Note: in order to continue on with the rest of the story, I have decided to skip ahead to the boys being picked up. The babysitting stage is over. It looked done to me, anyway. Nothing else really could happen that would be funny. They just spent the night….nothing really to write there.
Some fluff is evident in this chapter, but not a whole lot, until the end… Wait? Did I type that? Oops.
Chapter 22: Survey of Damage
"Ha-ha! See, I, HERCULE, can handle the simple task of two boys!" the world-champion screamed to the world when Vegeta dropped by to pick up the two brats. The look on Hercule's face told a different story than he was screaming. His face showed relief to see the two little boys leave.
Vegeta smirked, knowing a different story had happened. "I am quite amazed. Most people wouldn't get out of such a difficult chore alive. I think I should alert the press. I could see it now: 'Hercule Survives Babysitting Two Boys for a Day, Minimal Damage Done'"
Hercule didn't catch onto the sarcasm, but rather, his face paled until it looked like it was covered with a white paste. "You don't have to do that…the boys were nothing…We don't have to alert the world that I actually babysat two little boys…I'd be the laughing stock of all celebrities."
"I thought you would jump for joy at the thought of fame. I guess I underestimated your ability to control yourself. You know when to shut you mouth…at least sometimes," Vegeta said, though he didn't mean a word of it. Since becoming the husband of Bulma, he had learned some of the easier ways to make a person shut up, instead of threatening them with their lives.
The two chibis accompanied Vegeta outside. It was then that Hercule noticed that they had no means of transportation. Their forms slowly disappeared into the distance, then they turned a corner into an abandoned alley. The two boys looked as though they were having some sort of an argument. Hercule just overlooked that, and walked back into his mansion to take inventory of all the things that needed to be replaced. He hoped that he would never see the "trouble twins" for as long as he lived.
Meanwhile, the boys bickered.
It all started when Trunks poked Goten as they left Hercule's mansion. Goten poked him back. Trunks poked him back a little harder. Goten, tired of it, jabbed his friend hard in the chest. Trunks proceeded to punch his friend. Goten defended himself, and then punched Trunks back.
Vegeta, feeling a migraine coming on, yelled, "STOP it, BOTH of you!" To not bring attention to the boys or himself, he led them into an alley.
"He started it," the boys said in unison, pointing at the other. "No, I didn't!" they both said when it processed that the other had pointed at him.
"I don't care who started it! I want you BOTH to just stop hitting each other. Now, we are going to head to Capsule Corp. I hope that your short time, when knowing him, you trained, with the "Champ" didn't make you weaker. I expect both of you to meet me in the Gravity Room when we arrive at Capsule Corp. Something tells me that you two got into a lot of trouble."
"Define, "a lot"," Trunks said.
"Did you do any harm to Hercule?"
"No more than he asked us to. He wanted us to hit him in the chest. It isn't our fault that he hit the concrete wall."
"What about his house?"
"What can I say? His bathroom needed a sky light," Trunks said offhandedly, "It was rather dark, and the décor was quite atrocious. We just spiced it up a little for him." Silently, his father was proud of his son's ingenuity, but he couldn't let the boy know that. Goten just ignored what was going on, confused my Trunks's big words.
"That is all the more reason why you two need to have a Gravity Room session. You need to be punished for what you have done. Now, fly!" he ordered to the boys as they took off to the skies.
A small boy on the ground looked up at the skies at just that moment with his friend. "One of the clouds looks like a person! Ooooohhh, there it goes! Look there is a few of them!"
"Where?" his friend asked. The boy's mother came outside with cookies.
"Mom, I think I just saw an alien's space ship!" the first boy said as he started to make engine noises.
"Really, now?" the mother asked, not believing a single word. "Next time your alien friends drop by, tell me. I'll have cookies ready for them. Oh, and by the way, your principal just called. Your school is going to have a visit by the famous Bulma Briefs, and your class was chosen to entertain her son, Trunks."
"Cool!" the boy said.
On the roof of Orange Star High School:
"Whew, who ever knew that a day of school could go by so quickly?" Gohan asked. Surprisingly enough, most of their teachers didn't really want to do anything that day, so they got to talk for most of their classes, and the only ones that they actually had to work in were the easy ones, like foreign language and such.
"Well, now I have to go face the Tiger. Who knows WHAT those two boys did to my dad. I wouldn't be surprised if he begged them to leave." Thoughts of the great, mighty Hercule, bended down on his face, begging them to leave filled their minds. They laughed for a few seconds, then they became awkwardly quiet again.
"You know, you never have to face him alone," Gohan said sweetly next to her ear. "I'll always be there for you." He leaned in for a kiss. When their lips met, Videl felt a lot better about having to see her dad, except….
"What will Dad do when he finds out you are… you?" she asked, not trying to make him uncomfortable. She just needed to know.
"He won't believe me, but whatever he does, we will face it together. If he kicks me out of the mansion, then so be it," with determination, Gohan added "He cannot keep us apart."
Gohan climbed into Videl's jet copter, and they were off to the skies. What seemed like seconds later, they were at the mansion.
"What took you two so long?" Hercule asked his daughter and Gohan when they arrived. "And why do you have holes in your clothing? I can't believe you went out in public like that!" Hercule screamed.
"Sorry, FATHER, but there was a fire at our campsite, and Gohan just managed to save me before my tent burned to the ground!" Videl screamed at her father. The shyness and respect that she had planned on using before dissipated the second her father opened his big mouth.
"I wouldn't put it past him to try to kill you! How do you know that it wasn't HE who tried to burn the campsite? He might be trying to win my respect that way. I am not going to buy into it," Hercule said, completely ignoring the fact that Gohan was standing right next to him.
"Gohan would never do that!" Videl said, closing the distance between her and Gohan's bodies. Gohan, seeing that she wanted to get close to him, put his arm around her waist. That drove Hercule up the wall.
"Get your filthy hands off my daughter!"
"I thought you said during the Sleeping Beauty incident that I could be with your daughter if she so wished. Well, I think she has made her decision," Gohan said, remembering that the man had indeed said that, after the two had had a little fight, of course. He pulled her a little tighter. She just looked up at him and smiled, before looking at her dad with a look that said "Yeah, what he said."
Hercule just fumed, but shut up. He stormed away into his room, in order to watch more videos of himself fighting battles. Granted, he never won the battle with Cell, but that doesn't mean that he is a bad fighter. With human standards, he actually is quite powerful.
Videl and Gohan decided to take a quick inventory of the damage done to the mansion, for they had a suspicion that it didn't make it out of the visit alive. After checking each and every room in the mansion—a task that took them at least an hour, if not more—they found that seven rooms had been attacked by the boys.
The first one they came across was a guest room. Toy spiders peeked out from under the covers. Gohan, noticing this, pulled back the covers, and saw a bunch of random things such as rocks hidden there, including more plastic bugs. Seemingly written in rocks, there read, "Trunks was here". The bugs were arranged in the pattern of a face with a tongue sticking out. Gohan rolled his eyes when he say it, and put it in the back of his mind to return to clean the room when they had found all of the damaged rooms.
A few more rooms were covered in toilet paper. In the small movie theatre—which is never used except by friends of Hercule because it is off limits—there was an intricately designed graffiti picture of a boy with spiky blonde hair with colorful light coming out of his palms. The target was a man with a brown afro. The man, whom Videl and Gohan could only assume was Hercule, was bleeding profusely, and a champion belt lay forgotten to his side. The blonde, whom Gohan was sure was Trunks, had a look of indifference as the man was blown away with his power.
Videl gasped at the sight, but it did make a lot of sense to her. Her father had probably insulted the two boys by calling them weak, and Trunks wanted to get back at him for all of the things that he had done to them. That, and he just needed to be taught a lesson on being humble.
The last room that they found with damage was Hercule's bathroom. Actually, they never really got to see the room. They just heard Hercule muttering under his breath about the state of his bathroom, and how much money it would take to replace the ceiling.
After finding out where the damage was, Videl and Gohan spent the better half of the day trying to clean up after the two terrible chibis. Then, they went to dinner. Because the cook was chased off by Trunks and Goten, they were allowed to get whatever food they wanted. So, for that night, they ate pizza from the oven. Or, rather, several pizzas from the oven.
After they were stuffed full of pizza, they went to go watch another movie in Videl's room.
However, neither one really cared about the colors that flashed on the screen, nor did they hear the sounds coming from the speakers. They just stared in each other's eyes for a few seconds. They were on the couch, Gohan sitting beside Videl, his arm loosely around her shoulder. After the few seconds were up, Gohan lowered his lips to Videl's level, and they kissed. Videl felt like she was on a cloud as he silently asked her to open her mouth and allow his tongue access. She agreed.
'Is this what love is supposed to feel like?' she asked herself. She knew love was supposed to make her feel like she could take on the world, but the feeling was strange enough.
After a few minutes, they broke apart, and Videl cuddled into Gohan's strong arms. 'These same arms that hold me are the same arms that had the power to defeat Cell,' she thought idly as she put her hand onto his arm to feel his muscles. Just as she thought, they were quite hardened from all of the fighting and training he had done to them.
They, still entranced with each other, gave up on the movie, and decided not to go to their separate beds. They could—and would—just sleep as they were. The fact that they were sitting up meant nothing. Videl just leaned into Gohan to make herself more comfortable, then she drifted off into a wondrous sleep. Gohan followed suit only after he rested his head on top of Videl's.
Imagine for a second that you just walked into your teenage daughter's room, and you see her and her good-for-nothing boyfriend cuddled up on the couch, asleep. Then, imagine that the boy she was with is strong enough to beat you to Pluto—the literal one, and not the one that computer information goes to (1). Imagine that the boy has been—and will be for a while—staying at your house, and there is no way to keep the two apart.
If you got the right picture there, then you know how Hercule felt when he saw Videl pressed up in the arms of Gohan. He wanted to scream his lungs out, and since it is his mansion, he did.
"VIDEL! GET OUT OF HIS ARMS THIS INSTANT! YOU ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE LITTLE LADY! AND YOU, GOHAN, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED IN HER ROOM AGAIN, NOR ARE YOU ALLOWED IN HIS ROOM, VIDEL!"
The two teens just looked at him, then each other, then back at him, and yelled in unison, "OH, BE QUIET!" Gohan launched a small energy blast at the door, successfully closing it, and the two decided to get ready for another day of school—Friday!
END CHAPTER
I forgot to add the (1). Here it is:
(1) This is an inside joke at school. My history teacher continually loses information from her computer, including grades. She says that she has sent grades out several times, only to find out that none of them made it to the place it was supposed to go. The place of "limbo" that they end up at is apparently Pluto. One of these days, she says, they will find a ring around pluto consisting of 0's and 1's. when read, they will find all of her lost grades. This year, she has learned the system...then they required her to make and uphold a website. My class seems to disappear on random days from the website, and she forgets to change it (or the changes go to Pluto)
That took several attempts to get it right, and I still think it is a little bit stupid. Oh, well. There was some fluff for the fluffy people.
This story soon will end. I know that it is just "beginning", but I need to end it soon. It is my longest work, and I have worked on it for more than a year.
Maybe ten more chapters? Yeah. Or, maybe another year of work? Who knows. I'll get back to you on that.
Review, if you so please. If not, then review anyway. It doesn't take that long. It takes all of 15 seconds (yes I did count the amount of time it takes to open it, write one line, and send it.)