Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Perfection ❯ Chapter 9 ( Chapter 9 )
[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]
By: Todesengel_ 
"Well hello gorgeous."
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Hentai / Horror / Psychological | Type: Yaoi | Uploaded On: 04.19.2006 | Pages: 3 | Words: 3.8K | Visits: 435 | Status: Completed
"Well hello gorgeous."
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Hentai / Horror / Psychological | Type: Yaoi | Uploaded On: 04.19.2006 | Pages: 3 | Words: 3.8K | Visits: 435 | Status: Completed
My chest felt so heavy that I slumped backwards, nearly falling off the stump that held me. Weight was on my chest, my heart feeling as though every beat was pushing up tons of cold rock. I searched frantically through the papers, praying there was more or even, (in a very human means of self consolation), praying he would have written that it was all just a big joke, ha ha.
But that page wasn't there.
I felt tears contort behind my eyes and I let out a soft cry of frustration. I let the papers fall, steadying myself before just slumping to the ground as my knees could no longer hold my weight.
They were gone.
I looked upwards as tears bled into my eyes, my blinking rapid as I tried to hold them down. How could this have happened? I'd left a world where I'd virtually broken my family's heart for selfish means, taken them both for granted because I wanted more and now? I came to a world where someone that was virtually "me" had been destroyed by watching them die. Did they have that much power over me? Or was that just another difference between me and Kakarot?
Things began to slowly make sense and I wasn't given the warm shield of confusion anymore. The clearer things got, the colder the world around me seemed.
I had done this. This was MY fault.
I had wished away Kakarot's one link to who he truly was. I'd taken away the one person that could teach him the strengths AND the limitations of being Saiyan. With only Radditz's crude knowledge to guide him, Kakarot had begun to believe that he was supposed to be a monster, SUPPOSED to have conquered the human world. Now, at odds with his original creation, he stumbled around a world where the injustices seemed too great to handle. He didn't know that Saiyans and humans weren't really so different. He didn't know that both were given the ideas of conscience and soul and had rules of decency to abide by.
He didn't know that Vegeta would eventually form attachments to others that WEREN'T his kind. He wouldn't know that me and Vegeta would eventually fight side by side to protect the humans, including their basic rights and freedoms.
He only knew that he was at complete odds with everyone and everything around him. He only knew that instinctually, he was different. He craved bloodshed (as I did), he was physically infinitely superior and he was originally intended to enslave the human populace.
And when his family died a horrific, cruel death, he only knew that he had the power to correct it from ever happening again.
For a moment, my mind was expanded with one odd thought: we take for granted the impact of others in our lives.
I had never realized that Vegeta's precense in my life had made me who I am today. I had never appreciated the time we spent together or the things he'd taught me; the limitations of who we allow ourselves to become. We COULDN'T just behave like monsters, although we wanted to. We COULDN'T just gorge ourselves in blood and violence, although every fiber in our bodies wanted it.
We weren't monsters; we were men.
I was completely aware of my differences because I had a guide to explain them to me; their feelings, their effects, their weaknesses. I knew how to control my desires because I had someone that was a walking example of how cruelty and violence would eventually take its toll. I learned not to be a monster because I had Vegeta to make my mistakes for me.
Also, I had someone to ultimately beat out my frustrations upon. Our sparring sessions had rarely ever been about becoming stronger (at least in my case) or becoming better. More or less, we just needed to vent out our powers on occasion and knew, that in the world, we were the only two that could ultimately survive each other.
But what if I'd never had that?
I lowered my head. I'd be just like him.
"I thought I'd find you here."
My heart beat so loud I thought my ears would explode, my eyes very slowly creeping to the side. A soft sigh escaped and I felt relief sweep over me.
"Krillin," I breathed, standing up slowly.
I observed him oddly for a moment, wondering what exactly was going through his mind. Another thought had ultimately dawned on me and I was currently mulling over the details of it. Without Vegeta, I wouldn't be half as strong as I was now, NOR would I be able to reach the status of Super Saiyan. Therefore, seeing me with bright white hair, I imagine Krillen would believe me when I confessed that we were two different people.
He was staring at me, perhaps contemplating this very thing in his own mind. I swept a few fingers through my limp bangs, revealing my silvery blue eyes that seemed to set him back a few more moments.
"Do you know who I am?" I asked him finally, keeping my voice low so as to not startle him. At this point, he was just gawking at me, prepared for some sort of attack or something. Very slowly it dawned on him, his head nodding numbly.
"Then you realize I'm not him," I stated the obvious, moving just a little closer to him. "And that you have nothing to fear in me."
He nodded again, looking away from my eyes (that apparently unnerved him) and clearing his throat.
"I don't really know what to think," He admitted. "You'd imagine that after ten years, the impossible wouldn't seem so impossible but it does. You're here, and I feel 'him' over there. Yet you're the same guy or at least you look that way. The other night," He shook his head. "you'll have to forgive Yamcha. He hasn't been on the good side of Kakarot in a while. You just scared us is all. But I knew," He looked up into my eyes, which might have been painful considering his size. "I knew you were different. I felt it. You aren't the same guy."
"No." I shook my head. "We're not."
I paused, gazing around me.
"Krillin," I breathed almost painfully. "What has happened here? I don't understand."
He lowered his head, eyes on the ground.
"Terrorists," He whispered the word like he hated it. "let loose a stream of rats, carrying the Ebola virus, right into a series of schools."
I blinked hard, not wanting to really listen but knowing I had to. Like being a cancer patient and realizing they're about to tell you that you're going to die; knowing you had to hear, but hating every second of it.
"Gohan caught it," He continued, sentences clipped. "gave it to ChiChi. And Goku.... er...." He faltered. "Kakarot as he calls himself now, sat in that house with them for 16 days, more or less alone while they died. I guess it ruined him. Or whatever man he'd let himself be for so long. But let's not talk here." He glanced around. "Too many old ghosts."
It was an odd thing for such a logical man to say and I wondered suddenly what ten years of horrors had done to all of my friends. Who were dead? Who were alive? Who had gone insane? Who was tottering like Krillin was?
"Krillin," I asked before we took to the sky. "how did you know for sure it wasn't Kakarot when I came to the house? You just felt it?"
He nodded.
"That, and something else," He said, levitating now. "something you said."
"What was that?" I asked, now curious.
"You said the word "Vegeta"," he said. I was too astonished to even ask how he knew that name, rising with him into the sky.
"So?" I asked, flying next to him, careful to keep my power level as low as I could.
"So, it's a word I've heard him use before," He answered, being too cryptic for my frustration to handle.
"Krillin," I snapped, trying to keep calm. "Stop with the puzzles. I wake up in crazy land, get attacked by my friends, find out the whole world is basically enslaved by uhhh.. ME... I don't exactly need you holding shit back ok?"
He actually smiled, a sideways grin on his mouth appearing and then vanishing in a period of about .7 seconds.
"You used to say that name in your sleep," He said, faltering for a moment. "I mean, Kakarot did. Before all this." He shrugged. "He would be in deep sleep, thrashing around, screaming the word "Vegeta" over and over again. In the morning, I'd ask him about it and it seemed like he couldn't even remember having said it. Only, he was especially irritable about it, something that in those days, was rare. Like he hated me even saying the word or something."
I just blinked, not responding. I didn't want to. There was one more hilarious little detail to this "Soap Opera in Crazy Town" that I didn't want to reveal: the fact that all this, in more ways than one, was entirely my fault.
We arrived at the strange little home about a half hour later, the sun slightly setting in the sky. I had, against my will, taken into appreciation the sheer difference in the world that I had left and the one that Kakarot reigned now. The colors of the sky were more beautiful here, untainted by pollution or populated areas. Every bit of wild life I had seen on the way here had been running about carelessly, staring up at us in sheer curiosity, rather than fear of what monstrosities we would rained down upon them. This world was far more beautiful and improved than the one I came from, despite the price paid.
Yamcha was sitting inside, pointer finger still itching around the trigger of his massive gun, the barrel staring right at me despite Krillin's attempts to have him lower it. His beady black eyes were on me constantly, watching every movement I made. I slowly sat, my hands where he could see them, my cool stare meeting his.
"You know," I said casually, my pride getting the best of me. "I could crush that stupid thing before you even realized I moved. It really is pointless."
He shrugged, eyes never leaving mine.
"Yeah," He admitted. "But from past experience, I know you don't exactly like the feeling of hot metal in your chest. So for now, let's stick to the basics, like, why are you here?"
Krillin had taken a seat next to his friend, rolling his eyes.
"Oh geez Yamcha," he spat. "Give the whole 007 thing a rest eh?"
"Yeah," Yamcha was quick to hiss back, eyes blazing. "And the last time I did that, THIS mother fucker," he lifted the gun towards me, "slit my fucking throat! Or didn't you recall?"
Krillin just sighed, lifting his hands in a dramatic gesture. He looked at me, an apologetic grin on his mouth.
"We all tried to stop Kakarot," He explained, fingers curling over the wooden table-top. "When we realized what he was doing, we all tried our best to first talk him out of it and then....." He trailed off.
"And then all hell broke loose," Yamcha finished for him. "And YOU tried to kill us all. Fucking spun Krillin's destructo disk right at my throat you God damn PSYCHO!"
I closed my eyes, exasperated.
"Yamcha," I said simply. "I'm not him. So shut up."
He frowned, eyebrows together as he huffed, standing up and leaving the room much to my satisfaction.
"He always did listen to you," Krillin smiled slightly. "Despite everything, he still does."
"Tell me everything," I told him simply, moving my elbows over the table. "Tell me what happened."
"We tried to talk calmly to him," Krillin shrugged. "We spat out a thousand of the usuals, "they're in a better place now", "they're at peace", "you'll see them again". But it didn't work," He hung his head. "you can't heal a broken heart with words. You can't convince a person that time is going to erase the pain they're feeling. Everything that Kakarot thought he knew about life was destroyed. His basic 'faith in humanity' was crushed and he only knew that something horrible had happened and that he had the power to stop it.
"Sometimes I think life was so much easier when we had one big bad guy to focus on. With all humans seeing the ultimate evil, they stopped caring so much about the petty things. They had one united enemy and so they forgot petty squabbles amongst each other and banned together to stop that enemy.
"But once the big bads stopped coming, once the world was so-called 'at peace', it was worse than ever before. Kakarot gazed around himself with new eyes, without ignorance or naivety which, I'm sorry to say, but was something you guys always had to an extent. But imagine waking up from that one day and seeing a world where people unleashed evil on school kids just to make a point. Imagine gazing around you at a seemingly Godless world and knowing you had the power to stop all that.
"There is passion behind the man, I know that much. He sees a fantastical world created in time, where there isn't death and destruction. He sees this dreamlike state of mankind where people don't murder or rape or steal or any of the things that are, as I grow older and learn, basically what humans do. He wants to end all that. He wants to restore simplicity to the world, taking away our privileges of technology and restoring balance to creation.
"Medical resources are becoming nonexistent unless supervised by him. He saw a world where overpopulation was sucking away the price of human life. With so many medical ways to cure basic human sickness, people were living longer than they should have, reproducing longer than was natural. Children were having children and abandonment and abuse were prevalent everywhere he looked. So via Bulma, he created a means of making women sterile until the age of 18, to eradicate the problem of underage pregnancy.
"Women are given a shot at birth and remain unable to produce children until they are 18 years old, where another shot awakens their abilities to spawn. A massive blood search was conducted around year three, where everyone found with sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS, HIV, Herpes and anything else virtually incurable were tattooed, so as to extinguish the infected from the uninfected. Red symbols were placed directly on their hands and wrists, to show whether or not they were deemed "sick". And then, soldiers were dispersed, collecting the infected and shipping them away to the "Factories". Thus, sexually transmitted disease was, more or less, wiped out.
"He's a genius. A very sick, moral-less genius, but one either way. He does what he sees as necessary to improve human life, even if that means ending it."
"But what about Bulma!" I insisted, hating the fact that I agreed with some of what Kakarot had done. "Surely she wouldn't have such a part in all this. It doesn't make sense!"
The saddest look crossed Krillin's eyes his face drained from color. My heart started to beat hard as he stood up, walking towards the stove and putting on a kettle of water for tea. He just stood there, bent against the stove and watching the water spin in the pan. A thousand sadness-ess seemed to build in his eyes and he just gazed down, lost in them.
I watched him for a while, my patience running thin.
"It was about year five," He spoke solemnly, eyes still on the stove. "You two had only been married for about a year."
"Me and BULMA?!" I exclaimed, nearly falling over the table. He glanced at me, a very cool smile on his mouth.
"Yeah," He nodded. "It was hard for the rest of us to understand. I mean, it was no secret that Bulma always loved you, always stayed single, always kept," He lowered his voice glancing to the side. "always kept Yamcha at such an arm's reach. Even with you married, it seemed like the only times I really saw her smile were when you'd come to visit. Maybe that's why she always complained so much when you DID visit that you didn't enough!" He chuckled slightly.
I was too overwhelmed to give him the satisfaction of a laugh.
"Finally," He continued in a melancholy voice. "after enough years had passed, after the initial wounds of his family's death had somewhat subsided, he married her. I think things were probably good for some time, Kakarot's absence from the fields a welcome break. He didn't "check up" on anything and though work quotas were virtually never met, he didn't seem to care. They spent their time together, dwelling in whatever castle suited them for the time and things seemed to be going alright. But know this," he looked at me seriously. "as much as Bulma loved him, he NEVER loved her."
I wanted to disagree with this, keeping my mouth shut forcefully. How did HE know?
"He was using her," He explained. "She couldn't love enough for both of them. Kakarot wanted the world, and as sometimes happens, once he had it, he needed more. He couldn't just control; he had to control with fear. They couldn't just bow... no, they had to tremble. It seemed like he looked all around the world and every face he saw was the man that killed his family. He hated so completely that he lost himself to it. She just couldn't love him that much.
"It wasn't until she visited a "Factory" that she became broken. She, like some of the populace, still had believed they were simple rest homes for the sick and elderly, places for the sexually transmitted disease victims to live and die together with others that would understand their pain. She didn't realize they were heavily guarded assembly lines for killing people efficiently. But when she saw...." He closed his eyes. "She realized that in every endeavor to help Kakarot, she'd been aiding in a million people's deaths. It killed her Goku; it completely destroyed her."
I bowed my head, my eyes hurting from staring so long. We sat for a moment in the silent contemplation of the past, my mind seeing what he described and his own, reliving the horrors again.
"I remember the night she saw it," He said finally. "I can't forget that look in her eyes. Like every good thing in the world had just died. She told me, and now that I think on it, it was an odd thing to say but she said to me, in a voice that hardly even sounded like hers, "Krillin. I can't see colors anymore." And then she went to face him. I just stood out there Goku. Like a fucking coward, I just listened to it. The way she screamed and sobbed, so horrified by the person she had fallen for.
" "I loved you," She just kept screaming. "God, I loved you more than the world."
"I didn't know what to make of it, hearing them go back and forth like I've never heard a man and woman scream. He just kept saying it was necessary. That he would have it. That he WOULD have perfection. I'd seen her running, my eyes scanning her movements while I held my heart in my throat, watching as she went to one of the main labs and attempted to burn the entire thing to the ground.
"What was probably 20 years of work she tried to completely consume in fire, screaming the words "I love you but you can't have perfection" over and over as she sobbed like a mad woman. And then,...." He looked away.
I goaded him onwards with my eyes, insisting that he finish.
"And then I was too late." He told me. "He killed her."
I flew back from the table, knocking over my chair in my haste.
"No," I breathed, shaking my head. "No."
He just shook his head, burying his face in his hands.
"I just watched Goku," He sighed. "As he crushed her skull. She kept screaming the whole time, even as brains and blood were falling down her face, spilling on her clothes. She just screamed. Goku," He looked up. "I don't know if he meant to kill her or not. What I do know... is this...
"When she died, so did any lingering humanity within Kakarot."
A knock sounded at the door, Krillin sighing testily as he stood up. The sun was completely down now, the candle lighting flickering and reflecting around the room. I gazed at Krillin, still standing from my ultimate shock at his story.
"Neighbor kids," He told me, shrugging. "One of them was over the other day when you gave us... quite a scare."
I smiled slightly, remembering the little girl shivering in Krillin's arms.
The smile faded when he opened the door, two glimmering, piercing eyes glaring at us from the shadows around a beautiful face. I was smashed against the wall, my head breaking through the clay, embedding my back and shoulders as I was pressed hard against it. Pressure was around my throat, an arm strangling me as I gazed up in horror and shock.
I blinked hard, veins protruding from my temples as I took him in, the blackness around his eyes apparent from heavy drug use, his mouth so close to mine. He breathed me in, a psychotic smile on his mouth as he rubbed the tip of his nose against the softness of my cheek.
"Well," Kakarot breathed sexually. "Hello gorgeous."
But that page wasn't there.
I felt tears contort behind my eyes and I let out a soft cry of frustration. I let the papers fall, steadying myself before just slumping to the ground as my knees could no longer hold my weight.
They were gone.
I looked upwards as tears bled into my eyes, my blinking rapid as I tried to hold them down. How could this have happened? I'd left a world where I'd virtually broken my family's heart for selfish means, taken them both for granted because I wanted more and now? I came to a world where someone that was virtually "me" had been destroyed by watching them die. Did they have that much power over me? Or was that just another difference between me and Kakarot?
Things began to slowly make sense and I wasn't given the warm shield of confusion anymore. The clearer things got, the colder the world around me seemed.
I had done this. This was MY fault.
I had wished away Kakarot's one link to who he truly was. I'd taken away the one person that could teach him the strengths AND the limitations of being Saiyan. With only Radditz's crude knowledge to guide him, Kakarot had begun to believe that he was supposed to be a monster, SUPPOSED to have conquered the human world. Now, at odds with his original creation, he stumbled around a world where the injustices seemed too great to handle. He didn't know that Saiyans and humans weren't really so different. He didn't know that both were given the ideas of conscience and soul and had rules of decency to abide by.
He didn't know that Vegeta would eventually form attachments to others that WEREN'T his kind. He wouldn't know that me and Vegeta would eventually fight side by side to protect the humans, including their basic rights and freedoms.
He only knew that he was at complete odds with everyone and everything around him. He only knew that instinctually, he was different. He craved bloodshed (as I did), he was physically infinitely superior and he was originally intended to enslave the human populace.
And when his family died a horrific, cruel death, he only knew that he had the power to correct it from ever happening again.
For a moment, my mind was expanded with one odd thought: we take for granted the impact of others in our lives.
I had never realized that Vegeta's precense in my life had made me who I am today. I had never appreciated the time we spent together or the things he'd taught me; the limitations of who we allow ourselves to become. We COULDN'T just behave like monsters, although we wanted to. We COULDN'T just gorge ourselves in blood and violence, although every fiber in our bodies wanted it.
We weren't monsters; we were men.
I was completely aware of my differences because I had a guide to explain them to me; their feelings, their effects, their weaknesses. I knew how to control my desires because I had someone that was a walking example of how cruelty and violence would eventually take its toll. I learned not to be a monster because I had Vegeta to make my mistakes for me.
Also, I had someone to ultimately beat out my frustrations upon. Our sparring sessions had rarely ever been about becoming stronger (at least in my case) or becoming better. More or less, we just needed to vent out our powers on occasion and knew, that in the world, we were the only two that could ultimately survive each other.
But what if I'd never had that?
I lowered my head. I'd be just like him.
"I thought I'd find you here."
My heart beat so loud I thought my ears would explode, my eyes very slowly creeping to the side. A soft sigh escaped and I felt relief sweep over me.
"Krillin," I breathed, standing up slowly.
I observed him oddly for a moment, wondering what exactly was going through his mind. Another thought had ultimately dawned on me and I was currently mulling over the details of it. Without Vegeta, I wouldn't be half as strong as I was now, NOR would I be able to reach the status of Super Saiyan. Therefore, seeing me with bright white hair, I imagine Krillen would believe me when I confessed that we were two different people.
He was staring at me, perhaps contemplating this very thing in his own mind. I swept a few fingers through my limp bangs, revealing my silvery blue eyes that seemed to set him back a few more moments.
"Do you know who I am?" I asked him finally, keeping my voice low so as to not startle him. At this point, he was just gawking at me, prepared for some sort of attack or something. Very slowly it dawned on him, his head nodding numbly.
"Then you realize I'm not him," I stated the obvious, moving just a little closer to him. "And that you have nothing to fear in me."
He nodded again, looking away from my eyes (that apparently unnerved him) and clearing his throat.
"I don't really know what to think," He admitted. "You'd imagine that after ten years, the impossible wouldn't seem so impossible but it does. You're here, and I feel 'him' over there. Yet you're the same guy or at least you look that way. The other night," He shook his head. "you'll have to forgive Yamcha. He hasn't been on the good side of Kakarot in a while. You just scared us is all. But I knew," He looked up into my eyes, which might have been painful considering his size. "I knew you were different. I felt it. You aren't the same guy."
"No." I shook my head. "We're not."
I paused, gazing around me.
"Krillin," I breathed almost painfully. "What has happened here? I don't understand."
He lowered his head, eyes on the ground.
"Terrorists," He whispered the word like he hated it. "let loose a stream of rats, carrying the Ebola virus, right into a series of schools."
I blinked hard, not wanting to really listen but knowing I had to. Like being a cancer patient and realizing they're about to tell you that you're going to die; knowing you had to hear, but hating every second of it.
"Gohan caught it," He continued, sentences clipped. "gave it to ChiChi. And Goku.... er...." He faltered. "Kakarot as he calls himself now, sat in that house with them for 16 days, more or less alone while they died. I guess it ruined him. Or whatever man he'd let himself be for so long. But let's not talk here." He glanced around. "Too many old ghosts."
It was an odd thing for such a logical man to say and I wondered suddenly what ten years of horrors had done to all of my friends. Who were dead? Who were alive? Who had gone insane? Who was tottering like Krillin was?
"Krillin," I asked before we took to the sky. "how did you know for sure it wasn't Kakarot when I came to the house? You just felt it?"
He nodded.
"That, and something else," He said, levitating now. "something you said."
"What was that?" I asked, now curious.
"You said the word "Vegeta"," he said. I was too astonished to even ask how he knew that name, rising with him into the sky.
"So?" I asked, flying next to him, careful to keep my power level as low as I could.
"So, it's a word I've heard him use before," He answered, being too cryptic for my frustration to handle.
"Krillin," I snapped, trying to keep calm. "Stop with the puzzles. I wake up in crazy land, get attacked by my friends, find out the whole world is basically enslaved by uhhh.. ME... I don't exactly need you holding shit back ok?"
He actually smiled, a sideways grin on his mouth appearing and then vanishing in a period of about .7 seconds.
"You used to say that name in your sleep," He said, faltering for a moment. "I mean, Kakarot did. Before all this." He shrugged. "He would be in deep sleep, thrashing around, screaming the word "Vegeta" over and over again. In the morning, I'd ask him about it and it seemed like he couldn't even remember having said it. Only, he was especially irritable about it, something that in those days, was rare. Like he hated me even saying the word or something."
I just blinked, not responding. I didn't want to. There was one more hilarious little detail to this "Soap Opera in Crazy Town" that I didn't want to reveal: the fact that all this, in more ways than one, was entirely my fault.
We arrived at the strange little home about a half hour later, the sun slightly setting in the sky. I had, against my will, taken into appreciation the sheer difference in the world that I had left and the one that Kakarot reigned now. The colors of the sky were more beautiful here, untainted by pollution or populated areas. Every bit of wild life I had seen on the way here had been running about carelessly, staring up at us in sheer curiosity, rather than fear of what monstrosities we would rained down upon them. This world was far more beautiful and improved than the one I came from, despite the price paid.
Yamcha was sitting inside, pointer finger still itching around the trigger of his massive gun, the barrel staring right at me despite Krillin's attempts to have him lower it. His beady black eyes were on me constantly, watching every movement I made. I slowly sat, my hands where he could see them, my cool stare meeting his.
"You know," I said casually, my pride getting the best of me. "I could crush that stupid thing before you even realized I moved. It really is pointless."
He shrugged, eyes never leaving mine.
"Yeah," He admitted. "But from past experience, I know you don't exactly like the feeling of hot metal in your chest. So for now, let's stick to the basics, like, why are you here?"
Krillin had taken a seat next to his friend, rolling his eyes.
"Oh geez Yamcha," he spat. "Give the whole 007 thing a rest eh?"
"Yeah," Yamcha was quick to hiss back, eyes blazing. "And the last time I did that, THIS mother fucker," he lifted the gun towards me, "slit my fucking throat! Or didn't you recall?"
Krillin just sighed, lifting his hands in a dramatic gesture. He looked at me, an apologetic grin on his mouth.
"We all tried to stop Kakarot," He explained, fingers curling over the wooden table-top. "When we realized what he was doing, we all tried our best to first talk him out of it and then....." He trailed off.
"And then all hell broke loose," Yamcha finished for him. "And YOU tried to kill us all. Fucking spun Krillin's destructo disk right at my throat you God damn PSYCHO!"
I closed my eyes, exasperated.
"Yamcha," I said simply. "I'm not him. So shut up."
He frowned, eyebrows together as he huffed, standing up and leaving the room much to my satisfaction.
"He always did listen to you," Krillin smiled slightly. "Despite everything, he still does."
"Tell me everything," I told him simply, moving my elbows over the table. "Tell me what happened."
"We tried to talk calmly to him," Krillin shrugged. "We spat out a thousand of the usuals, "they're in a better place now", "they're at peace", "you'll see them again". But it didn't work," He hung his head. "you can't heal a broken heart with words. You can't convince a person that time is going to erase the pain they're feeling. Everything that Kakarot thought he knew about life was destroyed. His basic 'faith in humanity' was crushed and he only knew that something horrible had happened and that he had the power to stop it.
"Sometimes I think life was so much easier when we had one big bad guy to focus on. With all humans seeing the ultimate evil, they stopped caring so much about the petty things. They had one united enemy and so they forgot petty squabbles amongst each other and banned together to stop that enemy.
"But once the big bads stopped coming, once the world was so-called 'at peace', it was worse than ever before. Kakarot gazed around himself with new eyes, without ignorance or naivety which, I'm sorry to say, but was something you guys always had to an extent. But imagine waking up from that one day and seeing a world where people unleashed evil on school kids just to make a point. Imagine gazing around you at a seemingly Godless world and knowing you had the power to stop all that.
"There is passion behind the man, I know that much. He sees a fantastical world created in time, where there isn't death and destruction. He sees this dreamlike state of mankind where people don't murder or rape or steal or any of the things that are, as I grow older and learn, basically what humans do. He wants to end all that. He wants to restore simplicity to the world, taking away our privileges of technology and restoring balance to creation.
"Medical resources are becoming nonexistent unless supervised by him. He saw a world where overpopulation was sucking away the price of human life. With so many medical ways to cure basic human sickness, people were living longer than they should have, reproducing longer than was natural. Children were having children and abandonment and abuse were prevalent everywhere he looked. So via Bulma, he created a means of making women sterile until the age of 18, to eradicate the problem of underage pregnancy.
"Women are given a shot at birth and remain unable to produce children until they are 18 years old, where another shot awakens their abilities to spawn. A massive blood search was conducted around year three, where everyone found with sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS, HIV, Herpes and anything else virtually incurable were tattooed, so as to extinguish the infected from the uninfected. Red symbols were placed directly on their hands and wrists, to show whether or not they were deemed "sick". And then, soldiers were dispersed, collecting the infected and shipping them away to the "Factories". Thus, sexually transmitted disease was, more or less, wiped out.
"He's a genius. A very sick, moral-less genius, but one either way. He does what he sees as necessary to improve human life, even if that means ending it."
"But what about Bulma!" I insisted, hating the fact that I agreed with some of what Kakarot had done. "Surely she wouldn't have such a part in all this. It doesn't make sense!"
The saddest look crossed Krillin's eyes his face drained from color. My heart started to beat hard as he stood up, walking towards the stove and putting on a kettle of water for tea. He just stood there, bent against the stove and watching the water spin in the pan. A thousand sadness-ess seemed to build in his eyes and he just gazed down, lost in them.
I watched him for a while, my patience running thin.
"It was about year five," He spoke solemnly, eyes still on the stove. "You two had only been married for about a year."
"Me and BULMA?!" I exclaimed, nearly falling over the table. He glanced at me, a very cool smile on his mouth.
"Yeah," He nodded. "It was hard for the rest of us to understand. I mean, it was no secret that Bulma always loved you, always stayed single, always kept," He lowered his voice glancing to the side. "always kept Yamcha at such an arm's reach. Even with you married, it seemed like the only times I really saw her smile were when you'd come to visit. Maybe that's why she always complained so much when you DID visit that you didn't enough!" He chuckled slightly.
I was too overwhelmed to give him the satisfaction of a laugh.
"Finally," He continued in a melancholy voice. "after enough years had passed, after the initial wounds of his family's death had somewhat subsided, he married her. I think things were probably good for some time, Kakarot's absence from the fields a welcome break. He didn't "check up" on anything and though work quotas were virtually never met, he didn't seem to care. They spent their time together, dwelling in whatever castle suited them for the time and things seemed to be going alright. But know this," he looked at me seriously. "as much as Bulma loved him, he NEVER loved her."
I wanted to disagree with this, keeping my mouth shut forcefully. How did HE know?
"He was using her," He explained. "She couldn't love enough for both of them. Kakarot wanted the world, and as sometimes happens, once he had it, he needed more. He couldn't just control; he had to control with fear. They couldn't just bow... no, they had to tremble. It seemed like he looked all around the world and every face he saw was the man that killed his family. He hated so completely that he lost himself to it. She just couldn't love him that much.
"It wasn't until she visited a "Factory" that she became broken. She, like some of the populace, still had believed they were simple rest homes for the sick and elderly, places for the sexually transmitted disease victims to live and die together with others that would understand their pain. She didn't realize they were heavily guarded assembly lines for killing people efficiently. But when she saw...." He closed his eyes. "She realized that in every endeavor to help Kakarot, she'd been aiding in a million people's deaths. It killed her Goku; it completely destroyed her."
I bowed my head, my eyes hurting from staring so long. We sat for a moment in the silent contemplation of the past, my mind seeing what he described and his own, reliving the horrors again.
"I remember the night she saw it," He said finally. "I can't forget that look in her eyes. Like every good thing in the world had just died. She told me, and now that I think on it, it was an odd thing to say but she said to me, in a voice that hardly even sounded like hers, "Krillin. I can't see colors anymore." And then she went to face him. I just stood out there Goku. Like a fucking coward, I just listened to it. The way she screamed and sobbed, so horrified by the person she had fallen for.
" "I loved you," She just kept screaming. "God, I loved you more than the world."
"I didn't know what to make of it, hearing them go back and forth like I've never heard a man and woman scream. He just kept saying it was necessary. That he would have it. That he WOULD have perfection. I'd seen her running, my eyes scanning her movements while I held my heart in my throat, watching as she went to one of the main labs and attempted to burn the entire thing to the ground.
"What was probably 20 years of work she tried to completely consume in fire, screaming the words "I love you but you can't have perfection" over and over as she sobbed like a mad woman. And then,...." He looked away.
I goaded him onwards with my eyes, insisting that he finish.
"And then I was too late." He told me. "He killed her."
I flew back from the table, knocking over my chair in my haste.
"No," I breathed, shaking my head. "No."
He just shook his head, burying his face in his hands.
"I just watched Goku," He sighed. "As he crushed her skull. She kept screaming the whole time, even as brains and blood were falling down her face, spilling on her clothes. She just screamed. Goku," He looked up. "I don't know if he meant to kill her or not. What I do know... is this...
"When she died, so did any lingering humanity within Kakarot."
A knock sounded at the door, Krillin sighing testily as he stood up. The sun was completely down now, the candle lighting flickering and reflecting around the room. I gazed at Krillin, still standing from my ultimate shock at his story.
"Neighbor kids," He told me, shrugging. "One of them was over the other day when you gave us... quite a scare."
I smiled slightly, remembering the little girl shivering in Krillin's arms.
The smile faded when he opened the door, two glimmering, piercing eyes glaring at us from the shadows around a beautiful face. I was smashed against the wall, my head breaking through the clay, embedding my back and shoulders as I was pressed hard against it. Pressure was around my throat, an arm strangling me as I gazed up in horror and shock.
I blinked hard, veins protruding from my temples as I took him in, the blackness around his eyes apparent from heavy drug use, his mouth so close to mine. He breathed me in, a psychotic smile on his mouth as he rubbed the tip of his nose against the softness of my cheek.
"Well," Kakarot breathed sexually. "Hello gorgeous."