Gohan had wanted water.

He'd wanted it badly.

In the past, water had been easy. There were things in Gohan's life that had been hard, before Piccolo had taken him. Math had been hard. Sitting still inside with the sun pouring through his window like melted candy, when birds were singing somewhere, when his legs shook under his desk from wanting to run, that had been hard. But water had been easy. Just a tug on mom's apron, or, later, a push of a chair over to the sink, and holding a glass under the faucet, and water would come out, would fill the glass like a crystal.

After a day and a night outdoors, Gohan was willing to give back the stupid birds, the sun that beat down on his back, and even his legs, his tired, stupid legs that could barely hold him up. He would have traded it all in, the whole wilderness for his shady desk, his mother's apron, a glass of water from the faucet.

He hadn't bothered, that morning, to tell Piccolo that he was thirsty. Piccolo would just have told him to deal with it. So he had gone looking for water. And he'd found it. Only he didn't have a glass.

Gohan stood, perplexed, along the side of what was too big to be a stream. A river, he decided. He wondered if the water was safe to drink, or full of bacteria and germs and things that would make him sick. His mom had always told him not to drink anything that he didn't get from a safe source.

Then again, his mother had told him not to talk to strangers, and he was pretty sure that he wasn't supposed to get kidnapped, either. So maybe this was one of those cases where the rules just didn't apply. His dad had said that would happen sometimes.

Well, he thought, I guess if I think it through – if I don't drink anything, I'm gonna die of thirst sooner or later, definitely. Or I could drink the water and maybe get sick.

When he looked at it that way, Gohan didn't have a whole lot of choice. Holding his tail out carefully for balance, he made his way down the crumbly bank to the side of the water. Once there, he ran into another problem. "It's rude to use my hands," he said out loud. But there weren't any glasses or bowls around. The boy looked to his left, then his right, making sure that no one would see him. Then, carefully, he bent down, scooped the water into his palm, and brought it to his lips.

It didn't taste like it would make him sick. In fact, it tasted good – good and cold, and only a little bit like mud. Unable to hold off anymore, Gohan lowered himself down to his hands and knees, brought his mouth right down to the water, and drank like a deer, pulling as much of the water over his dry tongue as he could.

It was wonderful for ten seconds. Then the water blew up in his face.

Gohan screamed and scrambled back at the same time, faster than he thought he could move as the crocodile broke water right in front of him, its jaws snapping shut just inches from Gohan's feet. It fell to the bank in front of him, mouth opening again, soft pink folds inside that swelled and shrank with every breath.

The boy tried to roll over and run, but he saw the eye first. The big yellow eye the size of both his fists put together, glassy like a fish eye, fixed right on him. Gohan's blood froze, his body froze – he couldn't do anything but stare, just the exact way that a bird will stare at a snake.

The mouth came for him again. This time, Gohan wasn't fast enough. He curled into a ball, made a helpless sound as he somehow missed the teeth, pulled into the thing's mouth, so hot, dark, push around him, it was going to swallow…

The world rocked sideways shook, split open like an egg as light slammed into Gohan's eyes, as something yanked his collar hard enough to hurt, and then he was on the ground, thrown on the ground with a heavy motion like a slap, his arms shaking so hard he almost couldn't hold himself up, covered all over in goop. Gohan coughed, and shook, and stared at the ground, clenching his hands in the dirt and unclenching them, proving that it was real…

The world boomed around him: "WHAT in the HELL is WRONG with you?!"

It was Piccolo's voice – a yelling, angry Piccolo. When Gohan turned his head a little, he could see his feet planted on the desert floor like a pair of trees. "Do you WANT to die? Is that it?! What IS it with you monkeys, some kind of weird genetic tendency?"

Gohan couldn't really filter out what he was saying. Just that he was yelling still, that he was angry, that his voice was making him cringe, press himself even closer to the ground. Piccolo was in a really, REALLY bad mood, and doing anything to make him madder would've been a REALLY bad idea. But right then, Gohan didn't care. With a small cry he barely recognized as his own – it sounded like something a kitten would make – he threw himself forward and wrapped himself around Piccolo's shin, clinging to it with all the strength in his small body. And as soon as he started breathing again, he buried his face in the hot, rough fabric of the other's gi, and he started to cry. He cried so hard he shook from head to foot.

Piccolo went completely silent, and stiff – stiff like a marble statue Gohan had sat against once in town. He didn't bend down, put his hand on his shoulder like Gohan's dad would have done; he didn't pick him up and hold him close to his chest like his mom would have done. He just stood there.

Piccolo wasn't much of a dad or a mom, wasn't anything like Gohan had read that a friend should be like. But he was all Gohan had. So he'd just have to do.


Piccolo stared down at the child-sized growth on his leg in disbelief, so shocked he couldn't even manage to work his mouth around words. Which was a shame. Because he had a really impressive mental backlog of profanity that, with some creative mix and match work on his part, might help him to express JUST how much he didn't want to be used as a crying towel OR a teddy bear.

He thought about kicking the brat off. But given what a mess his aura in right now, he'd probably kick the little moron too hard and splat him against the rocks like an egg. Besides – Piccolo winced as he was struck with a mental visual of himself hopping around on one leg, attempting to dislodge an increasingly-determined child from his foot – that wasn't exactly the most dignified scenario he could come up with.

Piccolo huffed, crossed his arms, and glared down at the boy, hoping he'd take the hint. But he didn't. He didn't even look up. The kid was in hysterics, sobbing so hard it was a wonder he didn't heave out a lung.

Irritably, "Kid, for Kami's sake, take a breath."

If anything, Gohan clung tighter.

"You're not hurt," the Namek said. He gave his leg a slight shake. "Get up."

Gohan still didn't let go. But he seemed to be making an effort to control himself, hiccoughing, still shaking, still holding onto him as if he were a lifeboat in a wild sea.

Piccolo didn't know what to do.

"I dun…dun…dun…want…to die," the boy stammered out.

"Well, good," Piccolo said, rolling his eyes toward the sky. "You're not dead. Yet," he added sharply, giving his leg another meaningful shake.

"I…I…thought…I…was," Gohan gasped into the fabric of Piccolo's gi.

Piccolo very nearly snapped at him again. But…what good would it do? The kid was barely even hearing him, huddled against his shin, saliva all over him like egg white on a recently-hatched bird. Only Piccolo, on the day of his hatching, had been more able to take care of himself than this soft little monkey was.

Good gods, do they ALL start out this way? He wondered. Then, Did Son?

That couldn't be right. According to his father's memories, Son Goku had been a fighter by this age…had been more than a damn handful at twelve. But in this boy, Piccolo had seen no trace of a fighter, no chi flickers, nothing to indicate that he was a fighter at all.

Maybe it was the human influence. Maybe the boy really just was too soft, too young, too weak…whatever.

Maybe nothing he could do would make this boy any more able to take care of himself against schoolyard bullies, much less a hardened warrior like Cymbal.

Piccolo very nearly picked the boy up by the scruff of his neck then and there and hauled him right back to that soft little yard he had come from. He very nearly dropped him in a sticky, sobbing puddle at his mother's feet and washed his hands of it. But no. Something was holding him back.

Closing his eyes, Piccolo allowed himself to drift just a little – into that narrowly-defined world that is almost meditation, but not quite, not all the way. Piccolo, in one life or another, had killed children this age with less thought than he'd abandon this one. There had to be a reason.

He found it. It wasn't a good reason. It was only a memory, fuzzy around the edges from where he'd tried to forget it. He had been very young then, and a storm had come, hurling water and lightning down from the sky like weapons. He'd found a place to hide and huddled there, an overhang between two rocks. He had found something solid, and he'd clung to it with all of his young will to survive, had hid his face against the rock.

That was when he had known what it meant to be afraid, and not just tired.

The former demon reached down with one hand and grabbed the boy by the back part of the shirt. Gohan dangled from his fingers like a kitten, tears streaking down his face still, pink and puffy as any newborn. Piccolo tried not to let himself sneer too much. "Let's get you cleaned up," he said roughly.

Gohan nodded his head and smiled in a way that was a thankyou.


"And you're sure this will work," Cymbal said.

Tambourine shot him an irate look from the window. "I never do anything," he said, "without being sure."

Cymbal nodded once, and then looked down at his hands. He had been sitting at the table for most of the morning. He was strong enough to stand, walk around, but still he had no energy. The thought of stepping out of that room seemed too monumental an effort to make; the thought of fighting again so soon made him ache all the way down into the bones. Cymbal had been tired before. He'd been in fights that had lasted for hours, waged campaigns that had stretched on for days. He'd used every ounce of energy he had before – used it up until just drive kept him on his feet and his vision swam brown. But this was different. This wasn't tiredness. This was weariness. Heavy, cotton-textures weariness. And demons were not supposed to get weary.

He didn't know what to blame it on. Perhaps the last battle had just been that draining, perhaps it was the strain of stumbling on in the dark – but it felt as if something had been sucked out of him with a straw, leaving him exhausted.

Cymbal thanked any gods who were listening that Tambourine had been willing to step up, had essentially taken the reigns out of his hands. Cymbal would have fought that once, would have mistrusted his motives, but things had changed, somehow, over the past few days. He still did not, in the strictest sense, like his brother. There had been too many bad years. The difference was that if someone so much as moved against his brother, Cymbal would rip out the someone's throat with his bare hands. And he would make it last a long time.

He wanted to think about that dynamic, sometimes…but it seemed a foolish thing to sort through when so many other things were demanding his attention. The most important of these was that he wasn't sure he had the strength to do what Tambourine had asked him to do.

"And once I kill the boy," Cymbal said.

"Once you kill the boy, you will bring Piccolo back here."

Cymbal closed his eyes for a moment. "That'll be a real picnic," he said sourly. He didn't have to reach far back into his memory to remember talons sinking into his skin, bones fracturing under the force of a kick.

The demon flinched slightly when he felt Tambourine's hand on his shoulder – so light, like a spring rain. "It will be hard," Tambourine said softly. "But our Lord's memories are in him…perhaps his soul as well. Once you've broken all the ties that he has to this life he's chosen…" Tambourine's voice dropped slightly, almost a whisper, "one you've wiped the slate clean, I will be able to piece together the things that fell apart during his youth."

Cymbal swallowed, "And?"

Almost gently, "Cymbal – I've told you already."

"I want to be sure, Tambourine. That I understand." Then, a little heavily, "We can't all see things like you can."

The silver eyes arched slightly. "I might be able to put him back together, Cymbal. And he can return, just as he promised…just as he always meant to do." Tambourine shook his head slightly, a wry smirk playing across his features. "He never thought much of me, Cymbal. But he would not have left you…or this precious, sad little world of his… like this. You have to know that this was what he wanted."

"Why would you do this," he asked.

Tambourine offered him a small, tight-lipped smile. "We all have our own duties, Cymbal. Even when they aren't pleasant." The fingers on his shoulder tightened ever-so-slightly. "Even when it isn't what we want."

That was something that Cymbal understood – that he had always understood. He nodded once. But he didn't get up yet. Something was tickling the back of his head. Something important and small, like a thorn, needling him. He was having a hard time figuring out what it was…every time he thought he had it, it slipped away, something about souls and bodies…something about what-if…

Cymbal almost gave up on it. But he stretched just a little harder, and there it was, clear in front of him like a hand emerging from the water. "What about…" his mouth was having a hard time forming words – he couldn't hear them anyway over the sudden pounding in his head, the sudden thrum of blood in his ears. "The brat. What happens to him?"

Tambourine shook his head. "We've been through this once, Cymbal. You will kill him. It's necessary."

"No, damnit, not the monkey-spawn." Pause. "Piccolo."

Tambourine withdrew his hand as if reluctant to break contact – his fingers trailed off Cymbal's shoulder like falling leaves. After a moment, he averted his eyes. His voice, when it came out, was slow. "To achieve any end, sacrifices must be made," he said. "It's regrettable. But this is the purpose that he was meant to serve. And no one can argue with that."

The room was silent for a long time.

Finally, Cymbal spoke. "I understand," he said. The pounding in his head stopped. It left him feeling empty, weirdly empty. Something had passed through him, had scooped out all of the heavy things that had been pounding inside him just seconds ago. But he didn't feel any lighter.

For maybe the first time in his life, Cymbal felt no desire to fight. There was no excitement, no anger, no eagerness. None of that pulse-pounding hyper-alertness that he'd gotten used to, come to rely on almost as a drug. He felt none of that at all; nothing, in fact, just the tired sense of a task, the strange emptiness, and the bizarre desire to curl right back up on the table he'd finally crawled off of, close his eyes, and wait for it all to go away.

Except that was stupid, because it would never go away. Not unless he made it.

He wasn't sure that he was strong enough. But he would have to be anyway. There was no one else to do it.

"You should rest now," Tambourine said. "You're still not yourself. And you will need to be at your best for this."

"Yeah…I guess so." Cymbal lay his forehead down across his crossed arms, willing himself to doze. He'd never slept so much in his life – and never had it helped so little.


Snake Way, Son Goku thought as he stared down the endless, twisting path, was probably not as bad as it looked. Because that would be completely impossible. NOTHING could be as bad as snake way looked.

The road was, to all appearances, a snake – winding away from him like a crack in the sky.

"Man," he said, standing at the very head of what might very well be the longest road in the universe. "Kami, I'm not so sure we have time for this."

Kami bowed his head slightly. "It's only a year, Goku," he said.

"Yeah, but from what I've heard, no one else even knows about this…"

"All the more reason to go now…quickly. You'll be of more use when you're stronger."

Goku nodded. He knew already that if they didn't have time, maybe, for the trip in the first place, then they definitely didn't have any time to argue about it. He hopped up on the road…and he began to run, feeling each step through the balls of his feet, enjoying the feel of his body settling into rhythm. The problem with running was that it was so mechanical – so brainless – that he had a lot of time to think.

Time to wonder just what had happened. What was still happening on Earth. Without him.

The last few days hadn't exactly been reassuring. Chichi, when he had left her with Gohan, had been sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, finally upright after her encounter with Cymbal. She had been acting strong – seemed strong, even, in the way that a bamboo tree can sometimes seem strong – but her hands had been shaking so hard her cup of tea had rattled on its saucer.

Then there had been Gohan, sleeping fitfully in a blanket, huddled in Chichi's lap. Goku's heart ached just thinking of all the things that his son had been through over the past few days…and the danger wasn't past, not even close, not with people like Cymbal around, not with more Saiyans on the way. Every instinct he had screamed against running farther from his son right now. Even though there was no way he could help him any more from the check-in station than he could from Snake Way.

He was leaving his family unprotected when they needed him. And there was no getting past that. His family, his friends – he didn't even know if Krillen was okay, or if he was still out there in the rain, barely hanging on...

And then there was Piccolo. Unbidden, an image came to Goku's mind, bleary and full of rain – Piccolo, nose to nose with him, giving him a rough shake after he had fallen.

"No," he had said with a fierceness that Son Goku had rarely heard from him. "You don't get to do this to me, asshole. You don't get to drag me all over the free world, ruin my damn life, and then up and DIE on me."

Goku had been too dazed to really understand at the time…or at least, to understand beyond the fact that Piccolo had been worried about him and was trying –without a lot of success– to cover it. But it was more than that. Much more.

Piccolo was changing. It was a slow change, it was stubborn; it was something that Piccolo probably understood even less than Goku did. And even Goku could see that it was scaring the Hell out of him. Then, right when it mattered most, right after Piccolo had taken on his own brother to help him…he'd left him to deal with the repercussions on his own.

It wasn't supposed to happen that way. Goku would've known that even if King Yamma hadn't mentioned that he wasn't supposed to be dead yet. It just wasn't right.

And yet, it had happened.

He wished that he could talk to them, all of them. Tell Chichi that he'd be home soon, tell Gohan to be strong, to hold on. Tell Krillen that he'd done well, he was proud of him, to hold the fort for just a little while. Tell Cymbal that if he set foot near his family again, he'd make him wish he'd died. Tell Piccolo…

Son Goku had no idea what he'd tell Piccolo. What could he possibly say, other than, "I'm sorry?" And that would probably just make him mad.

It was all a moot point, anyway. Because Son Goku couldn't talk to them. He couldn't send a message, couldn't even wave goodbye. There was no point brooding about it.

There was nothing to do about it but run.