Krillen hated flying over the desert.

It was a holdover from the old days, he knew. The days before the Demon King Piccolo had been killed. Back then, the demons – Piccolo's family – and other, lesser demon-things that had crawled out from who-knew-where had joined together. They had been doing their best to eliminate everyone on earth, and no one, not a single one of them, not even Goku, had been strong enough to fight them all at once.

It was hit and run for years. Mostly run. A fine line they'd all tried to walk for years – pop up often enough to keep the demons from murdering everyone else on the planet, not often enough to get themselves all killed.

They were lucky, at least, in that the Demon King had realized that they were the only things on the planet that were dangerous to him. He'd insisted that they wipe them out first, because they gave people hope, and because once they were dead, the rest would be easy.

Those were hard years. Years of watching the sky, and counting the seconds between explosions like you would for lightning, trying to decide how far away, how long, whether or not you could get to whatever town it was in time to save anyone. Whether it was worth the risk.

Making that decision – whether or not to try to protect the human population of earth – was hard on all of them, though none of them took it as badly as Goku. He never complained. Never punched trees or cursed or railed against it like the rest of them did. No, Krillen still remembered how his old friend, barely half grown with wild hair and eyes too big for his face, had sat in the pine needles in the blue-colored evening, watching the distant flares of red and orange through the branches.

Kami had been with them then. Had stood white-colored like a ghost in the darkness, his face and hands disappearing into the dark around them as he explained to his favorite student – gently, always gently – that he had to make hard choices because he had to last.

Goku never argued with him. He just breathed out fog, pressed his forehead to his bo, and clenched his hands on it until his knuckles were white.

That time had changed his friend, Krillen knew. Not that it showed too much, most of the time. He still smiled, he always had, still kept that bright, stupid optimism, even when it repeatedly almost got him killed. But before the Demon King Piccolo, Son Goku had avoided killing like he avoided seeing a real doctor. After, while he still shied away from it, he would do it if pushed to it. And there were times, as those hard years dragged on, when Krillen would look over at his friend and see an expression on his face that frightened him a little. A sharp, narrow-eyed glare that wasn't at all human.

It made Goku's weird…trust? Friendship?...with the demon king's youngest son that much stranger in Krillen's eyes. If there was anybody on earth he should have hated, should have blamed for all the crap that went wrong, it should have been Piccolo. But Goku didn't. He never had.

And, the monk admitted to himself, Goku was right. Because when Goku had come for him, to save him from Cymbal, Piccolo had come for Goku. Without wanting to, he remembered the last time he'd seen the big demon – when Piccolo and Cymbal had collided in the sky like a pair of rabid dogs, and then after. The kind of wild, uncontrolled fighting they'd all tried their hardest to avoid during the hit-and-run days.

They were all, Krillen thought, more careful back then. They checked the sky before they flew anywhere, designed elaborate escape routes, stayed low. They stuck to dense, thick places as much as possible – swamps and forests; short, tough mountain ranges. Places where they could fly without leaving a silhouette against the sky, places where they could make a sharp turn and disappear.

Open places like plains, the desert – those were to be avoided at all cost. The demons had sharp eyesight and flew fast, and meeting up with a monster like Cymbal in the open sky was a worst-case scenario that no one wanted to think about.

It made Krillen wonder why Piccolo had come here. He would have known, same as any of them, that there was no hiding out here. Then again, Krillen thought. He pulled up in the air, stopped for a moment. Then again, you could see someone coming from miles away, too. Maybe outrun them if you were faster.

Or, he thought sourly, blast them right out of the sky before they saw you. "I must be a great target right now," he muttered. "Geeze, why don't I ever think of these things."

He looked around, the wide expanse of dirt and sky, and tried to decide what to do. To keep flying and risk being attacked, or to go back home and think of something else.

Then, he looked down at his uniform. The bright orange. His own white hands. "At least I don't look much like a demon," he said. "I guess Piccolo'll know the difference."

Then again, whether Piccolo was more or less likely to shoot him than his family, Krillen didn't really know.


The sun filtered down through the trees that grew near the river…not stunted, tough little shrubs, but ginko and sakura trees, fan leaves, white petals that formed fragile blankets in the stiller eddies.

All of which was completely lost on Cymbal, as he dug the talons of his remaining hand into the broken-up shale of the bank. They didn't catch right away. Dragged several inches through the sharp fragments, stuck under the nails and bled. But then they did catch - he didn't know on what and didn't care – and he could set about the business of dragging his far-too-heavy body out of the water.

He made it halfway before his arm shook and gave, and he reintroduced his face to the bank with a sharp houff.

To add insult to injury, his nose landed two inches from a dandelion. He swiped at it irritably, then blinked through fuzzy eyes. He was pretty sure Hell didn't have dandelions. Especially not dandelions with a lady bug tottering across the leaf.

"Holy Hell," he muttered, "I think I'm alive."

He glanced behind him, squinted to try to focus – the river gurgled and hissed, still felt cold to his legs – and forward. Ladybug on the dandelion.

Definitely alive, he decided. Being dead doesn't hurt this much.

Not that he was all that likely to stay alive. He didn't need to look to know that his severed arm was still bleeding, that he'd shattered more bones than he wanted to think about on the way down the cliff, even more during the churning end-over-end madness that had been the river earlier up – he couldn't remember it so well, supposed he must have blacked out.

Which, he decided, was probably going to happen again. Any second now, in fact. And he wasn't completely sure he cared. Because, for the first time in weeks, he could think straight again, or as straight as you ever think when you have a concussion. No more fog. No more weirdo disorientation. Just the facts, as near as he could see.

The demon king was dead, and he was never coming back.

Piccolo was nobody's reincarnation, which he'd always known, deep down. Because the demon king would never in a thousand years have taken up with that little monkey-tailed brat or his father.

That no matter how idiotic he was, he was proud of him for fighting him like that, for fighting that hard. Who cared about what. Not to say he wouldn't kill him for it later, mind, but that didn't make him feel any different about it.

That the giant monkey was real, and Tambourine probably knew that all along, too. That he'd known it and not said a word.

That if everything had gone as it was supposed to go, he has no doubt that he and Piccolo would have killed each other, that the stupid kid would have been caught in the crossfire some way or another, and Tambourine would have had the whole damn planet to himself.

Despite the injuries, he chuckled under his breath. "Set me up, didn't you, T. Same way you set him up. I live through this – big if, right now, I know – I live through this, swear to the gods..." he turned his head to spit blood out of his mouth. Grinned, roughly. Damn.

His ear flicked at a sound up the bank, and his first thought was that it was a deer. Light, quiet steps. He squinted up the bank.

A girl was standing on the bank above him. A human girl – he couldn't guess the age at all – but she had crow hair, almond eyes, and she was looking at him like you'd look at a bird that had snapped its neck on the window.

"Oh, brother," he said under his breath. "Just what I need."

The girl started back toward the road – he could see, if he squinted, what looked like a cart, hear some sort of animal stomping its hooves, nervous.

He must have blacked out for another few seconds, minutes maybe. The next thing he knew, she was kneeling beside him, drawing her skirt back to avoid the mixed puddle of water and blood.

"Lady," he growled, "this is probably a bad time." And normally, he would have cut her in half, because that's how he'd always dealt with humans. But his arm was stuck under his body, and she wasn't worth the effort. He doubted she could kill him anyway, even like this, without some kind of weapon. Was so damned small, too…couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He could crack her in half with the back of his wrist, even now, even like this, if he really felt like it.

Besides, she didn't seem inclined to kill him. She said something to him – and he was pretty sure he could hear her fine, but it was just gibberish to him, a bunch of sounds stuck together. Different language, he realized immediately. One he didn't know. She reached out a hand, touched his shoulder with her fingertips, drew her hand back quickly as if afraid of being burned.

"Take it you don't watch a lot of television," he said, "if you don't know who I am." The girl looked at him blankly, then at the sticky, purple liquid on her fingers. She bit her lip.

He laughed again, roughly, in spite of himself. "No survival instinct," he said, "the whole lot of you. Swear, was always like shooting fish in a…" he coughed. "Barrel."

Which was true enough. Anything was harder to kill than a big group of humans. Because they were too far removed from their pasts, milled in circles, clung to each other and screamed just in case some self-respecting demon was somehow stupid enough not to see them immediately. He wondered, sometimes, how they'd managed to survive as a people, even before his father and the demons who came with him had decided it'd be a service to the planet to wipe them all out.

Then again, this girl didn't seem to want to scream, or cling to anything. Instead, she touched his shoulder again. Seemed to be looking him over. Her color drained when she was able to see the other side of his body, the still-bleeding stump that had been an arm a few hours ago. He could see the small, blue veins in her face.

"See?" he rasped. "You're a lucky girl. I don't think I can move."

She pulled a sash from her waist, twisted it several times. Tied it tight around the stump, pulled. Looked, Cymbal decided, almost as green as he was as she did it.

He tried to focus. Tried, but it was getting harder. "Lady," he said again. "Are you stupid, or what?"

She said something to him in a tone he recognized – she was trying to reassure him. He snorted. "Unbelievable. Just like lemmings. You people really do want to die, don't you?"

But his vision wasn't so sharp, his lips were bloody, and he realized that he probably wasn't all that dangerous to her after all. "You're smart at all," he murmured. "You'll be gone when I wake up."

He somehow doubted she would be. Because humans were stupid that way.

_________________________________________________________________________

Krillen spotted them easy. Which should've been more encouraging than it was.

The two of them, Gohan and Piccolo, were standing in the middle of a charred spot over a mile wide, that smoked like the remains of a house fire. It smelled like burnt glass, burnt something else, possibly burnt- Bulma's- last -attempt at dinner.

Krillen had enough experience to know what that probably meant. That someone had died, or at least gotten scorched pretty badly. He began to think he might have come at a bad time. And maybe he should come back when it was more convenient. Like maybe in a month or two.

He was just getting ready to turn around and fly back toward the Kame house when Piccolo looked up and met his eyes square. His face was soot-stained and purple down one side, bloody too. It was swollen across one side of the jaw, and his expression said, plainer than words, don't insult me by thinking I haven't noticed you. Krillen spat a curse under his breath and stayed, feeling awkward and obvious in all the wrong ways, like a Christmas ornament hanging on a palm tree. Yeah. In the middle of the desert.

But Piccolo at least didn't blast him, and Gohan, who was against all common sense and reason cradled in Piccolo's left arm, was waving at him with a shaky grin on his face, like Krillen had once waved at Goku and Master Roshi from the other side of a ravine he'd jumped when he hadn't thought he could. When his legs were still buckling with the overpowering thought of "holy shit I'm alive."

Landing seemed like the right thing to do. So he did. The sand was more like broken glass than dirt. It crunched under his boots.

Piccolo didn't move from where he was standing. Probably because taking a step forward or backward was reacting, and would actually make Krillen's life easier. Instead of standing still, which literally made Krillen take the first step.

And, he realized as he landed, that first step was going to be a doozie, because the two of them looked terrible. Gohan was a soot-stained mess in what loosely looked like the clothes he'd disappeared in. And Piccolo wasn't standing right, was covered in what looked a lot like dried blood, was a duller green than Krillen had ever seen him.

"So, I must've missed some party, huh?" Krillen said.

Gohan blinked. Looked at Piccolo. "There was a party?" he asked, and it was so much like Goku suddenly that Krillen felt a weird contraction in his chest.

Piccolo's eyes narrowed in an unfriendly way. "So you did," he said to Krillen, ignoring Gohan completely. His voice was flat.

Krillen decided to shut up. His mouth didn't get the memo. "What the heck happened out here?" he asked.

Gohan looked at the ground, and his lower lip shook. Piccolo gave the boy a solid shake that rattled his teeth and said, "It doesn't matter. It's over now."

Krillen rocked back on his heels. Looked around again, and heard Piccolo growl when he did, so he stopped. "I need your help," he blurted at last. Looked up to see if he'd just committed suicide-by-Piccolo.

Piccolo laughed, low and rough in his chest like a car that doesn't run right. Gohan shifted nervously in his grip and gave Krillen a what-did-you-do look.

Krillen's face flushed. "Laugh if it makes you feel better," he said. "But I do need your help."

"This I gotta hear," Piccolo said. And he was grinning, leaning a little more on one leg than the other, but he was listening, too. "What do you think I'm gonna help you with."

"The dragonballs," Krillen said. "Two of them are…"

"Back at Camp Psycho. Yeah, I know."

"So if you know," Krillen said. "You know why I can't just go waltzing in there and find the darn things. That place is like a maze, and not to mention there are dem...," Krillen coughed, "other things you need to watch out for."

"I'm waiting for the part where this is my problem," Piccolo said.

And Krillen wanted to heave a rock at him all of a sudden. Because he did care about Goku, maybe even thought of him as a friend, if Piccolo understood the concept. Krillen saw it himself. Even if he hadn't seen it then, he could see it – or something like it – in the way he held Gohan, the way the boy was still clinging to him with his mud-coated fists. There was no reason for him to be so stubborn about it.

"You know what it's for," Krillen said.

Piccolo raised a browridge at him. "I know what you told me it was for," he said.

Krillen understood, suddenly, why Goku had so often seemed more stressed out than he used to be. Why he sometimes looked up at the sky and ground his teeth together for no reason.

"I saved your life," Krillen blurted.

Piccolo's whole expression changed like a sudden storm. "What," he said.

"Twice," Krillen said, and crossed his arms. Mainly because his hands were shaking, and that was the easiest way to hide them. "With the kienzan, and then with the giant monkey. So pony up already."

Piccolo opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked briefly confounded.

Gohan tugtugged at his uniform, or what was left of it. "Mr. Piccolo," he said, "I think he has a point, sir."

Piccolo gave Gohan a severe sideways glare that Krillen had only previously seen directed at Goku. The boy gulped and shut up.

"So what about it," Krillen said.

Piccolo's lips drew back slightly, revealing the too-shiny white of his teeth. It was almost, almost, a grin. "Come see me in a week," he said. "We'll talk about it."

"Wait, what?" Krillen said.

"Don't push it," Piccolo said. He turned on a heel – much, Krillen noticed, too slowly – and started to walk away. The small human wondered how much of an effort it was not to limp.

Then Krillen blinked as Gohan's head popped up over Piccolo's shoulder. The boy cupped his hands around his lips as if whispering a secret and mouthed "shh, that means yes."

So Krillen watched them go, dumbfounded in the middle of the desert. Realized Piccolo asked for a week because it would take him that long to heal. Realized he really was going to help them.

The monk tilted his head back at the nearly-white sky, grinned. "Looks like we'll be seeing ya soon after all, Goku," he said. And the wind rose up around him like a pair of cupped hands.