Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ The Problem With Ecstacy ❯ She's Not A Bad Girl ( Chapter 1 )
[ P - Pre-Teen ]
By: Saiyan Sentinel 
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama / Angst | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 11.08.2003 | Pages: 1 | Words: 2.5K | Visits: 217 | Status: Completed
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama / Angst | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 11.08.2003 | Pages: 1 | Words: 2.5K | Visits: 217 | Status: Completed
Disclaimer: I don’t own DBZ. There. I said it. Happy now?
A/N: This is a disturbing story. I’ve had it in my mind for a long time, but I’ve never really had a place to put it. I think that ff.net is that place. What will happen in here is not for the weak hearted, but it IS for anyone who’s trying to help someone through an addiction to alcohol or hard drugs. This is a sensitive subject to many people. The techniques used are not from any programs. It’s just what I would do if I were faced with the same situation, with a few obvious differences. The rating is R for the adult subject of illegal drug use and the graphic nature of some of the scenes, however if you have kids who hang with the wrong crowd, PLEASE show them this fic! I’m using DBZ as my medium for a reason. This is a story about HUMAN heroism, not superheroes.
_________________________________
CHAPTER 1: SHE’S NOT A BAD GIRL
_________________________________
Lina sat in the girls bathroom locked in one of the stalls with her book bag and purse. Her hair had lost it’s sheen a long time ago, her once beautiful skin was pallid beneath the tan, and her eyes were lifeless, sunken holes in her head. If a year ago some kind god had shown the wasted girl a picture of her present self, she would never picked up that first needle. She would have stuck to the pot at most, and might have even quit that eventually. But such intervention had not occurred, and the once popular seventeen-year-old girl sat in a bathroom stall with another needle, putting another track in her now-ruined elbow and filling her veins with another dose of the poison she was living on.
The drug had many names, like Sweet and Butterfly and even the vulgar Sex in a Stick, but it had only one true name, and it was Poison. (A/N: I’m not using an actual drug here. I don’t know enough about the real thing thankfully to go into detail about their effects, so I made one up.) It hit the pleasure centers of the brain like nothing else, causing it to be so addictive you could hook a newbie with half a dose. And Lina had been hooked just that easily, at a party with a “friend” of hers who’s parents were out of town for the weekend.
Now she was a shadow. Her heart was buried in there somewhere, but it’s chances of resurrection were so slim you could see through them. She had no life, her friends had abandoned her, her grades had gone from the A’s and B’s she used to get to straight F’s since she no longer did her homework or study for tests, not that she would have comprehended the material even if she had made the effort, and her parents, clueless as always didn’t even realize she had a problem. They thought she was just being rebellious, refusing to do her work to spite them. The only reason she went to school anymore was because it had plenty of places to hide, plenty of dark places where she could slowly kill herself and no one would notice. Oh they tried. The drug-sniffing dogs went through the place at least once a month and the cops trashed the lockers about twice that, but they were too regular, too predictable. Kids and dealers alike had no trouble hiding their stashes. In a building as old as that one, it was fairly easy. The kids knew about hidey holes that the adults thought were solid walls.
So Lina sat with her poison as the dreams hit her, sending her into a place far from reality where all was right with the world and pleasure was the food of life, where there was no need for companionship, for parents, for food or water, for education, or anything else, and she died a little more, her body waiting for the time when she would finally end it’s torture with a massive overdose. It couldn’t be too far away. After all, she wasn’t a bad girl. She didn’t want the vessel that carried her to suffer.
x x x
Trunks was a little bored, sitting in math class while the teacher went over the assignment from last night and pointed out a few of the most obvious mistakes that some of the students had made. He let his mind wonder a bit, and once he wasn’t paying attention to the student body, he started noticing what his senses were trying to tell him. There was a strange smell in the air, and it was close. He had smelled it a couple of times while on campus, usually masked by other oders to fool the dogs, but his Saiyan senses were even stronger than the obedient animals’ and he knew what they did not. This time there was no masking scent. It was stronger, closer than ever before, and untainted. He focused his senses, raising his power level just a tad to aid him, and he pinpointed the source. It was a girl sitting in the back row. She had dull brown hair and wore a long sleeved red shirt under a denim over-alls type dress that looked as if it had been slept in. Her eyes were no where near the class, they were somewhere else, another world. *Yep. She’s high on that Poison stuff.* At first all he felt was contempt. He considered her truly weak to allow herself to become so wasted. But he knew that was his father’s influence talking. After all, what could have caused her to sink to that level?
It took a week of asking around before he could even find someone who knew her name, but after that it wasn’t much trouble to find out who her friends had once been. Lina Ericson had been a junkie for barely a year and her parents didn’t even know. All they knew was that their prize was now a failure. He didn’t even have to talk to them to know that was how they felt. He saw it when her father picked her up from school, the utter contempt in his eyes. How could a parent act like that? Even Vegeta didn’t act like that, and no one would ever put HIM up for father of the year!
Trunks wasn’t sure what to do. He knew that the girl was a user, and that was against the law, but that was not the only issue. She would have to be gotten off the drug and healed before she could stop using it. He had researched the substance in his science report for last semester, and he knew that cold turkey, while possibly the best solution, would be difficult at best to impose on her. He had to make her trust him first. Then he would worry about getting her off.
The next Monday, he introduced himself to her. She was sitting at a table in the cafeteria, pecking at the food on her tray. He walked away from Goten, who was chowing at the snack his mother had packed for him, and over to her table. He held out his hand and said, “Hi. I’m Trunks. You’re Lina, right?”
She looked up at him with suspicion in her brown eyes. “What do you want?”
“Woah! I just thought you looked kinda lonely. You want to come sit with me and Goten? He eats sloppy, but he’s nice, and I won’t bite.”
She looked over at their table. Sure enough, there was a kid with wild hair stuffing food in his face and getting it all over himself. She giggled, a sound she hadn’t uttered for a long time. Well it couldn’t hurt. So she smiled a little at Trunks and said, “Sure.”
After that she ate with them every day. Goten couldn’t help but notice the funny smell, but he didn’t make the connection and he thought it would be rude to mention it. Besides, it was faint enough that she probably didn’t smell it herself. Goten saw that there was something wrong with her, but Trunks assured him that he was handling the situation, so he left off.
Trunks became a good friend to her over the course of a month, never allowing romance to enter the equation, just being there for her when she needed someone to talk to. She still didn’t talk all that much, but when she did it didn’t take much for Trunks to realize what had caused her to turn to drugs. Her family didn’t really know she existed, or at least they didn’t make it known to her if they did. All she was to them was a falling grade point average, at least in her mind, and they never even tried to control her, like they didn’t care what she did with her life. She could get away with murder in that house, and she hated the lack of parental concern. She didn’t say that to Trunks, of course. She bragged about how she could get anything she wanted, do anything, say anything, and never be punished for it. But he could hear her real emotions in her voice.
Trunks, meanwhile, tried to learn how other people had kicked the habit with Poison. Every story he found, and there weren’t many, had involved forced isolation. Trunks didn’t want to do that to her. He had gotten her to trust him, and if he locked her away in a room for the three weeks it would take her system to clean out, she would never trust him again. He wouldn’t blame her. He came up with a plan. He knew that he couldn’t even use senzu beans to help her out because a mind that already had an addiction could easily become hooked on the magic beans, and that would not help her, but he thought he had a solution. Christmas holiday was coming, and that would give them six weeks of no school, the perfect opportunity to get her away from the world and back into life.
He knew that his father would not approve of what he was doing. He could just hear the older Saiyan now. “If she’s that weak then let her die!” His mother wouldn’t like it either. She would want him to put her into a state-run rehab. She believed in science above all else. And of course, it was all too easy for his father or any of the Z-fighters to find him. All they had to do was look for his ki signature. But he had one way to get around that.
x x x
Bulma woke with a start to the screaming of the alarms in the lab. Vegeta was up too, and they went to see what had set them off. The computer showed the anti-theft circuitry had been activated. Angered that someone would dare invade his home to steal from him and his, Vegeta got into the room by the most expedient method available. He ripped the door off the hinges. He and Bulma went inside, expecting the perpetrator to still be inside as the doors had been designed to catch a thief so that none of the valuable technology inside would disappear, but no one was there. Taking a quick look around, Bulma found that the only thing that had been disturbed was the bell jar that had contained the ki shield that she had been developing for the Z fighters in the very rare case that they might need to hide from someone who could sense ki. Left beside the shattered jar was a note. It was in Trunks’ handwriting! It said, “Mom, Dad, I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you about this, but I don’t think that either one of you would truly understand. I have a friend who’s been hooked on Poison for more than a year, and I’m taking her to a secluded place where I can get her off it. I’m telling her parents that we’re going to a ski lodge for Christmas vacation. I need to be left alone with her. She trusts me, but not hardly anyone else. I couldn’t allow them to lock her away in some institution to get her clean, when it’s isolation that got her started in the first place. I took the shield cause I know you’ll worry and start sending people after me. I wish there was some way I could let you both in on this, but I can’t let anything get in the way of her recovery. This is the only way. I hope you won’t be too mad at me. I took spare batteries for the shield, too, so it won’t give out on me. Sorry. I love you both. Trunks.”
Bulma wordlessly handed the note to her husband. He was right. She would have done exactly as he said. She only hoped that he was also right about how to handle this girl. She went to the phone and called the Son house. She would need to know the girl’s name in case anything were to happen and if anyone would know everything and still be clueless about it, it would be Goten.
Vegeta looked at the note in confusion. What was the boy thinking? Why would he think that he would not support his efforts with the girl? Then he realized what he had said in the past about drug users and cursed himself. He had meant adults, not children, but Trunks would not make that distinction. He didn’t see the difference. He just said, “Damn.” and left the lab, leaving Bulma to handle the arrangements.
x x x
A/N: Well, you like so far? Before any of you ask, no this isn’t an excuse for Florence Nightingale syndrome. Please review! I need to know what you all think! Constructive criticism is always welcome but flamers will die!
A/N: This is a disturbing story. I’ve had it in my mind for a long time, but I’ve never really had a place to put it. I think that ff.net is that place. What will happen in here is not for the weak hearted, but it IS for anyone who’s trying to help someone through an addiction to alcohol or hard drugs. This is a sensitive subject to many people. The techniques used are not from any programs. It’s just what I would do if I were faced with the same situation, with a few obvious differences. The rating is R for the adult subject of illegal drug use and the graphic nature of some of the scenes, however if you have kids who hang with the wrong crowd, PLEASE show them this fic! I’m using DBZ as my medium for a reason. This is a story about HUMAN heroism, not superheroes.
_________________________________
CHAPTER 1: SHE’S NOT A BAD GIRL
_________________________________
Lina sat in the girls bathroom locked in one of the stalls with her book bag and purse. Her hair had lost it’s sheen a long time ago, her once beautiful skin was pallid beneath the tan, and her eyes were lifeless, sunken holes in her head. If a year ago some kind god had shown the wasted girl a picture of her present self, she would never picked up that first needle. She would have stuck to the pot at most, and might have even quit that eventually. But such intervention had not occurred, and the once popular seventeen-year-old girl sat in a bathroom stall with another needle, putting another track in her now-ruined elbow and filling her veins with another dose of the poison she was living on.
The drug had many names, like Sweet and Butterfly and even the vulgar Sex in a Stick, but it had only one true name, and it was Poison. (A/N: I’m not using an actual drug here. I don’t know enough about the real thing thankfully to go into detail about their effects, so I made one up.) It hit the pleasure centers of the brain like nothing else, causing it to be so addictive you could hook a newbie with half a dose. And Lina had been hooked just that easily, at a party with a “friend” of hers who’s parents were out of town for the weekend.
Now she was a shadow. Her heart was buried in there somewhere, but it’s chances of resurrection were so slim you could see through them. She had no life, her friends had abandoned her, her grades had gone from the A’s and B’s she used to get to straight F’s since she no longer did her homework or study for tests, not that she would have comprehended the material even if she had made the effort, and her parents, clueless as always didn’t even realize she had a problem. They thought she was just being rebellious, refusing to do her work to spite them. The only reason she went to school anymore was because it had plenty of places to hide, plenty of dark places where she could slowly kill herself and no one would notice. Oh they tried. The drug-sniffing dogs went through the place at least once a month and the cops trashed the lockers about twice that, but they were too regular, too predictable. Kids and dealers alike had no trouble hiding their stashes. In a building as old as that one, it was fairly easy. The kids knew about hidey holes that the adults thought were solid walls.
So Lina sat with her poison as the dreams hit her, sending her into a place far from reality where all was right with the world and pleasure was the food of life, where there was no need for companionship, for parents, for food or water, for education, or anything else, and she died a little more, her body waiting for the time when she would finally end it’s torture with a massive overdose. It couldn’t be too far away. After all, she wasn’t a bad girl. She didn’t want the vessel that carried her to suffer.
x x x
Trunks was a little bored, sitting in math class while the teacher went over the assignment from last night and pointed out a few of the most obvious mistakes that some of the students had made. He let his mind wonder a bit, and once he wasn’t paying attention to the student body, he started noticing what his senses were trying to tell him. There was a strange smell in the air, and it was close. He had smelled it a couple of times while on campus, usually masked by other oders to fool the dogs, but his Saiyan senses were even stronger than the obedient animals’ and he knew what they did not. This time there was no masking scent. It was stronger, closer than ever before, and untainted. He focused his senses, raising his power level just a tad to aid him, and he pinpointed the source. It was a girl sitting in the back row. She had dull brown hair and wore a long sleeved red shirt under a denim over-alls type dress that looked as if it had been slept in. Her eyes were no where near the class, they were somewhere else, another world. *Yep. She’s high on that Poison stuff.* At first all he felt was contempt. He considered her truly weak to allow herself to become so wasted. But he knew that was his father’s influence talking. After all, what could have caused her to sink to that level?
It took a week of asking around before he could even find someone who knew her name, but after that it wasn’t much trouble to find out who her friends had once been. Lina Ericson had been a junkie for barely a year and her parents didn’t even know. All they knew was that their prize was now a failure. He didn’t even have to talk to them to know that was how they felt. He saw it when her father picked her up from school, the utter contempt in his eyes. How could a parent act like that? Even Vegeta didn’t act like that, and no one would ever put HIM up for father of the year!
Trunks wasn’t sure what to do. He knew that the girl was a user, and that was against the law, but that was not the only issue. She would have to be gotten off the drug and healed before she could stop using it. He had researched the substance in his science report for last semester, and he knew that cold turkey, while possibly the best solution, would be difficult at best to impose on her. He had to make her trust him first. Then he would worry about getting her off.
The next Monday, he introduced himself to her. She was sitting at a table in the cafeteria, pecking at the food on her tray. He walked away from Goten, who was chowing at the snack his mother had packed for him, and over to her table. He held out his hand and said, “Hi. I’m Trunks. You’re Lina, right?”
She looked up at him with suspicion in her brown eyes. “What do you want?”
“Woah! I just thought you looked kinda lonely. You want to come sit with me and Goten? He eats sloppy, but he’s nice, and I won’t bite.”
She looked over at their table. Sure enough, there was a kid with wild hair stuffing food in his face and getting it all over himself. She giggled, a sound she hadn’t uttered for a long time. Well it couldn’t hurt. So she smiled a little at Trunks and said, “Sure.”
After that she ate with them every day. Goten couldn’t help but notice the funny smell, but he didn’t make the connection and he thought it would be rude to mention it. Besides, it was faint enough that she probably didn’t smell it herself. Goten saw that there was something wrong with her, but Trunks assured him that he was handling the situation, so he left off.
Trunks became a good friend to her over the course of a month, never allowing romance to enter the equation, just being there for her when she needed someone to talk to. She still didn’t talk all that much, but when she did it didn’t take much for Trunks to realize what had caused her to turn to drugs. Her family didn’t really know she existed, or at least they didn’t make it known to her if they did. All she was to them was a falling grade point average, at least in her mind, and they never even tried to control her, like they didn’t care what she did with her life. She could get away with murder in that house, and she hated the lack of parental concern. She didn’t say that to Trunks, of course. She bragged about how she could get anything she wanted, do anything, say anything, and never be punished for it. But he could hear her real emotions in her voice.
Trunks, meanwhile, tried to learn how other people had kicked the habit with Poison. Every story he found, and there weren’t many, had involved forced isolation. Trunks didn’t want to do that to her. He had gotten her to trust him, and if he locked her away in a room for the three weeks it would take her system to clean out, she would never trust him again. He wouldn’t blame her. He came up with a plan. He knew that he couldn’t even use senzu beans to help her out because a mind that already had an addiction could easily become hooked on the magic beans, and that would not help her, but he thought he had a solution. Christmas holiday was coming, and that would give them six weeks of no school, the perfect opportunity to get her away from the world and back into life.
He knew that his father would not approve of what he was doing. He could just hear the older Saiyan now. “If she’s that weak then let her die!” His mother wouldn’t like it either. She would want him to put her into a state-run rehab. She believed in science above all else. And of course, it was all too easy for his father or any of the Z-fighters to find him. All they had to do was look for his ki signature. But he had one way to get around that.
x x x
Bulma woke with a start to the screaming of the alarms in the lab. Vegeta was up too, and they went to see what had set them off. The computer showed the anti-theft circuitry had been activated. Angered that someone would dare invade his home to steal from him and his, Vegeta got into the room by the most expedient method available. He ripped the door off the hinges. He and Bulma went inside, expecting the perpetrator to still be inside as the doors had been designed to catch a thief so that none of the valuable technology inside would disappear, but no one was there. Taking a quick look around, Bulma found that the only thing that had been disturbed was the bell jar that had contained the ki shield that she had been developing for the Z fighters in the very rare case that they might need to hide from someone who could sense ki. Left beside the shattered jar was a note. It was in Trunks’ handwriting! It said, “Mom, Dad, I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you about this, but I don’t think that either one of you would truly understand. I have a friend who’s been hooked on Poison for more than a year, and I’m taking her to a secluded place where I can get her off it. I’m telling her parents that we’re going to a ski lodge for Christmas vacation. I need to be left alone with her. She trusts me, but not hardly anyone else. I couldn’t allow them to lock her away in some institution to get her clean, when it’s isolation that got her started in the first place. I took the shield cause I know you’ll worry and start sending people after me. I wish there was some way I could let you both in on this, but I can’t let anything get in the way of her recovery. This is the only way. I hope you won’t be too mad at me. I took spare batteries for the shield, too, so it won’t give out on me. Sorry. I love you both. Trunks.”
Bulma wordlessly handed the note to her husband. He was right. She would have done exactly as he said. She only hoped that he was also right about how to handle this girl. She went to the phone and called the Son house. She would need to know the girl’s name in case anything were to happen and if anyone would know everything and still be clueless about it, it would be Goten.
Vegeta looked at the note in confusion. What was the boy thinking? Why would he think that he would not support his efforts with the girl? Then he realized what he had said in the past about drug users and cursed himself. He had meant adults, not children, but Trunks would not make that distinction. He didn’t see the difference. He just said, “Damn.” and left the lab, leaving Bulma to handle the arrangements.
x x x
A/N: Well, you like so far? Before any of you ask, no this isn’t an excuse for Florence Nightingale syndrome. Please review! I need to know what you all think! Constructive criticism is always welcome but flamers will die!