Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Consacra ❯ Conditioned 1 - Conceptions ( Chapter 1 )

CONDITIONED

 

Chapter 1: Conceptions

 

He opened his eyes to the vast darkness above him punctuated by the cold stars. The newly arrived presence near him did not move.

 

“Quite bold, Namek, to tread so close to a sleeping Saiyan,” he said, stretching his arms out behind his head. The grass prickled his skin.

 

“Good evening to you too, Vegeta,” came the gruff reply from his left side. “I see you have plans for spacefaring.”

 

“Yes, you could say that,” he said calmly. The ship was fully prepared for launch.

 

“Care to share what exactly you plan to do?”

Vegeta closed his eyes. “Did Bulma send you?”

 

A bark of laughter, tinged with surprise. “She hasn't spoken to me since the last time I showed my face around here and made Trunks cry.”

 

A half-smile curved his lips. “Then why do you care to know?”

 

“I suppose that even if this were a routine training mission, you wouldn't tell me, just to be a jackass.”

 

“You know me quite well, Namek.”

 

“As a matter of fact, Vegeta, I know what you are planning to do.”

 

He opened his eyes and sat up slowly. Turning his head upwards and to the side, he met the Namek's slanted eyes under the white turban he customarily wore. So the presence of the priest had not been hidden after all.

 

“Then you know that this is my concern and mine alone,” he said, injecting the first drop of venom into his voice.

 

“The last time you regarded a dire concern as yours alone, the Earth suffered for it.” The cool reply was an intended barb.

 

“Careful, Namek,” Vegeta said in a low voice, bristling at the reminder of his recent failures.

 

“What was it?” Piccolo cut in. “What was that strange power you encountered?”

 

“None of your business.” He stood and turned toward the ship.

 

“Anything that can subdue a Saiyan and then blink out of this Earth's atmosphere is most certainly my business.”

 

The Namek could definitely sense the ki gathering in his fists as he paused with his back turned. Piccolo must have prepared himself for a beating before coming here to confront him this night.

 

“I'm not saying I would have been able to overpower whatever that thing was. In fact I might not have come out of it alive.” The Namek was backpedaling to cover his offenses. Protecting his own skin.

 

No, Vegeta knew, it was not about self-defense. The Namek was not afraid of him. He just wanted information, and he figured Vegeta would more likely give him information if he didn't drive him into a rage. Transparent, as usual. But Vegeta would still tell him nothing.

 

“Obviously you came out of it alive and unscathed,” Piccolo continued. Vegeta began walking toward the door of the ship.

 

“Did it track you down? What was its purpose for coming to Earth?” The Namek was certainly persistent.

 

Vegeta kept walking. The footsteps following him were expected.

 

“Why didn't it kill you when it could have?” Employing reverse tactics now.

 

Vegeta paused and turned his head just enough to see the Namek out of the corner of his eye. “Nice try. I won't take the bait.”

 

He opened the door to the ship, a new sleek model meant for speed travel, and stepped inside. There was nothing Piccolo could do to stop him. He smiled at the green man still standing on the lawn as the door slid shut.

 

This is my concern, Namek. And my kill.

 

*****

 

There was once a child.

 

Many prophecies were given at his birth. They foretold that the child would see greatness, surpassing all who came before him and all who would ever live thereafter.

 

He stared into the endless cold abyss surrounding him. Specks of stars far, far away stayed still as his ship hurtled past nearer bodies. Every few minutes, his view would turn completely white. The navigation system automatically sensed wormholes in the fabric of space, ripping through them conveniently to jump ever closer to his chosen destination.

 

The blank sea of white before his eyes filled with the blackness of space as he exited the latest spatial shortcut. Legions of stars seemed to blink to life as his eyesight adjusted once more to the dark.

 

He had seen greatness. His own power now indeed far surpassed that of all those of his race who had lived before him. He had achieved the status of the Legendary, meant to be worshipped and exalted and feared. Meant to rule over all the stars for eternity, as written in ancient folklore.

 

How ironic that no one of his race remained to worship and exalt him, save one man who had actually laid claim to the Legendary power before he had.

 

The prophecies were a lie. He had not surpassed all. That one man, now dead, had single-handedly silenced the mouths of prophets in their graves and had driven one more twisted nail into the coffin of his people. That one man had usurped his throne and his destiny without even aspiring for them.

 

It was useless to be so poisonously bitter. It was useless to hate and burn with anger toward a man who was already dead, whom he could no longer challenge in single combat to reclaim his honor. It was utterly useless to think about it still.

 

Except he had to.

 

He had to pick apart every word the priest had said, every uncanny piece of information he had heard in the confines of a wooden confessional. He had to know what was waiting for him at his current destination, the place he presumed was the “place of origin.”

 

At the age of five, the child was tested for the first time.

 

“Tested” indeed.

 

His nails dug into his palms, carving small mocking smiles into his skin. He imagined such a smile on an invisible face, a wash of white blankness covering all features except thin, curved lips as dark as the universe.

 

Here he was, on a ship hurtling through space to find one man among the countless stars surrounding him. A man who knew too much and perhaps was not a man at all. The balance sheet was never completely negative, however. Vegeta always calculated the good, or the acceptable, that could come out of situations such as this.

 

Perhaps this endeavor was an affirmation that he should have left Earth long before. He should never have involved himself in the affairs of such an insignificant backwater planet. After his revival on Namek, he had left Earth to search for Kakarott. What a blind fool he had been. Instead of scouring the galaxy for that harmless idiot, he could have been carving a new empire from the chaotic power vacuum that had resulted from Frieza's fall. Or he could have waited until the arrival of his son from the future—the boy had killed the other remaining threat from Frieza's lineage, leaving his empire wide open for the taking as well. At that time, he could have gained real power and unified two great empires under his own vast strength. Instead, when he had ventured into space again, it was not to conquer but to train, striving toward the singular goal of surpassing Kakarott.

 

What a fool he had been.

 

The mundane, bloodless life Earth offered him had almost secured its hold on him. He had a woman and a child. He had allies, though his ties with them were tentative. For the first time, he had begun waking up each morning assured that he would still be alive the next morning. There were no battles, no risks, no danger of death.

 

Yet humans were so fascinated by those things that had been intimately tied to his reality for his entire life. They were utterly terrified of death. Their civilization was built upon staving off death and fabricating excuses for the existence of its very concept. Humans seldom saw death around them, yet it always loomed over them as some evil entity. They could not conceive of it as anything but evil and attached superstition and supernatural concepts to it.

 

Humans believed in a god and a devil, and they exalted and feared death. And between these entities they placed a concept called “sin.”

 

The mundane life that had been slowly creeping over him lost its hold the day he had aimlessly stepped into that hollow, dimly lighted house of worship. He had been seeking amusement indeed, and perhaps a bit of enlightenment on why humans feared and hated death -and sin- so vehemently. The billions he had slain on purging missions, the countless revenge killings and assassinations, and the array of cruel torments he had carried out on his victims often for fun (or out of boredom), not to mention the designs he once had for immortality and becoming the despot of a new empire, surely earned him a place over the “worst” human who had ever lived. He had read histories of genocides and “crimes against humanity,” a term he thought was rather artful and self-righteous. Some crimes indeed had been horrible in their degree of cruelty, duration of pain inflicted, and number of victims, but each criminal had inevitably been caught and either locked away or punished with death. Yet Vegeta was convinced there were no humans in the rather short history of their civilization who could compare with him.

 

The priest had thrown the beginnings of that mundane life off balance.

 

Perhaps it was another “test” in the course of his blood-soaked, battle-mired life. A challenge of wits, a test to see how far he would go for the “answer” the priest spoke of. But the priest had failed to pique his interest in any supernatural concept of sin or death beyond curiosity and the desire for amusement. He had, after all, seen and experienced the afterlife firsthand, which was a mocking joke of any religion's concept of heaven or hell. Vegeta was not interested even in the idea that the real reason for killing was always choice. It was merely an overloaded, useless philosophical concept that moralists must have deduced in order to add weight to an individual's guilt over his own sins.

 

The real point of their dialogue had been to draw him into space. Vegeta was convinced of this. The priest was waiting for him somewhere. Perhaps for a confrontation to settle a score. Perhaps this man was some long-forgotten specter of his past who had finally tracked him down and wanted revenge. But then, he could have taken his revenge at any time during their conversations in the confessional, as he had displayed his sizable power at their last meeting. His powers were indeed potent and quite intriguing, but Vegeta had encountered similar types in his years as a soldier. He just had to be more careful and clever in order to overpower and kill such a warrior.

 

If not revenge, then what?

 

Why tell such a story, inject some philosophical nonsense, and then disappear? Perhaps it was a more elaborate plot for revenge involving some particular location in the galaxy? Perhaps it involved more than just that one man? There were many possibilities, he supposed.

 

There were several things he was certain of.

 

The priest knew too much about him. First, he had somehow known Vegeta would walk into that church although he had done it more on a whim than anything. He had known of the Arlian genocide and Nappa's death before Vegeta had mentioned them. He seemed to have known how Vegeta would answer all his questions, and even what questions Vegeta would ask him.

 

And he had known the story.

 

For that alone, Vegeta could not let him live. For the days or weeks he had been on this ship, he had scoured the walls of his memory, in anger and in calm, tearing out the buried corpses of his past, walking as far back into the catacombs as he could, reminding himself that he had plenty of time to discover who this man was. It was frustrating not to know, if there indeed was something in his memory that could help him.

 

It was one thing to know about the destruction of Arlia or the death of Nappa. Independent purges done by individual soldiers, some of them outside official orders, were often the topic of the night in the mess halls of Frieza's ships and checkpoints throughout the empire. News of Nappa's death, although less significant, would also have spread quite quickly, given the blatant fact Vegeta had come back from his mission to Earth alone.

 

But Vegeta had personally seen to those who knew of the story the priest had told.

 

All those in the story were dead, killed in battle or by Vegeta's own hand. They had taken the details of what had happened to their graves. Many others knew the general premise, but their conceptions of it were not as accurate as the priest's retelling.

 

So how did the man know?

 

*****

 

He had expected to feel something upon arriving here. Most likely anger or hate. Or perhaps foolish sentiment, as several years on Earth were bound to rub off on him.

 

He felt nothing. The planet loomed large before him, cold and void of life. A deserted wasteland, emptied of resources and its indigenous population long ago. It was the color of dried blood.

 

He waited. He had patience. Years of tedious, uneventful travel in space pods had built up his tolerance for inactivity and isolation. He had discovered long ago that his own mind was enough of an intrigue to explore and thus pass the time. Of course, he did not expect to wait more than several hours to meet the man who had drawn him out here. He was fairly certain this was where he was supposed to go.

 

The first hour ticked by. He recounted the words of the story patiently. They were ingrained in his brain now. The impeccable memory he had acquired from the rigorous mental training he had to undergo as a soldier would not allow him to forget a single word. He sat down on the floor beside the viewing window, gazing at the rust-colored planet.

 

He was handed over to the enemy by his people.

 

The second hour arrived. He had indeed been handed over to the enemy, by his own father in fact. He wondered why he had longed for his people and the empire that was rightfully his for so many years, when they had abandoned him long before. Perhaps if his people were still alive and he was their ruler, he would eventually cause their demise anyway out of revenge. Perhaps he would have ruled them just as cruelly as the tyrant they had given him over to, because he could never forgive them for betraying him.

 

He was kept in a holding cell like a common criminal and did not eat or drink for many days.

 

The third hour. At this point in the story, he had begun to seethe inside, knowing that the priest knew many things he was not supposed to know. The priest had mockingly crafted his words to sound like a tale from a religious text, free of the gritty details but full of ludicrous moral undertones.

 

He remembered his time in that holding cell quite clearly. It had reeked of sweat and body odors of aliens he had never encountered, former prisoners who had probably died in recent days. He had been told by the guards to consider it a luxury that he had the cell to himself, as it customarily held upwards of ten prisoners. He had waited, incensed at the numerous affronts to his dignity as Saiyan royalty, but had remained patient, not killing anything other than the rats scurrying around the dark confines of his cell. There had been one window where he could see the planet over which the flagship was stationed. It was the color of dried blood.

 

He had waited out of trust in his father, who had told him this was the best opportunity for him to grow stronger—to train in the imperial army of Frieza. To grow stronger for his people, for the throne he would one day inherit.

 

Bullshit.

 

On the tenth day he was taken from his cell into the presence of the enemy.

 

The fourth hour. When the priest's maddeningly calm, emotionless voice had reached this sentence, any last doubts about the identity of the child in the story were gone. No members of royalty were detained that long in such conditions, except as a confirmation that they were no longer considered royalty, and that their planet was most likely no longer considered sovereign. The duration of those ten days had been torture in itself, as he had begun eating the half-rotted carcasses of the rodents he had killed, his child's body shriveling to skin and bones without food or water. He was lying on the floor when the door finally opened, and could not move fast enough to avoid the kick aimed at his head.

 

He came to in a massive hall even bigger than his father's throne room. He lay on cold marble, raising his head to see a garishly embellished throne, where he met the eyes of a tyrant for the first time.

 

He was told that his people and his king were no more, and that he would now bow down and obey a new king.

 

The fifth hour.

 

His worst fears had been confirmed. Even at the age of five, he had known that there was something wrong with the egregious treatment he had received from his captors. Even if Vegetasei were to become a tributary state or even a slave state, there was no way Frieza would imprison and starve the Saiyan prince. Only if both his father and his planet had fallen would this be possible.

 

Later, he would learn that nothing was beyond Frieza's cruelty. The breach of propriety in relations with the Saiyan throne was a nicety compared to what the tyrant was capable of.

 

The child refused.

 

The sixth hour. Vegeta stood and paced before the viewing window as the blood-colored planet slowly spun before him. This place…this place was starting to get to him. He cursed the man for making him wait. Or perhaps this was not the right place after all. He took a deep breath. He would continue to wait until the story wore itself out in his head and he could no longer bear being here.

 

He had refused to bow. He remembered thinking in his juvenile mind that if he had had any saliva in his parched mouth, he would have spit at Frieza's feet. He had tried to stand and run, without a plan and without rational thought, as he imagined Frieza blasting a hole through his father's heart and then setting his planet to burn, the empire he would inherit reduced to a lifeless ball of ash.

 

The order was given that he should be beaten until he obeyed.

 

The seventh hour. The priest's wording had made it seem like a passive process, a turn of events that had naturally and inevitably come about. He had made it sound like some nameless third party, the indifferent hand of Fate, perhaps, had given the order for the prince to be beaten.

 

He sometimes wondered how the real events in embellished stories in ancient books and religious texts had actually played out. How much violence, slaughter, and suffering were left untold between the lines of passive narration, moral dogma, and divine purpose? “Beating” was far from adequate to describe what Frieza had ordered. The word “beating” did not bring to mind the fervent wish for death that victims of Frieza experienced.

 

For one day and one night, six soldiers carried out the order in shifts.

 

The eighth hour. Vegeta rubbed his sore eyes, tired from staring blankly at the black void and the unmoving pinpricks of light. Perhaps this was the wrong place. But how could it be? It had seemed so obvious that this would be it.

 

He remembered his tormentors' faces. Later he would learn their names and ranks and feel a sick sense of pride at the fact that Frieza had expended the efforts of his top soldiers on him at five years of age. He would kill some of them many years later and savor the moment he blasted each into oblivion or tore out their hearts. But because of constraining circumstances, he had accorded them more mercy than he had received in the speed of the pain he had inflicted upon them, and this was still a point of regret.

 

One broke his bones, another tore his skin, still another dislocated his limbs, and so on, until he could no longer move or resist.

 

The ninth hour. He opened a capsule containing meat and began eating ravenously. As he had retreated into the priest's words and his own memories, he had forgotten his hunger. He had encapsulated a freezer full of raw meat, which he had often eaten before Bulma had demanded he start cooking it. The blood was cold and congealed, but he savored the taste of it as he ripped chunks out of the steak with his teeth.

 

They had mangled his flesh as if he were nothing more than a piece of dead animal to be carved up and devoured. Broken bones and dislocated limbs were clean words, jarringly out of sequence with the memory of the pain. They had started slow, knowing they could do whatever they wanted to him because he was so weak from starvation and dehydration. But the priest was right. Each had “specialized” in a certain form of torture. For years afterward, each time he had run across one of them he had had to forcefully suppress the sick sensory memory of the excruciating pain of skin and flesh being sliced off his body, or of bones cracking as his fingers were bent backwards.

 

At the end of the ordeal he was thrown on his face before the enemy in a mocking semblance of prostration.

 

The tenth hour. The priest was not coming. Vegeta methodically cleaned his hands with a small purifying device on the wall which Bulma had installed in all of Capsule Corp's ships. The scent of blood vanished from his fingers, but the pungent smell remained in his mind. It had been the first time he had seen his own blood in such quantities, flowing out from his veins, splattering the walls, adorning his tormentors' hands and faces. He remembered his fury at the sight of their smiles, when they licked their lips to taste his blood. They were not worthy of spilling the blood of a son of Vegetasei. They were not worthy of drawing breath in his presence, least of all the tyrant who had smiled down upon his broken, powerless form from his throne.

 

The enemy stood from his throne and, approaching the paralyzed body of the child, said,

 

“You have obeyed. But now, you will learn to obey.”

 

The eleventh hour. He had stopped the priest's narration there with a curse and a failed attempt to shatter the wooden panel separating them.

 

Vegeta entered a command into the ship's computer to expand its shield several meters beyond the metal exterior of the ship. He then walked to the hatch, opened it, and stood still as a moving circular platform lifted him slowly into the cold of space. The invisible force field of the ship hummed around him, ending perhaps a meter in front of his face. His kept his breathing light; the expanded shield was there to provide him with oxygen, but it would only hold out for a limited time.

 

He extended his arm, looking down coldly at the planet looming beneath him. He decided he had reached the point where he could no longer bear being in this place. This planet -the same one that had graced his window throughout those ten days of imprisonment- would have to go.

 

Because he had chosen to destroy it.

 

He felt intense anger. But of course that feeling could not be the reason for the action he had decided upon.

 

Then again there was no point in annihilating the planet. This solar system was dead, unoccupied, lifeless. The act of destroying a planet would accomplish nothing, even if the sight of it angered him deeply.

 

Perhaps there was logic to the priest's philosophical assertions after all. He could release the energy he held in his palm, or he could power down and leave the planet intact. Either way held no consequences for him. So which path to choose, action or inaction? In this case, neither seemed to be a true path of action. Both were meaningless.

 

The choice was arbitrary, but it was nonetheless a choice consciously made.

 

As he watched the planet glow and split apart beneath him, he was oddly reminded of an earlier time in his life when he had done the same out of either fun or boredom. This time, it was out of neither.

 

“The power of choice” indeed.