Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Garrulous and Gritless ❯ I, 9: Bulma ( Chapter 9 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: ShiningMoon 
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action / Comedy / Drama / Psychological / Romance | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 01.15.2011 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.9K | Visits: 248 | Status: Completed
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action / Comedy / Drama / Psychological / Romance | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 01.15.2011 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.9K | Visits: 248 | Status: Completed
NOTE: Some of this gets a little intense (I think), so if you're really squeamish or have a particularly vivid imagination/ability to visualize, you've been warned.
I hope you enjoy this chapter! Whew!
...
I don't remember if the crash or the screams came first, but I recognized that voice the second it hit my chest, and the laugh that followed gave me shivers. I was nearly flying down the stairs, hardly thought as I grabbed a cleaver when I ran past the kitchen, plotted out in my mind where in the lab anything was that I could use as a weapon. Were Raditz's comrades here, or was it really—
Before I could even round the corner to the set of stairs down to my lab, I heard another crash, a yelp, and a voice screaming almost incoherently—Son?
And here I am, breathing heavily at the door to my lab—but it's already been kicked down. I stumble toward the source of the noise, still gripping the cleaver as I try to decipher what's happened. The screaming persists, and I round the corner to see that it's little Gohan—only he's somehow quite older than when I saw him two months ago, and his hair is getting shaggy, nearly standing on-end as he shouts, "You're gonna regret this!"
I follow his eyes to the torn-down room I kept Raditz in, over to Raditz himself. His eyes are bright with rage and he's grinning the devil's grin. From the angle he's standing at I can see fresh blisters on his back, and I'm certain it was somehow Gohan's work: there's no one else in sight but these two. But...Son was...
Oh, god.
I notice it as soon as Gohan takes one determined step forward, and another, looking past Raditz and through the gaping hole in the wall that leads to the outside. Son's body is crumpled on the lawn, unmoving, and I know it was him from whom I heard the first scream. Without thinking I make a dash for him, my feet smacking against shrapnel—bits of the wall—as I run dizzily to the brightness that is the outside. I notice vaguely that I'm still holding the cleaver, and my hand is clinging to it even tighter than before.
"Not so fast," Raditz steps in front of me, and I don't have time to stop—I stumble over his foot and the cleaver tumbles out of my hand, just out of reach. "Both of you," he adds, and charges a bright ball in one of his palms, eyes fixed on Gohan now that I'm down. I can't breathe as I wonder if this is how Son died, some angry ball of energy eating up his insides. Panic racks around my ribs—without Son, who's left? we'll all die, all of us—and Gohan seems frozen to the spot, suddenly, and quaking visibly. I feel a low laugh rumble out of Raditz as the ball gets bigger, his tail thrashing about like a cat's before pouncing on a mouse; from my closeness I can nearly hear excitement humming from him and it only makes my heart pound harder. "If you don't join me," Raditz says; I can't see his face but I can tell he's still grinning, "you're going to join your daddy."
"I can't," Gohan says with conviction that's nearly lost in the tears on the corners of his eyes.
Raditz laughs. Oh god—he's going to do it. The ball gets bigger and Raditz seems to brace himself for the recoil. Gohan's knees are shaking almost as much as my insides, and the panic makes my blood feel like fire as it pounds through me; I choke as my breathing becomes so fast that it tries to come in and out at the same time. My muscles tighten and before I can think about what I'm doing, I do it—I lunge for the cleaver and throw it over my shoulder at Raditz. My eyes are too blurred for me to see where it goes, or if it does anything, but I can discern Raditz moving in shock, and Gohan leaping over him, his little hands connecting with the back of Raditz's neck before the massive Saiyan crumbles to the ground. I rub my eyes and find Gohan looking off to the side, lip quivering.
"Did you kill him?" I whisper.
"No," says Gohan, his voice much louder, and it reminds me of his father's. "I...I couldn't. But you almost did." He looks down and balls his fists, and he sobs out, "I almost wish...that you wouldn't have missed."
I glance back at Raditz, and I can see his chest subtly rising and falling. "How long until he wakes up?"
Gohan just shakes his head—he doesn't know, and how would he? I pull myself to my feet, and discover the hard way that I twisted my ankle when I fell. My arms are scraped up from landing on the chunks of the wall that had been destroyed. Wincing a little, afraid of what I might see, I peer outside at Son, and tiptoe over the debris, stepping over what remains of the wall.
What I see is revolting—singed skin with burns that continue into to what may have once been organs and bones, blood everywhere. It is an ugly death for someone as beautiful as Son. He can come back, I remind myself—as long as nothing happens to the dragonballs; as long as nothing happens to Piccolo or Kami. But it will be impossible to erase this image. Gohan has come closer, but it seems he can't bring himself to look, and I'm glad for that. I close the lids of Son's eerily half-open eyes, shivering at the lukewarmth of his skin.
As I pull my hand back, he disappears.
"The work of Kami, no doubt," a deep voice echoes from the roof just behind me. It's Piccolo, but I haven't the energy to be afraid. "He must have plans for Son Goku in the afterlife."
"You think?" I mutter. For a moment I wonder if Piccolo could hear me over Gohan's quiet crying—but of course he could, with those ears.
"Yes," he answers, voice bitter, "I suspect so." When he leaps from the roof and touches down a distance away, Gohan stumbles over to him, wrapping an arm around his leg.
"Raditz killed my daddy," he whimpers.
"I know," Piccolo stares down at him, his long fingers inches from brushing through his hair. "Now you see why we must train for when the other two arrive."
"Do you think they're really coming?" I ask. I mean—maybe he's bluffing. God, I hope he's bluffing.
We all jump as a voice echoes between us; for a split second I think Raditz has woken up, but this voice is far too calm and wise. "Piccolo is correct to insist on training," it says—Kami's voice. "I feel great peril in Earth's future. What it is, I cannot see," he says, "I know only that my death is disconcertingly near."
"How near?" Piccolo demands.
"Even this is foggy," comes the answer, and Kami's voice sounds ridden with dread, "No less than a year, but I am not sure how much more. Perhaps two years." He pauses, and we all wait—I imagine Gohan's heart is as still as mine, and even Piccolo's, if he has one. "For this reason I have taken Son Goku. I will request for him special training in the afterlife. Let us hope that it will be enough."
"So I shouldn't wish him back with the dragonballs?" I ask, glancing at where his body had rested and imagining the boy I met haphazardly, now a man, on his way to becoming a god if Kami thinks that after his he'll stand a chance of beating Raditz's two far stronger (if what he says is true) Saiyan friends. It was because of the dragonballs that we met—but I never would have imagined them becoming our pass to the afterlife and back. Some god along the way must feel cheated.
"Wait until a year has passed," Kami finally says. "So he may get all the training he can and still arrive in time to defeat this threat. That is much better than risking the threat arriving first—lest I die before you can wish him back." I can hear him breathing heavily. "Even if I do not make it, the Earth may still—and perhaps Son can even change our fate."
"A year," I say, "all right." After I close my eyes for a moment, making sure I have this date committed to memory—not that I wouldn't already—I can feel, somehow, that Kami is no longer present. I turn to Piccolo and Gohan. By now, Gohan has stopped clinging to Piccolo's leg, and he looks determined—probably heartened by knowing that his father will be back.
"I'll be a good student," he says quietly to Piccolo, his eyes pinned to the little puddles of blood that haven't quite been soaked into the ground yet, to a little scrap that tore away from Son's clothes as whatever Raditz fired tore through him. Gohan takes a few steps forward to grab the cloth, and tucks it in his pocket before looking up into Piccolo's eyes. "Teach me everything."
"Then come," he turns away. "This is not the place for it." Before he takes to the air, he looks back at me, and at the hole that goes back into the lab. Piccolo's eyes pierce into mine and I wonder briefly why Gohan would subject himself to it—but I know. "He is still unconscious," he tells me, eyes lingering on Raditz's body. "I trust you will deal with him appropriately."
I shiver a little bit, and I can't think of anything to do but nod. This seems to be enough assurance for Piccolo, and he lifts into the sky.
"Mister Piccolo," Gohan says, his fists balled and eyes averted. Poor kid's embarrassed about something. "I can't fly yet. Can you carry me?"
"You will run," he growls. "And you will keep up." I open my mouth to offer a plane—but clamp it shut at the look that Piccolo gives me. Before I can blink, he's gone, and I can hear the already-distant thump of feet on the sidewalk as Gohan sprints after him.
My heart is deep in my gut, or maybe it's the other way around—either way, they're both buried in my throat as my mind turns to what I have to do now. If I don't kill him, it might be much less than a year before we can't use the dragonballs, and I know when he comes to, I'll be helpless to stop him—he'll probably kill me (probably cook me and chew me up and spit me out just to spite me), find his scouter, and leave for revenge on Gohan.
Somehow, these thoughts don't make it any easier for me to tiptoe back into the lab, across the floor, and over to the cleaver; don't make it easier to pick it up; don't make it easier to hold it as my fingers shake uncontrollably. I try to imagine Son, dead. I try to imagine his scream as I hover over his brother, trying to decide where...
I can see a little pool of blood underneath his head and I crane my neck around to see that he has a cut that seems to have nearly taken his eye out—slashing both the protrusion above his brow and down over his cheek, but not through the eye itself. This must be what Gohan meant when he said I had nearly killed Raditz, and now as I am getting ready to do what I have to, I'm wishing I wouldn't have missed, too. His nose flares each time he takes in a shallow breath, and unlike Son's body, his is still hot—hotter than a human's, I've noticed. His tail rests limply over one leg, and through the hole that's been burned through his shirt, I can see where it connects up to his back. With all this time I've spent trying to make sure he couldn't escape, I've hardly had the chance to study the Saiyan physiology.
But that's not why I'm hesitating, is it?
Some people look as calm as they might in heaven when they're asleep. Raditz doesn't—every crease on his face screams that he's ready for war, that while he sleeps he's making deals with the devil to keep him alive a bit longer, to make him stronger, to let him suck up in the unholiest of ways all the life he's drawn out of others—which, I'm getting the impression now, is quite a lot.
His stupidly messy mane flutters every time he breathes out, and I wonder if even in his unconsciousness he can taste the blood that drips down from his brow into his mouth.
I brace myself with the cleaver against the back of his neck. I know I'm strong enough to do this. This is the man who killed Son in cold blood, and god knows how many more before him. He's awful and anything he ever did for me was just a ruse to keep somebody from killing him sooner. The stupid insults to make me think I could take him on if I had to—the comment about killing and cooking me just to shake me up. Wrapping my toe—he just didn't want more blood on his floor, or...that promise he made was a lie, and...
Yamcha probably did a lot of awful things as a desert bandit, but nobody ever killed him...
Raditz just grinned like he did to fluster me, though, and—to—and that whole stupid thing about the pants was just—and I'll be letting everybody else, down, anyway, if I don't, so...
He only...
Shit.
I hope don't regret this.
Before I can think twice, I run over to the storage room for a flask of the kind of chemical even my father always warned me about, and kneel back down beside Raditz, willing my hands to remain steady as I remove my jacket and by sheer force of will rip it in half down the seam in the back. I stuff as much as I can into his slack mouth and uncap the flask. I need it near, and I pray it won't fall over on me if he has a spasm—and he will. I dip a corner of the cloth in to make sure it'll work—and to my relief, it takes at least a few seconds before the cloth starts dissolving.
All right.
This is it.
I'm going to do this.
I wrap one hand around his tail near the base, and with the other I grab the cleaver and slice his tail off, wincing as the cleaver catches midway through but forcing myself to finish the job. I hear the breath hitch in his throat, and I lift my heel from beneath me to pin it to his lower back (as if that will hold him down) as I reach for the flask, dunking the cloth in and taking a deep breath as I press it—hard—against the stump that remains.
A wild scream tears through the dead air and I throw the flask across the room just in time, as he kicks me to the floor. I land heavy on my palms and we lock eyes—his are full of murder; mine are stronger than I thought they ever could be as I stare back. His arm shoots out and he grabs me by the front of my shirt as he tears the cloth out of his mouth. "You...will...die," he hisses through labored breaths.
"Not so fast," I bark, wondering briefly if I'm someone else, or how else I'd manage to sound so calm. As my heart pounds out of my chest, I stretch my leg partway over him and bend my knee until my heel presses just above the stump. He screams in a way that assures me he is Son's brother, and I desperately hope I don't regret this. "Your tail is gone for good," I tell him quietly, "but there's one way to get it back."
"Fuck," he says, unmoving, and manages to mouth a, "what?"
I lift my heel off of him and crane my neck so that I'm inches from his face. "Me."
Converting /tmp/phpbn5S50 to /dev/stdout
I hope you enjoy this chapter! Whew!
...
I don't remember if the crash or the screams came first, but I recognized that voice the second it hit my chest, and the laugh that followed gave me shivers. I was nearly flying down the stairs, hardly thought as I grabbed a cleaver when I ran past the kitchen, plotted out in my mind where in the lab anything was that I could use as a weapon. Were Raditz's comrades here, or was it really—
Before I could even round the corner to the set of stairs down to my lab, I heard another crash, a yelp, and a voice screaming almost incoherently—Son?
And here I am, breathing heavily at the door to my lab—but it's already been kicked down. I stumble toward the source of the noise, still gripping the cleaver as I try to decipher what's happened. The screaming persists, and I round the corner to see that it's little Gohan—only he's somehow quite older than when I saw him two months ago, and his hair is getting shaggy, nearly standing on-end as he shouts, "You're gonna regret this!"
I follow his eyes to the torn-down room I kept Raditz in, over to Raditz himself. His eyes are bright with rage and he's grinning the devil's grin. From the angle he's standing at I can see fresh blisters on his back, and I'm certain it was somehow Gohan's work: there's no one else in sight but these two. But...Son was...
Oh, god.
I notice it as soon as Gohan takes one determined step forward, and another, looking past Raditz and through the gaping hole in the wall that leads to the outside. Son's body is crumpled on the lawn, unmoving, and I know it was him from whom I heard the first scream. Without thinking I make a dash for him, my feet smacking against shrapnel—bits of the wall—as I run dizzily to the brightness that is the outside. I notice vaguely that I'm still holding the cleaver, and my hand is clinging to it even tighter than before.
"Not so fast," Raditz steps in front of me, and I don't have time to stop—I stumble over his foot and the cleaver tumbles out of my hand, just out of reach. "Both of you," he adds, and charges a bright ball in one of his palms, eyes fixed on Gohan now that I'm down. I can't breathe as I wonder if this is how Son died, some angry ball of energy eating up his insides. Panic racks around my ribs—without Son, who's left? we'll all die, all of us—and Gohan seems frozen to the spot, suddenly, and quaking visibly. I feel a low laugh rumble out of Raditz as the ball gets bigger, his tail thrashing about like a cat's before pouncing on a mouse; from my closeness I can nearly hear excitement humming from him and it only makes my heart pound harder. "If you don't join me," Raditz says; I can't see his face but I can tell he's still grinning, "you're going to join your daddy."
"I can't," Gohan says with conviction that's nearly lost in the tears on the corners of his eyes.
Raditz laughs. Oh god—he's going to do it. The ball gets bigger and Raditz seems to brace himself for the recoil. Gohan's knees are shaking almost as much as my insides, and the panic makes my blood feel like fire as it pounds through me; I choke as my breathing becomes so fast that it tries to come in and out at the same time. My muscles tighten and before I can think about what I'm doing, I do it—I lunge for the cleaver and throw it over my shoulder at Raditz. My eyes are too blurred for me to see where it goes, or if it does anything, but I can discern Raditz moving in shock, and Gohan leaping over him, his little hands connecting with the back of Raditz's neck before the massive Saiyan crumbles to the ground. I rub my eyes and find Gohan looking off to the side, lip quivering.
"Did you kill him?" I whisper.
"No," says Gohan, his voice much louder, and it reminds me of his father's. "I...I couldn't. But you almost did." He looks down and balls his fists, and he sobs out, "I almost wish...that you wouldn't have missed."
I glance back at Raditz, and I can see his chest subtly rising and falling. "How long until he wakes up?"
Gohan just shakes his head—he doesn't know, and how would he? I pull myself to my feet, and discover the hard way that I twisted my ankle when I fell. My arms are scraped up from landing on the chunks of the wall that had been destroyed. Wincing a little, afraid of what I might see, I peer outside at Son, and tiptoe over the debris, stepping over what remains of the wall.
What I see is revolting—singed skin with burns that continue into to what may have once been organs and bones, blood everywhere. It is an ugly death for someone as beautiful as Son. He can come back, I remind myself—as long as nothing happens to the dragonballs; as long as nothing happens to Piccolo or Kami. But it will be impossible to erase this image. Gohan has come closer, but it seems he can't bring himself to look, and I'm glad for that. I close the lids of Son's eerily half-open eyes, shivering at the lukewarmth of his skin.
As I pull my hand back, he disappears.
"The work of Kami, no doubt," a deep voice echoes from the roof just behind me. It's Piccolo, but I haven't the energy to be afraid. "He must have plans for Son Goku in the afterlife."
"You think?" I mutter. For a moment I wonder if Piccolo could hear me over Gohan's quiet crying—but of course he could, with those ears.
"Yes," he answers, voice bitter, "I suspect so." When he leaps from the roof and touches down a distance away, Gohan stumbles over to him, wrapping an arm around his leg.
"Raditz killed my daddy," he whimpers.
"I know," Piccolo stares down at him, his long fingers inches from brushing through his hair. "Now you see why we must train for when the other two arrive."
"Do you think they're really coming?" I ask. I mean—maybe he's bluffing. God, I hope he's bluffing.
We all jump as a voice echoes between us; for a split second I think Raditz has woken up, but this voice is far too calm and wise. "Piccolo is correct to insist on training," it says—Kami's voice. "I feel great peril in Earth's future. What it is, I cannot see," he says, "I know only that my death is disconcertingly near."
"How near?" Piccolo demands.
"Even this is foggy," comes the answer, and Kami's voice sounds ridden with dread, "No less than a year, but I am not sure how much more. Perhaps two years." He pauses, and we all wait—I imagine Gohan's heart is as still as mine, and even Piccolo's, if he has one. "For this reason I have taken Son Goku. I will request for him special training in the afterlife. Let us hope that it will be enough."
"So I shouldn't wish him back with the dragonballs?" I ask, glancing at where his body had rested and imagining the boy I met haphazardly, now a man, on his way to becoming a god if Kami thinks that after his he'll stand a chance of beating Raditz's two far stronger (if what he says is true) Saiyan friends. It was because of the dragonballs that we met—but I never would have imagined them becoming our pass to the afterlife and back. Some god along the way must feel cheated.
"Wait until a year has passed," Kami finally says. "So he may get all the training he can and still arrive in time to defeat this threat. That is much better than risking the threat arriving first—lest I die before you can wish him back." I can hear him breathing heavily. "Even if I do not make it, the Earth may still—and perhaps Son can even change our fate."
"A year," I say, "all right." After I close my eyes for a moment, making sure I have this date committed to memory—not that I wouldn't already—I can feel, somehow, that Kami is no longer present. I turn to Piccolo and Gohan. By now, Gohan has stopped clinging to Piccolo's leg, and he looks determined—probably heartened by knowing that his father will be back.
"I'll be a good student," he says quietly to Piccolo, his eyes pinned to the little puddles of blood that haven't quite been soaked into the ground yet, to a little scrap that tore away from Son's clothes as whatever Raditz fired tore through him. Gohan takes a few steps forward to grab the cloth, and tucks it in his pocket before looking up into Piccolo's eyes. "Teach me everything."
"Then come," he turns away. "This is not the place for it." Before he takes to the air, he looks back at me, and at the hole that goes back into the lab. Piccolo's eyes pierce into mine and I wonder briefly why Gohan would subject himself to it—but I know. "He is still unconscious," he tells me, eyes lingering on Raditz's body. "I trust you will deal with him appropriately."
I shiver a little bit, and I can't think of anything to do but nod. This seems to be enough assurance for Piccolo, and he lifts into the sky.
"Mister Piccolo," Gohan says, his fists balled and eyes averted. Poor kid's embarrassed about something. "I can't fly yet. Can you carry me?"
"You will run," he growls. "And you will keep up." I open my mouth to offer a plane—but clamp it shut at the look that Piccolo gives me. Before I can blink, he's gone, and I can hear the already-distant thump of feet on the sidewalk as Gohan sprints after him.
My heart is deep in my gut, or maybe it's the other way around—either way, they're both buried in my throat as my mind turns to what I have to do now. If I don't kill him, it might be much less than a year before we can't use the dragonballs, and I know when he comes to, I'll be helpless to stop him—he'll probably kill me (probably cook me and chew me up and spit me out just to spite me), find his scouter, and leave for revenge on Gohan.
Somehow, these thoughts don't make it any easier for me to tiptoe back into the lab, across the floor, and over to the cleaver; don't make it easier to pick it up; don't make it easier to hold it as my fingers shake uncontrollably. I try to imagine Son, dead. I try to imagine his scream as I hover over his brother, trying to decide where...
I can see a little pool of blood underneath his head and I crane my neck around to see that he has a cut that seems to have nearly taken his eye out—slashing both the protrusion above his brow and down over his cheek, but not through the eye itself. This must be what Gohan meant when he said I had nearly killed Raditz, and now as I am getting ready to do what I have to, I'm wishing I wouldn't have missed, too. His nose flares each time he takes in a shallow breath, and unlike Son's body, his is still hot—hotter than a human's, I've noticed. His tail rests limply over one leg, and through the hole that's been burned through his shirt, I can see where it connects up to his back. With all this time I've spent trying to make sure he couldn't escape, I've hardly had the chance to study the Saiyan physiology.
But that's not why I'm hesitating, is it?
Some people look as calm as they might in heaven when they're asleep. Raditz doesn't—every crease on his face screams that he's ready for war, that while he sleeps he's making deals with the devil to keep him alive a bit longer, to make him stronger, to let him suck up in the unholiest of ways all the life he's drawn out of others—which, I'm getting the impression now, is quite a lot.
His stupidly messy mane flutters every time he breathes out, and I wonder if even in his unconsciousness he can taste the blood that drips down from his brow into his mouth.
I brace myself with the cleaver against the back of his neck. I know I'm strong enough to do this. This is the man who killed Son in cold blood, and god knows how many more before him. He's awful and anything he ever did for me was just a ruse to keep somebody from killing him sooner. The stupid insults to make me think I could take him on if I had to—the comment about killing and cooking me just to shake me up. Wrapping my toe—he just didn't want more blood on his floor, or...that promise he made was a lie, and...
Yamcha probably did a lot of awful things as a desert bandit, but nobody ever killed him...
Raditz just grinned like he did to fluster me, though, and—to—and that whole stupid thing about the pants was just—and I'll be letting everybody else, down, anyway, if I don't, so...
He only...
Shit.
I hope don't regret this.
Before I can think twice, I run over to the storage room for a flask of the kind of chemical even my father always warned me about, and kneel back down beside Raditz, willing my hands to remain steady as I remove my jacket and by sheer force of will rip it in half down the seam in the back. I stuff as much as I can into his slack mouth and uncap the flask. I need it near, and I pray it won't fall over on me if he has a spasm—and he will. I dip a corner of the cloth in to make sure it'll work—and to my relief, it takes at least a few seconds before the cloth starts dissolving.
All right.
This is it.
I'm going to do this.
I wrap one hand around his tail near the base, and with the other I grab the cleaver and slice his tail off, wincing as the cleaver catches midway through but forcing myself to finish the job. I hear the breath hitch in his throat, and I lift my heel from beneath me to pin it to his lower back (as if that will hold him down) as I reach for the flask, dunking the cloth in and taking a deep breath as I press it—hard—against the stump that remains.
A wild scream tears through the dead air and I throw the flask across the room just in time, as he kicks me to the floor. I land heavy on my palms and we lock eyes—his are full of murder; mine are stronger than I thought they ever could be as I stare back. His arm shoots out and he grabs me by the front of my shirt as he tears the cloth out of his mouth. "You...will...die," he hisses through labored breaths.
"Not so fast," I bark, wondering briefly if I'm someone else, or how else I'd manage to sound so calm. As my heart pounds out of my chest, I stretch my leg partway over him and bend my knee until my heel presses just above the stump. He screams in a way that assures me he is Son's brother, and I desperately hope I don't regret this. "Your tail is gone for good," I tell him quietly, "but there's one way to get it back."
"Fuck," he says, unmoving, and manages to mouth a, "what?"
I lift my heel off of him and crane my neck so that I'm inches from his face. "Me."
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