Give me back my heart tonight
I'm sick of never smiling cause you're so uptight
Cause we know its not alright
When neither one of us is putting up a fight
Little Razorblade, The Pink Spiders
'Here we are now, entertain us,'
Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana
"Just because they don't have powers doesn't mean they are good people, Krillin."
"It's okay. Really. They don't have any powers—"
"What?"
"What do you mean?"
"-So they can't hurt anyone."
"I suppose." King Yemma stroked his beard. With Krillin's big pleading eyes on him, he wilted like a dying flower. He winced and nudged his chair away from the much smaller human. The hugely bearded man had to tug at a tie.
Such was the power of Krillin's big pleading eyes.
"What do you mean we don't have any powers?"
"Just make sure to keep an eye on them."
"Of course I will."
"Oh my god, he's right. I can't use any ki."
He beamed at Yemma, and the huge giant seemed to pull himself back together.
"What is this? How is this possible?"
"You can't use any powers because you're dead, and only your mortal body had those enhancements Gero equipped you with." The giant troll sounded bored.
"That's insane. So now we're powerless?" Juuhachigou's fists were balled, and Krillin doubted that she could really not do any damage with them. At the least those fingernails could probably claw the eyes out of his head-she would find a way. Just like how the other Juuhachigou would get the TV working with a soft whack to the screen. How everyone would cheer when she would do that, and how they'd call her over for her expertise at the first signs of fuzziness.
"Basically, yes. It's for your own good."
The blonde girl looked ready to climb Yemma desk and show him what she felt was best for him, and her brother looked ready to join her. They had always enjoyed murdering and torturing together. "Do you think so?"
Krillin pointed to the tall white obelisks, one by one. Against the pinkish sky the color of gums, they resembled long misshaped teeth. "And that's the smoothie bar."
Fighters passed them on the stone pathway, giving sneering looks at the two, smallish twins. They received harsher looked in return.
In their casual, very youthful clothes that were somehow unmistakably from Earth, and with their slim bodies and unlined kittenish faces they looked nothing like the other fighters. Everyone must have wondered what they were doing up here, and sometimes so did Krillin. His back kept breaking out in a cold sweat, and he was having periodic flashbacks of being murdered by Juunanagou ever few minutes. Just looking at the other man made this world slip away and that dirty, painfully muddy gray of the Earth they'd tried their best to kill come back.
"And that's the hot springs."
Juuhachigou gave him a murderous glare. She was also not helping the situation any. Krillin had to keep having to remind himself that this wasn't the good-Juuhachigou, but the evil-hopefully-soon-to-be-redeemed Juuhachigou. Who, regardless, looked similar enough to her brother to bring forth all those nightmares that had already been stirred up.
He peeled his t-shirt away from his back, clearing his throat. "And there's the pool."
It was rather anticlimactic, their meeting. He'd thought there would be more discomfort from Juunanagou, who'd murdered him. Some more considering looks from Juuhachigou she absorbed that in other timeline she'd married and procreated with the man before her. Something like, 'hmm, maybe he's not so bad. Is it possible that I'm secretly attracted to someone like him? Could I really care for someone like him?'
Something like…what he'd thought. Then they could have a connection of reluctantly attraction and questioning of their own taste and wonder what the other was thinking, all the time, what went through that head. What would such an evil being think about? Did she ever wonder mundane things, like if her shoelace was untied? Did she ever have any deep complex thoughts towards what she did and why she did them? Like, say, 'Why destroy everyone?' only to answer with 'Why not?' The power and the inclination, and that's all that was necessary.
Or was it all programming beneath the pale skin and blue eyes? A mixture of numbers like Bulma's work, that ordered her to destroy people.
Which was better?
"I can't believe this is supposed to be heaven. I wasn't expecting winged angels, but something more. You know, a harp or two."
"It is very disappointing." Juuhachigou sneered at a passing fighter that had to outweigh her by at least two hundred pounds. Krillin did his best not to gape at the long legs incased in black tights. There really weren't many women up here. And the ones that were fighters definitely didn't look like Juuhachigou. No one looked like her, with the dark eyelashes and gold eyebrows and white-blonde hair.
...Except for him. Oh god. Those dead eyes. How he could only look bored or amused, and either involved killing people. Probably killed billions of humans. How he'd simply smirked and reached out with a pink palmed hand toward Krillin, a ball of light glowing, that horribly now you could sense ki radiating from him. Like looking down the barrel of a gun, his smirking face was. When it hit, the pain lasted a lot longer than you'd expect and seemed to continue on, even after he was dead.
Juunanagou's gaze fell upon with him with the same inescapable weight and speed as when a piece of one of a building fell on him during a sparring session. When he asked himself, why, why am I doing this, there was no answer. Only a crippling fear that Juunanagou was marking the spot on his neck where his hand would go through. He tried to explain, feeling his usual anxiety and defensiveness. "This is just where the fighters are kept."
He was glad he'd given the crystal ball back to a nonplussed Baba waiting by the gates of Yemma's office, after Juuhachigou had threatened to crack it on his skull. It would have slid from his slippery fingers and probably showing the other Krillin and Juuhachigou doing something particularly deviant before shattering into a hundred pieces.
"Look at that guy's toga."
"On the bright side," Krillin told Juuhachigou, "You get a second chance."
Her sneer was as good as Vegeta's. Oh god, Vegeta would be so pissed to see them here. He might kill Krillin just on the principal of it, before these two did. "Oh, goody."
"You have to admit, sis, the halos aren't too bad." Juunanagou kept trying to readjust his. "I guess playing strip poker with you gets you into heaven."
"Makes sense."
"Hey." His emotions still ranged from fear to anger to terror, but occasionally indignity would rise as well. Like rotting meat rising to the surface of a greasy stew. Mostly near Juuhachigou, whom he would seem to confuse with the different version of her, and expect something more than scorn. But still it was better than Juunanagou's smiles. The back of his shirt and gi were soaked.
"So, what do we do? Do we go down to earth, save a hundred souls, then we get to-" They passed a bickering Yamcha and Tien.
"No, it was way worse when Roshi had his own channel. It was all porn, or movies of Jackie Chun fighting."
"Why did he show those, anyway?"
"Who knows? The real question is, why did he have so many commercials about wigs?"
"—we get to stay up here." Juuhachigou's voice was wooden as she finished her brother's sentence.
"Hey, Krillin," The passing due waved at their shorter friend. They continued to walk a short distance, while Krillin and the cyborgs waited. Slowly, the two gave a double-take over their shoulders. Their expression was mostly made up of fear, and a little outrage.
Somehow, it was expressed through aggravation. "Well, I guess they're letting everyone into heaven now. There goes the neighborhood." Tien was always a brave man.
Yamcha began just screaming. "Where's Freiza? Or is he back at a bar, having a couple of drinks with Goku and Vegeta? Maybe they're all doing karaoke together?"
"How the hell did you two get up here?"
They shrugged. "We saw Krillin naked."
"Oh. Alright." To his friends' credit, they were mystified instead of understanding. Then they gave Krillin the same look when he'd told them about looking into the glass ball. Tien and Yamcha turned around and continue walking in the opposite direction. After a few paces, unable to resist, the scarred man turned around.
"You know," he yelled at Juuhachigou from what he believed was a safe enough distance, "In the other timeline, you have a kid with Krillin right?"
It took both Krillin and her brother restraining her to keep her from attacking the well-built fighter, again. Her fellow android was grabbing her arms, laughing like this was any jolly good time, and Krillin was clutching the back of her jacket, trying to avoid touching her hair at all because that really, really would only make things worse for everyone. For someone who was now a regular human, she was still strong. Or maybe he just wasn't trying hard enough to restrain her, out of fear of ripping her clothes…His hand inches from the back of her neck and the hair even brighter under the ever shining sun. The other Juuhachigou had enjoyed Krillin touching her hair, when he would curl a finger around a strand and stroke the back of her neck. Smile up at him.
Juuhachigou turned on her heel, and hissed at him like an animal to get his filthy hands off her. Immediately, his flapping hands left her back and pulled back from any proximity to her.
She doesn't have her powers anymore. She doesn't have her powers anymore. Still, still Krillin was waiting breathless for feeling to return to his limbs.
"Oh yeah," Tien was leading Yamcha away by the collar of his gi. His voice was laced with sarcasm; even his third eye was rolling. His parting shot, "This'll end well Krillin."
"We're only here," she said, tucking some of her hair behind her ear, trying to regain her calm. But her other hand was balled into a white-knuckled fist. "So we don't have to be stuck in Hell.
"It is literally this," she was yelling at the other fighters, "Or be stuck in some sweatsuited nightmare!"
"Please, everyone, just calm down." Even though Juuhachigou was the only one furious. "Come on; you guys have to find a way to redeem yourselves. Through good actions, and regretting your past."
"What did the other guy's do? We need a direct thing to do. Have us save a person about to kill themselves or something?"
"Yeah, push them from the bridge so they aren't technically committing suicide?"
Krillin stared at them. "No. Not at all. If you were even supposed to do that, you'd need to save them, show them how terrible the lives of those around them would be if they died. If that was what we had to do to redeem you."
"But we don't know that."
"Right, let's be logical. Plenty of people who kill themselves have to be screwed up."
"They can't all be saints."
Krillin wondered if it was unnatural or wrong to feel empathy for such a man as Gero. Hadn't he unleashed these two, only to be murdered himself by what he'd brought forth? "Let's just find keep walking. Maybe we'll find something."
He hoped desperately that Chiaotzu's bar was more than a pipe dream. How he would drink. Like a fish. Until he drowned on it and his liver gave out and he began hallucinating a world where he was happy and there were no androids anywhere. Only a blonde happy girl who laughed at his jokes, while their child colored in a book nearby.
Yamcha and Tien were probably gathering up everyone and telling them all about what craziness Krillin had gotten himself in now. Vegeta was probably cracking his knuckles and vowing to kill 'the shrimp' for this latest insanity, that this was a worse than him trying to start a Karaoke night, that this was the dumbest idea he'd ever possessed. Goku shaking his head, going 'boy' over and over again, even him not believing how far Krillin was willing to go in hopes of helping these two.
"You know," Juunanagou raised an eyebrow and looked at his sister. "You didn't seem all that angry that you and this shiny headed weirdo hooked up."
Juuhachigou looked horrified. "What are you talking about?"
"It's just," the dark twin shrugged. "You're not yelling or killing him."
"Well," she flipped her head coolly, apparently deciding to follow Juunanagou's lead and pretend Krillin wasn't in earshot. Or maybe they didn't care if he heard. Or act like she and her brother still were able to brutally slaughter him again. "I'm not married to him."
"Or carrying his child?" Juunanagou raised an eyebrow. "I hope."
"Shut up. I don't know what the hell's going on in that other timeline, maybe I hit my head or something, but I never married that shrimp."
"I saw a ring."
"I can make it so you never see anything ever again," Juuhachigou threatened. It was not directed to him yet, but still Krillin flinched. Then he did it again, after realizing that this only drew more attention to him. Her eyes were dead, missing nothing and not caring about anything. You had to wonder how it was possible that the exact replica of her could be so peaceful and loving and beautiful, and this one so terrible and frightening and beautiful.
It reminded the bald fighter of going to a beach, and then returning to it to find a beached whale, dying animal life and miles of spilled oil. It was still the same beach, sure, maybe even shaped the same, and maybe you could dig under the corpses to find the same sand, but otherwise there was no comparison.
They looked exactly the same, right down to the straight hair and shifting blue eyes that could darken or lighten depending on her mood and the background. But this woman never smiled at him. Maybe bared her teeth, but never smiled.
"Besides, she has much worse taste in clothes than me."
"What we need," Krillin said to himself, aloud, desperately, "Is to find people to save. To redeem you guys."
"Do we get to go back to Earth?"
"No."
"Well, then, how the hell are we going to do this?"
It was not unlike their counterparts and their own arguments. Oh sure, this was a little about the challenge they were facing, but it was also really about their kid and the marriage overall. The huge flaws that were hidden beneath the surface and the built up resentment that came out over the small mistakes the other made.
She obviously thought their marriage was a mistake that never should have happened.
Juunanagou threw his hands up. Krillin nearly began running away and screaming for help. "Just send us to Hell or give us something to do."
"You know," Juuhachigou was looking around. "I bet Hell isn't that bad."
"You've never been there!" Krillin offered as a rebuttal. Talking to her, looking at her, trying not to tremble. This was the most important thing in his life anymore, that overshadowed training and passing the time with his friends. Juuhachigou, do you think we can ever be friends?
"Neither have you!" White sharp teeth and narrowed demon sky-blue eyes. "At least if I was there, I wouldn't have to be near you!"
She hated him, so completely and utterly it was disparaging. Why had he saved her? He couldn't save her. Juuhachigou had no regrets. All those people she'd murdered, she felt nothing towards. She had been stronger than them and therefore was allowed to kill them. Any thoughts in the direction of, say, maybe not killing people were either nonexistent or ignored.
This woman was as much a cyborg as her counterpart was, but that Juuhachigou was a very different woman. That Juuhachigou had empathy and something other than hate.
How could he have looked at Yemma's trusting face and promised to look after them, promised that they would be good, that they could be redeemed and good fighters that wouldn't hurt others? He had thought he'd been so smart, so good, so decent, so like Goku, but cunning in his plan to somehow turn them to the light side despite not having a plan whatsoever. But hope. Krillin'd had plenty of that. A dream in his heart. Like a scrappy protagonist from a book or movie, the underdog with a heart of gold. But he'd always sorta been that guy, and look where that had gotten him: no girlfriend, no family, and death. Thrice.
He wanted now, to just look at the crystal ball he still carried in his arms, just to watch himself in some form being happy. No matter how unhealthy it was, it was safe and sweet. All he wanted was to be away from these murderers, and just watch the daughter he'd never have learn to walk. Her parents would hold her hand, and coo at every step and laugh and distract her every time she fell.
And a brilliant idea popped into his head. "Hell!"
"What?"
He slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand. "We'll go to Hell and help the guards there!"
"…can I still kick Gero's head off?"