With the sound of the ocean crashing below him, Trunks sat on the edge of a cliff with his legs dangling over the edge and his palms digging into the soft grass behind him. He didn’t know why he came here to this cliff so often, or why the sound of the ocean calmed his heart, but as he took another deep breath of salty air, he felt his body slowly start to relax. It didn’t bother him that the below his feet was a sheer drop off straight down into the sharp rocks and angry sea, and the heat didn’t even bother him here. Every time the waves hit the base of the cliff, the water was sent upwards in a mist, tiny droplets of salty water hitting his face. He simply looked out over the water, towards the horizon, where blue met bluer and the ocean seemed to meld into the sky. There were no clouds today, and the waves were relatively calmer than they usually were; it would have been a beautiful day to visit the beach on the other side of the cliff.

He wished that he could just start all over.

He wished that he could take back every word he had ever said since their visitors from the future had first arrived. Mirai Trunks was right. He had been immature. And he had been irrational. But what Mirai Trunks didn’t know….what no one else knew, was that he was slowly dying inside. The amount of stress in his life was slowly and thoroughly killing him. After everything that had happened to him, after all the tragedy and pain that he had been through, seeing new visitors from the future hadn’t been exactly pleasant. And when the past and future started colliding in a rather unhealthy manner, it had only made it worse. He knew that he was dying inside, and to him it almost felt as though Mirai Trunks were already trying to take his place. It hurt him that Mirai Trunks could talk to their father so easily, and hurt him that everyone seemed to trust the future warrior more than they trust him.

And he had to admit that it practically killed him to know that Tayhei found Mirai Trunks more appealing. Why would she fall for Mirai Trunks when he had been there all along? Was there something special about Mirai Trunks? Something that he just couldn’t see? If he and Mirai Trunks were supposed to be the same person, then why had Tayhei fallen for the future version? He didn’t exactly know how he felt about Tayhei, but it still hurt him to know that she had chosen someone else. Back when she was always flirting with Goten and spending so much time with him, he had been annoyed. It was irritating for her to be interested in his best friend. But now that she had chosen the future version of himself, it made him hurt in a way that he didn’t even know was possible. It actually made his heart ache to think about her holding Mirai Trunks’s hand and flashing him that beautiful smile.

Is Goten right, then? He thought as he drew his brows together, confused. Do I have feelings for Tayhei that are stronger than I’m willing to admit? Maybe I am feeling this way because I’m a little heartbroken. Maybe I feel so betrayed because somewhere inside of me, I always hoped that there was a chance for the two of us to be together.

It wasn’t something that he really wanted to believe, but he couldn’t really deny it. Especially when his heart was aching so badly. He felt like crying as he sat there on the cliff, staring out at the ocean. All he knew was that he didn’t want Tayhei to leave. He might have said it before, might have even prayed that she would leave. But he didn’t want her to, not really. In fact, he was almost certain that if Tayhei left for the future world with Mirai Trunks, she would probably take his last shreds of happiness and sanity with her. Yes, Tayhei had been cruel to him. She had made his life pretty miserable with all of her tricks and her manipulations. But through it all, he had always felt that they had somewhat of an unspoken understanding, a connection between them. Hating each other was more of a game to them. And as irritable as that game could be at times, he didn’t want it to end. He didn’t know how he felt about her or what he wanted from her --- he just knew that he wanted her to stay.

With that sudden realization, he stood up from the cliff and turned, walking back down the grassy hill. He batted away the overhanging blooms of white and pink flowers as he began to run, taking off into flight. He turned around once more to look at the beautiful ocean behind him, and the grove of flowering trees at the cliff’s edge. It was hard for him to leave a place where he felt so comfortable and all this thoughts seemed so clear. But he knew that this was one problem that he couldn’t just ignore. If he wanted her to stay, he was going to have to do something about it. And that didn’t mean starting another fight with Mirai Trunks or yelling at Tayhei again. It meant asking her what she felt for him, and finally accepting the fact that he was an adult now, and needed to start acting like one.

He barged into the laboratory, and the doors swung shut behind him with a bang, echoing through the stillness of the large room. Tayhei looked up from the file the computer that she had been working on to meet his eyes, but kept her fingers moving across the keyboard, not wanting to stop. She already far enough behind, and if Trunks was planning on yelling at her now, she could at least continue to do her work while she listened. Besides, it made it easier for her to control herself if she kept her hands and mind busy on something else instead of the words that he was saying. But to her surprise, his face wasn’t angry or even remotely unfriendly. He just looked rushed and worried and out of breath. She noticed that he smelled vaguely like the ocean, as if he had just been to the beach and the heavy salt was still embedded in his lavender strands. She made her fingers fly across the keyboard even faster, determined to not stop working while he was here.

“I’ve been thinking about this situation for days now, and I finally came to a conclusion. I don’t care about Mirai Trunks….” Trunks told her firmly, then pressed his palms down on her desk and bent down closer to her, staring deeply into her eyes. “I don’t care what is going on between the two of you or what he feels about you. The only thing that I care about is you, and how you feel. How you feel for….for me. I was talking to Goten earlier and he seems to think that there is more to our relationship than just hatred and fighting. And I thought maybe if other people can see something between us....Well, maybe that means that we should try and find out if there is more between as well.”

She immediately stopped typing. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about.” She snapped angrily.

He bent down closer to her, and his forehead was almost even with her own. A few strands of his lavender hair fell into his eyes, shading them quite handsomely. “Tayhei, look me straight and the face and try to tell me that you feel absolutely nothing for me.”

He really did smell like the ocean: fresh and clean, salty and warm. She knew that if she touched him now, his skin would be hot from the sun outside. Heat was something that she welcomed now --- it was always cold down in the laboratory. It would have been easy to rise up and fall into his arms, to be enveloped by the salty smell of the ocean and the warmth of his skin. She continued typing, not even caring which keys her fingers were punching as her hands flew across the keyboard. She didn’t mean for her voice to come out sounding harsh, but it did. “Trunks, I really don’t have time for these games. I’ve been falling behind in my work ever since our future visitors showed up, and there are some things that I would really like to work out before they leave.”

Trunks raised his eyebrows and straightened up a little, looking at her with a mixture of surprise and relief. “You….You’re not going with them?”

“No.” She snapped, irritated that he had to look so handsome right now, and that he was saying things to her that would make an ordinary girl melt into a puddle at his feet. It was such a change from his usual viciousness that she didn’t know quite what to think, and absentmindedly she began to type rows and rows of the same letter. She put a cool expression on her face and narrowed her bright green eyes at him. “If it makes you feel any better, Mirai Trunks decided that I wasn’t what he was looking for. I’ll never measure up to his idea of perfection in a girl. I’ll never be what he had before.”

“He thinks you’re not good enough for him, is that it?!” Trunks exclaimed, looking as if he were about to flew out the door and beat the hell out of the future warrior.

“I’m not right for him.” Tayhei clarified evenly. Not good enough?! If Mirai Trunks had actually said that to her, she would have beaten the hell out of him. Although she wanted to yell out the next few sentences, thinking about Mirai Trunks softened her up a bit. She still felt bad about what had happened between them, and she ached for his loss. If she had lost the love of her life, she would have been lonely and desperate as well. “I believe that’s a better way to phrase it. I don’t really want to go into details, however. I don’t feel it’s my place to be spreading around Mirai Trunks’s personal business. I will just say that he was interested in me because he was trying to find something that he lost. And we both decided that it was never going to happen. I can’t be his past and he just isn’t my future.”

Trunks looked straight into her eyes and smiled perhaps the most devastating smile that he had ever given her. “Who is your future then?”

“Trunks, I really don’t feel like talking right now.” She snarled, and slammed her fingers against the keyboard, typing furiously. She had to get rid of him, change the subject, piss him off….anything. If he kept saying pathetically romantic things like that to her, she was going to start getting angry. “And if you had any kind of sense, you would be with your little sister right now, paying attention to her. Bra’s been kind of lost in the shuffle lately. Perhaps you should attempt to make her another chocolate cake.”

“So Mirai Trunks isn’t trying to steal you away anymore?”

“He never was, Trunks.” Tayhei snapped, still heavily annoyed. “Like I said, he was just trying to find something in me that wasn’t really there. He’s a lot more torn up inside that you might think. He’s been through a lot more than just the horror of the jinzouningen. He’s lost a lot of people in life that meant very much to him, including the love of his life. A man like that is bound to get lonely after awhile. And if he was being cruel to you Trunks, it was only out of jealousy. Because you have everything that he used to have….you have everything that he lost. And he’s right. You don’t deserve it. You can really be a spoiled asshole sometimes.”

He grinned at her playfully. “At least I’m not a vicious bitch.”

“Get out of my laboratory.” She ordered sternly, but she couldn’t help the edges of her mouth from creeping up into a hint of a smile. “If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll make you dinner later.”

Trunks walked away from his conversation with Tayhei feeling a bit lighter. He walked down the hallway with a bit of a bounce in his step. She had obviously been irritated with him, and he detected a slight bit of panic inside of her eyes as well. Tayhei was very good at covering up how she truly felt, but he decided that he knew her well enough to know when something was bothering her. He should have known that she wouldn’t just fall into his arms and confess her love. She guarded herself much, much too closely to ever do something like that. But just that simple, nervous flicker in her beautiful green eyes gave him hope. He didn’t know what it was that he was exactly hoping for, but it made his heart feel warm and light to know that he had made her nervous just by saying things that were slightly romantic.

He stepped into his room and opened up his closet doors, intending to change. He still smelled like the ocean, and though he enjoyed the salty scent, he knew that his clothes probably needed to be washed. He started to whistle as he ran his hands over the rows of clothes hanging up in his closet, deciding which shirt he was going to wear. He reached up to remove one of his nicer shirts from a hanger when his eyes caught sight of a glint of metal.

His good mood immediately vanished. The whistle literally died in his throat.

There was the small glass cabinet, where Trunks had locked up the sword that had killed his mother. He had buried it in his closet so that no one else would be able to find it and be tempted to use it. He buried it in his closet because he could no longer stand to see it. Just looking at the shining metal and strap of leather wrapped around the hilt made his stomach lurch with an incredible, stabbing pain. There were no traces of blood left on that cool metal --- metal that seemed to stay ice cold no matter what the temperature was. But he could remember the way that the blood had coiled down the side of it, the end of the sword washed completely in deep red. It had been frozen there; the blood of his mother and his mother’s murderer permanently trapped together in frozen red droplets of ice. He had taken the sword because he was afraid. Because he never wanted another innocent life to have to die by its edge again.

Hesitantly, he opened the glass door of the cabinet and pulled out the sword, holding the sharp metal carefully in his hands. He admired the way that it glinted in the sunlight coming in through the window, and the flawless metal that made its blade.

But instead of taking in order to protect the lives of others, it had simply sat in closet, gathering dust. And the longer it stayed in his closet, the longer he would have to keep the grotesque image of blood on that snowy field, and the mutilated body of Pi stretched out over that sharp metal. As long as he kept this sword hidden away, he would never be able to let go of his mother’s death and go on with his life. That was another reason why he had taken the sword with him --- there had been nothing left in that vast whiteness except for blood, the body of his mother’s murderer, and this sword. It was the only part of his mother’s death that he could take with him, the only form of revenge that life had afforded him. As long as that sword sat in his closet, it would only burn like a flame in his heart. He would never be able to let go.

He turned the sword over in his hands and looked towards the cabinet where he had kept it locked away.

And what good did a sword do, sitting at the back of a closet? He wasn’t protecting anyone by keeping this sword locked away. There were other weapons and other ways of killing people. His attempt at peace had been nothing more than taking a single drop of water out of the ocean. The sword should be used for its actual purpose --- its intended purpose. Pi had used the sword to kill, and she had probably killed countless others before that cool metal had reached his mother. But if the sword could be used for a good purpose….for the purpose of protecting loved ones and defending innocent lives, then why should it sit at the back of his closet? This sword wasn’t an instrument of death. The evil Saiya-jin girl that had been wielding it was the instrument of death. Weapons could accomplish good things as well. It just depended on who was using it, and how they chose to use it.

When Mirai Trunks heard the knocking on his door, his first thought was to just ignore it. He didn’t really feel like talking to anyone at the moment. He would have been content to simply stand at his window and watch the birds fly across the bright blue sky for the rest of the day. He had already experienced too much fighting and emotional turmoil today. He just wanted to be able to mindlessly stare out the window and forget that anything had ever happened. But the thought that the knock might be something important made him turn around and look at the door with a debating expression. He knew that his mother was already on her way to the hospital, but it might be Tayhei or someone else important. He just prayed that it wasn’t his younger counterpart, coming to yell at him or accuse him of being a womanizer again. He strode towards the door and hesitantly opened it.

Trunks stood in his doorway with his hands behind his back.

Mirai Trunks groaned inwardly. “If you’re here to start a fight with me, I’m really not in the mood.”

“I’m not here to start a fight with you.” Trunks told him with a sideways grin. Then his face grew serious and he studied the floor under his feet intently. “I’m here to make peace. I’m not going to apologize, because I don’t believe that I did anything wrong. If I came to your future world and started treading all over your territory and acting like I owned the place, you would have gotten angry as well. But I may have said a few things that I didn’t really mean and some things that weren’t really necessary. So from now on --- no more fighting. Don’t ever try to steal anything that doesn’t belong to me, though. If you try to do it again, I will kick your future ass all the way across the world and back again.”

Mirai Trunks smiled in amusement at the last comment. His heart filled with relief that Trunks had finally come around. It was about time that the two of them stopped this ongoing rivalry. He didn’t think that they would ever be perfectly friendly with one another, but they could at least be civil from now on. And he didn’t have any intentions of taking anything from his younger counterpart --- he had already decided that his efforts with Tayhei were fruitless. And he had promised himself before he came here that if there was any chance of love between his younger counterpart and this world’s Tayhei, that he wouldn’t interfere. And it certainly seemed as though there were something there, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. “I suppose I can agree to those terms.”

Trunks nodded sharply, and then turned his attention to his sword, which was in its sheath and resting against the wall. “Do you really need that thing when you fight?”

Mirai Trunks crossed his arms and gave the boy a wicked smirk. “No. I just like to feel cool walking around with a huge sword strapped to my back.”

“I thought so.” Trunks replied seriously, then pulled another sword out from behind his back and held it out to him nonchalantly. “Well, if you ever need another one….”

Mirai Trunks took the sword from him uneasily and held it hesitantly in his hands. He looked down at the shining blade and noticed the metal was unusually cold to the touch. It felt as though it were almost made out of ice. It was a beautiful sword --- fine craftsmanship, exquisite detail, but it gave off a strange aura. Even though the blade was completely clean, Mirai Trunks had the feeling that it had been stained with blood many times. It was sad really, that such a beautiful weapon would have to shed blood in that manner. It was sad the way that some people chose to abuse these kinds of weapons, using them for murder instead of defense. He turned his sky blue eyes back up to Trunks then, and gave him a searching gaze. “Are you sure that you want to give me this?”

“Yes, I really think I am.” He affirmed in reply, then his eyes clouded over. “It’s the sword that killed my mother. After Otousan killed the Saiya-jin that murdered her, I took the sword, intending to never let it shed blood again. But I think I’ve learned that there are times when it’s necessary to kill. To protect, to defend. Those are good reasons to use a sword, pure reasons. And by taking this evil sword and using it to protect someone you love, it might erase a bit of the bloodshed that its blade has caused. Maybe it will help me sleep a little better a night, knowing that sword that murdered my mother is not just sitting in my closet, but saving the lives of innocent people.”

Mirai Trunks felt his heart ache when he saw the pained look on his younger counterpart’s face. He drew the sword closer to his chest and tilted his head slightly, giving him a genuinely compassionate look. “I’m truly sorry that you had to lose her. I know how special she was, and how much you loved her.”

Trunks looked down again and brushed the stray lavender strands out of his eyes. “It will stop hurting eventually, right?”