Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Sojourn ❯ Abeyance ( Chapter 4 )

Insert standard disclaimer here. I don't own Dragonball Z or any of the characters.

Sojourn, ch 4
Abeyance

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I sang as I worked, though not for pleasure, and none of my heart touched it. The quiet melody poured absently from my throat, faultless in pitch but miserably without soul. I broke the dim, heavy silence only because my mother maintained that the sound of my voice would reach him, and I had lost the will to speak. I could no longer bear to talk to him as though at any moment he would wake and smile, rolling into a stretch that would end with him lying on his side, dark eyes gazing into mine as he replied. Gently, I washed and dried his slack, unresisting limbs, now almost painfully thin and enervated from long unuse. It was as though his body lay slowly dying, the soul already long absent. With no small effort I shook off that morose thought; entertaining such bitter musings brought nothing other than a deep, numbing depression, and I needed to stay focused. I couldn't afford to let despair rule me now.

Finished with that task, I rubbed oil into his skin to keep muscle supple and stimulate sluggish circulation. Luxuries like body lotion and scented oils were becoming nearly impossible to find; I was using plain old olive oil. Gohan might smell like a salad when I was done, but it served its purpose well enough. His thrumming pulse under my fingertips reminded me that there was yet still life in his body, and while there was that, I had hope. Its bright wings carried me somehow through this intolerable waiting, eight endless months of sitting around helplessly while the machine charged again. My life shrunk in upon itself, condensing just to training, eating, and sitting by his side.

The song trailed off as I brooded, leaning back against the wall, hands falling limply in my lap. I stared blankly into nothing for a long moment, until finally I noticed the gooseflesh rising on Gohan's uncovered skin. Hurriedly I pulled the blankets back up over him, cursing at myself for the lapse even as I noted with cold detachment my utter lack of reaction to his nakedness. It still felt faintly wrong to see him so exposed, my fallen teacher, the lover I had only ever chastely kissed before the androids laid him low. But modesty had long ago fallen by the wayside, felled by necessity. His mother and grandfather couldn't be expected to shoulder the burden of all of his care...and doing these small things for him was the only closeness I had anymore. I sat heavily down on the bed next to him and rubbed a tiny bit of balm over his dry lips, kissing them gently.

My heart stopped -- Did he smile? No, it had only been the dance of lambent shadow on his face, misinterpreted by my weary eyes. I rubbed at them tiredly, running my hands through my unkempt hair, the ends of which were still bright red. It was late, and I could no longer keep my eyes open. Snuffing the candle, I curled up next to him, drawing another blanket over myself and pillowing my heavy head on his sunken chest. Twining my fingers through his unresponsive ones, I sighed softly as my thoughts began to drift away, as near to content as I could be in those circumstances. For sometimes, sleeping beside him just so, I dreamed...

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The dream is long and endless. It has no beginning that I can remember, and there seems to be no end soon approaching. I am utterly alone, but mostly unaware of the solitude; my world is total grey oblivion, an infinite vacuum that swallows all sound, light and thought. Those short snatches of time when the fog recedes are filled with the unintelligible murmuring of familiar voices, but there is no time to ponder their meaning before the void sucks me under yet again.

Ah, but sometimes, in the silent dark she comes, her presence an anchor for a breath of coherent thought. I can't seem to speak to her or rouse her from slumber, but I can at least hold her to my heart until the dream steals her again away.

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Where is it?

The only sound that greeted me in reply was the slow, continuous dripping of water tricking down the ruination of mortar and stone. The deep of night rendered the charred wreckage into indistinct looming shapes under the moonless sky -- indistinct for a human, anyway. For my highly augmented eyesight, midnight was as clear as high noon, and for the first time I wished it were otherwise. A sense of sudden, cloying dread rang like a clarion of warning though my head, a desperate tocsin heralding imminent doom. There was something here I did not want to see. No memory of this place sprang to mind, but the dogged impression of familiarity was unshakable. I had been here before...

Of course I had; We had leveled this entire quarter in minutes, at some point. It was only one of many, after all...But no, I had been here before that.

My heart lurched suddenly. There.

Half of a doorway still stood, though the door itself had been torn from the hinges and likely incinerated. One wall remained upright in the center of the carnage, burnt pieces of wallpaper curling in strips on the surface, the color and pattern now totally unidentifiable.

It had been green.

It had been green, and I had been punished once when I was very young, for peeling it off to see what was underneath. I--

Blood-red lightning lanced through my head, ripping away the thought without care for what else was lost. In breathless agony, I pressed my fists to my temples in a vain attempt to hold it together. I shouldn't have come here; what point was there? But since the day that cursed girl had stayed her hand with sudden unfathomable pity behind her eyes, I had been unable to recapture the detached ennui that had sustained me for so long. Her heated words haunted me night and day, relentlessly awakening an insatiable, desperate yearning for knowledge of who I had been and the life now forever lost to me. The tortured unrest and unbearable waking dreams of partial remembrance drove me outside in the middle of countless nights, searching endlessly for something I couldn't name.

But other than that one lone wall, there was nothing left to answer my questions, no clue to be found in what was now mostly just ash and crumbled stone. I put out a hand against it to steady myself, the friable surface falling away to dust beneath my palm.

Wait. Cruel in its flawless clarity, my vision caught an infinitesimal flash of crimson, a tiny red spark against the gloom. Nestled in the ash was a single earring, a plain cabochon ruby set on a gold post, its twin nowhere to be found. Taunting wisps of memory flickered in its scarlet depths, of such a gem on a woman's ear, her steadying shoulder soft against my cheek as her quiet voice soothed away some unseen dream-spawned fright.

Had I still been human I might have wept at the unbelievably bitter irony. If only she had foreseen those monsters who would eventually come, the kinds of horror that reduced the bogeyman of childhood nightmare to just a pale, harmless shade. If only she had known what would become of the children she rocked to sleep -- Had she seen her own death in our eyes, when the end came? Were we laughing all the while?

But as it were, I was not human, and tears were not a thing Gero thought worthwhile to build into his creations, though my eyes burned for the lack. I simply removed the earrings I had been wearing and placed the ruby in my left earlobe. Juuhachi would be sure to comment, but I really didn't care.

Turning to leave, one last unwelcome image came unbidden to my mind: The same woman, standing at the threshold, her face blurred by my fragmented memory but not enough to hide the frustrated hurt and sorrow, the pain in her voice carrying clearly over the pleading cry I could not recall. My last words to her had been something cruel, and I had never been able to take them back, as Gero had found us easy prey that night.

An animal scream tore out of my throat, agonized and primal, and in an involuntary shock of blinding power I incinerated the entire block, the shockwave resonating for miles but taking none of my pain with it. I took no joy in destruction anymore, but what else was there?

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Against a dark sky only beginning to hint at dawn, the bright ball of flame blazed with blinding radiance, greeting me ominously as I stepped outside to begin my matutinal training. It made no sense; it had surely been years since they had destroyed anything in this area, as everything for miles in that direction had long been turned to barren nothingness. Fear ran cold fingers down my spine at the sudden realization of the attack's possible significance. Were they searching for the Capsule Corporation bunker? Hunting us down in a sick game of cat-and-mouse?

Confronting them directly was not an option. I couldn't afford to get killed, not now when I was needed back in the past. Our world was doomed, surely, but I would stop them from wreaking the same havoc in that other, unbelievably elysian time...or I would die trying. Only after that task was done could I risk battle with the cyborgs. For now, I had to bide my time. I wasn't yet strong enough to take them both, and since that last fight I had never seen them alone. Just the same, I had to see what was going on; I couldn't return to the past knowing that the only loved ones left to me were methodically being stalked. I damped down my ki and flew closer, landing well before I was visible to their long-range sight and walking the rest of the way silent as a panther.

It was not hard to find him, though he neither moved nor spoke, and had no discernable ki. He stood dead center in the middle of the blast radius, smoke curling around his still form, utterly still and inexplicably alone.

I stood for a long time watching him, wondering what the hell he was doing. The sun slowly rose in the sky, but he remained totally motionless. Was he broken? Had Gero's perfect creation malfunctioned?

Finally, as he was alone and I could stand no more suspense, I stepped out of the shadows, deliberately making enough noise to be sure that he heard my footfalls, flaring defensively into Super at the last. He turned around slowly, as though either I posed no threat...or he just no longer cared. Frosted blue eyes flashed iridescent aqua as they met my light, the sun reflecting off of a glacier, bright and hard and as bone-chilling cold as a night in the grave.

"You." His voice was completely inflectionless, nearly dead. I stood loosely in a ready stance, awaiting the inevitable attack, but it never came. His gaze unfocused from mine, turning inward toward something I could not see. In the semi-darkness the flickering black of his hair seemed to absorb the light, reflecting none of it back.

As he seemed disinclined to speak, I asked coolly, "Have you run out of things to break? Are you now reduced to revisiting earlier sites of destruction, combing the rubble for something left standing to assuage your boredom?"

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Boredom, she says. She knows nothing of boredom. We need only a very little sleep to replenish the small percentage of our bodies that is still human, leaving far too many empty hours to fill. The large-scale destruction was an inevitable result of our making; channeling that much power in your hands leaves no room for wayward thought or feeling, and the humans made a fitting target. We hated them, because they still were what we could never be again.

She frowned at my lack of reaction, slowly releasing the power she had gathered, though each taut sinew stayed warily coiled to spring. Her fierce aquamarine eyes remained narrowed into glittering slits. As the energy seeped into the atmosphere her hair floated down gradually around her shoulders, darkening from pale glowing gold into a strange gradation of hue, the early sun turning the strands into flickering lines of cyan light whose ends blazed like molten copper.

She was rather delicate-looking for a fighter, even more so than my sister. The clean lines of her form were almost patrician, each curving lineament the work of an artist without parallel. Unlike my sister, she dressed simply and without jewelry, her untamed hair falling where it would. The utter lack of adornment only emphasized the beauty of her features and the natural grace in her lithely muscled limbs.

I had no appetite that morning for verbal fencing; I wanted no more of her words stirring unwanted memories into wakefulness. Neither could I summon the desire to fight, not here. I searched mentally for the quickest way to make her leave.

Assuming an indolent, suggestive smirk, I purred, "Are you then offering me different sport?"

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A thrill of fear reminded me then of what had nearly transpired the first time I encountered him, that day with Gohan. But I was no child anymore, and had nearly killed him the last time we clashed. I stood my ground as he advanced, unafraid. His smile widened, and he stopped with only a handspan of air between us. With a supreme effort of will I stood there unmoving while every instinct screamed at me to flee, meeting his gaze stonily.

Abruptly, I sensed it: a hairline crack shooting through his seamless armor, a fault running clear through the core that if struck at the just right place might cause the entirety to shatter into nothingness.

He wanted me to leave; this was a calculated effort to force me away. When I made no move to back down, I could see it in his eyes. His still-human heart lay suddenly vulnerable before me. Here then was a way I could break him, could I but find it.

It was possible that I could have beaten him in a fight, though not guaranteed. But something told me he was near a breaking point, that if I could only push him the right way the destruction would stop. Perhaps it was the world of pain in his eyes, impossible to conceal at such close proximity. He seemed to be consumed by some deep inner sorrow, and utterly weary of the continuous carnage and devastation.

If I could somehow seize upon that and twist it to my use it would obviate the need to kill him, and no more people would die, at least by his hands. Seeing clearly through the mask he assumed, I no longer hungered for his death. There had been too much killing already, and I saw that he was at last fully aware of what he had been, and was now, and that living with the full knowledge of that might be worse than death. If I could somehow reach out and turn him fully away from the path he'd been on, my mother and Gohan would be at least somewhat safer in my absence...

His pain was tangible now, standing so close, and it came to me suddenly what I could do. A scintilla of hope flared in my breast; mere seconds had passed since he'd spoken, time enough for a breath, and a prayer...

I closed the distance between us without hesitation, and kissed the cool lips with a compassion that was not feigned. His agonized turmoil and self-hatred tore at me, and was not my own father once a killer of millions?

There was nothing sexual about the gesture; it was a brief touch of empathy, a voluntary physical contact meant to unnerve him more than any blow could. And indeed he was greatly affected, a wild look on his face, fingers splayed in shock. Did the quick glint of tears touch that icy stare? Terror came hard on its heels, and then rage--

With numbing, limb-jarring force he blasted me some distance away into the ash-covered rubble, streaking recklessly into the sky without even a backward glance. Only time would reveal the effect of my reckless gambit.

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I could still feel the heat of her lips, blazing their brand indelibly into my skin, searing her mark on me. Heat had flowed in waves from her faintly glowing skin, drawn by the dictates of physics into the relative coolness of my cybernetic flesh.

How she had taken me wholly unawares. A meeting of lips without coercion, a deliberate touch of her own volition. Her reasons were completely unfathomable to me, her motives unclear, but there had been no guile in her startling blue eyes; at that moment there was no animosity in them at all. Most confounding was the hint of lenity in the kiss. How she could not hate me, I did not know.

The fearless look in her eyes as she struck would not leave me. She was so fierce, vibrant and alive: all that I wanted still to be. I hated her even as I began to realize that I wanted her.

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Though I waited uneasily for some kind of fallout, the last few months passed uneventfully. At long last the machine was charged, and I left within the hour of it reaching full capacity. Nervous excitement quickened my blood as I set the controls for the last day of prelapsarian Earth. My mother double-checked my work, kissing me farewell one last time and skillfully hiding her pained worry from me as she disembarked, though I did not miss the way she leaned heavily on the arm Chichi wrapped around her.

Stepping out again into that green halcyon peace, I allowed myself one long moment of clean, sweet air, the caress of sunlight on my cheek, the joy of seeing green things growing. I sucked in from nature the calm I needed to center myself before plunging into the storm that lay ahead.

I was not prepared for what I found, in the sky above the mountains. Goku was alarmingly absent, and the androids -- for that is what they undoubtedly were, they had no readable ki -- were utterly unrecognizable to me. What the hell was going on?

Piccolo was the first to sense my arrival, shouting out, "Bra is here!" to the surprise of me and everyone else. If he had made the connection, obviously no one else had. I doggedly searched the only face whose reaction I ached to see, and found nothing. Surprise, yes, but nothing beyond. No pride, no joy, not even contempt. Nothing.

He was angry at me soon enough, as I hurriedly explained that I had never seen these strange androids before. Piccolo and the others took the quixotic turn of events as an ominous sign of possible doom, but Vegeta seemed to blame the entirety of it upon me. I was more than a bit miffed, but before I would be afforded the opportunity to air my grievances, the air around us filled with light and all of my concentration was spent on keeping my bearings as the subsequent rush of searing wind buffeted me like a child's toy.

Finally collecting my wits, I saw two things at once: a ship bearing the unmistakable logo of my mother's company plummeted toward the earth, and my father spared it not even a glance. My heart sank even as I dove into action. Did he care so little, after all?

I tore open the hull with my bare hands, heedless of the damage to my skin. My mother's eyes were squinched shut, her body curled protectively around the squalling baby that must have been me. Severing the safety harness with a razor-thin blast of ki, I grabbed them to me and dove for the hole I'd made, at very nearly the last possible second before impact.

Even as I touched down, Bulma frantically began screaming for her baby, sobbing in relief at finding her unharmed. She always thought of me first. A lump formed in my throat as she looked up at me and smiled. "Bra. Oh, my beautiful girl." She touched my face lightly with one slim hand. "Look at you, so grown up and pretty," she sighed in wonder.

I placed my hand over hers and winked at her. "I got good genes. From one side, anyway," I added furiously. Even I could feel the steel in my gaze as it turned upward, to the figure that still paid the three of us no mind. My mother looked up with me and then quickly down again, but not before I saw the tears that clung to her downcast lashes. Rage blossomed in my breast as it had not done since the day I had found Gohan nearly dead in the rain. My feral growl shocked the younger me into renewed tears and echoed in my ears as I blasted off toward my father.

He pointedly ignored me, still combing the area below with his sharp gaze, intent only on his prey. He continued to do so until I planted myself in his face, our noses nearly touching. "Why didn't you save them?" Those who knew me would recognize that my voice had gone too quiet, sinking into an unnatural calm that always preceded an explosive storm of fury.

On the surface, his face revealed only mild annoyance that I stood between him and his target. In his eyes I was no threat at all, a mere fly to be swatted away. My fists shook with the urge not to shove him with all of my might. My eyes narrowed, and the growl was back in my throat, waiting to be unleashed. He visibly dismissed me, and made to turn away--

"Answer me!" I shouted, and the tone of command in my voice shocked even me.

His eyes widened very slightly then, reflecting my image back at me from the onyx mirrors of their expressionless depths, and I knew suddenly that he was fighting to see me as myself and not my mother -- for in our rage our body language and expressions were identical. The phrase 'whirling blue fury' danced into my mind inexplicably, and I saw that it was true; the completely restored blue of my hair whipped around my face furiously, and my eyes flashed the blue-violet hue of a fire's heart, of lightning striking scorched earth.

He shrugged with practiced ambivalence, though the motion seemed slightly forced. "What do I care what happens to that careless woman and her worthless girl-child?" His voice was perfectly composed. "She brought that danger upon herself, and if the child were worth keeping it would have survived the fall regardless."

Worthless. I would pay him back for that comment, in spades. "Ah, but if you cared nothing for her, there wouldn't likely be a child, would there?" I wielded my voice against him with the same degree of skill, the dulcet tones blandly innocuous. "And was it not the worthless girl-child who killed the monster you could not?"

I smiled a savage cheshire grin at his thunderous expression, knowing that a hard-won point had been scored in our verbal fencing. Finally, the mask had slipped, revealing raw unbridled fury beneath. Good.

He tensed as if to spring at me, than roared and said only, "Girl, I have no time to deal with insolent whelps! Even now, he escapes!"

He blasted away before I could reply, and I knew then that my mother was not the only one who would rush headlong into danger for the thrill of it, heedless of the risk. Or rather, in his mind there was no room for risk, so inflated with arrogance was it. And miserable bastard or not, he was my father and I was not yet ready for him to die. And so with one last glance at my mother's upturned face, I followed.

He tried to lose me a few times, and I am not sure if his inability to do so pleased or angered him. I didn't much care; I had a job to do. For though I wasn't sure how I felt about him, the pleading of my mother's bright blue eyes had held no hesitation. I didn't need telepathy to read their anxious supplication: Please, keep him alive.

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End Chapter 4

Yay, finally finished, and I only had to stay up all night to do it...thanks for your patience! :)