“Gohan?”

There was a slight pause, and a rustling noise as he turned to face his wife in bed. It was nearly three o’ clock in the morning, and he hadn’t slept a wink all night. He thought that maybe he was the only one, but Videl seemed rather awake and anxious to talk about something.

It was one of those colder nights when they had to bring extra blankets to bed with them, and huddle close for warmth, and usually, he was able to sleep quite easily on those nights, with Videl so close and comforting. But tonight, with all the anticipation of what would happen tomorrow, and all the worry about his mother, he just couldn’t get his mind to shut down and tune out the stress so he could sleep. They had tucked Pan in together, earlier that night, making sure that she was warm enough in bed with enough covers. She was very concerned about her grandmother, and kept asking them to take her with them. Pan and ChiChi had a very special relationship, and he could understand why she would want to help, but she was way too young and much too inexperienced for the kind of fighting and conditions they were going to have to endure there.

That must be what Videl is worried about. He guessed, staring into her quizzical blue eyes. She isn’t that experienced either, and leaving Pan after being with her for so long is going to be really hard on her.

“Yeah?”

Videl closed her eyes and scooted closer to him, leaning her head against his chest. “I just wanted to make sure that you were there, and that you were real.”

The statement struck him as so odd that it took him a moment to realize what she had just said. He smiled down at her.

“And why is that?” He chuckled, but when she looked up at him, he could see the seriousness in her beautiful eyes.

“Gohan, I don’t want to lose you. My life is so perfect now, with you, and with….with Pan, that I don’t think I can ever remember a time in my life when you weren’t part of it.” She took a deep breath. “And then I think of what happened with ChiChi, and how quick and unpredictable and sudden and permanent it is….It makes me worry that something like that might happen to you or Pan.”

He smiled again. “Well if I am ever outside hanging laundry on the line, I will be sure to use extra caution.”

Videl narrowed her eyes. “Gohan, I’m serious. This is really bothering me. Whenever I hear of Gokuu fighting or running off to train Ubuu and things like that from ChiChi, it scares me. I don’t want to lose you like she lost him. What if you died? What would I do? What would Pan do?”

Leaving them alone, visualizing them all alone made his heart ache painfully in his chest. He could never leave them the way Gokuu had left ChiChi all the time. He could barely stand to be apart from them for a day, for an hour, let alone years and years. He didn’t want Videl to grow old without him, and he didn’t want to miss Pan’s first day of high school, or the day she got her license. He wanted to be there, be able to see her married, and have a grandchild of his own. Nothing could compare to the love and the protectiveness he felt over them.

Gohan held her closer to him, breathing in the floral scent of her hair and wondering what he ever did without her. “Videl, I am not about to leave you or Pan for anything. I’m not like my father. I don’t live for fighting the way he does, and in fact, I would rather just not fight at all, but when the whole world is about to come crashing down, and the only thing left to do is fight, someone has got to do it.”

“But why you?” She murmured, and he could sense that she was about to drift off to sleep. “Why do you have to be the one to save the world?”

An answer wasn’t appearing in his mind, and he knew there wasn’t one, so he merely shrugged, and held onto her tighter.

“Just promise something.” She continued, slower now, with sleep taking into effect. “When we get to Sukuashi, do what you have to do, but don’t be a hero.”

He leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I promise, Videl.”

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen then, with her dark eyelashes fluttering against her pale cheeks, and her hair falling across the pillow, still and soft, with such a sadness in her that it almost brought tears to his eyes. And not only was she beautiful, and intelligent, strong and fun to be with; she was an excellent mother too. Videl loved Pan more than he thought it was humanly possible to love someone, and never once did she falter in that love. The two of them, whenever he came home and saw them sitting at the kitchen table, looked so close, and so happy.

And then she fell asleep, and he still held onto her, but lay his head back down on his pillow. Tomorrow morning he would wake up and face another enemy, another adventure, and another potential danger. His family would once again be put in danger, and though Videl was sound asleep now, and Pan was asleep in her own room, they were still in danger.

Pan wasn’t exactly the picture perfect little girl who wore cute little dresses and wanted to play dress up everyday, or play with dolls, but she was his little girl, and she was still special. It didn’t matter to him whether she grew up to be a fighter, or grew up to be a housewife. He could look deeper inside her and see what she really was, no occupation or label can ever change that. Closing his eyes, he pictured her cute little face as he had kissed her goodnight when he and Videl tucked her in that night. He only wanted the best for her, and if that meant facing ever single obstacle that he had to, he would, and he wouldn’t give it a second thought. No matter how strong Pan wanted to be, she was still so small and fragile compared to the dangers that lie out there. He understood now, a little of why his mother had wanted to keep him so protected and away from the fighting.

Videl was right; he could be hurt, or worse, any day, at any time leading a normal life, but he was among the world’s protectors, and that meant that his chances of death were doubled, or more. No matter what, something else always seemed to come up. If it wasn’t Gokuu’s long lost Saiya-jin brother, it was the prince of the Saiya-jins, and if it wasn’t him, it was Freezer, and if it wasn’t Freezer, it was Cell, and Buu, and so on and so forth until he wouldn’t have any left to give, and all his energy and motivation would be gone. At least now he had something to fight for. He loved Videl and Pan, more than life itself; he loved all of his family that way. If there were any threat to them, he would not hesitate to fight until he was no longer able to do so. And now one of them was in danger. His own mother.

She hadn’t been the greatest mother; looking back on it now, he was able to admit that. His academic career was so important to her that she went over the line sometimes, and she was so very strict with him. But when you took all of that away, and just looked at the person that ChiChi was, he realized that she had done the best she could. He knew she loved Gokuu as much as a person can possibly love someone, but she didn’t have a lot of respect for him and his lack of intellect. She was terrified that he would turn out that way himself, and so she threw him into studies, hoping that he would acquire a love for something other than the art of fighting. And he did. Not because she wanted him to, but because he finally realized that was what he wanted to do in life. He was actually glad that she had pushed him so hard back then. It was because of school that he met Videl, and it was because of studying that he was as intelligent and worldly as he was.

And now she is gone. His mind cried out, and though the blankets and Videl had been keeping him warm before, he suddenly felt a chill go through his body. She’s gone, and I may never see her again. I might never get a chance to say “thank you”. I might not get a chance to say anything.

So that sleepless night, awake in bed, Gohan, in his head, thanked his mother for every single little tiny thing that he could remember her ever doing to better the people around her, and hoped that somewhere, out in space, she heard it.

Tucked away quietly in a dense and rarely visited forest, a small cabin was nestled between a group of large pine trees, a thin trail of smoke coming up from it’s chimney and swirling in the night air. All of the windows were lit up with an orange glow, and though the rest of the forest seemed to be alive with sound, inside the cabin it was deadly quiet.

Juuhachi-gou sat at Juunana-gou’s side at the small kitchen table, idly tapping her perfectly manicured nails on it’s surface. A dark and depressing look was on her pretty face, and when Juunana-gou had first opened the door to let her and Marron in, she had nearly blasted it off it’s hinges in anger. She had yet to tell him what was bothering her, only saying that all men were insensitive idiots and should all be shot. Since then, she had calmed down a lot, but the anger was still there in her ice blue eyes.

Juunana-gou leaned back in his chair and folded his arms behind his head. “So are you ever going to tell me why I should be shot?” He inquired easily, and waited for her to answer.

After a short pause, she snorted. “Not you, baka. Just Kuririn.”

“I figured it was probably something along those lines.”

“He said I was, ‘just a machine’ and I ‘couldn’t feel anything’.” She spat out, and lowered her chin to her chest, glaring up at the wall.

Juunana-gou blinked. “And….?”

“And what?”

He laughed. “That’s all? I hate to inform you of this, Juuhachi, but you are a machine. And however much you may feel, you don’t feel a whole lot.”

She dug her nails into the surface of the table and made nasty looking clawmarks on the woods. Juunana-gou grimaced. He was going to have a hard time fixing scratches that deep.

“Shut up, kisama.” She snapped. “ I am not a machine. You might be, but I refuse to view myself as what Gero wanted me to be. I thought you would feel the same way.” She pointed out.

“Ah, but you see neechan, I can’t feel anything.” He gave her a wicked grin. “I’m just a machine.”

She clenched her teeth. “Bakayaro. I’m going to rip your head off if you keep this up.”

He smirked at her. “I’d like to see you go ahead and try that, but you wouldn’t want to wake up the little one, now would you?” He pointed to Marron, who was bundled up in a mass of blankets near the fireplace, sleeping peacefully with her mouth wide open and her pale blond hair loose from the pigtails, falling all around her head. She looked so cute with the firelight washing over her face and her hands curled up beneath her cheek. Even Juunana-gou had to admit that she was absolutely adorable.

“Niichan….I don’t want to see Marron unhappy like this. She wants to go so badly.” She murmurred, looking over at him pleadingly.

He thought about that for a moment. Ever since Marron had been very little, Juuhachi-gou would bring her over to see him every once and awhile, and though he considered himself to be quite cold and uncaring about most things, he had to admit that the little girl had broken through his icy barrier. She was like a little ray of light shining into an otherwise dull and tedious day of hunting, fishing, and gathering firewood.

“Hai. I’ve grown pretty attached to her myself. When she is unhappy, it’s as if the whole world frowns right along with her.” Juunana-gou asserted.

Juuhachi-gou snorted in laughter. “Well that was philosophical.”

He had been listening to the radio a lot lately, to a certain talk show that was on in the morning. At first it happened just by accident that he stumbled upon the station. He had found the radio in the woods somewhere, abandoned by over-eager campers, and thought it to be quite amusing, but the radio waves in the woods varried a lot, and sometimes he was left with only talk radio. While it may have been annoying at first, and still was sometimes, the show let him know how normal humans thought and felt. It was absurd really, how he was bending over backwards to fit in with those weakling humans, but as Juuhachi-gou had just said, it’s no fun to be known as just a machine. After awhile, that statement grows very, very old.

“I’m trying to broaden my horizons.”

“How about broadening them in outer space?” Juuhachi-gou suggested, and she sank lower in her chair, cupping her face with her right hand.

“You want me to come?” He asked, bewildered. “With you and all of your friends?”

He normally did not socialize with Juuhachi-gou’s friends. When she and Marron came to visit, Kuririn never came along, and he hadn’t really seen any of the others since the fight with Cell, not that he had been too eager to see them anyway.

Juuhachi-gou pushed herself up out of her chair and wandered closer to the window, gazing out at the moonlit forest. The fireflies had come out and were dancing around with one another, blinking on and off in the dark. She frowned at her reflection in the window’s dusty surface. “They are not my friends. They are Kuririn’s friends. And since I no longer wish to associate with him, I will be there alone with people I don’t particularly like.”

He stared at her back. “What about Marron?”

There was a pause, then: “I can’t take her.”

“I thought you wanted to.”

“I do. But I can’t.”

As odd as that statement was, he understood, what she was saying, and put his feet up on the table casually. This just might be not a half bad idea.

“You know, Juuhachi, people are not going to be very happy to see me there.”

“Let them suffer.”

He laughed. “Now that’s more like the girl I know.”

Chapter 8
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