Homeward Bound

Author's Note: Children have more complex emotions than most people think. Many adults say the kids don't understand the concept of love but I think they simplify it while adults just complicate things way more than they need to be. Children don't worry about if their love is proper or reciprocated. They just love you unconditionally.

Gohan, at this point in the series, only loves Colby as a very good friend. That may change in the future, but then again it may not. Hopefully this clears up a few things (I'll get to why I chose this title in the epilogue).

Chapter 9: A Wish Upon the Dragonballs

The phone was ringing very early in the morning, waking Gohan from a sound sleep. After it rang over four times he knew that his mother wasn't home and reached over Colby to pick up his extension. The sound of his father's voice made him happy but he knew by the tone that he wasn't calling about anything good.

"How are you doing this morning, Gohan?" he asked, loud talking in the background. "I'm calling to give you some news but I can't tell you if it's good or bad."

Colby cracked open one eye and cast a questioning look at his friend. "Where are you, Tousan?"

"Tokyo International Airport." A voice announced a flight and Goku said something to someone else. "Cyrus got away and he's going after the dragonballs. Based on my friend's device two of them are in Europe. I have to get at least one of them before he does."

"I understand. Tell Vegeta that I said hi and I'll see you two later."

"Hopefully this'll all be over soon and we can spend some time together." The voice repeated the announcement and Vegeta said something to him. "I've go to go before I miss my flight. I love you, Gohan."

"Love you too, Tousan. Ja." He replaced the receiver and sighed. "Vegeta and tousan's going to Europe to find the dragonballs before Cyrus. He left last night."

"I hope they find him and kill him," the other boy said very seriously. "Cyrus doesn't deserve to live another day."

"Colby, I hate what he did to you but I don't hate the man himself. Besides, no one has any idea of what he's going to wish for anyway. What if it's something good?"

Colby got to his feet with a huge yawn and started off to the bathroom. "What if it's not? No one's willing to risk everything just because he *might* be harmless now." The doorbell rang just as he had stepped into the hallway and he went to Gohan's bedroom window to see who it was. His parents were standing there on the front porch and he quickly backed away from the window. "Shit!"

"Who is it?" Gohan asked as he walked over to the window.

"Tell them I'm not here, tell them you don't know me," he whispered from near the doorway. "Better yet, let's pretend no one's home and maybe they'll just go away." 'They don't really care about me so why are they here?'

"My mother's pulling into the driveway," Gohan sighed. "She'll let them in."

He quickly began putting back on his clothes and he shoes and took off for the kitchen and the backdoor. "God no! I'll be around, Gohan. See you later!"

"Colby Stephenson, where do you think you're going?" His mother's stern voice floated to him, freezing the boy in the middle of the kitchen floor with a terrified expression on his face. He kept his back to his parents and ChiChi in the doorway but couldn't keep himself from trembling very slightly. No one noticed except Gohan and he looked over Mr. and Mrs. Stephenson from the doorway.

He instantly didn't like them for numerous reasons. What did they do to his friend to make him so afraid of them? Why hadn't they reported his kidnapping to the police immediately instead of waiting for the rescue to become public on yesterday's news? Why were Mr. Stephenson's fingers twitching on his belt as if he were anxious to punish his son for leaving home in the first place?

"What did you do to him?" Gohan asked as he stepped around the couple and stood before them, blocking the way to their son. That was when ChiChi noticed Colby's behavior and she moved just a little bit closer to her son, showing support for his actions.

"We did nothing more than parents have the right to do, boy." His father said harshly. "That includes disciplining my son when he does anything wrong."

"It's okay Gohan," he said quietly as he slowly turned around to face his parents. "I'll go with them."

ChiChi glared at Mr. and Mrs. Stephenson and began to herd them back towards the front door. "Get out of my house! Now!"

"We'll be back, Mrs. Son, and we will bring the cops with us." Mrs. Stephenson gathered up her dignity and strode from the room with her husband trailing after. ChiChi saw them to the front door and made sure they got into their car and drove away.

"They'll return, Gohan. Are you sure they did something bad to him?"

"I'm positive," he said while walked over to his friend. "Do you have scars from them? More than just mental ones?" Colby nodded, holding in his tears by force of will alone. "We need to see them, please."

"Iie," he said in a choked voice while shaking his head. "I can't let anyone see. He said he would kill me if I did." He wrapped his arms around himself and backed away. "Please don't make me show you!"

ChiChi's eyes narrowed in anger as Gohan pulled Colby into a comforting hug. "That's all the proof that I need," she said while picking up the kitchen phone. "I'm calling the police."

"You can't! Son-san, you don't know what my otousan and okaasan are capable of! More than one person has gotten murdered because they pissed them off." He began ticking the unfortunate victims off on his fingers. "My aunt, Misako, when she didn't pay back money she had borrowed, the mailman when they thought he stole a check out the mail box, the principal of my school when he said that the reason I was getting low grades was because I wasn't being helped at home..."

"Did they do it themselves or did they hire someone?" Gohan asked with wide eyes.

He shrugged. "I have no clue but I wouldn't put it past them to have blood on their hands. I'll just go with them the next time they come back and every thing will be okay for you guys again."

"You are not going back to them, Colby, and that's that!" Gohan put his foot down in a manner much like his mother. ChiChi looked worriedly at them for a moment until the police picked up the other line.

"This is Son ChiChi at 621 Cherry Blossom Drive and I have a problem that requires police assistance." She paused and then a frown creased her brow. "Hai, I'll hold."

"The police put you on hold?!" Gohan asked in a shocked voice. "That is not acceptable."

"Gohan, hush!" She gave him a look that made him back away involuntarily. "I have a little boy here that's been abused by his parents." At the word "abused" Colby's eyes teared up. ChiChi nodded a few times and then she put her hand over the mouthpiece. "In order for your parents to be charged they need physical evidence like scars. Strangers are going to take photographs for the trial, Colby. If you say no then we'll drop the entire thing."

"Go ahead Son-san," he whispered. "I don't love them anyway." He left the room and Gohan took a few steps forward to go after him.

"He needs to be alone now," ChiChi said. "To think." She went back to the phone, explaining what Colby had told her about his parents.

Gohan took a seat at the kitchen table, intensely worried about his friend. How would it feel to be beaten almost every day of his life? He had no idea but he knew that Colby had to be a very strong boy in order to survive it all.

His own mother wasn't the best but he never realized just how bad "the worst" was. You hear about things on television or read them in the newspaper, but until you saw a living, breathing person who had experienced the pain it all seemed so distant and unreal. Sure, you knew it was awful, but until it happened to someone you knew personally it wasn't truly horrific.

The sound of the screen door closing surprised him for a moment but soon he was on his feet and running off to the living room. He had to make sure that Colby didn't do anything hasty.

***

The plane was pretty crowded for an early morning flight. Vegeta and Goku sat next to each other, the larger man on the aisle, and settled themselves in for the several hour long trip to France. The miles from the current location was displayed on Bulma's Dragonball Radar but it didn't tell you exactly where it was or the direction you had to go. After driving a mile in each compass direction he figured out that he needed to go west and it was located somewhere in the country of France.

"Is there a movie on this flight?" Vegeta asked with a bored yawn. He could already imagine himself staring out of the window at the clouds or staring at Goku. While the other man was aesthetically pleasing to the eye that, too, could get tedious.

"Without something to do you get bored, don't you?" Goku asked while examining the radar. "There isn't a movie but I brought stuff."

He suspected that the other man's taste in reading material was vastly different from his own. "Oh? Um... arigatou." He dug in the bag Goku had in his lap and discovered a lot more than Reader's Digest. Vegeta grinned and settled down to his comic book. "Lots of blood and gore, just how I like 'em."

Goku smiled back at him. "I had a feeling you would."

They landed in Paris slightly sooner than expected and nothing out of the ordinary had happened on the flight except the pocket or turbulence they hit that caused the plane to rock and Vegeta's face to pale. Goku had just held on to his hand, reassuring him that everything was going to be fine. Dying in a plane crash wasn't one of his favorite ways to go [comma] but if he had no other choice then it would do.

The two of them took a taxi out of the city and into the countryside with Goku muttering about the radar, hoping that it wasn't broken. Between Paris and Versailles the radar suddenly stopped beeping and Goku pressed the button on the top.

"What's wrong with this thing? It was fine back in Tokyo."

Vegeta could tell that he was becoming frustrated. "Here, let me see." He examined the screen for a moment before pressing the button several times. Three small glowing dots were moving at a rapid pace towards another glowing dot over nineteen-hundred miles away. "It's not here anymore. Cyrus already has it, the one from Japan, and two more."

"Damn it!" Goku pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. It hadn't taken him long to figure out based on the mileage displayed on the dragonball radar approximately where in each country a dragonball was located. The one in Japan was gone before they had even left, the same thing must have happened to the one in France. Another one had been in Ireland, one more in Egypt. "He left earlier than we thought, maybe even a few hours after we'd taken the kids away."

"What do we do now?"

Goku sighed. "It makes no sense to try and catch him at the next dragonball so we're going to have to head off to Hawaii. It's a hell of a lot closer than Australia." He pulled his cell phone from his pocket to call ahead to the airport for two more plane tickets and it was taken from him by Vegeta.

"Let me do that, you look like you're about to scream in frustration." Goku gave him a grateful smile and continued to stare at the radar.

"There goes another one," he said softly. "Cyrus has six now."

Vegeta finalized things and hung up. "We're going to get there before he does, Goku. Count on it." He flagged down a passing car on the small, two-lane highway and spoke briefly to the woman before she would give them a ride back to Paris.

"When we get back to Japan we're taking a vacation," Goku decided. "How does a cabin in the middle of a completely deserted forest sound?"

"Will it have gory comic books?" Vegeta asked with a grin.

He smiled. "It can have anything you want."

"As long as it has you then I'm fine." He hugged him briefly and slid into the leather-covered backseat of the woman's car with Goku close behind him.

***

"Colby, where are you?" Gohan called out as he examined every tree and bush in his yard. "Please don't be doing anything potentially death-causing."

He heard one sniffle then another. Before Gohan could even think, he was running towards the sound and hoping that he wasn't too late. 'Don't do it, Colby! I... need you.'

"Colby, say something!" He stopped at the base of a beech tree in his front yard, searching. The small sniffle came again and he looked up to see his friend seated among the branches. "You're not dead!"

"Sorry about worrying you."

Gohan grabbed the trunk of the tree in both hands and attempted to gain a good foothold. When none were forthcoming he moved around to the other side and found something that held his weight. After two false starts he finally made it up and collapsed by Colby's side.

"How did you climb this thing?" he asked while examining his scraped hands. "I've never been able to before."

"I wasn't really paying attention, I just needed someplace to go." He took one of Gohan's hands and began examining it for cuts. The small action successfully took his mind the potential impact of his next words. "As soon as my mom or dad stopped h-hurting me I would go to the backyard and find my special tree. I would hide in it until they went to sleep though sometimes that took hours." He released the hand he had been holding and grasped the other one. "Sitting up there, looking around the neighborhood, almost made me forget what had happened to me."

Gohan looked at him, tears in his eyes. "You will never, *ever* have to go back to that house again. I promise you that."

"Arigatou, Gohan," he said softly while pulling the other boy to him for a hug.

"For what?"

"For caring enough to help me and for just being my friend."

The two of them sat among the tree's sturdy branches in each other's arms until ChiChi came outside looking for them.

***

They had rented a motorcycle at the airport and sped off to where the dragon radar was indicating. Vegeta was driving though he hadn't ever even touched a motorcycle before but after driving at a low speed for a short while he soon got the hang of it.

"Turn right at this next intersection!" Goku shouted above the roar of the wind. "We're really close!"

The small street they turned onto was lined with flowering bushes so thick the perfume was making Vegeta's nose itch. He maneuvered the motorcycle carefully and braked to a stop at Goku's tap on his shoulder. Only a short twenty feet from the road began white sand and Vegeta could already imagine the ache in his shoulders and back from digging.

"I'm sorry that we're going to have to do this," Goku said while releasing two shovels from their capsule. He used the point of his shovel to draw a circle in the sand, indicating that the dragonball was going to be somewhere inside of it. "It's a nice place for a vacation, though."

Vegeta shook his head and began his task. "Not for me it isn't. If I ever come back all I'm going to be able to think about is how much I had to dig." Goku laughed in response, beginning a semi-long stretch of companionable silence that would last until either one of them found the dragonball or Cyrus unexpectedly showed up. They were prepared for both eventualities.

Goku dug his shovel deep into the sand for what seemed like the millionth time. The sun had sank slightly in the sky, for that he was glad, but fatigue, thirst, and hunger were catching up with him. The sudden collision with something underneath the sand surprised him. "Did I-?" He asked as he dropped to his knees. Vegeta kneeled beside him and both began moving away the sand with their hands. The small sphere of the seven-star dragonball appeared to them and equally huge grins broke out on both men's faces.

"We found it before he did!" Vegeta exclaimed, seeing for the first time what a dragonball looked like in real-life. A shadow appeared over the two of them and Cyrus grinned as he grabbed the dragonball from the sand.

"Thanks for the help you two but I'll just be taking that now." He was running away from them before Vegeta and Goku could react. An idle motorcycle was waiting for him, conveniently turned back towards Honolulu. He hopped on it, dragonball securely placed into a saddlebag, and rode off in a cloud of thick dust.

"I'll drive!" Goku shouted as the two of them ran towards their cycle, shovels lying forgotten on the ground. "This chase is going to be tricky and I need you to follow him with the radar."

As Vegeta seated himself securely behind Goku, one arm wrapped around his waist, the sky suddenly darkened as if it were night and a fierce wind picked up. Vegeta was a little nervous about that, although he would only admit it to himself, and jumped slightly when thunder and lightning were making themselves known. What the hell was going on? A storm didn't usually come from clear blue sky. Goku tensed underneath his arm and Vegeta knew then that Cyrus was calling the Eternal Dragon, Shenlon.

'We're going to be too late.' Vegeta said sadly to himself. He didn't know what Cyrus was going to wish for but the odds were that it wasn't going to be good.

'Don't give up just yet, Vegeta-chan. We may make it.'

Vegeta nodded before it hit him that Goku didn't say a word aloud. He felt the other man's body shake as he laughed and then they, by the information displayed on the radar's screen, they were going off road into a semi-dense grove of palm trees. Goku was a skilled rider, however, and they didn't even come close to colliding with anything.

At the edge of a cliff surrounded by palm trees in a semi-circle Cyrus stood before the seven glowing dragonballs and the very large serpentine form of Shenlon. Goku braked quickly and Vegeta was running towards Cyrus before he had even come to a complete stop. They both knew that it was too late but it still didn't hurt to try.

"It is done," the dragon uttered. "I bid you farewell." A bright light blinded them all as the dragonballs rose up above the ground and sped off to different locations around the globe. When they were once again able to see and when the sky and the weather had once again returned to their normal state, Cyrus dropped to his knees with tears slowly sliding down his cheeks. It wasn't quite the reaction Vegeta and Goku had expected.

He looked up as he saw the shadows approached and smiled sadly. "You can go ahead and kill me now, I've completed my task. But I can't say that I won't regret not being able to see firsthand what my wish caused."

Goku crouched beside him partially concerned and partially curious. "What did you wish for, Cyrus?"

"I told your son two days ago that a lot of lives depended on that wish. Mine included." He exhaled tiredly. "I come from a small town in the Australian outback where we've had to struggle for what little we had our entire lives. A few weeks ago this weird sickness came through our town, something no one had ever seen before. The doctors couldn't pin down its origin so that a cure could be found so the first people who caught it died within a week from great pain." He fell silent for a moment but soon went on.

"My mother was one of the first people who caught it. She was getting on in years and her immune system wasn't strong enough for resistance. I stayed by her bedside every single day talking with her and saying that everything was going to be fine, that the docs would come up with a cure." Fresh tears fell from his closed eyes. "I had been lying to both myself and my mother but she knew that she wasn't going to last very long. That very same day I discovered that I, too, harbored some of the sickness inside of myself. The doctor only gave me four weeks at the most to live.

"It was sunny the day she died and I remember yelling at the gods in Heaven for being disrespectful to my grief. A cloudy day full of rain would have been more appropriate for my mood but I thought back later to the nice day and felt that it was trying to tell me something. So I asked the elders about the legends of our people and there were several about the great dragonballs that can grant any wish in the world. I thought to myself that day, 'If I can prevent this tragedy from happening to anyone else then I would be changing the world just a little bit for the better.'

"For long months I searched for the dragonballs and after discovering that the books my men found weren't useful to me, I became sidetracked by my ambition to have everything that I could never have before. All the riches of the world were suddenly available to me, all I had to do was steal them."

He looked up, a contented smile on his face. "So that was my wish, guys. I asked Shenlon if he could cure those with the illness and completely wipe away any trace of it from the world. I'm so happy that it was granted." He got to his feet, a peaceful expression on his face. "Go ahead and kill me. I'm ready."

Goku only threw up his hands and walked away from the cliff in silence. Vegeta looked over his shoulder at him and then smiled. "Don't worry about it, Cyrus, he can't kill you now but we weren't going to in the first place since Gohan asked us not to. He judged your character pretty accurately I'd say." He turned around and startled the other man with the stern expression on his face. "But if you *ever* kidnap, rape, or murder anyone again, nothing you could ever do will save you from the most gruesome death imaginable." He then patted him on the shoulder and walked towards Goku. "Have a nice day."

Cyrus watched the two of them ride away into the setting sun and knew that he would indeed not do anything illegal for the rest of his life. As his favorite uncle Frederick would have said, "Those are two *very* scary mother fuckers."