Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Iterations ❯ Absence: Part II ( Chapter 10 )

There is just one condition—you must write about yourself as well.

Break a leg, son.

It's almost comical how seriously I took my father's advice then as an impressionable twelve year old, still struggling to accept the Saiyan part of me that thrived on violence and pain. I made myself a subject of study, taking note of every time I felt inclined toward an act of selfishness, avarice, narcissism, arrogance, spite, vengeance, jealousy, you name it. In short, I kept a record of my daily “sins,” great and small - and of course they were all small, since I hadn't killed anyone or considered killing anyone like my father had and perhaps still did. But after a few days of that, I found that sins have their own way of magnifying themselves once you fixate on them, like a tick growing to a hundred times its size under a microscope. It was plainly uncomfortable to stare giant ticks in the face every time I opened my journal.

Consequently I adjusted my behavior and tried to be a better person, if only to have less to write down each day. Volunteered to take care of my sister so my mom didn't have to hire a sitter, and bit down on my impatience when she cried for no reason and pissed in her diapers right after I changed them. Helped Goten with his homework and quit calling him a retard fifty times a day. Even let him win some sparring sessions so he could feel better about himself, and didn't say anything snide when he taunted me about his undeserved victories.

My experimental good behavior had the annoying side effect of drawing my mother's adoring attention. Those few weeks were the only time in my life when she called me an angel, once in front of my father, who only smiled darkly and said nothing.

Even with her hands full as a middle-aged mother of an infant, she renewed her interest in me and often left Bra at home just to spend time alone with her “growing boy.” She confided things in me that she never had before, judging I was mature and understanding enough to tolerate the more embarrassing bits that her own mother probably didn't even know. Never mind that I didn't want to hear any of it. The most salient parts I wish I could wipe from my mind were the three times she almost lost her virginity and the one time she did in the back of a Capsule trailer the summer before she met Goku. It all made sense to her to tell me these things before my father got to me with stories of his infinitely more colorful escapades (which I'm sure were the stuff of snuff films and five shades of deranged by Earth standards), as if he would ever waste fifteen minutes scarring me with that information.

I was thirteen when she started on how she met my father, beyond the abridged version I'd heard repeatedly as a child. It was intriguing to find out what exactly got her to chase after a murderous alien, namely the part about Namek, which seemed to be her favorite. He was so confident. Dangerous. Didn't give a damn about anyone, a personal challenge to her if there ever was one.

Around that torturously mind-numbing time in my thirteenth year, I came across deeper and more inflected ideas of good and evil in my ongoing research. I had envisioned good and evil as forces, vague entities with the color of ki auras floating in some black space in the universe. Or sometimes evil was a living thing, insidious and intentional in expanding its territory, like a predator of sorts. It was locked in a war with good, which for some reason felt even more amorphous to me.

Then I read something that pushed such visuals aside. Evil is the absence of good. A privation, not a substance. An emptiness that does expand, but not in the way of living things. A vacuum that moves in naturally when good is ignored.

The full implications became strikingly clear one afternoon on the way to my grandparents' house. We were on an overpass. The car to our right pulled ahead and made to exit just as a jeep was merging onto the highway at twice the speed it should have been. My mom hit the brakes automatically, her high-pitched shriek filling the air as I threw up a ki shield around both of us. The first car veered sharply toward the edge and broke through the rail, then dropped clean out of sight. The jeep screeched across our path and spun around in the left lane, right into oncoming traffic. An SUV slammed into the driver's side at no less than 80 miles an hour. A body flew from the car over the other side of the highway, limbs splayed like a banana peel, dead before hitting the ground.

My mother pulled over and we looked back. She was wringing her hands, trying to keep them still, curses and prayers spilling from her mouth in indiscriminate fashion.

“Holy shit Trunks are you okay? You're okay right baby? Oh my God that was fucking close, what the fuck just happened—”

“It's not a big deal.”

I spoke the words as the realization hit me. She stared at me like the devil had just unpeeled itself Alien-style from an angelic shell.

“We can wish them back with the Dragonballs,” I elaborated.

The line of thought unraveled as quickly in her eyes as the blood pooling on the concrete across the highway. We could undo it with a wish, of course. A few days and this unfortunate accident we'd witnessed would be erased and two victims of tragic deaths would be alive. Consciences would be clear, we'd go on living with a breath of relief. I saw her hesitate nonetheless.

“You're right,” she said, forcing a smile and patting my head as if groping in the dark for a flashlight. “You're so smart, sweetie. That's what we'll do.”

We drove off as the sirens drew near and she glanced constantly in the rearview mirror as if she'd be caught for her cowardice, though she couldn't name exactly what was cowardly about the act. After all, we did gather the Dragonballs and wished the two men back within a week, and erased all public memory and evidence of the event per standard practice.

My father scrutinized us both over dinner the night we returned from the North Pole with the last Dragonball.

“Breaking both legs, aren't you?” was all he said to me on the way out of the kitchen.

A sin of omission is just as wrong as a sin of commission. I had passed the first test of that standard. But now the implications had reared their heads up all at once and stretched across the horizon, as numerous as the obituaries in every newspaper and lists of murders in the police beat and news tickers of disasters halfway across the world and rumors of abuse in neighbors' homes and Nature Channel specials on vanishing species and melting ice caps.

In the instant my father turned his back that night, it was all clear to me, the only path possible and sane and pure cold. I cut across several steps in reaching that destination, logic falling into place as if all the pieces had naturally come assembled as such.

My mother, however, didn't seem to be thinking about it at all. Probably saw it as another routine resurrection in her lifetime monopoly of the greatest game changers in the universe. So I decided to try something.

I waited for the weekend, when she didn't have work as an excuse to cut a conversation short. I woke up early on Sunday and cooked her breakfast, another part of my repertoire of good deeds that had given her so much faith in me. Then I set two magazine articles, both replete with graphic pictures, beside her plate of scrambled egg whites and French toast, and smiled as she walked in.

She kissed me and ruffled my hair, sat down to eat, and paused at the sight of what I had in store for her.

“Trunks, dear, is this for a school report or something?” she said, reaching for the syrup.

“No, I just thought they were interesting.”

“Mm-hmm.” She chewed thoughtfully as she skimmed one article. A look of sympathy crossed her face. “Oh, only ten years old. That's terrible. This is why I got Capsule Corp involved in medical research all those years ago. So many young kids are suffering…”

The pitying look turned troubled as she stared at the other array of pictures. The aftermath of a terrorist bombing in a crowded marketplace. Journalistic standards kept anything too bloody from print, but the dark red streaks on the sidewalks, the stained gloves and harrowed faces of medics on the scene, and the silent wails of mourners kneeling beside covered stretchers painted a more complete picture of tragedy than corpses could.

“The violence never seems to end, does it,” she said sadly. She turned her gaze of compassion on me, brushing back my bangs. “Are you okay, Trunks? Does this bother you?”

“Doesn't it bother you?” I asked.

“Well, yes, of course it does.” The half-lie was clear in her voice. “No decent person could ignore the suffering of other people. It's just so sad, what goes on in our world every day.”

“We don't have to ignore it, do we?”

“Oh sweetie, I know this is hard to deal with sometimes. But you can't predict these things, much less stop them. There's only so much within our control.”

“Really?”

“Yes, there's just no—” She paused, finally realizing that I didn't look sad at all, and she was surely missing something. “Okay, what are you up to, Trunks?”

“This is all within our control, isn't it?” I said.

The smile remained on her face but seemed to lose its luster. “I see. I get what you're asking. The Dragonballs, huh.”

I nodded.

“Well, it's a moot point, since they'll be inactive for a year.”

“But next year there'll still be millions of kids dying from disease and a few thousand dead from terrorist attacks, not to mention all the other shit that happens around the world.”

She flinched, either at the tone of my voice or the fact that I'd cursed. I reminded myself to write that down in my log of sins.

“Trunks, the fact is we can't help everyone,” she said, retreating behind her clinical scientist face. “We help who we can, but it's not our responsibility to erase every bad thing that'll ever happen.”

“But we haven't helped everyone we could have, have we? We've left the Dragonballs inactive for years. The last time we used them before that car accident was to wish for a better spaceship for Dad to train in space.”

She knew she was on the losing side of an argument and didn't keep up the fight. “Alright. So what do you think we should do? Take it upon ourselves to save the world from every little injustice? There are too many problems for the Dragonballs to handle, and they'll just keep springing up.”

“So you can look at this little girl's picture,” I pointed at the first magazine spread, a rail-thin child who'd lost all her hair, cradled in her mother's lap, “and just walk away, even if you had the Dragonballs with you, active, right now.”

She threw up her hands, flustered. “Well when you put it like that—honestly, I don't know what you're getting at. It's a sad story, a very sad story, and maybe, yes, I would help her…ugh, but then you'd just keep asking. It doesn't end, like I said. It just doesn't end.”

“So then what about those two people we wished back?” I pressed.

“What about them?” she said, irritation grinding into her tone. “We saved them and gave them a second chance at life with their families.”

“Why stop there?” I felt like one of those asshole courtroom drama lawyers at that moment, and found it strangely satisfying to cross-examine the much-acclaimed smartest woman in the world.

“Because we were there. We saw it happen and there's responsibility attached to that. Don't ask me to define it, because you were there too and you were the one who suggested using the Dragonballs.”

“I just wanted to see if—”

“You wanted to see if your mother has a heart?” she said, suddenly angry. “Has all this media crap gotten to you too? Let me tell you, it takes more heart than anyone will ever know to run this company and stand every day in front of the world smiling and then come home to keep this family together. I'm not the cold bitch the papers like to paint me as, Trunks, don't you believe it.”

It was an unexpected tangent, a brief unveiling of a dark and grotesque painting I hadn't seen before. Without meaning to, I'd unleashed the cloud of furies that haunted my mother.

“I told you why I went to Namek. Learned an entire alien language and piloted an old wreck of a ship I wasn't even sure would make it into space, risked my life dodging Frieza's minions and your psychopath father, got turned into a fucking frog all for one reason!” She paused to catch her breath. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “It was to bring Yamucha back. He's all I cared about. I just wanted him back! It was a completely selfish wish, and completely justified.”

It's hard to know what to do in the silence that follows a tirade, especially one that doesn't make sense.

“So, what you're saying is—” I started.

“You use the Dragonballs for people you care about. Not for strangers. Love is selfish, Trunks. That's the plain truth and it's nothing to be ashamed about.”

I pretended to consider it a moment, not wanting her to implode. “Okay, but what about—” Everyone killed by Cell? Everyone Dad killed at the World Martial Arts Tournament? The entire world after Majin Buu's rampage? “—those two guys?”

She was going to implode, I knew it. So I answered for her.

“It's about guilt, too, right? Guilt and selfishness.”

She sat there and steamed for a long while, closed her eyes to rein in her temper, and opened them again with forced serenity.

“That's right. You're very smart, sweetie. You've won the argument, now will you let Mommy get back to her breakfast?”

I nodded and gathered up the articles, went back to my room quietly like I was the loser of this odd philosophical skirmish. From then on she didn't take me out on any more mother-son bonding trips. Basically slathered all her attention on my sister, aside from handling my education and giving me the professional training I needed to take up the Capsule Corp mantle one day. That was her way of dealing with threats - infantilizing and ignoring them.

I came out of it feeling pretty good about myself, though perhaps I should have been more troubled. My father knew something was different, and I felt his approval like the accolades of a hard-won battle. I now had my own rule of sanity and coldness that I had tested and proven.

Most of the time, don't do anything unto others. When you're feeling selfish, do unto others what you want. Don't bother with guilt.