CHAPTER 15
Panting and sweating profusely, the boy lay down on the ground. He closed his eyes and, breathing as deeply as he could, tried to relax. He had been sparring for two hours without as much as a water break. As the child turned his head to the side to feel the cool grass sweep against his face, a runaway strand of black hair fell in front of his eyes. He was too exhausted to brush it away.
"Piccolo," the boy said between long breaths, "can we…take a break…for a little while?"
"Not until your mother has lunch ready," came a quick, gruff reply.
"But…but that could be another half hour–"
"Get up, Gohan. We're not finished." But the boy did not move; instead, he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to will away his exhaustion. Not until he heard an impatient, "Gohan!" from his master did he begin to sit up.
"Aren't you troubled by anything that the man from the future said?" Piccolo demanded, searching for something to inspire Gohan to continue training. "What of your own fate? And your mother's?"
"Piccolo," Gohan asked somewhat timidly, ignoring the questions, "do you ever wonder who he was? I mean…it's not that I don't trust what he said…he was nice, and he seemed worried about us…but he just came and left, and we don't know who he was or anything."
Piccolo paused and folded his arms. "I understand your doubt. But Goku trusted him almost immediately, and I have confidence in his judgment. Besides, the alternative is not training and waiting to find out. Would you rather do that?"
"No," Gohan replied, standing and stretching.
"Me either. So let's continue."
xxx
After showering and eating lunch, Ada pulled on a light jacket and made her way up the steps and out the door of Capsule Corporation. As had become routine over the past several weeks, she was making her way a block south to the home of one Sada Kurella. She scanned the area – so blackened and derelict that the day's sunshine did little to help – and, deeming it as safe as she could, began walking quickly and quietly down the road. Stepping sideways from time to time to avoid rubble, Ada drew near to the gray steel frame of what had once been a Capsule home, and a very nice model at that. No longer. In fact, without doing a bit of digging around within the ruins, one never would have guessed that a living thing, let alone a human being, could inhabit such a place. Of course, Mrs. Kurella did not live among the concrete slabs and sheets of rusting metal that had once been her home. Like everyone else who had survived until that point, she lived beneath it.
Hidden behind the fender of a car (the rest of which was nowhere to be seen) and a mess of defunct pipes was a wrought iron hatch. Ada crouched down beside it and knocked lightly a few times. After only a moment, someone below lifted the hatch several inches off the ground. Realizing that it was indeed the person she had been expecting, Mrs. Kurella propped up the slab of iron and beckoned Ada down with a smile.
"Lovely to see you, dear, as always," the woman said earnestly, helping Ada down the ladder. "Sunshine today? I thought I saw a glimmer of something up there."
"Oh, yes; it's lovely. And there's even a bit of a breeze. The air almost smells…fresh," Ada replied, eager to offer a bit of decent news to Mrs. Kurella. The woman was so kind, so concerned with the well-being of those around her, but aged well beyond her years. Her husband was quite the same. They both looked to be around Chi Chi's age, but Ada knew that neither could be more than thirty-five. The Kurellas, like so many others, had spent years bent on nothing but survival. Yet, though they did their best to act cheerful, Ada got the morbid sense that these forlorn people would welcome death and all her freedoms. That is, if it were only the two of them, anyway.
The Kurellas, though, had something that set them quite apart from most people. They had a five-year old daughter, Rei, whose very existence was anachronistic, almost eerie. Ada figured that she could count on one hand the number of children she had seen in the last three years. Of those, she was absolutely certain that not a single one had been planned. So it was with Rei. The Kurellas, childless until her birth, had lost every other member of both sides of their family in the course of eight years. Rei, they often said, was an unexpected blessing. As the little girl raced down the hallway, her face ripe with glee, Ada thought that she would have to agree with them.
"Mommy, where's my jacket?" she asked enthusiastically as she skidded to a stop right in front of Ada. Her mother, with forlorn contentedness, helped Rei into a windbreaker as the little girl chattered away to Ada about some astounding structure she had built out of blocks that morning. Rei then began making her way up toward the hatch, and Ada, after saying goodbye to Mrs. Kurella, followed suit.
Once above ground, Ada and Rei began making their way back toward Capsule Corporation, the child's hand securely in Ada's.
"What're we doing today?" the little girl asked as she kicked a pebble out of her path.
"Well, I thought we could read some more of the story from yesterday, and then maybe practice your handwriting a little bit. If we have time, we can even do a little bit of math. That sound okay?" Ada replied.
Rei nodded, and as Ada glanced down at the child, she thought about how more things had changed within the last year than they had in the long while since her brother's death. She had been tutoring Rei for over a month, and she had been training with Trunks since the end of the previous summer. It was now March, and things were relatively peaceful. The androids had not attacked anywhere nearby for weeks, and Ada was growing accustomed to her daily routine of training in the mornings and teaching in the afternoons. Though Chi Chi only saw her daughter in the evenings, she was pleased that Ada was enjoying herself.
Indeed, life almost felt normal – or what Ada imagined "normal" to be. She sometimes forgot that the population lived in hiding, that she was teaching a child to read and write because schools no longer existed, that in just a few months, the man she loved would be leaving for another time to fight what could end up being his final battle.
Ada blinked and pushed such thoughts from her mind. They were approaching the entrance to Capsule Corporation, and Rei needed a hand climbing over a pile of rubble. Ada helped her clear the concrete, and the two soon made their way downstairs and into the Briefs' home.
xxx
"Ada?" Rei asked as they settled in around the coffee table in the living room.
"Hm?" Ada was flipping through a book she had found in a closet at home. It was full of stories that her mother and Gohan had read her when she was young, and it proved fit for a career as a teaching tool. She found the page on which she and Rei had ended the day before and laid the book on the table.
"Where's Miss Bulma today?"
"Oh, she's just got some things to work on." She's just constructing a time machine that her son will be using to travel to the past in an effort to rid an alternate dimension of the androids that are destroying the world. "You know, she used to make all kinds of things."
"Like what?" The little girl was intrigued
"Houses, and cars, and even robots that would do whatever you asked them to," Ada replied, entertained by the amount of awe that she let filter into her voice when describing things to her pupil.
"Anything?"
Rei proceeded to list no less than twenty different tasks, each of which Ada assured her – if only to humor her – that robots could indeed do. It took a little while after that to get the lesson on track, but she eventually did so. Once Rei got focused on the story, Ada knew that she would not be ready for a break until she finished it. The little girl actually enjoyed learning how to sound out and read the new words that she came across, and Ada loved teaching such an interested pupil. Rei finished the story a while thereafter and then, after a quick pause, began learning how to write her new words.
In the middle of the handwriting lesson, Ada heard the door at the top of the stairs creak open. Always somewhat defensive at the sound, she tensed and turned to look at the entrance to the Brief home. Trunks, dripping in sweat and covered with dirt, emerged, and Ada found herself not only relieved but delighted to see his grimy face. Flashing Ada a tired smile, Trunks walked over to where she and Rei were sitting.
"Hi, Trunks," the little girl said without looking up from her writing exercise. She was getting quite used to the routine of her lessons, including the time of the afternoon when Trunks usually walked in.
"Hey there, Rei," he replied before bending down to give her teacher a kiss on the head.
"Good afternoon?" Ada asked, surveying him for a moment. She noted with chagrin that he seemed to add more scrapes and bruises to his collection every day.
"Yeah." And with that, he headed toward the shower. They could, of course, say very little about their lives in front of Rei. For all the child knew, Trunks spent his days working with the relief and reconstruction crews around the city.
Ada yawned and again turned her attention to Rei's lesson. She enjoyed teaching, but it made for a long day when added to getting up before sunrise to train.
"Ada?" Rei asked, putting down her pencil. Ada mentally chided herself for losing focus on the lesson; it nearly always caused Rei to lose interest, too.
"Yes?"
"Why don't you and Trunks have a little girl like my mom and daddy do?"
"What?" Ada blinked, a laughing smile slowly spreading across her face. "Why would you expect us to?"
"'Cause that's what you do when you're married," she responded matter-of-factly.
"But we're not married," Ada chuckled a little, particularly at the very 'grown-up' expression on Rei's face that was quickly turning to confusion.
"But you…kiss each other…and you're in love like in the story…" She motioned to the storybook they had been reading out of earlier. "Like the princess."
"Well, you're right," Ada responded, stifling some of her laughter. She didn't want Rei to feel as though she was being made fun of, especially when the little girl was so convinced that she was right. "We are…in love." Ada suddenly found that talking about her relationship, even to a five-year old, was somewhat challenging. Perhaps, she thought, it had something to do with the fact that the last time she had spoken openly about it to someone was when she was forced to defend it against her mother's arguments. "But people who are in love aren't always married. Some of them are, like your mom and daddy. My mom and daddy were married, too. But usually it's because two people have been in love for a while. Trunks and I are still a little bit new at this."
"Oh." Rei digested this information. "But after you've been in love for a while, you'll be married. Like the princess."
"Well…we'll see," Ada stammered. "'A while' can be different for different people. But how about we finish up these words, hm?"
xxx
"Thanks for taking Rei home," Ada tried to say through a yawn as she leaned her head back on the couch. She then put on a very feminine falsetto and added, "You're my hero."
"Well," Trunks replied after removing his jacket, "I have trouble saying no to you for some reason." He grinned and settled down beside her. Just as he expected, Ada immediately turned her attention to the sizeable gash on his neck.
"This one's new," she commented, brushing her thumb against the cut. It had begun to scab over, but only just. Ada leaned toward Trunks' neck and frowned.
"At least the droid missed my jugular," he chuckled. Some months before, Bulma had knocked up a few battle droids for her son to use while training alone. They hovered above the ground, moving rapidly in various directions while simultaneously firing beams of energy toward their target: Trunks. As he trained in an abandoned Capsule Corporation warehouse, there was little else to challenge the warrior in terms of gravity or terrain. Thus, each day, he increased the speed at which the drones moved and the rapidity at which they fired.
"You're hysterical," Ada replied drily. "How about taking a day off to let this heal? Right now, any sudden neck movement is going to tear it back open. And that hole in your leg is bleeding again."
"It's not a hole. Just a…scrape."
Concern written all over her face, Ada looked Trunks in the eyes. Silence.
"I love you," he said, the smallest of smiles on his lips. Ada said nothing to him in return, instead leaning in and very gently kissing his newest injury. She leaned her head on his shoulder and squeezed her eyes shut.
Just three more months. If he managed to keep himself alive for three more months…well, then he would be in top shape to leave for the past again. Where the androids would be waiting.
Ada found that she could not help but cling to him when she thought about such things.
xxx
Postscript: Hello again! I hope you've all been well. As you've noticed, I jumped ahead in time some months for this chapter. My plan is to focus on a few things: the three months before Trunks leaves, certain events that happened in the time I skipped (such as Chi Chi finding out about all these shenanigans), and what's happening in the past, or the other timeline (hence the scene at the beginning with Gohan and Piccolo). Hopefully, you've stuck around in spite of my absence. Your readership and reviews are absolutely wonderful!