Hi.
So... You wanna get caught up huh?
It's started again. Yeah, you realized that, yet, here I am, the vertible puppet on everyone's fucking string all over again. The news filled up once more with tales of horrors, so much like it had before and the earth, it seemed, let out a great sigh that it must have been holding for five years. Yeah, maybe somewhere within all of us, we knew it was too good to be true, too much to expect that it was over.
But enough on that. Let me update you before the story continues.
Five years ago I'd met the most beautiful person I've ever met in my life and as things turned out, I'd known him as a friend for a while. Only I hadn't and if you would just put down that comfy white jacket with all the buckles, I'll try better to explain it to you. My best friend died, or really he wasn't so much my best friend, probably better put an enemy and...... is anyone else convinced I haven't taken my prescription yet today?
Let me start over.
I fell for a monster a long time ago; a monster with the face of an angel; a devil that brought out the demon in me and made me love every single moment of it. He was so beautiful that he made ME feel beautiful. And he loved me. Maybe now, five years later, I realize that was a possibility, as I didn't then. Now that the walls of black and white, right and wrong, melt to nothingness around my feet, I'm free to explore the puddle of gray that amasses around me. And I guess I've never mourned the color gray quite like I do now.
His name, if you could call it that, was Vegeta. Or more, he took on the name as he has so many others: Beelzebub, Satan, Lucifer, Hades, Babylon the Great, yada yada. Vegeta unleashed the apocolypse upon the earth, his endeavour to slowly awaken humanity to the obliviousness of its creator, God. A sort of dare between the elements of good and evil. Between the lines of this war rested two things: humanity and me.
It might have actually been a simple dispute, easily handled and forgotten as humanity as we know it would have been wiped off the universe and forgotten about; as Vegeta said "one grain of sand on a grain of sand". Perhaps it is basic mortal defiance in accepting our meager standing in the ways of the galaxy but the race fought back in the form of me. Maybe it's easier to say that, in aspects, I'm more human than any human.
Regardless, with the help of some friends, both dead and alive, I was able to beat the ultimate evil, skewering his body through a cross.
Only, I think it killed us both.
After he died?
Smoking a cigarette even held some sort of nostalgic fascination for me, the beautiful wisps of gray forming his beautiful face, if only in my mind. I would watch them swirl over his imploring eyes and smiling mouth, closing my lids as I breathed in the scent that reminded me again of so many times. Good times, bad times; all wrapped up in the same instance.
The angel from my nightmares, the devil in my dreams.
Is it so bad to want something so sinful? Am I to be cursed for this obsession with evil? Five years have passed and I relay this to you as I feel everything now. The past is a story--now is the feeling and the heart behind the legend.
And that’s the cruel joke of it all. You’d think the infatuation would fade, the blinding desire and choking hold he had over me. You’d think after five years of hell, after learning that he’d all but raped me for those months, that I would have learned to cast him out of my thoughts.
But that’s the sad irony.
I couldn’t.
He was gone in every aspect except for my thoughts. I would see him behind me out of the corner of my eye, turning frantically towards the direction and seeing nothing at all. Sometimes I would stare into my reflection, the mirror deceiving my eyes with a slight grin that reminded me of his own, or a tiny twinkle in my eyes that would circulate a new cycle of memories. And sometimes I would touch my skin and feel his own beneath the tips of my fingers, smooth like silk, soft like a baby’s back.
I would flinch upwards, staring at my fingers as though they’d been burned, gazing at my skin like it was some sort of foreign substance.
And as much as you might suppose these illusions would appall me, in a sense all its own, I adored them. I think I welcomed them, invited them in just for those few moments in my day that I could know him once again. I think that’s the underlining meaning of it all.
I missed him. I would have never dreamed it, I would have probably denied it! But I missed him like you might miss a dismembered arm or leg. The phantom pain; like he had been a part of me since the day I was brought into this world and without him, the amount of emptiness was obscene.
I could be sitting in a room with a thousand people and still, in the back of my mind, be looking for that one androgynous face that would never be there. Funny that the loneliest moments I could remember were spent amongst thousands of people.
Is that love?
Is the torturous emptiness a side effect of finally getting that so-sought-after emotion? Of experiencing it once and living with the consequences for eternity? Is that why I couldn’t orgasm or even get off on my wife unless I pretended she was him?
If so, then let the records show, love sucks. Seriously.
She’d be breathing hard beneath me, her fat, full chest smacking against mine, sweat splashing all over me; and all I could think was that I wished it was him. I would lie over her, embedded in her vagina like I had been so many times before and instead of wanting release, I wanted to be dominated and violated. I wanted the pain to the point of torture, blood and the tearing of tissue as predominate as the pleasure.
And it was a gift that only he could give to me, as many times as I’d entertained the idea of getting what I wanted from Yamcha. He was a constant visitor to Capsule Corp. coming over for the most mundane, trivial reasons you could imagine. Asking to train with me (even when he knew it was the equivalent of training with a chipmunk); stopping in for dinner; coming by with flowers for Bulma or to baby-sit Trunks.
Each time we would “train” he would ask me questions. Questions about how it all ended (though he’d heard the story a thousand times) about the mind control and how Vegeta had brain washed me. He would ask in his own knock-around way what Vegeta had persuaded me to do, to what extent he could control me. I would courteously bounce around the more private parts and give him a thorough, but edited version. Besides, he knew what I had done with Vegeta. I fucked the devil! Not exactly some brilliantly hidden secret!
And so began his sick fascination with it, as strong as my own curiosity had been. It had begun within the second year of Sin’s end. He would visit more often than he’d ever previously, insisting that we needed him… or he needed us. At first I had attributed it to his missing Krillin, only to find later (after a few not-so-vague suggestions) that it was me he wanted to see.
I guess that’s the ironic part about straight men. We’ll always pretend we’re sickened by the thought; that we can’t for our life understand such a perverse obsession. But that’s only before we’ve ever been introduced to the idea of it. Once the mere thought or consideration has crossed our mind, we’re suddenly plagued with a thousand “well, what if’s” that we’d never even allowed before. And once you try it, baby, it BECOMES you.
Sometimes I’d catch him looking at me, his boyish features twisted with a far off, fantastical look. I would gaze into his eyes, flash him quick smirk and continue my push ups or sit ups or whatever it was at the time that caught his attention so completely. He’d swallow quickly, shaking his head and doing his thing; all the while casting quick glances in my direction. If I’d been a straight man, in a thousand years the thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind, but now? He was just a reflection of Vegeta, and therein laid the appeal. He wanted the sin that I’d already committed and he realized if anyone knew or was weak to it; that person would be me.
Still the desire built within me, the addict forever missing the drug. I wanted to feel my body being desecrated by something else. I needed that pressurized feeling of fullness; that moment when you feel your insides tearing with one pelvic thrust. I wanted those hands on me, doing the congenial reach around he always provided. God I missed him.
Anal sex was out with regards to Bulma, as we’d both silently decided it would have been too strange. She’d know who I was thinking about the entire time, as I figured she probably did even now. She would know, as I came on her stomach, who’s back I had envisioned it to be. As I smoothed my hands over her body, who’s rippling muscles I felt beneath them.
But you probably think its all physical, and that’s up for debate. There was the emotional part of me that missed him in a purer sense (if ever there was such a thing concerning the devil; I’ll have to get back to you on that). I missed him in the sense that I missed my freedom. It was like being caged again. Being caged after knowing what it was you had been missing all that time and then cursing that you’d know what freedom was all. It was the bittersweet missing because I DID when I shouldn’t have.
There were days when I was weaker than others, staring out the window as I drove along a road to nowhere, smoking a cigarette and thinking to myself, “Do you even remember me? Do you think of me at all?”
The leaves of another fall would cascade across the hood of the car, the trees over me casting flickers of light and shadows across the dash board. I would close my eyes for a moment, breathing in a smell so familiar to him.
“I try so hard not to think about you, not to dream of you every night.” I would whisper to no one, propping my head on my knuckles. “It’s wrong, I know. But no one can choose what they remember or what they dream of. I believe you’re still out there, Vegeta. And sometimes, I think I’d give up everything just to find you.”
He had as much control over me five years after he’d died, than he’d ever had while alive. I could feel him in everything that I did, whether it be driving in my car; training; jacking off in the shower. It didn’t matter. He was as much with me as he’d been before. Except, it was only his memory now and that couldn’t fill the void; the emptiness dwelling inside where I guess he’d been before.
The world as we'd known it had changed and not all for the worse. The price of human life sky rocketed after the fall of Sin, after so many had lost so much that even the most menial people in their lives suddenly had ultimate meaning. Fate's were changed inevitably, everything in life taking on so much more importance than before.
The horrors were unforgettable, the cases of psychologically unstable beings damn near outweighing the mentally coherent people left in the world. Over half of the population had been wiped out and those that hadn't had been subjected to intollerable madness, more so than you would ever suspect a human mind could endure. Yet again, I was reminded of so many words given to me as advice in those days. The adaptability of the human race was uncanny and the fighting spirit within worth saving.
Yes, Vegeta had shown us horror but in Sin, he gave us all a gift, didn't he? We could no longer take everything for grantite; that wasn't a commodaty for the human race any longer. We had to look at the world around us and those that surrounded our lives as temporary. Every word spoken was like a goodbye. Every kiss, every hug, every moment spent making love was like the last time they'd get to do that. And that was his gift to us. To SEE each other.
I had married Bulma only months after the fall, both of us seeing the peace as a promise from God that this was justifiable, that it was right. But I guess we both knew it wasn't. We didn't love each other, not exclusively. It was like our hearts were both torn in two different directions and we just met at the precipice of time, held together through desperation of what we could never really have.
Did we both love him? I think so. I think it's easy for me to swear I never loved him, that his wickedness was like the wrong side of a magnet against me. But that's a lie. It was his darkness that drew me ever closer. When does light shine the brightest except when a contradiction to the darkness? I needed the bad in him to solidify the good in me.
And in any pure sense available, I just loved him. And it sucks that I hadn't realized it until he died, holding my hand.
I'm convinced now that sadness is a person. Or at least, in some ways, it can feel like that. But I prefer sadness. Because it can be a companion, walking beside you through crummy subway stations, its arm around you as you numbly pass beggers and homeless people on the streets. Because is stands beside you as you watch ocean tides climb the sandy shores as they have been doing for centuries. I prefer the sadness. Because loneliness can never really keep you company.
Sadness makes you feel alive, as your blurry eyes watch tiny beads of rain cascade beautifully over closed windows. Because sadness reminds a broken heart to beat and awakens you constantly to the fact that it does. But loneliness? Loneliness only made me long for him. Sadness could make me see him out of the corner of my eye, or turn quickly to catch a glimpse of someone that only slightly resembled him. Yet loneliness would goad me on to stare into a mirror and pick out pieces of myself that he had fallen in love with.
And therein laid my ever pressing tragedy. I would rather dwell in my sadness than accept my loneliness.
Sometimes I'd trace my fingers over spots I knew that at one point in time, he'd touched. Like that brought us closer together or something. Like our fleshy fingertips were united for just a second, before I'd collapse my head in disgust for myself, my fingers squeaking over the surface of a mirror. Some people would say that abscence makes the heart grow fonder. But I don't believe in that sort of love. Because it was only the abscence of him that made me realize everything else that lacked without him there to sustain it. It wasn't the missing him that created dillusional obsession with what we'd had.
No. It was the reality that I MISSED him at all that made me realize that .... I never knew what we'd been in the first place.
...... that I had loved him?
Do you really think I didn't? All those times obsessing sexually about him, do you really think that was the undelyning truth of it all? That I was a mortal man obsessed with what my "mysterious" body could give me? Or did you read between the lines even more so than I did, realizing that the moment I impaled him, I stood beyond myself and the situation entirely, a being finally understanding that I'd killed the one person I'd ever truly been in love with.
That's right. I loved him. As surely as God must love the sea and the sky and the moon and the stars. As surely as I can gaze into a sunset and see his face within its depths of unmagnified beauty.
I was so in love that I lost myself to it. I became that love and I sunk beneath its depths and I saw evil.
But I suppose you realize.. that didn't make me love it any less.
Things regarding Gohan had never changed. He still sat, the living statue, amongst the shadows and cold drafts of the asylum. Occasionally, he would speak on my visits, (though it hadn't occured for months) telling wild tales of our adventures together. Tales that had never ceased despite our time apart. In the deranged, frozen mind of a child living in the body of a teenager, our adventures were always quite 2-dimensional; always alternate universes where a Trunks from a timeline before ours would pay a visit, spurning us onwards to train harder for future foes.
Lines between good and evil, in the mind of a child, were always gloriously black and white and the gray areas reserved only for Vegeta- who was always, of course, Vegeta the Prince of all Saiyans. And me? I was the upstanding, cartoon-like hero; the flawless father figure who everyone blindly idolized for his untainted virtues on right and wrong. The dragon balls were seldom tainted by the reality they faced in my world and brought back life again and again. And there never were the consequences the devil had promised me. No. People, aware of a fantasy land beyond death, welcomed life without even the most meager of questions.
A simple world. A jaded world for sure. But a world a far-stretch better than ours.
I would sit there, gazing into his glassy eyes, watching as he wouldn't blink as he recited these ridiculous tales. Everything was so childlike and simplistic that I would cringe when after one day of hard fighting and "never giving up", everything was virtually solved. I would look downwards over my lap, my fingers clenched as I nodded, encouraging these fabricated fantasies. If only everything was as simple as his world. If only team work and friendship could overpower any foe and end all days with laughs, smiles, reunions and cozy beds.
If only the lines between friendships and relationships were so boldly sketched. In his dream-world, I'm a married man and a hero. And that's where the lines are drawn. Chi Chi is still alive, and behaves as sociopathically as she did in life. Yet the irony is that I never question it in his world. I'm forever the untainted lover, her asexual husband that never raises a hand at her biting remarks, who never asks questions and whose mind would fall to pieces before it ever strayed.
My relationship with Vegeta is as simple as everything else. He hates me and I'm a fool. He's the prince, I'm the pauper. Nothing really deeper unless you read into it.
But he was comfortable with these hullicinations probably schemed up in the throes of medical overdoses to keep him physically in check. Only a few times in five years had his calm state been broken and his inhuman violence displayed towards the staff. But when it had been, millions had been spent as hush money for the butchery witnessed. I had once felt it, the early hours of morning shaken by his energy level soaring through the sky. I'd torn the sheets in half with my haste, unable to focus enough to instantly transmit my body to the scene and instead, flying at break-neck speed towards the asylum.
Only too late had I barefoot walked over broken glass and quivering pieces of flesh that danced along the floor, vibrating from his power. Every light had burst from the energy, the nauseating checker board, black and white tile, splattered with gore like a gothic Tim Burton film. I'd calmly reached his door, the plexy-glass window combusted and the metal hinges more or less shattered for their attempt to conceal him inside.
Yet, inside he'd stayed, his bare back to me as he sat, tense on the edge of his uncomfortable cot. It squeaked as he had bent back and forth over it, arms wrapped around himself. Blood stained his back in stretches, some of it from medical staff that had foolishly tried to restrain him and most, from himself where ki sparked fingertips had flagellated his bronze skin.
And when he'd seen me? He cried. I believe he cried for days. Was it so horrible for him, I had to wonder within myself, to see the epitome of his fantasies as a flawed, fallen hero? To see that all our adventures were a feverish combination of delirium and drug-inspired wishful thinking?
I'd cradled him against me, relief washing over me when he hadn't fotten against it. Maybe he'd been glad that I'd played the courageous, coddling father from his dreams. Maybe, he'd just given up, willing to fall back from his hated reality and seek solace within his fantastic world once again. Either way, days later, when I'd returned (news of the incident fallen to just crude rumors) he'd stared through glossy, unblinking eyes, once again, telling me stories of our adventures together.
Trunks was the haunting lavender figure of shadowy nightmares. It seems poetic and angsty to write him as such but I haven't a clue how else to sum him up. Like a ghostly, tiny figure, he crept without sound through his short life, constantly staring at me when I'd glance in his direction. I would stand in the kitchen at the latest of hours, turning my back and jumping at the sound of my own glass shattering in my hand as his icy gaze met mine. A small, compact body, tan skin and lavender hair, you would suspect that the young boy would be anything BUT intimidating.
Yet he haunted me in everything I did.
Maybe it was curiosity that spurned his spying on me. I was his father, or so I was encouraged to believe. Yet, in all my years with Gohan, he had never frightened me so. Was it my human fear after dealing with so many things I couldn't understand during Sin? Was that the underlining uneasiness: mistrust in all things that weren't traced with bold lines?
He was an enigma to me. His soft spoken revelations that were inappropriate for a child of his age. His gothic, morbid works of art that created him in the form of a prodigy from an age that most toddlers would rather eat a pencil than design with it. Perhaps my underlining discomfort was his inability to idolize me. And yes, in the early stages of my vexation, I'm certain that was the culprit.
Gohan had never gazed up at me with anything less than idolism. With every word from his mouth, he deified me to others, wanting in every aspect of his life to acquire my strength, my virtues, my everything (however fake they later were revealed to be). Until Sin had stolen that love, I was his walking God and loving father.
Yet Trunks never looked at me that way. There was never a blind trust or unwavering faith in my morals and virtues. There was never a fantastical view of me at all. Rather, it was as though he often was gazing at a formiddable opponant, sizing me up and at times, looking almost pitingly upon me.
Later, as time progressed, my fears were recognized through actions that were known to be common amongst the childhoods of the worst serial killers. Trunks' cruelty and simple fascination with death were solidified in his earlier years. Starting out with small rodents, I would find their corpses spewed out like smeared makeup over carpet and hard-wood floors. At first, it seemed in his distaste for them, he would singe them with small energy blasts, leaving their twitching bodies around the house.
Later though, he began to become fascinated with their deaths, perhaps taking it upon himself to deliver it even towards those that knew enough not to venture near the house. He would tear the front legs off larger mice, squeeling with glee when they would shriek in agony and try to flee, scratching their quivering bodies over rocks by pushing with their hind legs to no avail. Other times, I had found metal buckets, hidden in the garden, full of starving mice that had eventually begun to eat their young in desperation. And over the bucket, eyes gleaming with curiosity, was Trunks; the ever-patient sadist.
Over Thanksgiving on his fourth year, Bulma's mother, sating any loneliness by (as always) cooking a feast, had smelled burning hair while in her bedroom, walking towards screaming sounds that originated in the kitchen. A loud pop had met her as her bare feet met with fake tile flooring, her old eyes squinting towards the smoking microwave that held the remains of the deceased Mr. Brief's cat.
Psychologist struggled to no end with my hysterics; continuously insisting that this could be normal behavior for children suffering after Sin's attacks. That the world as we knew it before, or at least the standards of normalcy, were to be forgotten and a new age welcomed for its unpredictable creativity. Trunks' horrific cruelties soon progressed, as we more or less allowed them, into an artform. Gerbals used for scientific experimentation were found with barbie legs protruding from their eyes, pieces of metal ground into their mouths and dangling like razor sharp teeth.
Bulma would scold me for my insistance that he be put away or at least discouraged from this terrific obsession he delved into.
"He's just a child expressing himself," she would insist. "We don't know what the world will be like now nor do we have any right to squash his efforts to outwardly express his inner anguish. He's dealing with things in... ways we've never seen before. In ways that you and I will never understand." She had taken my face in her hand, guiding me with her brilliant eyes. "But we cannnot judge him Goku. We haven't the right. The world we were born and brought into is gone. We're on his turf now."
In all her wisdom, she would quiet my pleas; and in all her beauty, she would silence any resolve I had in the matter. And she was always right. In a way, any who had lived through Sin, were at a contrast with the world they stood in now. Everything we were raised to believe in, every moral and every religious belief that was so undying, had rotted around us. Now, we lived in a world that was unpredictable, an alternate dimension that only a revelation like Sin could show us.
People from around the world would come to see the child prodigy who, with unfeeling eyes, would create monstrocities that would later be seen and sold at outrageous prices in art galleries. Rather than seeing the murderous workings of a deranged child, they would stare with gleaming eyes at what they would later call "manifestations of Sin"---artwork that was a direct result of a child born after such a dark era.
But indeed, as I gazed around the world that remained after the wreckage, weren't we all just manifestations of Sin?
