Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Garrulous and Gritless ❯ I, 25: Gohan ( Chapter 25 )
[ 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: 03.07.2011 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.7K | Visits: 247 | Status: Completed
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action / Comedy / Drama / Psychological / Romance | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 03.07.2011 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.7K | Visits: 247 | Status: Completed
NOTE: It took me so long to get motivated to just sit down and write this, but when I did, I did it all in one go. Very excited about the next chapter…interesting stuff to come. I hope this isn’t too incoherent, given that it’s been a week since I last wrote…whew.
Thanks for your continued support, and for putting up with my slightly slower rate of late! Blame my classes, and Dragon Age.
…
Things are getting…bad…here.
When I went by to see Mom, she was I guess as sad as I was worried she’d be. She went on about me growing up, about my hair, about, about just about everything I’ve sorta liked about myself ever since starting training out with Piccolo and the others.
And when I told her how I’m gonna make sure that nobody kills Piccolo, nobody destroys the dragonballs, even if it means something…something awful happens…well…she was…mad. I told her, the dragonballs can bring me back to life, if me dying saves them. The idea is still real scary—real scary—but—every time I hear Piccolo mumbling to Kami when he thinks I’m already asleep for the night, it’s like my insides are made of hot steel and I know I can do anything if I’ve gotta.
And when I said that, about bringing me back to life, she was mad at all sorts of things—mad at the dragonballs and mad at Piccolo and mad at Dad and then finally she decided she was mad at Raditz ‘cause it was all his fault anyway for even showing up and for killing Dad that one time, since that’s how the Saiyans found out about the dragonballs and all that. And Dad didn’t help, he agreed with her, he said, Raditz was a big jerk and if he was just gonna run away before the fight, even though he made it seem like he was gonna help, well, he didn’t deserve anything. I said, Bulma thinks he’s coming back. But they didn’t believe me. They don’t know like I do, how Raditz secretly really really likes Bulma, in the eye-crinkling way that doesn’t happen when you only sort of like somebody. Because they never spent a whole afternoon just talking to him. And they never got the feeling maybe a little part of him was a little part of them, like maybe he really is my uncle, like maybe…well.
“Piccolo,” I say, cracking my eyes open, ‘cause I was just pretending to be asleep again. He looks up from meditating and his eyes are poking into me like he can’t believe he didn’t notice I was awake. I had to get good at making my ki look sleepy, to peek in on what he talks to Kami about. It’s never good. But maybe it is good that he talks to Kami anyway. Once, I heard, they were totally the opposite of each other. They’re different, but not the opposite. He grunts like he does when he wants to hear what I wanna say but doesn’t wanna go to all that trouble of telling me that. “Do you think Raditz is coming back? It’s been a while.”
“If what Bulma said is true,” he tells me, “that he told her there are—are dragonballs on the planet he wound up on—there is at least a way. The question is whether he believes he will be meeting his death here; or, indeed, if he has deemed us worth fighting with.” He snorts. “It seems there is little that man would willingly die for.”
“Mm,” is all I say, thinking about it. ‘Cause, yeah, Raditz did seem real scared of one of those others, Vegeta or Nappa, killing him, and I guess if he thought that Dad and Piccolo and me and the others aren’t strong enough to fight them off, then he’d figure we’re all gonna die and he wouldn’t wanna be a part of it. Then again, I have the picture in my head of how his face looked when I asked him one time what he’d do if Bulma died somehow in this whole big fight. And Piccolo doesn’t have that. But I don’t know if it’s the same, if him looking like he really didn’t like the idea of her dying all that much is the same as him risking dying so that she wouldn’t. Or maybe, maybe he just didn’t like me asking him about it. “Is there anything you’d die for, Piccolo?” I say. “I mean, um, I don’t want you to, especially ‘cause then the dragonballs would be gone…”
He just stays quiet.
“Piccolo?” I ask again.
“Go to bed, kid,” he says to me. “And actually do it this time. If you seem sluggish when we spar tomorrow, I’ll go even less easy on you. We cannot relent now, with the Saiyans so close; mercy is not an option, whether you’re tired or not.”
“Okay,” I say, rolling over and curling with my back up against a nice nearby boulder. Acting like he’s mean and all mad at me is sometimes Piccolo’s way of crinkling his eyes.
…
It’s weird, but I feel a lot better with my tail gone, and not for reasons Dad talks about like looking less like Raditz. It’s like before when I got really mad all my insides burned, a little like they usually do, but then they also sort of started feeling like sore muscles, like they’re little strips of rubber all rubbing together and not doing what you want them to but also like they’re covered in lava, or really spicy soup. It hurt, bad bad bad, and I just knew somehow it was coming from my tail. Well, I didn’t know it, but I felt like it, so much that that’s why I’m glad it’s gone now. I hope Raditz doesn’t get too mad. Or maybe if he does get too mad, he’ll find out too, about the tail making him hurt thing, unless maybe that’s just me, for being, what’s it he called me, a halfling. A while ago I tried to find books about stuff like that, but there wasn’t much. I think Mom would be happy hearing how I’m still reading, but probably not if she found out how most of what I’ve read was about fighting (lots of stuff but not very much of it helped me a lot), and aliens (not very much stuff and it was way way different than anything Raditz ever said), and…
Well, anyway. It’s good that I don’t have it anymore, I think. It feels…better.
Piccolo and I have been sparring all morning (I really did go to sleep) but Piccolo just seems really distracted. When he misses punching me by a long shot, he stops. “One moment,” he says.
“Is something wrong?” I ask. He’s not gonna die now, is he? Like…of a sickness or something? I shake that idea out of my head.
“No,” is all he says.
“I’m actually kinda hungry,” I say, ‘cause, I don’t think he really only needed one little moment, by how his eyes are all hazy and far-off. It doesn’t usually happen while we’re sparring. “I’m gonna go get some lunch, okay?”
“Fine,” he says. But I keep looking at him for a second, I guess partly ‘cause I don’t really know what I want to catch for lunch, but also because it seems like he wants to say something.
And then, he finally does. “So I really am from another planet.”
Ohhh. He was thinking about how Raditz is at the place where the other people like him are. I told him about it, after I heard from Bulma. I mean, we knew before, from Raditz mentioning it, but I guess maybe it’s different now that somebody’s actually seen that there really is a planet full of people like him.
“Like Dad,” I add in. He shakes his head a little, like I don’t understand something.
“Go get your lunch, kid,” he tells me. So I do.
…
I said things were bad around here but I never really said why, besides about Mom and Dad and Piccolo. Everyone is super nervous about the Saiyans. Yamcha is all angry, about something, about something having to do with Bulma still, but a little different than before. He almost tried to do the Kaio-ken again, the thing that messed him up so much before, but Tenshinhan stopped him. Yamcha cut off his ponytail that he used to have, trains almost harder than anybody.
Then this lady Lunch keeps showing up sometimes, and she’s real scary. Kind of like how Mom is—like how she’s not stronger than us or faster than us but she’s still real, real scary. Every time she shows up, Tenshinhan disappears, along with Chaotzu. One day, when she was partway through trying to shoot us with a gun, she turned into a different, nice lady. And she started crying, and I found out how she’s staying with Bulma so I took her back there. She said she’s scared about her “other side” and something about it creeping into her and…I didn’t really get it, but she was happy I could carry her back home even though it was a little scary for her. She had a motorcycle but she really really didn’t want to ride it, so we put it back in the capsule before I took off.
So that puts Tenshinhan in a bad mood, whenever she shows up, kind of like Yamcha’s bad mood, kind of like he wants something really bad but it’s not working. Except with him it’s a little bit…a little bit different. He doesn’t yell at other people. He mostly seems mad at himself.
Kuririn isn’t mad, but it’s hard to tell his mood. He’s not happy either…he’s worried. Dad always tells him he shouldn’t be, and it’s like he wants to think that, but he can’t. He says he just gets the feeling something bad is going to happen and he’s not gonna be able to do a single thing about it. I’m worried about that same thing, too.
…
I knock on the door, and it takes a little while, but Bulma finally answers. “Gohan!” she says, and it’s nice to see somebody actually looking happy for once. “Come here, you have to see this!”
So I follow her in as she sort of hops down the stairs, wearing her clothes that are all smudged up by I guess chemicals and oil and stuff.
“Ta-da!” she says, holding her hands out, and then she notices there’s nothing where she’s pointing. “Oops,” and then she pulls something out of her pocket, “forgot I capsulized it to test if that’d work too.” Then she throws down the capsule she pulled out and boom, there’s this giant…thing.
“It’s a ship, Gohan! Our spaceship!” she’s all bouncy and her voice is squeaky. I wonder if this is how girls normally act.
“Does it work?” I ask her. It’s kind of like a big huge version of the pod that I sort of remember getting locked in, way back when, when Raditz was gonna take me away or…or…I don’t really remember.
“I can’t really test it until, you know, we have to use it,” she says, “but it’s passed every single other test I possibly could have run it through with flying colors.”
“Why can’t you test it?” I ask her. ‘Cause, that’s kind of a scary idea, going into space without knowing if the ship is gonna work. You suffocate out there, you know. Scary.
“I think the launch of a Capsule Corp ship into space would be a little conspicuous, don’t you?” she says, and I just kind of keep looking at her. “You know, like, I sort of want to keep it a secret. The last thing I need are clients trying to talk me into building them a spaceship.”
“Oh,” I say.
“So,” she says, “if we need to get away from the Saiyans, well…hopefully…we can.” Then she raises her eyebrows at me and shrugs her shoulders. “Besides, is there really that much of a difference between dying on Earth and dying in space? At least this way we have a chance.”
“I’m fighting,” I say, “I think we can beat them.”
She grins at me a little bit. “Well, you’d better. Anyway, I thought I might show you a bit about how to run this, you know, just in case you change your mind…and I don’t trust your father to press a button, let alone seven of them in sequence.”
I smile back at her. ‘Cause, I’m not gonna change my mind, but, it’ll still be fun to learn. Maybe it’ll be useful later…after we beat these guys. Maybe I can even help her build another spaceship! It would be fun. Then we could go visit Piccolo’s home. “Was it hard to build this?” I ask her. It feels like a silly question.
“Of course it was, kiddo,” she says, and she reaches down and ruffles her hand in my hair. “But you’re smart, so I bet you’d catch on pretty quickly if I ever showed you how I did it.” Then she looks down at me, with her hand still in my hair, and looks me over. “And that, Gohan, might be the only thing that saves you from being just like your uncle.” Then she giggles a bit, and I do too, and she keeps looking at me with her eyes all kind of misty, like Mom’s when I first came in the door, before she got mad at me, when she was still so happy that I came to visit. “You do look so much like him,” she finally says. I nod, and think of that one time Raditz looked in that puddle and saw we looked like each other. Then she pats my head one more time. “You’re really something else.”
I dunno what to tell her, looking at me like that, but then I get an idea for how to make the sort of weird quiet go away. “Can I see the inside of the ship now?” And without saying anything else, just grinning like she has been, she presses this button on the side of the ship and the ramp slides down to let us in.
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Thanks for your continued support, and for putting up with my slightly slower rate of late! Blame my classes, and Dragon Age.
…
Things are getting…bad…here.
When I went by to see Mom, she was I guess as sad as I was worried she’d be. She went on about me growing up, about my hair, about, about just about everything I’ve sorta liked about myself ever since starting training out with Piccolo and the others.
And when I told her how I’m gonna make sure that nobody kills Piccolo, nobody destroys the dragonballs, even if it means something…something awful happens…well…she was…mad. I told her, the dragonballs can bring me back to life, if me dying saves them. The idea is still real scary—real scary—but—every time I hear Piccolo mumbling to Kami when he thinks I’m already asleep for the night, it’s like my insides are made of hot steel and I know I can do anything if I’ve gotta.
And when I said that, about bringing me back to life, she was mad at all sorts of things—mad at the dragonballs and mad at Piccolo and mad at Dad and then finally she decided she was mad at Raditz ‘cause it was all his fault anyway for even showing up and for killing Dad that one time, since that’s how the Saiyans found out about the dragonballs and all that. And Dad didn’t help, he agreed with her, he said, Raditz was a big jerk and if he was just gonna run away before the fight, even though he made it seem like he was gonna help, well, he didn’t deserve anything. I said, Bulma thinks he’s coming back. But they didn’t believe me. They don’t know like I do, how Raditz secretly really really likes Bulma, in the eye-crinkling way that doesn’t happen when you only sort of like somebody. Because they never spent a whole afternoon just talking to him. And they never got the feeling maybe a little part of him was a little part of them, like maybe he really is my uncle, like maybe…well.
“Piccolo,” I say, cracking my eyes open, ‘cause I was just pretending to be asleep again. He looks up from meditating and his eyes are poking into me like he can’t believe he didn’t notice I was awake. I had to get good at making my ki look sleepy, to peek in on what he talks to Kami about. It’s never good. But maybe it is good that he talks to Kami anyway. Once, I heard, they were totally the opposite of each other. They’re different, but not the opposite. He grunts like he does when he wants to hear what I wanna say but doesn’t wanna go to all that trouble of telling me that. “Do you think Raditz is coming back? It’s been a while.”
“If what Bulma said is true,” he tells me, “that he told her there are—are dragonballs on the planet he wound up on—there is at least a way. The question is whether he believes he will be meeting his death here; or, indeed, if he has deemed us worth fighting with.” He snorts. “It seems there is little that man would willingly die for.”
“Mm,” is all I say, thinking about it. ‘Cause, yeah, Raditz did seem real scared of one of those others, Vegeta or Nappa, killing him, and I guess if he thought that Dad and Piccolo and me and the others aren’t strong enough to fight them off, then he’d figure we’re all gonna die and he wouldn’t wanna be a part of it. Then again, I have the picture in my head of how his face looked when I asked him one time what he’d do if Bulma died somehow in this whole big fight. And Piccolo doesn’t have that. But I don’t know if it’s the same, if him looking like he really didn’t like the idea of her dying all that much is the same as him risking dying so that she wouldn’t. Or maybe, maybe he just didn’t like me asking him about it. “Is there anything you’d die for, Piccolo?” I say. “I mean, um, I don’t want you to, especially ‘cause then the dragonballs would be gone…”
He just stays quiet.
“Piccolo?” I ask again.
“Go to bed, kid,” he says to me. “And actually do it this time. If you seem sluggish when we spar tomorrow, I’ll go even less easy on you. We cannot relent now, with the Saiyans so close; mercy is not an option, whether you’re tired or not.”
“Okay,” I say, rolling over and curling with my back up against a nice nearby boulder. Acting like he’s mean and all mad at me is sometimes Piccolo’s way of crinkling his eyes.
…
It’s weird, but I feel a lot better with my tail gone, and not for reasons Dad talks about like looking less like Raditz. It’s like before when I got really mad all my insides burned, a little like they usually do, but then they also sort of started feeling like sore muscles, like they’re little strips of rubber all rubbing together and not doing what you want them to but also like they’re covered in lava, or really spicy soup. It hurt, bad bad bad, and I just knew somehow it was coming from my tail. Well, I didn’t know it, but I felt like it, so much that that’s why I’m glad it’s gone now. I hope Raditz doesn’t get too mad. Or maybe if he does get too mad, he’ll find out too, about the tail making him hurt thing, unless maybe that’s just me, for being, what’s it he called me, a halfling. A while ago I tried to find books about stuff like that, but there wasn’t much. I think Mom would be happy hearing how I’m still reading, but probably not if she found out how most of what I’ve read was about fighting (lots of stuff but not very much of it helped me a lot), and aliens (not very much stuff and it was way way different than anything Raditz ever said), and…
Well, anyway. It’s good that I don’t have it anymore, I think. It feels…better.
Piccolo and I have been sparring all morning (I really did go to sleep) but Piccolo just seems really distracted. When he misses punching me by a long shot, he stops. “One moment,” he says.
“Is something wrong?” I ask. He’s not gonna die now, is he? Like…of a sickness or something? I shake that idea out of my head.
“No,” is all he says.
“I’m actually kinda hungry,” I say, ‘cause, I don’t think he really only needed one little moment, by how his eyes are all hazy and far-off. It doesn’t usually happen while we’re sparring. “I’m gonna go get some lunch, okay?”
“Fine,” he says. But I keep looking at him for a second, I guess partly ‘cause I don’t really know what I want to catch for lunch, but also because it seems like he wants to say something.
And then, he finally does. “So I really am from another planet.”
Ohhh. He was thinking about how Raditz is at the place where the other people like him are. I told him about it, after I heard from Bulma. I mean, we knew before, from Raditz mentioning it, but I guess maybe it’s different now that somebody’s actually seen that there really is a planet full of people like him.
“Like Dad,” I add in. He shakes his head a little, like I don’t understand something.
“Go get your lunch, kid,” he tells me. So I do.
…
I said things were bad around here but I never really said why, besides about Mom and Dad and Piccolo. Everyone is super nervous about the Saiyans. Yamcha is all angry, about something, about something having to do with Bulma still, but a little different than before. He almost tried to do the Kaio-ken again, the thing that messed him up so much before, but Tenshinhan stopped him. Yamcha cut off his ponytail that he used to have, trains almost harder than anybody.
Then this lady Lunch keeps showing up sometimes, and she’s real scary. Kind of like how Mom is—like how she’s not stronger than us or faster than us but she’s still real, real scary. Every time she shows up, Tenshinhan disappears, along with Chaotzu. One day, when she was partway through trying to shoot us with a gun, she turned into a different, nice lady. And she started crying, and I found out how she’s staying with Bulma so I took her back there. She said she’s scared about her “other side” and something about it creeping into her and…I didn’t really get it, but she was happy I could carry her back home even though it was a little scary for her. She had a motorcycle but she really really didn’t want to ride it, so we put it back in the capsule before I took off.
So that puts Tenshinhan in a bad mood, whenever she shows up, kind of like Yamcha’s bad mood, kind of like he wants something really bad but it’s not working. Except with him it’s a little bit…a little bit different. He doesn’t yell at other people. He mostly seems mad at himself.
Kuririn isn’t mad, but it’s hard to tell his mood. He’s not happy either…he’s worried. Dad always tells him he shouldn’t be, and it’s like he wants to think that, but he can’t. He says he just gets the feeling something bad is going to happen and he’s not gonna be able to do a single thing about it. I’m worried about that same thing, too.
…
I knock on the door, and it takes a little while, but Bulma finally answers. “Gohan!” she says, and it’s nice to see somebody actually looking happy for once. “Come here, you have to see this!”
So I follow her in as she sort of hops down the stairs, wearing her clothes that are all smudged up by I guess chemicals and oil and stuff.
“Ta-da!” she says, holding her hands out, and then she notices there’s nothing where she’s pointing. “Oops,” and then she pulls something out of her pocket, “forgot I capsulized it to test if that’d work too.” Then she throws down the capsule she pulled out and boom, there’s this giant…thing.
“It’s a ship, Gohan! Our spaceship!” she’s all bouncy and her voice is squeaky. I wonder if this is how girls normally act.
“Does it work?” I ask her. It’s kind of like a big huge version of the pod that I sort of remember getting locked in, way back when, when Raditz was gonna take me away or…or…I don’t really remember.
“I can’t really test it until, you know, we have to use it,” she says, “but it’s passed every single other test I possibly could have run it through with flying colors.”
“Why can’t you test it?” I ask her. ‘Cause, that’s kind of a scary idea, going into space without knowing if the ship is gonna work. You suffocate out there, you know. Scary.
“I think the launch of a Capsule Corp ship into space would be a little conspicuous, don’t you?” she says, and I just kind of keep looking at her. “You know, like, I sort of want to keep it a secret. The last thing I need are clients trying to talk me into building them a spaceship.”
“Oh,” I say.
“So,” she says, “if we need to get away from the Saiyans, well…hopefully…we can.” Then she raises her eyebrows at me and shrugs her shoulders. “Besides, is there really that much of a difference between dying on Earth and dying in space? At least this way we have a chance.”
“I’m fighting,” I say, “I think we can beat them.”
She grins at me a little bit. “Well, you’d better. Anyway, I thought I might show you a bit about how to run this, you know, just in case you change your mind…and I don’t trust your father to press a button, let alone seven of them in sequence.”
I smile back at her. ‘Cause, I’m not gonna change my mind, but, it’ll still be fun to learn. Maybe it’ll be useful later…after we beat these guys. Maybe I can even help her build another spaceship! It would be fun. Then we could go visit Piccolo’s home. “Was it hard to build this?” I ask her. It feels like a silly question.
“Of course it was, kiddo,” she says, and she reaches down and ruffles her hand in my hair. “But you’re smart, so I bet you’d catch on pretty quickly if I ever showed you how I did it.” Then she looks down at me, with her hand still in my hair, and looks me over. “And that, Gohan, might be the only thing that saves you from being just like your uncle.” Then she giggles a bit, and I do too, and she keeps looking at me with her eyes all kind of misty, like Mom’s when I first came in the door, before she got mad at me, when she was still so happy that I came to visit. “You do look so much like him,” she finally says. I nod, and think of that one time Raditz looked in that puddle and saw we looked like each other. Then she pats my head one more time. “You’re really something else.”
I dunno what to tell her, looking at me like that, but then I get an idea for how to make the sort of weird quiet go away. “Can I see the inside of the ship now?” And without saying anything else, just grinning like she has been, she presses this button on the side of the ship and the ramp slides down to let us in.
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