Aoi sighed. One of these days she'd figure out where she wanted to be in life, but for now, she was at a crossroads.
She had three choices:
a) stay home and be a full-time mom to her steadily growing infant twins,
b) go back to school (nights, of course) and try for a career, or
c) find a job.
The money she'd lived on for the past four years, she had noticed, was considerably depleted. She'd burned through two and a half million dollars this year alone (though it was not frivolously, those babies were expensive!) and though there was probably another fifty million left, she'd arrived on Kolyma with two hundred million--her father's entire fortune. She'd no idea how or when she'd spent so much money, but one clue were the pair of houses--this one and the one across the street--she'd bought outright and paid the taxes for nearly the next twenty years in advance. She wanted her children to grow up in a stable home, not like she had.
Her mind drifted inexorably back to her childhood
Then, though fairly well off, her father had had to struggle to keep himself and his young daughter afloat. After bitter falling-out with his father when Aoi was born, he'd been cut off financially and had to work himself to exhaustion pay the bills. At that point he was almost constantly inventing things, and sold many of the patents to pay the bills.
Aoi had gone to public school for primary school, but because of her intellect Trunks wanted her to enter one of the nicer, private schools in the area for secondary. He took two jobs that summer to save up for her tuituon, uniforms, and books; one at a mechanic's shop fixing cars during the day, and the other at his grandfather's factory, assembling aircraft at night. Aoi hardly saw her father the summer she turned eleven.
Finally, Trunks swallowed his pride and went to his father to apologize. However, when he arrived at his parents' house, Vegeta was waiting for him. He himself apologized for overreacting, and if he was man enough to take two jobs to take care of himself and Aoi, he was man enough to have a child in the first place. Vegeta agreed to allow him access to the family fortune and move back closer to home--with the condition that he got to finally spend some time with his eldest--and so far only--granddaughter.
Soon after, Trunks married Chikara, a girl--now a full-grown woman--whom he'd known since he was a child. When he was eight she--a four-year-old--had come crashing to Earth in a Saiyan invasion pod. Her parents, both refugees of the destruction of Vegeta, had gotten it into their heads that their daughter was the perfect way to return the Saiyan race to its previous glory. Unfortunately, the pod was heavily damaged on its way through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The system which would protect the young girl on the way through the atmosphere malfunctioned and she was battered around severely upon landing. She lived only by the grace of her hardy Saiyan body, but had no memory of who she was or where she came from. She was raised by Goku (ChiChi was ecstatic, she'd always wanted a girl) and was, by all accounts, a model human being.
Aoi loved Chikara. She was the mother she'd always wanted: she always listened, wasn't too strict or too lenient, and had a fantastic sense of humor. The girl who had needed a role model finally got one, and it was a perfect match. They were an honest family with the birth of Aoi's half-sister Cosette, who had her mother's hair and her father's eyes. Aoi was twelve then, and was perfectly content to play with the little girl for hours at a time.
Two years later, Chikara had a baby boy, whom they named Jadock.
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