Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time it happens, it’s after they’ve just stopped a department store robbery and Trunks is still tying their main man to a sign post, wrapping his mildly battered limbs in tarp like a Christmas present for the police. He turns to ask Goten for a gag, and then freezes when he catches a flash of a girl’s high school uniform skirt, that shock of plaid clashing with the pale blue of Goten’s suit, arm outstretched with her phone in her hand, pressed up against Goten’s side as he reels her in closer and makes a peace sign at the camera.

“Aww, Mr. Saiyaman,” the girl whines, batting her lashes up at Goten, “my arm’s too short! It’s not getting both of us in it properly!”

“Hey, don’t worry,” Goten soothes her, too sweetly suave for Trunks’s liking, in that unknowing, misleadingly innocent country boy way of his, “let me take it for you, doll.”

Doll. Trunks tries his hardest not to subconsciously choke their assailant with the tarp as he watches Goten pluck her cellphone out of her hand and angle the camera down, his arm still wrapped around her narrow waist as she giggles and leans her head on his shoulder.

Snap! There goes the photo. The flash was on, for some reason. Even though it’s midday and the sun is still out. Trunks prays the photo comes out looking like crap.

“Yay, it’s so cute!” the girl squeals when Goten hands her phone back to her, her eyes twinkling as she looks back up at him. Well, there go Trunks’s hopes and dreams. “Thank you, Mr. Saiyaman!”

“Anything to make a lady happy,” Goten chuckles, throwing in a wink for good measure. Trunks thinks he rolls his eyes so far back they might fall out of his sockets. The girl is promptly reduced to a slew of blushing, preening atoms under Goten’s charcoal gaze, and Trunks thinks he is one minute away from doing something very unfitting of the hero he’s allegedly become ever since Gohan blackmailed the two of them into this gig.

“U-Um, so,” the girl starts, fidgeting shyly, “Mr. Saiyaman, do you think I could get your number?”

Snap! This time, that’s the sound of Trunks’s patience breaking in two. He all but stomps up to the two of them before Goten can even respond, hooking an arm around Goten’s waist and yanking him to his hip with a harshness that makes him yelp, fixing the girl a smile so strained it makes his eye twitch.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Trunks laughs, making sure she sees the way he coils his hand around Goten’s hip, “but that’s highly confidential information! You can’t just go around asking superheroes what their secret identities are!”

The girl looks properly embarrassed. Good. “Oh, I—”

Goten throws him an incredulous glare. “Trunks, what the hell?”

“Now, if you’ll excuse us,” Trunks booms, in his over-the-top hero voice, channeling his Inner Gohan, “we have some, uh, loose ends”—bad guys—“to tie up! Shall we, Saiyaman Number Two?”

Wow. Good one, Trunks. Goten grumbles, as he’s practically being hauled back to where the men they incapacitated earlier are, “Dude, I was obviously gonna say no, what’d you scare her off like that for?”

Trunks whacks him upside the head. “No flirting on the job. Now grab the gag.”

Goten sticks his tongue out at him, and that’s all it takes for Trunks’s heart to go flying off the rails in his chest again.

Baffling. Really.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Obviously.

Actually, why does it matter to Trunks? It’s not as though he doesn’t flirt with girls while Goten has to stand there and have it unfold before his eyes like watching paint dry—in fact, he’s pretty sure the poor guy’s had to sit through more than just a few of Trunks’s insufferable attempts at winning Mai’s affection. So what’s the big deal? Why is it driving him crazy seeing Goten stuck to somebody else, like Trunks can’t stand the idea of not being the only one in his most vulnerable proximity?

There is no big deal. There’s his answer. It doesn’t matter at all and Goten can flirt with whoever the hell he wants.

At least, that’s what Trunks had decided on approximately seven hours ago, when he was staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror while getting ready for school, and now he’s going back on it because—

“Wow, you’re just like my prince charming!” a young woman exclaims, swept up in Goten’s arms in a bridal carry, just before she plants a kiss right on Goten’s cheek and makes Trunks see red.

Let’s rewind a little, so we can mythologize the scene: it’s a hostage situation. Straight out of some terrible American-made cop sitcom. Some sicko’s holding the workers at a jewelry store captive and is demanding a sum of money that would make anybody else’s jaw hit the floor but sounds laughable to Trunks (stupid rich boy, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Goten harps in his head), the negotiator’s been shot to high heaven, and now it’s all up to the two of them. Goten and Trunks. Trunks and Goten. Yeah, that one sounds better.

“I mean,” Trunks drawls, taking a final bite out of the apple he didn’t have time to eat at school because he was studying all through lunch before he tosses the core off somewhere, “let’s just break in and kick his ass.”

Goten’s eyes follow the core as it lands yards away from them. “You could’ve thrown it in a garbage bin, stupid.”

“Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve,” Trunks fires off, delighting in the way Goten’s face steadily grows more mildly pissed off. “It’ll become compost and nourish the Earth in all her further exploits. Don’t sweat it, cowboy.”

“You’re full of shit,” Goten scoffs. He jams a thumb in the direction of the shop, which is currently branded with bright yellow police tape and surrounded by blinking, siren-screeching cop cars. “Let’s go?”

A shiver of something electric that Trunks can’t put a name to (he’s too afraid to put a name to) rushes down his spine. “Let’s.”

They launch off the soles of their feet as one and zip through the air, right past the officers who are yelling at them to fall back, kicking down the door ceremoniously before they’re met with the sight of the man who’s causing all this mundanely human chaos that can’t even compare to the likes of what the both of them have seen. The workers are bound and gagged at his feet, and he’s holding a gun with shaking hands.

“Who the fuck are you?!” he yells coarsely, finger on the trigger. “Bit too early for Halloween, you clowns!”

“Har-har, so funny,” Trunks says dryly, taking a few steps forward while Goten goes for the hostages. “Drop the weapon, moron.”

“No way!” The man’s shoulders lock with his focus as he aims the gun right for Trunks’s head. “I’m getting that money or you’re all dying!”

“Real mature,” Trunks huffs, just as a bullet comes soaring towards his face. He catches it in a fist with a flick of his wrist faster than the speed of light. “Come on, man. Let’s not do this.”

The man is staring at him slack-jawed like he’s seeing an eldritch horror instead of a seventeen year old boy. Though Trunks supposes he falls somewhere in the midsection of the venn diagram of those two categories. “You don’t understand,” the man carries on, steeling himself in the face of the unknown, “I need that money!”

“Get a job like the rest of us, then,” Trunks says flatly, deflecting the next barrage of bullets that hurtle for him effortlessly, bouncing off his forearm like his skin and bones are made of rubber.

“Dude,” Goten chimes, in the process of shattering the chains around a lady’s foot, “you are literally the last person that gets to say that.”

Trunks snorts as he surges forward in one fluid motion and snatches the gun out of the criminal’s hands. “Way to have my back, best buddy.” He disarms the man as he grabs him by the back of his head, hits a pressure point at his nape before he shoves him to the floor. “There we go. See? Easy-peasy.”

Goten ducks his head up to look at him after he’s finished freeing the hostages, and Trunks swears it’s happening in slow motion: his grin is gradual and lopsided, freckled with his dimples, and his eyes glimmer beneath the helmet’s visor like he’s got stars for pupils, galaxies for irises—wait, what? No, seriously, what?

“Good jo— Trunks!” Goten’s gaze turns frantic as it darts somewhere to Trunks’s right, but all Trunks can really focus on is the red of his chapped lips, the all-too-familiar scent of wild grass that clings to him from the mountains as he makes a dash for him, pushing him down and effectively breaking him out of his trance when he accidentally makes him bang his head on the tiled floor. Trunks doesn’t even remember to make a pained noise with the ache coursing through his skull when Goten climbs on top of him, face still turned to whatever it is he’s protecting him from, blocking an onslaught of bullets from a new third party with his brow furrowed.

Goten looks back down at him as he opens his hand and lets the bullets he’s ensnared pour out of his grip, onto the floor. “You okay?”

Trunks is suddenly very grateful for the chunky visor on his helmet, because the plastic blue barrier is definitely concealing the blush he knows is staining his face, judging from how hot his cheeks feel. “Y-Yeah—yeah, I’m— What happened?”

“See for yourself,” Goten huffs, rolling off of him and back onto his feet. Trunks finds himself mourning the feeling of being all but crushed into the floor by the other boy before he coughs and follows him up, narrowing his eyes at what he finds: another man, holding a gun to a worker’s head, one who hadn’t been among the hostages Goten took care of, if the chains around her wrists and ankles are anything to go by.

“Move an inch and I blow her head off!” the guy threatens, which isn’t scary in the slightest. Really, Trunks is more horrified by how his traitor mind keeps replaying the scene of Goten pinning him down over and over again and how his heart keeps skipping beats, in sync and on loop, a neverending torment. Shit, does he need a pacemaker? What the fuck is going on?

“Trunks,” Goten mutters, leaning in close so his breath ghosts over Trunks’s jaw, sending inexplicable flutters right through his belly, “get the gun out of his hands. I’ll make a grab for the lady.”

Realistically, this doesn’t need to be a two-man job. Either boy could do this stuff by himself, blindfolded and handicapped, but this is how they really work, at the end of it all: in tandem with each other, two parts of the same machine, sharing limbs and splitting every instance life throws at them in half and dividing it between themselves.

Trunks tries to remember how to breathe, and then stutters out: “O-Okay. Let’s do it.”

The operation ends up going as planned. Well, mostly. Trunks knocks the gun out of the assailant’s clutches easily enough, and then Goten sweeps a kick for his ankles so the woman falls right out of his hands when he collapses, catching her smoothly as she shrieks and crumples into his arms. Something sinks in Trunks’s gut as he watches Goten whisper a polite apology in her ear before he steadies her with a hand to her waist, going to dismantle the chains around her wrist as she blushes.

The sight pisses Trunks off. For some reason.

“Here, Goten,” he says, striding the couple paces over, “I can help with that—”

“Trunks, holy shit, duck!” Goten yells, raising a ki-enveloped palm with his eyes wild and wide at whatever’s behind Trunks. But strangely, Trunks’s brain is moving as slow as molasses. He has the words What? Why? on his tongue and doesn’t get to say them because he feels a bullet grazing his right cheek from behind—has less than a full second to pop a squat before Goten’s blasting the man who has miraculously risen from being knocked the hell out behind him right in both of his arms, hitting his wrists in such a way that makes the gun skid across the floor until it finds his feet when it drops from his hands. Goten blasts his ankles, too, when he sees the bastard trying to crawl away.

“Shit,” Trunks mumbles, running a gloved palm over the area that’s been hit, kissing his teeth when it comes away red. Bullets can’t do shit against his war tank of a body, and what should be a gunshot wound is really just a paper cut on him—but there’s still a faint sting throbbing in his skin, flooding his senses hand-in-hand with the shame. Sloppy. Careless. You’re forgetting the basics, comes the boom of his father’s voice, which only adds to the oncoming headache.

Goten smashes the gun to smithereens beneath his heel. “What the fuck, are you okay?” he questions, panicked stare scanning Trunks up and down under the cool blue of his visor. He’s still holding onto the woman—one of her ankles has been fractured, so she can’t stand properly. With his eyes still trained on Trunks, he tells her, “Ma’am, I’m going to carry you out. Is that alright?”

No, it’s not alright, Trunks wants her to say, eyes burning holes into her as she flushes at Goten’s inquiry.

“Y-Yes, of course,” she answers, and Trunks actually has to make an effort not to kiss his teeth when Goten gathers her up, holding her to his chest like she’s something precious.

No. That’s not right. Goten’s just doing his job. What the hell is Trunks getting so emotional for?

“Trunks,” Goten says more incessantly, rounding his side as the other boy stands, “are you good?”

“I’m fine,” Trunks says, swiping the back of his hand over his blood-marred cheek. “Just a scratch. Let’s ditch.”

“Sure,” Goten hums, fully not believing him. His eyes are huge and analytical, and Trunks thinks he’s going to drown in their endless pitch black. “Let me just get this lady to the paramedics.”

Trunks shrugs. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

Record scratch! Which brings us back to:

“Wow, you’re just like my prince charming!”

The woman’s arms are wrapped snugly around Goten’s neck when she kisses him right on his cheek, just as they’re exiting the building with the other unharmed hostages and the criminals in tow. Usually, they skip this part and let the incompetent city police handle the general clean up, but they had to actually come out of the woodworks properly today because of the injured woman Goten’s holding—and Trunks seriously wonders if he’s an awful person for immediately thinking of ways to injure her further as soon as her lips pop off of Goten’s suntanned skin, leaving a bruise of lipstick in her wake.

He’ll chalk her highly inappropriate behaviour up to post-traumatic induced stress so he doesn’t tear her off Goten right now and hurl her a hundred feet into the sky.

Goten goes red as a tomato, sheepish as he deposits her on a stretcher. “That’s very kind of you, ma’am!” he laughs, scratching the back of his head bashfully adorably in true Son family fashion, a move as lethal as a Kamehameha Wave. “Take care! I hope your recovery goes well!”

Trunks drags him off as soon as the last word of the sentence leaves his lips, fingers cinched around his wrist so tightly he’s probably cutting off his blood circulation as they rocket towards the skies in a bolt of ki and capes.

“Ow! Trunks, what is your fucking deal?!” Goten hisses, but he’s not breaking out of his hold as they sail through the endless clouds, destination nowhere. “First you got all distracted and actually let a bullet hit you—how did you not feel that guy’s ki flare up again? Seriously, why have you been so weird—”

“She kissed you,” Trunks states, sounding haunted. “She fucking kissed you, Goten.”

Goten scoffs. “Oh, big deal. I’ll never see her again, and she has no fucking clue who I am. What are you, a narc?”

Trunks brings them to a screeching halt right in the middle of the sky, where the setting sun is their only witness. “You were fine with it?” he asks, slipping his grasp down to Goten’s hand. “When she kissed you. Were you fine with it?”

“Huh?” Goten balks, raising a brow. “Dude, I don’t get what you mean. That poor girl was obviously out of it, she literally passed out two seconds later—”

“That’s not what I’m asking, man,” Trunks counters, veering in closer so their noses nearly bump. “Did you like it when she kissed you?”

At that raw sort of bluntness, Goten starts to blush again. Which, naturally, makes Trunks feel homicidal.

Naturally.

“Like, I didn’t hate it, I guess?” Goten squeaks. “It was a kiss on the cheek. My mom kisses me on the cheek sometimes. It was nothing.”

“You used to kiss me on the cheek,” Trunks says before he can stop himself, pulling the distant memory out of the depths of his brain like a rabbit out of the hat, feeling an odd satisfaction creep up his back when Goten flushes further at the reminder. “Remember? When we were kids?”

“What the fuck, why are you bringing that up!” Goten all but wails, his exclamation rushing out of his mouth in a hurried jumble of syllables, trying to tug himself free now and failing because he’s not nearly focused enough to escape Trunks’s steadfast attention on him. He’s burning up all over. Trunks can feel the flare of his palm beneath his touch.

He wants more.

“I just got reminded of it,” Trunks answers, which isn’t a lie; seeing that woman kiss Goten like that really did summon the age-old recollection, breathe vivid life into the reminiscence of how Goten would kiss him goodbye every time Gohan came to pick him up from their playdates at Capsule Corp, pulling Trunks close and smooching him right on the apple of his cheek before trotting off to his brother—why is he thinking about this, again? Trunks licks his lips. “Why’d you stop?”

“Why’d I— you asked me to stop, jackass!” Goten shouts, sounding like he might pass out. “Don’t just conveniently cut parts out whenever you feel like it! You were the one who said some shit like, ‘Ew, Goten, that’s totally gross, you’re gonna give me cooties. And boys don’t kiss each other, anyway.’” He actually does a stellar impression of little Trunks, haughty in ways current Trunks hasn’t fully outgrown just yet. “You said that, word for word! Jerk!”

Oh.

Yeah, he did say that, didn’t he. Huh.

Trunks suddenly wishes he was Future Trunks so he could have access to his time machine, use it to leap back across his timeline and slap his younger self for being so stupid. Why the hell would the little bastard even say such a thing? Boys can kiss each other. Boys who are best friends slash soul-bonded slash just bros can totally kiss each other. That’s so normal.

“Okay,” Trunks concedes, whipping Goten closer, “I’m taking it back. I’m rectifying it. Et cetera, et cetera. Kiss me on the cheek again. It’s fine.”

“What!” Goten’s eyes are as wide as dinner plates, but he isn’t backing away. On the contrary, his pupils are a little dilated, and he’s biting his lip. “Why the hell would I do that, we’re not kids anymore—”

“Aww, come on.” Trunks pouts, lifting his free hand so he can point with his index finger to the already scabbing cut on his cheek. “I got shot today, Goten. Can’t you kiss it better? Please?”

“Freak,” Goten mutters, but his half-lidded stare is lingering on the line of crusted blood Trunks is motioning to anyway, obviously mulling it over. “Ugh. I’m not your mom. Ask her.”

He’s one push away from caving. Trunks isn’t giving up that easy.

“Nah,” he says, squeezing Goten’s hand, letting his other arm drop to crimp around his waist, not missing the way Goten’s lips part with a gasp, “I want you to do it, ’Ten. What, you scared?”

Goten’s still chewing on his bottom lip, and Trunks can feel his muffled heartbeat through his chest where it’s stapled to his own—rapid and hammering, like Trunks’s has been for the past couple of days. Does Goten sense it, too, then? Has this unseen phenomenon caused Goten’s entire internal workings to go haywire around Trunks, the way it’s caused Trunks’s to around Goten? Trunks hopes so. Trunks really, really hopes so. He thinks some revenge definitely needs to be in order, here. It’s only fair.

“I’m not scared,” Goten coughs, looking into Trunks’s eyes as though he’s rising to a challenge, like they’re seven and eight and prowling circles around each other on the World Martial Arts Tournament arena again, waiting to see who strikes first. “Okay, okay, fuck, fine—just this once, you weirdo.”

Trunks smirks, and then he thinks he’s about to say something else—throw a witty comeback at him, bounce a playful insult off of him, but—

Goten’s leaning in. It’s all Trunks can see. The sun is setting, and Goten is leaning in.

They don’t talk about it for a week, and things seem to go back to normal. Their routines still revolve around each other like they always have: they do homework on Trunks’s bedroom floor, they beat the shit out of each other in the rolling fields of Mount Paozu until Chi-Chi has to wrangle them back in for dinner, they fight crime in dumbass complimentary outfits whenever they can sneak out—it’s good. It’s their alien version of mundane. And Trunks never wants it to end.

Until he sees Goten making out with Rulah behind the bleachers at school during lunch.

He punches a hole in his locker, that afternoon. His knuckles hardly bleed. His chest hurts so much more.

“So I’m thinking about asking Mai to go to prom with me,” Trunks says that evening, louder than he has to, over the sounds of their Mortal Kombat characters fighting each other on the screen of his living room television. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches for Goten’s reaction to the announcement. Goten’s shoulders rise and fall in a shrug as his eyes stay glued to the screen, and his nonchalance kind of makes Trunks want to break his nose.

“I mean, I already assumed that,” Goten hums, jamming the gamepad buttons and flicking joysticks to give birth to some violently bloody combo move he wields mercilessly against Trunks’s character. “You have, like, the biggest crush on her.”

“Shut up, I don’t,” Trunks huffs, even if he does—or, he thinks he does. He thinks he’s supposed to, probably. You’re supposed to like pretty, smart girls, aren’t you? Not buff, idiot boys like Goten. Yup. Totally. Trunks kicks Goten in the thigh so he doesn’t think about how the back of his neck is steadily growing hotter with a prickled flush. “I think I’m gonna ask her to be my girlfriend, too.”

At this, Goten’s brows raise. He still doesn’t turn to look at Trunks, but at least there’s some change in his expression. It’s progress. “Mai? Seriously? Good for you, man.”

Good for you. Trunks feels like stale bread at the approval. “Yeah.” He lets his foot stay wedged between Goten’s legs. Goten doesn’t shove him off. Their elbows knock together and Trunks murmurs, “What about you? You got anyone in mind?”

Goten looks at him. He finally looks at him. His eyes are eerily blank as Trunks’s character dies on screen, drawn out and grotesque. “Not really.”

Liar.

“Nobody?” Trunks nags, his leg practically hooked over Goten’s, now, careening forwards with the controller still in his hand. “You being straight with me, ’Ten?”

Goten squirms at his insistence, poker face cracking. He has honesty in his blood, which is why his birthright is a magical yellow cloud that only lets the pure-hearted mount its reins, but also—he’s physically incapable of keeping anything from Trunks. That factor mostly makes Trunks feel like an asshole, but sometimes it just makes his bones sing with a twisted kind of pride. This is clearly one of those times.

“Rulah asked me out,” Goten confesses, his face tinging crimson as he rubs the back of his neck. “I didn’t see it coming at all, to be honest. Kissed me and everything.”

Trunks can sense his ki start to do a nosedive with his despair. He suppresses it subtly before Goten can pick up on it. “Oh, yeah?” he prods, feeling like Goten’s just stuck a knife between his ribs and punctured his heart. One of his mother’s horrifyingly sharp kitchen knives, too. “So, what—are you guys, uh—” Stupid. Stupid. Why is he being so weird? Just this once, you weirdo, Goten’s voice echoes in his head, parroting what he’d said a week ago before he’d kissed Trunks on the cheek right over where the bullet had ripped his skin, and went home with Trunks’s blood all over his mouth. (It wasn’t the only mark Trunks wanted to send him home with.) Trunks forces out, through gritted teeth: “Dating?”

Goten clears his throat. “No? No, I don’t—”

Trunks doesn’t think he hears the rest of the sentence. No. “No?” he repeats, sounding way too overjoyed about this information, victory trumpets blaring loud in his head. “No, you’re not dating?”

“Yeah, like I just said,” Goten hisses, irritated, “we’re not. I said I’d think about it… I don’t know what my answer will be, honestly.” He looks down at his lap, bounces his right leg anxiously the way he has since he was a kid. “This kind of stuff is just still really new to me, so…”

“New to you.” Trunks isn’t sure when he put his controller down, but he’s crawling towards Goten and bridging the miniscule gap between them, slotting a leg between his and getting all up in face. “Was that your first kiss, ’Ten?”

“Screw off!” Goten squeaks, pushing weakly at his chest as he falls back against the sofa. “Obviously you know it was—ugh, see, this is why I didn’t wanna tell you, Trunks, now you’re gonna make fun of me—”

“What?” Trunks is grinning like a Cheshire cat, wide and full of teeth, hands planted next to either of Goten’s shoulders, a sudden surge of adrenaline overriding his system—he’s centimetres away from kissing Goten, centimetres away from solving the secrets of the cosmos, finding out for good why he’s suddenly been feeling every emotion on the spectrum tenfold around this boy he’s known since the dawn of all creation. “I’m not gonna make fun of you, Goten. You must think I’m a real jerk.”

“What the hell do you call all this, then?!” Goten groans, steadily flushing redder—like a cherry. Trunks wants to pluck him off the tree and eat him alive.

“Was it a good kiss?” Trunks tilts his head. He knows the slant of his grin is mocking. “Any tongue?”

Steam might start cartoonishly pouring out of Goten’s ears, at this rate. “Well, yeah, kinda—wait, shut up! Wh-What’s it to you?!”

“I can teach you,” Trunks breathes, not even thinking about what the hell is coming out of his mouth. “All about kissing, I mean. We both know I’ve done it a fuck ton more than you.” Sort of. He’s sure the various drunken house party makeout sessions he’s got under his belt have to count for something. “We can practice.”

“Practice?” Goten’s voice has reached an octave that may very well only be audible to dogs. “Practice—you mean, practice kissing?! Trunks, we can’t—”

“What’s got you so freaked?” Trunks laughs, doing a stellar job of acting all calm and collected, like he isn’t being reconstructed at the molecular level with this new kind of desire threading through him. “It’s just some good old fashioned exposure therapy. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” I want it to mean something. Please, God, say you want it to mean something, too.

He half expects Goten to shove him the fuck off and give him a concussion for good measure. Goten isn’t the kind of person who would kiss someone without it meaning something; he’s earnest in ways that have gone extinct in most guys their age, a real ‘wait until marriage’ kind of sap. Trunks watches his eyes flash azure and briefly thinks he’s going to go Super Saiyan so he can get a quick advantage, clock him in the jaw like a bolt of lightning and then break out through the window—but Goten’s always been the one guy Trunks never could read, and now he throws him yet another curveball when he shoots his hands out firecracker-fast and cups Trunks’s face.

“Okay,” he says, jerking Trunks closer. “Just practice, right?”

Trunks thinks his heart might be shattering. “Just practice.” He rocks forwards until their foreheads clash. Gently. “All good?”

“Yeah,” Goten says, and then he’s mashing their lips together clumsily, like an explosion of stars bursting in their mouths. He tilts his head with a little keen that sends a rupture of heat right to the bottom of Trunks’s gut, licks into his mouth eagerly, naively—Trunks may not be his first, but he’s still early enough on the list to mold his capabilities, take the lead and show Goten how to follow.

“Like this,” Trunks murmurs, slightly pulled back momentarily before he dives back in, lapping across Goten’s bottom lip before he finds the roof of his mouth, the back of his teeth, slotting their tongues together once more as his hands flounder for Goten’s sturdy waist. Feeling something so solid under his palms while there’s something so soft in his mouth—it’s jarring. Trunks is hardly used to it. He could certainly come to like it, though. “Mmmm…”

“Ah—” Goten’s fingers brush the buzzed hairs at the nape of Trunks’s neck before curling into them, a feeble hand pushing at Trunks’s reverberating sternum. “T-Trunks—can’t, I c-can’t—breathe—”

“You’ve got a long way to go, then,” Trunks chuckles, slinging one of Goten’s legs over his hip, nipping at the corner of his mouth and feeling faint at the whimper that leaves Goten’s lips. “Gotta try harder, ’Ten.”

“H-Harder?” Goten whines, groaning as Trunks crashes his mouth onto his again, going sloppier this time, messier, wetter—dragging his tongue over the ridged side of Goten’s, committing the taste of him to memory.

“Yup,” Trunks gloats, crushing him closer, smooching his top lip, “the ladies like to go for a looong time, buddy.”

Goten’s hardly breathing, true to his word, holding onto Trunks like he’s all he’s ever known. “Mmmphh—Trunkssss—”

“So?” Trunks exhales, right into Goten’s mouth as their tongues come apart. “How do I measure up?”

Goten’s panting underneath him, flushed all the way down past the V-neckline of his shirt, eyes halfway closed and glazed over, lips gleaming wet with the damage Trunks has done to him. Trunks can’t resist putting a hand to his fever-warm cheek, reaching out to see if he’s real.

“You mean—” Goten blinks up at him, still not all the way present, “in—in comparison to—”

“Mhm,” Trunks confirms, feeling a smirk itch at his mouth with how out of it Goten looks. He can’t help asking, really—he’s been doing stupid shit to impress Goten since they were snot-nosed brats, lying about nonexistent girlfriends since he was thirteen, and now, he needs to hear it out of Goten’s well-kissed mouth, that Trunks better at working him through than some girl from their high school could even dream of being. “How was it? Just as good as when you kissed Rulah?”

“Better,” Goten gasps, giving Trunks that dopamine rush like he’s holding a gun full of endorphins to his head, pulling the trigger and blasting them right through his skull, straight to his brain. “Better, s-so much better—”

“Again?” Trunks asks, already zeroing in on him.

“Yeah,” Goten moans, hiking his leg further up Trunks’s middle, digging his socked heel right into his spine, fitting their bodies together like they’ve broken out into a grappling match in the midst of a spar. “Trunks, Trunks, let’s—”

So, until the end of time.

It doesn’t exactly become a regular practice. The circumstances have to be perfect and the stars have to align for them to come together—the world just has to be a bit too loud, or maybe too quiet, and one of them will inevitably come running to hide under the other’s skin, test the waters of this brand new, delicate thing growing between them. It’s kind of like learning a new joint move that they have to rehearse every now and then so the ability stays fluid, doesn’t get rusty—wait, no, it isn’t like that at all, actually. Why would it be like that?

“Trunks, on your left!” Goten chimes beside him, breaking Trunks out of his overdrive mind.

“What is it now?” Trunks groans, going to scrub a hand over his face with his exasperation and grunting when he just sort of smacks himself across his visor. Looks like he, the young and upcoming genius of the Vegeta-Briefs family, son of the prince of all Saiyans therefore prince of all Saiyans by proxy and future Capsule Corp CEO, just totally forgot he was wearing his Saiyaman helmet. Whoops. “Fuck. Ow.”

They’re air patrolling the heart of the city in the bustling hours of the evening, and it’s a Friday night, which is when all the drunkards emerge like creatures of the night. Trunks suspects it might have something to do with the fact that the average person’s day job must suck balls. That has to be why they’ve already had to break apart four bar fights. “Is it another bar fight?” It’s a question worth asking.

“Nah.” Goten points down below to the headlight-adorned street. The river of cars looks like bugs moving at mach speeds, from up this high. “Drunk driver. Or maybe he’s sober and he’s just a really shitty driver.”

“Aw, shit.” Trunks sighs exaggeratedly. “Well, let’s get down there, Saiyaman Number Two.”

Goten laughs, and the sound of it makes Trunks’s heart whirl. “Aye-aye, Saiyaman Number One.”

They torpedo downwards until the concrete hits their feet. Ceremoniously, as soon as Trunks hits the ground, he sees a kid who’s definitely on the path to rushing out into the street, right in front of the car approaching from the left that’s going at least fifty above the speed limit.

“Oh, kid running after his ball at three o’clock,” Goten notes, automatically on the same page as him.

“Many such cases,” Trunks quips, already beginning to sidestep towards the endangered child. “I’ll grab him. You worry about the car.”

“Got it,” Goten agrees, and then they’re springing forwards, together. The collision between the car and the child plays out at a snail’s pace before them when it’s blink-and-you-miss-it levels of quick in anybody else’s reality. Trunks jumps onto the crosswalk and pulls the kid right off the street, swivels around with the wailing little boy huddled to his chest in time to see the way Goten front flips onto the road behind and puts two hands to the front of the sleek convertible, stopping it in its tracks effortlessly, even as smoke oozes out of its wheels with just how fast it was going, compared to its sudden pause.

Goten’s cape flourishes around him like a rippling red sea against the darkening sky, and for the first time since Gohan stuffed them into these suits, Trunks thinks he’s never seen anybody cooler. Which is a crazy thing to think about somebody wearing… what either of them are currently wearing.

“Hey!” the driver swears, obviously inebriated. Looks like Goten’s call was right on the money. “The hell do you think you’re doing, punk?!”

Goten smiles cherubically as he points to the traffic lights. “It’s a red light, sir.” And then he rips his car hood off like he’s peeling an orange. “I’ll be taking that. Since I don’t think you’ll be driving anymore tonight.”

“You little fucking prick!”

Trunks whistles and pumps a fist in the air. “Fuck yeah! Break his windows, too, ’Ten!”

Goten breaks his windows.

… They end up having to flee from the cops, after that. Breaking news, a reporter on a current events channel blares the next day, the revered Saiyaman 1 and Saiyaman 2 are delinquents?! Take a look at this! And then they’re pictured taking that drunk guy’s car apart, piece by piece. Sue them, it was fun. Bulma purges the rumours for them with her state of the art cyber security team (although there’s definitely also some hush money involved), after she conks them both on the head over brunch on her patio.

They also end up kissing again, that night. Here’s the general conversational build-up to it, taken straight from the file in Trunks’s brain where memories he’ll inevitably end up playing back over and over again go:

“Fuck,” Goten swears once they’re sailing above the clouds once more, cellphone balanced in his hand and earthly policemen long forgotten. “I totally have to go home. My mom’s pissed.”

Trunks leans over his shoulder so he can look at the time on his screen. 10:15, the numbers on the top read, above the notifications that consist of missed calls from Chi-Chi, multiple texts from her all saying some iteration of WHERE ARE YOU??!! GET HOME NOW, YOUNG MAN!. Trunks snorts. “Shit, it is pretty late, huh? Here, I’ll drop you off.”

Goten gives him this weird look; this strange, demure sort of look, that shouldn’t suit a boy like him, rough around his every edge—but it does, it suits him to a fault, makes Trunks want to scoop him up and be so tender with him it hurts. “Thanks,” Goten says, a little shyly. “You don’t have to.”

“Hey, come on.” Trunks thumps him on the back. “I want to.”

They fly in comfortable silence for a few seconds before Trunks breaks it, because silence isn’t exactly their style. Hasn’t ever been. “So did you ever give Rulah her answer?”

Goten stops flying. So Trunks stops, too. They’re facing each other mid-air. Goten says, “I did.”

Trunks’s fingers tense. His body is looking for something to bash in. Steeling itself in defense for being injured, preparing to be hurt. “Yeah? What’d you say?”

The entire Earth has stopped revolving in space. At least, that’s what it feels like. Everything has been suspended in motion, and the film has been put on pause—even the wind, except for the two of them.

“Turned her down,” Goten tells him, and Trunks is pretty sure the gods have resumed the world’s flow, right at that instant.

“Ah.” Trunks has to battle his own facial tendons and ligaments so he doesn’t break out grinning like a psycho maniac. “So you guys aren’t…”

“No.” Goten’s cheeks are red. They look violet under the cerulean of the visor. Trunks feels as drunk as the driver they just screwed over roughly twenty minutes ago. “That a problem?”

“Of course not,” Trunks says, hands trembling with how giddy he is. “Are you—I mean, are you upset about it, or anything?”

“I’m the one who turned her down. She’s probably upset, if anything,” Goten counters, brow furrowed, like he’s waiting for something to happen, waiting for Trunks to make something happen.

“I was just gonna say, like—” Trunks inhales. Exhales. How does this go, again? His palms are so sweaty. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yeah.” Did Goten learn how to pull off Instant Transmission or something? When did he get so close to Trunks’s face? “You can kiss me.”

“Okay.” Trunks thinks he might drop right out of the sky like an object out of a moving plane. He’s flushed down to his chest, the heat bypassing the barrier of his skin, almost giving him heartburn. “O-Okay, just—”

“Now, Trunks.”

His word is law.

And Trunks thinks he’ll remember the press of their lips until the day he dies, which is going to be a long time because he’s half extraterrestrial and has a longer lifespan than the average human male—you get the point. They eat each other’s faces off until the stars come out.

For some reason, whenever Trunks is having an S Class freakout and he thinks he’s five seconds away from detonating, the person he goes to first is his father. The ex genocidal space terrorist, of all people. Crazy business, he knows.

Which is exactly why he finds himself bulldozing through the Gravity Room’s door and stumbling against the five hundred times altered state of the gravity, falling on his ass and successfully getting Vegeta’s attention where he was doing sit ups against the wall.

“What,” Vegeta drawls, already on his feet in a lithe moment, towering over Trunks and looking increasingly unimpressed, “the hell are you doing here?”

“Geez, what a warm welcome,” Trunks snarks, pulling himself up and fighting against the force threatening to flatten his mass down into a pancake. “Ughhh. The fuck is your problem, this can’t be good for you.”

At this, Vegeta sneers. “Boy, you wouldn’t know what was good for you if it hit you in between the eyes and passed through your skull. When was the last time you trained properly, anyway? In fact, why don’t you drop and give me one thousand push-ups right now—”

“Hold on, hold on, can you just listen to me?” Trunks wails desolately, giving him the baby eyes, which may look like it pisses Vegeta off further outwardly, but Trunks has mastered the art of reading between his father’s lines well enough to see how he inevitably softens. “I’m totally fucked, dad. Seriously.”

“What?” Vegeta’s brow creases. “What’s wrong? Have unresolved enemies from my past finally come calling for revenge? Tell your mother to ready the ships, boy, we must prepare for war—”

“No! What?! No!!” Trunks yells, grabbing him by the shoulders and whirling him back around. “No—what the fuck, I was just gonna tell you that I—I think I like boys.” And also, should he be concerned about the ‘war’ thing?

Nah. Probably not.

He squeezes his eyes shut and braces for the fallout. When nothing comes, he cracks them open and finds Vegeta staring at him like he’s a particularly uninteresting insect. “Okay? Why are you wasting my time with this, again?” he barks.

Trunks thinks his jaw has dropped so far down it’s left a crater between his feet. “You’re not homophobic? Man, I totally thought you were gonna be homophobic. I was kind of prepared to get called a slur and everything.”

Now Vegeta is staring at him like he wants to hit him. He taps his foot impatiently on the bruised metal floor, probably itching to just get back to training already—that’s how little it matters to him. “No, such primitive ways of thinking only exist on this cesspool of a planet. Now are we done?”

Huh. It’s oddly reassuring to hear that his dad couldn’t give two shits that he’s probably somewhere on the gay spectrum—he hasn’t really been brave enough to sort out where exactly he stands, he’s still kind of been treating thinking about his sexuality like poking a bear with a stick—because now it feels like he’s been making a big deal out of nothing. Driving himself to the brink of insanity over nothing.

Tears well up in his eyes anyway, and Vegeta looks terrified.

“Why are you— stop!” Vegeta shouts, squishing his cheeks between his gloved palms and thumbing over the tears. “Quit your snivelling this instant, boy!”

“Sorry,” Trunks warbles. “It’s just—I think I like Goten.”

His father mutters something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like “God damn it, I knew it was only a matter of time.”

Trunks continues, hoarsely: “But I don’t think he likes me back.” Just practice, right? says the phantom Goten in his head, repeating those words out of his spit-shined cupid mouth.

Vegeta scowls, still holding Trunks’s snot-dampened face. “Shall I bring you his head on a silver platter?”

Right. Ex genocidal space terrorist.

“Trunks,” Pan hisses, peeved from head to toe, “stop moving. Uncle Goten, tell him to stop moving.”

Goten looks up from where he’s been immobilized on the other side of his bed with Bulla giving him a manicure, colouring outside every metaphorical line she’s faced with. “Trunks, stay still.”

“Sorry, PanPan,” Trunks chirps, flashing Pan a blindingly charming smile, feeling lightly offended when she actually mimics retching. “Oh, so mean. PanPan’s so mean to me.”

“Only ’cuz you’re the worst client, like, ever,” she justifies herself, huffing as she gets diligently back to work. “You keep making me get the nail polish all over you!”

“Right, because that’s definitely my fault,” Trunks quips, which earns him a sharp-knuckled fist to the stomach. “Ouch!”

“Careful,” Goten laughs, holding out his unblemished left hand just as Bulla finishes up on his right pinkie nail without needing to be asked, “dad says Pan’s on track to surpassing all of us one day.”

Trunks blows a raspberry as Pan vengefully slathers the sparkly blue polish on the pad of his index finger. “You know, it’s funny, my old man says the same thing about the little monster. Isn’t that right, B?”

Bulla sticks his tongue out at him as she smears an ungodly amount of hot pink all over Goten’s poor cuticle. “When me and Pan take over the planet you’re going down first, Trunks,” she announces prissily, turning her nose up in the air.

Trunks acts out being stabbed in the heart. “Betrayal! How could you, dear sister?”

“Fine, I’ll have some mercy. You can be my personal servant.”

“That’s your idea of mercy?”

Two endearingly awful manicures later, when the girls have officially gotten bored of them and jumped out through the window to probably race each other around the world for the umpteenth time, Trunks finds himself lounging on Goten’s bed like it’s his own, laying in a sunspot like a snoozing cat, eyes never leaving the canvas of Goten’s broad back as he tidies up his room. Trunks can smell the delicious scent of whatever it is Chi-Chi is cooking for dinner through the door’s slightly open sliver, can hear Goku getting reprimanded for trying to sneak bites behind her back, and as he watches Goten fold clothes and arrange his textbooks he can’t help but think—I want to stay here forever.

“’Ten,” Trunks calls, feeling his insides melt into a pile of mush at the way Goten ducks his head up immediately. “C’mere.”

“Mhm,” Goten says, padding over and diving onto the bed next to him. It’s the same bed he used to share with his brother, when he was younger—Trunks has fond memories of curling up with both of them at sleepovers, Goten and Trunks under Gohan’s wings, using him like a furnace. Years later and it’s just the two of them, but they’re too lanky for Gohan to fit anywhere between them anyway, now. Too grown up to listen to him tell them bedtime stories. Finding their own places in the world. Goten tilts his head at him, and the passive lift of his brows behind the shag of his uneven bangs seems to say, What is it? I’m listening. Trunks wants to live under his skin. He settles for putting his head in his lap instead.

“I dunno,” he says, picking at a loose thread in Goten’s sweats. “Just wanted you here.”

Goten’s laugh is an airy noise, velvety and punched-out. “I’ve been here,” he reminds him, which—yeah, holy shit, he has. Since always. Trunks shifts to lay on his back so he can look up at him, and he thinks his lungs cease to function when he catches the glimmer of Goten’s eyes, honey brown under the sunlight, lips pulled upwards into something secretive and knowing, in on an inside joke Trunks can’t even begin to decode. Goten asks, still gazing down on him like an angel here to take him to heaven after his untimely death: “You wanna talk about anything in particular?”

Trunks groans. “Why’re you asking? Fuck, I’ve been weird, haven’t I?”

Goten’s eyes crinkle with his grin. “A little.” He runs a hand over Trunks’s chest. “Talk to me about it?”

“Man, I— I don’t know,” Trunks answers, hardly an answer at all, slapping his hands over his face. Where would he even start? “I didn’t ask Mai to the prom. Or to be my girlfriend.” Okay, so why the fuck did he start there?

A pause. Trunks can’t see what Goten’s face looks like because he’s buried in his own palms. Then, with a comforting pat to his belly, like he’s a six year old, Goten offers: “I’m sorry, Trunks. What happened?”

What happened? What happened? You happened.

Trunks stares up at him through the cracks between his fingers. “No, I just—I kind of realized I didn’t actually like her… like that. I don’t know, it’s weird.” He clears his throat. “Been doing a lot of… internal processing, and all that shit. Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about. I’m good.”

“Hmm.” Goten pries his hands away from his face, and Trunks feels his cheeks scorch with his blush as soon as he’s left without that flimsy protection. “I could come to the prom with you. You know, if you want. Unless you’ve already got someone else lined up.”

No, Trunks has zero Someone Elses lined up. In fact, he thinks he would be on cloud nine if Goten came with him. Still, just because being a bit of a jerk is in his elemental nature, he says, voice trembling, “I think I can clear out my other candidates.”

Goten’s smile is lazy, only exposing the top row of his teeth, the slightest flash of canines. “Lucky me, huh?” he asks, so softly it makes Trunks want to tackle him to the pillows (that are constructed into a fort, courtesy of Pan and Bulla) and kiss him stupid.

So that’s what he does.

“Yeah, lucky you,” Trunks reinforces, hiding behind his bravado as he crawls between Goten’s sprawled open legs, blood rushing in his ears like the sound you hear when you put your head to a shell’s opening as a kid and you swear it’s the ocean, cradling the sides of Goten’s head with shaking hands. “You’re gonna make a lot of poor girls cry, you know. You get the Trunks Briefs all to yourself, bud.”

Goten’s lips part with a bark of laughter. “Don’t I always?” He smooths out the collar of Trunks’s rich boy polo shirt, mimes out straightening his nonexistent necktie. “Mr. Briefs.”

That’s. It.

Trunks kisses him as though he’s aiming to devour him, chomping down on his bottom lip and shoving his tongue in his mouth when it opens with his moan, snuffing out the noise as quickly as it surfaces when he explores every inch of the inside of his mouth. Goten makes little gasping whines against the bow of his lips, slinging his legs up over Trunks’s hips and mewling appreciatively when Trunks holds him up by the thighs, dragging his blunt nails down the tremor of Trunks’s jaw with a content sigh.

“You’re getting better,” Trunks says in a hot puff of air, trailing his teeth over Goten’s kiss-swollen bottom lip.

“What can I say,” Goten pants, reeling Trunks back in, “I’ve got a good teacher.”

Trunks groans as they crash back into each other, spending a few more seconds tongue-wrestling before he switches targets, lining kisses down the bobbing column of Goten’s throat, grazing his teeth like a whisper across his skin just to feel the way his breath hitches, the way his voice cracks on a whine as he claws into Trunks’s scalp—a scoreboard visualizes in Trunks’s hazy mind, vivid bright green with blinding white painted letters that say TRUNKS: 1 / GOTEN: 0. Trunks is the one in the winning lead, and he’s counting every jerk and twitch of Goten’s body beneath him as a piece of his triumph.

“Trunks—” Goten squeals, throwing his head back as those insatiable teeth sink deeper into his pale flesh, “a-ah, you’re gonna—g-gonna leave a—”

“A hickey?” Trunks finishes for him, smirking when he pulls back to see the way Goten flares bright red at the use of that word, hickey, all wound up like the goody-two-shoes he is. “Relax, ’Ten. ’M not gonna do it where your folks can see it.”

“O-Oh—but—” Goten’s only pulling him closer despite his weak protests, squirming under Trunks’s weight when Trunks starts fully biting into him, sucking on the spot just beneath his collarbones hard enough to draw blood and drinking in that red syrup like he’s a fucking vampire, lathering his tongue over the shallow wound and kissing it to blotched perfection. “F-Fuck, Trunks—th-that’s good—”

“Think you can hide it?” Trunks teases, veering back to smirk down at him with the blood between his teeth, soaking in the vision of Goten like this—dazed and marked, lying beneath him. Something primal roars to life at his crux at the view. “Looks like you’re gonna have to wear the winter uniform to school tomorrow, Goten.”

“Asshole, it’s summer,” Goten groans, lugging Trunks down for a rematch all the same. They’re all tangled up again when something breaks them out of their dreamland in totality—the sound of footsteps, clambering up the stairs and thunderous enough to only belong to one man, heading right for Goten’s room.

Trunks blanches. “Is that—”

“Shit, shit, shit, it’s my dad, get off me,” Goten splutters, pulling the neck of his shirt up frantically to hide the blemish. He pitches a foot right into Trunks’s chest and hurls him to the other side of the bed, though it hardly does anything for how their legs are still very much slotted together. “Crap—”

Trunks wheezes at the panicked amount of strength Goten’s accidentally put into his kick. The footsteps are getting exponentially closer, now. “Ow, holy shit, give a guy a warning next time—”

“Goten?” Goku sticks his head in around the door, obviously not having knocked once. “Oh, hi, Trunks. Forgot you were here, buddy.”

“Hello, Goku,” Trunks mutters, envisioning blasting him right in the face and being strong enough to get away with it. “How are you?”

“Good, thanks,” Goku says, blinking his huge eyes exactly twice as he steps fully into the room. He’s wearing the ugliest Hawaiian shirt Trunks has ever seen. “What’re you two up to?”

“Sparring,” Goten blurts out before Trunks can even open his mouth, let alone think of a lie, sending his father a smile that is mechanically muscular only. “Do you need help with something, dad?”

Goku looks like he’s trying to conceal a laugh behind his pursed lips. “No, son. Chi just asked me to tell you dinner is ready,” he answers, slipping his hands into his pockets. He smirks at the state of their nails. “Looks like the girls got you two good.”

“Yup,” they chorus, tailing Goku’s stare downwards at where their nails have been utterly victimized.

“Mm.” Goku’s eyes narrow ever so slightly, by such a tiny degree Trunks thinks it might just be a trick of the light—he sweeps his gaze briefly over Goten first, but then when he fixes it on Trunks, he knows it isn’t. “Don’t get too active in here, boys. It’s a small room.” He turns around, still looking at Trunks over the slope of his lethally broad shoulder, smiling like a stab wound. “Come help set the table in a minute, okay?”

“Yeah, sure, dad!” Goten calls after Goku’s retreating back as he leaves. It isn’t until they hear him reach the bottom of the stairs that Goten says, “Shit, that was close.”

“Dude,” Trunks says, sitting up, “I think your dad wants to kill me.”

Goten looks as though Trunks has just told him that the sum of one plus one is two. “Now you know how I feel with Vegeta.” He slaps him on his knee as he rolls off the bed. “Race you downstairs!”

Trunks flounders to catch up with him. “Hey, not cool!”

The next day, when Trunks slides the door to Goten’s classroom open at lunch so he can pick him up and they can eat together on the roof, he is shocked to find that said classroom is effectively Goten-less. Void and deficient of Goten. In simple terms: Goten is nowhere to be found.

“Hey,” he says, walking up to one of his classmates, “you know where Goten is, man?”

“Oh, hey, Trunks,” the guy says, chopsticks halfway to his mouth. “Goten’s totally getting confessed to, dude. By some super hot chick, too.”

The analog clock on the wall, hanging just above the classroom’s telephone, ticks on ruthlessly as Trunks’s blood turns to antifreeze in his veins. 12:30, the perfectly positioned arms read. It is twelve-thirty p.m., and Trunks is stuck in a nightmare.

“... Right,” Trunks replies, itching to split a desk in two down the middle. “Thanks.”

He ends up finding them easily enough. Sniffing Goten’s ki signature out is as easy as breathing—in fact, Trunks is pretty sure he always has Goten’s energy burning in the back of his mind twenty-four seven, residue from just how much time they spend in each other’s company. He nullifies his own ki and darts behind a wall nearby when Goten—wearing his uniform shirt buttoned all the way up the collar to hide the hickey Trunks gave him—comes into view, leaning against the wall and listening very intently as a pretty blonde girl pours her heart to him. The both of them are shrouded in the afternoon sunlight that projects down through a window overhead; it makes for great cinematography, really. Which is infuriating.

“Listen,” Trunks hears Goten say—eavesdropping shamelessly—after the girl has just delivered her confession, complete with a pink enveloped letter, “I really appreciate you taking the time and effort to tell me all this. I know it couldn’t have been easy.”

The girl—shit, it’s Faira, Trunks notices belatedly—nods, hanging onto his every word. Well, Trunks would be a hypocrite to make fun of her; he is, too, after all.

Goten takes a breath, and then after a beat of carefully thought out silence: “But I’m not in any position to accept your feelings. I’m sorry, but there’s someone else I like.”

Oh.

Huh?

Trunks crushes the juicebox in his hand to scraps. Its sticky, artificially red, fruit punch flavoured blood smears his palm and knuckles with the last of its shabby, manmade life. Someone else? There’s someone else? Mismatched names and faces flash through Trunks’s thoughts like skimming through a yearbook where everyone’s eyes have been scrawled over in pen. There’s no definitive answer. Why is there no definitive answer? Trunks can’t arrive at a conclusion, so he walks towards his problem and grabs it by the horns.

“Hey, ’Ten!” Trunks calls, strolling on over to the two of them and remorselessly cutting through the atmosphere they’ve built around themselves, slinging an arm around Goten’s shoulders as if he doesn’t see that Faira is actively trying her hardest not to start crying. Trunks yanks Goten closer to his side, looming ghastly over her with a cock of his head as he asks, pleather-fake cheer injected into his voice, “What’s going on with you, Faira? Not feeling too good?”

Goten slaps a hand over his forehead with an exasperated noise. “Trunks, leave her alone, you jerk. Let’s just go.” He starts pushing Trunks in the direction of the door to the rooftop stairs, bowing his head at her one final time apologetically. “Have a nice day, Faira. And thank you for telling me your feelings. I’m real sorry I couldn’t return them.”

They leave her there, on fire with her dejection. Trunks drops his hand to snake it around Goten’s waist as he looks back at her, just to be petty, show her he can easily touch what she can only fantasize about getting her hands on. He grins at her like the devil when her tear-trembling gaze turns furious.

Better luck next time.

Actually, don’t even think about trying again.

They’re eating lunch on the roof and Trunks is pretty sure all his questions are going to make him pop at the seams. He watches Goten shovel rice into his mouth as if he’s gone days without eating and all he can think is, Who is it? Who’s the person you like? You like someone? Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we were best friends. I want us to be more than best friends. Goten reduces a hunk of fried chicken to shreds within seconds in his apex predator mouth. Anyone else would find it gross, but Trunks sighs like a lovestruck maiden at the sight of it.

“What’s up with you?” Goten asks, blissfully unaware of the fleck of rice on his lip.

“Uh.” Trunks takes a bite out of his burger. “Nothing.”

“You’re so shit at lying,” Goten rags, fork dangling between his teeth. “Just tell me.”

Trunks opens his mouth. The inquiry is mauling its way up his throat. “I just—I wanted to ask you if, uh…”

Goten is giving him his undivided attention. Suddenly, Trunks feels like those girls he’d scoffed at, who had confessed their love to Goten and had no idea he would reject them because of how sincere he had been the entire time.

He shoots an arm out in a dash of speed, swiping the pad of his thumb over Goten’s rice-speckled bottom lip, brings his hand back to his mouth and licks the tiny grain off its calloused surface. Maybe just because he needs to remind himself he’s different. “You like someone?”

Goten looks shell shocked. “No, I— That was just a lie. To make it easier to reject her.”

He’s not lying, but he’s not telling the truth, either. It’s some hybrid combination of the two, and it’s throwing Trunks’s read on him completely off the scale. “Okay.”

Goten’s ears are turning red. “Okay.”

Prom night: Goten and Trunks wearing crisp black suits. Chi-Chi and Bulma pinning matching roseheads to their breast pockets. Vegeta driving them to the venue when he doesn’t even have a driver’s license. Vegeta going one hundred kilometres over the speed limit on the highway. Goten and Trunks holding onto the grab handles for dear life. It’s so easy for Trunks to forget that his heart is breaking in two when Goten is beside him like this, stuck to his hip, laughing at his morbidly unfunny jokes, yelling the quips he meets him halfway with in his ear so he can hear him over the obnoxiously loud music.

Rulah and Faira crash into them once they’ve threaded through a decent portion of the sea of bodies on the dancefloor, obviously already present—Trunks and Goten are, like, so late. It definitely has something to do with the fact that their mothers spent hours dressing them up down to the last strand of hair like they were Ken dolls.

“Goten!” Rulah calls, hooking an arm around his. “Finally, you’re here. I knew you’d show up with Trunks, dude.” She aims a customary smile at Trunks, and Trunks throws one back, hoping he doesn’t look like too much of a serial killer.

“Hey,” Goten laughs, letting her slip her hand into his. “Yeah, sorry, but we’re here now.” He holds up their conjoined palms and leans in a touch closer with a scheming grin. Goddamn ladies’ man. “Guess I owe you a dance, huh?”

Blegh.

“Hell yeah you do,” Rulah scoffs, all but dragging him to the part of the dancefloor where people are actually moving, and not just standing around. “Be back in a second, guys!”

Trunks waves them off with a little laugh, ignoring the way his chest hurts like he’s contracted that heart virus from the doomed future as he watches Goten slide an arm around Rulah’s waist, laugh in her ear as he lets her drag him to the centre of the strobe light dappled floor.

Faira elbows him in the ribs. “You are being so obvious.”

Trunks shoves her shoulder in response. “Obvious? Me? I have no idea what you’re talking about, haha.”

“You might as well have flipped me off after I confessed to him, you know,” she huffs, and Trunks has the decency to burn red at the reminder of his callous behaviour.

“Sorry, I was, uh…” Doing a lot of internal processing. Can’t go wrong with that one. “Doing a lot of internal processing.”

“Yeah? How much bullshit did you find?”

“Okay, ouch.”

It’s silent in their little wallflower corner outside of the blasting music before they break out into a fit of simultaneous snickers. Faira says, “You know, it’s weird. I thought you had the hots for Mai, Trunks. Never understood it, because she’s kind of a snob, but…”

“Hey, I thought I did, too,” Trunks sighs, watching Goten twirl Rulah around, the two of them gliding across the floor with the grace of two figure skaters on ice. “Things change, I guess. Maybe it was always going to happen this way.”

“For what it’s worth,” Faira offers, “half the school thinks you guys are a thing. I think that’s why so many girls who don’t know any better leave you guys alone.”

Trunks sputters. “Wh—really?”

Faira cocks a brow boredly. “You guys are literally together twenty-four-seven. I sort of thought Goten was going to reject me because he was going to tell me the two of you were in a secret relationship, or something, and then I was gonna go, ‘Secret? There’s seriously nothing secretive about you two.’ You know? I had it all planned out, man.”

Trunks’s face has gone apple red by the time she’s finished her spiel. He’s thankful for the fact that the disco lights are cancelling it out visually. “Oh, fuck. Faira, I really like him.”

There’s something freeing about saying it out loud. Faira gives him a pat on his forearm, and he can’t tell if it’s supposed to be sympathetic or encouraging. “So why don’t you give it a shot?”

Trunks’s shrug is a choppy, disjointed thing. He can’t tear his eyes away from Goten. There’s a spell on him, tethering him to Goten invisibly, red string of fate trying to tie itself around the other boy’s pinkie. “I don’t—I don’t think he even thinks of me like that. You don’t get it. We’ve known each other since, like, forever.” He runs a hand through his hair with a dramatically weary sigh. “I don’t wanna ruin that.”

“Well,” Faira remarks, looking up at him with an odd all-knowingness in her Mona Lisa expression, down to the idle curve of her sort of smile, “maybe you won’t be ruining anything.”

Trunks squints at her. “What do you—”

“Trunks!”

It’s Goten. Goten’s in front of him, swooped down like a saviour, threading their fingers together so they’re hand in technicolour hand. “Let’s dance.”

Trunks’s eyes widen at the invitation. “Uh—huh?” he balks intelligently, squeaking when Goten rolls his eyes and yanks him forward all the same. “’Ten—”

“What, you don’t wanna dance with me?” Goten challenges, narrowing his eyes over a murder weapon pout, pulling Trunks right into his orbit. “I’m insulted, man.”

“No, no, of course I do!” Trunks exclaims, squeezing Goten’s hand like a lifeline. He’s set ablaze from the width of his forehead beneath his slicked back hair to the underneath of his dress shirt’s crisp white collar as they float on over to the nucleus of the dancefloor, so hopped up and hyper and giggly Trunks is actually pretty sure they’re levitating a centimetre or two off the ground subconsciously. It’s a good thing nobody gives enough of a shit to spare them a glance, Trunks thinks as he flings his arms around Goten’s waist, breath hitching when Goten’s arms come up in turn to string around his neck.

Goten tilts his head, grinning impishly. “Am I the chick in this scenario?”

Trunks huffs, taking one of his hands in his once more and leading him in a loose waltz’s stride, muscle memory from when his mother made him take lessons as a kid. “You are, in fact, the chick in this scenario. Why? Wanna switch?”

“Nope,” Goten hums as he runs a hand over Trunks’s shoulder, following his steps all too gracefully. “Lead the way, dude.”

Nothing else matters but the two of them. They’re heavenly bodies in space’s void, growing into suns and trying to drown each other in their flames. Trunks swings Goten into a dip so low the longer ends of his mullet nearly touch the floor and fully realizes, finally, as he watches Goten laugh underneath him, glowing red and then green and then blue and then purple and every other hue projected from myriad of strobe lights on the ceiling, that he’s been in love with him from the start. He was doomed from the second Goten’s mother laid him next to him in his crib, and he’s only been trying to outrun the destiny he’d been born with all this time: to be Goten’s in entirety, whether or not Goten ever wanted to be Trunks’s in entirety.

(As a kid, when his mother had told him that his future self didn’t have a Goten, Trunks remembers asking her, But how did he survive without the other half of himself, mama? And his mother had just laughed and said, Well, sweetie, I guess you were the only version of yourself who was ever split in two.)

Trunks whirls Goten around and then snags him back flush against himself. Goten’s head tumbles forwards, his breath an unwavering constant across Trunks’s neck, winter fog on the car window, condensation slipping down the glass. “Hey.”

Trunks swallows. His throat is sandpaper. His heart is a hammer. “Hi.”

Goten is breathing muted, his ki making whirlpools at all his pressure points. Trunks can sense them respiring rhythmically within him. He looks up at him beneath those maddeningly long lashes that only seem to come out when they’re this close together, mascara commercial curly and ridding Trunks of the little sanity he’s got left. “Am I doing this right?” he whispers, the furl of his lips secretive, pearly white teeth luminescing every colour of the rainbow.

Trunks wants to start crying. Out of which emotion, he’s not even sure. His palm lays flat over Goten’s tailbone, selfishly keeping him closer as they sway together.

What he wants to say: You’re doing everything right. Maybe I was the one all wrong from the beginning.

What he actually says: “Nah, you’re shit at it, man. Watch and learn.”

And when Goten giggles, it’s a death sentence and a rebirth at the same time. “Jackass.” He cups Trunks’s face, and Trunks idly wonders if this is what it feels like when the Dragon Balls bring you back to life: you’ve been resurrected with a bit of divine knowledge leftover from when you were dead, like a gift from the gods for you to go forth with, and suddenly you know which direction your new existence will take you in. “Teach me, then.”

It’s useless. Trunks never stood a chance.

“Yeah,” he says, in a trance, nearly trampling on his feet, “yeah, we can figure something like that out.”

(And Trunks knows—oh, he knows—this is only just the beginning.)

Shit, Trunks thinks, unable to stop smiling as his entire universe laughs in his arms, I’m so screwed.

He really is. And the funniest part is, he thinks he’s okay with it.