Chapter Text
Trunks opened his eyes when he felt the time machine jolt. He didn’t move, just let his eyes examine the surrounding area. He was back. Yes, the destruction, the desolation, the isolation—it was familiar, wasn’t it. So different from the past.
His mother was running towards him. He could see her small form, sprinting across the jagged, bare dirt from what was left of the Briefs’ compound. For a moment, he just watched her run, trying to comprehend…trying to….
He broke out in a cold sweat, his palms were clammy. Trunks pressed the hatch and watched the glass move back so he could climb out.
“Trunks! Are you okay! Trunks! Did you make it!”
He hopped down to the ground and his mother nearly crashed into him. She latched into his sleeves, staring up at him. “Are you all right, Trunks? What happened?”
A million thoughts flooded through his mind, all clambering together for attention. He took a deep breath to get himself under control. “I made it back. I gave Goku the medicine, Mom. I told him about the cyborgs.”
She searched his face. “And?”
Trunks peered at her solemnly. “And…he said they would train.” He shrugged a little and looked away from her.
“Trunks?” Bulma said, following him with her eyes as he started to walk passed her. “Trunks!”
“What is it, Mom?” he said, very quietly, voice carefully even.
“Did you…” Bulma mouthed soundlessly for a moment before regaining her voice. “Did you…meet the others?”
Trunks stopped on the barren earth. He stared at the ground. He took another deep breath. “Yes. I met them. They were all there. Just like you said they would be.”
“W-Was I—“
“Yes, you were there, Mom.”
“Ha,” a nervous laugh bubbled up from Bulma. “I bet my hair looked really crazy, huh?”
Trunks attempted to smile for her. “Yeah. It was, uh, big.” He started walking again.
Bulma kept looking over at him. He felt her eyes examining his profile before she moved ahead of him to open the door inside. “I’ve got some rice ready if you’re hungry?”
Trunks looked around the dilapidated house. “I’m…I’m not hungry, Mom but thank you.”
“Trunks? Please—what happened? What’s wrong? Gohan? Was it Gohan? He was still a little kid then—I know it must have been hard, seeing him.”
“Yeah…it was,” he said.
“And was….Vegeta there?”
Trunks felt his chest clench, teeth gritting. “Yes. He was there,” he answered, a little more tersely.
Bulma fretted with her sleeve, something in her eyes cracking apart. “Trunks—I know he was…difficult to be around sometimes—“
“Why didn’t you warn me?” Trunks cut her off. He finally looked at her, examining her. He shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell me what he was like? You’ve let me believe for all my life that he must have been…a good man. That he was like Gohan. That yes, he was difficult and abrasive but under that—he was good. That there was some reason that you loved him. Was there a reason?”
Bulma looked away. “I….you had lost so much…I thought that letting you think that he wasn’t so bad—“
“No, it let you believe that he wasn’t so bad. Right?”
Bulma flinched a little.
“You should have warned me, Mom.”
“He might change if he lives, Trunks.”
“Maybe,” Trunks said softly. “Who knows, right? I don’t suppose we’ll know for awhile yet? If I’ve changed anything?”
Bulma took a breath. “I…I’ve been watching since you left this morning. Because if there was going to be any change…then it should have happened right away. At least, according to my theories.”
Trunks’ eyes widened a little. “So…it was pointless?” Trunks drug a hand down his face.
“Well—no—Trunks, listen to me. There were always two theories that I built the time machine around. Either time is a linear line and everything that happens in the past will affect our present or, it will simply cause a branch in the timeline in another universe. We never had any way of knowing which would happen. Since there was no change here…it seems to be that…where you went was another universe.”
Trunks went to the kitchen table, sitting down heavily. He drug his fingers through his hair. “So nothing will change here.”
“Right. But,” Bulma said, sitting beside him and looking into his face, “if they find a way to defeat the cyborgs in their present—it might help us figure out how to do it here.”
“So now we just have to wait three years and hope for the best,” Trunks said quietly. His tone was resigned.
“I’m sorry, Trunks. I wish we could have known sooner—but it wouldn’t have changed anything, I suppose.”
“No, it wouldn’t have. I would still have gone.”
Bulma got the kettle off the stove, pouring two cups of hot tea and bringing them back to the table. “What did Goku think of you?”
Trunks managed a crooked half-smile. “He was impressed, I think. Though, more astounded by who my parents were. He was…strong but…but I can see now that Gohan wasn’t actually like him. I mean, Gohan was good and powerful and brave—and Goku was those things too. But Goku’s…attitude, I guess, surprised me. He was—“
“Sometimes, he was an idiot,” Bulma said flatly.
Trunks chuckled a little. “Gohan seemed to be more like Piccolo. He seemed to take after him more. At least—I think. I only got to speak to them for just a short time before Goku showed up. But Piccolo reminded me a lot of Gohan.”
“Goku was…gone a lot,” Bulma said, a little delicately.
“Yeah,” Trunks agreed, a little softer. He took a deep breath before he picked up his tea to take a sip. “It was nice though…seeing Gohan when he was happy.” His hands tightened into fists on the table. His mother’s hand crossed his vision, taking hold of one of those fists.
“I’m so sorry, Trunks.”
The half-saiyan finally looked at her. “Me too, Mom.”
He slept late the next morning, plagued all night by dreams of his mother’s friends, of Gohan’s death—only his mentor was a little boy again and the cyborgs butchered Gohan in a strange reversal of ages. He started a list of things he needed to ask them about when he went back in three years. What were the coordinates to New Namek? Could they replace the guardian of Earth? Was there a way to contact the Kais? Why were they always so willing to intervene before—but not now?
Was Earth cut off from the intergalactic neighborhood because they had no guardian? And if that was the case—how had they even gotten a guardian in the first place? There was just so much history that was lost. But if he could get to New Namek somehow—what if he could wish Gohan back with their dragonballs?
He tried not to put much stock in that. After all, three years was a long time to survive until he could presumably go back and presumably meet the same Goku he had met yesterday.
Now that was weird to think about. Yesterday felt like a fever-dream. It had been kind of nice to actually win a fight for once, though. Freeza and King Cold were nothing but target practice to the super saiyan form. Sometimes with all the death and destruction in this time, he forgot that in other times—against other enemies—he would have dominated them.
That was probably the real difference between here and there. Back there, back then, they had hope. They hadn’t spent seventeen years getting the shit kicked out of them at every corner. They had confidence. Even Yamcha and Tien and Krillin had confidence. It must have been amazing to grow up in a world like that—where there was all that potential.
He looked out the window of the small library his mother kept, touching the glass. Instead of here, where everything is just…wasted.
Trunks shook himself. He’d never been much of an optimist, that was his mother’s area, but they had done something, at least. Now, all they could do was wait. In the meantime, he had to keep trying. Keep trying. No matter how fruitless it seemed. If he was dead, he couldn’t go back. So he, at least, had to keep alive for that.
Three years. Just three years more.
Three hours later, Trunks heard their ham radio sound an air raid siren. He dropped the scrap he’d been taking apart for his mother and raced into the workshop.
There was a jumble of beeps and scratchy static before someone came in on channel twenty-seven. It was a channel designated for warnings when cyborgs showed up. It broadcast on an inbetween frequency, one that was boosted by long-range towers and an extensive set-up that his mother had built. The Briefs’ compound was a center for information to the few who remained living in the area. Ham radios were one of the only ways to transmit long-distance communication any longer. Bulma had rigged together a couple satellites so that their house basically worked as an amplification hub. All signals nearby could reach it and then be boosted to farther distances. It could go all the way to Plano, and that was, at least, three thousand miles away.
This warning appeared to be from somewhere much closer. A young woman was saying:
“This is Jaida out of the Martinsand hub. Deadhead activity at Latitude: 39.5. Longitude at -119.8. Within five miles of Koma—evacuate immediately. If you’re in the city of Koma, go underground. Repeat, deadheads at 39.5; -119.8. Evacuate immediately or go underground.”
Trunks’ eyes darted over to the map beside the radio equipment, placing his finger on it and skimming down to the southwest. The door into the lab opened and his mother came through. He looked at her.
She sighed. “How far out?”
“Koma is seventy miles to the southwest. I’ll go now.” He grabbed his sword and jerked on his jacket.
Bulma hurried up with his GPS and a capsule that likely contained first aid supplies. He put the tracker on his wrist.
“Be careful,” his mother said quietly.
Trunks looked at her and then pocketed the capsule. He took a running start and blasted off.
Bulma hurried back to the radio. She could only wait on tenderhooks, fretting. Jaida out of Martinsand, a ruin of a seaport city about one hundred and eighty miles to the north, continued broadcasting the warning for Koma. Line twenty-seven was understood as a warning frequency and so Jaida wasn’t always the one broadcasting. Signals came in from all over for Bulma’s satellite to amplify. Jaida repeated her warning about once every minute from wherever she was holed up in Martinsand.
“Koma, if you’re still there, flip to channel eleven and respond,” Jaida said, her voice scratchy.
Bulma turned on the second radio, flipping it to the channel to listen.
“This is Dizon. Still here,” a man was saying. “We got confirmed sightings on both of them. They’re definitely doing laundry today.”
“Son of a bitch,” the woman out of Martinsand responded. “Why did they go to Koma?”
“They’re probably bored. Or maybe they can pick up the signals we broadcast in their heads?”
“I imagine it’s kinda tinny,” Jaida responded, with a short chuckle. “Or maybe Half-Bake out of Expola tried shining out some country music again.”
Bulma smiled at the radio. All she ever heard were voices in the dark. Saiyans and Namekians and every other race could trashtalk humans all they wanted…but deep down…they never gave up. They never completely submitted. She touched the flexing waves as the two operators kept in contact. They’d probably never seen each other—just like Bulma had never seen either of them—but the voices were familiar.
“We’ve got incoming,” said the man from Koma. “Switching back to twenty-seven.”
Bulma followed them, turning down the volume on eleven.
“The explosion hit to the south side of the city—but west of Crafter’s Park. If you’re in the subway, find an archway to duck under in case the road collapses. It—“
Dizon was interrupted by a blast of static.
“Dizon?” Jaida’s voice rasped.
“Shit,” Dizon came back in. “Had to duck. The black-haired one flew up to the window. Blondie is—oh shit--something—wait—it’s that kid!”
Channel eleven crackled again. “The one with the purple hair?” Jaida asked.
“Yeah, poor bastard,” Dizon replied on channel eleven.
Bulma twisted her hands together. There was silence on both channels for several long moments before twenty-seven sparked back into life:
“Oof, kid is on their shit today,” Dizon said. “If anyone in Koma is listening, stay off the streets, get underground if you can. Looks like he’s going to try and lure them away from the city.”
“Somebody buy that guy a beer,” Jaida said on channel eleven.
“Or bandages,” someone else said who wasn’t Jaida or Dizon.
Only Dizon could give them any updates. Bulma and all the radio operators that were currently listening could only wait.
“He seems to be heading towards the dam. If you’re at the Koma dam, you should probably get the hell outta there,” Dizon from Koma advised. “I’m watching the twins right now—they’re following the kid out that way. He’s doing that thing where he glows.”
“Does anyone actually know who he is?” someone piped up on channel eleven.
Bulma reached for the handset and the hesitated. She’d never…actually interacted with very many of the other radio operators. It was difficult sometimes to listen to them when they were broadcasting from an area that was under attack. She couldn’t bear it sometimes, listening and waiting to hear them talk about Gohan…
And then Trunks and Gohan…
And now, just Trunks.
The voices in the dark only knew him as the “kid with the purple hair”, or the “one who glowed”. The truckers who used channel five-seventy-five called him the “Yellow Dart”.
Bulma grabbed the receiver and pressed the button. “His name is Trunks.”
There was some static as more than one person apparently tried to key in at the same time. Someone said, “Who?”
“Trunks—one of the Briefs, I think?” asked someone else.
“I didn’t know any of them were still alive,” said a grizzled-sounding old woman.
“How does he glow like that?” Jaida from Martinsand asked on channel eleven.
Bulma hesitated again before pressing the button in. “He’s…got mixed blood. His father was from another planet outside this system.”
“Shit, they blew the dam!” Dizon from Koma yelled on channel twenty-seven. “Brace yourselves!”
Unconsciously, everyone listening did. Even if they weren’t in Koma.
It was several long moments of wrenching silence before Dizon scratched back in. “Shit…okay, so…looks like maybe the twins flew off? That guy—Trunks, you said? He just landed on the main street. Looks pretty fucked up, poor bastard.”
“Is he dying!?” Bulma couldn’t help herself, grabbing into the receiver like a lifeline.
“No, ma’am—no, no—he’s still walking. He’s just…roughed up. If anyone is still listening in Koma, looks like he’s dropping a capsule inside the old Green Mountain Bank. Stay out of the open until nightfall, in case the bastards come back for a round of pop shots. If anyone has any Hetap, take the guy a can.”
Bulma listened to them chat on channel twenty-seven as Koma carefully relaxed. Dizon kept a running play-by-play for Bulma’s benefit on channel eleven, which many interested parties appeared to have tuned in to.
When Dizon indicated that Trunks had finally taken off, Bulma switched to channel one-forty-one. There was someone on it who went by Bandit. He read books in the evening. They were ones he’d scavenged from various places and he’d pick one and read it all the way through. It usually took him a week or so to get through a book. But that was all he seemed to do with his ham radio. He just read books out loud. And people turned in to listen. Books were hard to come by nowadays. Sometimes it nice to just listen to a story from Before.
Trunks arrived a half-hour later. His jacket was torn and soaked in blood. He looked tired. More tired than usual. Bulma made him eat and then he staggered off to bed.
Bulma sighed softly, tuning in to Bandit again as he started to read a book about a boy who discovered he was a wizard.