Work Text:
The morning sun. Red, like cooking fire. Like the blood streaming from a boar’s neck after slaughter. Beneath it, the southern mountains- immense and shrouded by distant fog, like the arms of giants sprouting up from the ground to hold the heavens. Grandpa said the sky was a canopy that held the clouds and the stars, and he had never seen the edge of it. It was forever and always. That was the promise of the sky to the creatures upon it: The sun may set, but it would rise again, forever and always.
Forever, and always.
A single whisper of white streamed out of Goku’s mouth and into the bleeding sky. He blinked at it. It was his breath. He was cold. He was naked, and covered in dirt. He was outside.
Goku lifted himself from the hard ground and looked around, rubbing his arms for warmth. The ground around him was freshly broken and riddled with wide, shallow craters. It was like a huge beast had been rudely woken from its winter nap, and stomped angrily across the valley in search of a new place to sleep. Some of the pines in and around the valley had snapped in half during the night like so many twigs broken to make kindling. The river ran grey and sallow through the wreckage in the eerie morning light.
No animals made a sound in the valley. No birds greeted the morning from their trees. The foot of Mount Paozu was silent. The hair on the back of Goku’s neck stood straight, and not only from the cold.
“Grandpa?” Goku called. “Grandpa, y’ out here, too?”
He sniffed the air. Fresh sap from broken trees. Pine. Moist earth, exposed roots. Urine. Lingering blood. Monkeys, bobcats, lizards, bears, birds. Fear. But no Grandpa. Not recently.
Goku turned around.
His grandfather’s plum-roofed house sat high on a hill, alone but for a tree and well - a trio of silent witnesses. No old man crouched over a crackling fire in front of them. No white smoke billowed in the sky, and no breakfast roasted on a spit.
“Grandpa?” Goku called, again. “Grandpa?”
He let out a few more puffs of air, furrowing his brow and wrapping his thick, brown tail around his torso. The fur tickled his stomach.
“‘M cold,” he said. “Grandpa’s prob’bly cold…”
Goku danced from foot to foot to shake the numbness out of his toes before dashing over the disturbed earth and up the hill to the house. Why he was naked, he couldn’t remember, but his grandfather could tell him.
He hurried around the neat stack of firewood leaning against the side of the house, and rapped twice on the two short, blue doors. The red character painted in the center of each was the only written word he knew. Son. Descendant.
His grandfather’s lacquered red staff leaned against the door frame.
No answer. Goku entered the house.
“Grandpa?” he asked. “I knocked, in case of you havin’ ‘lone time.”
The room, empty but for a bed, a table, a chest, a shoe house, and a pedestal holding a glassy golden ball, stared back at him.
“Grandpa?” Goku said, stepping inside to peek under the bed, at the ceiling, and at the four gemstone stars at the center of the ball. He found his own reflection overlayed in the last of the three items, but no Grandpa.
“Hm,” he said, opening the chest and pulling on the warmest clothes in his size, and then bundling his grandfather’s coat in his arms.
“Don’t see his other clothes,” Goku muttered, grabbing his grandfather’s red staff as he raced out the door.
“Grandpa!” he called over the valley. “Grandpa Gohan!”
-ohan, Gohan, Gohan, echoed the valley.
A single snowflake fell from the sky, like the force of Goku’s voice had shaken dust down from the heavens, or that a stray star had been left behind by the night and fallen from the canopy above.
Grandpa said that, one day, he would be with the stars. He said that, even if Goku couldn’t see him, he would be watching Goku with them for as long as the sun set and rose on each new day.
Goku slung his grandfather’s staff over his shoulders, and hurried into the mountains. He hurried over cliffs and called into every cave, and upturned every stone on his way to the lake at the end of the river.
“Grandpa!” he called. “Grandpa!”
He scared a group of birds cowering in their nest, but nothing else stirred. They erupted from the mountainside in a squawking display of red, yellow, and black.
Goku puffed a few clouds of white over the fresh snow, and then turned around towards the mountain before taking off into a run toward its crown.
“Grandpa!” he shouted. “Grandpa! Grandpa!”
The sky turned from red to white under the falling snow. It gathered in piles on the ground, and Goku left tiny footprints on its surface in his wake. A bear stared fixedly at him with wide, round eyes from its mountain cave. It, and everything else on the mountains, should be sleeping this winter off, but it was wide awake like Grandpa after one of his nightmares about the moon.
Goku asked the bear about his grandfather, but it slunk into the darkness of its cave with a terrified groan. Goku frowned, but hiked on.
“Grandpa?” he called.
Nothing. He tapped the red staff on the ground, and it grew to eight times its height like a red sprig of bamboo living its entire life in the span of a few seconds. Goku rose above the trees with it.
“Grandpa?” he called, again. “Grandpa!”
-Ndpa! Grandpa! Grandpa! echoed Mount Paozu.
Goku adjusted his weight to one side of the staff, and it bent like a branch laden with an overripe piece of fruit until Goku’s feet touched the ground. It shrank to its original size an instant later, and Goku hurried to the mountain’s peak.
At the top of the mountain sat a single rock wedged in the uneven roots of three trees, like the rock had somehow started to drag the trees out of the ground, but they’d fought back and held it in place. Grandpa said Goku was born here.
“Grandpa? Ya thinkin’ up here ‘gain?”
Goku asked, tapping the side of the boulder with the end of the red staff.
“‘Nother bad dream? Ain’t just you. Bears ain’t right, neither.”
No answer. He paused.
“Got yer coat. ‘S coooooooold!”
Still, no answer. Only snowflakes. Snowflakes, and the faded sky.
Goku sat on the boulder, and looked out over the mountain, the valley, the river, the lake. Where was his grandfather, if not there? What else was there besides what he could see? Where else was there besides Mount Paozu? He’d looked at everything there was to be looked at. He’d looked everywhere. He’d searched the whole world.
Except the sky. Not even Grandpa had been to the edge of the sky. Unless...
He looked up, and found snow. It landed on his nose and started melting. He scrunched his face, and rubbed it off.
“Not there,” said Goku. “Not anywhere.”
He wrapped Grandpa’s coat around himself, and inhaled. It smelled of smoke and sweat, and of sap from the pines. It smelled of truffles he’d stuffed in the pockets, and berries from the bushes on the mountain. It was Grandpa, but only a coat. Grandpa was nowhere Goku had been, and nowhere he could follow.
New snowflakes fell on Goku’s feet. He counted them as best he could. There were more than nine of them, but he didn’t know how many more. He didn’t know.
He didn’t know. Grandpa would know, but Grandpa was nowhere.
The stars. Of course. That’s where. Grandpa made it to the stars- and not just any stars, but stars that would always be watching Goku!
Goku jumped from the top of the boulder with sudden conviction, and tore down the mountain. He didn’t stop until he’d thrown open the doors of the plum-roofed house and stood face to face with his reflection in his grandfather’s glassy ball.
“Yer there,” said Goku to the four gemstone stars floating inside the ball. “Shoulda known y’ kept this ‘round for somethin’. You made it.”
The four star ball glittered beautifully, like always. Goku smiled at it, bowed to it, and then made for the door in search of his next meal.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.