Love, A Game..

Chapter 23

Look into my eyes – you will see
What you mean to me
Search your heart – search your soul
And when you find me there you’ll search no more

Trunks wasn’t normally one to notice the cold. After all, he’d grown up in a time where temperature was usually among the least of a person’s problems. Consequently he didn’t notice he’d been standing on the balcony of his room for ten minutes wearing just a fluffy towel around his waist until a passing female pedestrian fainted.

Even then all he did was go into his room, and that mostly to avoid the deathglare being sent his war by said female’s boyfriend. He paused in front of the open wardrobe pondering what to wear. His eyes were clouded in thought, still slightly sore from the crying he’d been doing yesterday despite his best efforts to rinse them out and care for them. He didn’t need to have red eyes when he saw Gohan again – he was too much his father to allow himself to be seen displaying such weakness.

When, later that day, he tracked down his seemingly unrequited love and found that the other demi was already carrying on a conversation with Videl, his first reaction was to curse under his breath in roughly half a dozen different languages. However, once he’d over-mastered the rather Saiyan-ish compulsion to blast the human female out of his way, he decided to, as the saying goes, ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead’.

In other words he’d ask Gohan out even though Videl was sitting right there. Whether this was due to bravery or stubbornness was debatable, but unimportant.

The handful of free tickets to the next Titans baseball game, the best ace in his deck, seemed overly bulky in the open palm of his hand as he contemplated them, finding it vaguely amusing that such small pieces of paper could weigh on his mind so. This was possibly because his skin, as it always did, had decided to kick into hypersensitivity as soon as he got within an indeterminate distance of Gohan.

Back in the time after the Cell Games, when he and his beloved were together and all was right with the world, he’d found the ways his body betrayed him amusing; now, they wavered somewhere between inconvenient and bloody annoying. He didn’t need his desire to be quite that evident when there was a lady, or at least a female, present.

Gohan and Videl were sitting, almost but not quite side by side, on the bench beside the sandy gravel track that wound in lazy loops through the park just down the street from Orange Star High School. The charcoal-eyed Son’s backpack sat on the ground between them, somehow managing to slump forward and fall over despite being full of books. It was an entirely casual and passive situation, but Trunks approached the couple like a Saiyan readying for battle.

He was about to say hi to Gohan in a pleasant voice, not overly friendly since his heart had been broken the last time he spoke to him but not cold either so he didn’t come across as sulking, just a nice balance between the two, and conveniently forget to greet Videl for several seconds or until prompted, whichever came first, so as to give the impression that she wasn’t important and therefore not a threat to him since he had known Gohan for roughly seven years longer than she had and had obviously been more intimate with the demi-Saiyan than the human female had since there was hardly any closeness in their body language, when he was beaten to it.

“Hi, Trunks!”

Don’t tell me it’s not worth tryin’ for
You can’t tell me it’s not worth dyin’ for
You know it’s true
Everything I do – I do it for you

The tone of Gohan’s voice was exactly the kind of pitch Mirai had been hoping to achieve with his greeting and he was momentarily thrown off course. When he did manage to stammer a clumsy reply, it was in the form of the oh-so-coherent and articulate, “Oh – oh, hi Gohan…”