Trunks carefully scraped up the delicate shards of glass, stained with blood, and dumped them into the trash bin that had been rolled into the storage room. Mirai Trunks was there as well, methodically mopping up one of the puddles on the floor. The future warrior’s gaze was distant and pained, as if he were reliving some awful memory over and over again in his mind. Trunks eyed him with suspicion. He didn’t trust his future counterpart --- not after all that happened. Sure, the guy looked depressed now, but as soon as he turned his back, Trunks had no doubt that the future warrior would try to steal Tayhei away again. It was like he was obsessed with her or something, and the thought of that just pissed Trunks off. Things were never going to get better if Mirai Trunks didn’t leave Tayhei alone. Besides, the girl had obviously made her choice.

He tried to ignore the rush that went through his body when he thought of that. It had just been one moment --- and there had been a handful of other incidents similar to it, but this time, he had been able to see more of the real Tayhei than he ever had before. The real Tayhei wasn’t the bitch that loved to humiliate him and pry away at his insecurities. He was absolutely positive that the real Tayhei was the girl that had just been in his arms, shaking with fear. Thinking about it again now made his heart beat much faster than necessary, and he took a deep breath, trying to calm him. He didn’t know why he was feeling this way, or why he was even allowing himself to feel this way. He still didn’t know how he felt about the girl; still didn’t know what that scene in the storage room doorway meant to either one of them. It had been something. They couldn’t deny that a connection had been made as they held each other. He was just afraid that she might revert back to her usual self again, and pretend that nothing had ever happened. She had done it before, and he had no doubt that she would do it again.

His father had once told him that love was for the weak. He didn’t think much about it at the time, but now that he had seen the world for what it was, he disagreed with his father’s logic. Love wasn’t for the weak, love was for the strong. There was so much fear and anxiety attached to love; it would never be the quite the fairy tale story that anyone wanted it to be. Love was unreliable and inconsistent, and more often than not, unreturned. The weak ones couldn’t deal with that, so they balked at the idea of love. But the strong ones were able to look past the fear and the uncertainty and grasp onto love with both hands, ignoring whatever pain or danger they might be jumping into. Though Trunks hated to admit it, he knew that his father was weak when it came to love. Once he had been strong enough to allow it into his heart, but as soon as it had been taken away from him, he had retreated back into his cold, impenetrable shell again.

It seemed as though Tayhei was a weak one too. She avoided love in every one of its forms. He had seen her casually avoid those kinds of emotions before, and he had also seen her snap, wild with anger, when anyone got too close. He didn’t know why she guarded her heart so closely or why she felt didn’t need love, but he had a feeling that it had something to do with her little sister. He had heard snatches of the story from Bra and his mother, but Tayhei had never come right out and told him everything about it. That was just another sign that she was probably still carrying a lot of guilt and a lot of grief. That was why she avoided love --- in her eyes, all that love meant was suffering. She had never been able to experience anything real, or anything that lasted.

And him? He wasn’t sure what he was yet --- weak or strong. To be honest, he had never had a chance to find out. He had experienced the good kind of love; he had loved his family and been loved by them. Even his father loved him, as harsh and mean as he was at times, he could still feel it. But at the same time, he knew the bad side of love as well. He had seen death and felt its sting far too many times. The experience of losing his mother alone and seeing his father’s grief was enough to make him wary of love. He didn’t want to go through what his father was going through; didn’t want to look into the mirror and see nothing but a ghost of the man that he used to be. But there was a strong part of him that wanted to feel it more than anything, that wanted to cast everything aside and simply jump headfirst into whatever fate he had Tayhei shared.

There were complications though; a lot of complications. Besides the fact that he wasn’t even certain how he felt, he didn’t know how Tayhei felt. He had a strong feeling that she was going to do everything she could to get away from him and to push him away, now that he had seen the other side of. And then there was Mirai Trunks as well. The future warrior had to be added into the equation because there was no doubt that he was the one that had been stirring things up. There was more to Mirai Trunks’s strange obsession with Tayhei than just sexual attraction; it was almost as if he had been sickly in love with her in another life. That didn’t mean much on Tayhei’s end --- if anything, the girl would probably be scared off by such undaunted affection, but it meant that Mirai Trunks was not going to give up. The future warrior was just going to keep trying and trying, because for reasons unexplained, Tayhei meant everything to him.

And that just pissed Trunks off.

When Mirai Trunks slowly set down his mop and started for the doorway, Trunks snapped his head up from the dustpan and glared at him sharply. “Where do you think you’re going?”

His future counterpart shrugged. “I’m going to go see Tayhei. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Maybe.” Trunks stood up and tried his best to look manly and intimidating, but it was a bit difficult when he was holding a dustpan. He knew that it was probably difficult for Mirai Trunks to see him as anything but a child --- after all, Mirai Trunks was completely an adult, and he was just moving into his twenties. It was hard to get respect from someone who viewed you as just a child. But didn’t just want respect, he was demanding it. He had to let Mirai Trunks know that he couldn’t just get away with everything, especially when it involved Tayhei. He stared at the future warrior with unblinking, suspicious eyes. “It depends on what you’re going to do.”

Mirai Trunks rolled his eyes. “It isn’t like I’m going to tie her up and drag her to the time machine.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

His future counterpart sighed heavily and glared. “I don’t even know why I’m asking your permission. I can do whatever I want. You don’t own me, and as she clearly stated earlier--- you don’t own her, either.” The dark frown that had been on his face momentarily lifted into a slight smirk --- a challenge.

Trunks let him walk out the door, but only because it gave him a chance to flip the future warrior an obscene gesture while his back was turned. Mirai Trunks kept walking on, taking smooth, long strides as he made his way through the laboratory and out the door. Trunks stared after him for a long while, clutching the dustpan and small broom in his hands. He didn’t understand Mirai Trunks at all. One moment he was depressed and miserable and completely docile, and then the next, this strange arrogance would flare up --- an arrogance that almost rivaled his own. It was as if Mirai Trunks were two different people at once. He doubted that there was much of anything in his future counterpart’s life that was certain; the guy carried around a suspicious look on his face at all times, as if he half expected the world to come crashing down on him at any moment.

Tayhei watched calmly as the doctor from the Capsule Corporation infirmary wrapped a bandage around a gash on her arm. She had refused the drugs that they wanted to give her, citing rather angrily that if the jinzouningen came back to life again, she didn’t want to be too drugged up to defend herself. The doctor was a strange little man with slow movements and eyes too big for his head. She didn’t know why, but she found him completely, amazingly annoying. If Bra hadn’t been there sitting at her side and carefully eating the lollipop the doctor had given her, she would have been much more uncooperative. As it was, she was still shooting vicious glares towards all of the nursing staff, and she would jerk herself away from the doctor whenever he caused her the slightest amount of pain. She didn’t even care about her reputation right now. She was too angry to care about anything. The only thing calming her presence now was the tiny little girl sitting next to her. If Bra weren’t here, she would have attacked the doctor and run from the infirmary screaming, ripping off all of her bandages and hunting down Trunks in order to kill him.

If she had been thinking rationally, she would realize that it wasn’t really Trunks that she was angry with. She was angry with herself. She was angry that she had let herself show him her weak side. She had opened herself up for a moment and let years of pent up emotion come spilling out. And he had been there to witness it all. It made her feel uncomfortable that he had seen that --- it made her feel scared. And Tayhei hated feeling afraid. When she was younger, she used to assert the fact that she wasn’t afraid of anything. And she hadn’t been, until now. But the thought of Trunks being able to creep into her heart and make her fall in love with him terrified her. It made her feel like running as away, as far from Capsule Corporation and Trunks as she could get.

Just when the doctor finished bandaging her up, the infirmary doors opened and Mirai Trunks strolled in, looking worried and tense. Immediately, Tayhei’s hands grasped the smooth white paper that she had been sitting on, and it crinkled beneath her fingers. Out of everyone on the entire planet, why did it have to be Mirai Trunks? She didn’t even know what she was supposed to tell him yet, or how she was supposed to say it. She really didn’t even know how she felt, except for the strong certainty that she wasn’t going back to the future world with him. She couldn’t do it. As strong and brave as she was, she simply couldn’t leave behind the life that she had here. She might have been able to do something like that for love, but she didn’t love Mirai Trunks. She knew she didn’t.

Tayhei stood up abruptly from the infirmary bed, nearly knocking the doctor over, and stumbled away towards the door, dragging the precautionary IV behind her. “Look, I’m kind of busy and I don’t really want to talk right now and I---”

Mirai Trunks shook his head and held up a hand, in an attempt to calm her down. “Tayhei, just listen to what I have to say, okay?”

After a moment of hesitation, she looked down at Bra and patted her head softly. “Bra-chan, do you think you could leave the two of us alone for a while? Later on today, maybe we can watch a movie together. The doctor says I need to rest, so I can’t do anything too strenuous. I’d take you shopping, but I don’t think I’ll be going out anywhere public for a long while.”

The little girl nodded happily and scooted off of the infirmary bed, silently strolling to the door with the lollipop still in her mouth. As soon as she was gone, Tayhei turned her gaze to the annoying little doctor. She only had to give him a withering glare and half of a snarl before he laughed nervously and left her bedside, carting away all of his equipment and supplies. When they were both finally gone and the small room was quiet, Tayhei nodded at Mirai Trunks to continue with what he had to say. She felt silly sitting there in her ruined clothing with bandages all over her, but there was really nothing that she could do about that.

Mirai Trunks took a deep breath, then began to speak in a calm, sad voice. “You’ve made your choice. Even though you’ll probably never even admit it to him, I know you’ve made your choice. It was strange….all along I thought that I would be devastated if that happened --- if you ended up choosing him over me.” He looked over at her with half of a smile, tilting his handsome face sideways for a moment. “But you know what? It didn’t sting quite as badly as I thought it would.”

Tayhei raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know if I should be relieved or insulted.”

“I love Tayhei.” Mirai Trunks explained, in a voice that clearly proved that he did. Tayhei had never heard a man sound as in love as the future warrior did. Knowing that someone was capable of loving her that much (or a different version of her) made her heart practically burst with hope and joy. “I will always love her. And I thought that it would be easy for me to transfer that love to you and start living my life again, but it’s impossible. You’re two completely different people. You might look exactly like her and sound exactly like her, but it’s just not the same. I was so blinded by love and hope that I thought I could make it work, but I can’t. You’re heart just isn’t in the right place. No matter what you might say, you already belong to someone else.”

A sudden thought occurred to her. It was something that she hadn’t been able to think about for a long while, but now that it was brought up again, her mind began to think deeply about the possibilities. She eased back on the infirmary bed and her eyes became distant in thought. “If only there were two of me….”

He put a gentle hand on her arm, as if to bring her back to consciousness so that she would hear what he had to say. His sky blue eyes were sad and full of grief, but they were determined. “Even if there were two of you, it still wouldn’t be the same. I belong to someone else too. I love Mirai Tayhei, not you. And I don’t think that is ever going to change, no matter how lonely I am. I don’t know what I’m going to do now, though. I’ve been hoping and dreaming for so long now that I don’t even know how live life normally. I guess I just have to face the fact that I’m going to be alone.”

She didn’t know what else to say. Her voice came out sounding small and insignificant. “I’m sorry.”

Mirai Trunks sighed heavily and sat down next to her on the infirmary bed. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. It’s my fault for coming here and dragging you into all of this. It’s my fault for being foolish enough to think that anything in my life could ever turn out right. Happiness just isn’t something that fate is willing to give to me. You have nothing to be sorry for, and I’m not certainly asking for any kind of sympathy from you. This is your world and your life, and I shouldn’t have interfered. All that’s really important to me now is your happiness. I tried to give that to Mirai Tayhei while she was alive, but I wasn’t allowed enough time. In this perfect world, you have every chance at happiness and love, and I want you to be able to have it all. If by the time I’m ready to leave, I can gaze into your eyes and see nothing but pure happiness, I think I’ll be able to turn away and never look back.”

“I doubt you’ll ever see pure happiness in me.” Tayhei told him truthfully, with a wry smile creeping at the corners of her mouth. “I think I am one of those people that enjoys being dramatic and miserable. Besides, that little scene with Trunks was really nothing. I respect your decision to stay away from me to honor Mirai Tayhei’s memory, but that part of Trunks and I? It just isn’t like that. It was just a moment of weakness, that’s all. I was scared and he was scared and we both just clung to each other for support. That happens all the time with other people. You see it in movies every day. We just took a short break from our terminal hatred and fell apart together. It meant nothing.”

Mirai Trunks raised his eyebrows up, and she could see that he clearly didn’t believe a word that she was saying. He cleared his throat. “Well then, you better tell him that. Because I believe he’s under the impression that it meant a lot more than just a break from your terminal hatred.”

She ignored the uncontrollable thud of her heart against her ribs and folded her arms lightly, shaking her head in disbelief. She rolled her eyes and did her best to appear nonchalant. “He is? Well, that’s just like him. He’s always reading way too much into things and fooling himself into believing in things that aren’t really there. It’s like the fairy tales never died for him. He’s such a child sometimes.”

“Why are you like this?” Mirai Trunks asked her suddenly, and his expression was a mixture of disgust and confusion.

“Like what?”

“Why do you keep pushing love away, like it’s going to kill you if you fall for someone?”

“If you honestly think that I’m in love with Trunks….” She trailed off and laughed, shaking her head as if it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. “Listen, I don’t deny the fact that there is an attraction there. Everyone, including Trunks himself, knows that he is handsome. And I suppose that poking and prodding at him until he starts to scream at me like a little girl can prove to be amusing at times. But other than that, there is nothing there. You might have had a better relationship with Mirai Tayhei, but things just aren’t the same here. You’ll see; by tomorrow he’ll by just as cruel to me as ever. After all, according to him, I’m completely unlovable. His direct quote, I believe, was that I am actually poison.”