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Trunks groggily opened his eyes. Sunlight streamed through the window and he groaned, shielding himself with one hand. His alien physiology meant that he didn’t get hangovers but he still didn’t feel good after a night of drinking.
He rolled over onto his side and realized that the other side of the bed was empty. He sat up fully and stared at the disturbed sheets. He could have sworn Goten had the day off (hence why they went out the night before), but the hospital often called his husband in, begging him to come to work since they were short-staffed.
Satisfied with his reasoning, Trunks swung his legs over the edge of the bed and got to his feet. He padded out into the living room, intent on futzing with the stove enough to make himself breakfast. The moment he left his bedroom, though, he heard a squeak.
“Trunks!”
Mai stood in his living room, beet red with embarrassment. She had both hands covering her eyes. Trunks couldn’t help but roll his. Sure, he was only in his boxer briefs but it was his house. How was he supposed to know she was just weirdly standing in the middle of his living room? And why was she here, anyway?
“Please,” he said. “You’re, like, sixty-seven, aren’t you?”
Indignation won out over embarrassment and Mai lowered her hands.
“Sixty-two, thank you very much.”
He tossed her a charming smile as he passed by her to head towards the kitchen.
“Well, you don’t look a day over fifty-nine.”
She sighed and shook her head and he couldn’t help but wonder if she wished that the other Trunks, the one who purportedly loved her--until he joined a time force, met a time-displaced Goten and lived happily ever after. But Trunks could have told her that. He wasn’t sure how alternate timelines worked but he figured that a constant of them would be the fact that he was gay as the day was long.
“What’s up?” he asked because, honestly, in the grand scheme of his life, Mai randomly being in his living room wasn’t that odd.
“You don’t remember last night, do you?”
“Should I?”
She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. Mai had followed him into the kitchen and stood with her arms folded over her chest. Trunks made a face at her guarded pose as he opened the fridge to check on the contents. He had slowly been learning to cook since he and Goten finally got married. He figured one of them ought to be capable of making meals. He could handle a fry-up, anyway, which was what his groggy body was demanding.
“I wasn’t that drunk.”
Mai let out a surprisingly regal-sounding laugh. “You were flirting with Goten.”
He was forever amazed at how she was physically his age, mentally older than his parents, and somehow still acted like kissing and flirting were x-rated acts. Some of the time, at least. When it was most annoying to him.
“So? He’s my husband.” Trunks wrinkled his nose at the lack of food prospects and shut the door. Takeout it was, apparently.
“You asked if he was single and then cried when he said no.”
He considered her words for a moment before snorting with laughter. “Yeah, that sounds like drunk me.”
Mai rolled her eyes again and Trunks decided that it was time to stop just accepting this as fact and get to the point about her presence this early in the morning.
“So why are you here?” he asked. “Other than to bring up drunken shenanigans I clearly remember because I wasn’t that drunk.”
She swept her hand out as if she were shooing his clearly untrue statement away from herself and sighed.
“Your mom sent me. She said you’re supposed to be at this board meeting today at Capsule Corps.”
It took a moment for her words to sink in and Trunks slumped against the counter.
Fuck.
His mother had asked him to come to a board meeting. Trunks was only on the board in name, since he split his time between the bioengineering and robotics departments but he was still expected to show up, which he was currently failing at spectacularly.
“Fuck.”
No one could say that Trunks had an issue going from what was in his head to what ended up coming out of his mouth. Without another word to Mai, he flew towards his bedroom to throw a suit on and get out the door.
--
It was amazing how often he took his lineage for granted. Few others could blast into the shower, Super Saiyan themselves dry, throw a suit on and fly to Capsule Corps in under ten minutes. He skidded to a stop in front of the board room and checked his hair and tie in his phone’s camera to make sure he didn’t look like he blasted here.
He opened the door to find his mother and a few shareholders talking amongst themselves.
“Am I late or early?” he asked.
His mother smiled.
“Early, actually.”
He exhaled in relief. While his mother didn’t care if he even came to these things, he was still technically on the board by virtue of his name and so shareholders and other board members got pissy when he didn’t show.
“So what happened last night?”
Trunks groaned. Why was that the theme of the day? So he got drunk. He was in his twenties--it was his privilege, nay, his right to get occasionally shitfaced with his friends and his husband, wasn’t it? The Beastie Boys fought for his right to party and Trunks was not going to squander that gift.
“You too?”
She nodded and pushed some of his hair back the way she always did when he was a child.
“Well, you crashed back at home some time around two AM.”
“I what?”
“Oh, yeah. You stumbled into the house, banging around my lab--you woke up your brother.”
Trunks winced. His youngest sibling was just over a year old and a notoriously light sleeper. His father couldn’t even train into the late hours of the night without his energy signature waking baby Boxer up.
“What did I want?”
His mother shrugged. “Who knows? I made your dad deal with it and he didn’t say when he came back to bed.”
Trunks pressed his fingers to his temples and tried to bring himself back to last night. He remembered being in the bar and daring Goten’s cousin that he could go shot for shot with him, but everything after that became a haze.
Suddenly, the thought of being in this meeting, listening to people drone on was the thing he wanted to do least in the world. His nerves felt jangled, like they did whenever he felt particularly manic. It wasn’t just the unknown of his night last night--it was the fact that his dad, the second most powerful mortal in the universe, was out there and pissed at him for waking everyone up.
“Mom, can I--”
“Get out of this shitty meeting to go home and ask your dad what you were looking for? Of course.”
“Seriously?”
She waved a hand towards the gathered suits.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll feed them some excuse. You know I don’t give a shit.”
That was true enough and, really, all he needed to hear. He kissed his mom on the cheek and beat it out of the room.
Luckily, the main Capsule Corps building was attached to his house--in a sense. Trunks’s childhood home was a sprawling compound of living quarters, laboratories and corporate buildings. It was still a probable half-mile to his actual house.
Trunks felt his father’s ki in the backyard--it was the easiest for him to find other than Goten’s--and pursued it until he found him alongside his sister and brother. They hadn’t seemed to notice him yet, which was a good thing. Bra knelt down and held her arms out.
“C’mere Boxer!”
His brother toddled towards her on chubby, unsure legs, his face schooled into a look of determination. It was a bit embarrassing to have a brother twenty-three years younger than him. His mom had finally made good on her threat to make Shenron wish her fifteen years younger and the ensuing “celebration”--his words since hers would leave him scarred--with his father had ended up with her pregnant again.
Boxer finally reached Bra’s outstretched arms and fell into them. She grinned and ruffled her hand through his dark hair.
“Good job!”
Trunks came around the corner and lifted a hand in a wave. It was the only way he could make an entrance if his dad and sister were pissed at him.
“Hey.”
Bra’s grin fell from her face, morphing into a glower that eerily mimicked the one that his father wore.
“Nice morning, huh?” he tried. Their scowls stayed in place. “Okay, fine. Dad, do you know why I was in mom’s lab last night?”
His father rubbed his chin as if he were actually thinking about it when, in reality, he was probably deciding whether or not he was actually going to tell him.
“You woke Boxer up,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.
Trunks sighed.
“Yeah, I know. Mom told me. Sorry about that, Boxer.”
Boxer gave a surprisingly potent glare of his own--which wasn’t a surprise since he basically looked like a baby clone of their father--and Trunks nearly dropped his head.
“You woke me up, too, asshole.”
Bra knew a wide variety of curse words for only being eleven, but he had been the same way as a kid.
“Sorry, sorry. Just--what was I looking for?”
His father bent down to scoop Boxer up and, again, took his sweet time answering. Trunks really didn’t have time for this. It was getting warmer, too, and the heat was seeping through the heavy material of his suit. He wanted to find out what he was looking for, go home, get changed, and wait for Goten to come home from work.
“You were lucky your mother and I weren’t sleeping,” he said and the corner of his mouth hitched up just a little.
The heat was suddenly not the only thing make him feel a bit nauseated.
“Dad! Why?”
He glared at him with intensity that made Bra and Boxer’s scowls look pitiful in comparison. Trunks had long since stopped being intimidated by his father’s glares, but there was no denying its potency.
“Because it took forty-five minutes to get Boxer to fall asleep again.” He shook his head and, finally, said, “you were looking for the dragon radar.”
“I was what?”
He hadn’t even thought of that. What the fuck was he planning on doing with the dragon radar?
“Did I make a wish?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
Yeah, it went without question from whom he and Bra got their way of speaking. Not that it helped. Now Trunks knew that he had taken the dragon radar and--what? Drunkenly flew around looking for the dragonballs and drunkenly made a wish? He didn’t remember any of it, but he had a feeling that he knew who would.
--
“Hey, it’s Goten. You just missed me. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible! Thanks, bye!”
Trunks shook his head as he ended the before he could leave a message. It was his third time calling his husband and the third time it had gone straight to voicemail. He had stopped home to change into casual clothes, and Goten wasn’t home yet. He took his speeder out instead to Wukong Hospital to just outright see if he could visit him. If he was out there making drunk, bad decisions, then odds were good that Goten was with him. He would know if he managed to search for the dragonballs, make a wish, and somehow go home and go to bed without remembering it.
He went straight to the nurse’s station, hoping he’d luck out and Goten was just right there, looking adorably pounceable in his scrubs, but there was only one of his co-workers. Rin smiled when she saw Trunks and didn’t start primping like some of the other nurses did when he dropped by. He liked her partially because she took no shit and partially because she didn’t constantly try to flirt with him as if he wasn’t in gay and in a committed relationship.
“Hey,” she said as he approached. “Didn’t think I’d see you in here on Goten’s day off.”
His heart sank.
“He’s not here?”
She shook her head.
“Nope.”
“Shit. I thought he might have gotten called in since he wasn’t at home.”
“And, let me guess, he isn’t answering his phone?” Rin laughed. “That boy is the worst at technology. It’s like he was raised in the woods.”
“Mountains,” he corrected.
“Right. All the way out on Paozu--shit.” Rin shook her head again. “But, no, he’s not here.”
Trunks acknowledged her words with a nod. He figured his best course of action at this point would be to simply go back home and wait for Goten to show up.
Unless.
Shit.
What if he had done something to piss him off last night? If he was crashing into his parents’ house and apparently trying to search for the dragonballs while trashed, what if he had done something to upset him?
He had to get home.
--
When he entered their apartment, Trunks was never more relieved to feel Goten’s ki in the spare bedroom. On the drive back from the hospital, his shit brain had gone from “You did something to upset him” to “he left you,” and it was all he could do to try and shut it up.
He walked towards the room and found the door open. Goten sat on the floor, humming to himself. He seemed to be constructing something and kept glancing from the spread out instructions to the wooden structure. Trunks squinted at it. It was a dark-colored wood and there were barred panels, almost like a--like a crib.
It was then that he noticed the baby seat next to Goten on the carpet or, more importantly, what was in the seat. A newborn baby slumbered peacefully, wrapped in a light green blanket. A shock of purple hair stuck straight up from its head. He stared in disbelief at the baby--the baby!
“Hey, babe,” Goten said without looking up. “Can you give me a hand with Bustle’s crib?”
Bustle? He and Goten had talked about starting a family and that had been one of the names on their list but that was talking. This was a baby sitting there, alive and whole.
Is that what he wished for?
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Buying baby stuff,” he replied. Goten glanced at his phone and widened his eyes. “Oh, oops, I let my phone go dead again. Sorry.”
Trunks walked into the room and sat next to him on the carpet.
“Buying baby stuff,” he repeated. “For...the baby.”
“Yeah. You know, the baby you wished for last night?”
He had made a wish on the dragonballs and that wish was apparently for a baby. An honest to Kami baby, that they apparently named Bustle.
“I wished for a baby?”
“Yep,” Goten said with a cheery smile. He was the one who opened the dialogue for them having a child. “You wished for our daughter and then when Shenron asked for your second wish, you sat down, started crying, and said you wanted a pizza.”
Trunks considered his words while looking at the baby--their daughter--sleeping in her baby seat. As far as “dumb things he’s done while wasted,” this one was permanent but. He wasn’t upset about it. He smiled at her and then back at Goten, the second half of his sentence finally sinking in.
“Yeah, that sounds like drunk me.”