CHAPTER 23

As he stared at the ceiling above his bed, Trunks realized that this night, like so many in that forsaken place, would be sleepless. He did not mind. Hundreds of nights of nightmares had taught him that exhaustion was not the worst sort of suffering.

He had never dreamed before. Maybe as a kid, sure: most children had nightmares of the androids. But as a grown man, his nights had been, while sometimes turbulent with fear, quieter in sleep. Since his entry into the Time Chamber, however, his nights ended with, at best, disturbing snippets of nightmares tumbling through his mind. At worst – well, Trunks didn't want to relive those. So he placed his hands beneath his head and closed his eyes. Over the last year, he had spent almost all of his waking hours alone; he was accustomed to wandering into the far reaches of his mind to those places he kept secret, kept hidden. To those corners where dwelt memories and hopes and photographs and fantasies. To those places he loved best of all.

The warrior breathed deeply. And he thought, as he almost always did, of her.

xxx

Three straight hours of sparring. Punch-block-kick-block. Repeat. Trunks rarely felt exhaustion so complete. As he lay on the grass, looking at the woman sprawled next to him, he could tell by Ada's ragged breathing that she was in a similar state. Of course, the unbearable summer heat did not help. Even the shade of the valley's trees could not hold back the effects of the sun's piercing rays. He closed his eyes, feeling beads of sweat roll down the sides of his face. So tired. So very, very tired. Maybe just a short nap, right here on the ground, and then he would be able to get up…

"This is ridiculous. We've got to cool off." Her strained voice pulled him back into the world of wakefulness.

"Mmmnggg…" he grunted. They could cool off later.

"I'm going to the pond. Come on, lazy," Ada jested, giving his side a playful kick as she set off for the tiny body of water to their east.

"Fine," Trunks replied with a small smile. He rose slowly and gingerly and followed. He was only vaguely aware of how to reach the place; he'd not been since they were children.

A mere ten minutes later, the pair emerged from a thicket of pines into a tiny glade. On the far side was a pond. The gentle flow of a mountain stream emptying itself into the water sent a faint bubbling sound toward them. Ada turned and smiled at him before breaking into a run. In typical fashion, she launched herself from a nearby rock and cannonball-dove into the water with a resounding WOOSHHHHH. Trunks grinned and pulled off his pants. Boxers were the same as swimming trunks, right? Just as Ada emerged from the depths of the pool, Trunks slid in.

In spite of the record-breaking heat, the water was cool. He groaned with delight. "So good," he said in a barely-audible voice.

"Why, thank you. I've been perfecting my technique for years," Ada laughed.

He faked surprise. "Oh, the cannonball was alright, too."

This was, of course, met with a splash directly into his face, which, naturally, commenced a full-out battle between them. Somehow, their fatigue disappeared as they raced around the pond, assaulting and dodging for the next quarter of an hour.

Ada was grinning devilishly a few feet away from her prey. He could tell that she was about to launch one final, all-out offensive. Trunks knew that he would have to beat her to the chase. He ducked beneath the water and darted toward her legs. In one smooth motion, he wrapped his own legs about hers, effectively paralyzing her movement, and emerged from the water mere inches from her face. A shrieking Ada had begun to fling her arms at him when he wrapped his own around her. She couldn't budge.

"Pinned you," Trunks said with a smirk.

"I declare shenanigans. This was a strictly above-water battle," Ada replied in mock indignation.

"Rules were never declared, I'm afraid. It's time to face your loss."

She stuck her tongue out at him before putting on an air of resignation. "I guess I'm your prisoner. I ask only for a quick and painless death," she pleaded.

Trunks laughed, freeing her legs as he did so. He did not yet untangle her from his arms, however. Ada giggled at him, her soaked black hair falling in front of her eyes.

"Need a hand?" Trunks brushed the wet lock behind her ear. As he did so, her smile transformed into…something else. She gazed at his hand as it moved away from her face.

"Thanks," she replied. Trunks slowly moved his hands to her waist under the water. She seemed hardly to notice, only locking his eyes into her own.

"So beautiful," he whispered, almost to himself, as though no one was intended to hear. He surveyed her damp pearl skin and dark eyes; her lips, wet and pink from their fracas; the droplets of water running down her neck and collarbone. Trunks moved toward her and fastened his lips to her neck. She jumped in surprise; clearly she had been expecting a rather more traditional kiss.

He kissed his way down her neck, lightly licking up the water droplets as they fell. She sighed, her hands finding their way to his head, combing into his wet hair. He reached her shoulder before stopping, then faced her again. She looked back at him invitingly. Seconds later, he had taken her mouth with his. His blood was pumping furiously; his face felt hotter than it had following their sparring session. Trunks gulped. In spite of his pleasure, he felt that he needed to stop. That if he didn't stop now…well, he wasn't sure.

He needed her. Desperately, he needed her. He felt that no matter how tightly he clung to her, no matter how close he pulled her to him…it wouldn't be enough. It could never be enough.

"It's okay," Ada whispered into his ear before looking into his eyes. She loosened her arms but left them hanging lightly around his neck. He could feel the flow of her ki relaxing, and he took several deep breaths until his did the same. Trunks touched his forehead to hers, the water splashing softly around their chins.

"Being here, right here, at this moment – this is enough," she said quietly, calmly, her thumb stroking the nape of his neck. He felt his muscles relax, and his need – if not his want – ebb away with the ripples extending across the water. "For now, this is enough."

xxx

Oh, it had been a good memory…however desperate it felt.

As he turned over onto his side, Trunks wondered what 'time' it was. About two a.m., he hazarded to guess. He sighed. He should be sleeping, he knew; if all went according to plan, the door to the mysterious chamber would open within the next twelve hours. The gigantic hourglass that loomed over the living space of the Room of Spirit and Time was nearly spent. Vegeta had made mention the evening before of the necessity of absolute preparation for anything they faced as they reentered their own dimension. Or Vegeta's own dimension, anyway. Trunks knew that leaving this alien place would make him feel no closer to home than he had for the past year.

"You must be on the offensive at once," Vegeta had explained, a hint of excitement in his voice. "Much can happen in one day." The older man had then retired to his bed, leaving Trunks to contemplate what the morning would bring.

Trunks mentally chided himself. He knew full-well that he should be reflecting on his training, on the strategies that he had learned and honed, on the newfound power within him. The defeat of the being Cell should be first and foremost in his mind.

But it wasn't. Rather, a wave of familiar nostalgia mixed with dread had turned his focus inward. In the same way that he had been filled with reservation and apprehension before leaving in the time machine, he now considered, rather than what was to be won, all that could be lost. With a healthy dose of shame, Trunks admitted inwardly that he was not ready to sacrifice himself to the salvaging of a world that was only a blurred reflection of his own. The people here – Goku, Gohan, Bulma, even his father – deserved his help. And he was desperate for theirs, of course.

But his life…his one opportunity to enjoy the gift of existence…had never before seemed so precious as it now did. After the death of Gohan, he had been more than willing to throw himself away. What was the use of living if it only meant running and suffering?

And then there was Ada, he thought with a rueful, tired smile. Suddenly, he not only wanted to live; he needed to live. There were people, he had realized (from an angry exchange of opinions between the two – it seemed eons ago, now – as they sat on a streetside curb and gazed at the stars), that were depending upon him. Ada needed him to save the world.

And, oh, how he needed her. Trunks felt an ache deep in his chest at the thought. He had not seen her, had not spoken to her, had not touched her in an entire year. He missed her more desperately than he could articulate.

He could not die in this place. He could not die here, without her. Without seeing her again. Their time had been so short. They had been cheated of so much. There were so many things, thought of on nights such as these over the past year, that he had never told her but knew that he must.

xxx

The wet clothing in Ada's hands trembled as she transferred it from the laundry basket to the clothes line. In the dense, humid, mid-day heat, not a wisp of air seemed to move. The day before, a light breeze had rustled through the trees of the forest. It did not return.

The young woman pinched a clothespin open and moved it toward the line, her other hand holding up an old tee shirt. Each time that she tried to make the pin and rope meet, however, she missed. By inches. As her frustration grew, her hands shook more violently. The tenth attempt and failure at this simple motion was the last.

Ada shouted in a mixture of pain and anger, balled up the shirt, and launched it as far as she could. The pin fell from her fingers, and her strength seemed to melt away with it. She collapsed onto the ground, her bottom hitting the grass with a painful thud. Ada pulled her knees to her chest, rested her folded arms atop them, and buried her face in them. And then she began to cry. Her sobs were unconstrained and seemed to echo all about her, even in the dead weight of the summer heat.

Seven days. One hundred sixty-eight hours. Back before dinnertime.

"I'm sure that Trunks and I made some error in the calculations," Bulma had said, pencil eraser rubbing furiously across paper. "We're exploring something entirely new to science. An infinite number of factors could cause a discrepancy between time of departure and time of return."

"Bulma," Ada had said softly, loathe to ask, but desperate to know: "How many times have you done the calculations over again?"

The older woman's jaw had dropped slightly as she looked from the paper to Ada. "I…" she stammered, her gaze full of foreboding, "Probably a hundred. Maybe more."

"How many possible answers have you gotten?"

Bulma had closed her mouth, pressing her lips together tightly. If the two women had not been indoors, Ada would have sworn that a cloud was passing overhead, bathing Bulma in shadow. "One."

Ada looked down into her tea. "Sixty-eight hours?"

"Sixty-eight," she had heard Bulma whisper. The two had sat in silence at the Briefs' kitchen table for…how long? Minutes? Hours? How much time had passed before Bulma had sent Ada home? Had the young woman stayed there, waiting for Trunks' return, for three days? Four?

She had not returned. She didn't know if she could bear it: walking into the remains of the Capsule Corp. compound to find a forlorn Bulma, scrawling, calculating, checking, re-checking, grasping…

Time seemed to mean nothing now. Minutes crawled by. Ada's mind would wander off into a memory of Trunks, and she would be startled awake by her mother's voice, or a creak in the floor, to find that an hour had passed. Each second seemed disjointed, somehow, as though time were not a flowing constant but a series of moments that never connected to one another.

Ada's recollection of the past week was a blur, but she was sure of one thing. That morning, as Ada was cutting up melon for breakfast, Chi Chi had plopped a pile of dirty laundry into their old wicker basket and dragged it into the kitchen. So it was Saturday. Laundry day. For as long as Ada could remember. Saturday. That meant that it had been a full week since Trunks' time machine had vanished from her reality. Seven days.

Ada sat there, beneath the clothes line, weeping until she had no tears left. Just as her eyes ran dry, she felt a fat drop of rain on her bare shoulder. She turned her gaze to the sky. Storm clouds. As though the atmosphere had taken over when her own crying gave out. As though the earth itself were weeping.

Back before dinnertime.