Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Chiaroscuro ❯ One-Shot

He understood despair. 

He was on intimate terms with it.  He knew its allure and its crushing weight. Experience had mapped its terrain for him.  It came and went, surging and ebbing with his failures and small triumphs. It was the price of being the last saiyajin prince.  A lifetime of living with Nappa's ferocious bouts of depression had made it acceptable to him, had taught him that it was part of the life of a warrior. Nappa had also shown him that action was the only cure.  A goal to reach and an enemy to fight were all that a saiyajin needed

Now Vejiita had lost both.

Furiza was dead.  Kakkarot was dead.  Vejiita himself had become a saiyajin god, yet it hadn't ultimately mattered. The mind-shattering strength he'd achieved had been worthless.  It had been his father's dream to see his heir ascend, but unless the dead king had a special seat in Hell, that was another failed dream.

There was nothing left.  Everything that had been pushed back by his quest for strength, lost in the glare of his dreams of immortality, now came back with a vengeance.  He was the prince of a dead race, and he had nothing left to shield himself from that truth.  Kakkarot had taken himself out of the equation, choosing to die rather than stay behind and give Vejiita someone to blissfully hate.  His future looked empty, and cold.

He stopped training, for the first time in his entire life.

After Cell was finally dead, Vejiita had gone back to the woman's house.  It was familiar, at least, and that was the only definition of 'home' he knew.  Bulma had opened the door for him and asked no questions, and he felt a pathetic sort of gratitude for that. He was unused to such fragile emotions, and they left him feeling weak. He wrapped himself up in darkness and silence, and wondered why he still bothered to live.

It never occurred to him to talk to her about it, and maybe she understood that too.  Her life flowed around him, encompassing him and yet leaving him untouched.  The house thrummed with activity he didn't understand and had no part in.  Food was brought up to him and the plates were taken away again.  He occasionally put his laundry in the chute and it came back clean the same way, all without him seeing a living person. Only Bulma came by, every couple of days as her schedule permitted. 

Her visits rarely lasted long.  He tried to remember what it had been like to be blind with lust for her, to need her hands on him like he needed air, but that was a thing of the past, a memory without substance.  Without even that tenuous connection between them, they no longer seemed to know each other.  Yet she was kind, and he was the father of her child, and they were easy enough with each other.  She never nagged him about his retreat from the world and he never volunteered anything.  The distance between them was undeniable now, but it was better that way.  Knowing her, she would be contrary enough to pity him, and he didn't think he could bear that.

He kept to his rooms, flipping through video channels and watching the incomprehensible life of this planet flow past.  He meditated.  He slept.  He kept the windows covered.  More than anything else, blue sky reminded him of Kakkarot, and brought his self-loathing back around full circle again.  Kakkarot had embraced this world, had made it his home, and then turned away from it.  What should it mean to Vejiita, then?

~~~~~

From time to time, Bulma brought his son and left him, claiming that he was already too much of a handful for his grandparents to watch for her. Vejiita didn't believe her, but he didn't really care whether the kid was there or not. Mostly he ignored the brat, turning away from the pale hair and pale eyes.

Trunks didn't seem to mind his visits with his father, but after the first few times the boy had stopped trying to engage him.  He left the distant, sullen prince alone and pursued his own pastimes.  If he needed anything, he would start yelling for his mother, his voice rattling the windows, until Vejiita would summon her over the intercom.  Vejiita never offered him anything, and Trunks never asked.

The father would watch his child and brood, until Bulma swept back into the room and took him away again.  Over and over.  He wondered why she bothered.

Trunks had no tail. He didn't trill or purr like a saiyajin child would. He was as weak as any human child.  He was as alien as everything else on this planet.

If Vejiita hadn't seen Mirai, he wouldn't have believed Trunks was his son.  But he had seen him.

Fought with him.

Lived with him for a long year in that strange room.

Seen him die.

Not wanting to follow that particular train of thought, he rolled over, looking for distraction. Trunks was with him this morning, sitting in the only patch of sunlight that dared enter the room.  His love of light was yet another irritating thing about the boy.  Why the hell did he need the goddamned curtains open every time he came?   

He watched without much interest as Trunks held his hand up and glowered at it, his brows narrowing with fierce concentration.

Vejiita vaguely wondered for a moment what the idiot child could be staring at, and then gave it up, sighing and closing his eyes.  Maybe he could get a nap, if the kid was quiet. He was always tired, lately, and yet he did almost nothing.  Vejiita was trying to clear his mind of that particular thought when he felt the faint surge of ki being concentrated.  Kakkarot's brat, he thought briefly, before realizing who it must be.

Gaudy sparkles of light had appeared above Trunks' palm, and they were increasing as he glared at them, willing them into existence. 

Vejiita stared, and then looked away again.

It didn't matter.

So the brat could externalize his ki.  At his age, Vejiita had been learning to kill things.  What, he wondered, had Kakkarot been doing? Distracted again, he almost missed what happened next.

Grinning, Trunks turned to show Vejiita what he'd done, holding out his hand.  It wasn't the smile that struck Vejiita; the boy did that often enough.  It was that he was showing his achievement to his father, sharing it with him like Vejiita mattered.

His alien son.

His son.

Trunks.

The ki flickered out and the boy growled in annoyance, scowling ferociously.  Vejiita caught a quick glimpse of sharp teeth and faintly remembered Bulma complaining about being bitten. Of course the child would bite; saiyajin children always did... didn't they?  He tried to remember the brief, precious years of his own childhood.  Had he bitten his father and mother?  He thought so.  Did he really remember the king proudly showing off his baby son and the vicious bite on his arm, or was that another one of Nappa's stories? 

Vejiita was suddenly struck by how much Trunks resembled not himself, but his own father.  It was there in the eyes and the shape of his brow, and the way his jaw set when he was determined to get his way.  He wondered what the king would have said about having a mongrel for a grandson.

Mirai Trunks had killed Furiza and his father without even breaking a sweat.  He had taken vengeance for the royal house without any but the faintest knowledge of his heritage.  It had been in his blood.  His royal blood.

The thought occurred that the king of all saiyajins would not have been stupid enough to waste something as precious as his only heir.

Damn it all.

Slowly, as if he had been bedridden for some time, Vejiita got up off his bed and knelt down next to his son.  Awkwardly, he reached out and cupped the boy's hand between his own calloused palms.  "Let me show you something, brat."

He let his own ki flow through Trunks' hand, and a small, glowing sphere grew above it.

"This," he said a little roughly, "is yours. Your inheritance. Own it."

Trunks looked up at him, his eyes even paler in the sunlight.  "Mine," he said a little tentatively.

"Yes."  He let go of the boy's hand, and the sphere wavered before disappearing.

Trunks stood up and shoved his hand in his father's face.  "Mine!" he demanded.

No fear at all.  A saiyajin prince, demanding his rights.

Vejiita smiled.  It was a thin and faint smile, but Trunks understood it.  The boy responded in kind, beaming at him.

"Perhaps it is time we stopped neglecting your training," Vejiita said.  He stood up and offered his hand. 

Trunks didn't hesitate.  His grip was surprisingly strong.

Of course.  He was his father's son, after all.

~~~~~

Later that afternoon, Bulma noticed that the gravity room was running again.  A quick check of the monitor told her everything.  Trunks, unaffected by the slightly higher gravity, slept in a pile of blankets stripped from Vejiita's bed.  On the other side of the room, his father followed a routine taught to him as soon as he could walk, fighting an unseen enemy, rebuilding himself.  He was violence and grace and pride, personified, and it seemed that he'd finally remembered it.

Bulma smiled a little wistfully and turned off the monitor.  Father and son had crossed into a place she literally could not go, set apart from her by a heritage she had no part in.  Her work getting Vejiita to acknowledge his son had not been in vain, but she felt an odd sort of loneliness now, having seen them together.

It was not in her nature, however, to stay down for long.  Vejiita wouldn't leave now.  She was sure of it. It didn't really matter if he was staying for her sake or for Trunks'.  He would be here, and she could work with that.  Her son would have his father and she… maybe she would have another shot at the most irritating male she'd ever met.

For the first time since Goku died, Bulma felt something like hope.

~end~