CHAPTER 17

Disclaimer: Several short phrases in this chapter were taken from Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Mr. Flood's Party" and from the film The Young Victoria.

xxx

Ada hurried down the steps leading into the Brief kitchen, wiping the wet hair from her eyes. She shivered and struggled to get her sopping jacket off.

"Slow down, girl," laughed Bulma from her seat at the kitchen table. "You haven't missed anything. How's the monsoon?"

"Still a monsoon," Ada answered, stepping over to the sink to wring out the jacket. A week before, it had begun to pour down rain. The clouds were still releasing their fury over the city, turning it into a swamp of concrete, floodwater, and mud. Ada hung her jacket over the back of a chair and set her dirty shoes in the sink. She took a breath.

"How is he?" she asked quietly, taking her hair down from the damp, knotty mess at the top of her head.

"Doing alright, I think," Bulma returned. "We just finished running the final checks on the time machine, and it's all in order. He said he was going to shower."

Ada nodded, nervously – and sloppily – braiding together her dripping hair. She looked meaningfully at Bulma, who gave her a small, reassuring smile. There was, they both knew, little to say. They had been waiting years for the launch that would begin in just twelve hours' time. Everything was as planned. Everything was ready. Everything was…

Doing her best to smile back at Bulma, the young woman walked slowly from the kitchen to the hallway. She entered Trunks' room, then, after closing the door behind her, began peeling off her soaking clothes.

"Hey," Ada said to the bathroom door to her right as she approached Trunks' dresser and opened the third drawer from the top. She heard a quiet noise issue forth from the bathroom and took it to be some sort of acknowledgement of her presence. After rifling through a stack of pajama pants and some undershirts, Ada found a tee shirt and pulled it over her head. She then began rummaging around for a pair of boxers to complete her outfit. Between running errands for her mother, picking up some things for Bulma, and tutoring, it seemed to Ada as though she had been swimming around the city in her freezing, clinging clothes all day. The welcome feeling of dry cotton against her skin was enough to make her forget, if only for a moment, the man on the other side of the bathroom door.

She collapsed, exhausted, onto Trunks' bed and, for some moments, just lay on her back, eyes closed, listening to the plop plop of the water as it burst against the tile floor of the shower. When Ada opened her eyes again, she surveyed the familiar room with a sense of comfort. It had hardly changed since Trunks was a boy. Sure, the markers and crayons upon the desk had turned to stacks of blueprints and small mechanical devices, the functions of which Trunks had explained to Ada on some occasion or other. She could not recall the finer points of the lessons now. Where toys and clothes had littered the floor years before, there were now only a couple pair of shoes, a number of books, and the small pile of wet clothes that Ada had neglected to put into the hamper.

Nothing in her life had been constant. Her family was gone. Millions of people had died. Entire forests had burned to ash. Mountains had crumbled before her eyes. Cities had fallen in moments. Everything had changed.

But this place, this room, in all its simplicity, had not. And something about the man that slept in the bed on which she was laying at that moment gave Ada hope that she would one day feel so secure about all things.

The rapid pitter-patter of the shower suddenly came to a halt, and Ada glanced at the bathroom door. She sat up and took a deep breath, trying to clear her head so that she would be able to greet Trunks with a smile – even if it was insincere. He would almost certainly need it.

Trunks emerged from the door moments later, enveloped in steam. His hair was still sopping wet, and the slump in his shoulders seemed to creep through his arms and into his hands. He looked, Ada saw, tired – but more than that, he looked defeated. As though he had been fighting for hours on end and would collapse at any moment. As though the Earth itself rested atop his frame but the burden had become too much to bear. He gazed down at his hands, which clung gingerly at the towel wrapped around his waist.

Ada was standing before Trunks even before he had raised his head to look at her. She threw her arms around him, desperately worried at his sudden weakness, and he leaned into her. He silently rested his head on her shoulder, burying his face in her neck.

Tears gathering in her eyes, Ada took the towel from Trunks and, moving away ever so slightly, began drying his body. After finishing his torso, she moved to his back, where she sopped up each water droplet and then planted tiny kisses in place of them. She ruffled the towel over his head, then handed it back to him and moved to his dresser to fetch a clean pair of boxers.

Several minutes later, damp purple locks sticking out every which way, Trunks sat down on the edge of the bed and massaged the bridge of his nose. He felt a finger brush a bit of hair from his face and looked up to see Ada standing before him, doing her best to smile. He smiled back at her, mournfully but sincerely, and took her hands in his own. In a desperate attempt to recreate some kind of normalcy between them, Ada broke the silence some moments later.

"We match," she commented, her smile widening slightly as she gestured to the boxer shorts she was wearing. Trunks looked at her and then down at his own waist to see that they were, in fact, wearing the same pattern in different colors. He smiled and pulled her to him.

"They suit you," he replied, wrapping his arms around her center and resting his head against her stomach.

Silence once more.

Ada squeezed her eyes shut, longing to say something, anything…and coming up empty. There were a million things she wanted to tell him, but hearing them would do him no good at all. She looked down at him, her eyes beginning to tear, and, without thinking, said the thing at the forefront of her thoughts:

"You don't have to go." She felt him tense and loosen his arms.

"Ada–"

"I just don't want you to forget that…that you're doing this to yourself. And…if you wanted…you could just stop, just decide not to lea–" Ada's voice had very quickly taken on a tinge of desperation.

Trunks withdrew himself from the embrace and looked up at her, eyes hardened. "Doing it to myself?"

"You know what I mean," Ada stumbled to correct herself. "The pressure you feel…it's all coming from you, Trunks."

"Because you, and my mother…you've never encouraged me to keep training, to keep trying, to work harder." His words were uncharacteristically short and icy.

"That's not what I'm saying–"

"And I came up with the time machine idea on my own, too, I guess." Trunks stood and walked across the room, running a hand through his hair.

"I misspoke," Ada stammered, suddenly realizing that she was not going to be able to fix what she had just let unravel.

"Misspoke?" He turned around to face her again. "Or is that what you really wanted to say and it's just now coming out? You've been putting this all on me the whole time?"

"No, Trunks; don't be ridiculous," she snapped. "I just meant to say that if you decided you didn't want to go through with it, no one would blame you–"

"Of course," he muttered. He was speaking…acting…like a different person. He was angry, and allowing that anger to show. It was, in a way, frightening.

"Maybe none of us thought this through before, you know?" Ada said. "Maybe…you and I could keep training until we're strong enough–"

"But that's not the plan, is it?" he half-shouted. Ada's jaw dropped slightly, taken aback by the way Trunks was speaking to her. It made the fighter in her mind claw its way out.

"Well maybe I don't like the plan anymore," she snapped back, her voice rising with his.

"You've been awfully encouraging this whole time to be saying that now."

"And you've gone along with it!"

"Because I've got people depending on me!"

"Depending on you to stay alive!"

Silence. They glared at one another for some moments until Ada could no longer take it. She wasn't angry. She didn't want to pretend like she was. Not tonight.

"I know you think," she said, her voice quiet, "that, somehow, I'm going to be able to move on, like nothing ever happened, if you don't come back. And it's ridiculous and naïve, because this relationship was more than that from the beginning. So stop pretending like sacrificing yourself is going to do anyone any good. It isn't noble. It's selfish."

Trunks dropped his gaze, and the slump in his posture returned. He leaned against the dresser that was behind him and rubbed his face with his hands.

"I'm not going back to the past to sacrifice myself. I don't…plan on dying…" He looked up at her, eyes red, hair matted and messy. "I don't want to die…that's just it…I…"

Ada took a hesitant step toward him, but he turned his face. "I'm afraid."

"Afraid?" she breathed. She couldn't keep the exasperation out of her voice.

"Yes, afraid," he snapped back, his cheeks reddening.

"Trunks." Ada gave him a small smile – all that she could muster – and took one of his hands. "It's not something to be ashamed of."

He stared at her mutely for some moments before squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head. "You say that, but you've never met Goku. I mean…" he fumbled, "I used to think that Gohan was fearless and reckless. But Goku…he never hesitated, never showed a moment's fear, even after all that I told him. He was ready for the challenge. And I can only imagine that my father reacted the same way when he heard the news."

"And?"

"And I'm afraid."

"You're talking about men who had nothing to lose, Trunks."

"Your father has a family, in the past. And Gohan, he had you, and your mother."

Ada sighed and shook her head. "Even in the past, my father has already died once. And whatever Gohan might have felt that he still had to hold onto didn't stop him from all but committing suicide. Even if they really had everything to lose…they didn't see it. They didn't act like it. You can hardly fear death when you relentlessly pursue it."

"My father would call me a coward."

"Your father murdered millions of people without batting an eye."

Trunks squeezed Ada's hands in his and swallowed hard, afraid of what her answer would be when he asked, "And what about you?"

"What?"

"What would you say about me?"

She paused, giving him a firm gaze and smiling at him softly. "That you have good reason not to seek death out. That you can be brave and afraid at the same time." She kissed the top of his knuckle. "And that you love me."

"I do," he breathed.

"I still think that you're going to save the world, you know."

Trunks couldn't help but smile, albeit sadly. He dropped his forehead down to hers. "I do."

"And you'll come back to me."

"I will."

"And stay with me."

"And stay with you."

He leaned down and gently kissed Ada, then stood for some time in silence with his cheek to hers.

"You should rest," she whispered. "Early morning tomorrow."

"Coming?" Trunks asked

"Mm-hm."

And with that, Trunks picked her up and carried her over to his bed. He lay her down gently, as though, Saiyan though she was, she was made of glass and prone to break at any moment. As though his treating Ada with trembling care was somehow akin to his cradling their relationship in his hands, fearing it would crumble if he took one misstep. He would be leaving the next morning. Perhaps forever. For the first time in his life, the world looked like crystal waiting to shatter. So much could go wrong.

He turned off the light and crawled into bed next to Ada, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkness before seeing the clear outline of her head on the pillow next to him. Just as she reached out, seeking his embrace, Trunks pulled her to him. He pulled at the quilt at their feet until it was on top of them, keeping out the world.

"Ada?"

"Hm?"

"I love you."

"I love you, too, Trunks."

xxx

A/N: Well, it's only been a century or so since I last updated. I do apologize. As I promised, however, I have not abandoned this story. I don't plan on doing so, either. So, dear readers, if any of you are still out there, I have a question. I'm going to follow Trunks into the past, but I'm wondering whether I should begin that as a different story, a sort of 'part two'. I would end this one with one more chapter and then begin the next. The other option is continuing to post on this one and having lots of chapters. Opinions?