A cold wind blew, icy and bitter against his skin as he made his way into the city. It had been years and years since the jinzouningen first appeared and began to terrorize the world, but it seemed to him now as though it had been yesterday. It always seemed like when he tracked through areas like this, where the destruction of the twin monsters was most evident. Though, if he were honest with himself, he knew that the memories had never gone away. They were there, burning bright and hot in his mind, every single second of every single day.
There were good memories too, vague memories of friends and family before they were killed by the jinzouningen. There were memories of what the world once looked like, with bright skies and green grass, a world untouched by evil hands. And most of all, what stood out in his mind the most was the image of a girl. A girl with green eyes, golden hair, and a brilliant smile that she rarely ever let herself show. He had to pause for a moment to catch his breath; the memory of her was too rich, too real. It was hard for him to sometimes grasp the concept that she was longer here, that he would never see her face again. It was almost unbearable sometimes, realizing this, but he kept a secret hope that someday he and Tayhei would be reunited. It was impossible, he knew. In this cruel future world, there were no second chances, no dragonballs to make wishes. Bulma had reminded him of this many times, her blue eyes empathetic and sad.
“There is no way. It’s too late, Trunks. We cannot bring any of them back. What’s done is done.” She would say, and then her face would become expressionless and she would avert her eyes. “Your father was killed by the jinzouningen as well. Don’t you think if there were a way to bring them back, I would have found it by now?”
Although he trusted his mother and valued her opinion, he couldn’t help but think that maybe this time she was wrong. He had tried, tried as hard as he could in fact, to accept the fact that he would never see Tayhei again. But he couldn’t. Actually, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that there had to be a way to bring her back. He didn’t want to delve into the reasoning and faith in higher powers, didn’t even care about all of that. He just knew and trusted in love. He also knew that what he and Tayhei had was very, very special. Their love flourished and grew under terrible circumstances, refusing to give up hope, even when it seemed impossible. Even now it was still alive inside of him, and he knew that wherever Tayhei may be, love was living inside of her as well. It had been a long time since he mentioned something of this nature to his mother. Bulma was sympathetic at first, and understanding of course, because Tayhei had meant a lot to her as well. But as time grew on and his opinions never changed and his hope never died, she grew worried. She, like most mothers, didn’t want to see her son in pain. And as she viewed it, Trunks was hanging on to something that he could never have again. She herself had done this for many years and knew what the consequences were of having all hopes extinguished.
Still, he refused to believe that there was no way. With a love so strong, how could they not end up together again? A plan had been forming in his mind for some time now, but he was scared to propose it to his mother. He knew that she would help him do whatever his heart desired, but when the future world was in such a dire situation, it was almost selfish of him to want to bring happiness into his own life. Then should he give up hope and live life as it is? Or should he never let go of the hope for something better, even if it is selfish? As he stepped closer to the destroyed city, a calming feeling came over his soul and he closed his eyes, reveling in it. And somehow he knew that he would find his answer here. If in such a terrible, defiled place, he could find any sort of hope, then there could be hope for him and Tayhei as well.
It wasn’t as though the death of their loved ones had ended their own lives as well. Both he and Bulma had suffered, struggled, and eventually becoming something stronger, something more stable. He had become quieter, more thoughtful, and more mature. Because of the horror that Juunana-gou and Juuhachi-gou had caused, the people were eager to learn how to defend themselves, how to protect their loved ones against any kind of future danger. He had seen this, expected this, and when the Underground city was opened and the people were let back out into the sunshine, he decided to become a martial arts instructor. It was tedious teaching children, and even more tedious teaching adults who thought they knew what they were doing, but he was happy. And his mother was more than happy to hand out snacks and boss everyone around. Trunks smiled, thinking of his ambitious, vibrant mother. Almost instantly after the destruction of the jinzouningen, she had began rebuilding the planet. Again, she was herding the people along, protecting them and caring for them in a world that had been turned completely upside down. Capsule Corporation had become something more along the lines of Capsule Construction, and when Trunks was not teaching, he was either building or scouting, like he was doing today. His main job was to simply fly around and find the cities that had been destroyed. If there was any hope that it could be rebuilt, a team of workers would be sent there. Of course none of the cities could ever be restored to their previous state, but they would be livable, and that was what was important. Understandably, no one wanted to live in the Underground City anymore, which presented a serious lack of housing elsewhere. Bulma had immediately set up a makeshift city near the old headquarters of Capsule Corporation until the city could be rebuilt.
This had once been a great city he knew, bursting full of people and life, with more shops and business than he could imagine now as he stood before its ruins. Stepping over a mound of rubble, he gently lifted the shredded plastic hanging from a crooked light post and drew it back to reveal the sight behind it. His breath drew in sharply, angrily. The buildings, which had once scraped the sky so proud and tall were now only dust at his feet. Shards of glass the size of coffee tables stuck out of the dust in various places, so that he had to take a strange and winding detour through the street. Stop lights were broken and twisted into strange and unrealistic positions, hanging over the dust of the buildings. He stepped around large chunks of concrete and faced the center of the city with a frown on his handsome face. Ashes floated around with the rest of the dust and debris, signaling that at some point, there had been an enormous fire, one that had raged until the next rains came, with nothing or no one to stop it. Everyone that lived there had already been killed, their bodies scattered about the city, surround by the fires, hopeless, silent and doomed. The destruction was unbelievable, even to him, who has seen such sights on almost a daily basis since the coming of the jinzouningen. He closed his eyes tightly, remembering all of the hurt and anger. They had taken everything. His father, his friends, his childhood, his laughter, his love, his life. Everyone on the planet had felt the pain that he felt in his heart now. Everyone had felt that bleak hopelessness as they stared into the faces of the jinzouningen, cold and unfeeling. He opened his eyes, and they practically sizzled with anger. After all these years, he still felt it; his hatred for them had been burned into his soul.
A hint of green caught his eye and he turned his head to the side, squinting his eyes through the dust that he had stirred up. Nestled between a jagged shard of glass and a concrete wall, a small plant was persistently poking up through the destruction, grasping the wall with its malnourished vines. He jumped over a twisted mound of cables and concrete, and strode over to the plant. Ignoring the sharp pieces of glass, he dropped to his knees in the dust and ash, creating a small cloud that floated over his head in a haze. Gently, he pushed away the debris from the plant to give it air, and from the pocket of his jacket he took a canteen of water and sprinkled it into the dust below. Before his eyes, the plant seemed to brighten, its leaves becoming greener and stronger, and it loosened its grasp on the concrete wall and began reaching out to the rest of the world. As he turned again, he caught sight of more green, and realized that there were more plants, that they were growing all over the city’s ruins, strong and healthy. They were under the broken lamp posts and along the chunks of concrete, spreading vines across windows and blooming as the sun hit their faces. And Trunks smiled as he realized that there was hope. There was hope in everything. It may be buried under the rubble and destruction, under the fury, the pain and the disbelief, but there is always hope.
Hope for love as well.
He stood and brushed the dust off of his legs with the same hopeful smile on his face. There would be much work to do here, but if he squinted his eyes, he could see restoration and peace once more. With quicker movements, he straightened the jacket around his shoulders and brushed the lavender hair out of his eyes. He glanced down at his Capsule Corporation watch, noting the time, and then leapt up into the sky with a burst of renewed energy and strength. He had some things to discuss with his mother.
Bulma sat quietly in her lab, papers spread out before her in a disorderly fashion. Glasses perched precariously on the tip of her nose as she looked down and scanned the contents of a worn file with a frown on her face. The cup of coffee at her side hadn’t been touched since early that morning. One of her assistants had cheerfully given it to her right before she ordered everyone out of the lab so that she could fully concentrate on what she was reading. Her dark blue eyes closed for a moment, resting. She could already feel the strain of a migraine coming on, thick and penetrating, but still she kept reading, a feeling of unease growing steadily in her heart.
Subject A: subject resists commands. Subject refuses to partake in provisions or water. Subject is coughing and urinating blood after experimentation. Swelling occurring in areas of recent circuitry. Incident involving Subject B resulting in complete separation and punishment.
Subject B: subject is unresponsive. Swelling occurring in areas of recent circuitry. Subject is bleeding steadily through eyes, nose, and ears. Heartbeat is minimal. Brain activity is reduced severely. Complete memory loss.
Bulma flipped the page up and held it with her other hand, reading the next page below it. She felt sick to her stomach. It bubbled up as she turned to the next page, where diagrams showed the circuitry through the body, and blown up pictures of open flesh displayed bloody wiring. A particularly frightening picture of Juuhachi-gou --- Subject B, showed her naked in a tank filled with thick green liquid, crude stitches running all over her pale skin. She found this picture extremely disturbing, not because of the grotesque stitching or the almost translucent pale skin, but because of the look on Juuhachi-gou’s face. In all the years that she watched the jinzouningen terrorize the Earth, she had never seen such emotion on either of their faces. Juuhachi-gou’s eyes were open wide and unseeing in terror, and her mouth was twisted into a horrified scream, bubbles forming in the green liquid that surrounded her. She looked terrified, pained, and defeated all in one. It was this picture that made Bulma begin to think about the jinzouningen in a different light.
She had always hated them. From the moment that she heard about their first ruthless attack until the moment their evil bodies finally became dead and motionless, she despised them. Even after, when she stepped foot into the world again and led the people of the underground city back into the light, she hated them. They had destroyed her world, raped her of absolutely everything she had. She couldn’t even say their names without wanting to spit and scream obscenities. Even going through Dr. Gero’s files, she still hated them, for what they had let him do to them. And then she came across that picture of Juuhachi-gou, with her face twisted in horror, and she could no longer think of the jinzouningen the same way. It had floored her, made her gasp when she first saw it. It was then that she realized the jinzouningen had once been human beings, not just in body, but in mind and spirit as well. Their lives had been ripped away from them; they were tortured, experimented on, literally killed and brought back to life as monsters. Monsters they were, and they would never be forgiven in her eyes, but she would never have the same hatred for them that she once had. For they were nothing but puppets. The man that created them was the true monster.
With a weary sigh, she closed the file and brushed her long turquoise hair back from her face, knotting it loosely at the nape of her neck. She uncrossed her legs and stood from the stool that she had been sitting on, stretching tall with her hands behind her back. As usual, after reading Dr. Gero’s files, she was exhausted. His diagrams were confusing, terribly confusing, and a lot of the journals that he had kept were far too complicated for her to understand. She didn’t know what had possessed her to read the files in the first place. What was done was done. The jinzouningen were long gone and the horror was over….Still though, she had never understood. She never understood the mass destruction, was never able to see the story through the eyes of the jinzouningen or Dr. Gero. Even after it was all over with, even after all of the fires had been extinguished and all the smoke had cleared, there were still questions in her mind.
She ran a hand over the worn file. Why? Why were these people chosen to be his monsters? His weapons? Could it ever happen again? Cell would have been a complete ugly surprise if he had ever fully grown. Did Dr. Gero have more of those tricks up his sleeves? What if this circle of destruction and horror is never-ending?
She hated to admit it, but she was scared. She had seen too much, experienced too many things not to be frightened of the unknown. Although she wanted life to be peaceful and happy, her heart told her that it would never happen. Back when she met Gokuu and befriended him was her first step on the path of disaster. She had chosen this life and long ago she thought that she could handle it, but as she grew older she was beginning to think that it was no longer true. Though she filled the people of the world, including her own son, with the hope of a peaceful future, she knew it would never be so. Too much had already happened, and it would all happen again someday as well. It never stopped. It seemed as thought life was constantly testing her as if to see how much she could take. She had passed every test that life had thrown her; she was still here wasn’t she?
And I’ll be here no matter what else it throws at me. She asserted. She was tough, she had a strong heart, and her will was more powerful than anything. And she was fighting for more than just her own life. She had an entire world full of people who looked to her for protection and guidance and she was not about to let them down. That had been Son Gokuu’s secret, why he won every battle. He was not fighting for himself, but for his family and his friends. He was protecting what he loved and that made him more powerful than anything.
I wonder how the Son family is doing? She thought idly. She thought of the past world often, the world in which everyone was still alive, in which the jinzouningen had been defeated and the cities still stood tall and proud. A world in which she was still alive and still in love; where she saw Vejiita every day and where Trunks grew up without pain and agony. A world which she would always be jealous of. How she longed to be there, to have everything that the past Bulma had. She wanted it so bad sometimes that she could almost taste it.
The sound of the lab door opening caught her attention, and her blue eyes flashed angrily towards the door, for she had told everyone that she did not wish to be disturbed today. When she looked up however, she did not see one of her eager lab assistants, but instead she saw Trunks. She smiled gently at him and her heart was at once filled with love and pride. He had done so much for them all, had risked his own life to defeat the jinzouningen time and time again. He had become an extraordinary man; handsome, strong, intelligent, responsible, kind. She couldn’t possibly be more proud of the person that he was, and although she knew that it had a lot to do with the circumstances he grew up in, it had a lot to do with her as well. To know that she had raised this wonderful human being and taught him everything that he knew was a beautiful feeling.
“Trunks-chan!” She called, and he blinked at her surprised. She hadn’t called him that in years, but at the moment it felt appropriate. She reached out to straighten the jacket around his broad shoulders. “What did you find in the city today?”
He was silent for a moment, then reached out and took her hand. His blue eyes met hers and she saw the glisten of excitement in them. “Hope.”
Chapter
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