Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Iterations ❯ Evil ( Chapter 3 )

The only class in school that I ever struggled with was history.

 

Not that it was difficult to pass; all academic study came as easily to me as it did to my mother, who finished university in two years and held two PhDs by age 25.

 

But it distinctly bothered me whenever we discussed war history. Particularly the Second World War.

 

In middle school, my history teacher gave us a rather bizarre assignment. He was good at coming up with assignments that restless adolescents would enjoy or at least find tolerable. We were reading excerpts from Dante's Inferno at the time, that brilliant epic that made me realize humans were much better at coming up with eternal punishments than the inept demons that currently keep hell running, according to Piccolo. Our assignment was to think of three historical figures that deserved to spend eternity in some layer of hell and make up punishments for them as relevant to their sins in life.

 

There was one prohibition: we could not choose Hitler.

 

My teacher found that every year he had assigned this project, the entire class without fail would think of Hitler as the first of the three. I suppose it became boring for him to read after a while. Hitler being burned in a furnace. Hitler being forced to dig trenches and shiver in the cold, dressed in mere rags. Hitler seeing his loved ones torn away from him over and over again and subjected to the tortures to which he had subjected millions of others.

 

I didn't need that prohibition. The first person I thought of wasn't Hitler.

 

It was my father.

 

And it bothered me greatly. I'd never really come to terms with the fact that my father was a mass murderer and probably a rapist, torturer, and who knows what else on the side. I'd found out from a spattering of sources, usually the conversations between one of the Sons and Piccolo, Krillin, or Yamucha. They'd always stop and change the topic when they noticed me listening, but the air of embarrassment would linger.

 

Even from the little information I had heard, I knew that if my father ever met Hitler in hell, he could rightfully laugh in his face. At least Hitler hadn't killed that many people with his bare hands. He had given orders to his underlings and probably signed some papers, and six million had been exterminated that way. My father had killed at least a hundred billion if not more, often in batches of several billion with a single ki blast from his hand.

 

So it bothered me when I went home from school that day and tried to figure out who my three historical `martyrs' of evil would be. I couldn't get over the fact that no human in history could ever compare with my father. But…he couldn't be that evil anymore. He had a wife and a child—me. He didn't kill people now. He had even defended the planet a few times and given his life for it. Sometimes he still beat me to within an inch of my life, but I thought that was normal. Not only because I was used to it, but because that violent part of my nature expected it, even wanted it, so that I could grow stronger.

 

My dad was evil. I kept thinking about it as I did my other homework. At the time I wasn't sure whether to say he `had been' evil and no longer was…which would mean his actions determined whether he qualified as evil, or if he still was evil, just intrinsically. It was a hard philosophical issue to grapple with as a twelve year-old.

 

I watched him every day after I got that assignment. I realized that if anyone in my class had known about his past, then my teacher would have had to make a new prohibition: no writing about Trunks' dad. Still, I wanted to know the status of his soul, so to speak, at the present time. My naïve mind thought I could figure it out through observation, like watching a lab rat.

 

Wrong.

 

My father figured out something was up. I supposed I should have been flattered; he spoke to me so little most of the time that I thought he was oblivious to everything in my life. He probably didn't even know my age, let alone what grade I was in.

 

But he sensed me watching him, probably because it fell within the realm of his warrior instincts. He must have felt me watching him not as a scientist watching a lab rat but as an enemy scrutinizing someone he wants to kill.

 

He made me train with him one night in the middle of studying for a test. It was painful, as usual. I tried my best, but of course my thoughts were mostly centered on watching the way his mind worked, not his movements as he gave me a sound beating.

 

He broke my leg, maybe by accident, but I didn't care at the moment. I cursed at him before I could stop myself. Then I froze, knowing what that would earn me.

 

He laughed instead, to my surprise. He laughed and sat down beside me, and made some remark about how his weakling half-human brat was finally showing some Saiyan. The next thing he said to me threw me off even more.

 

“It's a bit early for you to have patricidal thoughts.”

 

He took my silence to mean my vocabulary wasn't expansive enough yet to understand the word he had used.

 

But I understood every word in that sentence perfectly; I was my mother's son, after all. I was silent because I had no idea he would have interpreted my observing him as some kind of desire to kill him.

 

“Let me rephrase that in simpler words for your limited intelligence,” he said disdainfully. “Why do you want to kill me?”

 

I told him I didn't. The thought had never crossed my mind.

 

“You're lying.”

 

I wasn't.

 

He shook his head. “Every Saiyan child is instinctually driven to kill his sire at some point during his coming of age. Usually on the cusp of adulthood. You seem to be an early bloomer.”

 

My response to that soured his mood. I wasn't fully Saiyan.

 

“Of course,” he mused darkly. “Of course…that's why Kakarott's brats haven't tried to kill him either. The human taint.”

 

Questions regarding the nature of evil were spinning in my head again. I had no idea that Saiyans were supposed to kill their parents. Or rather, that the desire to do so was ingrained in their genes.

 

“So then why have you been watching me, boy? Why the sudden fixation?” he asked curiously.

 

I did something he probably didn't expect. I told him the truth.

 

He laughed for a long time. My leg throbbed, and I think he had forgotten about it. Or maybe he just didn't care. He had sustained much worse injuries and had continued fighting, so he probably figured his son, half-human or not, could put up with a single broken bone.

 

“So you want to see if I make the cut, hm?” he said in amusement. “If I'm really as evil as the humans say?”

 

I told him I didn't think he was evil anymore, because he had stopped hurting and killing people. His crimes were in the past, and he had made up for them by sacrificing his life for the Earth.

 

He shook his head again. “You are lying. And your reasoning is irrelevant.”

 

He saw through my words; I didn't actually know whether he was still evil. I definitely didn't think he was good, in any case.

 

“You can write about me for your useless class if you want,” he said easily. I looked surprised. “I doubt your human teacher would believe you if you described my origins and what I've done to merit eternal punishment, but it's your call. There is just one condition—you must write about yourself as well.”

 

I had been keeping up with him so far but was totally lost at that point.

 

“You think evil is defined by actions? Only in part, and only as a manifestation of the will. Why do people commit crimes in the first place? Evil crimes must be conceived and decided upon first. I have stopped killing. Does that mean I have stopped thinking about killing?”

 

I swallowed. My mind was working again, as fast as it always did, and the implications of his questions were branching out before me.

 

He hadn't stopped thinking about killing. That led me to question how often he thought about it still. Several times a day? Whenever he got angry? Or whenever he saw another living, breathing being? Was that how a Saiyan lived? The way that he expected me to live?

 

Hell, he expected me to want to kill him!

 

Was being Saiyan equivalent to being evil?

 

But what did that make me? I was a half-blood.

 

“What are you watching me for? To see if I follow through on any violent inclinations? If I secretly murder humans when no one's looking?” he said with a smile. “I am often tempted. Humans are such annoyances most of the time.”

 

Then he turned the conversation toward me.

 

“Don't waste your time observing me, Trunks. Observe yourself. You'll see why.”

 

He clapped me on the back as he left me in the gravity room. “Break a leg, son.”