AN: Multiple wishes would be many years off!
Am I getting the implication right that the One Piece world is hell? Because I could kind of jive with that.
The Next Dimension Over
Chapter Fifty-nine
She didn't say anything.
After the three words she'd said in the room, she didn't say anything else. She walked perfectly fine, stood up and left the room quicker than any of them when the old crone dismissed them, but she said nothing else. Goku chattered, Bulma asked questions, and she still didn't say anything. She didn't even pointedly ignore them, didn't go out of her way to avoid answering or looking at them, or addressing them. She just didn't say anything, and eventually they stopped.
Well, Bulma stopped. Goku...got quiet, and then started talking to someone else. But that was basically the same thing. He didn't even try talking to her. It wasn't like she made a great habit of listening to him normally. If she wouldn't answer Goku, talking to her would have been a waste of his breath.
She didn't look at anyone, either. She just...walked, got onto the Nimbus cloud thing, and then...stared at her hands. She didn't even have an expression. She didn't look sad, she didn't frown. Her eyes were red, but she didn't seem to be actively crying. She didn't even look...surprised? Distraught? She didn't look like she had any kind of strong emotion at all. If he didn't know her better, she would have looked...about normal. For a quiet person.
It creeped him out.
It worried him more than he wanted it to.
That...that kind of pissed him off. What the hell was 'gone'? What was it of hers that she could have lost that the old crone could 'show' her? Why did she need to know it? How did the old woman even know what people needed to know and not, anyway, if she went and asked them what they wanted? Why was it so important? If it was broken, couldn't she just wish it back or something? Weren't dragonballs designed specifically for that kind of thing?
She wasn't the kind of person to react badly to a crush that could never be, right? She...wasn't even the kind of person to get those kind of feelings, probably. She wouldn't have gone asking about it even if she were, would she? Or was it something that could be?
Ugh...he couldn't even keep up with his own head about what it could be anymore.
Why didn't she just explain herself?
Why...
Why did she look so...blank? She never looked blank. Blank wasn't neutral!
He rubbed his face in his hands and sat back in the plane with an aggrieved sigh. "I don't know what the heck her problem is." Seriously, he'd been wasting way too much time on thinking about her problem. They still had to get those stupid wishing orb things, fight off a bigger orb with guns on it, and...do whatever it was they were supposed to be doing with them. Bring the sour woman back to whatever place she came from, or find her country while looking.
Yamcha, who still sat in the pilot seat despite not being the one who bought it, shook his head. "I'm not sure...but I think it's a safe guess to say it's something about her home."
"Her home?" He frowned. But...what did 'they' have anything to do with her home or going there? She'd always been pretty vague about where she supposedly came from, so he couldn't think of anything specific that might mean...them. They. Did the letter make a difference? How did that have anything to do with that damn fortune teller when Sakura didn't even have the money to make that kind of a purchase? Did she? Had Bulma Briefs given her a small fortune just for living with her for that one month? That seemed much less harrowing an adventure for money.
He groaned in frustration and shook his head, dismissing the whole...train of thought. It was already getting derailed completely, and that didn't help him with anything.
Whatever. Worrying over that girl...he almost suspected she was just doing some sort of crazy antics to irritate him. It was marginally less frustrating to think that. Even if he didn't believe it.
"She'll talk about it eventually." Bulma nodded. Also sitting up front. Also not an official owner of the vehicle. "There's no use prying until she's ready, though. It will only make it take longer."
He harrumphed. That didn't help him at all right then, did it?
"These are the last dragonballs aren't they?" He crossed his arms and glanced out the window in the direction of where she sat on that cloud. "Shouldn't she be happy? After all...she's almost left here."
"Well..." Yamcha glanced in her direction. "I don't...think she is going home any time soon."
"What are you talking about?" Had she changed her mind? Admitted she made the whole thing up? If she didn't want a wish anymore, why were they on the quest at all?
"Er, well. I'm pretty sure she's decided to put that wish off for the sake of that kid's village."
"Uh." He squinted at Yamcha. Kid...village. Okay, he remembered something about a kid at Capsule Corporation, and he remembered something about a village and the red ribbon army, but by that point in the telling he'd already tuned them mostly out and only listened to things that sounded like important land marks in the conversation. Like 'dragonballs are somewhere or another nearby'. And 'destroyed a whole army like it was nothing'.
"...What kid?"
Maybe he'd been paying slightly less attention than he admitted to.
Maybe.
(*)
She remembered feeling something at first, when she saw it all happen. She remembered feeling something, but she couldn't remember what it was she felt. Disbelief, grief, shame, some sort of shock? Anger? Pain?
If she could remember, she could react. She could do something. Her tears dried, and that wasn't fair. Her teammates, her family, her home. Sasuke. Naruto's dream. Konoha.
Everything...
Everything deserved tears. She should scream, she should cry. She should fight, claw her way through the walls of the universe and take that monstrous woman apart with her own hands.
She would...
Gather together the scattered dust and ash of Naruto and Sasuke that spiraled through the gusting wind and vanished into the snow.
She would...
She wouldn't do anything. She couldn't do anything. She didn't do anything.
Why didn't she feel anything?
The wind whipped by the nimbus, tugged at her hair and blew strands of it into her face. Goku said something, but she didn't - couldn't - hear it. The wind drowned out his voice, called to mind the sound of the freezing air in the snowy kingdom she should have been. She should have been there, because at least she could have tried to do something, instead of stand on the other side of crystal and watch helplessly as the people who meant the most to her died.
As the entire world, the real world, the world she belonged, was trapped in a genjutsu forever.
She didn't know how to begin to feel. She crossed her arms over herself, warding off the wind as it cooled at the edge of the desert. The sun sank down the edge of the sky until it vanished over the horizon. They didn't stop directly at sunset, but she lost track of the time they flew on before they settled down in a wooded area.
She stepped off of the cloud as they set up the house. Yamcha said something, and for a moment it sounded like-
She pressed her hand to her head. Her head hurt. Her hand hurt. Everything hurt, and she still didn't feel anything. She could be angry, she could be sad. She could be horrified and...fight. She leaned against a nearby tree and stared out at the gloom of the forest they landed themselves in. Nothing moved, and nothing would. Of course it wouldn't.
Leaves rustled in the wind above her.
"Thanks to you."
She started slightly and turned her attention toward the voice. It was a real voice. Real words. Reality, where the madness she'd suffered through for almost a year was only a delusion from heat and exhaustion. It could have been. It was nearly believable.
Krillin glared up at her, looking thoroughly unimpressed. "You heard me. Thanks to you, we totally forgot to get Bulma's card back from the witch...woman. Fortune teller."
"Well, we won't buy anything else anyway." Bulma waved her hand, and wandered into the house.
The sounds from the house were a confusing distraction. Even muffled as they were through the windows and the walls, it made her head hurt, and she didn't know why. She walked away from it, walked so that the sounds faded into silence, walked so that the light from the windows vanished into the gloom of the trees around her. Walked until it felt like if she kept walking the trees might eventually part to the open and waiting gates of Konoha.
She leaned against the nearest tree before she could look beyond it.
She sank to the ground, because an unreasonable part of her threatened to convince her simply to run. It didn't matter where. Maybe in the direction of the dragonballs. Maybe it didn't matter where she ran as long as she did, and if she ran, she would be running to something. To a solution that would...solve everything.
Something would put everything back the way it should be.
She wasn't tired. Sleeping was...she was asleep when they died. When she should have been there. When they fell into dust and scattered hope and dreams and all of the peace they were supposed to have, all the happiness they should have been...it all scattered in the wind. She should have been there to help. If nothing else, she could have been there to block the attack. Even if she couldn't heal from that horrible attack, then she would have protected the only hope that the world had...and that was what mattered, didn't it?
If it were her...
She pressed her forehead to her knees and curled her arms around her legs.
She didn't want to sleep.
She didn't really deserve to go to sleep in a world so peaceful and calm, and she didn't want to.
Her body trembled. Had it been trembling the whole time? She hadn't noticed, with the movement of the cloud. But the world hadn't stopped moving since she sat down, since the wind vanished and left her with the silence of an empty forest and an empty world. Of the sound of a million people trapped in a dream world they could never wake from.
Of a world without Team Seven.
In a world without Team Seven, what was she?
In a world without Sasuke...
In a world without Naruto...
Did it even matter?
Why...why couldn't she just focus? Why couldn't she keep her thoughts together, organize herself, make herself think? Every time she tried, her thoughts scattered and shattered, and she felt the world around her collapse.
Absolutely every person who ever trusted her. Every person who ever cared, who loved her, who believed in her. Everyone she promised, everything she wanted and hoped for. Everyone who ever mattered to her, every precious person, every single person she loved.
She couldn't save a single one.
She didn't help even one.
Oh-
She promised to be there, she promised to help Naruto the next time.
Just wait for me
It'll be the two of us next time
I'll do it
She was asleep.
She was just asleep.
From now on
I'll stop relying on him
She was dreaming.
They died and she was dreaming.
She wanted it to be a dream.
Everything...
Everything...
Why couldn't it just be a dream?
AN: It's a legitimately short chapter this time, because mostly it just didn't fit into last chapter. It would have about doubled the size, and that would be crazy longer than the rest. So yes, this chapter is shorter! But consider it a part two.