Goku had carried her over the threshold a long time ago. He'd walked with her up the hill that had been covered in new spring grass, almost so green that you couldn't stand to look at it, and he'd smiled at her with such shy intensity that she'd caught her breath.
Chichi had never been really beautiful - not like Bulma with her exotic hair and traffic-stopping hips, not like Launch with her Bonnie-and-Clyde posture. She'd been plump as a girl and grown up stocky and strong, and she'd given up any hope that a boy was ever going to look at her that way. She'd learned to punch instead, to her father's alternating pride and despair. "Honey," he'd said, "I love you and what you do, but you'll scare anything away that's sensible."
Goku hadn't been sensible, that - he did crazy things, and he only ever seemed to pause to wonder why no one else did them. And, the day after their wedding, standing at the top of the hill they'd built their house on together, he'd said, sheepish as any schoolboy, "Can I pick you up?"
Chichi had smoothed her hands over her skirt, feeling strangely self-conscious...he hadn't known what getting married was, had been all around the world with Bulma, who was cheerleader-light and perfect, and she felt that, when he picked her up, he'd feel as if he'd somehow been cheated. "Well, obviously you can," she'd started. "It's just that you might not..."
That quickly, she was off the ground, and he carried her through the door as if he was just carrying an armful of flowers and not a grown woman. Unsure what to do with her hands, she'd caught her arms around his neck, and he'd winked at her as if to say hey, I don't know what we're doing either, but we're at least doing it together.
She had decided in that moment that she was going to love him for the rest of her life.
As she was carried over her threshold for the second time, by a man who only looked like Son Goku, she reflected grimly that she may have been a little more accurate in her assessment than she'd first thought.
This was, of course, different, like a cursed-mirror version of the first time, because this man wasn't Goku, and the way he carried her in over his shoulder was all business. He dropped her like the dead weight she felt like, and she landed on the floor on her hands and knees, glaring at his back as if she might set it on fire if she tried hard enough.
The other man - Saiyan, she thought, like Raditz - ignored her entirely, as if she were beneath his notice. He looked instead at the walls...the pictures she had straightened lovingly before she'd gone to see Roshi about getting proper training. He walked slowly from place to place, tapping at the lense on his face in an odd way until she realized it meant he was taking pictures. He was photographing her photographs, likely storing them as some scientists snap pictures of canyons, and that knowledge banked the coals of her anger all over again.
"Where is he?" the man asked. He tapped a picture of her husband.
"Dead," she snapped.
He gave her a bored look over his shoulder that said he no more believed her than he would have if she'd told him the man had sprinkled fairy dust on himself and disappeared. "I can make you tell me," he said with quiet confidence.
Chichi stood up slowly. As she had all those years ago, she smoothed her hands down her skirt - though this one was slit up the sides and worn over sturdy breeches. She clenched her bleeding fists and smiled at him. "I'd like to see you try," she said.
The man pursed his lips, and he seemed to be deciding how to do just that when the lense on his face lit up with numbers, and his expression turned dangerous.
"Don't go anywhere," he warned her, tapping his scouter. "I'll only find you again and break your legs for you."
She was proud of the look she gave him, which was, she was sure, the kind of look that only a mother could give - complete disappointment.
Against all expectation, he winked at her - achingly like Goku. And then he walked out the door, which was, she thought bitterly, also achingly like Goku.
She wondered who had been stupid enough to come here after them - Krillen, maybe, for as much as she liked her husband's small friend, he was not naturally brave. She knew very well that he had a lot of courage in there somewhere, but it sometimes took him a while to find it.
When she looked out the door around Turles, though, she saw someone unexpected - Piccolo, who was standing in her front yard with an unreadable expression on his face.
What was he doing here? How had he known?
It was like one of his worse nightmares, Piccolo decided, when the Saiyan - because what the Hell else could it be - stepped out of the tiny house with an eerie smirk on his face. Because, down to the size and shape, it was Son Goku absolutely, the question-mark tail, the impossible hair, but if so, this was the negative version of his dead rival, and his aura made his skin crawl.
"Back so soon, Son?" he growled, even though he knew - knew - this couldn't be him. The others had fallen for it. Maybe if he seemed to as well, it would make his new enemy over-confident.
The other smirked at him in a way that reminded him of Raditz, hungry and sure. "What can I say. I'm easily distracted."
"It's good to see you," he said, his voice carefully measured as he walked forward.
The Saiyan's grin, if anything, was more sure. This was like a game to him, Piccolo thought, like a game of cards when you know you have a winning hand already. "You too," he said - and was it Piccolo's imagination, or did the monkey actually run his tongue over his teeth like a wolf watching a baby deer?
We're all the way through the looking glass, here, Piccolo thought. He offered a hand to the newcomer with unfeigned awkwardness - shaking hands was a stupid human custom he was NEVER going to take to - and said, "I wanted to apologize for before."
The Saiyan positively beamed at him. "Sure, old friend," he said, mirroring Piccolo's gesture with none of his disquiet.
Piccolo allowed his expression to become startled - he looked over Turles's shoulder in naked alarm, which quickly turned to a smirk as the Saiyan whipped around.
He dug his chi-infused claws into the alien's unprotected stomach and ripped.
If Turles had been powered up, behind that powerful chi-shield of his, it would never have worked. As it was, the other fighter was fast enough to twist away from the blow before it could sink to killing-depths, his too-familiar face twisting up in pain and ugly, base hatred in a way that Piccolo flat refused to acknowledge. No distractions. He had an opening, and he had to use it.
Chichi was not a fainter, but at the sight of what was happening in her yard, she had to catch herself hard against her kitchen table. She tried, with her rational mind, to remind herself that what she was seeing, what she was watching right now, wasn't actually the nightmare she'd had since well before she married her husband. She wasn't watching her husband getting systematically ripped apart by a demon, for all that's what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like. She was watching a demon fighting with the alien who had killed Master Roshi and stolen her.
She wondered, horribly, what Piccolo thought was happening - was he, in his mind, sinking his claws like that into an imposter or into Goku? Was he snarling and clawing that way because he thought it was her husband or because he knew it wasn't?
There was no way to know.
The fight was, ultimately, very brief - she could tell from the way the sun had been setting when it started and still setting when it finished - even though it seemed as though it took a hundred years. They never left the ground, never went into the air at all; it was a true Blitz attack, no subtlety, no maneuvers. She did see, as the Saiyan stumbled backward, a moment when he ignored Piccolo completely, his face - split open now, bleeding - pressed into an expression of concentration that tore at her heart as he pressed his scouter and snapped something into it in a language she didn't understand.
Piccolo's hand raked across his face again, and she heard the Saiyan's neck snap with an audible pop.
Piccolo stood still for a moment after the Saiyan fell, breathing hard as if he were a horse that had just run itself out. The Saiyan was dying, he could see that - would have expected it anyway from the amount of blood on his hands, his arms, the cut-up remains of his shirt. It had been too easy - this creature had been stronger than Raditz, he'd sensed that right away. Arrogant, sure, which contributed to part of his success...but even a blitz-attack on Raditz would not have been this successful.
That meant at least that he was stronger - that his fights with his brothers and his frequent need to dive for cover in training his volatile pupil were giving him some benefit.
It should have given him the same grim satisfaction he was used to when he increased his strength - but instead, he felt only nausea and an unexpected urge to wash his hands until they'd been scoured of at least a layer of skin.
He turned away from the body, closing his eyes, searching for some of the control that had been too damned elusive lately.
He didn't know how long he'd stood there when the woman cleared her throat behind him.
"What," he snapped, ashamed of the rawness in his own voice.
She was quiet for a long time - so long that he'd had time to wrap the too-abused tatters of his own dignity around himself like a straight jacket. He turned to face her.
He then promptly cursed his lack of experience with humans, because her expression was nothing he recognized.
They stood silently in the yard until the last, eerie light of sunset faded from the eggshell-colored house. He couldn't help but notice that she was doing almost the same thing he was - clutching onto her composure just by her very fingernail tips, but not willing to let it go completely yet.
We share a set of afflictions, he thought dryly. Pride and Son Goku. Those two things don't seem to coexist very well.
"Where's my son?" she asked.
"With me," he said
She drew herself up, brittle. "You had no right."
"I know."
The night was gaining strength around them; the dusk insects had started to sing.
"He needs his mother," she said. There was steel in her, he noticed with some admiration, despite the unsteadiness in how she was standing and the dried tears on her face. He thought that Son would have been proud of her, and that cut, too.
"His father, too," Piccolo said bluntly, because admiring or not, facts were facts. "I don't see that happening any time soon, either."
He expected her to be angry. Instead, she gave him an oddly approving nod, as if that was exactly what she'd expected him to say. "You've been training him," she said.
Piccolo shrugged one shoulder. "Trying," he said.
She smirked at him with no trace of humor. "Well, you're no turtle hermit, but you might have to do."
Piccolo decided he was offended on at least three immediate levels, and decided to jump on the biggest affront first, "I'll have to do?!" he snapped.
Chichi shrugged. "You wouldn't have been my first choice."
Piccolo almost asked who her first choice was, but decided firmly against it - he didn't know if you could actually explode from indignation, and he wasn't in a hurry to find out. "Fine," he growled, and he turned to go.
"Wait," she said, and damnit, he did.
"What," he growled.
"I want to see him."
He had at least expected THAT. "No," he said. "Not until we're done. He's been coddled too much already."
...the ensuing glare probably should have set him on fire, but at least she didn't argue right away. He could see her turning it over and over in her head before she swallowed it like an unpleasant medicine. "How long?" she asked.
Piccolo didn't know. Seeing Turles had reminded him of an unpleasant, near-death conversation he'd had with Kami, one he'd hoped, in a somehow-optimistic back corner of his mind, had been a dream. He knew better, now...and even if he hadn't had that warning, he knew that Turles had, before he killed him, sent some sort of message somewhere. "Until it's over," he said. "That's all I know."
The woman swallowed that, too. Then she lifted her chin at him and he experienced another sharp, sinking feeling of dread.
"Then when can you and I start?"
Piccolo knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was gaping at her like an idiot, but he couldn't seem to stop. "Start what?" he asked, hoping he didn't sound as helpless as he felt.
"I was at Roshi's to train," she said. "Just for things like this - and to get my son back from you."
Piccolo put his hand over his eyes. "No," he said. "Not under pain of...what the Hell is the matter with you people?"
"If something bad is going to happen, you want more help, not less of it," she said.
"I can't train you," he said. Hell, I can't even train your damned kid, and he's got enough raw potential that HE should be a walk in the PARK! He thought bitterly.
"Once a week," she said, her eyes flashing. "Once a month. Whenever you have time."
"Does no one on this rat trap understand the word no?" he asked.
She stared at him, unflinching, until his shoulders hunched slightly in defeat. Then she smiled at him - a cold, unhappy smile that gave him no hope at all.
"So," She said with false brightness, "Tomorrow, then?"
"So, obviously, I'm going to die alone and I should just accept it," Hina said. She was carrying her soccer ball under her arm for once instead of chasing it back and forth on the dirt path that came up to their house from the bus stop, her small face screwed up in a scowl.
Cymbal, who was walking back from the bus stop with her for reasons he couldn't begin to wrap his damned head around, rolled his eyes up and left and said nothing. He'd understood most of what she and her mother said for a while now, but he hadn't gotten around to answering back yet - not that it seemed to deter the kid, any. She'd chatter away at him for hours about everything from history class to which color socks she should wear to practice, none of which he actually cared one damn whit about, but there you are
"Do you know why?" she asked, her small, freckled face a study in serious resentment that would make him laugh if he wasn't careful.
Cymbal schooled his face in "bored" and pretended to look at the trees.
"Because I'm not pretty," she said.
And what the Hell does that have to do with anything? Cymbal wondered with the part of his mind that was listening - the rest was in trying to decide how long it would take to walk the two miles back to the house at this pace, and whether or not he could foist the role of "listening ear" on the donkey as soon as they got close enough. She chattered at the little animal in much the same way that she'd ramble on at Cymbal, which, among other things, made him seriously worry about her lack of social development with her own species.
"I mean, I already knew that, I just didn't realize how bad it was. I heard some of the guys talking today, though - they said I looked like a boy. Then they laughed about it."
Cymbal idly reflected that humans were even dumber than he'd thought. He wasn't claiming any level of expertise, here, but even he could clearly see that she was female. Weren't they learning anything at that stupid school?
"I bet you never had to worry about looking like a girl," she said.
Well, you got me there, he thought.
"I wish you could talk back sometimes," she said, shaking her head so that her hair - freshly cropped for soccer season and, if he were being honest, kind of boyish now - shook down around her face. "Mom says you don't understand much yet, but I think you do - right?"
He was careful not to betray that he understood with even a twitch, keeping his attention everywhere but on her.
She smiled and shook her head. "So anyway, no one's going to ask me to the spring dance - not that I want to go, because it sounds stupid, and I'd rather try to get my grades up for fall than go dress shopping - and I'm going to die alone with twenty cats."
Cymbal's brow creased before he could help it. What's the deal with the cats? By what fucked-up equation does "dying alone" lead to some kind of vermin infestation?
The girl kept on going, though, with no handy explanations as to what relevance cats had to her plight. "Then again, mom's headed that way, and she doesn't seem to mind. She says she's too busy to find somebody, but I think she just misses my dad too much."
Right - "dad." These mammals lived in insular family units. Where was this "dad" she'd mentioned?
"He died when I was really little," she said like she was stating facts, not like she was grieving. "I barely remember him, so I don't mind too much, but it's best for mom if we don't talk about him." She winked at him. "Of course, I can always trust you to keep quiet, right?"
Cymbal, of course, kept quiet.
Hina smiled at him awkwardly and ran her hand through her (still unfamiliarly short) hair. "Mom says I look like him, but I can't tell from the pictures. She said we both look 'stubborn.' He was a soldier, you know."
Cymbal stopped walking.
Hina didn't even notice that her friend had stopped walking with her until she'd taken several more steps, chattering about how her dad had been in the service of the king once upon a time. She turned around to see where he'd gone and saw that he was just...standing, for all the world like he'd forgotten to keep his feet moving. He had an odd look on his face, too - like he'd never seen her before.
"Hello," she'd said, waving her hand over her head in a motion exaggerated enough to flag down an airplane. "Earth to...do you know how weird it is I still don't know your name?"
He opened his mouth like he was going to speak, and she felt an odd surge of excitement - but then he didn't, and she sighed, trying not to let her disappointment show through too clearly. It's not like he could help not speaking her language. "Come on," she said, walking back to him, "Mom'll want me to get the meat thawing for dinner, at least - you're gonna make me late."
He still didn't move. He just looked at her - right at her, with none of that staring-past-her stuff that he usually did - and she got the oddest feeling that he was maybe a wrong word from walking off into the forest or something.
With an exaggerated sigh, she reached up - yes up - for his hand. Hina was gawky and tall for ten, but she still had to reach up to get his hand when it was above his waist, which she thought was either unfair or a sign that her friend would be the best basketball player possibly in the world. "You're worse than a little brother," she said, taking his hand in hers carefully, half afraid he'd pull it away or walk off like he still looked like he was going to. "Or not worse...more trouble, anyway," she muttered, giving his hand a gentle tug.
He did not step forward. Instead, he knelt down in front of her so suddenly that it was ultimately just her grip on his hand that kept her from tumbling backward.
"Hey!" she said, flustered, as her dropped soccer ball rolled down the path and into the ditch. "You could give someone a little warning."
He, of course, said nothing - he just looked at her with uncomfortable intensity, like he was searching for something in her face and not finding it. Even kneeling, he was nearly as tall as she was, and she scuffed her free hand through her hair again, just for something to do. "A lesser person might tell you that you're acting like a mental case right now," she said.
Unexpectedly, he smirked at her - like he'd gotten her joke - and she relaxed, because maybe he wasn't going to walk away after all. She let go of his hand and retrieved her now-muddy ball. She looked from it to the house, which she could see between the trees, then back to him. "Want to race?" she asked.
He raised a brow at her as if to say that she MUST be joking.
"I'll beat you if I get a head start," she said.
His expression was skeptical.
Still, this was more encouragement than she usually got from him. He'd lounge in the yard while she practiced her dribbling, but any efforts to coax him into games had failed completely. Even passing the ball to him only usually resulted in him standing perfectly still and letting it bounce off him with a longsuffering expression that made her feel bad and made her mom call out the window for her to stop bothering him.
Today, though, he shifted into an easy crouch like a runner and raised a brow at her. Hardly believing it, she set her ball down again and said, "Really? Okay. Twenty second head start."
He shrugged.
She crouched down beside him. "Ready?"
He didn't move.
"Set...go!' And then she was running for the house as fast as her legs would carry her.
Cymbal had watched hundreds, maybe thousands, of humans run away from him before. Some of them had even been given head starts - because he'd hated them so much that simply ripping them into their component limbs was not enough, or because a quick, easy death wouldn't coax the humans who mattered out of the underbrush to where they could be killed more conveniently. Most of them had run inefficiently, had screamed when they should have been breathing, had tripped because they were looking back over their shoulders.
For all he knew, this girl's father had been one of them.
He'd looked at her face - really looked at it - but the truth of the matter was, he'd killed too many people to remember anyone clearly, much less whether any of the faces he'd watched contort in agony had matched Hina's hazel-brown eyes, black hair, or pronounced nose. He'd put no more stock into distinguishing their facial features than he might to sorting out a nest of cockroaches.
I'll never know, he thought, and then wondered why he'd want to.
Now she was running away from him, just like her father might have before he died, but she wasn't screaming or looking back. She was laughing, her small legs a blur under her body, and yet he knew - he knew exactly how easy it would be to catch up. Knew that...no matter how hard she tried, how intensely she trained, that she would never really be able to pull away from him...remembered the absolute surety he'd felt of that, years ago, when he'd crouched and watched and smiled as his enemies had tried to escape. It had felt good, then, knowing that he'd always catch them, knowing that, even if he lost sight of them, he'd be able to smell their fear and desperation clinging to the morning grass and follow them to where they'd run themselves off their feet.
It had felt good before. He had no idea why it felt like barbed wire now.
He'd given her more than twenty seconds. She was a bright figure in the late sun, her white knee-socks catching the light like a foal's legs, and maybe it was just that he needed to face it, but he stood up, and he ran after her.
If he'd flown, of course, it would have taken less than a second, but he didn't. He ran - it wasn't a sprint, even, but the long run he'd often used to chase these creatures through the forest, because flying attracted too much attention when you were off on your own.
It was uncanny, almost, how fast he caught up to her - like she was standing still, though he knew she was running as hard as she could go, could hear her near-gasping with effort when he pulled up alongside her, even though he was barely feeling the pace himself.
She saw him from the corner of her eye and redoubled her effort, her face alarmingly red.
Feeling...odd, he slowed his pace half a jot, and let her run through the garden gate first, dropping to a walk though he wasn't even winded. She stopped, too, stumbling, catching her hands on her knees, gasping like a dying thing (and he would know). Her face when she looked up at him, though, was all glowy triumph. "Told you!" she crowed. Still leaning on her legs for support, she pumped one fist in the air. "Next time, maybe you should only give me ten seconds."
He swallowed a strange...discomfort in his throat and nodded.
"Okay," she straightened, scrubbing her hands across her face and shaking out the sweat. "I'm going to start that stuff thawing - since you lost, you have to go get my ball." There was nothing mean-spirited in the grin she gave him as she disappeared into the house.
He leaned his forehead against the garden gate and closed his eyes.
