Chapter Text
Despite the desolate black surrounding the stars and shrapnel outside and the fading chaos of the fight not moments ago, the ship’s enormous garden had been tranquil and serene on its earthbound journey. The butterflies and glowing insects gently filtered about with no concern that the master of the place had just perished outside, and the trees dropped soft petals like luminescent snow. Sevoya imagined this was how heaven might look, assuming it was real.
Dende had sat by the waterfall, repentant and pensive, while Sevoya steered the ship towards the planet’s surface. Together with Polymnia’s help, the three of them figured out how to move the ship without tossing its passengers against its walls in a panicked rush. It travelled at a modest clip towards the bright blue and green Earth.
Melpomene never moved from his spot in the center of the garden with the unconscious Clio clutched in his hands. When asked, he said killing Clio would destroy his artificial brain, and he couldn’t override its self-preservation programming. Gohan leaned against Dende in a half-asleep stupor with Trunks lying in his lap. Meanwhile, Dende clutched the potted, sparkling sprout this ordeal apparently started over in his hands. Sevoya couldn’t help but sneak glances at the three of them every few minutes - particularly Dende.
She understood from Krillin that he was some kind of alien, not a demon, and had been chosen as Earth’s Guardian for his ability to create something called the Dragon Balls. Instead of making him appear more mundane and approachable, it made her feel even more out of her depth around him than before.
He had been in her head more than once. He guided the fate of the planet. It was possible he knew everything there was to know about her, but just as possible that he did not.
“So, what are you going to do with that tree?” Polymnia asked, obviously unnerved by the silence between them.
“Return it,” said Dende. “It doesn’t belong here.”
Something inside Sevoya busted open like a dam crumbling from the pressure.
“Why not?” she said, surprising herself. “Wouldn’t it be a good thing to grow your own gods? That’s what it does, right?”
“It doesn’t grow gods, exactly,” said Dende. “It grows beings that may or may not be chosen to become gods.”
Sevoya’s voice came out with a cold sneer. “Chosen the same way you were? Because you had a particular skill set? Do they turn in resumes?”
She hadn’t spoken at length since she’d snapped at Dende when he tried to apologize. Her hands hadn’t stopped shaking, though, and her numb relief had given way to a slow anger. What had she been thinking? What was she doing here? Why was any of this okay?!
Dende looked up at her.
“No,” he said. “It’s done by age, and then by lottery within the age brackets.”
By lottery. Lottery. Sevoya took a step back like she’d lost her balance.
“So,” she began, suddenly sweating, “everything the blue lady said was true? The gods. They’re lazy and they don’t care about us?”
Polymnia scoffed and planted his hands on his hips. “Would you rather have sided with her? She was gonna ship us off to an alien pl—!”
“No! Shut up!” shouted Sevoya. “I wasn’t talking to you!”
Polymnia’s face curled into an offended frown like he’d been rebuked - especially after his earlier friendliness towards her. He turned away and leaned against one of the rocks flanking the waterfall, arms crossed at a defiant angle. Sevoya focused her attention back on Dende, who had schooled his face into something placid despite the dark, hooded look of his eyes.
“Do you care about everyone on Earth?” asked Dende. “Do you take the time and energy to know every single person there?”
Sevoya frowned deeper, not understanding.
“Assuming you had the power, do you have what it takes in your heart and mind to weave all of their lives together in a way where everyone lives happily, always, sparing nothing for yourself?”
Sevoya blinked. Dende continued.
“And what about the planet around them? The plants and animals? Do you think you could figure out a way to make them happy and healthy always, simultaneous to every person on earth? Remember that any mistake you make ends in catastrophe you caused and they are powerless to fix, because it was made by your hand.”
“What’s your point?” snapped Sevoya.
“My point is that what I just described pertains to only one planet. Each Kai is responsible for at least a quadrant of each galaxy with about as many planets as there are people on Earth. None of them could possibly manage them all to such a degree of detail, and none of them could endure the emotional and physical consequences of a failure on a scale so large as multiple galaxies. Kai are not omnipotent or omniscient. At least, not at every second of every day.”
“How convenient that you can so neatly justify the universe’s inequalities like that.”
Dende bowed his head. His green skin appeared luminescent in the ambient cast of light reflected off the waterfall pool and glittering on the wings of the garden’s insects. The waterfall itself faded into darkness to display the stars and planet Earth as they appeared outside the ship. From Sevoya’s angle of vision, Dende appeared to be speaking directly to the planet rather than staring off at some indeterminate point in space.
“The Kai care as much as they can without inviting madness to themselves or the universe,” he said. They hold steady an equilibrium that allows the rest of the universe to change and grow independently of them, and protect it from otherworldly changes it cannot withstand.”
“So you’re saying it’s out of your hands?” Sevoya snapped. “Everything that’s happened?”
Dende tilted his head towards her. She met his dark eyes, and reminded herself that in bright light, his irises appeared as an unnatural red.
After a pause, Dende asked, “Why did you come after me, Sevoya?”
“I,” she stammered, almost offended by the question. Her hands twitched. A muscle in her cheek spasmed.
She could say she didn’t know. She could pretend she was still confused and consumed by a pit of grief so deep and swirling that she was helpless in its tide from one moment to the next. But that wasn’t strictly true. As tumultuous as she felt inside every day and as often as she lapsed from grief to anger to numb forgetfulness, she knew that her situation was not something she could rightfully blame on Dende even if it involved him indirectly - even if sometimes she liked to think she wanted to do so.
Instead, she said, “You possessed me.” She swallowed. “Three times. I know you were propelling me to this stupid crystal before I sent it off into that lady. I never would have made it here so fast otherwise.”
“No,” said Dende. “That was all your doing. That was your power.”
That gave her pause. She was certain something had hurried her along in the garden to reach the crystal console. But then again, maybe not. Maybe all she needed was her own will.
Sevoya stammered. “Th-that’s not important! You’ve been in my head, so you t-tell me why I did it! Okay?!”
Dende tilted his head. Next to him, Gohan’s now-dark eyes glittered like he had something to say, but Dende silenced him with a gentle hand.
“No, Sevoya,” Dende said. “I will not look into your mind any more than I have already. You have endured enough. Your thoughts and actions are your own to understand and share as you decide.”
He was going to make her say it?! Was that it? After everything, he was going to make her spell it out for them both. She grabbed her wrists to make her hands stop shaking.
Gohan was her friend. He trusted and cared about Dende enough to want him safe. Deep down, she wanted to trust Dende, too. She wanted to believe that Earth’s Guardian truly cared about the planet - and cared about her. She did it because she wanted to believe she had the power to do something meaningful in return, even if she screwed it up in the process. It sounded so pathetic in her own head that she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. Not now. Not yet. Not when she could barely handle not knowing exactly how the world was changing far below her, and what that meant for her future.
“Sevoya,” said Dende. “What I began to say earlier, I truly mean. I cannot possibly begin to know the depths of your grief, nor how to fix it without ripping away who you are. I can only offer my apologies, as I feel if I were a more experienced Guardian, I could have mitigated them somewhat. I had no way to know how insidiously complex the Earth’s situation might be to those trapped in between otherworldly tragedy and its greater context.”
Sevoya shook her head and wiped at her face. If she had been trying to say anything before, it came out as a wheezing sniffle.
“I must also thank you,” said Dende, bowing his head. “From the bottom of my heart. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” echoed Gohan, bowing his head as well.
She stared at them both. Their words were gratifying. They were horrible. They were everything she wanted to hear, and yet she couldn’t bear to listen to them. She felt as if she was being pulled in a million directions at once. She was hollow and full at the same time.
She turned towards the brilliant blue crystal and focused only on it, pretending nobody else could see her falling apart.
—
Dende’s face and demeanor towards Sevoya on the ship and Piccolo in the wasteland was as different as night and day. When bowed at Piccolo’s feet, he didn’t do it with compassion and humility. He did it with a stone face and impenetrable calm.
Piccolo glowered at him over crossed arms and a stare that could cleave rock. His shadow fell across Dende’s body like a mantle. Still, Dende stayed where he was, almost entirely unfazed.
If they were communicating with one another, it was for the two of them to know, and no one else.
Then, Piccolo broke. He grunted, and then threw his head to the side as if he could not stand to look at Dende any longer.
“I accept full responsibility for my actions,” said Dende. “The fault is mine, and mine alone. My involvement, while indirect, drastically altered this planet’s course. I have broken the policy set by my predecessors and revealed myself, as well as the existence of a Kami, to the world. I am now in the public eye.”
“You say that like it is something to be proud of,” said Piccolo, spitting the words like they were something foul.
Dende’s back straightened so he could look Piccolo in the eye.
“They are my actions and I intend to stand by them,” he said. “As Earth’s Guardian, I made my decision. I accept my consequences as the planet’s steward, including whatever happens next.”
Piccolo set his jaw.
“And what are you going to do about that? Are you going to turn your back and hide on the Lookout? Pretend this will all be over? We both know you’ve rendered the Dragon Balls inert for another year. This isn’t something you can wish away.”
“What?” said Sevoya and Gohan, with two different levels of incredulity.
“Wish away?” asked Sevoya.
“The Dragon Balls are inert?” asked Gohan. “Who made a wish?”
Dende shook his head. His eyes softened, and he lost some of the self-sustained certainty from his earlier expression.
“No one made a wish. Not directly.” He looked down at his hand. “I needed the power to take down Clio’s ship - more than I have on my own. I drew it from the Earth’s core in the same manner the Dragon Balls channel its power to manifest the eternal dragon.”
“So we can’t undo this,” said Gohan, saying the words like each was a new flavor he couldn’t quite identify.
Everyone would know that Hercule Satan was a liar, and he did not save the world. Everyone would know ki existed, and that their Kami was a small green alien. They would also know about the Circle of the Inner Flame, and that Son Gohan did, at least at one point, save the world. Whether from Cell or from a rogue Kai was a different discussion.
Gohan felt small and exposed. In the chaos of urgent danger, he’d forgotten the size of the world and how much it frightened him when he wasn’t simply flying above it in anonymity. The sensation rolled over him like storm clouds closing in over the plains. He was a culture in a Petri dish; he was a nervous stagehand caught in the bright center spotlight.
“Not for at least a year, no,” admitted Dende. “Not while the Dragon Balls remain as stone. It’s permanent, at least until then.”
“Until then?” said Sevoya. “You’d take it all back?”
“I hope you’re happy with your choices,” said Piccolo. “Erasing an entire year from the collective memory is not the same as wishing Cell’s victims back to life. One is an isolated incident, and the other impacts the culmination of a series of—”
Sevoya’s head snapped to Piccolo, and an instant later, her hands buried themselves into the white folds of his cape. If she’d grabbed anyone besides the disciplined Namek, she might have pulled their face level with hers, but instead a faint ripping noise erupted from the cloak where she pulled and Piccolo refused to bend. Still, she held fast. Her face was white as a sheet, and her jaw worked and unworked behind her closed lips.
“A wish. That’s what caused people after Cell’s attack to return? That’s how it happened? Magic?”
Piccolo blinked, dumbfounded. Sevoya shook him, or tried to, and then pulled harder on his cape when he did not move.
Meanwhile, Gohan felt his blood turn to ice. He’d forgotten he had never actually told her the details of why he knew her mother had never come back.
“Tell me!” demanded Sevoya. “Magic? Some kind of magic? Was it magic that brought everyone else back but left my mother behind?!”
When Piccolo still didn’t answer, she released his cape and pushed him away with a disgusted sneer. Instead, she turned to Gohan and Dende.
“One of you! Tell me!”
“Yes,” said Dende, closing his eyes.
Sevoya froze. Gohan reached out to catch her in case she fainted, but to his surprise, she suddenly turned around and slapped Piccolo as hard as she could across the face. It didn’t make him so much as blink, of course, but his shock was palpable. He stared at her, slack-jawed and dumbfounded.
“You want to just make people forget? You think you should just shelter us from everything that happens, and then make us live with, what, with people coming back to life? Like what we do doesn’t even matter?! Like what we learn gets taken away from us?! That’s what you think the best thing to do is?!”
“What?” said Piccolo, wincing from the volume of her voice so close to his sensitive ears. “N-no, but the course of Earth and the breadth of the knowledge given all at once can overwhelm the—”
“That’s a band-aid over a bigger wound! That’s a piece of tape over a crack in a dam! What the hell is your problem?! Who the hell are you?! What makes you get to decide how and when Earth advances?!”
Gohan cleared his throat. Sevoya turned to him and gave Piccolo a merciful reprieve from her verbal onslaught.
“Actually,” he said, hanging his head, “I’m the one who made the wish to--”
“Shut up!” screamed Sevoya. “Shut up! I know! I don’t know the details, but I know, alright?! You’re a coward who disappeared when we needed you the most! You hid! You did this, and then you hid away! I don’t need to hear about it anymore! I don’t care! I only care about what you are going to do now!”
Sevoya fell quiet, bent at the waist and panting from her outburst. Nobody else moved.
The wind blowing across the wasteland grew in force, and then in volume. It howled with a hollow echo that battered Gohan’s ears. It was as if it was flowing directly into him and getting lost inside for how empty he felt. He had prepared himself for slaughter and even death, but not for this - not for living with a guilt for which he could never atone.
Sevoya grabbed Gohan by the collar and looked at him like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to cry or spit in his face. Then, she pushed him aside and shoved her way forward between him and Dende. Gohan watched her go until she was a purple-topped figure on the horizon, her loose hair whipping in the wind like an anchored tornado.
Was it stupid of him to believe everything might be over once they made it through one more fight? Was it stupid of him to believe that he could calm the fears and anxieties they spread by moving past it? No, it was blatant denial. His struggles impacted other people, but he would be lying to himself if his victories could count for others in their own struggles. Whatever Sevoya chose to do was up to Sevoya, and he had to accept it.
When Gohan looked back, he found Dende smiling. It was like a butterfly battling a storm: determined and battered.
“The people of Earth have spoken,” he said, eyeing Gohan. “Are you ready for that?”
“I have to be,” said Gohan, glancing at Dende before finding Piccolo’s stunned eyes and signature frown.
Then, Gohan took a deep breath, and ran his hands through his hair as he found himself both excited and frightened about all the ways his world was about to change. This was everything he thought he wanted, and it made him want to vomit.
He hoped he was careful enough in what he wished for. Whatever happened to the Earth now, he had to accept it and grow with it.
---
A year passes. As much changes as does not, as is probably standard when the unknowns you feared become your known reality.
It is May 11. Gohan is legally eighteen, and as far as anyone who matters is concerned, Broly is one year old. This is his first birthday party on Earth, and the first full year he can remember being on the planet. Chi Chi makes both of them their own cakes, and then a third for the partygoers to split. Each of the three could feed an entire wedding party.
Chi Chi sets the first of the cakes in front of her son with both hands. A glowing orb holding four stars sits at the very top, but everyone knows it is made of blown sugar. Behind her, Hass carries the remaining two atop his huge arms. As he sets the first in front of Broly, he stumbles from the weight. Chi Chi catches him with a quick hand. Her frazzled terror at the potentially ruined dessert is evident in her shrill scolding, but the small smile and shy pat on his shoulder tells a more truthful story.
Sevoya watches across the table in a seat next to Videl. She’s never had one brother, let alone three, maybe, but that might change. Her father sold the original Lucky Egg’s lot for a house closer to Mount Paozu than Orange Star. His new restaurant features his favorite foods as well as cuisine representative of Fire Mountain. Chi Chi is the only one allowed to speak louder than him in his kitchen, and she does. A lot.
She looks around the dining room of the new Lucky Egg. It’s decorated in teal, red, and gold for the party, but once the sun sets she knows they’ll have to strip it and redecorate it in pink and white for the first of two weddings this weekend. Videl’s hand brushes hers beneath the table, and Sevoya grabs it to start a mock thumb war. When she wins, Videl pulls a face.
Videl flounces her short hair and turns to Erasa and Sharpener instead. Both of them look like they were caught whispering something to one another. They probably were. Sevoya grins and pretends like she doesn’t notice.
Sitting at her table is Krillin, who is telling a funny story to both Mark Satan and Thalia, and mercifully, he has them both laughing away the awkward tension that permeates almost every room the man enters. His hair is short now and his moustache was gone, so his face wasn’t as grossly iconic as it was in the days of his official fall from the media’s grace. According to Sevoya’s father, Mark Satan had a talent for coordinating weddings and big events, as well as the brawn for setting up tents and hauling decorative accoutrements out of trucks. In the throes of pre-wedding jitters, most clients didn’t look too closely at his face or otherwise give a damn about him beyond telling him what to do, so it worked out.
He and his daughter live in a townhouse not too far away. When she wasn’t at school, Videl disappeared into the wilderness to cajole Tienshinhan into beginning the Crane school so often that Sevoya thinks she barely lives there. If you asked Sevoya, it was working, even if Videl was still his only formal student. For now.
For now.
For now, school is strange. Not bad, but strange. People still whisper about her, and about Videl, and especially about Gohan, but they never do anything more than that. Erasa’s knowing smile and Sharpener’s flexed biceps get to them before they have a chance. Sevoya doesn’t have many friends there, but she has friends, which is more than she could say than before. Her father gets antsy when she doesn’t bring them over about every five days, which is a pain, but she supposes it’s better than the quiet, crushing concern that ruled their old house for seven years.
King Furry made them a promise that the media would die down once they grew bored. In return, he also made them promise to tell him about cosmic events that could jeopardize the Earth. Sevoya had no idea how he could possibly enforce that agreement, but she supposes that the only leverage he needed was making Gohan, Vegeta, and apparently God into known public entities. If something went badly enough, the world would never leave them alone. Gohan said it was the Earth’s responsibility to work as one to defend itself, so Sevoya got the feeling that what Furry wanted is what he wanted, as well.
As for Erato, his life would likely end at the same time as his fame. Sevoya saw him once more, shortly after she had landed in the wasteland on the strange ship one year ago. Tubes and wires stuck out of him from where he lay on the hospital bed, and his misshapen body was fragile with burns and scars. His face held the ghost of a smile when he spotted her around the corner, and something about it brought her out of the tired, dreamlike state she’d fallen into in the winds of the wasteland. Sevoya knew her father held a grudge against Erato because of her mother, but Sevoya couldn’t help but feel Erato had felt the loss, too.
Before she left the hospital, she gave him her emerald necklace. It seemed fitting to give a man in chronic pain and under an unimpeachable, permanent house arrest a way out, should he want it. He had only smiled. The woman at his bedside, Urania, had thanked her as well.
Tienshinhan, as well as a strange friend he calls Chiaotzu and an even stranger woman named Launch, leans in to hear Krillin’s story in a way that makes them look almost comfortable to be there rather than comically out of place. Eighteen excuses herself from the table to hand her daughter off to her brother. The two of them say something to one another, but Sevoya can’t make any of it out before they fall into a comfortable silence. Seventeen bounces a laughing Marron on his knee.
Seventeen sometimes stops by the restaurant on his many trips to or from Orange Star. The city and its destruction impacted his conservation efforts, and Krillin had connected him to the local government as a consultant. In return, part of Seventeen’s reserve became a martial arts school - the Turtle School, led by Krillin. Unlike Tienshinhan, he was immediately popular, and also unlike Tienshinhan, he was better at making connections. Sevoya has to guess that Seventeen drops in on his sister often thanks to their proximity, though the last time she saw the two together, it was to take Clio from Melpomene’s iron grip for questioning somewhere.
She didn’t know where that might have been. They hadn’t looked like they’d had any questions in mind for him. Sevoya decided it was better that she didn’t know any details.
Melpomene - Cray - watched the three of them from a wheelchair pulled between their table and Bulma’s table and with a saccharine smile plastered across his face. Without Clio’s interference, Bulma had altered his mechanical brain to give him control of his body once again, though not without drawbacks. The accident that forced him to adopt the mechanical brain left his organs and muscles irreparably at odds with his nervous system. Cray would never have as much mobility and power as he’d had in the past, but he didn’t seem to mind it.
Once he starts Thalia on an animated explanation of something to Tienshinhan, Krillin excuses himself from their table to ask his wife something. Cray breaks into a huge grin and pulls him into a huge hug when he draws near. Krillin looks surprised, but then starts laughing when Cray pulls in Eighteen as well and begins excitedly babbling something about true love. Seventeen cooly hands Marron over to her father, and snickers into the drink Bulma hands him.
Bulma is beautiful, intimidating, and timeless in her emerald pantsuit and bright red lipstick. She appears less corporate and more like something off a magazine, and that makes her son and his friends darting around her feet even more comically incongruent. Vegeta sits at the table behind her, turning up his nose in impassioned agreement or disagreement - Sevoya couldn’t tell - with Yamcha. Whichever it is, it makes Yamcha laugh, which turns Vegeta an aggravated pink. Pu’ar and Oolong whisper something to one another about it until Vegeta snapps at them and walks away from the table in a self-conscious huff.
Instead, Vegeta awkwardly hovers over Broly and waits for a window to ask about a training session after cake. He isn’t very good at most types of conversation, which was exceptionally funny during his now semi-regular public appearances alongside his wife.
Roshi flashes a grin as he leaves, and then pulls out a pack of cards from the pockets of his fuschia shorts. Apparently, Vegeta isn’t good at cards, either.
Calliope, led forward by Trunks and Goten pulling her left and right arms respectively, hurries towards Gohan and Broly’s table as Hass and Chi Chi fumble with the lighter and candles. Leif watches with a look on his face that puts him somewhere between wanting to scold them and laughing. Lief and Calliope live quiet lives in Orange Star - he works in one of Julian Naan’s medical offices as some kind of records keeper, and Chi Chi sent Goten to the same school as Calliope with strict instruction for her to “keep him focused on his studies.”
The two have reputations as class clowns, but their grades are good. Together, the two of them even tutor Broly in whatever they were covering in class. Trunks pretends like he is too good to do that, but Sevoya finds him hanging around to do the same thing almost every time she sees the four of them together. They alternated between Chi Chi’s house, the restaurant, and the Briefs’ complex in West City, so she sees them together a decent slice of the time.
Chi Chi cleared her throat and gestured to the cakes - now with lit candles.
“Now,” she said, holding up her hands to begin a clap, “sing!”
They sing. It is awful. Piccolo distanced himself from the gathering and threw his hands over his ears. Broly was prepared with a set of rubber earbuds, and he makes no secret of plugging them into his ears. Dende stays put where he was next to Gohan, but Sevoya could tell by the tense smile plastered on his face that he felt the same way about the sound.
Dende and Gohan are together more often than they are not. There are days when Gohan simply does not show up to school. Chi Chi hates that, but his grades are perfect and he is never gone more than one day a week, at the most. Sevoya or Videl bring him any missed work he may have. When she asks what he is doing, he very matter-of-factly says they are seeing the world. She knows he is also writing a book. She read the first drafts. If he can get it published, he may find himself famous for reasons completely unrelated to his status as the Delivery Boy.
Gohan’s goal is to become a doctor - specifically in places abroad that need them most. He has an internship and accelerated study program arranged with Julian Naan and Urania that he accepted only after Julian, Leif, and Thalia promised had no ulterior motive. Even then, he had not accepted until Julian audited his business, publicised the results, and took Gohan along on all manner of inspections to make sure nothing untoward was lurking in his literal and figurative basements. Julian had done so with aplomb.
Sevoya smiles at Gohan as he sends the candles across the table as he blows them out. He grins back.
Then, she catches Dende’s eyes. She hasn’t spoken to him in almost exactly a year, though she had hardly seen him. He is a ghost she caches in glimpses behind Gohan, or learned about through other people’s stories. He is an elephant in the room that, overnight, everyone in the world began to acknowledge - some with fear, zealotry, adoration, or contempt. But the sun kept rising, and nobody had started killing one another in his name yet, so it was a start.
Honestly, she has not known what she might say to him. Gohan, she had learned through an awkward dance of quiet conversations and forgiving grace whenever she regressed into an old anger misattributed to him, and everything he represented. She knew it wasn’t just because he was kind; she knew because he felt the same thing towards so many others. They were more similar than they were different, and that made him a haven in a storm.
Still, some things they never talked about. Entire chapters of their lives the other could never connect with, and that she was afraid to know. Dende was one of those things - unknown, and therefore frightening. But he is here now, and she is here now, and the two of them are smiling at one another across a party.
Sevoya rises from her seat, and takes the first of many steps towards the two of them. She is not sure what to say, but she will figure it out.