Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Iterations ❯ Alienation ( Chapter 8 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

By: Cantare

My latest joke of a relationship is finally over, and I actually have a veritable reason for it.

Dani brought up the idea of having children. Stopped me right in my tracks as I was walking her home.

I'd excused her stupidity for long enough, but I couldn't overlook plain insanity. For a second I dreaded that she'd secretly gone off the pill and was already pregnant. For a second I even considered killing her. When I get agitated, Saiyan instinct overrides more civilized options.

But she assured me she was just thinking. “Thinking.” I heard her out for a few minutes. She'd apparently always wanted to have a baby before she hit age thirty. That was news to me; one of the reasons I had decided to date her in the first place was she didn't want to get married or have a family. I had the sickening revelation that she was like my mother, adamantly set on staying unmarried and unfettered through her young professional life, and then suddenly deciding that her lifelong dream was to rock a cradle.

But what really clinched it was when Dani said she thought I'd make the perfect father; I was caring, rich, compassionate, rich, and patient, and rich.

I told her it was over right then and there, in civil but utterly direct words.

I'd rather not talk about how she reacted. I have a bad feeling that I'm going to need to call my lawyer just for damage control. But it'll pass soon enough. I'm sure with her beauty and the money I lavished on her over the past several months, she'll easily find some other man to father her kid.

Poor kid. I just shudder thinking about it. Dani would make a worse mother than my own. And I'd fare only slightly better than my father.

I wouldn't want anyone to suffer through being my child, or more specifically, having any amount of Saiyan blood in their veins. My own childhood is a case in point.

My first memory is of killing one of the family cats. It's rather fuzzy, but I remember the strange sound the calico made as it squirmed in my chubby hands, trying to claw at me with only three paws. I remember laughing. There was a lot of blood. Soon after that, I heard my grandma screaming as she ran across the living room toward me. I don't remember how the episode ended.

A little after that, I remember that every morning my mother strapped some kind of metal belt around my waist before putting on my diaper. I hated it because it made all my movements slow and sluggish (i.e. normal human speed) and it seemed to drain my energy. But once it was on, I couldn't get it off. When I was three, my father had a serious argument with her about it and ended up leaving the house for several days. Nonetheless, the belt stayed on until the first day of school, when my mother judged I was ready to behave.

At that time I vented my natural penchant for violence on the myriad toys my mother threw together for me. They were mostly robots made of reinforced steel. But she and my grandparents reminded me every day that I wasn't supposed to play rough with actual people because I'd hurt them. I listened to them, but never really understood why. It didn't seem wrong to hurt someone else if I could and felt like it, especially because I didn't mind getting hurt myself.

I endured a full lecture before my first day of kindergarten. Even at that age, my memory was impeccable, and I was bored out of my mind as my mother reiterated everything she had ever said about being nice to other kids, playing gently, and not telling anyone I was Saiyan, even though I was super special and strong and should be proud to be Saiyan. She didn't have to worry; I knew the rules and what I was supposed to do. The first month went by without a hitch.

It was a random day after school in the fall when I broke the rules.

My grandma was late to pick me up for some reason. I ended up waiting outside on the playground with another boy. We were on the seesaw, and I was quickly getting bored. The seesaw was made of wood, not reinforced steel, and I felt confined, as I did every day sitting in a snug, brightly painted classroom with coloring books and toys made out of flimsy plastic.

On a whim, I decided to just sit with my feet planted on the ground and let the boy—I guess he was my friend at the time—hang out on the raised end of the wooden board. He was annoyed and tried to push his weight down so I'd lift off the ground and the inane seesaw movement could continue. I didn't budge an inch. Like a typical child, he started whining that it wasn't fair instead of noticing that something was inherently wrong with the situation.

Just for the hell of it, I refused to move for several minutes, forcing him to sit up there. He was too scared to jump down or try to crawl down the seesaw toward me. I knew what cowardice was; my father had pounded its meaning into my head since he had first started paying attention to me. The kid started begging after he was done whining, a coward through and through. He frankly sickened me. Why hadn't he made any threats? I'd just challenged him, and he wasn't fighting back at all.

I finally let him down because his sniveling got annoying. He jumped back from the seesaw as if I'd detach it and hit him in the face with one end. I had half a mind to do it before he suddenly ran up to me and punched me in the gut.

I laughed. Maybe he wasn't such a coward after all. I remembered my mother's words though—no hurting other people. I'd only broken a minor rule so far, something about being nice to other kids. So I didn't fight back as he hit me again, apparently mad that I hadn't let him down for five minutes.

Then he asked me a question, his reddened face scrunched up in childish anger. “Why'd you do that?”

I remember the exact inflection of his voice; the question stuck with me over the years. It's quite a relevant question, though oftentimes the only answer I can give is a shrug.

But my answer that day surprised me just as much as it surprised my friend. “I'm an alien.”

I felt the light-headed flutter of having done something taboo, and it felt good even though I technically hadn't broken a rule; I hadn't told the boy exactly what race of alien I was. And my answer made perfect sense to me, even though the question was why, not how.

The kid scoffed at me, obviously disbelieving. I said I was serious. He said aliens weren't real. We could have argued forever the way little kids argue until their parents drag them apart or one of them starts crying. But there was no point when I could prove my words right on the spot.

“Give me your hand.”

He looked wary, backing away a few steps even as I walked toward him, my own hand extended forward.

“Just give me your hand.”

“Why?”

“I'll prove to you that I'm an alien.”

“You're stupid! Aliens aren't real!”

I smiled. My mood was lifting for some reason. I realized my hearing had grown sharper all of a sudden; I could make out the scrape of individual leaves against the ground in the breeze, the faint crunch of tires on a gravel driveway down the street. I focused on the boy's face and smelled ripening fear, and I didn't feel bored anymore.

“You can't know aliens aren't real if you don't have proof,” I said.

“But I know that aliens aren't real,” he retorted, falling back on what I would later recognize as circular reasoning.

I stepped toward him at what I thought was a normal speed, but the look of surprise on his face told me I had moved too fast for him to see. I took one of his hands in my own and before he could even squirm, I snapped his forearm between my thumb and two fingers.

The details following that moment aren't central to my point. The kid went to the hospital, healed in a few months, my mother shelled out a lot of hush money to avoid a lawsuit, and I transferred schools. The belt went back on, and my mother began a draconian mental conditioning program to weed out the Saiyan in me, even as my father continued training me and feeding my hunger for violence.

Years later as I sat in the gravity room nursing a broken leg, I recalled that day in kindergarten. My father's parting words suddenly made sense, when he'd told me to observe myself in order to understand evil.

I think that moment in the gravity room was the beginning of my age of accountability, when I realized the alien part of my blood would always be at war with my humanity, and I would always be a walking moral quandary. Despite my human upbringing, I couldn't deny that I enjoyed pain and violence, especially when I was the one inflicting it. Between kindergarten and seventh grade, I'd just had so much hero lore floating around in my head with meeting Goku and saving the world from Majin Buu that I didn't realize love of pure violence was my true core. Not some silly ideal of heroism or being strong for self-defense. It was love of violence that had led me to tear apart a harmless cat as a toddler and record it as my first memory. And it was love of violence that had led me to snap a kid's arm and smile at the feel of broken bones between my fingers.

We're always the most honest and genuine when we're children, because we don't yet see a reason to hide or deny something about ourselves from ourselves. For human children, that's fine. At worst, a kid will feel perfectly justified stealing another kid's crayon or shoving someone on the playground. For Saiyan children in a human society, it's plainly dangerous. People would say it's abnormal, or alien.

So any child of mine would make a terrible person, even as a quarter-Saiyan. I'm not using the word in too much of a derogatory fashion here; I just mean he'd be terrible by society's standards. Likewise, to be an alien isn't insulting or shameful in my eyes. It's just a fact of life, like one's skin color.

The bad thing about being alien, though, is that alienation inevitably follows.