Intertwined Destinies

DISCLAIMER: I don't own DBZ or Elfen Lied.

CHAPTER 1: The Discovery at the Beach

It was a beautiful day in Kamakura in the Kanagawa Prefecture of southeast Japan. The sun was out and glowing brightly in an endless expanse of cerulean-hued sky dotted with large, puffy white clouds soaring gracefully overhead, along with many soft pink flower petals falling down from the air like snowflakes and painting the area in a warm, breathtaking feel of hearth and home, as though to welcome new arrivals with a friendly greeting. And at Gokurakuji Station of the Enoshima Electric Railway, a young woman was waiting patiently on the opposite side of the stationhouse entrance. Her hair was chestnut brown and styled in the traditional Japanese way, framing the young woman's heart-shaped face and highlighting all the areas of beauty, from her petite nose to her gently curving chin leading up to the girl's full, round cheeks and ending at her chocolate-colored eyes, filled with the compelling blend of both deep, caring compassion as well as firm, resolute strength, an ocean of emotion one could quickly get lost in.

Checking the time, the young woman was surprised to discover the one whom she had been waiting for was now late. Wasn't he coming to see her? Did he forget she was here? Feeling angry and disappointed, the beautiful woman left the stationhouse, obviously intent on tracking him down. Traveling down the pathways of Kamakura she took in the familiar sights and surroundings with a lighter heart, thinking back to days gone by. It had been eight years, but very little had changed at all in the small town where she and her favorite cousin had met and played in. She smiled nostalgically. Those days she spent with him as a child were some of the happiest times of her entire life... and some of the saddest, too, she remembered as her happy grin turned into a remorseful frown. Her uncle and her other cousin had both died eight years ago, and though the pain was no longer fresh, it was still there. She may not have been as close to them as she was her cousin, but they were still her family, and she had wept for their deaths with all the pain and regret in her heart. Hopefully, her cousin managed to recover from that and make something resembling a life for himself.

The young woman was now walking up a stone stairwell sloping upward and bracketed on the right by a cliff side, all leading up to the homes of the area. Suddenly, she caught sight of a young male who seemed to be around her age walking up one of the stairways. Was it him...? She examined the newcomer more closely. That unkempt black hair, those dark eyes, his gait, the very way he moved, like someone who was sure where he belongs yet not sure where to be... her breath caught in her throat. It was him, she would recognize him anywhere, even after all these years. The young man turned to face her, and both jumped in surprise, taken off guard by the presences of one another.

"Oh! You're Kouta, right?" the young woman said.

"Um..." the young man said, blinking a bit, like he didn't know how to proceed.

The young woman fought down a wholly inappropriate giggle. "I'm Yuka. Your cousin."

The light clicked in the young man's eyes. "Oh, you're Yuka?"

The young woman nodded, and the two set off down the streets of Kamakura.

"Since I didn't see you at the station, I looked all over for you," Yuka said, a trace of annoyance in her tone of voice.

"Really?" Kouta said, and then he hung his head in embarrassment. "Sorry."

Her beloved cousin, that bright, intelligent, lively boy that Yuka had remembered from her dreams, now had the feel of being a few steps behind the world around him, like he was struggling alone in a dark and empty cave to find a candle he didn't know existed. Yuka felt her heart go out to the poor boy. What was the cause of all this? Did Kouta still mourn for his deceased family? And did he remember the promise he had made to her at the festival, more than eight years ago now?

"I'm surprised you figured out that I was here," Kouta added.

They were approaching the beach now. Walking ahead of him, Yuka stopped right aboard the stone walkway overlooking the sandy shores laid out before them, the picturesque view of the blue sea. Memories from those wonderful times played out in Yuka's mind, and she turned a genuine smile on her cousin, trying to draw him out from his shell.

"You like watching the ocean from here, right?" she ventured. "I remember."

"Yeah..." Kouta replied.

Truth be told, Kouta was able to recall the beach, and even some vague memories of his beloved little sister, Kanae, picking up seashells for him. However, any attempts at further recollection would end with his mind becoming foggy and disoriented, and in the worst of cases he would end up with a headache. All he could do was cling to what little memories he had left of his childhood, and smile in nostalgia. It was at least better than not remembering anything of his happy family at all.

Thinking back on his cousin, Kouta managed to recall a few bits of memories of their past history together. She used to drag him around playing all the time, always trying to make the most of his attention, which would often ignite an argument between her and his sister, who also tried to get her "Onii-chan" to concentrate on her instead. Looking at her now, Yuka still looked familiar enough for him to recognize her, however, one glance would be enough for him to realize how much she had grown up since, both in the way Yuka now carried herself, and by how much she had... filled in.

Blinking in surprise, Kouta caught himself before his mind could wander too far in that direction. If there was one constant memory that he could recall with perfect clarity, it was that Yuka used to have quite a bit of a temper, and he sure didn't feel like provoking her by being a pervert.

As he gazed out at the ocean with Yuka, he smiled happily. Yes, despite it all, they had had some good times here.

"The view looks the same," he pointed out. "It hasn't changed since we were kids."

"And now we're going to the same college," Yuka said teasingly. "Who'd have guessed?"

Kouta's mind then clicked as he remembered the reason he'd come here in the first place — he had finally been admitted into a very good college. He couldn't help looking forward to it. After all, for a while it looked like he wasn't ever going to catch up. He had been hospitalized in a mental ward the year following the death of his remaining family members, and his development had been very slow. The doctors were quite adamant that he might not fully recover, so the fact that Kouta had even made it this far was a miracle.

Kouta smiled as he glanced at his cousin. He had to admit, Yuka entering the same college as him was a bonus. It was a chance to get to know her again and perhaps to regain some of his lost memories. Pretty much everything about those days was a blur, and maybe with enough time, he could rekindle a familial relationship with one of his last few living relatives.

"We've come this far already," Yuka said, beaming at her cousin. "Let's go see the ocean!"

"H-Hey! What're you doing?" Kouta stammered.

Yuka grabbed him by the arm, leaving him quite flustered, and passing a cemetery on the side, Yuka led him down to the beach.

"Come on! We used to go there all the time!" the brunette declared excitedly.

Did we really? Kouta thought, but he let her guide him down to the shoreline, where they were afforded a breathtaking view of the ocean laid out before them, moving closer and closer until they could reach out and touch it. The sandy floor beneath them sunk slightly under the weight of their shoes, and Kouta suddenly wished he was barefoot so he could squeeze the sand between his toes.

For a while, the two just stood there, staring out at the ocean, the waves crashing along the shore in a never-ending rhythm of advances and retreats, tidal forces beyond their control moving the waters in a constant natural system larger than themselves.

"Remember when we used to play here?" Yuka asked Kouta.

"Yeah. The three of us," Kouta said sadly, the sight stirring up memories of his long-dead little sister. And despite how long ago it had happened, the wounds were still fresh, and painful. "You, me, Kanae-chan. We came here on the last day too."

"Kanae-chan..." Yuka murmured distantly.

The beautiful brunette grew sad and wistful at the mention of her other cousin. Being with Kouta, remembering those times, she could feel the weight of nostalgia bearing down on her, not just the good experiences, but the bad ones. She glanced over and saw that, if anything, her surviving cousin looked even worse than she felt now. He was sitting down, hunched over, as though there was a thousand-pound boulder sitting on his back, pushing him down, crushing him under its bulk.

"She was here... collecting seashells..." Kouta whispered, in such obvious agony that Yuka felt her heart splinter in two. It seemed as if he could reach out and grab the past simply by talking over what he remembered.

A girl, no older than nine, was happily presenting Kouta with her treasure, a beautiful pink seashell. The girl bore a strong resemblance to him, with violet-hued eyes, long, shaggy dark hair, and a red bow on her head.

"Onii-chan! Look! I found a ton of pretty seashells! Look! Aren't they great?!" the girl declared cheerfully.

"They don't look so pretty to me," Kouta said dismissively.

Kanae began growing very mad as her hands balled together into fists...

"Kouta!" Yuka's shocked voice interrupted his thoughts, bringing him back to the present.

"What?" Kouta asked, sitting back up again and sounding confused.

Yuka wondered if her eyesight was going bad. She couldn't be seeing what she thought she was! It was impossible! But after a few moments Yuka realized it was real. No dreams or hallucinations were this vivid.

"Look the other way," Yuka urged her cousin. "Quickly, do it!"

But Kouta, now thoroughly lost, instead looked in the direction Yuka was staring in.

"Huh? Uh, uh, what's going on?" Kouta said slowly.

"Your guess is as good as mine," Yuka replied, somewhat sarcastically. Why didn't he look away like she had told him to?

Because standing there, in the middle of the pounding waves, arms hanging lankly by her side and completely naked, was a young woman who seemed to be their age. And what a strange girl she appeared to be! She possessed long, luscious pinkish-red hair, flowing from the top of her gracefully down her bare back, cool, analytical red pupils in the same color of her hair that seemed to be watching them very carefully, and to finish this odd look, there were two cat-ear protrusions which were poking out of the sides of her head.

"Where did she come from?" Kouta asked, blinking as he could feel heat rising in his face and a slight tightening around his groin. No, not here! he moaned inside his head. Not with Yuka only a few feet away from me!

"How am I supposed to know?" Yuka said with exasperation.

"Maybe she came from one of those parties over near the university," Kouta suggested. "You know they can get pretty wild."

"Then explain that!" Yuka shouted suddenly, pointing at the girl.

Looking more closely, Kouta saw a trickle of blood running down the pinkette's head. Whatever had happened to her, it was something bad. No one came out in the middle of the beach both naked and bleeding.

"Kouta, you don't think she was raped, do you?" Yuka asked in alarm.

"I don't know," Kouta said, now growing more and more worried for the naked young woman standing in front of him.

Yuka stepped closer. "Listen, miss..."

But then she stopped.

To their surprise, those ruthless red pupils appeared to shift before their very eyes, and the girl's whole body shuddered. Her hands began moving, not to cover her nude body, but upwards, to touch her own face. Her hands and her face spread out plaintively, and the weird girl now spoke, feelingly, as though she wasn't really used to speaking.

"Nyuu...?"

"U-Um... excuse me?" Kouta said, wondering what on Earth was going on.

The girl whipped around to face them, looking scared and confused, and to the amazement of the two teens watching, she tried to run, but apparently this girl wasn't very well coordinated, because she tripped in the muddy sand and sprawled over, hitting the ground facefirst. The provocative sight and position of her naked body was in opposition to her reaction to the fall. Struggling upright into a kneeling position, the young woman's hands flew to her eyes as she began bawling openly. Her body may have been that of teenaged female, but her tears were those of an infant.

"U-Um... h-hey!" Kouta shouted.

Suddenly, his cousin, whom he had forgotten was even there, grabbed him by the shoulders and forcefully turned him away from the sight.

"Kouta, take your clothes off right now!" Yuka demanded.

Her request could not have been more of a shock to the young man.

"What?" he gasped, gaping at his cousin like a fish.

"Just take off your clothes!" Yuka persisted.

"But then I'll be naked!" Kouta objected.

Yuka glared at him. "Fine. Then give me your shirt. The poor girl simply can't walk around naked!"

Kouta blinked. Oh, so that's what she wanted them for.

"Point taken," Kouta conceded.

With that, he started shucking off his shirt, and once it was successfully free from his torso, Yuka took it in her hands and carried it over to the still-crying young woman. She knelt down next to the nude horned girl and placed a comforting hand on her back.

"Hey, shhh," she said soothingly. "It's all right."

The naked girl stopped crying and glanced upward to face the brown-haired woman now beside her.

"N-Nyuu?" she said through tearful eyes.

"I just want to help you," Yuka reassured her. "Can you speak?"

The pink-haired girl tilted her head to the side. "Nyuu?"

Yuka sighed. "I suppose it was too much to hope you could understand me. Oh well. I guess I'll have to do this manually."

After a few tries, in which the girl's arms didn't wanna seem to cooperate with her, Yuka had dressed the girl in Kouta's white muscle shirt. It was a poor substitute for actual clothing, since the oversized shirt fell down well over the girl's waist and lower torso, ending at her thighs, but it would ensure no one got a look at the young woman's "private areas."

"Can you stand?" Yuka asked the girl.

"Nyuu!" the girl said.

Sighing in exasperation, Yuka helped the horned teen to her feet, but then, out of nowhere, the odd girl threw her arms around Yuka.

"Nyuu!" she declared, hugging Yuka tightly.

Hesitantly, Yuka wrapped her own arms around the strange woman and hugged her too.

"Yes, yes, it's okay," Yuka said. "Come on, we need to figure out what we're going to do with you."

Kouta was walking over, seeing how it was now safe to watch, when suddenly, he came to a complete halt.

"Wait, do you hear that?" the dark-haired man said.

Yuka looked over, disengaging from the clingy girl and perking her ears, trying to listen for whatever it was Kouta had heard.

"I don't hear anything," she said.

"I could've sworn I heard something!" Kouta insisted.

And with that, he took off running down the beach.

"Hey, wait!" Yuka yelled angrily. "Don't leave me here! What are we going to do with her?"

"Nyuu?" the innocent girl asked.

Feeling her temper rising, Yuka glanced at the girl and took her hand in her own.

"Will you come with me?" Yuka asked her.

Without bothering to wait for a response, Yuka took off after Kouta, dragging the pink-haired girl along with her. The nerve of her cousin! Run off and leave her alone with a girl who so clearly needed help? She'd show him...

"Kouta, wait up!" she yelled. "Wait! Slow down!"

And then Kouta turned a corner and came to a stop. He gasped.

Yuka finally caught up with her cousin and was very tempted to give him a brainer for daring to run out on her.

"What's the matter with you?" she demanded. "We have a hurt girl here and you take off like —"

"Look," Kouta said simply, pointing at something near the bend.

Too surprised to even argue, Yuka obeyed and like Kouta, she gasped too.

There, laying sprawled on the sandy beach closer to the stone wall, were two figures. One was a teenage boy, maybe sixteen or eighteen years old. He had deep midnight black hair swept down into a perfectly styled crop top. He wore rich purple clothing, like the gi most serious martial artists wore, except they were torn and shredded, revealing much of the bare skin beneath, which was covered in many deep bloody gashes and black and blue scrapes.

The second figure was another boy, though he appeared to be much younger than the first boy, perhaps six years old. Unlike the older boy, this younger child appeared to be perfectly fine, and he was kneeling by the older teen, shaking his shoulders desperately, his head pressed to his hair while he urgently begged the boy to regain consciousness.

"Please, Nii-chan, wake up!" the younger boy sobbed brokenly.

Yuka blinked. "Nii-chan." That was what the younger boy called him. Then this must be his older brother.

"Yuka..." Kouta breathed softly.

"I know," Yuka said.

Startled by the two voices he heard, the little boy looked up and glanced at the two newcomers. His features drew down together into a fearsome frown and he leaped up, moving in front of his brother with both arms held out. It was quite clear he wanted to protect his brother from what he viewed as two strangers who had come to hurt him.

"Stay away from my Nii-chan!" he said fiercely.

"Calm down, little fella," Kouta assured the little boy. "We're not here to hurt your brother."

"That's right," Yuka piped in. "Just relax, okay? You can trust us."

The boy slumped, and he glanced down at the sand underneath him.

"Sorry," the little boy apologized, sounding very embarrassed.

The horned girl, meanwhile, was looking between both the two teens and the two new people, her confusion mounting.

"Nyuu?" she wondered.

Yuka let go of the pinkette's hand and moved closer to the two boys. Kouta put his hands on the horned girl's shoulders reassuringly.

"It's all right," he informed her. "You don't have to worry. She just wants to make sure they're okay."

"Nyuu!" the girl shared.

Yuka knelt down next to the little boy, placing a finger under his chin and forcing him to look up at her.

"Honey, what happened here?" Yuka asked, her maternal instincts kicking in full drive.

"Nii-chan... Nii-chan is hurt!" the boy said sadly. "Please, you've got to help him! He needs help!"

"I promise we'll do everything we can for your brother," Yuka vowed.

She turned back to look at Kouta.

"The first thing we need to do is get them off the street," she told her cousin. "I think we should take them to your place."

"What do you mean, my place?" Kouta asked.

"The place you're moving into," Yuka said. "We can't just leave them here."

"Er, yeah," Kouta agreed.

She turned back to the little boy and offered him a kind smile.

"You're safe," she said. "Once we're at the house, we'll figure out what to do."

Suddenly, with grateful tears shining in his eyes, the little boy leaped forward and hugged Yuka, much like the girl had done.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" the boy babbled.

Smiling, Yuka wrapped her arms around the child and hugged him back, just enjoying the feel of hugging the innocent little boy. How she longed to do this with children of her own, when she and Kouta were married with a family one day.

Setting the little boy down, Yuka stood up and looked over at Kouta, giving him a rather pointed look.

"Huh?" Kouta said. What did she want now? "Oh."

Of course, he would carry the other boy, who was older and heavier than the little boy was. Heading over to his side, Kouta reached down and put his arms around the teen's shoulders, and with a grunt, he began lifting him up, noticing something interesting as he did.

"Oh wow, this guy's ripped!" Kouta commented.

"What?" Yuka said, now distracted as she had taken the hand of both the little boy and the older girl.

"Take a look," Kouta said. "This kid must be a bodybuilder. I don't think I could get these kind of muscles."

And through the open front of the older boy's gi, Yuka noted that Kouta was correct. The older teen had exceedingly large, well-defined pectoral muscles and a strong abdomen with the beginning of a six-pack from the area the shirt cut off. All in all, Yuka wondered what he looked like beneath it... with a blush Yuka discovered herself staring unnecessarily long at it. She couldn't be doing this! The boy was hurt! It wasn't right! Besides, she had promised herself to Kouta! He was the one she wanted to marry and raise a family with!

"We can't worry about that now," Yuka said, trying to hide her own embarrassment. "Let's go."

And as they set out, Yuka turned to the little boy trotting along at her side, realizing there was something she hadn't asked him yet.

"Pardon me, but I forget to ask you your name!" Yuka said. "Do you mind telling us? My name's Yuka."

"And I'm Kouta," her cousin grunted as he struggled under the weight of the other teen.

The boy glanced up at the older kids and shrugged. Why not?

"Goten. My name is Goten."