Disclaimer: See Part I
Spoilers: ...You've read this far, so a spoiler warning is sort of asinine, isn't it?
Warnings: My writing disintergrates even more! And the whole mirai-Bulma thing is resolved. Somewhat. I suggest listening to Smile Like You Mean It by The Killers while reading, because it's scarily close to the tone of the fic.
III. Epilogue: Ad Infinitum
Come hence, let be, lie still; it is enough.
Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep;
And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love.
"A Leave-taking," Algernon Charles Swinburne
The end of the world comes far more quietly than it should, especially considering that she'd thought it had already happened seventeen years ago when the best of men died from a heart attack.
But one can only live and learn.
The world ends when her son returns and she thinks for a moment that the entire thing is unsuccessful because he was gone for less than a moment, a breath, a blink, and now he's back with a stunned, heart-broken look on his face.
I--Gokou, Dad--Nothing's changed.
And that's when she figures it out.
Everything has changed, but not for them, and not for her. You can't unmake the present by reweaving the past, but you can make a new present. It will never change for her. She will always be the woman who loved Son Gohan before he died and she will always be the woman who promised Gokou that she wouldn't bring him back and keeps her promise, and she will always be the woman who sent her son to change the future without changing anything.
Everything's changed just not in this timeline.
There have been many different ideas about time travel and the results thereof, but none of them were right, or even close in many cases. She wishes absently, because that's the only way one can wish now, that there is still some sort of society that she could present a paper to because she knows that it would be grand to see all those grey faces turning green with envy.
Time travel. She's always thought that if you actually made it back to some point in time, anything she'd do would change--or even completely decimate--the reality that she'd been in originally, so in effect the time/space continuum is always in flux, always reshaping itself so it adjusted to any paranormal events. That way there was never more than one outcome, and never more than one future.
But that is wrong, obviously.
When the door to the ship had opened and Trunks had jumped down, devastation clear on his face, her first thought was; I fucked up. I did it wrong. I can't fix this. And panic uncurled long, chilly fingers up her spine.
But she hadn't.
You looked happy.
The words were a stab to her heart. And they proved beyond any doubt that she'd been as successful in this endeavour as she is in everything else. She'd looked happy. She wanted to laugh and cry simultaneously and that told her that she'd done it. She'd rewritten history.
And she didn't even remember it.
The sky should break, she thinks. It should twist and crack and split open like a too-ripe plum because the end of the world has already come and gone and it shouldn't still be standing.
When she thinks of it as fatalistically as that, she shouldn't be standing either.
So she fantasizes that if she were to look away once the sky should shatter into fragments and rain down upon her head. And she wouldn't see it coming because how can you see pieces of the sky? Would they be blue and jagged, or clear and wide, or thin and sharp? Would they slice her to pieces or crush her flat?
The sky should break because the longer she looks at it the more she thinks she's living on borrowed time. The sky should break because she has felt too much for it to be contained under this thin shell.
The sky should part and show her the infinite lines of time tunneling through the air because now this world, this reality, is no longer an option. Now that she knows what to look for she can nearly see them--she can nearly see each little future birthing which each sigh of breath. There is a new future and she thinks if she looks hard enough she can just about see it.
Which one, she wonders idly, will live and grow and maybe become their new future, because now that she knows that there's another Earth (not ravaged) and another Gokou (not dead) and another Vegita (still a bastard) and another Gohan (not mangled) she knows that there will be one, regardless. And that is a comfort like nothing else because she has never been too terribly religious.
Still, she can't help but be a little jealous of this other woman who is her-but-not, and who can see all of the people that she has ever loved day in and out. She just can't help it because she is certain that in some other timeline she is loved by or loving Gohan, or she is berating Vegita while fixing dinner, or she is under the stars with Gokou on a journey once again.
And, anyway, even if that her-but-not exists she will never have the same memories that she has. She will never know or understand the aching and the wanting and the loss and the love that she has felt, for all that they are from the same person sometime long ago. That she will never regret.
But the sky should break because she can see it cracking already and now there is only the waiting left.
And she has never been a patient woman.
Time is like a tree, she figures now. Her son sleeps restlessly on the couch, a blanket drawn over him. He is disappointed with his venture because there is no change to their world. He is still less powerful than the androids and Gohan is still dead.
She is so proud of him it hurts.
Because he'd tried, which is more than she'd ever done and even though he thinks he fail he really hasn't. He has managed to change their past while retaining their present.
So time is like a tree, she tells him, tries to reassure him that he has made a difference, a dent. She can see a stubborn lack of comprehension in his eyes, not because he doesn't understand but because he doesn't want to. It has this one huge taproot off of which everything else branches. There is the one, prime timeline but if you deviate--say turn left instead of turn right--it opens up a new, smaller root.
The roots keep on growing, as some choices feed some of the roots and not others different roots crop up and others whither and, eventually, a couple of the roots (having been feed by certain smaller timelines that supported that particular outcome) would become more prominent, maybe even as big as the original taproot. So that leaves several different realities running parallel to each other.
And it also means that even if you make a change to the original root, it won't change the one you came from, he finishes for her sourly.
Yes: it won't change the one you came from.
Somewhere all the probabilities that fed this timeline are withering and soon, she's sure, this will be just a dead end; an un-possibility. This will be one of the futures that never comes to fruition, and she is fiercely glad for it. She glad that Gohan will never love her and she'll never have her heart broken by his death. She tells herself she's glad because--
Because, because she knows if she tells herself otherwise she will just weep and weep and weep and never stop.
Trunks has done the impossible; he has let her keep her selfish memories of Gohan while giving him back his life. Now they will all have a life and a family and even if not with one another, she will not complain.
Because she is allowed to keep the cool nights and the warm days and the hands and tongues and kisses that she'd stolen. She will never complain even though her heart is still broken.
She has saved the world and saved a boy, and not her world and not her boy, but it is enough.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
"Hollow Men," T. S. Eliot
Afterthoughts:
Not much to say on this one. This is sort of how I wanted the Mirai timeline to get done, and it's sort of how I saw it in my head. The mind is a terrifying thing, eh?
Because I like Buruma, and I like Gokou, and I like them together. And I like Gohan too. And I do think that something happened between Buruma/Bulma and Gohan in the Mirai future.
I hope I didn't downplay Vegita's importance because I really do like him. Really and truly. And him together with Buruma is all good; but even so, I don't really sense the same affection between those two in the Mirai timeline (but that may just have been me) that I did between her and Gokou, or even her and Gohan.
I also hope that I didn't screw up Chichi because while she isn't my favourite character, she is so important to the series that I just couldn't ignore her.
I really did try to keep this as close to cannon as I dared, but because in all honesty I haven't watched or read my DBZ manga/anime in so long, I'm sure I've screwed something up somewhere along the line. But I hope that it didn't affect the enjoyment (if any) that you folks got out of reading.
Thanks and goodnight!