Enough Time
Morning After
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Enough Time
By Sefiru
***
Pairings: none yet, Mirai x OC
eventually
Warnings: R, violence, character deaths, angst
Disclaimer: I don’t own Dragonball,
but Mirai ownz at
everything.
Starlight_dragon: glad you liked
the parrot. And no offense but … Bardock and Vegeta-
pun_xy: it’s good you’re not catatonic from that. ^^
I’m going to start wrapping this up, folks, mostly because I
don’t want to be the kind of author who rambles on for 100 chapters and then
gets hit by a bus. Expect another half-dozen chapters or so.
In this chapter: Gohan has to deal
with his mother.
***
Chapter 12: Morning After
***
When
to their apartment, they found Chichi waiting on the doorstep. She looked
rather rumpled; her hair was sticking out in odd directions and her eyeliner
was smudged. Gohan ran forward. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“
night!”
“I was out with
She huffed. “No
decent person stays out all night long.”
“Decency is
overrated.” And sometimes, though he loved her, his mother simply didn’t make
sense. Behind them Videl unlocked the apartment and
went in. Gohan maneuvered Chichi into the living room
and sat her on the couch. He put the kettle on. “This was Videl’s
last night out before Pan is born.”
“And what on
earth is that?”
“You have to go
get it removed right away!”
“After the
trouble I went to to get it back?” He set out cups
and saucers and tried to ignore his mother’s fearful look. It had come as a
shock to Gohan to realize his own mother was afraid
of him, when he’d never so much as said a harsh word to her. But he’d hit his
growth spurt at sixteen, doubling his height in six months and his muscle mass
in twelve, and she’d insisted he was old enough to have his own apartment. Around
that time something hormonal must have kicked in, because Chichi’s
scare tactics just … stopped working. That probably disturbed her the most.
“You’re turning
out just as bad as your father,” she said.
“I’ll take that
as a compliment.” He poured the water. “Why did you come to see us?”
“
“Huh? He and
Trunks are on Vegetasei, camping with Bardock. Didn’t
he tell you?”
“No! And just why
didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you
knew.”
gently and set it on the table. He suspected now would not be a good time to
tell his mother that he, also, would be spending half his time on
and Videl intended to bring up Pan as a
slipped out of the bedroom with her bookbag over her
shoulder, dressed in a university sweatsuit. She
kissed him on the cheek. “Later, Gohan.”
“Take care,
As soon as the
door closed, Chichi exploded. “You never listen to me! You spend all your time
in sleazy bars, you consort with those horrible barbarian Saiyans,
you never think about getting a normal job. How could you do this to me? You’ll
come to a bad end and I’ll waste away in my old age. What kind of example are
you setting for Goten?”
pummeling wouldn’t hurt him and held her as she vented. “It’s ok, mom. I do
have a job, you know. Actually right now I have more work than I know what to
do with.”
“If only you were
normal, none of this would have happened.”
“So I’m glad I’m
not normal.”
“Please, will you
just get rid of that tail?”
“I’m not going to
do that, mom.” He almost thought this would provoke another outburst, but
Chichi seemed to have lost momentum.
“Fine,” she
huffed. “Don’t blame me if this all ends in disaster.” She stood up and walked
to the door.
“You can come by
anytime, mom,” he called after her. From her point of view this probably did
seem like a disaster; Chichi’s concept of happiness
was a house in the suburbs, a wife who cooked and cleaned, and a nine-to-five
desk job in a downtown office tower. Gohan could be
Crown Prince, or the Saiyan Minister of Science, or
the third most powerful fighter in the universe, but as long as he didn’t own a
necktie his mother would consider him a failure. Recently he’d found he could
live with that. Does that make me a bad
person? No, just an adult.
He put away the tea service and headed for the shower. He did, after all, have
work to do today.
***
Since the
Landing (as the history department had settled on calling it), his job at the
university had been one thing: language lessons. Of the seven people who were
fully bilingual in Terran and Saiyan,
he was the only one with the time or temperament to do any teaching;
recognizing a Herculean task when it came along, he had cannily started with
the linguistics faculty. Too bad we don’t
have any of those imprinting machines they used on Dad. Make my job easier to
dump a whole language straight into someone’s head. Instead he was stuck as
guinea pig doing translation exercises hurled at him by scholars on both sides
of the language barrier.
His furious
scribbling was interrupted by his cell phone. The originating caller:
He shot to his
feet, grabbed his bag and was out the door by the end of his next sentence.
“Where are you?”
can take me to the hospital.”
receptionist that he was leaving, and rushed to the roof so fast that he sucked
the air in behind him. Pan – ! He grinned as he launched
into the air. Now there was a conection between
humans and Saiyans that needed no translation.
***
Aha! Pan is on the way.
Next chapter: Mirai and