Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ A Shadow in the Twilight ❯ Chapter 26 ( Chapter 26 )
Chapter 26
A maddening, disconcerting emptiness had become Lluvia's conscious world. The disorientation reminded her of the time when, as teens, she and Tris had broken into a day spa and she tried out a sensory deprivation tank as a lark. The experience had started out quite soothing, but then evolved into a terrifying feeling, as the lack of sensory input stretched the scant few minutes into a heart-stopping eternity. The memory of it still gave her chills.
Fortunately, her trip in the memory vortex was mercifully short-lived, and the world around her suddenly gelled into a more recognizable state. Looking around her, she realized that she was standing in the middle of a Vegeta-sei infirmary; a nursery ward, to be exact. The med-techs and others were going about their routine duties, tending to the mostly male Saiya-jin babies, checking if they needed feeding or cleaning, and doing various tests. None of them paid her any mind (despite the fact that she was quite naked), which made her realize that she was in a kind of astral state of being, as an observer of sorts. An on-going lusty wail coming from just behind her made her turn around to see why this particular infant was carrying on so.
Poor little babe, she thought to herself. It sounds like his little heart is breaking!
Positioning herself above the elevated crib, she glanced down at the spiky-haired and howling infant. His eyes were spilling hot tears of frustration down his reddened, round cheeks. His tiny fists were clenched in anger and ineffectually waving in the air, trying desperately to get someone to pay him some attention. Finally, a med-tech strolled over to give him a superficial once-over, decided he didn't need anything, and returned to resume his conversation with another, equally bored-looking med-tech. Lluvia watched their indifference with a mixture of anger and surprise. How could they just leave the poor little thing to cry like that?
Lluvia's heart ached as she watched the child continue to cry uselessly, longing to give some comfort this miserable, ignored baby, but when she reached down to pick him up, her hands passed right through his body and the underlying crib.
So much for that idea, she thought. Who is this unhappy little guy?
Moving to the side of the crib, she perused his data sheet. She scanned down the attached document, first noting his parents' names, the day/time he was harvested, his last measured weight, height, and finally his name: Bardock.
The world around her suddenly swirled in a rushing centrifuge motion, and the scene in front of her eyes changed into one of a wooded area. Excited children's voices, raised in what seemed like good-natured rough-housing, caught her attention and she walked through some adjacent bushes toward the sound. When she emerged into the nearby clearing and her vision was finally unobstructed by the foliage, Lluvia taken aback by the sight that met her eyes. The spiky-haired babe was now a young boy, roughly seven or eight standard years, judging by his build and height; though like his Saiya-jin peers, he was already quite muscular. From what she could surmise, what had begun initially as a playful sparring session had turned downright serious. For some reason, Bardock had become the focal point of several Saiya-jin boys' determined efforts to pound him into submission. Though quite bloodied and bruised, he was not about to give any quarter, as was evinced by the number of boys already laying on the ground around him, groaning and whimpering through their pain. Just as the remaining few regrouped to launch a new attack on the heavily panting boy, their assault was broken up by the arrival of a handful of older boys who had been watching the action from afar and had finally decided to intervene.
One of them looked down from his slightly taller height in admiration at the still-feisty Bardock, who had yet to back off from his attack stance, despite the fact that these larger, more experienced boys could easily beat him into a senseless pulp. Impressed by the Bardock's tenacious ferocity, the older boy smiled and motioned an invitation for Bardock to come and join up with their group. Wary, but nonetheless intrigued, he walked over his fallen opponents and cautiously followed the departing group.
Lluvia stared fixedly at the rakishly handsome, older boy, and thought with a start, Now I recognize him! That's Toma! So this is how they met!
Years passed before Lluvia's eyes and she watched the boy grow into a man. Throughout their years at the training camp, the two Saiya-jin boys became fast friends, although they exhibited quite diametric temperaments. Toma usually did just enough to get by and was quite "devil-may-care" in his attitude, while Bardock was the serious one, very driven and focused. Yet the two complemented each other's divergent natures, each subtly influencing the other's base attitudes. Toma's lighter nature helped Bardock to loosen up, while Bardock's quiet encouragement of his older friend helped to change him from being a slacker to realizing his fullest potential.
The younger warrior's increasing strength and unwavering inborn ambition did not go unnoticed by the higher-ranking instructors. They carefully monitored his progress as they continually threw more difficult and challenging drills his way. Despite his third-class birth status, they grudgingly noted that the youngster would fight in his sparring matches with all his might, each and every time, even when he was dangerously out-numbered or supposedly out-classed. He fought hard, but he always fought smart, and it was this singular trait that impressed them most of all.
Upon his graduation from the training academy, Bardock was awarded a junior officer's commission. As such, he bore the distinction of being the youngest third-class soldier ever to achieve such a significant rank in such a relatively short period of time. This enabled him to be immediately inducted into the planet-purging division of the Planet Trade alliance. His first assigned tour of duty was to assemble a crew, made up of handpicked warriors, to rid a planet of its stubborn inhabitants. This particular mudball was populated by an inflexible-but-powerful bunch of ningens and its clearing had been on the roster for months, much to the chagrin of the Planet Trade brokers.
Not surprisingly, Toma was the first to be recruited by Bardock for this maiden task, followed by Ceripa, Totepo, and Pamboukin. The working chemistry between the five of them clicked right from the beginning. Bardock's fledgling crew dispatched their first assignment with relative ease; which set the cornerstone for his planet-purging team, establishing an enviable reputation for getting the job done with lethal and methodical efficiency, usually with time to spare.
Soon after his promotion to lieutenant commander, while on a brief furlough on Vegeta-sei, he enjoyed a memorable one-night stand with a lusty female sergeant named Pimienta. A few months later, he received a communiqué from her informing him that he had fathered a son. Upon his subsequent return home, he'd made it a point to look in on his developing offspring, who had been recently moved out of the incubator ward and into the nursery area. Like his dam, the baby boy was strongly built and already sported a wealth of long, black hair upon his little head. Before she'd gone off-world to her latest assignment, Pimienta had stopped in to name the brat Raditz, which was a fine Saiya-jin name by anyone's standards.
Until this point, Lluvia tried to observe the happenings in Bardock's life with an unemotionally objective eye, but whenever his crew went about their destructive work, her soul cried out in agony as she witnessed the deliberate and senseless carnage of so many innocents. All done in the name of profit, and only to make the rich richer, discarding the sentient beings that got in their way like yesterday's unwanted refuse. What made it all the more heartbreaking to her was the expression Bardock wore through out his missions; sometimes bored, sometimes amused, but never regretful, and definitely not ever sorry.
The spinning centrifuge suddenly threw her against the vortex's wall, fast-forwarding to a new scene.
At the same time, Bardock was in the middle of an uncontrollable free-fall in his separate vortex, and hating every bloody second of it. He'd always depended upon his base Saiya-jin instincts to guide him in most given situations, but nothing had ever prepared him for this! This feeling of tumbling unchecked but not really falling was most unsettling.
Whereas Lluvia's journey through his memory vortex ran from his birth forward, his particular sojourn took him in a series of jarring backward spins. He watched as the memories flew before his eyes in blurring rewinds. All the events of the last few days into the last several weeks sped by. It would only slow down periodically to run in brief forward moments so that he could witness key occurrences in Lluvia's life.
He stood by her side and tapped into her emotions when she encountered him and Toma after the benefit on Theta Seven. It was a bizarre sensation to feel the true depth of her initial desire for him, as their souls seemed to connect on that fateful evening. It only served to solidify his conviction that an unstoppable catalyst had been set in motion that night, and their respective destinies were set upon an inescapable course towards a joined future.
As he spun through the void the Saiya-jin bore witness to her amazingly checkered past. Over a short period of time, she met and assembled her special rag-tag group of entertainers, giving them all a home and a place where they felt free to hone their unique talents. In return, they unanimously made her the artistic director of their makeshift group. Lluvia had an unerring sense of timing and public promotion and with it she made sure that her company got the exposure and notoriety that would soon catapult them into the fore of the entertainment world.
He saw a teen-aged Tristan and Lluvia, spending time on the pleasure space station and learning from the seasoned dancers and musicians there, while making fast, platonic friends with the male and female socialators. The owner/madam of this popular establishment, known to all as Diamond Lil, was a long-time boon friend of Master Masaki's. She had made it crystal-clear right away to all involved that the two teenagers were there in a limited capacity, and were strictly off-limits to the resident socialators and clients alike.
The Saiya-jin couldn't help but chuckle at the sight of a very horny and frustrated Tristan trying to keep his mind on his music, while surrounded by scantily clad females who invariably loved to flirt with him. Lluvia, on the other hand, seemed to have no problems staying focused on perfecting her dance moves, while tactfully and gently rebuffing the advances of quite a few males. Her enigmatic aloofness only served to make her more desirable to them. A couple of well-to-do male clients had offered Lil near-obscene amounts of credits if she would sell Lluvia to them, but Lil would always refuse them, protecting the lilac-skinned girl as if she were of her own flesh.
Bardock watched, remembering Adarath's tale about how she and Tristan literally fell into Master Akira Masaki's life as they were chased by the chicken hawks. It was one thing to have listened to the dark dancer's spoken tale, trying to rely on his imagination to picture what had happened, and another to actually be in the middle of it, experiencing the unfolding sights, sounds, and smells of that life-altering episode from Lluvia's perspective.
The furious re-winding of her life took him further back, through the sordid, shadowy places where she and Tristan would continually hide furtively gleaning what food and temporary shelter they could take from their hardscrabble existence. Bardock felt the warmth of the two children's unwavering bond of friendship, and the hard, cold stone of loneliness that she carried within her heart before the sad, russet-haired boy came into her solitary life.
My poor Lluvia! Bardock's mind sympathetically cried out to the rag-covered and dirty girl-child huddled in a rain-slicked doorway as she strove to catch a brief respite from her hostile world. Just as he reached out to gather up the slumbering Lluvia in his astral arms, the vortex claimed him again and rudely slammed him back into its dizzying whirl.
Until this point, the memory vortexes were assailing both Lluvia and Bardock with a plethora of sights and sounds, accompanied by the emotions that each of them underwent as their distinct personalities formed. All the joy, pain, loneliness, and sorrow that they each experienced piled one upon the other with ever increasing, suffocating weight. Both vortexes converged into a single entity, still spinning their principals around, until it suddenly stopped without warning and everything went black and silent.