The weeks melted away - or that was how it seemed to Chichi. The first, tentative light of spring bloomed into a rainy season that left the trees wet and the ground sot. Flowers bloomed on the rocky places of the mountain in soft purples and yellows, and Piccolo, true to his word, came to train her often.
Training with him was nothing like training with her father, who had been exuberant and warm and enthusiastic. Piccolo was distant and cold. He rarely spoke except to growl at her about her guard or make caustic remarks about her odds of survival. If he stopped long enough to demonstrate a technique for her, then he was brusque and impatient - "here, no, not like that, are you blind?" - and he exploited any mistakes that she made without any hesitation that she could see.
She spent an unhealthy amount of their time training together thinking about how much she wanted to punch him right in the composed, scowling face. She even envisioned his eyes crossing in the moment before her fist shattered the obnoxiously-perfect bridge of his nose.
Not that it was ever likely to happen.
True, Chichi had always known that Piccolo and her husband were stronger than she was - but she had no idea how far they'd outpaced her in just a few years. No matter how hard she pushed herself in between his visits, she felt like she might as well have been slapping him for as much as he responded to her attacks.
Like now, for instance - she cursed as her foot sliced through air where the Namekian warrior had been a second before.
"You know, you shouldn't waste your breath," Piccolo said as he elbowed her in the side and shot past her. "You're gonna need it."
"Bastard," she said, just to show him what she thought of that advice, throwing a chi blast after him. It would barely be a bee sting if it hit him, but she was proud of herself for learning to do it.
He dodged it more out of reflex than need and threw one at her in turn - more light than punch, but it still burned her skin as she twisted away from it. "Are you this respectful to all your teachers?" he asked as he followed his chi blast in.
Chichi had to think she was doing better - he would strike at her now with less hesitation, and every blow didn't knock her down - but still she could see the strain in his muscles as he tried to contain all that damned unruly power he had, and she wanted to scream in frustration.
"Only you," she muttered, knowing he'd hear her clear as day.
She half-turned right, and then something hit her - she didn't know what, she'd barely even seen movement - and the next thing she knew, she was staring dazedly up at the cloudy sky and wondering how she'd got there.
Off to one side, she heard Piccolo say, "Damnit," under his breath, presumably to himself.
She sat up with some effort, and her lower lip felt unaccountably warm. When she touched it, her hand came away wet with blood.
She could hear the Namekian walk over to her. She looked up to find that he wasn't making eye contact - his gaze was fixed on the tree line somewhere. "Sorry," he said gruffly, offering her a hand up. It was the first time he'd ever done something like that.
Chichi looked at his hand - the thick joints, the powerful claws - and took it carefully. She let him haul her to her feet.
What followed was possibly the most awkward silence of Chichi's life. She kept on looking at the Namekian - not even damp, she noticed with irritation, not even winded - who was pointedly not looking back at her. He crossed his arms, his eyes still on the distant tree line, his jaw clenched so tight she was a little worried that one of the tendons might snap loose and put someone's eye out.
You didn't mean to hit me that hard, did you? She thought. You lost control a little, and you're angry at yourself.
She looked down at the front of her training clothes, already dotted with blood from her nose and lip, and said as briskly as she could manage, "Well, this is a fine mess you've made - you might as well come in while I get cleaned up."
"...excuse me?"
Chichi rolled her eyes, put on her best mom-voice, and said, "Did I stutter?" She put both hands on her reluctant martial arts instructor and herded him up the hill toward her house.
Fortunately, he was too stunned to dig his heels in - at least until she already had him inside, and then he caught himself and huffed like an unwilling dog that had been plunked into a bath.
"Tea?" she asked brightly.
Piccolo looked at her, finally - visibly wondering if he'd knocked something loose when he'd hit her. "Sounds...fine," he ventured warily before finding a spot on the wall to look at.
Chichi realized that the man she'd been scrapping in her yard with for the past several weeks, for all his power and abilities and stony composure, had no more idea how to interact with people in a nonviolent way than he would have known how to arrange flowers.
Incongruously, her husband flitted through her memory, his face a jumble of confusion as he explained to her, hand-in-hair, that he'd thought marriage was some kind of food.
Her heart knotted up all at once, and she turned away from him to compose herself. She filled a tea kettle with water and put it on the stove. "Don't go anywhere," she warned him as she walked into her room to change, her eyes unaccountably stinging. She absently hoped that he wouldn't be able to smell the salt the way that Goku always had - not that her poor husband had ever known what to do with tears, aside from look at her with naked confusion and ask, gently, if he'd hurt her, if he'd done something wrong.
Chichi braced her hands on her dresser and tried to think in straight lines, but her mind was lilly-jumping. Her Goku, who had never been quite right, never reacted as he should...her husband sitting on the floor while Gohan, much younger, sobbed disconsolately over some broken toy and clutched at his father's shirt. The way that Goku had looked at her, baffled.
Her poor, alien husband, who'd never realized that he wasn't human, had always just thought he was damaged, and they'd all helped him right along with thinking that, hadn't they? But then she'd met Raditz and Turles, and she'd learned a little something of the species he must have come from - a cold, predatory race that seemed not to connect closely with anyone, not even each other. A group of near-animals that didn't even raise their own children, but sent them off to space to fend for themselves.
She thought again of Goku - his gently puzzled expression the first time she gave him his son to hold. No wonder the poor thing had been so clueless. She'd chalked most of his confusion and awkwardness up to naivety before...she wondered now how much of it had been him trying to do things that were unnatural for him.
Was he even capable of the kind of life they'd both thought they wanted?
Her eyes spilled over. She swiped at them angrily, then ran some water in her sink, splashing the coldness over her face until she was uniformly red and splotchy. She didn't want Piccolo to think she'd been in here crying like a little girl because he'd hit her too hard.
She dried her face, swept her damp hands through her hair to calm it, and changed her clothes. In the kitchen, she heard the tea kettle start to whistle. "Steady, girl," she told herself.
She walked out of her bedroom like a champ, half-expecting Piccolo to have exercised some sense and escaped. Instead, she found him still standing in the middle of her kitchen - but the big warrior was looking at some of the pictures on her wall with an expression she didn't understand. She followed his gaze to a cluster of photographs of Goku and Gohan.
"They looked more alike when he was smaller," she said.
Piccolo, much to her disappointment, didn't jump. He just nodded once and gave her an uncertain, sidelong look.
You have no idea how to make pleasant conversation, do you?
She wondered how they'd ever managed to communicate, this man and her husband - because Goku tripped over his words and stuttered and said one thing when he meant another, and Piccolo, unless he was insulting you, seemed disinclined to talk at all.
"Won't you sit down?" she asked him, gesturing at their table.
He eyed her furniture mistrustfully. "I'll stand," he said.
"Suit yourself." She handed him a cup of steaming tea and watched with interest as he took it - he held it like you might hold a bubble you were trying not to pop, and she thought she'd never seen a living creature look so uncomfortable.
"...in fact, I should be going," he muttered, looking anywhere but at her.
"Of course," she said, "you're very busy. I just have a question before you go."
He raised an eyeridge at her.
"Are you helping me because of my husband?"
She had the satisfaction of seeing him nearly drop the cup she'd put in his hands - he fumbled for a second, then tried to pretend he hadn't.
"Why?" she asked.
The Namekian sighed, his shoulders slumping forward slightly. "I don't have words for what you're asking," he said. He looked at her, finally, and his eyes were sad. "I can't explain. I'm sorry."
"So he was your friend?" she ventured.
He shook his head slowly. "It's funny," he said, "that you'd think I know what that is. I don't. I was..." he faltered, took a deep breath, "I was hurt badly once, and he helped me...which complicated my life far beyond what I consider reasonable. When my own family - my people - would have written me off as collateral damage, he put himself through a lot of trouble to keep me breathing."
Piccolo set his cup down with ridiculous care, as if he were handling an eggshell. "I don't know how you repay something like that," he finished, quietly. "And I...I should go."
She made no move to stop him as he swept out the door, cape fluttering like a cloud in a high wind.
Cymbal stood at the bus stop with his arms crossed. The rain was cold and constant; the river was an oppressive roar in his ears, and the bus was late.
That by itself wasn't too unusual. Frankly, if all human children were anything like Hina, Cymbal was astonished that anyone ever managed to herd a group of them anywhere, with or without delays. He felt restless all the same, though - the river was high, snow was melting in the mountains, and every animal instinct in him warned him to get to high ground. This low, there would be mudslides and floods to deal with.
Fine time to be late, kid, he thought, eyeing the rising water with a growing sense of unease.
The unease condensed to an unpleasant knot when he heard Ami come running out of her house. Ami was obviously to him the kind of woman who was more inclined to read than run a marathon - she looked ungainly doing it, and he might have offered her some tacit advice, except that her face was a mask of worry.
"Come with me," she said, "quickly, please, there's trouble."
"What kind of trouble," he asked - he'd spoken to her only a few times, found her more difficult to talk to than her daughter for some reason.
"You'll see," she said, and the bloodless way she pressed her lips together made him bite down further questions.
She all but dragged him up the road.
Of course, he knew what she meant him to see as soon as he saw it - the river had swelled up over its banks, trapping the bus. It sat on a small hill, so the water had only come up to its axles or so...but Cymbal had some experience with human vehicles during the war, and he realized that the heavy vehicle had likely sunk up to its wheel rims in mud.
The good news was that there was no immediate danger. The bad news was that the river might rise again, and if the damned thing turned over, he suspected it'd fill with water as fast as any empty bottle.
The Hell is wrong with them - why don't they just walk to higher ground?
The answer came to him quickly enough - the swirling water, which he wouldn't think twice about walking through, would carry any human away, would crack them against rocks and drag them under the surface despite grasping hands and the frantic clutching they would do at anything that might save them. He'd seen it before, caused it before, thrown them into swollen rivers or churning oceans like some fishermen toss carp, and those had been healthy, grown men.
Cymbal sighed. "Fine," he told Ami, "but this never happened." And he walked into the water.
"Be careful!" she called from the bank, staring with real fear at the river.
Be careful of what? he thought. It was cold, of course - chunks of ice and snow rolled with the current, tumbled down from the tops of mountains - but to him, grown in the Tsubris, it was barely unpleasant. He walked through the thigh-deep, then waist-deep flood waters as if they were nothing to him (because they weren't) until he could walk up the small hill to the bus.
It was deeper than expected. The water still swirled up past his knees.
He knocked on the door.
When it swung open, though, he had a surprise, for there almost in front of his nose was the muzzle of an Uzi.
"Huh," he said.
"Back away," said the bus driver.
Once Cymbal's eyes adjusted to the relative darkness of the bus, he could see that the driver was...older, overweight. That he had only one leg, and a glass eye. That he was looking at Cymbal with the grim expression of a man who knows exactly what he's looking at.
Cymbal put his hands up in what he hoped was a placating gesture. "Now look," he said, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice, "I don't want trouble."
The bus driver scoffed audibly. "These are just kids," he said. "Just babies. Even the likes of you..."
"If you know what I am, you know how damned useless that thing is," Cymbal said. "You'll shoot, I'll dodge, and then I'm going to rip that gun out of your hands and beat you to death with it, which is..."
"...a damn sight better than just rolling over." The bus driver audibly clicked the safety off.
Cymbal rolled his eyes heavenward and counted to ten. "I'm not here to kill anyone," he said. "I'm here for..."
"Cymbal!" Hina called from the back of the bus.
Cymbal put his hand over his eyes. "Great," he muttered.
The bus driver's expression darkened further, as he recognized his name. Cymbal could practically feel the air depress as he squeezed the trigger.
Fortunately for him, his speed hadn't deserted him completely - he was on the bus with the Uzi in his hand before the bullet had even buried itself in the bank.
The bus driver, who had gone white, still had enough presence of mind to spit at him.
Cymbal briefly entertained a very satisfying mental image of smacking the man across his broad face with the butt end of the gun.
"Hina, get up here," he said instead. "You're late for dinner, you're grounded until you're thirty, and we're leaving."
The bus driver gaped at him, mouth opening and closing soundlessly, as if he were a large trout.
The girl ran up the aisle of the bus, but she stopped just out of picking-up range. She put her small hands on her hips and gave him a reproachful look that she must have learned from her mother. "What about the rest of us?" she asked.
Cymbal raised a brow at her. "Pardon?"
Hina looked over her shoulder at the other children - the ones he was just now noticing - who were clutching at the ugly olive-colored bus seats and staring at him like he was from outer space (which he was, he guessed, but it made it no less damned unsettling to be on the end of). "You can't just leave them here," she said.
Cymbal felt that he was losing control of the situation somehow. "Why not," he asked, aware that he sounded petulant.
"Cymbal!"
"The fire department or the police or...someone will be here any damned minute, there's no need for..."
"Then why aren't you letting ME wait for them?" she asked.
Because I happened to be in the neighborhood...because you're already late...because...shit, because it's dangerous and you know it, and you're not letting me off that easy, are you? Cymbal felt his shoulders slump forward in defeat. "Will it shut you up?" he asked.
Hina beamed at him. He retreated, because he didn't need to deal with THAT.
"Close the door," he advised the still-stunned bus driver, who did so.
"Fucking perfect," he muttered, eyeing the vehicle. It was heavy and awkward, but six months ago, he could have flown the damned thing wherever he wanted. Hell, he could've thrown it as far as the opposite bank if he really felt like it.
Now, he wasn't so sure. He'd been healing steadily, but...
He eyed the stretch of churning water from the small hill the bus was on to the safety of the bank with some trepidation. He didn't know.
"More trouble than you're worth, kid," he muttered, moving around to the back of the bus, and promptly catching himself against it as a new surge of flood water gushed up around him. He could hear the grinding sound of the wheels scooting along the road.
Alright. Fine. So there wasn't time to fret about it.
Cymbal leaned his back against the bus, hooking his hands under the bumper. He tested his footing on the road and, once he had it, he pushed.
Nothing happened.
Well, shit.
He adjusted his grip and tried again - he could hear the faint grind, again, of the wheels rocking against the sunken road, but the bus stayed stuck.
Come on, it's not that heavy.
He shifted so that he was facing the dusky yellow metal and put his weight into it.
The Hell is the matter with me - it's NOT that heavy.
The bus finally lurched forward, and he went with it, moving to the side opposite the current. The bus became easier to move as the water got deeper, but it got harder to control, too - it was too long and, like a canoe turned sideways in the stream, it wanted to flip on him. It made for slow going. He felt like he had never done anything this painstakingly slowly in his life, but finally, he felt the resistance of dry ground and, with another shoulder-shove, pushed the bus free of the floodwaters.
He resisted the urge to flop down on the bank, because...well. Dignity.
Only then did his focus abate enough to see that he had a problem on his hands. There were cars where there hadn't been before. Fire trucks. People milling around the vehicles, pointing and murmuring, their expressions unsettled.
He barely even heard the wooshing sound of the bus door opening, barely noticed when Hina ran to his side and said, gleefully, "That was easily the coolest thing I've ever seen - you just moved a whole bus."
In a perfect world, of course, someone would have started clapping. Cymbal could see already that this wasn't going to go that way. People were reaching into their cars for things. People were sharing silent, grim looks. Ami, who had run down to the bus when it had reached the bank, moved subtly between Cymbal and the crowd as if she could hide him, which he could have told her was stupid. He was easily three times her size - it's not like they weren't going to see him.
"What's their problem?" Hina asked.
Cymbal could barely hear her - the blood was already pounding in his ears. He shook his head out, took a deep breath. "Get away from me," he said in a low voice that wouldn't carry.
She looked up at him in shock. "What?".
They were starting to band together up top, starting to move forward, drawing courage from their numbers. Cymbal flexed his hands absently, felt his claws extend...and was dimly aware of the way that Hina looked at them, her eyes wide, perhaps realizing for the first time what he could use them for.
"Cymbal," she said urgently, "what's happening."
"What's happening is that you need to get the Hell away from me," he snapped. "The both of you, right now."
Ami looked at Cymbal with water in her eyes - but she grabbed Hina, who was too shocked to fight her, and dragged her away to the other side of the bus.
Which was at least one less damned thing to worry about.
More people were arriving, with the roiling sound that warned of a growing mob, and on one level, he knew what to do. Sure, there were a lot of them, and sure, he wasn't as strong as he should be - but they were humans and fragile, and he stood a good chance of fighting through them. His chances would be better if he fired a blast into the milling children first. It was what his father would have suggested - the humans on the hill would be too shocked, too horrified, to be effective.
Then why did his stomach knot at the idea?
Not like you got a wealth of other choices here, he thought grimly - there was water to either side of him, people in front, and he didn't trust his chi for flying. Plowing straight through was equally stupid...no matter how small or fragile they were, they could bury him with numbers. He'd seen it happen.
The other option was surrender, but that was no option at all. They'd either tear him to pieces or set him on fire - or worse, haul him away to some sterile place with scalpels and wires.
He did something he'd never done in his life.
He tried to diffuse a situation.
He put both his hands up slightly, much as he'd done with the bus driver. "Steady now," he said, "We don't have to do this."
He might've said nothing for all the reaction he got.
He tried again: "I don't want to fight you."
No one seemed to believe him - not that he was especially shocked. He didn't even believe himself.
He could distantly hear Hina, from where her mother was, sensibly, dragging her farther away: "What are they doing - no, let me go!"
They were coming toward him in a slow, amoebic press. He backed up a step and felt the water lapping at his heels.
The answer came to him suddenly, and he didn't take the time to second guess himself. He charged up a chi blast and threw it into the ground practically at his own feet.
Results were spectacular . Dirt and water erupted in all directions, smoke and dust choked the air - and Cymbal jumped head first into the flood water, disappearing under the brackish surface with barely a ripple.
