Goten was grounded. No big surprise there, but still, we had stuff planned. I went to his house to fetch him after cleaning my room and his mom answered the door in a towering rage. Chichi informed me, voice shrill with supressed anger, that my best friend would not be coming out of his room for the rest of the day. As I didn't want to increase the chance of Goten's sentence getting extended, I did not apologise for blowing up their shed like my mom had told me to, deciding to leave that for another day. Chichi clipped the door shut in my face after the advice to watch my lingo. Her parting words suggested that Goten had been foolish enough to cuss in front of her. Again, no surprise. When I levitated up to my best friend's bedroom for the details, he was already waiting at his opened window with a dour look on his usually happy face. He confirmed that he had used the word that was gaining ground ever since the three Saiyajins' arrival. It was one I wouldn't dare use even without grownups around, but Goten had no trouble letting it slip when dropping a box of cereal that morning.
"It just rolled out, man." he said with a huge grin. "And my mom blew up like your dad when he did the Final Explosion to take out Majin Buu."
"Dude, not funny." I said. Being reminded of my dad's failed self-sacrificial ploy, still made me fight tears. It was the most traumatizing thing I had ever experienced. Goten just saw it as the best badass move ever and failed to grasp that I lost my dad that day, even if I got him back soon after.
I called Goten a dumbass for basically blowing me off by getting grounded and not being able to spar with the Saiyajins, to which he told me that they had come around for training with his dad and that they had headed off someplace together.
Our exchange was cut short when Goten hissed: "My mom is coming."
I gave my best friend a last pointed look and took off to higher altitude so that Chichi wouldn't spot me, cutting through a whisp of cloud in my upward dash. I wanted to kick myself for teaching the Saiyajins how to suppress their energy yesterday. They were masking it like we all did and that made it impossible for me to locate Goku and the Saiyajins' training ground. Bummed out, I decided to just head back home, but I picked up speed happily when I sensed that one single huge, stationary power level had remained there. The captain had not succeeded mastering ki-suppression, something my dad had found both telling and hilarious. Him giving that words – like he was apt to do – had set her off so completely that the only way she could make her ki go, was up into extremes, the red energy literally bursting out of her skin. That had been cool. I had never seen red ki before she went crazy like that.
Driven as she had shown herself in ascending to super, vowing that the power would be hers in time, I couldn't figure out why she hadn't joined the others for training. I was determined to find out what the deal was and landed on the lawn of my home at the same time that the captain emerged from the back compound a vengeful Athena again. It was convenient catching her outside. My mom had forbidden me to go in there. The captain's tail was slashing through the air behind her like a declaration of war, but when she spotted me, she made a beeline for me, her scowl lessening just a bit. The scar at her mouth twitched as she upturned the corner of her lip in what I gathered must pass for a smile. Pre-empting my daunt I still could not shake, I gave her the kind of big grin that got me out of trouble with my mom and grandma and even managed to take the sharp edge off Chichi's anger when timed right.
The captain hmphed, put her hands on her hips and let her piercing eyes move from my beaming face to the gravity tank a little way behind me. The round spaceship gave a succession of portentous quakes to showcase how my dad was going hard in there. It made the corner of her mouth lift a bit more and she returned her attention to me with a flick of the head that sent her tangle of wet hair back across her shoulder like a cracking whip. There was a fresh scrape on her right temple, next to that long pink scar running into her brow.
"Hello, Princeling." she said dangerously.
I couldn't say that I was struck with a need to vanish up my own arse at my title like my dad warned me not to. It didn't sound cool at all. It rang more like the off-brand to its much appreciated and widely accepted superior name-brand counterpart. I was the generic rip-off to my dad's Coca Cola, aspiring, but not nearly as good as the real thing. As if to agree, a massive flash of blinding light shot from the gravity tank's round windows and made shadows dance on the captain's raised, curiously engaged looking face.
I struggled with the knee-jerk "Ma'am." that left my mouth and rectified: "Captain." just in time to stop her already frightful expression from growing darker and more sinister. I got in front of my own doubts again and asked: "Where did the others go to train?"
"Fuck knows." the captain said with little agitation.
She gazed around and did it physically with a dynamic rotating on the spot to face all points of the compass. I noticed that like her hair, her blue pants were soaking wet and she smelled like she had taken a dive in a bottle of shampoo. Had something as trivial as a bath really side-tracked her from training? And why had she taken it with her pants on?
"I should have brought more fucking gear." she muttered to herself as if she was answering my thoughts, then she told me: "I have to go to the ship for a refit." she gave a jerk of the head. "It is that way, right?"
She was pointing out the exact direction of the wreckage and still I rushed to offer: "I can take you." added a firmer "Captain." and blurted on: "I wanted to return anyway and have another look around."
The captain was looking at the gravity tank shaking on its fundament again. "Alright." she accepted, adding a threatening: "Princeling."
"Okay!" I cheered. "Just give me a sec. I want to get my camera!" and before she could change her mind, I tore across the lawn into the house to fetch the polaroid camera I had been given on my birthday. I wanted to take pictures for my mom. She refused to join me to the wreckage, even if she was curious about the technology that had been preserved down there. She was too busy with her work and the baby that had claimed all her attention for the past two years. I wondered when Bra would stop being the baby and hoped that once she did, my mom would have time to spare on me again. Perhaps taking some snapshots of the equipment inside the wreckage could sway her to forget the baby for a while and go on a fieldtrip with me.
I came back out of the house and the second I did, the captain blasted off into the direction of the wreckage. She did not wait for me, did not make eye-contact, tell me to follow or give any other indication that she had not just decided that she did not want me to come along after all. But if she had, then why would she have waited for me to return? It was puzzling me and I stood looking up at the trail of white she left behind in her wake across the blue summer sky. Why she, of all people, should be so hard to read was just wrong. With her hazardous temper, she was the one person who's actions you would want to be able to predict at all times. I usually had a knack for picking up on others' moods, but with the captain I had no idea.
I hesitated, then went after her. If she had waited for me to get out of the house, it stood to reason that she did want me to come along. When I caught up with her, she made her scar twitch again. Since she did not send me from her side, I took that for another smile, positioned my flying self beside her and hung my camera around my neck.
The captain gave it a passing glance and pinned her predatory eyes on me. "What is that?"
"A camera." I told her. She just glared at me and I elaborated: "It takes pictures." the slight raise in her scarred brow told me that this wasn't clearing anything up for her and so I told her: "You'll see. I can't snap shots right now. The wind will rip the polaroid out of my camera."
She hmphed again and gazed ahead. While we cut across the sky together, the foreboding of her continued silence was somewhat lessened by the wind that was bludgeoning my ears and before I could get too uncomfortable with it, she slowed down her pace and spoke up. "Tell me about that sadistic cunt's downfall."
I obliged, happy for the distraction and slowed my pace with hers so that I wouldn't have to scream over the wind. Occupied as I became with giving my recount, I no longer had room for feeling on edge with Athena, no matter how vengeful she may get. I realised that I liked telling her the story. Liked the idea that I had taken revenge for her as well as for my dad. She pushed me to give up whatever gory details I had and did it with relish. Her inquiries were clipped yet thorough, the hows and whys in reaction to my answers gaining her as complete a picture as I could paint for her. By the time we reached the wreckage, I had told her everything I knew and she seemed satisfied. Clearly time-travel wasn't a subject she couldn't wrap her mind around. She even wondered out loud what other, unforeseen effects my changing the course of the future might have had and hypothesized that I could have saved her from a fate worse than: "… getting stranded at the arse-end of the universe." She made it sound like this was bad enough.
I deflated at that. She relentlessly crushed the notion that I had given her back her freedom.
"This planet can't be worse than being stuck in that machine we sprang you from." I said wanting to point that out to her.
"It is not my planet."
Well no, but her planet was gone. I thought about the back compound, about Athena exchanging Mount Olympus for a futon on the floor of some disused lab. "I'm sorry." I said embarrassedly.
The captain let those piercing eyes sweep my face. "What for?"
I shrugged uncomfortably and it wasn't just the glare. "You know, my parents not giving you a real room to stay in."
"I give fuck all about comforts." she dismissed me. "All I need is food in my belly."
"So, you don't mind?" my hopeful bid for reassurance made me sound wimpy and whiny, two things I didn't think appealed to Athena.
"There are a lot of things I mind. Getting questioned about something that I already made clear, for example." she said, but the sarcasm left her again instantly and she resumed with something I guessed had to be optimism: "Boars and kack. I have a roof, a shower and a shitter." she granted me another one of her sinister looks. "And my life, for which I have you to thank, Princeling. Or the you that is to become of you some turns around the suns down the road."
Turns around suns were what Saiyajins called years, I had learned through my dad, and they counted ages by decades, possibly because they had a much longer lifespan than humans. I was two years into my second decade now and my father was halfway into his fifth. Chancing a quick glance at the captain hovering beside me, I wondered what decade she would be in. She looked young, but then again, so did my dad and I figured that her hyper sleep had made her younger than her living years, like my time in the hyperbolic time chamber training with my dad had made us physically older than we were.
Instead of asking her what decade she was in – my mom had taught me that talking to women about their age was impolite – I said: "I am way ahead of that dude."
The captain showed me her small, white teeth. She was grinning, I thought, and it looked aggressive, like the way a dog would curl up its lip when it snarled, yet there was real laughter in her scary eyes which made them less so and more endurable. This wasn't the kind of condoning smile my mom gave me whenever I bragged about something. It was appreciative. Athena was giving me credit for showing off.
"Is that right?"
"You bet." I quipped brashly and she snorted a laugh.
Even if I was being cocky, it was true. Not long after attaining my super form, I had surpassed my future self. At last, according to my dad, but he had been cocky too. I had never seen him as proud as he had been that day. Not until the baby was born, anyhow. Bra could fart and garner pride from my mom and my dad, though never in my mom's presence, would declare my baby sister a scrapper in the making whenever he picked her up and she kicked out with her fat, clumsy legs or accidentally slapped him in the face. I was distracted from feeling left behind and sorry for myself when the captain shot down inside the wreckage like an arrow from a bow, leaving me behind for real. I hurried to enter after her mentally noting that I should stop expecting to get a heads up from her.