Consacra: Prologue C

Prologue C

The boy missed another punch when he shouldn't have and his forward motion carried him right over his opponent's knee. A swift kick to the chest and he was down.

“You know better than to expose yourself like that. What happened to instant cleanup after mistakes?” he said gruffly. He folded his arms as Gohan stood slowly, one hand still clutching his chest as he caught his breath. His gi hadn't torn yet, but the front of it was covered with grass now.

“Sorry,” he said softly, not looking at his mentor. Piccolo could see the resignation in the boy's movements as he resumed a combat stance.

“Forget about it,” he said, dismissing his student's apology and the rest of their training session. He paused before his next words, wondering how he had started feeling the obligation to curb his language around Gohan. You look and fight like shit these days translated roughly into, “You're tired. Take a rest.”

“I can keep going,” he said, but the crack in his voice signaled zero conviction. In recent months it had started changing as he made the shaky transition into pre-adulthood in the human life cycle. Teenager, Piccolo knew was the word. It sounded annoying in itself.

“Do yourself a favor, Gohan. Go home and eat. And I mean eat like a Saiyan, not like a human. You've lost too much weight. Then sleep. If your mother tries to wake you up to `study' or some bullshit, ignore her and keep sleeping.”

A smile appeared on his weary face, a glimpse of the naïve five year old Piccolo had taken on as his pupil years before. But there was a twinge of guilt in that smile, probably because the boy thought it was blasphemous to be amused at the use of the word “bullshit” in relation to his mother's commands.

They left the patch of meadow considerably more intact than their other familiar training grounds. It was calming for Gohan to fly, Piccolo knew. To just fly without a certain destination, without any oncoming threats to the earth to worry about. The boy had shouldered too many burdens in his young life, and only a part of it was from fighting powerful enemies. Being airborne gave him the semblance of freedom, at least, from the leaden weights that had settled on his back since the day his mercenary uncle had arrived from outer space.

Gohan had been flying slightly ahead of his teacher, setting a rather meandering path toward his home in Mount Paozu. The sun was starting to set over the mountains in the west, casting hues of orange and hazy red across the ground far below them. Piccolo veered toward those mountains. He could sense the boy hesitated to go home, just as he seemed to be hesitating in everything else as of late. Noticing his mentor had split off from him, Gohan paused before giving up his own course and trailing the fluttering cape in front of him.

They flew quietly, the wind against their faces and the rays of the setting sun settling across the half-shut lids of their eyes. The boy used to be talkative. Piccolo had found it annoying; he was too much like his overly friendly dolt of a father, his former enemy. But now it seemed the student had become too much like the teacher. Piccolo still couldn't get used to the prolonged silences that stretched between them where there should have been conversations (though perhaps one-sided, with Gohan doing all the talking). It was not normal for the boy…and despite all the times he had told him to shut his trap, he knew it was not healthy.

Piccolo began to descend as he saw the plateau basin below them. The sunlight glimmered slowly across the vast pool of water in bright, lazy flashes. He settled into a cross-legged position right above the water's surface, adjusting his levitation technique slightly so he could sit still and unwavering. Gohan did the same a few feet away from him, questioning him with his eyes.

Piccolo broke the silence with customary bluntness. “When are you going to snap out of it, kid?”

The inquisitive look in his eyes dimmed. He opened his mouth to speak, hesitating again. A resigned sigh escaped his lips. He looked to the side, at the water, as if it held answers.

“I know it's hard,” Piccolo continued. “But you're acquainted with hardship by now. It's time to move on.”

“I'm sorry…”

“I don't want to hear that again. You apologize all the time without reason. What was one of the first concepts we discussed in training, Gohan?”

“A warrior should never act without reason,” he mumbled.

“How are you going to live out that statement if you sound so half-assed saying it?” Piccolo questioned.

“I'm s—” he stopped the habitual phrase from leaving his mouth and raised his eyes to his mentor. “I'll change, Piccolo.”

“For yourself, Gohan.”

The boy said nothing.

“You have to change for your own sake. Not for me. Or your mother, or your brother.”

He nodded mutely. The lack of conviction remained in every bit of his demeanor. Piccolo suppressed the urge to call him out on it.

“Don't think that you have an obligation to me or anyone else right now. It's about time you did something good for your own life instead of trying to be a hero for other people,” he said, consciously taking some of the stern edge off his voice.

“I'm not trying to be a hero,” Gohan said quietly. “I can't be one anyway.”

The kid just took everything negatively, twisting most of what other people said into self-reproach and punishment. What a far cry the meek boy before him was from the stoic, single-minded warrior who had killed Cell.

“You're not being honest with yourself, Gohan.” He tried to sound patient. “You should know your weaknesses, but also your strengths, and you have plenty of them. You know that's not a compliment because I don't give out compliments. I'm just being honest with you.”

“Thanks, Piccolo.” The boy smiled wearily again. “I guess I can do better than this.”

“You can stop guessing for a start. Start eating and sleeping normally. Start getting out of the house more,” Piccolo said. He looked at Gohan squarely in the eye. “And start letting go.”

Seconds passed between them like ripples on water. Gohan's smile fell. His lean frame seemed to sigh downward toward the water's surface. Piccolo kept his gaze fixed on him.

“You know he wouldn't want you to be like this,” he said in a low voice.

“I know,” Gohan said softly.

“He would want you to move on,” he continued more carefully.

“I know.”

“So that knowledge should be an incentive to get on with your life.”

Gohan lowered his head so that Piccolo couldn't see his eyes under the unruly spikes of his seldom-trimmed hair. Elbows resting on his knees, his hands hung limply near his ankles. The slouch made him look defeated, and much older.

“I guess I'm a hypocrite,” the boy said, his voice slightly cracking at the end. Piccolo wondered how he would turn this thread of conversation into a self-reprisal.

“I know Dad would want me to move on,” Gohan continued. “And I guess that means I should. But…I keep thinking that he had already moved on from me…from Mom and me…basically right after he died. He moved on so fast, so easily…I guess it came easy for him just like everything else did. And I resent him for that.”

Gohan raised his eyes to meet his mentor's unmoving gaze. “I didn't want him to move on. I don't want to believe it was so easy for him to just let go of us, like he forgot about us or didn't really care about how bad it was…how bad it's been for us. I want to let go of that, but…if I did, it would only be out of spite. It would mean hating him. And that, I think, would hurt even more than missing him.”

It surprised him how much the boy knew himself. It was almost uncanny that the child of one of the most thick-headed, intellectually challenged warriors he had ever met was so attuned to his own emotions and psyche.

Son, I'll have to kick your ass next time I visit Heaven for doing this to your family. Piccolo wasn't too keen on justice and family loyalty, but the indignant feeling in his gut was not going away.

“Your father wasn't perfect, Gohan,” he said levelly. “You'd be wrong to idolize him like he was some flawless hero. You can't do anything to change him now. But you can change how you think about him. Don't feel guilty about resentment or hate. Face up to it.”

Gohan's dull eyes seemed to flash briefly at those words. “I don't want to hate my father, Piccolo. I don't want to hate anyone. It's a horrible feeling to have.”

An internal struggle with memories flickered across the boy's face. “When I was fighting Cell and ascended beyond Super Saiyan…it almost consumed me. Like hatred was part of my blood, and it was the lens through which I saw everything. I don't want to go through that again. Especially not toward my dad. I just miss him. I…”

He looked to the side, mouth set in a taut line. Piccolo did not move or speak; he just watched the boy master his emotions which threatened to flow in tears.

“I wish I could wish him back,” Gohan said. He smiled again, but only one side of his mouth managed to curve upwards. “Bizarre, huh? What a useless fucking wish. Wishing for someone who didn't want to be wished back in the first place to want to be wished back.”

That was the first bit of cynicism, accompanied by profanity, that Gohan had ever displayed. The bitterness had been festering inside him ever since that day on Kami's lookout where Goku had refused the gift of life and the chance to return to his family. Perhaps Piccolo should have been amazed that Gohan had held in his resentment and anger for so long.

“Like I said, you can't change who your father is,” Piccolo said. “Or was. Learn from it. Learn from the ways he screwed up and get on with your life.”

“I'm trying,” Gohan said tiredly. “It's hard, Piccolo. My mom is just…I try to help her but she…I think he hurt her even more than he hurt me, and she hasn't been dealing with it well. And there's Goten…I feel like I have to be a father to him now or something, I have to be more than just an older brother. We're low on money…I'm too young to take on a real job…”

“If you could survive kidnapping when you were five, take on the Ginyu Force and Frieza, and kill Perfect Cell, then you can get through this, Gohan,” Piccolo said. He was feeling more and more like a shrink. Or maybe one of those motivational speakers. “Pull yourself together. Don't let me hear you whine about what you have to do now after all the things I've seen you accomplish.”

“This is different from fighting,” Gohan said. “It takes the human part of me to do this, not the Saiyan. And I realized it's much harder to be human. You have to deal with life, the crappy day-to-day reality between the all-or-nothing battles that God seems to throw at the earth to humor the last bits of Saiyan blood in the universe. But Dad seemed able to live as if it were all one reality, treated it all the same, loved fighting but loved everyday life, too. I miss that part about him—about my own life when he was around. He seemed to make life easier, brighter, more meaningful, even though we never thought about what that meaning might be. When he died, he took all that with him. Part of me went with him…and some of me still goes every day. I guess I'll have truly moved on when there's nothing more I can give up.”

Piccolo looked at him for a second longer. Then he punched the boy in the jaw, snapping his head sideways.

“Since when did you start thinking it's fine to lie down and give up, Gohan?” he said bluntly. He stood from his sitting position, still hovering over the quietly rippling waves. The boy didn't touch his jaw but his eyes were watery from the unexpected blow.

“Piccolo…”

“I asked you a question,” Piccolo cut in. “Did I teach you it was okay to whine and bitch about things you can't control and then sit back and piss away the time while you fail to grasp onto the things you can control?

“No…” Gohan looked at his mentor without anger, but with some measure of resolution.

“Then hit me back.”

The boy slowly stood, still more than an arm's length from his teacher. His eyes had cleared, and a single trail of salty fluid was drying on one cheek.

“We're finishing our training here,” Piccolo said simply. “This is reality, Gohan. There aren't two of them. Perhaps you'll start realizing it when you hit me back.”

They fought until the sun fully retreated behind the horizon, leaving them in the dark night air. Gohan was far stronger than he was by now, but the boy kept his power level equal to his sensei's for an even match. Even in power, but not in experience; Piccolo was far more skilled, yet Gohan held his own, to his surprise. Seconds and minutes flowed through swift punches and kicks, feints and ki shields. Neither landed a blow for what seemed like hours.

Piccolo thought he saw a brief smile flit across his student's face as Gohan finally broke through his defenses and knocked the wind out of him. It wasn't of victory…but it was the hesitant beginning of something.

*****

The woman had an uncanny ki sense like a seasoned warrior. Maybe she had just naturally learned from being around her husband all those years when he was still alive. She didn't look up from her sewing as he stood outside the window behind her, but he knew she was aware of his presence. Something about the way her back straightened in that steel-like manner she always carried.

“My son's not here,” she said curtly.

Piccolo watched her as she methodically pulled dark blue thread through the clothing laid across the table. “I know,” he stated.

She turned around at that. Her eyes were cold. But as of late, it seemed she was cold toward everything, not just him.

“Then why are you here?” she asked.

Because Son Goku is willfully dead and you are still here to resent him. Because your son sees me as more of a father than his real dad.

“Because Gohan said he'd be here soon,” he replied nonchalantly.

She stared at him for two seconds longer, her expression giving away nothing. Then she turned her back to him again and resumed her sewing.

Minutes passed as the needle went through the cloth over and over, and both of them were silent. Droplets of rain began falling, the beginning of a shower.

Another minute passed before she reluctantly broke the silence. “Get in the house before your clothes soak through and I change my mind.”

They sat across from each other at the rather small kitchen table. Piccolo wondered briefly how she had managed to feed two Saiyans when the table could probably hold only five plates at a time.

“You should be mending this,” she said huffily, gesturing with needle in hand toward the dark blue gi on the table. “God knows how often it's been torn while you were roughing up my son.”

“Afraid I can't be of much assistance.” Along with her ki sense, the woman had the innate ability to piss anyone off with a combination of a few choice remarks. This was probably the first one in a combo, but he'd be damned if he let himself be affected by her acidity.

“That's right, none of you big strong men are ever useful outside of a global state of emergency.” Number two.

“As former guardian of the earth, I can send down some calamities if you'd prefer to see us doing something productive,” he countered smoothly.

“And use it as an excuse to whisk Gohan off and make him fight for his life? I'd prefer never to see that again.”

“He can take on any homegrown catastrophe by now, you should know that. Your son is the strongest fighter among us, after all.”

She glared at him and made a “hmph” sound that human females seemed to employ when they were annoyed and couldn't think of anything to say. Especially when he had responded to her attack with an indirect compliment.

He changed the topic. “Where's your other son?”

She gave him a suspicious look as if he were going to force the infant into wilderness training like he had with five year-old Gohan. Paranoid woman.

“He's upstairs sleeping,” she said.

He tapped the table surface absentmindedly with the long-nailed fingers on his right hand. “Behaving well?”

“Well enough,” she said.

“Have a big appetite?”

“What kind of question is that? Of course, he's got his father's blood,” she said. Her voice grew more cynical with those last words.

He took care to say his next words in the same indifferent tone as before. “Does he have enough to eat?”

She looked at him sharply. The woman might have been extremely insensitive, but she was very smart and calculating. In her eyes he could already see the unspoken rejection of his unspoken offer.

“You came here to wait for Gohan,” she said. “You know where he is right now?”

He was silent.

“In the city,” she continued. “Finding a job so he can be useful and help his family, unlike everyone else he's been hanging around all these years.”

It seemed she was almost done mending the garment. She paused as she accidentally pierced her finger with the needle. Before blood could appear, she pressed her lips to the cut.

“So he can grow up to be a successful man with a stable career and financial security,” she said in an adamant tone, as if this were all in a booklet she had written. “And Goten will be the same way.”

He considered her carefully before speaking again. She was quick to lose her temper and fanatically protective of her children, but she was a strong woman, and he judged she wouldn't fly into a blind rage if he went back to his earlier point.

“I asked a question about the present, not the future,” he said. “Does he—and you and Gohan—have enough to eat right now?”

She somehow looked surprised, offended, and perhaps grudgingly impressed that he dared to persist in asking about their wellbeing. “We're fine,” she said, raising her chin in a gesture of defiance.

He suppressed the urge to tell her she had become too pale and too thin to be considered “fine.” Instead, he stood wordlessly and began opening the cabinets and drawers behind them one by one. She dropped the needle and thread to stop him halfway as he reached for the drawer below the sink.

She gripped the wrist of his hand on the drawer handle, grasping it with surprising strength for a human. He looked down at her coolly as her face flushed with embarrassment and indignation.

“How dare you—”

“Do the rest of the cabinets look like these?” he asked pointedly, waving with his free hand at the rows of empty and near-empty shelves he had exposed.

“This is my house! How dare you touch anything without my permission!” she fumed, tightening her grip on his wrist as if she willed the bones to snap.

“This doesn't look `fine' to me,” he said, ignoring her angry words. “It looks like you aren't doing—”

“Don't tell me things aren't `fine!'” she cut in sharply. “Don't you dare tell me I'm not already doing the best I can. I've slaved away all these years for this family and I will decide what doing `fine' means!”

“Clear your head, Chichi, and understand that I'm not playing offense here; I'm not insulting you, though there're plenty of things I could say to do just that,” he said brusquely. “I'm telling you that you—and your sons, more importantly—need help. You need to stop denying it. They depend on you to put their lives above your own pride.”

“You don't think I've given up everything I can for them?!” She was getting hysterical. Piccolo almost sighed; was there a way to stop her before she totally lost it? “You think I haven't been putting my children first before everything, including my own life?!”

“Your life, yes,” he said, consciously trying to sound more conciliatory. “But what about your pride? You can starve yourself while you give all the food in the house to your sons, but what happens when it runs out? Will you still refuse to ask for help just to preserve your pride?”

She looked furious, but also afraid now. She was mad because he had gone too far into her family affairs, but she was fearful because he was forcing her to confront her own weakness. Her grip on his wrist loosened. She glared hatefully at him still.

“Gohan will get a job and will make more than enough to feed us. We don't need your help or anyone else's,” she spat.

“Gohan isn't old enough to be legally employed,” Piccolo said bluntly. “He needs to go to school, not start working some dead-end illegal job.”

Another insult to her pride. From when Gohan could first talk, she had instituted an extremely demanding, borderline tyrannical education plan to turn him into an accomplished scholar. His education was the primary competitor with his training. It represented the one area of his life she still had control over, the part of his humanness that she adamantly refused to relinquish to the Saiyan part of his nature. And now Piccolo was reprimanding her for holding Gohan back from his education which she had fought so long and hard for.

“There are people willing to help you if you'd just step down from your pedestal and notice,” he continued. “You don't need to—”

He froze as she did something completely unexpected.

She burst into tears and made an almost inhuman noise that sounded like a sob. Yanking her hand away from his wrist, she retreated to the table, snatching the newly mended gi and tearing it in half. He took in a breath and prepared for an onslaught of profanity Gohan had probably never imagined his mother was capable of.

It didn't come. She threw the ripped pieces of the gi to the floor and sat down heavily in a chair, covering her face with her hands as angry tears flowed from bloodshot eyes, her breathing reduced to wheezing rasps.

He forcefully pushed down the brief surge of panic he felt at this rather drastic turn of events. At the moment he would rather be fighting Frieza in third form again than deal with a hysterically crying human female.

With deliberate slowness, he sat down across the table from her, feeling a sizable amount of awkwardness. He said nothing for a minute as she held her face in her hands still, breath hitching in her throat with each sob. He amended his earlier thought. He would rather be hit with a full blast from Nappa again than sit through another minute of this.

Clearing his throat audibly, he reached across the table, his hand stopping an inch above her shoulder in hesitation. He could withdraw his arm now and wouldn't have to touch her, and wouldn't have to deal with her reaction to his touching her—after all, at the moment she couldn't see the hand poised above her shoulder. He cursed the nice conscience he had acquired from Kami; he could almost hear the old man chuckling as he nixed his copout plan and patted Chichi on the back.

She jerked back almost violently, glaring at him with reddened, puffy eyes. He wondered how Son Goku had put up with this hideous version of his wife, and how often he had had to face her in this form.

“Don't touch me,” she snapped, swiping at her tears with one sleeve. “I don't need your pity.”

He returned her glare with equal intensity. “I don't need to deal with your pitiful crying.”

“Get out of my house then. I should never have invited you in. Get out and don't expect to see Gohan. We don't want anything to do with you.”

“`We?' It's for Gohan to decide whether he wants to see me. If you don't want to see me again, fine,” he shot back.

He stood from the chair and looked down at her for a long hard moment. Then he picked up a piece of ripped fabric from the floor. He caught her hands before she could hit him, and carefully wiped the tears still trailing down her cheeks as she sputtered in indignation.

He had to catch one of her hands again as soon as he had released both of them; she was trying to hit him. No good deed goes unpunished, he thought.

“What the hell is wrong with you? I'm trying to help you!” he shouted in frustration.

“I told you I don't want your help!” she gritted out.

“For God's sake, calm down and think for a moment! You can't do this alone! Gohan and Goten need you to be totally honest with yourself. You have to face reality, Chichi.”

“I—”

“Your sons need you to.”

The strength seemed to seep out of her at last as her shoulders fell into a slump and she turned away from him, staring intently at the floor. He folded his arms and stood beside her, waiting. There was a welcome silence for a short while.

“You want to help, but you can't,” she said in a different tone of voice. It was quiet and dead. “Even the Dragonballs can't.”

She looked up at him, a tear running down her face which was now blank. “The problem isn't food. Or money. It's a broken family.”

Gohan's cynical half-smile had looked just like the expression on her face now. “He doesn't want to come back even though we have the power to bring him back. And even if he did come back and stayed for good, nothing could erase what's happened. The knowledge of it, that he chose to stay dead over staying here with his family, will always be there to separate us.”

She paused and took the torn, wet piece of cloth Piccolo had dropped on the table, absently curling it around her hand. “Sometimes I wonder why…why it all came down to this. Why he always leaves and the pain stays.”

She held the patch of fabric in her hands, considering it for a moment. “Gohan once wore his father's surname proudly as an emblem. Now he bears no name on his gi.”

They both sensed the boy's presence at the same moment, turning their heads in time to see him disappear up the stairs to his room. He hadn't even noticed how long Gohan had been there watching and listening.

She looked at Piccolo again with her cold eyes. He doesn't bear your name on his gi anymore either, they seemed to say.

*****

The air was thinner, the sky clearer above the clouds. The wind kept the myriad tiles on this platform cold, and the sun gleamed off them in brilliant white. He sat quietly, realizing this was the longest time he had ever taken trying to sink into meditation. Imminent threats to the earth hadn't weighed on him as heavily and persistently as this. Perhaps because there had always been other warriors, those stronger than he, who would inevitably shoulder most of the burden.

Dende and Popo had wisely left him alone upon his arrival, probably noticing that the usual indifferent look on his face was different this time. He sat with his eyes open, staring into the sky before him. This view had more or less stayed the same through his entire life, and probably had been the same since this lookout was first constructed.

The strings in his consciousness that were tied to the Dragonballs were humming lightly. Most of the time he didn't hear the flitting pulse of their connection. Only when he was still, and simplified his world down to this—a view of the sky and even breaths—did he feel the bond alive and inside.

He hadn't offered the son or the mother the thought of using the Dragonballs. He had only offered help with his own hands and the resources of their circle of friends. The Dragonballs were useless in this case, he knew. He just hadn't expected they had known too, and so clearly. Perhaps they had brooded over the matter as much as he had…no, that was impossible.

Although he didn't constantly feel the presence of the Dragonballs, he did constantly think about their existence. How they had been made. How his people, out of all the sentient races in the universe, had made them. Why they had wanted to make them in the first place. How the Dragonballs came to have such power—power that was vast and dangerous, but also so limited. They could turn insignificance into tyranny, poverty into plenty, and death into life. But they couldn't heal pain, erase hatred, or violate free will.

It was Goku's free choice to reject a wish for life. Even if he had made the wrong choice, it was not within the power of the Dragonballs to stop him from making it.

So that begged the question again: what was the purpose of the existence of the Dragonballs? To save the poor and hungry? To heal those who suffered disease and calamity? To bring back loved ones from death? What was the point, if all people would die in the end anyway, no matter how many years the Dragonballs added to their lifespan? Or if Frieza had succeeded in wishing for immortality—what would have been the point? To rule over a universe that would also eventually decay and perish? All things led to death; it seemed life itself was an anomaly, like the Dragonballs, as they both stood in stubborn defiance of death.

Perhaps the things the Dragonballs couldn't change were the things that really mattered. Love, hate, healing, and pain. And free will. Perhaps they were stronger than the pulse of life itself, because they could not be altered by the fickle wishes of mortals or even changes in the very fabric of time-space.

His meditative trance was broken in a split-second as he felt something flicker to life beside the thread connecting him to the Dragonballs. A distinct alien presence, yet familiar in a very disconcerting way. He closed his eyes and tried to pinpoint where it was…if it were even in the physical plane.

It was. His eyes snapped open. It was growing in power—in the West Capital…close beside it was the angry flame of Vegeta's ki, actually struggling to rise, and failing…

And then it was gone. Just gone. Like it had never been there at all. Vegeta's ki rose again in his customary rage in addition to bewilderment. So the Saiyan had come across someone, or something strangely more powerful than he. But he could no longer sense it—

No. It had appeared again, but it had changed. It was…not on Earth any longer. He furrowed his brows in concentration. It somehow could exist in both the physical plane and in the realm beyond that, to which the Dragonballs were tied. It could be in the next solar system, or it could be a galaxy away…he did not know. Physical measurements of distance did not apply in the dimension beyond the current world in which they lived and breathed.

He stood, sensing Dende approaching with concerned footsteps.

“Yeah, I felt it, kid.” Piccolo looked upwards into the expanse of blue and the faint glimmer of stars beginning to appear as the day drew toward dusk. “I'm going to find out what it is.”