Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Slumber Party! ❯ Shattered Dreams ( Chapter 14 )

Tori sat on the floor of the bedroom Chi Chi and Goku had given her, a box lay in front of her, scorched and blistered. She stared at it with narrowed eyes, willing her hands to move towards it, to open it's cracked and peeling lid that used to have a sigil of a lion with wings on the top.

She'd gone back to her old house, if it could even be called that, it was just a pile of smoldering rubble now, and sifted through the remains for anything that she could take with her that had belonged to her loved ones. When she'd seen the box all other material odds and ends, no matter how unscathed were swiftly forgotten.

She touched the metal of the box and let her fingers drift over the once familiar item, memories of happy times with her family came rushing back and her eyes flooded with tears. She'd thought she'd cried all her tears out a long time ago. She had been doing very well with her training and had learned how to use her ki to lift herself from the ground a little bit, not much, but it was progress. She'd thought that she'd left her time of greif behind to focus on something far more tangible…vengence!

Yet, as Tori held the small, damanged metal box in her hands before her and thought about what it held within it's protecting grasp, her heart felt as if something had grabbed it and was ripping it apart. She sobbed and hiccuped, swiping a hand over her eyes to wipe away the water and steeled herself. She knew that she must open it. She knew that she must look inside and face the past and the hurt and anger…only then could she move on…only then could she deal the justice she knew her family wanted her deliver!

"Mommy…" She flipped the lid back, revealing a stack of photos miraculously hardly touched by the fire, just the edged curled a bit. She plucked out the one on the top of the pile, her mother looking younger than her, bright eyes and rosey cheeked in a light powder blue dress that hardly reached to the top of her knees. A soft smile played on her lips and her hands held a bouquet of pink and dyed lavender silk flowers.

It was one of her mother's wedding pictures. She looked so alive and happy. Her long, flaxen hair straight down her back like a shimmering waterfall, a few tendrils on the sides of her pale face curled into becoming ribbons to frame her heart-shaped features. Features that Tori saw every day that she looked into the mirror, right down to her cornflower blue eyes.

The man standing next to her mother, tall and lean and dark. With eyes that Tori had always fondly called `honey-almond' due to their shape and their sweetness. Oh, how she missed the way her father would look down at her with such love and pride in his eyes…her chest ached as a droplet fell upon his handsome, smiling face, a face that had turned it's share of female heads in his day and even later, after Tori had grown some and he'd gained the touch of silver at his temples that made him look distinguished.

She lifted the wedding photos out and looked at several snapshots of family vacations, her birthday as a toddler, her face smeared with stawberry icing, since, even at such a tender age, knew what she wanted and she did not like chocolate! She came across pictures of April as a baby and a toddler, how cute she looked in her christianing gown, the same one she had worn and later, Todd.

Tori found the last few photos were random pictures of April and Todd from the last few years. Todd with his buck-toothed smile and love of anything creepy-crawly and just plain gross. She remembered hours on the floor of the livingroom creating great `cities' out of building blocks and action figures and cars and trucks and toy spaceships with her little brother gazing at her like she was the most wonderful creature that he'd ever laid eyes on.

He loved it when she'd play `cars and `trucks' with him and she bit her lip to stifle the pain in her body when she thought about how cruel she was to him over the past few months when she had wanted her freedom and he had just wanted his big sister. She hated herself for feeling annoyed with him when he'd follow her around, he'd wanted to be just like her. He emulated her every move as best he could and bragged about her in school to his buddies. How she missed him! She'd give anything to be able to hear his hyper little voice shout out that he'd found something disgusting in the dirt in the backyard! Anything to gaze, just once, into his huge blue eyes.

She sighed and her eyes fell onto a picture of her sister. April had been wearing a formal gown of dark crimson. Her hair was done up in a cute little bun on the top of her head which was titled ever so slightly in that half-cute, half-rebellious attitude she'd developed from her preschool years on. She was smiling in a kind of half-smirk at the camera and Tori raked her mind to recall just what was happening during the taking of that picture.

Ah! She had it. The father-daughter dance when she, April, was twelve. April had been so proud of her new dress that she'd picked out herself and begged their mother to let her wear it before the dance, to school, to show off to all her friends. Of course their mother had more brains than that and refused to allow April to even breath on the dress until it was night of the dance.

She gazed though haze-fogged eyes at the picture of her sister and thought back to the talks she used to have with her, late at night when April got scared of some dream she had and ran across the hallway to crawl into bed with Tori. Tori had spend many nights telling her little sister made-up bedtime stories to frighten her nightmares away and allow the younger girl to sleep better.

She also remembered fits of nearly insane giggles that would wake their mother up until she came into the room and joined them, ending with one of them suggesting cocoa and marshmellows. It had become a random ritual of sorts among the Lawson girls. The menfolk always slept though everything, Tori recalled, smiling past the tears.

"But now, there will be no more late night giggle fests," She mumered half to herself, half to the ghosts of her siblings and parents she somehow felt were always near, "And April will never go to another dance…never show off a new, pretty dress…and Toddy…he'll never get to play cars and trucks again…" Suddenly more angry than sad, she picked up the box and threw it as hard as she could at the opposite wall, screaming as she did so.

Just before it hit, she lifted her hand and, as fast as it took her draw breath, the box exploded in a wash of flame, the sound terrifying loud, and rained down scattered bits of still-smoking debris from the ceiling. She turned to the scattered photos on the floor and, knowing that nothing could erase their faces, voices, hands, laughter, selves, from her mind and memory, she pointed downward.

A tickle of flame crawled down her finger and beamed outward towards the photos. She consentrated a bit and the remaing pictures were engulfed in the fire of her power. She watched them burn and curl and become black nothingness before she stomped out the remaining flickering embers.

She cleaned up the room, sat down on the bed and tucked her feet up under herself. She closed her eyes and, for the first time in her life, actually willed a vision to come. She had been giving this a lot of thought over the past few months. She'd never known, why, exactly she'd never thought of it before. Perhaps because her visions were normally so painful, both physically and mentally, and frightened her so much that she never bothered to look beyond merely getting rid of them.

She could use her visions as tool…to aide her. She could find those who killed her family. Find them and them deal with them. Tori sighed and breathed deeply, moving into the alpha state of conscience as easily as if she'd been doing it all her life. She knew, a few more moments, and she would be difting, free…her spirit in the void and her body waiting below…held tethered to her soul by a mere silvery ribbon, visible only to her ghost-eyes. It was within the velvet blackness, other spirits like stars twinking just out of reach all around her, she would find the answers she seeked. She knew…it was here…where everything was old and new at the same time…that she would find where they were.

And there would be no hiding. At all.