Trunks left Bra’s room with a tug of regret, following the long corridor down towards the laboratory. Not only did he want to stay and keep his sister company, but he felt safe when he was there with her. In that lovely room, with its purple colors and mounds of stuffed animals, he was detached from the rest of the world. It was just him and Bra, away from all of the pain and all of the difficulties that life had been handing them lately. Besides, he wanted to be there if Bra woke up and needed him. She had been through quite a scare earlier and he suspected that the scene with Juunana-gou was going to repeat itself in her nightmares. However, the only way to completely eliminate a threat like the jinzouningen would be to watch over them, and see that Mirai Bulma was able to work in safety. That’s the only reason why he had left the shelter of his sister’s room and ventured down the hallway. He could always check on her later, and if she agreed to it, he just might camp out on her floor tonight, just to make sure that she was safe.

He was beginning to think that the episode today had scared him more than it had scared her.

He smiled as he thought about that, rounding the corner in the hallway, his eyes focused on one of the family photos hanging on the wall. In the picture, his father was in the back corner as usual, his face turned completely away from the camera; his mother and Bra were dead center, holding onto each other with matching grins. And he was simply there, just floating in the background, somewhere between his father and his mother. The picture brought back a round of family memories and he smiled, staring at the exuberant face of his mother. They had had their bad moments of course --- sometimes very, very bad moments, but they were a family. He felt comfortable with them, safe with them. It was the one place where he knew he would always belong, no matter what. And although his parents clearly favored Bra, he never felt unloved. He knew that his mother held a very special place in her heart for him, along with his father. He had always done his best to make the two of them proud. He had excelled in the company and in school, making his mother proud of his intellect. And he had reached levels of power that were enough to even impress his father. Like any normal boy his age, he struggled a bit, but he was still a good son. They had taught him well. It probably hadn’t been a conscious effort on their part --- their parenting skills had been quite lacking when he was a child, but they had set examples for him, and he had learned through that. He was still staring at the photo when he smacked straight into someone coming from the other direction.

Startled, Trunks looked up to find the angry face of his future counterpart.

“Watch where you’re going.” The future warrior threatened in an irritated voice, glaring at him as he brushed past his shoulder and down the hallway.

Trunks turned to watch him walk away, glaring back in response. He had no idea what he had done to upset the older man so much, but whatever it was --- it must have been big. Mirai Trunks had barely said a kind word to him since he’d been there. He had a suspicion that Tayhei had something to do with it. The girl simply had a way of manipulating people against him. All she had to do was look at someone with those pretty green eyes and innocently brush back a piece of golden hair, and they were instantly putty in her hands. He had no proof that she had turned Mirai Trunks against him, but judging by her record, he was almost certain that she had.

He sighed as he pushed his way into the laboratory, swinging open one of the heavy doors.

Mirai Bulma didn’t notice him at first. She had her back to him, bent over a table between a stack of files and Juuhachi-gou. The unconscious Juunana-gou was on the table as well, and Trunks could see several small, barely detectable stitches on various parts of his body. The future woman was reading a file intently, her hands flipping through the contents eagerly. From behind, where he couldn’t see the age on her face, she looked frighteningly similar to his own mother. Her hair had been shorter --- falling in feathery layers around her face, but the body was the same, and so was the stance. The woman even held the files in the same manner that his mother had: unconsciously tapping her finger along the words and diagrams, nodding her head as she read. It made him miss her again, and caught up in the moment, he simply stood and watched.

His mother had been a very special person, and someone that he loved very much. Sometimes it was hard to believe that he would never see her again. Especially when he was faced with the future version of her; the voice, the gentle eyes, the impulsive grin --- it was all there. And although he could have easily fooled himself into believing that this future woman was his mother, he didn’t allow himself to do it. They appeared to be exactly the same, right down to what was inside of their hearts. But there was one thing missing: she just didn’t feel like his mother. He couldn’t feel the closeness that he had felt with his mother, couldn’t feel anything at all.

Mirai Bulma was just Mirai Bulma, and he didn’t think that was ever going to change.

“It looks like you’re making some progress.”

Mirai Bulma lifted her head at the sound of the familiar voice, looking up to see the younger Trunks standing before her, his hands clasped behind his back. There was a vaguely angry expression on his face, something that reminded her very much of Vejiita. No matter how happy he was, he always seemed to carry around this perpetual sneer, as if everything that he saw made him simmer slightly with anger. The young Trunks moved around and sat on a countertop across from her, hopping lightly onto the edge and dangling his feet down towards the floor. She noted that his one of his sneakers was untied, and pure, motherly instincts made her want to reach out and tie it for him. She shook her head though, reminding herself that although this young man might be identical to her son, he definitely was not.

“Hai.” She answered him, looking back down at the jinzouningen. She was working on the electrical currents, looking through the files that the other Bulma had kept on the jinzouningen. According to her notes, they could withstand an amazing amount of damage, so she would have to charge the sensors with a very high amount of voltage. Generating the power was not a problem, but she just didn’t want to overdo it and end up hurting them. She sighed, brushing the long strands of turquoise hair away from her face with weary fingers. It had been a long time since she subjected herself to this kind of stressful work. Her body just wasn’t used to it anymore.

She looked back up at him, giving him a small, tired smile. “I should be finished with this in a few minutes. I’m just trying to find the right amount of voltage right now. I guess the only real way to test it would be if they woke up, but I think I can gage it pretty well without having to deal with that. Believe me; I definitely don’t want to set these monsters loose again, not after what Juuhachi-gou just did to the city.”

With the way that he nodded in reply, she was instantly put in mind of her own son. That was the way that he would always listen to her, staring at her with careful sky blue eyes, soaking in all of the information. And when she was finished, he would always give one, sharp nod, a sign that he understood what she had been saying. At the thought of him, her heart gave a sudden, sick ache. She had never meant to say the things that she had said to him. Trunks was all that she had; she loved him more than anything human being in this world or any other. He had been nothing but kind and respectful to her his entire life, and she had just simply shot him down and crushed his hopes. It made her ashamed to think about it, and she looked down, avoiding the younger Trunks’s eyes. She needed to apologize, but she had to finish this project first: people’s lives were depending on it.

Trunks reclined back, resting his hands on the countertop behind him. His somewhat angry face took on a thoughtful expression, his brows drawing close together. “Juuhachi-gou talked to us, you know. Before she attacked us, she said that it wasn’t really her, and that she was trapped inside.” He paused for a moment, twitching his mouth to the side in thought and lifting a hand to brush away a lock of hair from his eyes. “I think maybe whatever happened to the city, it wasn’t Juuhachi-gou that was doing it. There was something else inside of her, making her do all of these things.”

Mirai Bulma didn’t know why, but the image of Juuhachi-gou from Dr. Gero’s old files --- the one of her in the tank of thick green liquid, with crude stitches running all along her body --- suddenly came back to her. Undoubtedly, Dr. Gero had done horrible, unspeakable things to them. They had only been children then, both of them not even twenty years old. And for some reason, they had been selected to be a mad scientist’s revenge on the world, on Son Gokuu; they had been selected as his weapons, his instruments of death and destruction. Whatever human parts of the jinzouningen still existed (and she was certain that they did in fact exist), were buried deep under the flawless skin and tremendous strength of murderous monsters. Juuhachi-gou had managed to bring those human parts back up to the surface, but Dr. Gero’s programming was simply too powerful. In the end, the evil had overtaken her again, and she had become the monster that she was originally created to be.

She looked down at the female jinzouningen, laying unconscious on the examining table, her eyes shut gently and her pale blond hair falling back onto the smooth surface of the cool white table. It was hard to believe that all of that horror and destruction had actually come from this beautiful woman. Certainly, Dr. Gero had wanted it to be that way. He had created them to look beautiful, to look startlingly perfect. That was his plan, to send these monsters out disguised as angels; his own personal angels of death. Bulma almost felt guilty for cutting that smooth, flawless skin, for altering the perfect body in any way. Something so beautiful was hard to touch, hard to break. But it had to be done for safety’s safe, to keep the world away from harm. They simply couldn’t let the jinzouningen run free any longer; this was their only chance at containing them until they could figure out how to solve the puzzle of how to erase the evil programming from their souls.

She pursed her lips, looking back and forth between the bodies and the files. “It seems like everyone around here is assuming that it wasn’t Juuhachi-gou’s fault. I don’t think anyone wants to hear that their friend is capable of murder. Sometimes it’s just easier to make excuses for their actions, covering up what they’ve done wrong.” She paused in her movements, looked up at him with serious deep blue eyes. “Don’t misread me, I’m not saying that Juuhachi-gou should be held entirely responsible for what happened, but she has to take some of the blame. Those were her hands that killed people; you just can’t ignore facts like that. And given the circumstances of the future world, it seems entirely feasible that she and Juunana-gou both have the potential of causing massive death and destruction.”

“But Juuhachi-gou is Kuririn’s wife, Marron’s mother.” Trunks argued quietly, kicking his legs back and forth on the ledge of the counter. His voice was convincing, thoughtful, and so familiar that Bulma could almost imagine her own son sitting there on the ledge of that counter, back in her own lab in the future world. His heels gently kicked the legs of the counter, soft sneakers meeting the cool metal with a quiet clang. “I think she really wanted to be normal. She was always really quiet, but you could tell that she was just trying to be like everyone else --- be one of us. Maybe the Juuhachi-gou of the future world was a villain, but the Juuhachi-gou of our world is different. Things just aren’t the same here. Your world and my world are two very different places.”

Bulma sighed, looking back down at her work again. She thought of her son, thought of how he had come here in hopes of finding the woman that he loved --- not even pausing to think that the two Tayhei’s would be different, that there would be different circumstances. “Would you please tell my son that? I think he’s having a rather difficult time differentiating between the two.”

“Does Mirai Trunks have something against me?”

The question caught her off guard, and she looked up at him blinking. The young boy’s face was serious, his eyes holding a glimmer of childhood innocence that she hadn’t seen her own son’s eyes in many years. She placed one hand on her hip, pursing her lips as she stared back at him. “He’s just jealous of you.”

The serious face disappeared, momentarily replaced by a look of mischief. “Because of my dashing good looks?”

She smiled, a grin stretching from ear to ear. The boy sounded more and more like Vejiita every second. She didn’t mind too much though, out of all of Vejiita’s traits, arrogance was probably the least annoying. It could actually be amusing at times, especially when accompanied by that interminable smirk. “I think it has more to do with the fact that you have everything he doesn’t. A father, a sister, a perfect world, Tayhei….”

The young boy’s eyes quickly met hers. “Tayhei?”

She hadn’t meant to say that. It was hard not to say it though, hard to look the boy in the eye and not tell him the truth. If Trunks was treating his younger counterpart with any kind of harshness, the only true reason for it would be Tayhei. And that was either because he sensed the same tentative attraction between the two that she had, or because he didn’t like the way that the younger Trunks talked about the girl. Most likely, it was a combination between the two. She knew that her son had had a fierce jealousy streak when it had come to the woman he loved. And even more than that, his protectiveness of her was clearly evident. Seeing the way that this Trunks treated Tayhei probably just triggered all of those feelings inside of him again. Of course, she didn’t need to tell the boy these things. It would only complicate things further; she had no doubt that if the young Trunks knew about the relationship of her son and Mirai Tayhei, there would be quite a burst of anger.

Mirai Bulma chose her words carefully, not meeting his eyes. “She….was a good employee in the future world.”

Evidently noticing her use of past tense, he titled his head in question. “Was?”

“She….died.” The simple statement sent her wallowing in the pain of it once more. Yes, it had affected Trunks more than it had affected her, but it had still hurt her deeply to see the young girl die. And talking about it only seemed to make the pain more real, more recent. She never liked to talk about the deaths of people that she loved, but Tayhei especially hurt her. She still felt partially responsible. If Tayhei had not been protecting her, protecting the city, none of it would have happened. She looked down, and tried to keep her expression calm. “The jinzouningen killed her when Trunks left for the other timeline. The jinzouningen attacked the city and the only person left to defend it was Tayhei. She just didn’t have the fighting skills to defeat them on her own. Trunks and I were both sad to lose her.”

“Were you really close or something?”

Yes, they were close. In a world where there was nothing but pain and death, Tayhei had been like a ray of warm sunshine. She had embraced the girl quickly, perhaps too quickly, nearly suffocating her with affection. She had been the daughter that Bulma was never able to have; the influence of youth and hope that their entire world was desperately in need of. And she had watched the relationship between her son and Tayhei grow, watched it deepen. She had seen the happiness creep back into their lives again, saw that they were teetering on the edge of an amazing change. In that short period of time things had begun to turn. Their bleak, gray world had begun to see spots of color and light. And then it had all been ripped away from them. Tayhei had died, Trunks’s spirit had died with her, and Bulma’s heart was killed once more.

The tears came quick and fast, and dropped her head down low, shielding her face from the young boy. She reached up a hand and fanned her face, feigning heat exhaustion as she stared blindly at her files.