The Final Chapter?
Bulma had long since ceased her struggling, eyes wide with disbelief, mouth dangling as if to catch the words that could allow her denile of this haunting discovery. But as much as one could wish he spoke the lies that had given him his legendary fame, the feeling was undeniable. Something grew within her and that something, was a child.
"Will you let her live?" He continued asking. "Even if you could defeat me, would you let her continue walking with the abomination that thrives in her womb? Face it my most beloved; she is dead to you now one way or another. And oh yes, that child will be born. And oh yes, it is either here or in hell with me but it WILL happen."
I wanted to cry. I wanted to sob and I wanted to cry. I wanted to roll into a ball and be comforted by the mother I'd never even met. But I wanted to break and I wanted to stop the pain that had become a throbbing, seeping wound since the moment I first fell in love with Bulma. And now rather than indulge in the fantastical, unrealistic bliss that I had so feverishly wanted, she had become the living mother of death itself. The angel that would soon spawn a devil.
I felt like I was standing at her funeral. Only I was the one to put her beneath the surface of the ground. I held the lever that would bury her, screaming and sobbing beneath the dirt. Like I could almost hear the screeching of her finger nails on the ceiling of her coffin; like I could discern the sound of breaking flesh when the jagged pieces of wood embedded themselves beneath them.
Yes, I felt like I was watching her die even as her eyes cried for me to let her live.
I wanted to be buried beside her.
"No," She ground out between her teeth, wrenching her arms free of his grasp. I hardly heard her voice over the sounds of her screaming.
I shook my head, trying to shake off the madness that my grief was stirring within me. I had to get a grip. I had to remain sane if only for her and drown out the sounds of scratching fingernails.
She reached into her pocket, throwing a plastic bottle onto the ground. I blinked, staring at the white pills that scurried along the floor, the sound of them shaking against the plastic suddenly drowning out the imaginary sobs that had been muffled by the dirt I saw myself throwing on the roof of a coffin.
I looked at each one, each tiny white pill that crackled along the concrete, searching each for some sort of better meaning.
It was then that the words on the bottle registered and my confusion overlapped my insanity.
Birth Control/Controceptives
"I stopped taking them a week ago," her calm voice explained to us. "And if there is a baby inside me," she looked into my eyes suddenly. "Than that child can only belong to Goku."
I heard the sound of what seemed to be a great big breath of air, like someone drowning had just surfaced from the depths of the water. Like I had just pulled her and myself from the grips of suddenly death. And I felt like I'd just been born again suddenly; like I was seeing her and myself for the first time.
And I was in love with both.
"NO!" He screamed, collapsing to his knees. His fingernails wrenched through his hair in agony, his rage cracking the scream. I guess I might have expected some disbelief, some denial. I was met with nothing of the sort and watched in fascination as the undefeatable devil now tore at his borrowed skin in rage and hatred. That Bulma and I had slept together, that we had conceived a child through our secret affair.... It was unbelievable to him. That he could have missed it, that it could have slipped past his noticed was inconceivable and unforgivable. For who could ever have suspected that such adultry could go unnoticed by the devil himself?
His anger shook the very air particles that surrounded us, yet I let her jump into my arms as though we had won some sort of victory. Like the danger was over and all that lay ahead was bliss and a heavenly future. A pretty fiction to be sure.
"You think you've won," His voice cut through my fantasy like a double edged razor. "You think this is over?"
His voice was now stained with an inhuman pitch, deep and hoarse. It seemed as though two voices were speaking through one mouth, each tainted with malice. His eyes were like torches of blue fire, blazing with sadistic insanity and a rage that you could almost taste. He was absolutely shaking with it, the ground crackling and splitting beneath us.
"Bulma," I cried over the sounds of plaster and concrete shattering. "You really have to get out of here now! I have to finish this!"
She nodded, her eyes brimming with tears that I couldn't distinguish as happy or sad. She pulled me to her lips, kissing my forehead and resting her nose for a moment against my own.
"You have something to fight for you know," She whispered. "I need you to believe that."
And with those words she was gone, fleeing through the corridor as pieces of the ceiling and walls collapsed behind her. I only watched her for a second, knowing that I now had to accomplish the impossible and refusing to let the word discourage me.
"You can't beat me," He was screaming, the voice he now spoke with making the hair on the back of my neck rise. "You can't destroy evil you fucking FREAK!"
I had to smile at his desperation, smile at the change in tides.
"Maybe not," I grinned, reaching into my pocket. "But I can destroy that body and chances are, you won't be finding one as strong as it any time soon."
"Destroy my body?" He seethed, his chest rapidly rising and falling as he kneeled, glaring up at me. "And how prey tell do you intend to do that?"
"You may not fear me," I agreed. "I'm a mortal. A mortal with the power to slay a God? Unthinkable."
He smirked with no humor, eyes twisting with greens and purples and black, his flawless, mortal figure slowly peeling away to reveal the true evil that animated it.
"But I know something even you wouldn't touch," I whispered, pulling something from my pocket and hiding it from his view. My trick, my homework. The one thing created for the soul purpose of fighting against you in fact. The one weapon that was meant for your destruction. Wanna hold it?”
I tossed the black leathered book into his hand, watching as the animated flesh caught fire instantly, the smell of burning skin permiating the air. He jumped back, eyes alight with shock.
On the ground lay a tiny, simple little book that I had been concealing. The one thing I had seen him fear. A bible. One of many that had been burnt so crucially in piles by the victims of Sin. Only, this one had been missed and now he scampered away from it in horror and disgust.
"An old friend taught me the one thing I'd been over looking for so long," I grinned at his reaction. "Knowledge is power."
"W-what," He stuttered, tearing his eyes away from the offending object and glaring at me. "you think one little fucking book is going to do me in? One little fucking insignificant book of lies and broken promises? I can't touch the paper, that's true enough. But unless you've sewn together a biblical little nighty underneath those pants, I can certainly touch you."
I ignored his taunting, closing my eyes as I pushed back any lingering affection or guilt that I held for him. I would teach myself the one good thing he had given me.... detachment.
"“May gluttony burn your evil as those you’ve stolen, Betray you with the words sworn to be your undoing." I began, reciting words that Zarbon had made me read repeatitively. The final straw, the final undoing. The last hope of a faithless endevour.
His reaction was less than satisfactory, a look of confusion and almost pity crossing his features.
"Just what the fuck are you doing?" He snapped. "I hardly think this is the time to be reciting poetry."
"And cinders be left as the inferno consumes," I ignored him, praying I could recall these last few words. "That which was dead and has arisen again."
"What does that mean?!" He was screaming as the wind suddenly wrapped around us, the power of my words making the clouds above us roll into black waves over the sky.
I swallowed down the last sentence, feeling the air leave and enter my lungs, my last few moments before the end.
This was it.
I opened my eyes, gazing at his face, filled with wonderment. He couldn't understand it and that made him more beautiful to me. Because no longer was he this perilous, impentrable creature. He didn't have all the plans, he didn't know all the secrets... he wasn't beyond surprise or shock. And now more than any time I had been with him, he seemed human. He seemed as much human as did those I had loved so much and lost in this journey. He was one of those I had loved and lost. The body in the coffin was no longer Bulma's and beneath the dirt and sweat and tears, I heard his cries.
The moment stopped and the wind ceased in the second that I sighed, wanting just once more to pull him to me, to let him seduce me. The air stopped twisting around us and time stood still as I watched his face, wanting him to be human. Maybe, more than anything in the world that had stopped around me, wanting to love him. Maybe in that moment, wanting to not love him. I always wondered if it was true.... that love could set you free.
"May the lives you take," I breathed in a shaky voice that didn't even sound like mine. "be the words you hate!”
I think I sobbed when he fell to the earth, his chin digging into the concrete as he bawled in agony and pain, his skin contorting over the muscles. The crude tattooing, the cruel lines that represented the lives he had taken in the past transformed into Hebrew words and those were the only undoing that there ever could be.
The tattooing on his skin had become bible versus.
He roared in pain, throwing his body on his side, arms wrapped around his stomach as he cried. The smell of burning flesh became overwhelming, yet I forced myself to watch as he winced in horror and indescribable anguish. The tattooing etched itself around his arms, the sounds of crackling making me nauseous. But I watched and I screamed, not even knowing it was my screams until my jaw ached from it. Blood poured from his skin, squirting onto the cement and leeking through the cracks. It pooled close to my feet, yet I refused to move, letting the thick crimson soak the souls of my shoes.
I let the blood drip over my ankles, more blood than a human could produce. I let it cleanse me, let it purify me as I watched him die, watched the skin over his cheeks burn and crinkle. Watched his gorgeous lips sob in torment, untouched. His eyes dripped blood, vessels bursting with the pressure of his pain. He was to me, morbid modern art; beautiful.
He pounded his fists into the ground in his misery, the skin on his knuckles quickly ripping off.
"How could you do this to me?!" He was screaming. "How the FUCK could you do this to me?!"
I fell to my knees, soaking myself in his blood. I wanted to scream that I was sorry. That I was with him, that I was dying with him.
"I hate you! I hate you!" He screamed until his voice was raw. He threw his body on his back, feet digging into the ground to drown out the pain. "I swear to GOD I HATE YOU!"
I fell against the floor, screaming as loud as he was. Screaming as loud as I could. Screaming to drown out his screams and stop the agony that caused it. I covered my face with my hands, just screaming until I thought my throat was bleeding. Until I thought my head would explode and we would die together on the floor. And then I only screamed harder because I didn't know if that was a bad thing.
I felt my new tail wrap around my mid section, felt the hair upon my skin tingle with the wind that blew around it. But I still screamed. I saw Bulma in my mind, fresh and young and new and pregnant. And I just kept screaming. I saw Chi Chi's breast fall from the blade, the blood gushing from her chest and then I screamed harder.
It wasn't until I saw a vision of him in my mind that I felt any comfort at all and when I saw it, I realized that it wasn't a vision at all, but his face, burned and disfigured as he held his hands around my neck.
"I would have loved you!" He screamed in terror, his lips plump and bloody. "I would have fucking given you everything!"
His blood pumped over my body as he pulled me to my kneels, choking me slowly as we both began to die. And I didn't have the will enough to even try and stop him.
"Didn't I set you free?" he bawled, blood draining down his chin. "Didn't I make you live?!"
I began to black out, my eyes rolling back as he slowly choked the life from me.
"I would have given you the universe if only you would have loved me!" He screamed against my face, his bloody, chard skin meshing with mine. My eyelids fluttered as I gasped for air around his iron hard fingers.
"WHY!?" He screamed, nearly collapsing my esophagus. "Why couldn't you just love me!!??"
With all my remaining strength, I grabbed his arms, flying us high above the ground with his fingers still entangling my neck. The wind rushed around our bodies as we held each other in a terminal embrace, crushed and collapsed floors one by one disappearing. My head fell back to meet the air as we tore upwards, spiralling towards the sky. His fingers relinquished their hold, the breath returning to my lungs as I pulled his body against my own.
"We belong together," I whispered, pushing my lips against his and tasting the blood as it poured into my mouth.
We turned in the sky, plunging back towards the ground as I saw the object of my desire. A large, broken cross pointed up towards us as if to greet our return. As if to tell me this was how it was meant to be. This was my destiny and it began and it would end with him.
"This is it," I breathed against his smile, feeling every inch of his beautiful, burnt skin mesh against mine. "This was how it was meant to end. Me and you."
I closed my eyes, seeing that the sharp point of the thick wooden cross was near. I saw in my mind how it would happen; how the thick wooden stake would pierced us both through, crushing our spines and bursting our hearts out through our chests. I saw us die in each other's arms as it was meant to be, rotting and roasting in hell; two monsters precisely where they belonged together.
I smiled at the thought, my real smile as I touched my forehead.
"Forever." I whispered, pointing his back towards the stake.
I heard the sound of flesh busting, a spine snapping and blood spray through the air. My feet touched the concrete, my fingers feeling the icy cold solid surface as I knelt, refusing to open my eyes. My one last trick Zarbon had taught me. Instant Transmission from one point to an entirely different one. I heard his body shaking and trembling from the impact, the wood splintering. I could still hear the sound of blood spraying on the concrete, feel the mist of it against my face.
I finally opened my eyes, seeing that the wood of the cross had pierced directly through his back and now was littered with scraps of flesh, innards and drenched with blood as it purtruded from his heart. The color had drained from his mutated face, hands and fingers trembling and shaking as if in disbelief of what had happened. His heart, or what was left of it, struggled to beat around the thick wood stake that had pierced through it, body parts struggling to maintain the impossible.
His head finally fell back, blank eyes staring at me as blood gathered like tears and fell from them. His lips were darker than ever, purple with approaching death as he just stared at me.
And then, it seemed my heart let out a tiny sigh, tears welling into my eyes.
I stared in shock as my vision blurred with warm water, his morbid, gorgeous figure clouded and distorted by it. A hot tear, my first I could ever recall, fell over my lower lashes, dripping in a warm pattern down my cheek and dripping from my chin. Others followed and as I stared at the beautiful creature I had murdered, I began to sob.
I sobbed that Chi Chi was dead, that I had betrayed her trust and our marriage that had once meant so much. I sobbed that I'd never see her smile again, the way she had when we first held our son in our arms. I sobbed that Gohan had grown and changed so much this year that the first male love of my life was now the greatest stranger I knew. I sobbed that Bulma had been that stranger to me my entire life and I'd never opened my eyes enough to see it. I sobbed that I'd taken advantage of her the first time I hadn't been blinded to it.
But mostly, I sobbed when he died and when I held his hand for his last moments. I sobbed that he didn't know how much I guess I really did love him. I sobbed that in his last moments, as much as I tried to convince myself that evil couldn't love, he did. I cried in those moments enough tears to compensate for the thousand I had denied myself for my entire life.
You see, he set me free as much as a person can be freed. He gave me life as a mother never could. He saved me.
And yes... love sets you free.
I thought that the last breath he had would mean a part of me would have died along with him. But you see, that was the gift he gave me; the last gift that he could give. He let me go. He set me free. And as much as I thought I'd die, I think that was the very first day I truly lived.
................
I write this now, four years later, looking back as if memories of him were just feverish dreams of long ago. Time seems to ache and bruise, stretching by slowly as if it had been paused the day I held his hand for the last time. Philosophies of love will forever come to the conclusion that evil is the very contradiction of it. But it's not. Stone hearts beat just as surely as those made of flesh and blood. And sometimes, I think, you have to die a little bit to live.
A week ago Bulma's father had a stroke, leaving him unconcious in a hospital, doomed to spend his remaining days rotting away like a piece of meat on a table. I find it coincidental that people believe Bulma was doing him a favor by secretly pulling his plugs when the doctors and nurses were away. But when I saw her face, standing over him with a pillow, I knew that my years of blindness and anger at never knowing were about to come to an end. She killed her father yesterday and I've never heard her sleep beside me so soundly.
And despite her fear of never being able to cry at his funeral, I think she did.
My son Gohan never recovered from his change. He sits now as he has for four years, in the same spot in the asylum, gazing out a window. They tell me he'll never come out of it. Maybe people will think I'm heartless for saying so little about him, for caring so little that he hasn't spoken a word since the last day the devil lived. But considering the price that Sin paid on the majority of earth's families, I thank God that he remains a child's mind in the body of a young man gazing out a window.
My other son, Trunks, stares at me now as I finish this, his cold, calculating eyes so much like those of his father. And no, my eyes have never been cold or calculating. They call him a creative mind, in fact, a toddler with the artistic ability of a young adult, creating morbid pictures of death and distruction in his play room. They call him a revolutionary artist, a genius. I call him detached.
But I don't want to talk of such things. I end this now as I began it; my creative outlet; my absolution with the world. And so I will end it this way.
Looking back, I miss Chi Chi terribly. I guess admitting this to Bulma is like regretting that I married her, so I don’t. I simply lay awake at night, listening to her breathing and remarking to myself that it’s so different from my former wife’s.
Love will do that to you, as Jurion and Vegeta had prophesied, insisting that sadness and pain were close associates with the emotion. But it's true, isn’t it? I miss them like nothing else.
Memories of those I’ve lost are like sweet dreams, the ones that follow you for the rest of the day. Times when we were all together are like dreams from childhood. You can’t recall if they were actual experiences, or just wistful thinking.
I dream of sunny days and warm picnics, bathing in the sunlight, all of us together. I dream now of times long past, that remind me that I can’t go back. Sad thing about happy times. You’ll never see them again, not like at the time.
I dream that Krillin is with Marron, or maybe someone else. I can’t always see her face as she towers over him, for some reason, extremely confident and bright, something that Marron never was.
I dream that the billions lost aren’t so lonely now, finding their families, running in fields of sunflowers, kissing when no one is watching. I dream the parents find their little children, tears falling down their cheeks as they meet in the middle of a great field of swaying wheat, holding each other like they never had in life. A world of promise, not taken for granted. A world free from death and pain. A world where there are no goodbyes.
In my dreams, I always get to say goodbye to Chi Chi, like I hadn’t in life. I hold her to me, and it’s so real that I feel her clothing give just a little, the thickness of her body real to me. She tells me that she loves me, in the way she so seldom did when we were together. But thoughts like that are gone in this pretty world. Green grass and cloudless skies kiss away bad memories.
“You see,” she smiles, pointing above her. “my skies are always cloudless. I never need to look up at them anymore. My mom is right here with me.” Z
And sure enough, she is. And they hold onto one another, both so young, both so strong. I don’t think I ever even met Chi Chi’s mother, but in my dreams, she loves me. She thanks me for everything I did for her daughter. For almost crying at her funeral, for keeping Chi Chi strong and being there as Gohan turned from a child into a young man.
Then me and Chi Chi are alone again and in my dreams, she’s never angry at me for marrying Bulma so closely after her death. She says that she forgives me for sleeping with Bulma when she was still alive and tells me that no time could make her love me any less. She says she’ll wait for me forever, even if that means loving me alongside Bulma.
I laugh and insist that it’s not at bad idea. She smacks me playfully, and kisses my cheek. And that’s where the dream begins to end, because her lips are like the wings of butterflies against my skin. Flickering. I begin to cry in my dreams, holding onto her hands and telling her to keep me there.
“Don’t let me go.” I cry, interlocking my fingers with hers. “Not yet. Let me say goodbye this time.”
But I never really get to. She just waves. Says she loves me and I feel her emotions as I awaken to my bed, the last whispers a requested promise that I watch over Gohan for her.
Love isn’t something to regret. Four long years of missing has never made me bitter that I gave my heart to so many people. Instead of feeling the pieces as missing, I know that they’re with someone else, thriving in the soul of another person. And that’s the strongest feeling in the world. To know that even though they’re gone, no distance, no time, no space can ever remove the love you gave them.
Death is never the end.
And love is stronger than death.
If I’ve never learned anything in my life, these two are all I’ve ever needed to know. For a man who hurt so many, and caused so much pain, I have loved more in my life than I have ever hated. And perhaps, in the end, it’s not so much what we DO in life as the amount of love we gave to those we touched during it. I don’t think I’ve ever really found the reason for life. I don’t know if God so much HAD a reason when He created, except maybe a little amusement and curiosity. But I think that in the end, He really fell in love with His experiment.
In a sense, like a mother who never wanted a baby. Abortion an option, courage alone led her through the pregnancy and before she turned that child over to the adoption agency, she fell in love: helplessly, thoughtlessly, illogically in love. Criticize love all you want, but without it, we wouldn’t be here. Out of love, we were spared extinction. And maybe, because of it, we were created at all.
