“Ow!”
Trunks rubbed at his arm, glaring at his mother as she walked away holding a syringe of his blood. That was the third vile she’d stolen. Why couldn’t she have just drawn a pint and called it good?
Hell, his father was itching for a fight and he was happy to have the sludge beaten out of him. Take the blood that way. Anything to beat his hormones into submission.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Bulma replied absently, pulling up data from the regeneration tanks she’d built when he was a kid. “You’ve been beaten to within an inch of your life more times than I care to think about and have walked away unscathed every time. I sincerely doubt my little needle hurt you that much."
“It could have,” he muttered, leaning back onto his forearm and poking his stomach. They’d been down here for an hour and a half, Bulma testing his DNA and blood against recent records and records from his childhood, trying to determine the full extend of the damage Bra’s wish had manifested.
And he did mean damage. The refrigerator was clanking in ways it hadn’t clanked since the squirt was born and nothing could disrupt Capsule Corp’s image anymore than that wish already had.
Then there was the matter of his hormones...
He poked his stomach again. He’d forgotten how violent hunger pangs could be; he felt as though he hadn’t eaten anything in days.
“What do you think of all this, Trunks?”
He blinked and pushed himself to attention, reaching out to take a diagnostic printout from Gohan. The eldest Son had been giving him funny looks ever since Bulma had called him three hours ago, telling him that ‘there was a bit of an emergency’ and ‘would he mind coming over to help her deal with it?' Trunks wasn’t quite sure, but he was willing to swear that Gohan was looking at him as if he couldn’t trust him.
In all truth, he wouldn’t blame Gohan if that were the truth. He didn’t trust himself either.
Although he had a feeling that Gohan was more worried about his daughter than about what Trunks might do with his newfound youth.
“I think I want to be thirty-two again,” he mumbled, hiding beneath lavender bangs from Gohan’s steady black gaze. Pan only complicated matters. Sure, he’d always been terrified of women, even in high school when he'd known what he was doing: they held a power over him that he’d never given any of them power to have. Pan was one of those girls who not only had that power, but also the actual physical strength to take advantage of it. There’d be no escaping her if she set her mind to ensnaring him, just like when he used to babysit her and she wanted ice cream.
Only, now, she wasn’t four years old. The closest thing he’d get to babysitting this time around was…
“Trunks?”
Open the flood gates! Power all engines to full! Full steam ahead!
Silently, Trunks mentally squished the Scottish brain-mechanic that decided his head needed to be the color of fresh picked tomatoes. Forcing back the blush, he looked up at Gohan.
“You alright?”
He nodded, fumbling with the diagnostics. “I...er...” Crap. What was he going to say? He couldn't exactly tell Gohan that he was terrified Pan was going to man-rape him. It was best to lie. But the problem with the Sons was, well, they'd buy it. Most of the time. Except for ChiChi, but he was willing to swear up and down that she was psychic. Swallowing thickly, he struggled for an excuse. Dammit, he'd always been good at this as a kid. What could he...
His face flushed again as his stomach threw itself angrily against his diaphram, kidneys, and the wall of flesh that separated it from going and raiding the kitchen on its own. The primal screams of his irate stomach echoed through the lab. His teeshirt trembled as if it'd just been told a horde of starving moths were coming to collect on a debt it owed them. Trunks grinned sheepishly, holding out his hands palm up as he shrugged.
Gohan laughed wholeheartedly, his face splitting into a wide grin. Trunks sighed, scratching his head and setting a foot on the edge of the table, perching the diagnostics against his leg as he leaned back against his forearms.
"I feel sorry for you Bulma. Not only do you have Vegeta and Bra to feed, but now you have this bottomless pit as well."
"Black hole, is more like it," she muttered absently, leaning back in her chair and pressing the rim of her coffee cup to her lips, cupping the mug in both hands as she watched the computer run the comparisons.
Trunks grumbled and set his gaze to the page Gohan had handed him, his eyes scanning the numbers and his mind pulling out the propper figures. Gohan leaned back against the table, crossing his arms over his chest, watching him curiously with those wide black eyes that never seemed to miss anything but that always managed to miss just enough to assure Trunks that Judgement Day was not yet upon him.
Wary under the older man's gaze, Trunks blinked, throwing the corpse of the dead scotsman in his head onto the pile of figures he'd put in short-term memory to keep them from wriggling away. Slowly, he looked up, nervously meeting black eyes with blue.
"Sorry...I just find this whole situation rather amusing."
Trunks grumbled, shaking his head, snagging his now-useless glasses from the edge of the table, twirling them around on one leg. "Feh. Everyone does, except for me and Bra. Don't get me wrong or anything - under different circumstances, I'd actually enjoy this. But I have responsibilities to Capsule Corps and to Goten - and to myself - that I can't just drop. And being like this only complicates things." He shook his head, smacking the page in front of him with his glasses. "According to this thing, me as I'm supposed to be and me now are two different people: everything matches perfectly up until I turned 19. After that, everything from scar tissue to the drop in metabolism to bone fractures to probably anything else Mom can think of doing to me, might as well have just," he fumbled for the word, eventually making an all-encompassing gesture with his hands. "It doesn't exist, didn't happen, or won't happen for another 10 years."
Trunks sobbed quietly to himself, flopping back onto the table, glaring at the ground as his upper torso hung off the side. Crossing his arms across his chest, he shook his head, kicking angrily at the air on the other side of the table. "As if it wasn't terrible enough to live through the first time, now I've got an older Bra to deal with. Which was terrifying enough in itself, but now I have to worry about her making more crazy wishes. If I'm not careful, I'll wind up in the hospital with no balls and boobs sprouting from my chest."
Gohan laughed, harder this time than he did the first. Trunks sighed heavily, shaking his head, handfuls of lavender hair swaying back and forth beneath him.
"You know, what I don't understand is how that wish was granted in the first place."
He blinked, latching a hand onto the edge of the table and hauling himself upright, gazing curiously at his mother as she turned her chair around on it's axis, setting her coffee cup on the edge of her desk. Absently, she batted a lock of blue hair from her eyes, crossing her legs.
"On one hand, there's the fact that the wish should never have come true," she continued, cupping the back of her head in her hands, the arms of her sweatshirt bunching around her elbows. "Goku and the Dragonballs have been gone for almost four full years, and I'm sure we've all wished for things in the meantime. So why this wish?"
"It was more vehement than anything else and was so vindictive that whatever God granted it thought it'd be worth the energy?" Trunks grumbled bitterly. They ignored him.
"It's always possible that Dad never entirely left us," Gohan said after a while, his voice deep with thought. "Because he never really did. There are times when I can feel him watching over me and my family, and others when I can honestly feel the full weight of his loss, which I can't say I've ever really felt at all, even with all the times that he's died."
"But what does that have to do with anything?" Trunks interjected. "I mean, yeah, sometimes I get the feeling that if I turn around fast enough, I'll see him standing behind me or catch him ducking into a store. But Goku could never grant wishes, at least not as far as I know."
Gohan shook his head. "Dad merged with the Dragonballs, remember? To say that he's essentially become the permanent enbodiment of Shenlong is not all-together unfeasible. And it makes perfect sense, as Shenlong was the wishgranter the collected Dragonballs summoned."
They sat in silence for a few moments, mulling over his words. In all truth, it probably was the truth. There was a hammering in Trunks's gut that told him that if he didn't trust Gohan on this one, he was a bigger moron than he'd ever accused Goten of being. He sighed, planting his hands on the table and resting his weight on them.
"And on the other hand," Bulma picked up after a moment, "why eighteen, and not thirty-two?"
The silence around them became deafening with the obvious: Gohan was right; only Goku could mess up a wish that simple. The three of them looked back and forth between each other, before Bulma smacked her leg, like a teacher who felt that her students had had ample time to answer.
"When you really think about it, wishes are strange things. Unless you're specific, which one one ever really is, they tend to define themselves. Bra only wished you'd act your age, and let's face it Hun, you've never really grown up. The only difference between you at eight and you and eighteen was that by eighteen you weren't so much arrogant as you were simply Vegeta's son."
Gohan nodded, seemingly seeing this as a full explanation, but Trunks still felt like he was wandering around - blindfolded - in the dark. Maybe when he'd woken up that morning he'd have been able to grasp what was being said, but there was a wisdom that came with age, and that he simply wasn't privy to any longer.
"You know," the older man mused, his gaze shifting to look at something that wasn't in the room, a look that Trunks and Goten had always jokingly called "the smart-guy look". "You know, Mom's always said you're every age you've ever been. For instance, a five year old can never know what it's like to be fifty, but an old man can remember what it's like to be young. In a way, I guess that could explain this. Trunks was acting like a kid when Bra made that wish, and this is the age he was acting - essentially, the age he was."
Trunks sighed, finally understanding. "So you're saying that because she never wished for me to grow up, whoever granted that wish thought this was the age she was talking about."
"Exactly," Bulma replied, stretching an arm in the air and waving her finger at him with a wink.
Trunks grumbled and flopped backwards again, his back popping as he fell over the edge. "In that case, I'm gald she didn't make that wish while I was eatting breakfast."