After they had finished eating, Gohan tried to at least pay his share, but Videl was having none of it.
"No, I'm serious. If it weren't for me acting stupid, neither of us would have wound up in detention. This is my way of saying sorry. Now, do you want me to take you home?"
"Not that I don't appreciate it, but don't you have a home of your own to go to? I'm sure your parents would be getting worried." Gohan looked down at his watch, it was approaching seven o'clock. He realised that they had spent over two hours in that diner, without really noticing how fast time had gone. "It's way past home time."
Videl smiled lightly at his almost childlike term, before realising at that moment she couldn't really think of a better way to say it. "My dad wouldn't care, at least not really. He'd spout off some nonsense about how I'd better off not be spending time with boys. He does it all the time, even though he knows I help the police most nights anyway."
Gohan left the police thing rest for now; he was slightly more interested in something else. "What about your mother? Won't she be concerned?"
The girl looked away from him, all traces of good humour gone from her face.
"Oh…I'm sorry. Did your mother pass away? It's all right if you don't want to talk about it…" Gohan wasn't sure how to act, he'd dealt with death before, a little too often maybe, but it was always framed within extraordinary circumstances.
"Not exactly." Videl replied, rather cryptically. "She just doesn't live at home." She was silent for a few moments more, and Gohan thought that perhaps she didn't want to go too deeply into it, so he let it lie. "So, you want a ride?"
Gohan considered her offer again, and decided that it was probably a good idea to take her up on it; after all, he didn't actually know quite where he was.
"So, where do you live?" She asked him as they took off from the parking lot.
"My building is on Percy Drive."
"Really? That's just around the corner from my house, you live about two minutes away from me. You live in a really good area, your godmother must be pretty rich to just be able to give you an apartment like that."
Gohan smiled, wondering just how much money Bulma had. "She does OK for herself."
A few minutes later, Videl was landing her copter on the grass opposite Gohan's building. Gohan struggled to limb out of the small vehicle, but managed to do so a little more gracefully than he had done earlier. The girl got out too, and capsulated her jet copter. Gohan supposed that she would probably just walk from here.
Considering how nice she had been to him this afternoon, he was feeling a pang of guilt over the way he had treated her over the past two months. "I'm sorry, for ignoring you and pretending I wasn't who you thought I was. I just didn't want anyone to know about me. I don't know why I even thought that I could pull it off."
"Well, like I said, you aren't an easy person to forget. I do have an exceptional memory too, I remember a lot of things." The way she said it seemed fairly ominous, it seemed to Gohan that perhaps she wasn't about to stop trying to find out more about him and his secrets. "Anyway, I'd better be going, it is getting pretty late."
"See you tomorrow then Videl." Gohan turned and waved.
"Gohan – wait!" He turned back to face her. "Since we live so close, why don't we walk to school together?" She oozed confidence, Gohan liked that, she was his polar opposite in that sense. He was the sort of person that had doubts about anything – from boiling a kettle to his own fighting ability – but he could imagine that she had probably never doubted herself or her actions in her life. "Come to think of it, why haven't we seen each other on the way to school before? I walk everyday, I only use my copter when I get a call from the police."
Gohan blushed a little; this was a question that he had already been asked more than once by teachers. "I'm a bit of a late riser to be honest, you're probably already on your way before I'm even up." This was a half-truth, sometimes he was pretty late getting up, but others he woke early and took off as Saiyaman while the streets were quiet.
"If we're going to walk together, you'll need to be up early to meet me." She appeared to have already made the decision for the both of them.
"I could try…I guess." He thought longingly of his bed. No more lie-ins for him it seemed.
"It's settled then." She proclaimed. "Since your place is on the way, we can meet out here at eight fifteen, all right?" It wasn't really a question; it was more of an order.
Nothing much happened this chapter, it's all set-up for the rest of the story, and to ease me back into multi-chaps. Cheesy one-shots can only get you so far.
