It was an accident that Turles made it to earth first.

He wasn't sure how it had happened. Vegeta and Nappa had had quite a head start on him – he could only figure they'd stopped over somewhere on the way to stretch their legs, gotten distracted, taken longer than expected. Easy to do when Nappa was around. The big Saiyan had, as Vegeta was wont to exclaim, the attention span of a drunken gnat.

Nevertheless, here Turles was, and much sooner than he'd hoped for. He pushed the door of his pod open and looked at the vibrant green of this new world. It was, he noted, soft – the grass bent under his feet, and he could smell the wet, dark scent of crushed vegetation. Not like Vegiitasei, where grass was a sharp, stiff thing that could cut you, where trees were thorny and dense.

Turles adjusted his scouter and wondered what on this pitiful, soft planet could have killed Raditz.

Not that he was all that sorry to see Raditz go. They'd known each other back on the old planet Vegeta before everything had gone to Hell – they'd started on a squad together near thirty years ago. Raditz had made no bones about hating him right away. He found out later it was because he looked so much like Raditz's father.

Turles didn't know what kind of daddy-issues Raditz might have had. Nor did he much care. But as time went on, they worked well together. Raditz was a barbarian, but a strangely tactical one; as long as he had Turles around to yank his chain when he got too caught up in playing with his food to notice critical details (such as reinforcements arriving at a rapid pace and cutting off their retreat), then he was as effective as could be expected, Turles guessed.

They had not been friends. They had not, in fact, seen each other since Turles, annoyed beyond words at the prancing, undignified nature of most of Frieza's high-ranking officers, had quietly and discreetly put in a request for transfer to Coola's army. Frieza was amused enough at the idea to agree – Coola apparently had less regard for monkeys than his brother did.

Vegeta, Turles remembered, had not been pleased. Not that the snooty little prince had said as much. He'd just turned his back on Turles, crossed his arms, and tapped a bicep with his white, white glove. "What do I care what you do with your low-class carcass," he'd growled. "Go do what you want."

But his tail had been bristled, his back had been stiff, and he'd felt the betrayal, Turles knew. He might have tried to explain that it was best, what he was doing. That being the last of them, they needed to not have all their eggs in one basket. But they were Saiyans and they didn't talk about such things, so he'd bared his teeth at Nappa and Raditz (kind of a customary goodbye and fuck you both at once) and he'd left.

Now Raditz was dead, and Vegeta and Nappa were headed straight toward whatever had killed him, and Turles thought to himself that it was a wonder his race hadn't gone completely extinct eons ago with THOSE kinds of instincts.

He supposed that meant it was up to him to gather some intel. With a put-upon sigh, he pushed a button on his scouter, searching for Raditz's last known location.

As expected, he wasn't far off. Turles walked slowly over a rise on the soft, soft grass and came to what was left of his former squad-mate. The form in question was charred almost beyond recognition. Scavengers had done their work…bone showed through, so dry even the flies had moved on. The hair mostly remained, though…matted with water and dirt, plucked at by birds, but it was there, waving quietly in the breeze off the river.

Turles looked down at the empty sockets that had once been Raditz's eyes and thought for no particular reason about a time when he'd passed out cold in some sort of lake, only to have Raditz haul him out by the hair, give him a good shake, and snap at him for being incompetent. Like he was one to talk anyway.

I should report, he thought. Nevermind that the prince would probably not take his call.

Instead, he pressed another button on his scouter.

The reading of power levels was, to say the least, puzzling. He saw two big ones to the west, a small cluster of three that were considerable, but lesser, to the far east…and one big one, comparable with the first two, way off down south by itself.

None of them seemed strong enough for Raditz. But maybe a few together, maybe if they'd surprised him.

The three to the far east were closest. Turles bent his knees and took off toward them.


"No," Master Roshi said for the fourteenth time that day. "I will NOT teach you the Kame Hame Ha. Not yet."

Krillen sipped at his almost-empty drink, carefully noisy, and slid his eyes over to Chichi. He could only see her back, as she was standing at the sink and washing dishes in a clearly-aggravated manner. "Why not," she said.

Krillen looked back at Master Roshi. The old turtle hermit was clearly flabbergasted at his newest student – Chichi was, unlike most, completely unwilling to defer to her master's "superior" knowledge.

"Because you're not ready for it, that's why! Bejeebus, woman, you're likely to fry us all if you don't learn some basic energy control first."

"You taught Goku when he was twelve years old," Chichi said. A dish crumbled in her hands and Krillen winced.

"I did NOT teach it to him!" Roshi exclaimed, waving his hands for emphasis. The old turtle-hermit was beside himself, near-dancing in agitation. "He figured it out! He figured it out against my advice while I was standing next to him saying 'Goku, don't do it,' that's how he learned it! And he nearly killed us all when he did, might I add."

Chichi huffed again and set another dish – one of the lucky few survivors – in the drying rack. "Listen, old man, I don't have time for this. My son is out there with that monster Piccolo and I'd like to get him back before it's time for him to go off to college. And besides, who knows where he is, what he's doing to him…"

Krillen was grateful that both Master Roshi and Chichi were ignoring him as he couldn't hide the guilty rush of blood to his cheeks. He looked down at his lemonade glass and for one of the few times ever thanked the gods that no one ever seemed to notice him. Because he knew exactly where Gohan was and what was happening to him.

And sure, he felt bad about not telling Chichi that, while Gohan was with Piccolo, he was actually fine. Or as fine as you can be when Piccolo is regularly beating on you, anyway. But Krillen had good reasons for not mentioning it. One, Chichi wouldn't have believed him when he said that Gohan was okay with Piccolo – that he actually, against all odds, really seemed to like the cranky demon. Two, if he told her that he knew where they were, someone would eventually make him take them there, and in no way was that gonna end well. Chichi would demand to take Gohan back; Piccolo wouldn't want to let her. If he DID give the boy up, then Gohan would lose out on the training that Krillen could see pretty well that he needed. If he didn't, then Piccolo and Chichi were going to fight, and Krillen didn't want to explain to Goku how he'd managed to let his wife get killed right in front of his six-year-old son.

No, okay, that wasn't true. Because Krillen just didn't think Piccolo would kill Chichi. It was more, if he was being honest with himself, that he didn't want to put Piccolo through that right now. The big demon was grieving – sure, it had taken Krillen a while to figure that out. Because Piccolo didn't grieve like normal people. The symptoms were easy to mistake for just being physically hurt: Piccolo kept going off by himself. Drifting off mid-conversation, walking by himself at night, even sitting quietly and staring at nothing in particular in a way that only pretended to be meditation Krillen thought at first that it was just taking Piccolo longer than usual to recover from his latest fight. But no, even after he was obviously fine - it couldn't be anything else. True, Krillen didn't know whether he was grieving more for his family or, impossible as it seemed, Krillen's old friend Goku (or, he admitted to himself, it could be both), but whatever it was, Piccolo seemed determined to deal with it on his own.

And sometimes, when Krillen spent the night out there, he would watch the way that Gohan set his head on Piccolo's thigh or curled up to doze in his shadow, and he'd want for some inexplicable reason to offer to help. He knew that's what Goku would have done, even if he knew that Piccolo would turn him down cold. But Krillen never offered. He didn't know how.

"Goku knew the Kame Hame Ha better than I do," Roshi said firmly. "And he still has his hands full with Piccolo. One extra little trick isn't going to change anything, Chichi. I understand your frustration, but you can't rush these things. You'll just get yourself killed, and I don't want that on my conscience."

"I don't give a damn about your conscience," Chichi said. Another dish crackled – pieces of it pinged off the counter on their way to the trash. "Where was your conscience when my Goku went off to fight with those monsters by himself?"

"Confound it all, woman, I wasn't even there! And even if I had been, what good would it have done – he never listened to me, either! None of them did!"

Krillen sighed and turned his head to look out the window, familiar enough with his old master's speech about disrespectful, reckless students that he could safely tune out for a while. He knew they'd eventually get loud enough that they wouldn't notice when he snuck out to go work with Piccolo and Gohan…and that they'd attribute his disappearance to his natural dislike for arguments (cowardice, Bulma would suggest, but what did she know anyway). Until then…

Krillen blinked. Because unless he had finally gone completely nuts, there was a very familiar person just now landing on the beach outside the Kame house.

Goku looked different, for sure, His skin was a few shades darker – which Goku's never seemed to get, not even when he was out in the sun all the time – and he was dressed funny, almost exactly like Raditz had been, with a slab of tinted glass over one eye. Still, the face and the hair were unmistakably those of Krillen's childhood friend.

"Goku?" he said, slowly and quietly.

He realized belatedly that both Chichi and Master Roshi had stopped arguing to stare at him. And his first impulse, for some reason, was to just grin, wave both hands, and say sorry, he'd been daydreaming, what had he said? But instead he sat very, very still and took another noisy sip from his drink.

"What is it, Krillen," Chichi asked in her too-calm voice. The one that had always sent Goku running the other way.

Krillen's stomach flip-flopped, and he nodded at the window.

Both Chichi and Master Roshi gathered at the table to look out at the beach. Where Goku was still standing, hands on hips, looking out over the ocean as if he'd never seen it before. And like that, Chichi was out the door and running toward him, and Krillen felt like he had done something very stupid somehow.

Master Roshi seemed to think so, too. He followed more cautiously, his expression impossible to see behind the sunglasses. And Krillen almost followed, but didn't. Some small instinct told him he should wait and see.


Turles had never seen a base quite like this one before.

Now he'd seen some stupid things. Floating cities, cities with guns that would only fire one way, military bases built on fragile sides of cliffs that were easily demolished with a well-placed chi blast.

But he couldn't for the life of him figure out why three of the highest energy readings on the planet were sitting on an island smaller than most living rooms in the middle of the ocean. Gods above, a good wave would destroy the place, and any self-respecting invading force would exchange high-fives and go home for dinner early.

Not to mention that he'd just been able to LAND here – here, ten feet from the front door of the house, ankle-deep in the water – and no one had yet come attacked him in any way, or seemed to notice him at all.

As if on cue, the door to the house burst open, and Turles turned to see…well, his first thought was that it was a Saiyan woman running down the island to meet him, except that there weren't any other sayians, and none of them were women.

Nonetheless, she LOOKED Saiyan – compact and strong, not delicate like the women of most species. And, in a strangely-accented voice, she was yelling at him, "Goku! Goku!"

He absently wondered if that was some kind of bizarre earthling greeting or curse. He turned himself fully to face the woman in question – much to his surprise, she didn't even slow down. He thought that she intended to run right into him as if they were lovers and thought to himself that this was the strangest world he'd ever been on. Nevertheless, when she jumped, he caught her. And the woman wound her arms around his neck, near-sobbing. He only understood half the words as they all came out in a rush: So glad you're back, but we didn't use the dragonballs, how did you – no, I don't care, I'm just so glad you're finally here, Goku, I've missed you.

So either the woman was a lunatic, he thought, which given where she was living was not outside the realm of possibility, or she was mistaking him for someone else. Someone who had to be Saiyan. He could never have passed for Raditz, Vegeta, or Nappa, but hadn't there been another one? The one Raditz kept growling on and on about, maybe, his little brother who was sent to some backwater planet just before Vegitasei bit it.

Then an old man came toddling out of the house, and Turles decided he'd ponder his current case of mistaken identity another day. The old man was a skinny, ancient creature with knobby knees, but Turles's scouter warned him that he was dangerous. Worse, from the bunching up of his forehead, Turles could tell that the older fighter had realized that something was wrong. So, with a small, grim smile, Turles flattened his hand at the old man and, before he could say a word, he blew his head clean off his shoulders.


Piccolo knew something was wrong before Krillen landed.

He felt the energies surging off to the east and, while they were nothing like the chi battles he'd experienced a few months ago, they were still at a high enough level to warrant concern. He felt one large, unfamiliar power flare briefly like a pair of headlights on a dark road, then gone, and the air felt stormy afterward.

A training exercise, maybe, he thought to himself…though deep down, he knew that wasn't true. He'd felt the old turtle hermit's energy sputter and die.

He was so distracted by wondering what might have happened that Gohan managed to land a square shot to his jaw. He staggered back a step or two, swiped the back of his hand across his lips, and shot the boy what he figured was a more indignant look than the small success warranted.

Gohan looked up at him, wide-eyed. "But sir, I thought I was supposed to hit you!"

Piccolo made up his mind then and there that he was simply not cut out to be a parent. Or babysitter. Or whatever. "Not now, Gohan," he said, because the kid was right, and he didn't know how to express that in a way that didn't immediately offend his dignity.

Gohan had huffed and settled in beside him, arms crossed in what Piccolo assumed was an unconscious mimicry of his pose. At least, he assumed that until Gohan peered up at him, adjusted his stance slightly, and made his best effort to glare at the sky the same way that he was.

I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do if I ever give you back, kid, he thought wryly.

Which brought up the awkward question of what the Hell he was going to DO with the brat, anyway. Because, if he really thought about it…with Cymbal, Drum, and Piano gone, what did the kid really have to worry about anyway besides (possibly) Tanbarin?

And was learning how to throw punches really going to help the kid all that much with his older brother, Piccolo wondered. Granted, Gohan needed to learn some control to keep from vaporizing himself (and everyone else), but that would probably come with age and time, and if there wasn't an immediate threat…

Piccolo looked down at the little monkey beside him and wondered if maybe it wasn't time for the kid to go back to his mother. The idea was, for some reason, acutely painful, which probably meant that it was the right thing to do.

Then he spotted a distant dot that had to be Krillen. The dot, he thought, was moving too fast, and it was too bright.

"Stand still," he told Gohan. Then he walked forward several long paces to get some distance between himself and the boy.

Krillen landed badly, with a little stumble that threw gravel and dirt against Piccolo's shins. The small monk doubled over, resting his hands on his knees and panting. He was shiny with sweat. Piccolo felt his stomach tie itself into a slow, elaborate knot.

"Well?" he said.

"It's Goku," Krillen said in a hushed voice. He looked past Piccolo to see if Gohan was listening in and squinted his eyes, giving a small, quick nod when he decided the kid was out of earshot.

Piccolo's stomach moved from knotting to perhaps weaving. He raised an eyeridge. "Go on."

"He's back somehow," Krillen said. His voice was even quieter, and Piccolo realized that it was less out of concern for Gohan's hearing ability and more out of an effort to keep his voice from jumping and shaking like a teenager's. "But he's not himself. He looks different, his energy is strange, and…" Krillen took a deep breath. "And he killed Master Roshi," he said.

Piccolo took a deep breath of his own. He couldn't process what Krillen was telling him. Because it was impossible that Son Goku would be on earth – it was even more impossible that he would murder his old teacher. By the same token, he knew Krillen – he knew him better than he wanted to admit. And Krillen wouldn't be out in the middle of the desert having a panic attack if he didn't think what he was saying was the absolute truth.

"Anything else?" Piccolo asked, startled at the calm in his own voice.

Krillen looked up at him as if he'd lost his mind, which Piccolo had expected, as that was a question he was asking himself, as well. What he didn't expect was the other element of the monk's expression. Piccolo had seen Gohan look at him that way. The kid had had that same look when he'd found a sparrow that had hurt itself on the rocks, when he'd gotten a splinter, when he had those dreams that involved red-eyed creatures and men with long, rough manes. It was a hopeful expression, almost, one that said, "Please fix it."

"Chichi's gone," Krillen said. "He took her with him."

Of course, the question on the tip of Piccolo's tongue was why in Hell anyone would WANT that crazy woman. But then he remembered when he and Son Goku had first met Raditz. When Raditz had thrown Chichi aside, snapped her arm with an audible crunch…the particular look on Son Goku's face when he knelt next to her.

Piccolo looked over his shoulder at Gohan, who was visibly trying not to look like he was straining to hear. The boy, he thought incongruously, doesn't actually look much like his father. No, Gohan's eyes were narrower for his face, more almond-shaped…his chin was a little more square. His whole frame, in fact, was sturdier than Son Goku's, his hair less wild. He looked, Piccolo thought, so much more human than Son. So much more like his mother.

Piccolo turned his head back to Krillen, who was still looking up at him expectantly, and he said, more quietly than he'd probably said anything in his life, "How bad is it, Krillen."

Krillen blinked at the use of his name, but said, "She fought him, Piccolo. I didn't stick around." The monk looked down at the ground. "I mean, I wanted to help, but he's…he's stronger than he was. There's nothing I could've done."

Piccolo nodded curtly. Then he closed his eyes. He was lining two images up in his mind: Son Goku, after they'd brought Gohan back from the Tsubris. The way he'd put his hand on his wife's back as if he'd been afraid of breaking her.

In opposition to it, he put the mental image of his rival punching the woman in the face. He couldn't reconcile the image in his head.

"I need to see this," Piccolo said.

Krillen opened his mouth.

"I believe you," Piccolo said before the monk could speak. "But I need to see it for myself. Stay with Gohan."

Before Krillen could argue, Piccolo closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and looked for an energy signature that did not belong. It was closer than he would have liked, moving toward Poazu.

Piccolo took a short run to get into the air. As the desert spun away beneath him, he thought he heard Krillen yell, "But what the heck do I tell Gohan?"

Piccolo ignored him.


The forest trail was uneven and difficult to run on. For what felt like the hundredth time in the past few minutes, Cymbal slowed to a walk, resting his hand against a tree for balance. His lungs were burning pitifully early; his limbs, while fully grown-in, still felt rubbery and stiff from all the time he'd been forced to spend lying around. It was, he decided, a little bit like trying to work out when you're drunk and half asleep. He shook his head irritably and decided if he was going to be this out of shape, he might as well be human.

Of course, if he was going to be human, he thought he'd probably need to bang his head on a tree for a while to get the mindset right. Living with that woman and the little girl had been like a case study on the suicidally insane as far as Cymbal was concerned. Take that morning, for instance. He had been sitting in the living room – for reasons he did not understand – while the girl pushed buttons on a box that apparently made a small, red-clad man drive a golf cart (he wished he was kidding).

The woman came into the living room. She had smiled brightly at him, which Cymbal was rapidly coming to recognize as a bad sign. He looked at her warily.

The woman said something he couldn't follow. She was wearing an apron.

Cymbal gave her a blank look. He flinched as he heard something else explode on-screen.

The woman shrugged, but didn't seem less smiley. She came over, took his hand in both of hers, and gave him a firm pull toward the kitchen.

Cymbal sighed. "Insert obligatory protests about demons and kitchens."

Predictably, the woman ignored him. Cymbal wondered if he had not in fact died in the river and this was the form that Hell had chosen to take for him, but he did not voice this. "So, lady," he said.

She didn't miss a beat. She handed him a mixing bowl and a spoon.

"I don't know if you've noticed. But that kid's hit everything on that course."

She cracked two eggs, dumped in some flour.

"I mean, sometimes she crashes into the same thing three or four times."

She patted his hand as if to say not-to-worry. Then she dumped in a cup of sugar.

"And I was wondering…is she going to drive one of these days?"

She added a cup of milk.

"Because I don't mind telling you, the thought of that? Scares me."

He winced at the sound of another explosion from the living room. "Then again," he said dryly, "she might have some career openings in my old line of work."

The woman gestured to the bowl, then to the spoon, and Cymbal suddenly realized what was happening. "Oh no," he said. He shoved the bowl and spoon toward her. "This isn't happening."

The woman had, without flustering, without concern, pushed the bowl and the spoon back at him. This had continued for several minutes. Finally, in exasperation, Cymbal had all but bellowed, "I am NOT baking COOKIES!"

The woman had looked up at him with such a clear expression of surprise, concern, and hurt that he'd actually been afraid she was going to cry like one of the crazy women on the soap operas, who can go from zero to sprinkler in twelve seconds flat. And he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do about that – if he was supposed to smack her around until the hysterics stopped, as had always been standard procedure when he was dealing with POW's, or if he should pat her on the back or magically produce flowers like those idiots on television, or if there was some kind of written protocol for women who were leaking.

Cymbal had rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. He'd picked up the bowl. And he'd started stirring.

A few hours later, there were cookies (which he slipped to the donkey when no one was looking. He had no idea what the Hell cookies would do to his digestive system, and he had no intention of finding out). And a little after that, he'd slipped out for a run, mostly to clear his head.

It probably would have worked better if he hadn't had company. Already, he could hear the small footsteps getting closer, and pretty soon, the girl had caught up to him.

She was wearing the same workout clothes she wore to chase her ball around, and she was clearly more winded than he was. Her small face was flushed almost the color of the little cart-man's clothes, and her ponytail was coming undone. She almost stumbled when she stopped beside him.

Cymbal looked over at the kid appraisingly. He was far from the top of his game, but he figured they were about a mile out from the house. He hadn't expected her to make it that far.

He thought about telling her to buzz off, but that never helped anyway. Instead, he pushed off the tree, took a deep breath, and took off for the house. He didn't have the muscle control for a sprint or anything close to a sprint, but he had longer legs than a human, and out-of-shape for him was still a pretty damning pace for a girl with maybe a two-foot stride. He heard the footsteps get fainter and fainter as he stretched himself out.

He left her well behind him. When he got back to where the trail fed into the yard, he couldn't even see her – just a winding strip of dirt that disappeared into trunks and tree branches. And he almost went back to the house, but something made him wait, arms crossed, in the place between sunlight and shade. He wanted to see if she finished.