(Author's note: This story takes place after Dominion: Reprise.
If you haven't read that fic, then this won't make a whole lot of
sense to you. :) If you have, on the other hand, then I hope you
enjoy this pointless, silly, romantic little tale.
-Trin)
Love's Labours Won: a Love Story, part four
The two gentlemen "rescued" from the erstwhile spaceship could not, as it turned out, breathe oxygen. They inhaled some sort of strange hydrogen-methane combination and exhaled pure nitrogen, both of which sent Bulma into fits of scientific joy/frustration, but only mattered to the Z-warrios insomuch as it meant the men could not remove their helmets. Their eyes stared wildly through their clear faceplates, wide, cat-pupilled, and terrified. They spoke Japanese (or at the very least came equipped with some damn good translators), but for all of that, they still couldn't explain what they had wanted with Vejiita's daughter.
"Yip!" cried the slightly taller alien. He did so because Vejiita had just "mistakenly" crushed the man's right foot.
"Easy, Vejiita," Bulma chided mildly, not believing for one moment that it was an accident but hardly inclined to tell him to stop. "Sorry about that," she told them, and smiled like a barracuda. "You wanted to do what with our daughter, again?"
"Nothing, nothing!" protested the shorter alien, fearing the flattened feet of his shipmate. Said shipmate whimpered. "We wanted Chive, and we found Chive, and then she wasn't there again, and we had your daughter instead, and she ruined our - gack." Gack wasn't a thing. It was the sound one makes when one's throat is in the hand of the prince of all Saiya-jin.
"You told us that already," said Vejiita, who looked like he was enjoying this. He squeezed.
"Hhhhck," said the alien.
"You're going to tell us something we don't already know," Vejiita eludicated with great patience. "Then you are going to tell us even more. Once that's done, you'll find even more things to tell us. If you don't, I'm going to do this - " he squeezed. " - to your balls, until they come off, and then I will make you eat them." Proud of his little speech, the prince of all Saiya-jin stepped back, crossing his arms and grinning every bit as viciously as his wife.
Trunks's face was hidden behind his hands. "I am not related to these people," he muttered to Goten sotto voce.
"You're more related than I am," Goten replied with little logic but much feeling, and Gokuu hushed him.
Gokuu wasn't sure about this. It wasn't his daughter who had been (potentially) threatened, so he understood instinctively that he didn't have first dibs regarding these aliens. That didn't mean he had to like how it was being handled."Uh, Bulma?" he said, and was ignored.
"We didn't mean to get her at all!" said the taller alien, having recovered his facility of speech. Vejiita raised his hand warningly. "I mean to say," the alien rambled quickly, "that if we don't find Chive, all our people are going to be dead, and you don't want that, do you, I mean we looked you up and you're supposed to be GOOD guys, heh heh, eh heh..." He cringed.
"We are good guys!" Gokuu piped up, and Bulma shot him a glare that would, pike-like, have skewered a normal person.
"Our daughter is not Chive," Bulma said decisively.
"Then where is she?" whined the second guy. "Our planet's gonna blow!"
"Maybe we should find out what they're talking about," Gokuu opined.
"Good," said Vejiita, ignoring his fellow Saiyan. "Then there won't be any of you left at all."
And to everyone's surprise (except possibly Vejiita's), the second alien began to cry. They were harsh, wracking sobs, a little too real to be funny, and some of the wrath left Bulma's gaze.
"...I suppose they didn't really hurt her," she relented.
"They could have!" Vejiita snapped.
"But what about your planet?" asked Gokuu, and - recognizing sympathy and potential aid - both aliens twisted in their seats to face him.
"It's gonna blow!" exclaimed the taller.
"Chive can fix it," mourned the shorter.
"But Chive's dead," Cumber finally spoke up from his position on the couch, and the shorter alien resumed his sobbing.
"So WHAT?" Vejiita shouted; this situation was rapidly spinning out of his control. "What is wrong with you? So they cried! So what! That makes them no less evil!"
"But we're NOT evil!" protested the tall one.
"Yes you are!" Vejiita stated.
"Maybe they're not, Vejiita," Gokuu replied, finally moving to come between them. "Okay. So... tell us what's going on with your planet, okay? And what'djoo need Chive for anyway?"
The cat-eyed aliens glanced at each other; the short one sniffled. "You tell him," he said, and so the taller one did.
Alpha Epsilon was a simple planet, technologically advanced but politically lucid. Sure, it was a feudal system, but everybody liked it, and there was food to go around. Unfortunately, the volcanos changed all that.
Nobody ever quite figured out what caused the mountains to start blowing their literal tops. The first year it happened, it was just something strange that had people curious, but not terribly concerned. No one lived near the lava flows. People were slightly concerned the second year, but as the eruptions simply continued unabated, that concern faded quickly. The third year, they were apathetic; it didn't even warrant news anymore, and after a decade or so, the constantly flowing volcanoes simply became a funny thing that the planet did. Since any worries about pollution had been abandoned centuries before when the Alpha Epsilonians perfected solar power, nobody thought to test what this planet-nausea might really be doing.
"The faults showed up right around then," said the taller alien, head down with his arms limply on his thighs. He looked like he was reciting a funeral dirge.
"Faults?" asked Trunks.
"Yeah. In the ground. Huge cracks, just... splitting open, and at first it happened out in the desert and nobody cared, but then one opened under the sea, and the whole thing got drained - "
"That's impossible!" snapped Bulma, who was apparently doing calculations in her head as this was explained.
"I know. Our scientists said the same thing," moaned the shorter alien, finally deciding to chime in. "But it was anyway no matter what people said, because it happened. All the water just... just was gone, in only a couple of months. Oh gods, the smell... all the fish and whales and seaweed and seapeople... oh gods. It was like a corpse-pit."
Cumber suddenly jumped so abruptly that some of his bloodied bandages - which had begun to stick to the sofa - peeled right off his skin. "YOW!"
Everybody was staring at him. "What?" said Goten.
"N-nothing," Cumber said, inhaling between his teeth as he lay back again. Vejiita smirked.
"A lesson learned, Kyuujinshu-jin," he intoned with dire timbre.
Bulma rolled her eyes. "Go on," she said, ignoring her husband.
The taller alien did.
The ocean disappearing was only the first of many unspeakable tragedies. It was impossible, but the planet seemed to be vomiting itself to death. Social programs were tried, patches were attempted; nothing worked. By the year AV 21 (time was counted in After Volcano years at this point), the air was beginning to grow poisonous. Gasses and ash released into the atmosphere were destroying the entire ecological system, and food was beginning to be dangerously scarce. Water had to be tested before it could be drunk, and it was just when the government was seriously considering trying to evacuate the planet's entire population that Chive's ship arrived.
"She came alone," said the taller alien in tones usually reserved for religious icons, oblivious to the repulsed look on the faces of his audience. "And with her came all the answers we never needed."
It was just a small ship, one of the stolen Saiyan scouters. She'd come wearing a mask to allow her to breathe, and - here the alien was a little vague on details - descended on their government, reorganized it, built a machine that stopped the planet's constant nausea, and then simply went away again.
"She did what?" asked Cumber with an odd look on his face, so the taller alien repeated it. "But that makes no sense," Cumber said immediately afterward.
"Why not? It's what happened!" the shorter alien insisted.
Cumber shifted in his seat. Once again, everyone was staring at him, and he felt too uncomfortable to speak. To his surprise, Bra did for him.
"Because all Chive ever intended to do was steal what technology might be useful to her and leave again," she said, and now everyone was staring at her. "It's what the Kyuujinshu did. Where else do you think they got half the crap they used on us?"
"Bra..." said Bulma in a strange tone of voice. Her daughter sat languidly on the arm of the chair, an expression of cool disinterest in her eyes, as though she were bored. Grace lay pantherlike in her pose, and at that exact moment, Bulma wasn't completely sure she was looking at her daughter at all.
"She's right." Cumber sounded forlorn. "That's all they did. We did. I... they often killed people while they were doing it, so I don't know why she would do this."
"...we?" asked the shorter alien in a dazed tone.
"That is a good question," said Trunks with a frown. "You know something? This might bear visiting. I mean, we'll need some serious equipment so we can breathe, but I think we should go check it out."
"We?" repeated the shorter alien a little bit louder.
"What? Fly to a dying planet? Are you out of your mind?" demanded Vejiita, who was staring at his son as if the lavender-headed man had gone quite mad.
"We?" said the taller alien this time.
"We," Cumber replied, and the taller alien abruptly flung himself past Vejiita and onto the floor.
"PLEASE!" he cried, kowtowing to great dramatic effect. "Help us! Aid us, oh friend of Chive! Save our planet before we all - "
"Oh, please," Bra said, and in those two simple words, ice stabbed like knives. "You really think he could help you? He can't. Nobody can - but me."
Heads swung in her direction again, like following the action at a bizarre tennis match. "What?" asked Vejiita.
"You heard me." Bra crossed her arms.
"Because... you have Chive's memories?" Bulma said hopefully, not really liking where this was headed.
"Yes," said Bra, and Vejiita sat down hard.
"All her memories?" he asked in a spooked sort of voice, which earned him a funny look from his wife.
"Yep. We're wasting time. Can we go now?" said Bra, and the taller alien - carefully judging which way the wind was blowing - crawled over to her on his knees and resumed kowtowing, this time directly in front of her jean-clad knees.
"Please! Please oh lady-whom-is-not-Chive! Please come and help us! Please!" And at that exact moment, Piccolo walked in through the door.
"What on earth is going on in here?" he said, staring at the wrecked room, the two strangers, the odd behavior.
"Yeah," Gokuu agreed, which seemed to sum it up for everyone - everyone, that is, except for Trunks and Cumber. They knew what was going on. Dende had warned them what was going to happen, and now it was happening, and they looked at one another. They didn't know whether to stop this or not.
"I guess we're going to space," said Bulma in the thick silence that followed; both the aliens cheered. "I'd better get some breathing apparatuses ready," she said, mentally making a list as she walked to her lab.
No one spoke in her absence.