Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Fathoming Love ❯ Chapter 32 ( Chapter 32 )

Fathoming Love
Chapter 33
The Other Side



"We're everything personified that a human hates about themself.” Vegeta mused. “We're lust, rage, sadism, violence, narcissism, vanity; everything rolled into one. And we love ourselves for it. But Kakarot? No. Unfortunately, no.”

“So where was Bulma throughout this self-discovery?” I asked.

“She was…” It was like a blade had flirtatiously crawled across his back, his mouth closing and his eyes wide. “She wasn’t around much in those times.””…….” My eyes spoke volumes of questions, my mouth staying shut. What did he mean? Bulma, at this point, seemed the ever constant in his life, the one thing that remained, as always in one form or another, pretty predictable.

“She wasn’t around a lot ok?” He answered tempestuously, turning away as if in shame and basic pissed-off-ness.

It was the cold shoulder, once more, and by now, I’d figured well enough to leave it as it was, placing a pathetic (maybe comforting?) hand on his back before I packed up my paperwork and left.

I went home after that, the sky already a dark shade of blue and the sun setting as the moon already reigned amongst glistening stars. I thought of my wife Laura, as I always did on my way home, wondering how her day was spent when mine so often seemed as though it was all or nothing attempts to escape time with her. I adored Vegeta, I was obsessed with his story, with his life that sometimes made mine feel so numb and boring.

And then I would remember and I would hate that I had forgotten. Yes, boredom takes on such crude connotations but sometimes? I prayed for boredom, for days when I was with my family and cursed life of mediocrity.

I opened the door quietly, hearing the sound of the TV coming from the living room, walking in the darkness to see her, already collapsed against the armrest of the couch, her hair looking burnt and old as it lay on a cushion, lifeless.

How many more years would we contemplate our loss in silence, unable to forgive each other and ourselves for the way things had gone? How many more years would I walk amongst shadows around her, unable to tell her how sorry I was, how much I wish a thousand times a day things had gone any other way contradictory to where they had?

I let her sleep there, as I always did, unwilling to shake her from her solitude of dreams, knowing that reality was worse than any nightmare, than any panic you feel when waking up alone.

I crossed the hallways like a zombie, wondering a thousand things. Things. Just things. Nothing worth putting into words or writing now. I walked into my lonely room, seeing the empty bed, unmade as always, as it seemed there was no point these days to making anything look beautiful in a world of ashy pasts. I felt my eyes widen before I registered that anything was amiss, seeing papers, trembling from the open window, placed upon the foot of my mattress.

The first thought that came, was of course, divorce papers. But setting myself down next to them, I squinted in the moonlight, making out unfamiliar hand writing and eventually, the words "Diary of Bulma Briefs".

I caught my breath, glancing around as I held the rough edges of a small stack of papers, quickly shutting the door and clicking on the nightlamp. The papers had obviously been torn from a larger book and the word "Kakarot" left my mouth before I told my lips to form it. I knew instantly that he had been here, that this room had felt the mark of an intruder, with the one intention of leaving something for me, chancing the possibility of my wife finding it first.

Did that mean that he watched me? Did that mean that he could see me now, hunched over his secret?

I swallowed, closing the window and the blinds before I huddled my knees to myself against the headboard, pulling the papers over as I began to read.



Vegeta has been gone for nearly a week now, and I should be missing him, missing the days we could travel together, the days and the moments when I would just be content to be near him. God, don't I sound like such a stereotypical woman, pinning after the even more stereotypical bad boy? I hate myself right now.

I used to think that love, love was just something that people sought after because it was the ideal ending to a wasted lifetime; the last sentences of a fairy tale, "and they lived, happily ever after". I used to think so many people craved the idea of "falling in love" because they simply hadn't taken the time enough to learn to love themselves first.

Now I don't know. I think I hate that he's such a cruel person. I hate that I doubt myself when I see good in his eyes, when he whispers secrets to me that I have no doubt he's never told another soul. I hate that I see a good man when his past tells a thousand horror stories he alone enacted upon the innocent. Am I so cruel to forget his wicked deeds, to forsake those that suffered at his hands because he's so beautiful?And he IS beautiful. So beautiful. I remember when I first saw him, I knew exactly who he was. Oh yes, I was arrogant enough to think a limited number of years in the body of a woman could so easily sum up a deranged, beautiful devil. He gazed around the world in constant contempt for his lot in life, like he needed only the time enough to kill something simply to feel better about the way of things.

But I can't think that now. He IS a good man, even if I alone know it. Even if he doesn't know it and is so irrefutably sure that I'm too naive to think otherwise. Is that a universal flaw? That we all are our own biggest critics, even to the perilous point of never letting ourselves be more than the caged identity we relate ourselves to?

But I think I love him.

Please please please don't let me love him. Don't let me love something greater than myself and create fantastical futures with someone that can never love me back. Is that why I do? Is that why I fell and fall and dream and forsake every bit of acquired intelligence? So that I can be in love with the one person in all the galaxy that couldn't possibly return those feelings? A cruel trap set by myself?

It would be easier to love a man like Yamcha. It would. So loyal to any cause greater than himself, so much in love with me it makes me want to cry that I can't return that. We've both damned ourselves and maybe, in that, we share our one true thing in common: our self-inflicted doom.

Vegeta is hard and cold and mean. I never know what lurks beneath his calm smiles or the strange looks he gives me when he thinks I don't notice. I don't understand his odd compliments, so ruthless and unintentional yet reserved, so it seems, only for myself. I think a million ideas must graze his mind a million times a second, yet he rarely voices anything of substance. I think he's afraid to, if I dare say a man like Vegeta, fears anything at all.

But maybe he does love me. He is a master of control, mostly over himself, over anything that could resemble humanity, the humanity he so often scorns. But other times, it's like he places me above my race, above my gender, never letting either hinder his opinion of me. Even in a human world, women are so often underestimated yet he's never pretended that I was less than a man. It seems, gender seldom occurs to the alien, as though such supposed "weaknesses" didn't exist where he was from and all strength and honor and respect was simply earned by anyone, female or not.

Other times, I think he treats me so highly because he must have been in love at some point. Men who hate women, often have either entirely fallen for the wrong one, or never fallen at all. Vegeta regards me as nearly equal, in his softer moments, as the shadows play the hard, evil lines of his beauty.

"You don't need makeup and your hair is fine," He always tells me, though he compliments me all the same, good days or bad. I think he's the first man I've ever met, truly met, that makes me feel beautiful all the time. All the time. I never worry about the same social rules around him that I am gender-bound to around other men. I never look in mirrors around Vegeta because for some reason, I think he sees me more beautiful than I have ever seen myself.

I am oddly comfortable around him, sleeping more soundly within his reach than ever before. Yet, how many have died at the hands of such naivety? How many have slept, unawares of the creeping alien that doesn't even bother to wake them before he sends them into the next life?

Everyone wants me to fear him, Yamcha most of all. "Stay away from him," they'll whisper when he leaves the room, very probably oblivious to the fact that I'm certain he could hear them if he cared enough to listen. Yet I can't stay away. I don't want to. Damn me for forsaking all humanity by wanting to be with him most of all. Damn me for becoming more female around him than I've ever felt, yet spared the social expectancies when I am.

If only he knew. If only they knew.

I went to the doctors today and it looks as though there is no other way. I thought all these years, watching Lifetime television and tear-jerking dramas about cancer that I would never really feel it directly touch my life. Oh, but how cliche is that? "It can't happen to me!" Am I so far removed from my mortality?

Chemo. I think it's sick they can abbreviate the word Chemotherapy as a means to dull the cruelty of its reality.

God, I'm so scared. I am... so scared.


I looked up, hearing what sounded like Laura repositioning herself on the couch, the lined quilt brushing against itself. I looked hastily through the next few pages, seeing most were condensed with equations and blueprints. I swallowed hard, finding another, with the same haunting lines as the first, "The Diary of Bulma Briefs".

He came back. I think I forgot how much I missed him until I saw him land, in all of his glory, on the lawn, quirking an eyebrow at my desperation to see him, to hold him, for as long as he lets me. I think it unnerves him, how often I demand to hug him, to touch him, to share some form of physical contact with him. But maybe, it’s just the intuition within myself that tells me he needs it, that tells me as much as he scowls and writhes away from me, that he appreciates the gesture, that he craves the touch as much as I do.
I've hugged people my entire life, feeling as though physical means of communication always numb those of verbal. Yet, when I hugged him for the first time, beneath the glassy surface of my pool he'd thrown me into, I thought we'd both be electrocuted by the current of power that passed between us. Or maybe just within myself. Who knows? I could be an absolutely arrogant asshole thinking he reserves any special means of attention for me. But I don't know if that's the case.

I've just never felt this way before. In fact, I never really expected it to. Leave love and romance and all that silly garbage for the writers and poets of the world. I am a scientist. I can write the fucking equation for birth, for life, for anything chemically induced. Yet, I'm at a loss to really even describe this, let alone mathematically explain it. Maybe that's the one truth that all logic falls short of: there IS no real equation for love, otherwise, no mathematician or scientist would ever fall prey to it.

I never wanted to fall in love, if that is what this is. "Oh, you'll know if it's love." Bull shit. You'll know nothing and you'll understand nothing and if that is the answer for love, than yes, I am most certainly a victim of it. Because everything is so chaotic. Everything is nauseating and incomputable. I stare at computer screens, knowing answers to a thousand questions no man or woman on earth could even fathom, yet I just continue staring blankly, trying to make sense and reason in a world that seems lost when he isn't there.

I don't really even ask where he has been. I doubt he'd answer me unless he felt the pressing need yet it seems, (and again, my faulty femininity be damned) that he's missed me too. Hugs last longer and touches linger in a time that only seems broken by my boyfriend. I hate myself for hating him in that moment. We both just stared, like we'd been in an impenetrable room with each other for so long that an intruder or possibility thereof, seemed... entirely illogical. Like we hadn't seen another being for so long that we'd virtually forgotten what they even looked like.

I had created the gravity room as a distraction, not from him, not from Yamcha, but from the pain.

I am so sick. I am so sick every minute of every day. I feel the sickness creeping under the flesh of my arms, every time I try to lift them. I feel the sickness turn my entire belly when I lean over in the most menial, trivial tasks of acquiring something from the floor.

I was so thankful Vegeta was gone when the Chemotherapy began. I guess I should have known, watching enough movies, that it would be awful. What was I thinking? That I'm better? That I'm stronger than other people? That trips to otherworldly places, to galaxies unknown to humans would set my body beyond the capabilities of theirs and pain and ache and nausea could never touch me?

I sat in the confines of my room, thinking I would die. No. Wanting, wanting to die. Wanting my face to fall, my hair clumped with vomit, to the floor as I escaped this world and went into one that had to be better. God, I was so sick. Brain tumors? I thought headaches sucked, the only reason I admitted myself for an MRI. But this? This is unbelievable and truly, if I am superior to those others of my race that have fallen victim to cancer, than I am awestruck that anyone less than myself could even survive this, let alone desire to.

All life is composed of goals, otherwise, it has no meaning. Without real reason to continue, a body lays still until it passes on, no means of life to sustain it or to move it from its place. I think only, in the moments where I vomit and shit and piss and make myself all the more ill in doing so, that perhaps this hero of mine, however jaded, is the only reason I keep on.

My mother suspects, or at least I believe she does, watching tears fall from her crystalline eyes for no apparent reason. She sees my paleness, the lifeless stain of my hair, the sweat that beads on my upper lip and brow-line, even on the clouded, rainiest of days.

But I won't let them see me sick. Some people would think its valiant, to take pain straight up in the confines of seeming indifference. But maybe it's truly cowardice, that I can't even tell my loved ones that I may be dying of something I can't possibly fight. Maybe it's cowardice that couldn't keep me going if I saw them cry, if I saw my own desperation reflected back at me in the faces of those who see me as invincible.
So I fight the pain alone and it makes it easier.

I won't let him see me sick. I would die first. I would die before I saw contempt in his eyes, saw the hate fill his face as he realized all the frailty he'd placed me above was just a human reality neither of us could help. I want to be all that I see myself as when I look at him. To everyone else, I'm Bulma. To Vegeta, I'm more in his eyes than I've ever thought I could be.

Maybe that is real love. When being around that person makes you stronger and smarter and more beautiful than you've ever felt in your entire life.

I turned the page to the next entry, seeing the trembling of my fingers as I did so.

The doctors informed me that I needed to tell my family, that I needed to have others aware of what I was going through. Fat chance. Why not just say you wanted someone to monitor the inevitable demise of the great Bulma Briefs, the enigmatic mind that fell from a stupid tumor? A tiny growth, a tiny piece of gray shit, growing in my brain, could end my life. The brain I always let myself fall into narcissism over, the brain that held more power than any bra or makeup or new hairstyle; the soul reason I was never a stereotypical female nor limited to the tiny provisions of human thinking.

I won't fall to this. I cannot fall.

Perhaps it is, indeed, the human in me that will not let such a pathetic thing end the story of me. I will go down fighting. I will go without regret, without animosity towards a life I was meant to live, that for no real reason was cut short.

Vegeta still seems entirely oblivious, and I'm grateful for it, if for nothing else. My acting skills have preceded me, though his comment on my wearing too much makeup struck a cord today. But I thank the female facade, the charade that hides the sickness; the rogue that kisses sunken cheeks and the foundation that hides the blackness beneath my eyes. I thank the red lipstick that reigns above a pale mouth and the clothes that seem to hide my shrinking body.

He hates my hair and I nearly laughed, in spite of a very dark premonition that has befallen us all in the form of a handsome, purple haired young man. "What have you done with yourself?" He spat so hatefully, making me shrink away as he examined threads of blue plastic placed upon my head in obnoxious curls that damn near resembled a fro. I wanted to be awful with him, to smack him in the face and let all my rage at fate be pent up in the palm of my hand as I did. So he could feel this, so he could understand the sickness in my gut, or the vomit constantly in my toilet; so that he could cry beside me in the moments I pounded the soft side of my fist against tile, wailing away the hours after chemo, wailing away the pain and sadness of a dying body.

I wanted to hate him so capably, for not having walked beside me, for not feeling the helplessness as I tried to match my hair color to ugly, false wigs. I wanted him to stand beside me, with his face a scowl, a mask over rage-filled tears that threatened to break over my papery cheeks as I covered the thinning strands of lifeless blue on my head.

I guess I became a real woman the moment I saw it, my beautiful hair, tangled amongst the lines of a shower drain. I fell back against the shower tile, feeling the coldness slide along my back as I collapsed into the tub, sobbing like a broken hearted teenager as I hugged the clumps to my bare chest, bawling until the chemo had stolen my strength and will enough to do so.

Please don't let Vegeta find out. Please let me live through this and continue life in the secret that I was strong enough to beat something on my own.

The doctors tell me that writing my feelings is a good way to vent them, if I still continue on with the determination to beat this without the others knowing. "You need to release this. Emotionally as well as physically, you're zapped of your power. Cry, cry and write and scream and do whatever you need to try to stand up again."

Sometimes, just getting out of bed is the hardest part of my day, though I never recall before this having particular difficulty with such. Funny that now, trivial things are more important than anything. Movies tell you that, but it's true. I don't really feel the need to go to places I've never been before or accomplish things I didn't when I was healthy. I just sit sometimes, for hours, contemplating the best times of my life and really feeling guilty that most of them were spent with the one person I avoid most these days. I'm grateful that he respects my secrecy, that he isn't constantly hollering, demanding my attention as he used to. He seems to spend a great deal of time training either alone or with Goku, their moments with each other another language that I guess I'll never understand.
I remember the first time he nearly killed himself in the gravity chamber, how long the run had seemed on weak legs as I went to him, lifting him with arms that seemed to be made of wrapping paper. He glared at me, not wanting my help. I guess I respected that, much as it didn't seem that way, understanding this odd connection we shared: the incessant need to pick OURSELVES up.

I wanted to be awake when he came to, to scold him for scaring me, for ruining my hard work. But the chemo, the cruel reality that it was, stole my power once again and I fell upon my face, right on the desk next to him, deep in sleep.

When I awoke, he still laid there, his face a mask of confusion as he gazed at me, eyebrows slightly upturned for once. My breath caught because I had fallen so deeply asleep, when I was naturally a light sleeper, wondering how long his keen eyesight had fallen over my sinking features, how long his eyes had examined the once beautiful face that now resembled a porcelain doll: false, fake, created.

It was such an odd look he gave me, his body for once not fighting the tiredness within it, nor the IV's in his arms or the mask on his face. It was as though, for a moment, he let himself contemplate the reality I was going through, the very real probability that I was keeping a very serious secret from him, when normally, I guess we shared damn near everything with each other.

I gazed into his eyes, feeling so naked, so fucking ugly as he gazed at me. I wanted to curse the chemo for taking away my youth, my natural brilliance. And then of course, I wanted to curse myself for being so fucking insecure that I was quickly resembling a normal woman, something I never really wanted to be.

"I've been spending a lot of time with Kakarot," He told me, strangely enough. I watched his immaculate features, watched how illness hadn't sucked away all the beauty as it had with me. "I've been away a lot, I know."

I nodded to him, wanting to will away the awkwardness that was so unusual for us. He knew. By God, he must have known.

I realized something, something that maybe I would have missed had I not been paying more attention. He had stayed. His body and his will were naturally intact, despite the seriousness of his injuries and he was more than capable of getting out of bed and leaving me to my slumber. But he'd stayed and now, it was as though he was telling me he would stay put even longer, if I asked it of him. His back lay against the pillows comfortably, as though he had no real intention of leaving them anytime soon, as though telling me, he was here, he had no place special to be and that if I needed him, we could stay in that room forever until we were both ready to stand on our own and exit.

I made myself not cry in the realization, so tempted to push my body into standing, hurl a thousand tears from my bloodshot, tired eyes, and collapse in his arms while I wailed away so much emptiness and hurt. I wanted to tell him how much pain I felt, how much I just wanted to die, to fucking die because I was so sick. I wanted him to hold me like I knew my mother would if I let her, to wash away the pity from his eyes as I told him I was getting better, that I'd keep on fighting and that I knew now, that I had the strength, the real strength to keep on going; not because I insisted I did, but because.... he believed I did.

I nodded him on, telling him to be careful, entirely intent on scolding him later because I knew he wouldn't be. But when he left the room, muscles straining against wounds, breath hitching as he gathered his strength, I knew we'd both be ok. I knew he understood, to some extent, the power behind my secret and the will to keep it to myself. It was something only he would ever respect because he knew that like me, there was only a reason to stand if you were the one that made it so. Arms around you could place your feet on the ground but unless YOU had the strength to keep upright, they could only haul you up time and time again until you made it happen on your own.

So he left and I watched him go, wondering if the amazing amount of thanks within my heart was indeed, powerful enough to have reached him, to have touched him. He gave me the strength to believe in myself.. because he believed in me.