She's serious.

Somehow the capsule is now something she wants to hang around her neck, on a necklace given to her by her fiancé of all people. The fact that she's engaged in the first place still doesn't fit with any reality I've been living in. In any case, I can't begin to imagine what twisted, masochistic reasoning led her to this aesthetic choice.

Actually, who am I kidding. Twisted, masochistic reasoning is the basis of Saiyan psychology. I've just forgotten that she still has it in her, as she's made every effort to renounce her nature since the day the capsule became her albatross.

The story behind this particular capsule is a secret she and I share. Perhaps the only thing we've ever shared other than blood. And the fact that I know, that I made it possible, has always terrified her, like a reaper's blade in my hands. I suppose I can't blame her. Saiyans are dangerous and sadistic enough without weapons.

It's part of the reason she's stayed away, not only from me but from the whole family, seizing the first chance she could to escape across an ocean after high school. Immersing herself in the safe anonymity of foreign cities where drugs are as readily available as one night stands.

It started on her seventeenth birthday.

x.x.x

It was a bigger party than her sweet sixteen. She'd gotten my parents to open up the house on the shore and assign Goten and me chaperone duty. Somehow she'd convinced my dad not to stick around and personally intimidate every male who walked through the door. I guess that was supposed to be my job.

It was five hours of ear-pounding dance music and watching my sister and her friends get sloshed. Pretty early on we staked out a spot on the roof to keep our distance from all the small impending disasters down below. There were a couple of drunken fistfights that weren't worth breaking up. In the third hour a girl stripped naked and ran into the ocean. Goten hauled her back out, realizing too late that the over-the-shoulder carry was not a good idea. The pretzel-and-beer vomit cost him his shirt for the night.

"Your mom's paying us for this, right?" he muttered as he sat down beside me again, his shorts dripping seawater onto the tiles.

"Pretty sure she's willing to pay us anything short of the insurance on this house."

"I can't believe we're still on babysitting duty. I just got my first promotion. You're a few years away from taking over the biggest corporation in the world. And here we are dealing with kiddies making out and throwing up on each other."

I took a swig of beer. For some reason I wasn't as bothered as he was. Maybe because I hadn't yet been thrown up on. "Yeah, well, you know. There isn't anyone else who could."

He rolled his eyes and flopped onto his back. "Alright, I'd understand if it were you or me getting drunk down there. Our dads would have to step in if things got too wild. But it's Bra. I haven't seen her throw a punch since kindergarten."

"Oh, she can still throw a punch. She can't fight, but she can hit, trust me."

Goten chuckled. "Sounds like she doesn't miss. Getting slow, Trunks?"

"Better for her to hit me than destroy the house. You know who'd get the blame."

"Sometimes I actually don't envy your life. Just sometimes."

"Ha ha."

At some point Goten drifted off to sleep, numb to the bass reverberating up the walls. I stared absently at the wide swath of sand below us, full of gyrating bodies and waving glowsticks. The tiki torches around the edges were swarming with moths. The air smelled like a stale mix of alcohol and seaweed.

I had been keeping tabs on Bra's ki signature the whole time. It wavered between wildly excited and pleasantly mellow, I guess depending on who she was talking to and what she was drinking. I couldn't see where she was in the crowd but I knew she was somewhere down there.

So it was a surprise when her ki suddenly disappeared from my senses. I leaned forward and scanned the mass of bodies, but it was too dark to pick her out even with her bright blue hair. I looked further out down the beach. No one was near the water at the moment. So she'd either passed out and was in need of medical help, or she was deliberately hiding from me.

I nudged Goten awake, and he realized the problem before I had to tell him even in his groggy state. Still, he shook his head and pulled me back before I could leave the roof.

"Seriously man, there isn't anything at this party that could take a Saiyan down to absolute zero. She's probably just looking for privacy with her boyfriend or something."

"It's always better safe than sorry with her. This is Bra we're talking about."

"Trunks, chill." He didn't let go of my shoulder. "She's seventeen. Remember all the stupid shit we pulled at that age? Give her a bit of time for herself. What's the worst that could happen? Even if she's getting amped or something, it'll be out of her system in a few hours."

In hindsight, I shouldn't have listened to him. This really was my sister we were talking about. But a combination of laziness and annoyance at this whole chaperone setup kept me where I was. Goten went back to sleep and I blocked out his snores with my own music turned up to max volume. Just another hour maybe, and the kids would start stumbling home.

Sure enough, sometime around 3 AM the beach was mostly empty. Only one of the torches was still lit, and the sand was littered with crushed plastic, discarded joints and the stray bikini top. The music stopped once the DJ left, and no one was sober enough to turn on the stereo to keep it going. The night was blessedly silent, though remnants of the bass lingered in my head.

I still couldn't sense Bra. I finally broke my inertia and jumped off the roof, not bothering to wake Goten. A quick look around confirmed that none of the semi-conscious bodies sprawled on the sand were my sister. So she was in the house. I already dreaded what I'd find.

I skipped the first floor and went straight to the master bedroom upstairs. It was locked. No sound inside. I fought the first bit of panic at the thought she might have actually OD'ed. I would at least kill Goten before my dad got to me.

I forced the door open and took in the scene before me.

A split-second later I turned back around. No one should ever have to see their little sister naked. Especially not with her boyfriend in the same state.

"Shit, Bra. Get some clothes on," I snapped.

She didn't answer. The only thing I heard was a whimper, barely there. I frowned, remembering from my brief glance at the room that something was off. She wasn't on the bed with the guy. She was on the opposite side of the room, huddled in the corner. As if she were hiding.

With a deep breath I turned around. She sat hunched over with her arms around her knees, one hand clamped over her mouth. Her eyes were red from crying. Vomit on the floor all around her.

I looked at the bed. At the guy on the bed. I'd thought he was asleep, but his eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling. His face was tinted blue, and his throat was covered in purple marks. Clearly not breathing.

"What the fuck did you do."

I started over to where she was sitting, cowering from her very obviously dead boyfriend. I hauled her up by the wrist and got right in her face. It vaguely registered with me that she was in shock and probably couldn't answer coherently at the moment. But I was beyond furious. She'd killed someone right under the roof where I was babysitting her party. From the looks of it she'd killed him while fucking him into the mattress. Choked him for the high.

"Bra. Look at me. Look at me." I grabbed her chin and forced her to return my stare. "Do you have any fucking clue how much shit you're in? How much shit you just put me in?"

She opened her mouth, stuttering, but couldn't form a complete sentence. She was sorry, alright. She was sorry and terrified out of her mind.

"Okay, calm down. Breathe. Fucking breathe, dammit!" I sat her down in a chair and kept a loose grip on her shoulders. My mind raced, trying to figure out our options. God, I was pathetic. My sister royally fucks up and the responsibility immediately falls on my shoulders. Story of my life.

"Help me," she croaked, her throat hoarse from crying. "Please, Trunks…"

"I should just leave you here. Let Mom and Dad come here and see you for what you are. Let Dad deal with it. Not like this is the first dead body he's ever seen."

"No," she whispered, clutching feebly at my hands. "No, don't tell them, they can't know, please, please, don't."

"Then what the hell do you think we should do. What you should do. Fuck, this isn't my problem. This is completely your problem, Bra."

"I know. I know, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, Trunks, please, just please help me, I don't know what to do, I'm so scared, God, I don't know I don't know!"

"Okay, okay, just shut up. Shut up and let me think."

But she wouldn't shut up. I'd somehow gotten her started on all the gory details.

"He…he cheated on me. I was so mad. I was so mad at him, but I love him, I still love him so much. I couldn't stand it, and he asked for it, he said he deserved it, but it'd feel good, he said, he said…"

I laughed despite myself. "So it was a revenge killing. That sounds more Saiyan. You'd make Dad proud."

"No! I never meant to hurt him, I just didn't know, I was drunk, and then it was too late, I just didn't know!"

"Okay. Shut up and let me tell you what we'll do. What you'll do. Do you want a way out of this mess?"

She nodded, a fearful jerk of her head.

"This wasn't a natural death. So we can use the Dragonballs. But they're not going to be active for another year."

Ironic. We'd just used them in advance of her birthday party to grant her a tour of heaven and hell. She'd complained for a long time about being the only person in our family who hadn't seen what it was like from the Majin Buu incident. Then Pan got to erase her last SAT score, and my mom used the third wish to make herself look younger. Ladies and gentlemen of the human race, these are the kinds of things the heroes of the earth waste an all-powerful wish-granting dragon on.

"So for now, we're going to hide the body. And you're going to tell me everything you know about this kid. Where he hangs out, who his friends are, his drugs of choice, everything. I'm going to make up a most likely story. Okay? You have to tell me everything."

"Okay. Okay. Thank you, Trunks, you have no idea—"

"Thank me after we get his fucking corpse out of this room. God, I could just kill you. It'd almost be easier than dealing with you for the next year."

"Everything okay in there?" Goten's voice from the hall. Bra froze, a cornered animal. The door was half-open, but Goten respectfully kept his distance, not looking inside.

"Everything's fine. My sister can't find her clothes and everything's covered in vomit. She'll clean up." I glared at her and motioned to the adjoining bathroom. She got the hint and ran inside, turning on the water to start washing off the grime.

I walked back out and closed the door behind me. Goten raised an eyebrow. "That bad, huh?"

"I shouldn't have listened to you. She's a fucking mess. And now my eyes are scarred for life." I tried to keep my voice light, but Goten knew me well.

"Sorry. I guess I underestimated her ability to make everything a living hell for you," he joked, but underneath there was a serious question. What's really going on?

I shook my head. "I'll deal with it. You can go home."

He gave me a significant look. "Trunks…if there's something wrong here…"

"I'll deal with it. Trust me."

He didn't look happy, but stopped pushing. "Alright, I'll make sure the stragglers leave on my way out. Call me if you need any help."

If I needed any help. I wanted to laugh and maybe scream and blow up a mile of the beach. She had my work cut out for me for an entire year.

I covered the body with a sheet because she was freaking out from staring at it. I made her stay in the bathroom until I got back from my office. I was a few months into my rotation in the engineering department at Capsule Corp, and managed to filch a prototype of a capsule designed for EMTs.

It was one of our most controversial products under development. We expected it'd be years before the regulators gave it the OK, for the exact reason that I was using it for now. Making a dead body disappear.

I wiped the tracking codes on the capsule and hacked our system to make sure no one would ever notice it missing. I could just imagine if somehow it became known that the future CEO of Capsule Corp was stealing top-secret materials from the company and covering up murders on his free time. I'd probably have to move off-planet. Follow right in Dad's footsteps.

Of course, we had the Dragonballs to fix everything. I just had to wait an entire fucking year.

The cover-up went as well as it could have, given that the guy in question was involved with the daughter of Bulma Briefs. There were plenty of people asking questions, writing tabloid features, even a serious investigative journalist or two who tried to peer past the steel wall I had drawn up around the case. Bra was saved by her hysteria. No one saw guilt beyond her tears, because her grief was actually genuine. The official "most likely" story was that he'd been intoxicated and strayed too close to the water, and the tide had swept him away. The lack of witnesses was sketchy. But then again every kid on the beach had been plastered.

The only thing that didn't quite check out was Goten and me. We were supposed to be watching the party, so how could we have missed him when Goten had hauled that one girl back after she went in?

Goten knew the truth without having to ask. He covered my ass for a year without even knowing all the details. Our story was we'd had a bit too much to drink, dozed off after the incident with that girl (which was half-true) and were dead to the world until the party was over.

Then there were my parents. I didn't even bother trying to bullshit my dad. He knew there'd been foul play and I was in the middle of it, and that if the truth were uncovered someone would be in prison. Thankfully he had no interest in human notions of justice, and actually felt glad that the "weak little shit" who was banging his daughter had died on his own before he'd had to deal with him himself. Bra stopped talking to him for months after he shared his fatherly opinion with us over dinner.

My mom on the other hand was pretty distraught. Both because her baby girl was falling into depression and because I had failed miserably at chaperone duty. Whatever had happened, accidental drowning or manslaughter or suicide or whatever, I was supposed to be in control of the situation and not embroil the Briefs family empire in another PR scandal. I guess she'd gotten into enough crazy shit in her teen years that she didn't care about the facts (or whether my sister was at fault at all), only the fallout.

Eventually the shitstorm tapered off and the rest of the year crawled by. I hardly saw my sister. She barely managed to make it through school and then sequestered herself at one of our summer homes. Of course, the capsule remained in my possession.

Sometimes, late at night on some listless weekend, I'd take it out of its safe just to look at it and feel the weight of it in my palm. It weighed almost nothing. The genius of capsules – no matter what's inside, it only weighs an ounce once our technology shrinks it. Reminds me of that myth about weighing the hearts of the dead against a feather.

Bra didn't answer my calls for a month leading up to the one-year mark. I figured she was still depressed and just didn't want to remember what she'd done. Her loss. I wasn't going to collect the Dragonballs for her. She was going to have to do that on her own.

Then on that exact date, at midnight, she showed up at my apartment without preamble. There was no crying, no guilt-ridden expression, no begging for me to do the job for her. With complete serenity, she told me she didn't want to bring her boyfriend back to life anymore.

Another surprise. I wasn't sure yet whether it was of the unpleasant variety.

I asked her why. She said she'd changed her mind, that was all.

I might have gotten a little angry then and threatened to put her through the wall if she didn't get serious. After all the shit I'd gone through for her, she'd have to give a better answer than that.

"I know I could make it all right, even erase everyone's memories and make it like this whole thing never happened. But it's not worth it. He's not worth it," she explained calmly. "I've done a lot of thinking in the past few months. If I brought him back and let him start all over with me, it'd still go south. We were already fighting a lot back then. He cheated on me with at least two other girls. I know he wouldn't hesitate to go back to them. So at some point in the future I'd probably kill him again by accident, or not by accident. And we'd be back to this."

It was some of the most messed up reasoning I'd ever heard. "Or you could just bring him back for the sake of bringing him back, since, you know, you killed him and all. Has it not crossed your mind that you could just break up with him?"

She shrugged. "He's not worth it."

"So his life isn't worth living if he's not going to belong to you."

"He's not worth it, period."

She had just defined a new level of selfishness. And I thought I was self-absorbed. "So is this going to be a pattern? Planning to kill every sick fuck who cheats on you? That's a long line of bodies."

"No, just him," she said curtly. "I learned my lesson. No one can cheat on me because I won't have any more relationships. I'll be free. I'm leaving in a few hours for Paris. I need some time away, so I'll get back in touch when I'm ready."

Not a thank you or anything. Not one bit of gratitude or remorse for how much I'd done for her.

"Don't bother. I rather enjoy my life without you fucking it up. Next time you bloody your hands, get someone else to clean up for you."

I moved to shut the door. She stopped me with one more request.

"Wait. I need you to destroy the capsule."

It took me all of one second to figure out my revenge. "No."

She frowned, a tantrum on the horizon. "You have to do it. It'd make life easier for both of us."

"No."

She shoved at the door, trying to force her way into my apartment. I blocked her easily.

"What the fuck, Trunks? Why wouldn't you—"

"You know, that particular type of capsule is a marvel of engineering. You could store a body in one for centuries and it wouldn't show an ounce of decay. Your dead boyfriend looks exactly the same as he did one year ago when you wrapped her hands around his neck and choked the life out of him. Veins all discolored, eyes bugged out, your DNA all over his throat and his dick. He's going to look like that forever. You won't be erasing that. And don't even think of breaking in and taking the capsule. You won't be able to open it, not with the encryption I've slapped on it. And if you try to destroy it, it's wired to transmit the exact specs of its contents to our parents' personal phones."

A little off-the-cuff bluffing for that last bit, but I had half a mind to follow through with it if she really got serious. It was nice to turn the Daddy threats on her for a change.

If I were human she probably would have killed me at that point. But the best she could do was leave scratches on my arms as she tried to get in despite my warnings. I shoved her away from the door and punched her in the face for good measure. It felt good. She held her cheek in disbelief, probably short-circuiting from all the ways she wasn't getting what she wanted today.

"Couldn't take that, could you? No more play-acting at Mommy's little angel and Daddy's precious princess. I have a feeling they'd stop you from going to Paris. They'd stop you from going anywhere."

"I swear to God I'm going to kill you," she spat, throwing her stilettos at me. I incinerated them on the spot. She'd have to walk home barefoot. Poor choices all around.

"You're welcome to try, but I'm afraid I'm a bit tougher than the last guy. Have a nice time in Paris."

I shut the door and reinforced it with my ki. She didn't try to get in again. That night I slept pretty soundly. Maybe it should have bothered me that there was still a dead body in my apartment and I was still the chief accomplice in my sister's crime. But instead, the thought of it sitting in its safe, feather-light and preserved into eternity, felt like a passable form of vindication.