Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Crimson Rain ❯ The Mask We Wear ( Chapter 4 )

Disclaimer: Dragonball Z, all of its characters, places, and other descriptive elements are property of Akira Toryama, Bird Studios, FUNimation, etc, etc. All other characters, places and events are my own. I make no money off of this writing.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

The Mask We Wear

Crazy, but that's how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it's not to late
To learn how to love
And forget how to hate

Ozzy Osbourne - “Crazy Train”

 

It took the rest of the day for them to find a suitable apartment. It was nowhere near as large as Trunks' but it was still in a good area of town, and close to Trunks' home. Since it was already furnished; she wouldn't have to worry about buying furniture. Four thousand credits paid her deposit and the first three months rent. She had a little fewer than fifteen thousand credits left. A job wasn't as easy; no one seemed to want to hire a princess that had no practical experience. Trunks had exhausted every contact that he had made over the years and finally came back to the office.

He remembered how no one would hire him; how he had ended up fighting to make ends meet. He didn't even know if she could fight, which would be a problem if she couldn't. Neither he nor Scar could be there twenty four hours a day. She would need to know how to defend herself.

Kyara sat in one of the client chairs, looking forlorn. She knew that she had to work, but she wasn't sure that there was anything the she would specifically do well at. When Scar emerged from the garage, he looked at both of them.

Trunks finally answered him without the question having been asked, “We found her an apartment, but no job yet. She has some money, but it won't be long before that runs out.”

Scar nodded, “Well, you know, I've been thinking about this entire job thing. My wife is always carrying on about how we need some kind of office manager to keep the place clean and organized. Since she refuses to clean since the last time-“

“Well, Scar,” Trunks interjected, “you did yell at her when you couldn't find the core to the sonic drive.”

Scar shrugged, “It wasn't where I put it.”

“You put it on the lid of the toilet, Scar. She moved it into the garage on top of the tool chest, a perfectly practical place for it.”

“It makes no difference, but I agree with her. This place could use someone to keep it together. I'll pay you fifteen credits an hour, but mind- and I stress this, do not move anything without telling me where you put it.”

Kyara nodded. After all, it seemed a simple request. Of course, Kyara wasn't aware at the time that Scar was, quite possibly, the biggest packrat in the North Galaxy. Trunks tended to throw things away after they no longer served a useful purpose. Scar, on the other hand, held on to things with the hope that they may one day be useful again. He shuddered to think that one day he might have use for one of the empty food bags that littered the floor and on that day, it wouldn't be there. Even the tiniest bit of string might be needed one day to tie two tiny things together.

The other thing that Scar stressed was that the garage was his and Bors' domain. Kyara was not allowed to clean and organize in there. They both knew well enough where every tool, every part, every speck of lube, grease, oil, gas, or other mechanically essential item was, thank you very much. And despite the chaos that was enclosed in that space, there was no need to make it neater, for it was a garage, after all, and garages were supposed to be dirty and unorganized. Kyara wasn't sure if this was a male thing in general, or specific to males of Scar's species. Either way, she respected his request.

However, the office was not part of the garage, and all of the parts, tools, tins of oil and grease that were in the office were boxed in small crates and dropped onto the garage floor. When she ran out of crates, she began nonchalantly tossing pieces, parts, tools, tins of oil or grease, and bits of metal into the garage, eliciting curses and yelps from Scar as he dodged or frantically tried to catch the more fragile items. Bors seemed to find this entertaining, watching his father jumping around in a frenetic attempt to avoid the odd screwdriver. Once, she even tossed an entire drill at him. He managed to catch it, and muttering something under his breath about using them to put together a pair of iron shackles, he hung it on its hook on the wall.

It took nearly three weeks of ten hour days, with two days off per week, but finally, the office had a visible floor, two visible desks, and a visible couch that was scheduled to be deep-cleaned later that week. The file cabinet in the corner that had previously been something that stood there and caught dust, with a third drawer that had become the home to a small family of rodents, was now clean and organized with the exception of the third drawer. The rabbit-like creatures that were no bigger than a common rat got to keep their home and were fed and watered daily by Kyara.

Both Trunks and Scar now had two piles of paper on their desk; one for completed jobs awaiting payment and one for current jobs. Everything else had found a home in the file cabinet. With the hard work done, Kyara now sat at Scar's desk while he was in the garage; which is where he seemed to stay most of the time he was there. She and Trunks were now trying to find them work, and to her surprise, Scar gave her five percent of any payment for a job she located. She arranged meetings with the clients who came to them and ran things when the job required Trunks and Scar go to the clients.

Although Trunks knew that Bors could fight, he knew that the fourteen year old would be little more than a small threat to anyone that might come after Kyara. In their spare time, Trunks started to train Kyara. He found that she already was a fair fighter, having obviously been previously trained. Still, even with this amazing power that she possessed and seemed to rarely use, he needed to make sure that if he and Scar were gone that she could protect herself.

Even though he had no idea where her power came from, he suspected that it was a form of energy, much like his own ki. Experimenting, he formed a small ball of ki and tossed it at her to see if she could cause it to move, like she could solid objects. She cocked her head to the side as if to tell him that this was child's play and the small blast shot off at an angle, eventually exploding into the side of a condemned high-rise that had once been condominiums for the ultra rich, then government-run tenements for the extremely poor. Now, it was just a crumbling scar on the face of Andromeda Station. The politicians, however, could not figure out what to do with it. Tearing it down and rebuilding was expensive, but so was any kind of renovation.

Satisfied that she could defend herself from any species capable of projecting ki energy, he set out to teach her to be a better fighter. He always held back in their sparring matches, not yet confident that she could survive an all-out onslaught just yet. She improved with each day, learning to use her small stature, with its low center of gravity to her advantage, as well as her speed against larger targets. She wasn't tiny, but she was short and lithe, with enough curves to distract any straight man. Also limber and dexterous, she could bend herself into positions that made Trunks cringe and unravel herself just as quickly to assume another.

Perhaps it was the fact that she was more skilled with a blade than he was that caught him most by surprise. Giving her a katana and sparring with her proved to be the one thing that Trunks was mistaken in; it was clear that she was the superior fighter in this arena. He determined that the Unseelie guards, almost always equipped with swords and daggers had coached her in this. He could only deduce from what he had seen that they relied more on their weaponry than hand-to-hand combat.

It was Scar that had purchased her a small gun out of his own money and taken her to the shooting range. At first, her hand trembled so much that she barely hit the paper, let alone the black target painted on it, but within a few weeks she was steady enough to regularly get close to the center though she was certainly no crack shot. As long as she could hit what she was aiming at, Scar figured that he had done his part in teaching her to defend herself. He forced her to wear the shoulder holster so that she would become accustomed to it, even in the sparring matches between her and Trunks. It should feel like an additional layer of clothing rather than something that was cumbersome. After some trial and error about placement, left or right side, and the adjustable straps, they finally found the fit that was most natural for her.

During this time, Trunks and Scar only took local jobs, things that would keep them away no longer than twenty four hours. It limited the amount of money they could make, but regular payment from the Unseelie for being Kyara's bodyguards starting coming in. Scar began giving this to Kyara instead of her wage, stating that since she wasn't actually doing much work; her real job was keeping out of trouble. It ended up being quite a pay raise, but neither Scar nor Trunks could take any credit for actually having had to guard her. In three months, there had been no sign of the Seelie or Unseelie.

Trunks didn't want any of them to get complacent. He thought that the Seelie would bide their time. After all, first they had to find her, and they were probably still checking out other royal families on other planets. At this point, there was probably no reason for them to think that for all intents and purposes, she was living the life of a commoner. Trunks had successfully used this camouflage himself and didn't see any reason why it couldn't work a second time with Kyara. Emotionally, outwardly, he remained distant. He was friendly, but was careful not to allow himself to appear as anything other than a co-worker and a friend.

 

It had been three months since their return to Andromeda Station. There had been no sign of the Seelie. They kept in regular contact with the Unseelie, usually Kyara's father, but he still wasn't convinced that it was safe for her to return. Kyara sensed some deeper reason for his wanting her to stay here, or rather, not return to Faeyr. Though she never mentioned it, or asked about it, Kyara believed that there were reasons her father didn't want her to come back that had nothing to do with the Seelie.

Though she missed Faeyr terribly, she had made a home on Andromeda Station. Trunks was making sure that she could, indeed, take care of herself. He believed that since they hadn't heard anything from the Seelie that they might send bounty hunters after her. It wouldn't take too big a leap for them to find their way to Andromeda. While he and Scar were principled, there were other bounty hunters and bounty hunting teams that weren't. Some of those teams would do just about anything they wanted to their quarry as long as it didn't kill them. There were more than a few documented cases of torture and rape.

Kyara understood his point. She wouldn't think that the Seelie would show up en masse on Andromeda. It would be too obvious and one of them would hear or see something before they had a chance to locate her. An anonymous bodyguard could stand right night to each other and she wouldn't know it. As a precaution, Trunks had slowly been trying to teach her the bukujutsu technique. He wasn't sure that she could use ki, mostly because she had a minimal ki signature. What he was certain of was that if she could throw a full grown man across a room with just her mind, then it shouldn't be that difficult to project that into levitating herself.

At first, nothing happened. No matter how hard she concentrated, she could not raise herself even a millimeter off the ground. Frustrated, she sat down on the ground in a huff. How was it that he could do it so effortlessly, and she was exhausted just from trying? Were his ki and her… magic so different? He hovered above her, looking down at her.

“I don't know how to explain it to you,” Trunks said, “I learned when I was a small child.”

“Lucky you,” she said gruffly.

“I have an idea,” he offered, “but, I don't think you'd try it. I think you'd be too scared.”

She stood, offended, “Scared? What do I have to be afraid of?”

“Heights?” he suggested, his lips curling upward slightly in a bemused smirk.

“Hardly,” Kyara said, “I'm not afraid of heights.”

“Good,” Trunks said, scooping her up and shooting upwards, stopping to hover about two hundred feet in the air.

“You wouldn't dare,” she said.

“Well,” he said then he dropped her, “Yeah, I would.”

Kyara screamed as she fell, watching as the ground rushed up to meet her, and thinking desperately of somehow remaining in the air. Five feet from the ground, she swooped upwards, careening like an out of control paper airplane to the ground a few yards away.

Trunks landed beside her, looking down at her, bent from the waist, “Yeah, control takes time.”

“You son-of-a-bitch! I could have been killed.”

Trunks shook his head, “I wouldn't have let you hit the ground. Seriously, now let's try to recreate what made you fly to keep from falling.”

“The hell I will. You're not dropping me again.”

Trunks rolled his eyes, “That's not what I meant. I meant that we're going to try to use that feeling, that… memory of falling, to see if you can use it to fly.”

Kyara looked at him skeptically, “Why do I even have to learn this? I've gone twenty-three years without it.”

Trunks sighed, “Because some of the bounty hunters that might come after you may have the ability to fly. I just want to cover all the bases.”

“Can't it wait?” she asked and he shook his head once.

She sighed, “Alright then.”

She stood and he looked at her, “Try to remember the feeling.”

Kyara closed her eyes, trying to bring that sensation of falling back into her memory. When she couldn't quite get that same dropping feeling in her stomach, she looked at him and shook her head.

“See? It didn't work. Guess I'm not meant to fly.”

He sighed, “Don't make me drop you again.”

“I can't do it, okay? My… power doesn't work that way.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, “Let's try something else, then. One last thing.”

“What could it hurt?” she asked.

“Nothing. Well, almost nothing,” he said cryptically.

“What do you mean, almost nothing?”

“What I want you to do is to focus your power on the ground. Focus on using it to push you up.”

Exasperated and wanting to get the humiliation over with, she did as he asked. At first, nothing happened except the wind around her picking up.

“Concentrate harder,” he said watching as the wind began to pick up, tossing her hair wildly around her.

Her face was intent with concentration as she focused her energy more and she began lifting off the ground.

“Okay,” he said, “now use it to propel yourself higher.”

She opened her eyes, still concentrating and discovered she was hovering about five feet above the ground. She pushed against the ground with her mind and rose higher, and then switched tactics as she pushed against herself to propel herself forward.

“That's good for now. You can come down,” he said.

“Are you kidding me? This is awesome!”

“Kyara,” he sighed, “try not to call attention to yourself. It's not exactly the best idea.”

She figured out that to land, all she needed to do was stop pushing gradually.

“If you can fly, and use those… ki blasts, then why do you use guns?”

“Because,” he said, “using my ki, like I do when I fly and… fire blasts, even when I fight, can be felt. Everyone has their own unique ki signature. There are others who would know it was me if they felt it.”

“So, you are hiding from something.”

He shrugged, “No. I just want to live my life. I'm not hiding.”

She dropped it. She knew that he was lying, but like her, he might have good reason for hiding his identity.

“Can we go back now?” she asked.

He nodded, “It is getting late.”

“Trunks?”

“What?”

“Thanks for… this. For showing me how to protect myself. You and Scar can't be with me all the time.”

“You need to know how anywhere you are. Sometimes the monsters look like everyone else.”

“Are you a monster?” she asked.

He looked at her, “That would depend on the definition of monster you're thinking about.”

“You don't seem like a monster.”

“I'm many things,” he said softly, “I try not to be a monster.”

The way he said it indicated that he could be. That he repressed that part of himself. He had buried it so deeply inside that it was lying somewhere below the surface, waiting for the chance to be let out. A hibernating beast, waiting for its time to awaken. Outwardly, he was quiet and indifferent, but she was beginning to wonder if the mask he wore hid more. She wondered what lie beneath that façade.