Taste of Crimson

Disclaimer: I don’t own DB/Z/GT or any of the characters found in this fic. They are the property of TOEI ANIMATION in Japan and FUNimation in the U.S.A. I am making no profit from this work of fanfiction.


A/N:

Type of story: A/U, this used to be a PWP, but now it has gotten a little out of hand.
Rating- R for language
Pairing: None

“X” indicates spoken dialog

‘X’ indicates thoughts

~X~ indicates telepathy


Eighth chapter- ‘Reflect’


The last thing Krillin and Juuhachi-gou were expecting when they returned to the Kame Island for a quiet romantic evening was for an upset and highly volatile Goku to I.T. into the middle of the small, candle lit living room.

At first Krillin wasn’t certain what to do or say. ‘Not to mention I’m half naked,’ he thought embarrassed. His long-time friend’s hair, though still ebony, was standing in pronounced spikes indicating he wasn’t far from transforming. Even more disturbing than this, was the silence from the sayian, only interrupted by harsh breathing in and out of Goku’s nose.

Juuhachi-gou was the first to react however. Getting up from the couch, Juuhachi-gou tied the front of her robe closed. “Perhaps we should step outside?” She suggested. The way Goku’s eyes followed her, but his head didn’t move, ‘Something has made him irrational.’ She didn’t move to touch Goku or bother to say anything else after her conclusion. Instead she led by example, and moved in an exaggerated circle to get to the front door.

“Goku?” Krillin started to say before being interrupted by his wife. Goku’s eyes darted from following Juuhachi-gou’s slow movements to Krillin’s position where he was still on the couch. The sayian’s head ducked down, eyes piercing, as Krillin got up.

“Honey, you’re not dealing with the Goku you know right now,” Juuhachi-gou tried to explain. Again, Goku’s attention was pulled to the direction of sound, head having to move in order to orientate his eyes to its origin.

Juuhachi-gou denied further explanation. Instead she opened the front door, and beckoned Goku to follow her with a wave of one of her willowy hands. The sayian’s shoulders turned and then the rest of his body followed as he stepped towards the blonde and the doorway.

Juuhachi-gou stepped further out onto the porch while still holding the screen door open for Goku. Once he had stepped past the threshold by a couple of steps she let it close slowly, rather than letting it bang harshly shut.

She took note of Goku’s hair and how the spikes had come down a bit. Taking this as a good sign, she reached a hand for one of his.

Goku let the android lead him to the sand of the small island. There he went to his knees, still dazed.

“What do you mean by this isn’t the Goku I know?” Krillin asked as he stepped out onto the front porch. He let the front screen bang shut as he started pulling a T-shirt on over his head.

Juuhachi-gou cringed at the sound. She was relieved to see that Goku hadn’t acted adversely to either it or the sound of her husband’s shrill question.

“Something has upset him,” she said. Getting a huff in response from Krillin as he stepped off the front porch she tried to delay his display. “You need to take it easy. He was almost ascended when he got here.”

“Yeah, I noticed. What’s wrong Goku? Is there a new enemy that I haven’t felt?” Krillin asked his long time friend. Krillin turned to his wife when all he received from the sayian was more of that strange harsh breathing, “What’s wrong with him?”

The blonde android wasn’t really certain either. She had no answers for her husband as to why the sayian was acting the way he was. She also didn’t understand all her motives for reacting the way she had.

She was an android. She didn’t have empathy, and generally didn’t recognize when someone was in emotional pain. One of the reasons she and her daughter were on estranged terms.

Goku’s actions screamed volumes to her. When she finally paid attention to where all of this foreign information was coming from, she was astounded to realize it was from a data bank headed under ‘Animal Mannerisms’, only realizing at that moment she had also knelt into the sand in order to be on level ground with Goku.

“I don’t know what has caused him to act li…,” she was cut off from one word by the sayian.

“Vegeta,” was all Goku said. His shoulder slumped with the quiet tattling of one proper noun.

“What? I knew that bastard was no good,” Krillin divulged, still standing. He crossed his arms.

His wife gave him a hard glare before he could go on and suggested, “I think you need to go find Master Roshi and Oolong. They said something about having a night on the town. I am pretty certain there are only so many strip clubs they could have gone to.” ‘The last thing Goku needs to hear from his ‘best’ friend is an ‘I told you so,’ she thought.

“He’s my friend,” Krillin said possessively, “If he needs to know what to do about that bastard…”

“No, he doesn’t need to hear anything Krillin. He’s going to need to talk,” Juuhachi-gou said in a calm voice.

“He can talk to me,” Krillin stated.

“No, honey. He wouldn’t talk to you. He’d end up having to listen to you,” Juuhachi-gou knowingly said.

“I can listen,” Krillin said. He was starting to wear down though.

“This is going to take patience Krillin,” before he could interrupt her she said, “You do have patience. However, this is going to take phenomenal patience. Something you don’t have, and I do.”

Krillin caved at that. His wife was correct. He didn’t have the patience she had. ‘After all, she is an android,’ he smiled to himself, ‘Just look at the patience she has with me.’
“Alright, I’ll go find the guys and pretend I am a bachelor myself for the evening.”

“Thank you. Take your cell phone with you. I’ll call if we need anything,” she requested and advised.

Krillin gave both people kneeling in the sand one last look before walking towards the pale pink house.

Goku didn’t start to speak until long after Krillin had taken off for the main land.

It certainly was easier telling his story to his best friends wife than it would have been to tell his best friend. Juuhachi-gou was correct when she had said this was going to take patience and listening. Krillin would have been verbally abusing Vegeta and passing all sorts of judgments any time there was a silence that became longer than it should. That’s just what Krillin did. It’s just what humans did.

There were plenty of those long pauses. Juuhachi-gou sat and listened, not saying a word, other than to acknowledge she had heard him and understood what he was saying. Waiting for Goku to sort it out in his head rather than push for a continuation to fill the voids. Her non-comments made it easy to lay the whole story before her. He went into details he knew his friend would have been appalled by.

He even went so far as to tell her about his transgression with Bra. Something he hadn’t and wouldn’t have been able to tell another soul. A confidence he knew she would keep. ‘Part of being and android, she doesn’t need to gossip. Maybe that’s why neither Chichi or Bulma ever warmed up to her?’

That’s when the damn finally broke. It wasn’t with the recounting of the last two months with Vegeta. It was with his one thought of Chichi.

Silent tears trailed down his flushed cheeks, “Why did she have to leave Juu? None of this would have happened if she hadn’t strayed,” he said, trying to place all the blame on his wife.

Although Juuhachi-gou was unmoved by his tears, she did contemplate his question seriously before answering, “I think both she and Bulma saw something none of the rest of us recognized Goku.” Scenes of the two full-blooded sayian’s interacting with each other played in rapid succession. Something she hadn’t been able to disable from her past. Anytime one of the full bloods was within her eyesight, she observed them. ‘And to think I get annoyed with my photogenic memory.’

“W-What?” Goku asked. He looked Juuhachi-gou and had a strange feeling she wasn’t actually seeing him at the moment. Then she blinked and recognition came back to her eyes.

“You do know Vegeta has been after you for a long time?” She asked.

Goku wasn’t certain he was ready to hear that information.

Juuhachi-gou sighed, realizing her mistake, but not being able to take it back. ‘One of the draw backs to having limited emotions is not realizing until it’s too late what not to say to someone who doesn’t have that disability.’ “I am not going to try to defend him. It’s not in my nature to do so. I can tell you things that I have observed and their logical conclusions. This won’t, however, justify you either. Do you want to hear this?” She asked. “It may also bring some light as to why the ladies left.”

Goku wasn’t certain that he did, but he nodded his head anyway.

“I don’t know exactly what transpired between father and daughter. He may have been frustrated enough to enlist her help in seducing you. From what I can remember he watched you at bar-be-ques all the time. He has a working knowledge of you that rivals my own, and he isn’t an android who was programmed to destroy you. Sad to say, my program wasn’t to destroy him. So there is only one reason I have such a built up data base on him,” Juuhachi-gou stated.

“Why?” Goku asked the only logical question to get her to continue. He was finding it rather disturbing that Juu was talking about programs he hadn’t thought she still had.

“I have more knowledge of him than Chichi filed away. Somewhere along the way, my programming must have concluded that you cared more for him than your own wife and he could be used as leverage against you if necessary.”

‘This must be a part of the ‘not certain he wanted to hear’ category,’ Goku thought, but this wasn’t really new news to him, ‘I thought about this at the hot spring.’

He looked at Juu again, but once again he got that feeling she wasn’t seeing him, “Yes,” she said, still having that blank look in her eyes, “At get-togethers you were either around him or looking for him. If he seemed to not want to be bothered, you always had an eye on him,” she told what she was accessing.

Then she laughed, seemingly inappropriately, “Forgive me, at one point in time, when I wasn’t in total control of this program, it seemed I had categorized Chichi as a potential ally,” Juuhachi-gou blinked her eyes owlishly to get them back to the present.

She noticed a peculiar look in Goku’s eyes, “Relax big guy. I haven’t had the urge to create mass destruction since before I married Krillin. I was able to create a program that overrode my original. If it would hurt him in anyway, and killing you would hurt him, then I can’t do it. I had to create the program because I couldn’t erase my original one. The original is tied to key circuits that keep me functioning.”

This didn’t make him relax as Juuhachi-gou had planned, but Goku’s curiosity drove him to the next question, “You said he had been after me for a long time. This information is from your data files on him. So, tell me exactly what you observed when watching him,” he requested. He reclined from kneeling to sitting and crossing his legs.

Again Juu’s eyes took on a faraway look. A moment later she said, “His body temperature rose. His eyes dilated any time you were in his sight. He answered questions before you asked. There are actually a couple of times he covered for you.”

“Huh?” Goku wasn’t certain he had heard that last part correctly. Vegeta had always enjoyed making Goku the butt-end of his sharp tongue, ‘Or at least I thought so.’

“A couple of times he put on his mantel of ‘Bastard’ in order to distract everyone from you and what ever you were doing at the time,” she came back to the present to see if the last information was understood.

“You mean all those times he became an asshole at a party was on my behalf?” He asked incredulously.

Juu shook her head, “No, not every time. He really is socially inept most the time, but there were a couple of times he went over the top. The biggest incident was when Master Roshi had spiked the punch and you drank it all after having eaten some spicy food. Chichi wanted to know where her husband was, because she wanted to go home early and you were in the bathroom tossing your cookies.”

“Oh, yeah, that time,” Goku laughed, scratching the back of his head. “Hey! Master Roshi spiked the punch? I thought I just had drank it too fast,” Goku said. “Chichi would have been pissed if she knew I was drunk, even if it wasn’t my fault. She was mad enough she had to go home alone. I got to hear all about it the next morning. Come to think of it, I was kind of confused when she started in on her normal ‘Training is Bad’ speech.”

Juuhachi-gou nodded her head, “I guess you don’t know, but Vegeta told her to go home, that he had ‘ordered’ you to spar with him in the G.R. Lucky for him Chichi hadn’t capsulized her frying pan for that particular bar-be-que. Otherwise, things could have gotten very ugly.” She shuddered at the image of Vegeta and Chichi duking it out. Ki didn’t have much of an electrical effect if it couldn’t be conducted and Chichi had had the handle of that pan coated in rubber; a bit of information from her ‘Chichi as potential ally’ databank. Vegeta wouldn’t have thought he needed to transform to overcome the weak harpy even with her weapon. ‘Yeah, that would have become bloody fast,’ on Vegeta’s favor or Chichi’s Juu still wasn’t certain.

Goku remembered the morning after that party. He’d woken up in the G.R. alone and not really certain how he had gotten there. In light of everything that had happened recently Goku found it disconcerting to think Vegeta had dragged him in there while he was in such a vulnerable state. “If he drugged me to get to me two months ago, did he do anything while I was passed out?” He wondered aloud.

Juu shrugged her shoulders, “That I don’t know. Krillin and I had gone home by then: shortly after Chichi left. Do you remember anything that could answer your own question?”

Goku thought about it, “No, all I remember was a gods-awful headache and a jug of water near by,” he blushed, “There was no smell of sex and I would recognize that now. Just the smell of Vegeta in a place he spent a lot of time.”

“Which means he didn’t try to clean anything up,” Juu interject.

Goku nodded. If Vegeta had tried to clean up something that had happened, there wouldn’t have even been that scent. “I also wasn’t sore any where, and no bruises or bite marks. Just that headache.”

One of Juuhachi-gou’s eyebrows rose with that last statement, ‘Frisky.’

“Still, either way doesn’t change the circumstances of my first time with him I was tricked,” Goku said, starting to get angry once again. “Regardless of what he said his intentions were and that it wasn’t suppose to have gone that far with Bra.”

This was new information to Juuhachi-gou. “What did he say his intentions were?”

Goku gave a sad chuckle and shook his head, “Would you believe he was trying to help me get over my ‘moping’?”

“Maybe he wasn’t drugging you Goku. Maybe in his own sick way he was trying to help,” Juu said quietly.

“Yeah, maybe he was,” Goku agreed just as quietly. His talk with the android hadn’t really sorted his thoughts as much as settled him.

Juuhachi-gou sighed. Things were far from fixed, but Goku was back from the edge.

Both of them started at a large ki signature coming from the main land in the direction of Capsule Corp. “You stay here Goku, I’ll call Krillin and have him check it out.”

~o0o~


Trunks literally flew down the halls of his home. Goten following closely behind. All that time as chibi’s playing tag in the house, with an irate Bulma screaming after them, was paying off. Trunks was certain there would have been a few dents in corners if Goten and he hadn’t already memorized every nook and cranny of the building.

Neither one of them knew exactly what was going on, only that Trunks’s father’s ki had spiked drastically and then they had heard Bra screaming. Which had ended abruptly.

When he finally made it to that part of the building it was no longer necessary for him to dodge corners anymore he stopped. There were no walls to impede his view of the goings on, ‘Great, another remodeling effort I don’t have time for,’ Trunks thought grimly to himself as Goten also came to an rapid halt at the scene of Vegeta’s current tantrum.

One quick glance told him this wasn’t going to be easy untangle, “Damn it! Goten, go get the ki suppressors,” he turned and requested to the darker demi behind him.

As Goten nodded in acknowledgement Trunks flared his own ki in order to become Super Sayian two. He was going to need it in order to subdue his father, who currently had his sister pinned to what remained of the floor, digging his heel into her neck as he ran his foot over one side of her face, causing her other cheek to compact into the ground. ‘It’s a good thing my father likes to take his time exacting vengeance, other wise my sister would be dead. Wonder what she did this time.’

These thoughts were second place to the yell he gave, trying to distract Vegeta from his quarry. When that didn’t work Trunks took off at full speed, hoping to knock his father off of his sister.

Which failed also. He found himself crashing into one of the few remaining walls in that part of the building. “Fool,” he heard his father spit out.

This failure didn’t matter to Trunks. He picked himself up out of the rubble and, not bothering to dust off, charged again. ~Hurry up Goten, I think we are going to have to fuse in order to overcome my father with out killing him before he kills Bra.~

He received a telepathic equivalent of a nod from his partner.

The second time he charged his father, Trunks changed his tactics. Just before he made it with in his father’s reach he stopped. Vegeta, not paying full attention to the one charging him, because of his first priority, crushing his heir’s head into the ground, didn’t realize Trunks’s bluff for what it was until it was too late.

His outreached arm was grabbed and he was slung away from his victim. With no walls to stop his momentum, he had to stop himself: after a few stunned moments and choice curses of course.

In the time it took for Vegeta to curse, stop himself, and fly back to the scene, Goten had already gotten back with the devices Trunks had requested. “We are going to have to fuse Goten,” Trunks informed his friend and lover.

Goten didn’t stall the dance with needless questions. Instead, he went to Bra and dropped a few items in front of her with no explanations. He hoped Bra was well enough to take the senzu bean, and understand what the suppressors were used for and when to apply them.

Vegeta came with in hearing distance as the first part of the dance became audio. “FU..”

“Why those little Fucks!”

“SION,”

He flared his ki as far as it could go, cursing Kakarott and the third class’s lack of interest in training over the last couple of months.

“HA!”

“Crap,” Vegeta spat. Coming into view of the chaos he had started, he saw that the fusion of his son and Kakarott’s spawn wasn’t fucking around. They had already gone Super Sayian Three. ‘Where’s the over confident brat when I need him?’ Vegeta thought to himself as he looked on at the much older version of Gotenks.

That’s about all the time he had before he was tackled by the freak. “Bra,” the Prince heard as, in turn, his head was smashed into the ground, arms twisted in an awkward angle and a knee in the small of his back. Vegeta heard hesitant steps and then felt coldness of metal being placed around his left wrist. “Put the other on his right ankle,” he heard the dual voices order his heir.

Power shifted, became less, and then became even more than less. “Shit,” he choked out as he lost his transformations. He hardly had enough ki to keep his own muscle bound rib cage from collapsing on its self.

“We’ll adjust it later when I return to my selves,” he heard the freak say as it got up off of his back.

Vegeta tried to push himself up, but found his arms were practically useless. Instead he rolled himself over and looked the fusion in the face, “You kinky bastards,” he cursed. There was only one reason he could think for the boys to have had these things laying around.

The fusion’s attention was pulled away as Bra tried to sneak off, “Ah, ah, ah,” Gotenks said. “You have some explaining to do when I dissolve. Don’t wander off.”

Bra humfed, crossed her arms and sat in a chair that had miraculously survived the whole confrontation and resulting destruction.

That’s when Krillin finally made it to Capsule Corp. A little perturbed to have had to leave the table dance he was enjoying, courteously of Master Roshi, “What’s going on guys? Juu called and said there might be some sort of troubling going on over here. Does this have anything to do with why Goku is over at my house?”

Vegeta rolled his eyes. Bra hid her face in her hands. Gotenks scratched his head in a VERY Kakarott like manor.