Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ The Story of My Life ❯ Chapter 2 ( Chapter 2 )

[Disclaimer (This goes for the last chapter too): I don't own DBZ or Beckett Magazine]

The Story of My Life

Chapter 2

My father went in his room and barely came out at all during the day, other than for going to work. In fact it seemed like he never came out. He did though, but he wasn't the same. I remember I was slightly taken aback that he didn't yell at Mom anymore and didn't even yell at us for weeks after I had found her dead. Even when people had come to the house to make funeral arrangements with him, it never occurred to me that my mom was gone. I still believed that she had gone to sleep and was taking a lot longer than usual to wake. I know that seems so far fetched, but I was only four and still slightly naïve, even with my maturity and being able to see past things. Maybe I even just blocked out the knowledge that I knew my mom was dead and I was reduced to be the naïve child that I really was at that age. It wasn't until the actual funeral that I began to believe that maybe she wasn't going to come back.

Dad told the people who were going to make her up and make her presentable to be shown at the funeral that Mom had requested to be left with the make up she had put on herself and that they would have to work around it or at least replicate it again. At the funeral, Dad lifted me up so that I could see Mom and said, "Here, Bobby, say your last words to her." His voice cracked and his breathing became ragged.

I turned and looked at him with all the innocence that a child can have when they don't understand that someone is dead. "Why? Is Mommy going somewhere?"

"Yeah," he answered softly as he looked at her, "and she's not coming back."

I studied him then. He was dressed up in a black suit and was entirely clean, no sign of grease or filth anywhere. He didn't have alcohol on his breath either. To me, he looked like someone important that had appeared out of no where to take notice of my mother at her funeral. I looked back at my mother, still in her evening gown and still appearing to be an angel now in my eyes. I kept expecting wings to sprout out of her back and hoped that she would wake up and fly away with Jenny and I in her arms. The morticians had done a good job, at least to my child-like senses, that I thought that she was still alive. The bluish tint was gone, at least. I thought that my parents, had they always dressed up like this, would have looked rich. I saw what my life might have been had my father not gotten himself so deep in his drunkenness.

"Did Mommy get mad at you? Is that why she's leaving?"

His lips were pressed together in an attempt to keep back his sobs and he only nodded in reply.

"I don't want her to go, Daddy," I cried. I looked at her suddenly and expected her to disappear before my very eyes and leave me behind without her. I was desperate to have her hold me again. "I want to go with her!" I wanted her to do what she had done before and pick me up and take me with her to the stores and we would come home. She would read my stories again and she would stay there with us forever. I grabbed the edge of her coffin and attempted to climb in, but my dad easily pulled me away and set me on the ground. Jenny looked at me with pity when I started crying just before Dad lifted her up to say goodbye too.

I remember looking up at the coffin and thinking that I would never be able to reach it, I would never be able to climb up that high to be with my mom again. Not even her parents were there and I felt like I was the only one who truly knew her and loved her. I would always hang around my mom and we would shower each other with affection. It struck me as odd that everyone Mom or my father had ever known had shown up except for my grandparents. What I didn't know, but that I later found out, was that they had died in a car accident.

After the funeral and in the following weeks, I slowly began to realize that Mom would never come back. I don't remember anything in detail after that. All I know is that my dad went back to drinking and would yell at us a lot, but would hit us less than he had hit Mom. At some point I wondered why Mom had left us all alone with him. I resented her leaving, but as I matured I realized what she had gone through and she had sacrificed herself many times for Jenny and me. She had kept him away from us and had taken many hits that could easily have been aimed at us if she hadn't taken them. Even though things weren't as bad as they were with Mom, we still got hit after she died. Anytime I could I would attempt to protect Jenny and would let myself be hit instead of her.

The years passed and I would wish that Dad would die and leave my sister and I alone and that Mom would come back. But instead of dying, he kept on living and the daily abuse kept going on. That is, until we were 12.

He went out to work one day and never came home. Instead, a policeman came to the door and asked to see the adult in the house. I became uneasy because there was no one else there other than Jenny. My father had left us at home all day while he was at work after Mom died and didn't bother to find us a babysitter. The only thing he did was to enroll us at school and threaten us to get up to go. We would have to get up on our own and walk the entire long walk to school, even through the bad sections of the neighborhood. He always left us home alone and warned us never to open the door for anyone. He said that if people found us home by ourselves, he could be arrested and we would be taken away. Strangely, that scared us. We, at least I, wanted him to die and leave us alone, but when he said things like that, it scared us and we didn't want him to be taken away from us or to be taken from him. Now I had disobeyed Dad and the door had opened for the cop who very well might have been there to take us away.

"No one's here. I'm in charge," I answered. Jenny walked up behind me and looked up at the policeman with a slight hint of fear gracing her features.

He looked at me incredulously and thrust his head around the doorframe to take a look around inside. Jenny always did her best to keep it clean to give Dad one less thing to yell about when he got home. So now that the policeman looked at it, the house worked to our advantage and made it look like nothing was wrong with our lives.

"Will anyone be coming home?"

"No," I answered strongly and a bit coldly. I guess even back then I had been distant from others and cold towards them. "We live with my dad."

When he shifted uncomfortably, I knew something was wrong. "Can I come in?" he asked hesitantly.

"I'm not supposed to open the door for strangers; I only did because you are a policeman."

He sighed and got down on one knee and shattered our lives forever. That man could not possibly have known what he did to us, because I think that day was the start of it all, what eventually led to us becoming androids. "Your father is dead," he said. "He died in a car accident."

Hearing that changed our lives forever. Our life may not have been the best, and our father may not have ever won the best father of the year award, but it was our life, our home, what we knew, and the way we knew how to live. That was what we faced everyday and in a sense we found comfort in the routine, going through the paces of our day. To many people that probably sounds strange. We didn't want to leave the only family we had left, but instead he was wrenched away from us and that policeman had been the bearer of bad news.

Pockets of my memory are gone. Usually people may not remember every detail from their lives, but they have a sense of how they felt or what happened to them in a particular period of their life, like a generalization. Androids, we remember everything since we were activated. I can go on for days about the very first day I was ever activated as an android and how I had taken in everything and tell about all the things that happened after that point in time in detail. My memory logs record everything and it's all stored away for future reference. But I have lost a lot of my past. I'm pretty sure that that is thanks to Dr. Gero tampering with my mind. He had tried his best to make us unfeeling and made 18 and I forget our past so that we would have no qualms about taking life. Needless to say, trying to get rid of feelings didn't work. I still had a connection to my sister and could feel fear, hate, ndifference and the one that most people know about me is my ego. I'll get to that later though.

Eventually somehow we managed to run away. When we did, I took my mom's suicide note with me. I could finally read it after all those years that I hadn't been able to read, plus the fact that Dad had locked it away to where I couldn't get it. I read it often when I finally got my hands on it. Jenny and I refused to be separated and we didn't think that anything could be worse than what we had already been through, but we were wrong.

We had no other family to run to and we didn't have money to use to get to them even if we did. So, we were forced to live on the streets. Well, I don't know if I can say with absolute truth that we were forced to. We had the option of going with social services and being adopted. But we were smart enough to know that that doesn't work out. There was too much of a chance that we would be separated and there would be the chance that we wouldn't see each other again. So, since we were twins and we didn't want to be separated, we ran away and became street kids. I remember hating that kind of life at first and wished that Dad were still alive so that at least we could have a roof over our heads. We were constantly moving around because the police kept finding us in the abandoned buildings that we slept in. Actually, they never found us, because we would always run away from them and find another place to stay before they found us, but there were some close calls though.

It's funny how no one wants homeless people to sleep on a park bench in front of them or seek shelter in an old building that no one uses anymore when that homeless person can't find anywhere else to sleep. It's not like they wanted to lose their dignity as individuals and be homeless, but it happens. No one wants homeless people around and yet they won't lift a finger to help out. We were reduced to begging strangers for money. No one knows what an indignity that is until they experience it for themselves, I think. I remember how degraded I felt and the feeling of worthlessness and helplessness that enveloped me whenever I had to beg for food or dig through people's trash to find some. When homeless people ask for money, they need it, obviously. Sure, some use it to go drink alcohol, but hey, that's their choice. But not giving anything or giving children the bare minimum change in your pocket is downright cruel. When people in suits walk by you and you know they have money and they choose to only give you a quarter, it really makes you think. And makes you angry. But hey, their defense is "Beggars can't be choosers!" I guess that's true but a quarter instead of at least ten bucks, just enough for a meal for two, is in my opinion wrong.

Jenny and I barely made it through the next few years on our own, until we were spotted by a biker gang. We were scared. We had some vague idea how gangs operated, how ruthless and violent they were. We wanted nothing to do with them, but then again, if we refused to join, they could kill us. Surprisingly though, the leader was actually pretty nice. His street name was Ratz (he was called that because of his love for rats), but his real name was Kyle and that's what we ended up calling him most of the time. He had dark brown hair, and a big, bulgy nose due to the many times it had been broken in fights. That day Kyle was wearing the gang colors, black and dark red in the form of his black jeans with a blood red t-shirt. Before going to fight, he would wear brass knuckles and he had had them on when he found us. Most of the time, what we saw him wearing was usually a black t-shirt with a long sleeve white shirt underneath and jeans. He seemed powerful that day and looked like he could hurt us badly, but when he spoke, he was incredibly gentle and understanding.

Kyle had found us huddled at the end of an alleyway next to a pair of garbage cans, just finishing a bag of stale chips someone had thrown away. We had felt pretty lucky that cold day because a lady had actually taken us to a fast food place to eat. She had told us to eat anything and everything we wanted and she would pay for it. I felt guilty about her kindness and I wanted to eat as little as possible so that she wouldn't waste her money on us. But instead, hunger won out and we pigged out on the food because we had no idea when we would find food again or when we would get another chance to eat food like that. The more we ate, the more the lady smiled. She seemed to actually take a happiness in our well-being and I thought that the world needed more people like her.

Anyway, back to what I was talking about before…Kyle found us and offered us a place for us in the gang. Jenny had moved closer to me as he approached and tried to hide behind me. He talked to us for a while patiently as we begged him not to hurt us and he kept trying to reassure us that he wouldn't. I slowly began to see that he really wanted to help us, not necessarily enlist us. I think we reminded him of himself at our age, because I later found out that he had been orphaned too when he was a kid. After a while, he convinced me to join. Jenny wasn't too thrilled with the idea. I think she only joined too because she didn't want to be left behind and that the whole reason that we were out in the cold lonely streets instead of a warm house was because we wanted to stick together above all else. The good thing, though, was that we didn't have to go through an initiation.

All the time that we stayed with him, we looked up to him as a big brother. He let us stay in the building the gang kept as their own. It was far away from the city, but at least the cops didn't know about them being there. We stayed there while they went and caused trouble and all that stuff. A few of the members were angry that we were let in and we didn't even do anything. They were afraid that we would go tell the police, but they were only idiots. I mean, we had a roof over our head and we got food. After all our troubles living on our own, why would we give something like that up?

I remember that I felt like I was at home there. The gang became my family, though not as close to me as Jenny was. When he had time, Kyle would stay and talk with us and entertain us for a little while. He was a muscular guy and we always felt protected around him. There were a lot of things to be afraid of for us at the time. I don't quite remember what they were, but I know one of them had to be fear of the other gang members. Jenny always used to cuddle up against him and he took to the role as big brother fairly quickly. Kyle seemed to feel a little awkward at first, but after that, he enjoyed protecting us, it seemed, and he would always give us advice on different things. His deep voice always used to put me to sleep.

He had a whole bunch of pet rats that he would bring out and let us play with. Well, he let us play with them, but only I did. Jenny was scared to death of their eyes and she was always afraid they would nibble her to death or give her rabies. Kyle would always tease her and put one on her head or put one close to her face and she would squeal and try to bat it away. She always got mad at me when I laughed at her and did the same thing.

Anyway, life went on like that for about two years before I started getting bored of just sitting in the building all day. It was then that I decided that I wanted to join the gang, really join it. I wanted to go out and do something, even if it was causing trouble. There was nothing for me to do and I couldn't possibly talk to Jenny all day. There were only so many new things I could talk about my day that Jenny didn't already know about. She thought I was completely crazy when I told her about my plans.

"What is your problem? We have it good here. You know that they are violent, don't you? You could get killed. All we have to do is sit here all day and not even have to kill anyone. Why do you want to go looking for that?"

Nothing she said convinced me that I should stay. I knew that I was taking a big chance with my life and that if I died, she would have no one left. And if anyone in the gang wanted to rape her or make her the gang slut, I wouldn't be there to protect her. It was unbelievably selfish, but that just shows you how bored I was. I needed to get out and do something.