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I try not to blame him. Every day I try. He doesn’t deserve it, and he doesn’t need me to add to his guilt. He’s already tearing himself apart. I see it in his eyes, in the hesitant way he speaks now, in the slow and cautious movements as though he’s trying to work out every possible scenario before he does or says anything at all. All that happy confidence—that bluster and bravado that comes from the belief that nothing bad, nothing really awful, could ever happen to him—it’s all gone now. My boisterous, unstoppable hurricane of a son is gone, replaced by this quiet and fearful boy. It breaks my heart to see him in pain, so young. I shouldn’t find that kind of self-blame, that self-hatred, in his eyes. Not this young. And so every day I try not to blame him. And every day I fail. I do blame him. I try not to show it but he’s a smart kid. Obviously. He knows. He can read it in my face.
It wasn’t his fault, I fruitlessly repeat to myself. He’s a kid, after all. He was doing things kids do. Things I did myself at his age—and worse, if I’m honest. He was exploring new places, the way a curious mind will do. Not even dangerous new places. Just a truck. Just a simple, stupid truck. How was he to know he’d get caught inside? How was he to know he’d be taken to another planet, and need to be brought back?
How was he to know he’d lose his father there?
I know why I blame Trunks, even though I know—I know—I shouldn’t. I know that it’s not fair. But I have to blame someone, something. When I wake up and the sheets beside me are cold. When I stand by the window waiting for a pair of hands to be placed on my hips. When I have to stop myself from listening for the hum of the gravity room, or from ordering twelve pizzas for dinner, or from turning to say something he’d pretend not to find funny. If there were no one to blame, it would mean that the universe was meaningless, that there was no reason for anything to happen. And something inside of myself can’t accept that. Even if it’s true.
I’ve always known I could lose him. Always, every day, the possibility was there. I’ve come so close to losing him for good so many times before, the thought was always present. And every time I send him off to save the world yet again, I get ready that this might be the last time. But this...this was nothing. This was stupid. This wasn’t a grand battle against a dangerous opponent. This was…
This was supposed to be an errand. A quick trip there and back. Go get our idiot son who managed to have himself delivered to another planet. Bring him back, tell him he’s grounded for a week, and have dinner. But he never came home. Instead, Goku came, bringing back our son and a story of magic water and nothing else. And of course I was upset. Angry, scared. But I had the Dragon Balls right there, in our vault, and we’d fix this.
But when Shenron came, he told me. It wasn’t that the “copy water”, or whatever, had killed him. It had absorbed him. Dissolved him. Taken away every part of him. There was nothing to bring back. Nothing left.
I don’t remember what happened next.
We sit together at the breakfast table, not talking. Mom makes us pancakes. Too many. Far, far too many and we both sit staring at the pile that shouldn’t be there. Trunks can’t help but keep looking at the empty seat. He eats a little, mechanically chewing. I eat nothing, just drinking my coffee and trying not to think. But then Trunks frowns, and it’s too much. His eyes, the crease in the middle of his forehead, his frown, they are too much. Too alike. And I can’t stand one more second of the reminder of what I will never have again. I stand up abruptly, my chair scraping too loudly in the silence, and don’t quite run out of the room. I see the hurt and pain on his face, but I can’t stop. I run to our bedroom and into our closet and I grab a piece of blue cloth from the laundry basket and fall apart entirely.
He’s not the only one I blame, of course. If anything, he’s the most innocent of all.
After we failed with Shenron, and I came back to myself, I went to Goku and demanded everything. The entire story from beginning to end. We sat down, mugs in hand—his filled with green tea, mine filled with the black coffee I can’t seem to stop drinking. He told me the story, about what Jaco had told him about the water, about it grabbing him, about the copy. He told me about the fight, about trying to kill the duplicate before my husband disappeared entirely. He told me, in a broken voice, about winning the fight and turning in victory only to see Trunks standing alone, a plastic pacifier in his hand.
And I sat, and listened, and nodded, and when he was done I asked the question that took thirty years of friendship and shredded it like wet paper.
“You fought as hard as you could, right? From the very beginning?” I kept my voice calm, even. “You didn’t waste even a second at lower power, trying to enjoy yourself?”
I already knew the answer. But I was hoping I was wrong. The look on Goku’s face told me I wasn’t.
“Get out.” I spoke quietly. “Get out of my house and don’t come back.”
“Bulma…” he tried.
“You killed him. You wanted to play instead of saving him and you were too late and now he’s dead and he’s gone for good and you will get out of my house forever. Now.”
He tried to argue and it escalated and I ended up with one of my prototype guns in my hand and our friendship ended exactly the same way it began.
The kitchen is empty when I come back down, thankfully. I pour myself a mug of black coffee and sit at the table, trying not to look at the empty chair. Try not to remember all the times he was sitting there. But it never works. His ghost follows me everywhere, memories of him wherever I look. Remembering every time he looked at me, every nuance of his voice, every time he touched me. The way he would bury his face against my hair, the way he would try to hide a smile when I winked at him. They all come at once and it kills me. I push away the mug and bury my head in my arms. I’m so tired of crying. So tired.
It’s easy for me to hate Goku. It’s easy for me to hate a lot of people. The boys, Kami forgive me, for crawling in that truck. That weirdo Monaka for taking them to that gods-forsaken planet. Jaco for taking my husband there to drag them back. My sister, for introducing him to me. The old man who let the water out of his sight. Whis and Beerus for showing up in the first place and dragging us all into all this fucking galactic fucking bullshit when we were fine, perfectly fine, staying here where it was…not safe, not safe, but at least everything made sense. We didn’t have to deal with universal threats and bickering gods and stupid, idiotic, weird purple goop that somehow managed to steal everything from me.
And the hatred is nice. It’s warm. It keeps me sane. Even when it’s toward my own son, may I someday be forgiven for that. Because when I can blame everyone else I can keep myself from putting the blame where it belongs.
I’m the one who told him to go.
I'm the one who ordered the snacks which brought the truck, and I'm the one who kept Monaka in the lab so the boys could stow away in it. And when we found them missing, I'm the one who told him to go bring them back. That’s the thought that keeps coming back to me, over and over and over and…I’m sure these days I look awful. I haven’t been eating much, and I barely sleep. I can tell by the way Mom looks at me that it’s pretty bad, but I wouldn’t know. Because I can’t bear to even look into the mirror anymore. Maybe I didn’t have any reason to know what would happen, but that doesn’t matter. My brain won’t let it go. I think about it all day, every day. I dream of it, at night. I’m standing in front of the house, and Jaco is telling us the boys have been taken to that planet, and I tell him to go get them back. Vegeta makes a joke about my bossiness, and I frown. In the dream this is when I scream at myself inside, telling myself to just shut up, to just close my fucking mouth for once. But I always speak. And I tell him to go.
I told him to go and he went, and he never came back.
The crying fit stops, and I sit up. In a large gulp I finish my now-cold coffee. I can’t even remember how many cups I’ve had today. Still, I pour another. Because today I need it more than ever. After all, if there was one thing I’ve always loved about him, it was that he would never give up. No matter the odds stacked against him, he kept fighting. Kept trying. I owe him the same.
I take my mug down the hall. It’s time to get to my lab again.
I sit down at my bench, setting the coffee down, and I stare at the metal cylinder in front of me. It was difficult to get. The old man was unwilling to let it out of his grasp after what happened last time. I had to shoot him with a high-powered taser to knock him out, then threaten to do the same to Jaco when he protested. But I got what I went there for.
I couldn’t get him back, because there was nothing to bring back. All of him had been dissolved into this. But the thing is…dissolved isn’t gone. Somewhere in there, the scattered pieces of my love still exist. And I will find them and pull them out, if I have to destroy the entire universe to do so. I will never give up. I will keep fighting. And I will get him back.
Carefully, I pour the purple fluid into the test chamber. It’s time to get to work.