Welcome to Boxer & Rice

Trunks stood on the front porch in the early afternoon sun. It had been a rough couple of hours when he and mother had first arrived. He had seen the desperate ploy behind the heavily bandaged, young woman’s attempt to deflect Aunt ChiChi’s spoon feeding session. He hadn’t expected ChiChi to nearly choke the poor lady to death by cramming a large spoonful of egg-flower soup down her throat in mid-sentence, however. He grinned at the remembered tirade his mother had given Aunt Chichi and the strange look that had passed over the young woman’s face before she appeared to faint. The two women had tried in tandem to wake her up for several minutes before calling the doctor.

The old man, who had shown up, was so feeble Trunks had immediate doubts about his competence. He wasn’t wrong, he decided after the old man had continually asked “Eh what was that? Oh yes lovely weather isn’t it?” among other odd and completely unrelated simple pleasantries, instead of understanding the two anxious women, who were attempting to tell him that he needed to see if Hunter was alright.

His mother had rapidly left the scene with the admonishment that he was to get rid of the quack while she went and got a real doctor. ChiChi had grumbled about it not being her fault that the elderly Mr. Rind, was the only doctor in a hundred miles, that could come and see to the young woman’s care, when Bulma had made her loud announcement, before slamming out the front door in a huff.

Trunks didn’t blame Aunt ChiChi for having the old geezer come in and look at the girl’s injuries. He had helped her bathe and clean the wounds the last time he had visited. He had to admit that the old man knew how to stitch up an arm, a thigh, and numerous deep gashes in her mid-section and back. She had slept through the ordeal of getting her wounds doctored, re-bandaged and bathed without so much as a flinch, due to the heavy dosage of pain killers that the doctor had prescribed.

Trunks had tried to ignore the fact that, for a teenager, the girl was well formed, and anything but girlish because of that intimate encounter. She had the longest legs he had ever seen, and a shapely, yet she was still athletic in build. Well toned muscles were neatly defined without being gaudy and oversized. Her torso was long without being overly so, even though it had a cross hatch of thin scars covering it. Her arms were long and well shaped from what he could see of them outside of the cast, bandages or badly swollen, stitched regions, including the numerous scars that they boasted also.

She had a dainty, heart shaped face, but her vee shaped stubborn jaw line was very much a dominate feature. Wide large eyes and thick, dark lashes dominated her peaches and cream face. She had a sensual face, more-so than a classically beautiful one. Hair that was close, but not quite black, rippled like a flag on a windy day across the pillow her head had lain upon. The natural semi-curling, baby fine texture flowed like a living entity even though it wasn’t truly moving, begging for someone to run their fingers through it.

This strange young woman was obviously used to living hard and probably knew only too well how to use the weapons that sat in the living room that he had finished cleaning and honing for her while awaiting his mother’s return.

He couldn’t get the short period when she had been awake out of his mind because of her facial expressions as ChiChi had badgered and pushed her to eat and take the foul smelling and probably worse tasting pain medication. Compound the short introductions, with the help he had felt compelled to offer in getting the girl’s wounds redressed and cleaned, and Trunks found himself shaken by his thoughts of the young woman.

He already was overly worried about that nasty gash in her right arm, and the deepest one on her thigh. Both were darkly colored and swollen to stitch ripping degrees. Both were seeping horrible smelling, pasty textured fluids and it was clear that infection had set in. The one that was the most swollen was her right arm. The deep, jagged gash started just below her armpit and ran halfway to her wrist.

It was well known that Velociraptor claws carried nasty bacteria that could cause gangrene, and worse skin eating infections, to set in if not treated appropriately. Cleaning wasn’t always capable of removing all the virulent strains of skin eating staff infections that the animals carried naturally, so it was routine for doctors to operate on the patients, removing the immediate tissue surrounding such wounds, and giving heavy antibiotics to patients who managed to survive Velociraptor attacks at all. He had to admire the fact that the young woman had held on as long as she had in such good shape for all the damage that the raptor pack had caused.

The old doctor grandpa Ox had found hadn’t able to get his hands on sulfa drugs, much less strong enough antibiotics, and most likely was too shaky to really be effective at cutting the worst of the damaged flesh away without doing permanent harm to the young woman anyway.

Trunks found himself, once more, wondering where her family was. She almost didn’t look old enough to be on her own. She had said she was nineteen years old, but she looked younger to his eyes. She had to have family somewhere nearby.

He suddenly had a sickening thought that perhaps the Velociraptors had made a snack of her parents before going after her. It was known to happen. The pack order meant only the strongest ate first. The weaker ones would have gone after the easiest pray, the youngest member of the family as it were. Of course Hunter was anything but weak, as her verbal sparring with aunt Chichi proved, among other forms of obvious evidence like her scars and weapons. Her determined independent nature gave credence to her ability to stubbornly stand her own ground in a fight of any nature he believed.

Grandpa Ox had told him that there were at least nine carcasses that he had noted when he had been loading the young battered girl into his vehicle, the day he had stumbled upon the battle. Nine was a slightly larger than normal pack for raptors. But Ox had said five others had left when he had arrived and shooed them off the girl, who had stood defiant and bleeding almost unto death, trying to act as if she had everything under control. That brought the total of raptors to fourteen which a much larger than normal pack, Trunks knew for a fact.

Trunks smirked. He could imagine the scene, after having witnessed her reactions to having ChiChi try to mother her. She was a fighter and she didn’t bother trying to hide it from anyone. He had to admire her spunk, if not her foolish brashness. His smirk grew into a full, bashful grin at the idea of his mentally accusing anyone else of brash foolishness, especially after some of the stunts he had been known to pull in the past.

He had been even worse than ChiChi’s unwilling houseguest not so long ago he reminded himself as he turned back towards the door of the small cottage. He also found that her brash foolishness was one of the things he liked about her, even when she was quite grouchy from the pain she was obviously enduring from her injuries.

Trunks stopped short of opening ChiChi’s front door, hand on the knob, contemplating his reactions to the young woman currently sleeping in Gohan’s old bedroom. He couldn’t help but grimace at the memory of his own physical reactions to her body, when he had been helping ChiChi with her earlier in the week. He felt uncomfortable momentarily with the knowledge, as it made him feel disloyal to Gohan’s memory somehow.

He recalled the moment he had become aware of Hunter, as a physically attractive body, with a hesitant and heavy heart. Gohan had been dead a fairly long time, so Trunks knew logically he shouldn’t have felt guilty in the least, but he still had that hesitant twinge of guilt every time Hunter’s body rose in his mind in the past two days to plague him. Trunks remembered only too clearly how Hunter had looked when she had been out like a light from the heavy narcotic pain medication she had been given. Although he had tried not to notice her as anything but an injured person in need of help, he had noticed such things as her body build, and how nice her figure and legs were, even with the scars she had already accumulated before the raptor attack.

He had been far too aware of her curves when he had held her up at aunt ChiChi’s request, so ChiChi wouldn’t have to strain her back, to get the wounds across her back cleaned up. He had even held onto the girl while ChiChi had changed the bedding so that there wouldn’t be sweat damp sheets to lie her back on.

Although she had been dressed in a light, oversized night shirt that he recognized as being an old shirt of Gohan’s, Trunks had noticed every detail of her body with an electric clarity that he didn’t want to think about. He had been momentarily caught off guard by the idea that the spunky lady in his arm, was probably the only one brassy enough to give him ‘the what for’ as his mother used to call her disciplinarian talks with him.

This was also her reasoning for his father having gotten together with her he had learned, in the few moments that Bulma had bothered to tell him anything about his father, Vegeta no Oji. Their fights had also been �the what for’ syndrome as Trunks had re-termed the verbal wars his parents had engaged in during his time in the alternate dimension he had visited repeatedly, trying to alter his world’s woes.

Something about the dark haired woman had simply reached out, silently screaming that she was his equal in a feminine form. Some dormant instinct, probably from his father’s race, had grabbed him by the nose, and tossed him head first into a momentary vertigo before he could regain complete control of his mind. Trunks was much too thrilled with the sensation, and had made a point of staying well out of the way of Aunt ChiChi’s need of assistance ever since. Trunks had refused to enter Gohan’s old bedroom, even when ChiChi had nearly choked Hunter to death earlier, leaving the details to his mother instead of jumping in without thinking.

He needed to stay away from the feisty young lady that he couldn’t shut out of his mind, after only a few minutes of meeting her. He was definitely losing control of whatever these suddenly, not so dormant instincts we, that had begun to shift how he thought about almost everything and everyone. He would have done just about anything for the chance to ask his father what had happened to him in Gohan’s bedroom the other day, if his father were still alive in this timeline to ask. He thought back to that intensely charged few minutes where he had cradled the unconscious girl in his arms, sitting besides Gohan’s old bed, and was surprised to realize how clearly he could remember her smell, her skin’s texture, her breathing rhythm and more details he immediately tried to shut out as he found himself jarred into another uncomfortably aroused state.

Here he was, hiding from al those women who were chasing him, as best as he could, and yet he was having fantasies about one that was practically on her death bed. Hadn’t he learned to stop being an idiot yet, he wondered as he blew out an exasperated breath in his vexation over this instantaneous attraction he felt for the stranger in Gohan’s house. Trunks shook his head, trying to clear the clutter, that roamed through his mind, both past and present. His lavender hair momentarily shimmered in the breeze, and tickled his nose, as he grabbed for the semi-fading image of Gohan that rippled across his memory momentarily. He still missed Gohan immensely, but he couldn’t bring his mentor back, and the other Gohan in that long lost alternate universe he had helped save, by dying and being revived, wasn’t an option for him. He was the main protector of the survivors of this hellish and cracked landscaped world, and he wouldn’t turn his back on those who needed him most.

Trunks wondered absently if the tall, lithe warrioress inside had a boyfriend that she would soon return to as soon s she was recovered from the dinosaur attack. She was already showing an independent enough tendency that she might not have had anyone to lean on in years, he reasoned to himself, in what he felt amounted to an almost despicable attempt to reassure himself that she was probably not attached to anyone. He tried to force the thought back out of his head. “She’s not for me. I lost the one I loved a long time ago thanks to the Androids.” Trunks muttered to himself trying to get the continually re-emerging images of a battle hardened feminine form out of his mind.

Trunks knew the symptoms of abandonment syndrome from too much experience. He had seen too many orphans, too often, through the years. They were the hardest and proudest. They sought to survive above all else and they hated almost everyone. He had been told about the roots of the syndrome by one of his teachers while he had gone through his advanced studies between sparring matches with Gohan so long ago. Children who suffered from the trauma of initial un-faced loss, usually grew up to have such a fear of further abandonment that they would push away anyone who tried to get too close to them.

As independent as Hunter was perhaps she was one of those tough and isolated youths who refused to walk beside anyone out of a sense of self preservation. She might insist on being a loner, as most did who had lost parents and been forced to live as best they could, off whatever refuse they could scavenge. It would explain a lot of the scars she had seen on her body at least. Such abandoned children often paid heavily for their survival over time. Trunks opened the door, wincing as it squealed in protest to being used. Trunks made a mental note to bring over some oil and tools to fix the hinges on the door.

He needed the excuse to get his mind off of the current dilemma he was experiencing at Capsule Corporation with the gaggle of women, who refused to leave his mother’s property, even when the police arrived and arrested them for trespassing, and squatting on the Corporation lawn. Grandpa Ox was getting too old and arthritic to be doing a lot of the household repairs that were obviously being ignored, such as the squeaky door hinges that assaulted his ears every time he visited of late.

It was beginning to show in other small ways that Trunks was sure would prove dangerous to the inhabitants soon. He had noticed a rather bad molt of light in the den earlier in the afternoon, that hinted at a hole in the ceiling. Leaky, dome shaped roofs were not something he would allow his spunky aunt ChiChi, or grandpa Ox to contend with. He was far stronger, and could fly, unlike his elders. He knew that if Gohan were still alive, he would have fixed the roof, and made the many repairs that needed to be done, long before now.

Trunks berated himself for not having visited several months ago like he had originally planned. He shook his lavender head ruefully, as he banished the dark, brooding direction his mind had begun to spiral downwards towards, from thinking of his long dead mentor, beloved, and brother of his heart. Losing the most important person in his life was a wound that still had not healed even after so many years. He stood just inside the doorway, listening to the sounds of aunt ChiChi cooking, reminiscing about a time when he would have heard Gohan laughing at him as he charged into the house, headed for a delicious meal he only got at aunt ChiChi’s.

He smirked at the fond memory, as he inhaled the smells of baking bread, and other delicious aromas that still could make his stomach growl after eating a huge meal only a couple hours before. ‘Mother may have learned to cook finally,’ He thought impishly, ‘but she’ll never be half the chef aunt ChiChi is.’ Trunks smirked, as he walked into the kitchen, hoping to grab a quick meal.