Vegeta turned his scouter off.

He almost hadn't taken Turles's call - the low-class traitor had left to make his own way, and Vegeta sincerely hoped he choked on it. Ultimately, he'd let it ring twice, almost let it go to voicemail, but curiosity had made him click the green button at the last possible second.

Turles's voice brought him right out of the comfortable, near-doze he'd been in after his battle. It's a planet of liars, Vegeta, they can mask their chi, they're tricky...

Bright red image of a snarling creature that Vegeta vaguely recognized as a Namekian - but weren't those supposed to be peaceful? - and then the audible sound of a neck popping, and the scouter showed only grass and sky.

That's Prince Vegeta to you, you low-class upstart, he thought automatically. Turles had never been good at titles, had, if he was honest, spent too long offworld when he was young. Picked up some bad habits. Never learned proper respect...no, that wasn't right. Turles had never learned to demonstrate proper respect, never learned to use titles, never learned to bow properly. He'd also never hesitated to throw himself between Vegeta and anything he thought might harm him, no matter how little he needed protection, especially from a first-class waste of DNA like Turles.

"So, him too," Nappa muttered. What he'd seen hadn't even spoiled his appetite - he kept right on munching at the leg of some fallen insect-warrior, rolling the meat around in his mouth in a way that was both pensive and thoroughly disgusting.

"Him, too," Vegeta muttered. Raditz was careless and brash, but Turles had a head for subtlety. He was, if Vegeta was honest, downright sneaky when it came to people with higher chis than his, and that stupid planet had killed him, anyway.

It might have done the same to Vegeta, somehow, if he'd landed unprepared.

I know better now, he thought. I'll be ready.


I am in no way ready for this, Piccolo thought.

He and Goku's widow had come to one of the larger clearings around their mountain home - somewhere he wouldn't have to worry about low-hanging branches or dense brambles. His skin, of course, was more than up for it, but if he tossed Chichi into anything sharper than wild grass, she'd be cut to shreds and he'd have the discomfort of feeling bad about it. If he threw her into a tree, she'd likely break something she was going to need later.

I don't even know how this HAPPENED.

Chichi was warming up. She leaned her weight into one leg first, then the other, all the while eyeing him like he was some sort of stain she intended to scrub out of her laundry. Piccolo did not think of himself as a coward, but some part of him quailed a little at the sight of her, and he thought sourly that if all they used her for was to stare down the encroaching Saiyan menace, then those invading warriors might well think better of their damned mission and run off with their tails between their legs.

Piccolo carefully popped the knuckles of one hand, then the other.

This is crazy. I'll kill her.

"Alright," he said, trying not to sound as apprehensive as he felt. "Show me what you've got."

Unlike her son, Chichi showed no hesitation in launching at him. She came at him hard, one knee up in an extended leap, her hands flexed in an unfamiliar blade technique.

Of course, he sidestepped her easily, but she changed direction like a cat, digging one of her feet into the ground and sliding at his knees. He sidestepped that, too, and gave her a light push-kick to the back when she went by that sent her skidding, face first, through the dirt.

Piccolo winced internally. Too much.

She sprang to her feet before she'd finished plowing the trench with her face, though, and her expression was thunderous. She came right back at him, which actually put him on his heels briefly, because surely any living creature would have better sense.

"You're holding back!" She growled at him as her small fists pounded away at his forearms, as the upper parts of her boots struck against the outside of his leg blocks.

"I'm trying not to kill you," he snapped, barely pulling his face back in time to avoid a swipe. He sneaked a flat-palm strike under her guard that barely would have rattled Son or one of his brothers and winced as her body bent around it, and she stumbled back a half step to recover.

"Well, don't do me any favors," she said. Her body spun and he sidestepped her kick, taking her ankle and throwing her away from him to buy some breathing room, to stop mindlessly reacting in ways that might be fatal for his student. Even that, though, was too much - she flew almost the length of the clearing, and he put his hand over his eyes in what was, frankly, embarrassment.

Piccolo had dedicated his entire life to gaining strength because he'd needed it. Control hadn't been nearly as high on the priority list, because, at the time, he'd never been able to conceive of a situation where he'd be around humans and have a compelling reason NOT to break them in half. Now that time had come, and while his chi control was something to be admired, he found that his ability to control his physical strength was...well...

...limited.

The crazy woman was coming at him again. He had to give her credit for heart, but her style seemed to be entirely made of offense, with little regard for protecting herself. He admired her audacity, if not her sense for self-preservation.

"Say, you ever hear an old saying about discretion being the better part of valor?" he asked

Chichi tried a feint that Piccolo was never in a century going to fall for. He went over it easily and hit her with what he thought was a tap of a roundhouse. She backplanted into the ground, but showed sense enough to roll clear before he could stomp on her.

You know, if your son had this kind of aggression, it'd save me a lot of trouble, he thought sourly. But no, of course not, he had to take after his goddamned soft-hearted father instead.

Chichi managed to pop up inside his guard. He nearly took her head off out of reflex, barely stopping his talons short in time.

She, of course, didn't hesitate. She punched him square to the solar plexus with all the strength in her body.

Nothing happened.

They both looked down at her clenched fist, which was still resting solidly against his undamaged torso.

"God damnit," she cursed so suddenly that it made Piccolo jump, pulling her hand away from Piccolo and shaking it out gingerly. "What are you made of?"

Piccolo opened his mouth, closed it again. He took a deep breath to regain his composure and said, with what he thought was an admirable amount of calm, "That's enough for today."

Chichi, still with one hand carefully cradling her wrist, glared at him. "You haven't even taken your weights off yet."

"And I'm not likely to," he said. The thought of controlling his speed with her without the weights - no, that would be impossible.

"I'm not a child," she said, surly. "If this is going to work, you're going to have to take me seriously." Her wrist, he could already see, was swelling. He averted his eyes.

"I'm giving you homework," he said. He tilted his head a little, and he materialized a shirt for her - it was weighted like Goku's, and though she stumbled at first at the weight, she didn't fall down.

"Twenty miles a day," he told her with no trace of sympathy in his voice. "Up the mountain and back down, carrying as large a rock as you can. I'll be back in two weeks. If you haven't done as I've asked, I'm through wasting my time with you."

Chichi stuck her chin out at him stubbornly. "I'll run thirty," she said.

He believed her.

He almost asked how her wrist was, but she was holding it out as if it was fine, and he didn't think she'd appreciate it. He shook himself out instead and lifted off the ground. He'd left Gohan to spar with Krillen, and he suspected the small monk would need to tap out by now.

"Hey," she called after him, "Tell Gohan not to stay up too late! Remember, I'm going to have to get that boy back on his sleep schedule once you wreck it!"

Piccolo flew away quickly, pretending not to hear.


Hina sighed with relief when she could finally shimmy out onto the sturdy branch she'd seen from the ground. She lay flat against it so that she could tie the rope she'd found in the shed around it at as thick a point as she could find.

"You're going to kill yourself," Cymbal said in a bored tone of voice from the ground. Her big green friend was doing kata on the smooth bank by the river - she recognized the strange movements from some of her friends who took martial arts classes. Her classmates were all eager to show off their new moves, but she could see that none of them would have been anywhere close to Cymbal's level. He did things that she didn't think he should be able to do, even if he did sometimes still pause partway through and ruefully rub a shoulder or stretch out a knee.

"Am not!" She called down. "Lots of people do this!"

"Do what - hang themselves?" He did something that looked a little bit like a cartwheel with no hands, then struck out hard with the heels of both palms.

Hina pulled down an eyelid and stuck her tongue out at him. "Sometimes I think I liked you better before you started talking. For your information, I'm making a rope swing."

That got Cymbal to pause in his kata and eye her thoughtfully. He looked at her...then her tree...then the small cliff by the riverside that her limb hung out over.

"Kid," he asked, "Do you know what a lemming is?"

"No idea," Hina said.

"We may want to ask your mother about this. By we, I mean you. You should ask your mother about this."

Hina kept her eyes on her hands, making sure her knot was as good as she could make it. "No way am I bothering mom today," she said. "She's got a big order due, and besides, she gets sad this time of year."

Cymbal looked off as if he'd found something very interesting to look at elsewhere. "Wonder why that is," he muttered, as if he knew exactly why, but Hina didn't ask him.

"No idea. Besides, this'll be fine."

Cymbal did not look convinced.

"When did you turn into such a killjoy?" she asked. She climbed down the tree carefully, then walked over to the rope. "You didn't ever want to try something like this?"

"Well, I can fly," Cymbal said dryly, "so no."

Hina paused in her testing of the rope. "Really?"

Cymbal coughed, seemed uncomfortable. "Could, anyway. Haven't tried it since the river."

"Yeah, about that - how'd you wind up in there, anyway? And looking that chewed up?"

"Well, I did something dumb without askin' my mother," Cymbal said with a perfectly straight face.

Hina laughed. "Nice try," she said. "How really?"

Cymbal shook his head. "Never you mind. You're not seriously going to jump off a cliff, are you?"

"Unless you want to go first - wait, you might be too heavy." She eyed him speculatively. "How much do you weigh?"

Still straight-faced, he said, "Two hundred pounds."

Hina snorted. "On what, the moon?"

He flashed his teeth at her in what she was starting to see was as close to smiling as he got. "At least that science class of yours isn't completely useless. It's almost twice that."

"Maybe I better go first, then."

"Kid, if you think I'm swingin' from a rope, you got worse issues than I thought."

"Just wait until you see how much fun it is," she said. Then she took a run and she jumped.

There was a dizzying moment of pure flight, and then she heard the limb above her head snap like a gunshot, and she was falling much too soon, above the sharp rocks at the bottom of the cliff instead of the water a few feet further out.

She never hit the rocks, though.

There was a peculiar rush of air around her, like standing in an updraft, and then she hit something solid enough to knock the breath out of her. She realized a second later that Cymbal had caught her - was standing in the air with her, looking somewhere between puzzled and sour.

"Yeah," he said, "that looked like a blast."

Hina barely even heard him. She was leaning over as far as she could without falling. "You're flying," she said.

"Floating," he said gruffly.

"Still," she said, unable to keep the awe out of her voice. She looked up at him. "Can you go higher than this?"

"In theory," he said. "No higher than I can jump, though. My chi's still not as reliable as I'd like it."

She twisted her fingers in the shirt of his uniform. "Will you?" she asked.

He hesitated a moment, then shrugged one shoulder, and suddenly, they were stories up. She could see her house, the road, the bus stop as small as doll furniture. "This is amazing," she said. "If I could do this, I'd never come back down."

"Got its upsides, I guess," Cymbal said noncommittally. He began to drift down, slow as a feather - and, true to his warning, his chi sputtered in the last ten feet, and he had to catch himself, which was...jarring, but not too bad. After he put her down, though, she couldn't help but notice that he stood up more slowly than usual, seemed tired.

"Cymbal," she said quietly, not wanting to startle him. "How DID you wind up in the river?"

He looked down at her with his weird, red eyes and said, "I did something stupid. Didn't realize how stupid, even, until I met you."

"I have no idea what that means," Hina said.

"Maybe I'll get around to explaining it to you one day."


Krillen woke up flailing.

He half expected to wake up beset by demons or Saiyans or monsters wearing his best friend's face...but he was alone except for Gohan, who was sleeping across the fire from him and as dead to the world as the rocks around them.

Still, something must have woken him. Krillen tried to pinpoint it, even as he carefully moved around the firepit to settle a blanket more firmly around Gohan's shoulders. No, something had woken him - a sound like someone choking, but the only other person it could be was Piccolo, and Krillen couldn't see any sign of him.

He started looking around anyway, and ultimately, he almost tripped over him when he stepped around a bluff. The other warrior was sitting against it, his arms folded over his knees, his forehead against his forearms, and if Krillen hadn't known the posture so well from experience, then he wouldn't have known what Piccolo was doing.

He was recovering from a nightmare.

Of course, there was no especial reason why Piccolo shouldn't have the same godawful dreams that the rest of them did - he'd more than earned his share of them. It's just that Krillen had never really thought of the demon clan as losing a moment's sleep over any of the terrible things that had happened. Demons were supposed to like war and murder.

Still, the evidence was right in front of his face, and like it or not...it made Piccolo seem a lot less distant and alien.

He opened his mouth to speak.

"Go away," Piccolo said in the flattest tone of voice Krillen had ever heard, all without picking his face up from his arms.

He should have gone away.

Instead, he asked himself what Goku would do, and while he was vague on that, he knew that his oldest friend would not have gone away. So instead, with the absolute understanding that he was taking his life in his hands, he sat down next to Piccolo instead.

"Y'know," he said quietly, after they'd sat in silence for a while, "if it helps any, he ruined my life when I first met him, too."

Piccolo growled at him, quietly.

"I mean, I know you think you've got the market cornered and all, but think how I must feel about it. I'm a crazy-short guy with no nose and no money, and I'm totally awkward with women, but the one thing I had going for me was I was good at martial arts. And then I met Goku, and he passed me right up like I was standing still."

Piccolo lifted his head slightly and looked at him.

"Yeah," Krillen said. "Just...wow. And to this day, I'm still..." he held up his hand to his forehead and pretended to squint waaaaay off in the distance, "I'm still chasing him, but he's so far ahead I can barely see him, anymore."

Piccolo's head tilted slightly.

"So I'm still short. And bald. And funny looking. I still don't have money, and I'm still totally awkward with women. I don't think I'm the best martial artist I've ever met anymore. On top of that, I keep getting dragged into crazier and crazier fights with people I have no business fighting with. But guess what?"

Piccolo raised an eyeridge at him.

"I wouldn't trade it all for anything."

"At this point," Piccolo said dryly, "I'd trade the whole damned thing for a night's sleep."

"Sometimes, I feel that way, too," Krillen said. "Like I'm never going to be able to sleep again. Not that we've exactly had enough peace at one time for me to try to get back to normal, but...it's been so many years since the war, and it still hasn't gone away."

"What do you dream about?" Piccolo asked.

"Different things. The war, mostly, like I said...what the people looked like if we got there too late." He shrugged one shoulder, tiredly. "Your brothers. Dying. What about you?"

Piccolo sighed. "Almost the same things."

"Do you think it'll ever go away?" Krillen asked.

Piccolo smirked at him, though there wasn't perhaps as much of a knife's edge to it as before. "Honestly?" he said. "No."

It was Krillen's turn to sigh. "Neither do I," he said.

They sat together in the darkness that didn't have a moon and waited for daylight.