wicked looking edges. Spirals of oily smoke rose from here and there like carrion crows that were spreading unnaturally long wings. Incredibly, embers still glowed in defiance of the rain, casting a reddish sheen over the wet remains of the village. "Did you do this?" Piccolo asked, a trace of reluctant awe festering in his voice.
"I? No."
"Then why bring me here?" Piccolo looked up at his brother and, for the space of a heartbeat, he was only a curious child – the killer he was meant to be was all but gone from his widened eyes.
Tambourine smiled absently, his own eyes still drinking deeply of the sprawling destruction before them. Whether or not they found the draught bitter was impossible to tell. "Because you have questions."
"I. . .what?" How did he know?!
"About humans," the elder demon continued coolly. "You are not Daimao's reincarnation, in spite of what I told Cymbal. That simple-minded fool will never understand the difference anyway," he finished, half under his breath. Then, more loudly, "Oh, I've no doubt that he bequeathed you his memories, perhaps even a few of his more. . . interesting skills, but understanding is not a gift to be given." Tambourine shrugged. "Knowledge without understanding is useless. He as much as gave you a locked chest, but not the key."
Piccolo swallowed once, managing not to make it sound like a gulp.
"He knew," Tambourine added, perhaps sensing his brother's unspoken question. "He was many things, youngling, but not stupid. Now, come."
The two of them wove between once-buildings like worms through a decaying apple. Bodies, many horribly mutilated, lay in the street, scraggly hair and rigid limbs all intertwined, colors muted by mud, accented with edges of red. Men, women, even the occasional child, Tambourine stepped over them all indiscriminately, his aloof expression never slipping. Piccolo, after one glance at the grotesquely twisted visage of what had once been a terrified young man, kept his eyes firmly on the back of his brother's gi, trying to ignore the clenching feeling in his stomach. He pointedly did not think.
He just as pointedly did not inhale through his nose. One whiff of charcoal, mixed with the sickening (if surreally familiar, alluring) smells of burned hair and singed flesh, had set off a tempest of reactions that he was not prepared to face. It was disgusting. . .nauseating, even. . . but so very, very intense. . . horrifying, but. . . so beautiful. . .
Quailing inside, he squashed that thought. Beautiful? THIS?! In spite of his better judgement, he glanced down at the road, at the tangle of spent humanity beneath him. For some reason that he did not understand, his chest hurt. He averted his eyes quickly, unsure if he wanted more to laugh out loud, to huddle in a corner, or to run from this place as far and as fast as his legs would carry him.
He didn't realize until they had threaded through several streets that Tambourine was looking for something. His impassive gaze was covering ground more quickly than they were, prying into every crack with detached intensity. "Come now, surely there must be one, at least," he muttered every now and then.
The sound of water splattering onto the gorged earth was beginning to unnerve the young demon. It sounded too much like – no, don't think about that. "If you didn't do this," he asked softly, "then who did?"
"They did it to themselves," his brother answered absently.
"WHAT?" Piccolo barely kept from wincing at the volume of his own voice. Tambourine rounded on him sharply, and somehow the grim amusement on his elder's face rubbed him the wrong way. "That's ridiculous. Why would anyone do this," a sweeping gesture to indicate the graveyard that had once been a bustling dirt road, "to himself? Aren't humans supposed to value family?"
Tambourine actually laughed. Piccolo had never heard his laugh before, and he fervently hoped that he would not hear it again. It was an awful sound, a harsh, rattling noise that rebounded from every battered building. Piccolo squared his shoulders, drawing up to his full height (all four feet of it) and glaring at his brother with all the fury he could bluster. He thought that he did a fairly clean job of disguising the internal quaking set off by that laughter.
The elder demon cut off the sound of his mirth abruptly, tilting his head to one side, birdlike. "A human values his own family," he corrected casually. "Which does not mean that he holds anyone else's in particular regard. What happened here is nothing unusual."
"What was it?"
Tambourine shrugged again. "I really don't know. They have many names for the same thing. Suffice it to say that someone wanted what someone else already had. It may have been a different town, believing that this one had better land for crops. It may simply have been a riot, perhaps a religious disagreement. In any event, I doubt that much will be growing here now." The demon crouched, somehow making the movement graceful, and lowered a finger to the ground. He drew it back with a drop of what was obviously human blood darkening the tip. "Salt," he said simply.
Piccolo shook his head. "If what you say is true, then these people are insane."
A slow smirk spread across his brother's face, but it was quickly banished as he stood. He closed his eyes as if listening very closely for a barely audible sound – but Piccolo could hear nothing, and he knew that his ears were every bit as sharp as his brother's. In his father's memories, he'd found reference to chi sensing…perhaps that was what his brother was doing. Piccolo made a mental note to learn that as quickly as possible.
Tambourine's dead eyes opened with alarming suddenness. "Ah! I knew there had to be one."
"One what?" Piccolo snarled, nearing the end of his endurance.
A wink. "You'll have to come find out." They were off again, but much faster. Tambourine's long strides ate ground, and Piccolo was forced to nearly jog to keep up – an activity that every part of his young body protested in its own way. They turned several sharp turns in succession, and Piccolo was just admitting to himself that he wasn't quite sure whether or not they were going around in circles…when they stopped.
Or rather, Tambourine stopped. Piccolo skidded, nearly falling in the slippery footing. "Here," the elder demon announced flatly. Piccolo raised his eyes hesitantly, half-afraid to do so. He didn't think that he could deal with any more surprises.
A little girl – she couldn't have been more than six – was kneeling in the remnants of what had once been a house. Her mud-streaked face was buried in equally grimy hands, her nightgown – once dove white - was blotched with crimson, brown, and ebony. Hair, raven black, tumbled in a damp cascade down her back, clinging to her like a ragged shawl. She was rocking back and forth, wracked with silent sobs, heedless of the rain. A more perfect picture of misery Piccolo could never have designed.
He needed not to be told where her parents were. If he looked carefully enough, he was confident that he would find them in the blanket of corpses lining the town.
"This," Tambourine began, his tone that of a lecturing professor, "is a human. Their lives are painfully short and unfulfilling, but they cling to them all the same."
The little girl looked up, the dark, gaping holes beneath her bangs reflecting sudden, desperate hope coupled with fear. "Help me! Please, Mommy was in the kitchen."
Now that Piccolo looked, he could see that a massive section of the roof had come down on a portion of the bottom floor. A corner of red seeped out from beneath the beams. Not for the first time, he wondered if he was going to be sick. "We aren't. . . going to leave it here, are we?" he asked, subdued.
"Of course not," Tambourine hissed darkly. "What kind of monster do you take me for?"
Piccolo barely checked a sigh of relief. He didn't know why – perhaps because he had seen a touch of himself in her frantic, desperate eyes.
"Come here, little girl," the elder demon called, his voice almost kind. "I believe we can help you."
The child stood, tear-streaked face shining with obvious trust. She took several quick, halting steps toward the two of them. Tambourine extended a hand, palm up, expression blank. Eagerly, the girl reached toward it with chubby, muddy fingers.
The red beam that shot from the green talons was too fast for her eyes, although Piccolo could see it easily enough. The small, thin chi blast went cleanly through her forehead, and she crumpled like a melting snowflake at the demons' feet. "Far kinder this way," Tambourine noted detachedly. "No point in letting it suffer."
Piccolo bit down hard on his cheek, barely checking a cry of outright shock. He had seen the corpses in the street, but this was somehow different. The little human had been alive not so long ago. . .walking, thinking, feeling. . .
Hurting. . .
"It hurts no longer," the elder continued, and if Piccolo had not been so distracted, he would have wondered at the way Tambourine always seemed to guess his mind. "I have done it a service. Do you disagree?"
Looking down at the form sprawled in the mire, one rebellious lock of hair still dancing in the wind, face still aglow with trust and joy, he involuntarily memorized every detail. How wonderfully the pallor of her cheeks accented the cherry red streaming down her forehead. The way her eyes were no darker or more restive than they had been when someone used them to look out of.
"Let us take this opportunity to study death."
The way her narrow chest no longer lifted.
"No two things are born equal – but good, evil, right, wrong, all become as one in death. Could you tell which of those bodies back there belonged to a "good" person? Which were the liars? The saints? No. No one can."
The way the water around her face was not disturbed because no air exited her nose or mouth.
"A beautiful concept, is it not?"
Piccolo cringed visibly, unprepared for the return of his thoughts, less ready for the part of him that voiced its assent.
A hand rested briefly on his shoulder, but he did not look up. "You are overwhelmed, no doubt. I. . . had not intended this. I merely wished to see how much of him had. . . well, never mind." Piccolo blinked numbly. Had that been an apology? He looked up at his brother and saw, or thought he saw, a glimmer of understanding struggling within those soulless eyes, but it was too quickly gone. They were like dead seas – nothing could live there for long. "I will leave you to mull this over."
His brother flew away.
When he was certain that Tambourine was gone, Piccolo fell to his knees – he hadn't the control to kneel properly – beside the girl. He reached forth a trembling hand, brushing it against her arm. Still warm. He could still see the hot, pinkish glow of her aura, shimmering around her like a butterfly hovering over its cocoon.
He crouched there with her until long after the body had grown cold.
And once she had, he merely closed his eyes, bowed his head. Oddly, in his mind's eye he could see … or thought he could see…A lithe, angular form was perched lightly on one of the turrets of the old stone fortress, long legs dangling over the battlements. It looked like Tambourine… And he could hear thoughts… Mission status: accomplished, the figure was thinking, the faintest trace of satisfaction writing itself in the lines around his mouth.
He is no Daimao.