This fic is dedicated to my girl, Veronica, for being my first fan, and for countless hours of… inspirational… conversation.

Summary: Just another Truten fic . . . really.

Disclaimer: Saiyan Smut is a non-profit organization. All characters have been shamelessly stolen from their original creators.

Warnings: Angst. Slash. Redirect.

CHAPTER ONE

Caving In

I think I have a pretty serious inferiority complex.

So, this is where the psychoanalyst says, "Oh, that is interesting! Tell me about your mother." Right? I don't think it has anything to do with my mother.

Okay, well . . . maybe it has just a tiny bit to do with my mother. She's a bit of a legend around the world, you know. An air-headed genius, beautiful even in her fifties, married to a man with a perfect physique, a man who doesn't age, which fortunately no one has discovered is due to the fact that he's an alien . . . heiress to what is undeniably the humblest multi-billion-dollar corporation in the world, headquartered not in a towering city building, but in a largish capsule domicile with a few labs and a couple of nice-ish rooms for meeting important and semi-important people.

Sometimes I think we're famous because of that supposed 'humility' – the media certainly makes a big deal about it – because no one really cares about great scientists or CEOs of multi-billion-dollar corporations, right? Not that much. I feel pretty much like a pampered rich kid anyway. What's the big deal about living in a 100-room mansion? Who needs all that space?

Whatever. We're famous, for whatever reason. Maybe it was my mom's hot bod that first propelled the family into stardom – not that I look at her that way, you freak, but I know how to recognize these things in an objective sort of way – because as far as I can determine, no one outside the scientific community seemed to care much about my grandfather until mom was a teenager. If that's the truth, then I guess I just came along and fit the mold. Lucky me, right?

I couldn't tell you how many people want me, and I'm not really sure I want to know. I can tell you that a disturbing majority of females that I meet are downright obvious about wanting me, ranging from undressing me with their eyes to giving me a phone number, or a handle for one of those online 'adult friend' things, or worse, trying to grab something. Women can be pretty shameless.

Men can be even more shameless, which I discover anew every time I venture out into the real world, admittedly as seldom as life allows. It can be a bit of a culture shock.

At my high school, guys tended to be more respectfully appreciative than shameless. There were a surprising number of appreciative guys, several times the statistical average. After all, me and Goten made it fashionable to be gay.

***

Sometimes lately I think my whole life is just a really, really bad cliche. As if the entire thing was the product of the unbelievably twisted imagination of some pathetic, emo thirteen-year-old girl who learned about true love from a mommy who boozes herself into incoherency every night because daddy beats them. As if normal, happy and perfect relationships just don't exist, or aren't interesting enough to make life worthwhile.

It wasn't always that way. I used to be a whole person. I used to know who I was.

Now I just waste away my days thinking entirely too much. Trying to diagnose myself. Worried that my troubles are like worms, eating me away from the inside. Maybe I will run into that stupid fucking emo girl one day, and she can tell me exactly what sort of mental illness she stuck me with, so I can be cured.

The price of the cure is not an issue, and neither is the taste. I will pay whatever it costs. I will drink it down, and keep it down until it starts working.

Maybe then I will know what Goten seems to think I should know already.

***

We were adventurous kids, and started playing around with sex when we were really little – not sure when except that it was way before Buu, before Goku came back – and by the time high school rolled around, we were fucking like rabbits, as often as we could get away with it (which was pretty often; the parental reins were loose on both ends, if a bit less so where Chichi was involved).

It took years to convince Goten that everything would be alright if we told people. From the time we started public school, we had always been trendsetters, and it was pretty hard for me to imagine a scenario where coming out would be a bad thing at school. I mean, what were they going to do? Beat us up?

And sure enough, not only did we pretty much eradicate the social stigma against gayness at our school, but there were a good number of kids who started 'experimenting' because it was what the cool people were doing. Not just that small and weird-ish group of kids that I'm sure every high school has . . . but people from every social circle. Thanks to our fans across the world, the phenomenon spread well beyond West City, and even now the global demographics seem to suggest that the effect might remain despite the loss of the much-beloved poster boys.

I would have been pretty worried about dad if he hadn't figured it out on his own. I can't tell you how grateful I am that I remained completely unaware of the prejudice against homosexuality until shortly before he found out, so I was spared years of angsting about it, though it was probably the worst few months of my life. And he was actually pretty cool about it, after scaring the shit out of me by even having a clue.

He didn't bring it up until after the first time me and Goten engaged in full-fledged butt-fucking – he recognized the smell even after I'd washed up in the lake (sans soap, alas), a skill that demi-Saiyans apparently lack – but he claimed, with his usual hateful, nose-in-the-air ,'if you think I am an idiot, I will gladly disabuse you of the notion' Glare of Death, that of course he had known we were going that way for years, and he seemed to think it was all right and proper. "You are a Saiyan prince, boy. You deserve a strong mate. There is no one else who is worthy."

Which really just begs the proverbial question, doesn't it? You'd think he would have turned his nose up at mom – a human woman! – but he seems to like her alright. I mean, by his own philosophy, he should have . . .

***

. . . okay, so that thought makes me laugh uncontrollably, even though the thought has occurred to me many times before, with pretty much the same effect. But really, he should have gone after Goku years ago, right?

Well, to be fair, I know why he didn't. I mean, on top of the fact that I have no real reason to think my dad would swing that way, other than the fact that it didn't seem to bother him that I did. And even if he did swing that way, there's nothing to say that Goku would. Other than the fact that he was also apparently unfazed by Goten being gay (and it was Goku that managed to keep Chichi from freaking out about it, miraculously, though it took her a couple of months to be happy about it). I mean, they're both with women, and that is something that I have never even considered.

But anyway, the real reason why my dad would never go after Goku is almost certainly because his Saiyan instincts would make him the sexually submissive partner.

He's actually the one that explained that to me, when I asked him why it just didn't feel right unless I was 'dominant' during sex; we tried it the other way, but neither one of us could get off. Dad says it's because Saiyans are warriors, and our instincts are to follow strength in sex. Even in the rare cases where a female was stronger than her male mate, it still applied, but 'dominance' is simply more clearly defined when it comes to sex between men.

And honestly . . . there's just something about the image of my dad, on his hands and knees, getting his ass reamed by Goku, that's just . . . wrong. Very interesting, I have to admit, but still wrong. And not just because he's my dad, and I really try not to think about him like that. I mean, anyone who knows my dad would understand. That image is like . . . the antithesis of my dad's life philosophy. Which, admittedly, seems to revolve around Goku a lot. But not like that?

Anyway . . . Goku figured it out on Goten's side too – apparently the same way, caught out by the pure Saiyan's uncanny sense of smell, and I hope that's true because I find it really weird to imagine our dads having a conversation about it! – and pretty soon all the family and such knew, and thus Goten's arguments for staying in the closet at school got a lot weaker.

So we came out our senior year, and then right after we graduated . . . bam. Goten left me.

For a girl.

***

Aside from a few other unpleasant consequences of that momentous event, the media noticed.

I'm expected to keep up with what they think about me, and usually it's halfway-entertaining bathroom reading. Of course they decided that we, like our impressionable schoolmates, had just been 'experimenting' all along. I didn't bother to correct them (I never do). The women used to leave me alone for the most part. Now they're all convinced they have a chance.

They don't. And not just because I'm gay (I definitely am), because really, none of the men have a chance either.

They're not Saiyans.

In fact, they're not anything like me at all. What would I do with a human guy? Seriously. I'd break him. Well, I suppose I could be gentle – dad and Goku manage with our moms, after all – but what is the fun in that? Besides, strength is only a small part of it, and only really has to do with the sex. Sex isn't everything, right?

Goten is just my other half.

We were raised, despite the celebrity of my family, in a pretty exclusive little social bubble. A social bubble that's always in the midst of the most important things happening on the planet. It's like the rest of the world is ignorant, while we're the only ones that know the truth. We're the only ones that know the gods, of the planet, and of the universe. We're the ones the gods depend on when the fucking universe is in danger!

Goten is in that with me. He's a part of it. None of those human guys are a part of it.

There are a few other guys in the bubble, but they're ridiculously easy to mark off the list . . .

Our dads are out, of course. My dad for obvious reasons, and Goku is kinda like a second dad to me. And married. To a woman. Gohan is apparently happily married, and therefore probably straight . . .

Incidentally, I actually considered seeing what I could do to change that after Goten left me, partly out of post-traumatic shock syndrome (really), and partly just to fulfill a secret fantasy of mine that I would never have seriously considered as long as his little brother still loved me.

I was going to start slow on him, see if I could cry on his shoulder a little, feel him out for possibilities. But sadly, I realized pretty quick that Gohan still sees me as a little kid, and will probably always see me that way. He's out of my league, on top of being married. And probably straight.

That's it for the Saiyans. Nameks are asexual, not that I'm interested in green people.

The human guys . . . they're pretty strong for humans, I guess. But Krillin is out (thank Dende!) due to being straight and married, and Tien is even more antisocial than my dad (and he's got that freaky third eye!) and he's probably straight, since I heard he once had a thing for some crazy girl with MPD or something that could supposedly do some serious damage with automatic weapons. Interesting, that he likes that sort of thing. But he's still out, and on the whole I can't say I feel like I'm missing much.

Yamcha is still pining over my mother. I could see him being gay and just delusional because he's got this macho image thing going on, but whatever. He doesn't interest me, partly because he is just lame, but also because he is one of those people that feels the need to remind me every time I see him that he is a heterosexual, usually with some idiotic and even misogynistic line about girls, always delivered with the full expectation that I will empathize, even though he knows better. Speaks pretty strongly for him being in denial, but who wants to be with someone who's that stupid? Either he's straight, or he's fucking retarded. Or bisexual, but really . . . Yamcha just doesn't do it for me. And he's getting old.

That's it. There is no one else, unless I need to explain why a centuries-old fart and a pig and Goten's humongous grandfather aren't really options.

And I guess that other people have been brought into that bubble through marriage before . . . but not really. Chichi met Goku when he was a kid. She was a fighter, and her dad studied martial arts with Roshi. My mom met Goku before Chichi did, and she was onto the dragon balls before then (which is, incidentally, why she found him). The dragon balls are a huge part of what we are, our little social bubble. Videl just happened to be the daughter of Satan, the guy who took credit for beating Cell when it was really Gohan. Most of the other people came to be a part of the bubble by fighting Goku, including my dad.

To understand why they all ended up being 'friends', you just have to know Goku.

I could go down a list of people who are somewhat slightly associated with the bubble – like the announcer guy at the martial arts tournaments! – but it starts to get really ridiculous. Me being desperate for someone I can relate to, but knowing it's utterly fucking useless.

Out of all the people in the bubble, Goten is the only one that completes me.

Yes, that is a cheesy fucking line that I totally stole out of a retarded fucking movie, but I just can't think of a better way to put it. Sorry. Unlike the idiots in the movie, we have actually been one person, more times than I can remember. After scary Buu got carried away by the only spirit bomb that ever did what it was actually supposed to do, fusion was a fairly regular occurrence for me and Goten, and by the time the other strong people (basically Saiyans and Piccolo) got tired of fighting Gotenks – we pretty much gave it up then, since fusing when there was no one to fight meant being alone instead of getting to hang out with your best friend – it had gotten to the point that we always felt like one person, even in our separate bodies.

***

So . . . in nutshell, that's why I'm sitting here, all alone on a Friday night, feeling bitter . . . feeling like a half a person, jagged edges all broken and bleeding.

Goten claims we will never be one again, but I'm hoping he'll show up tonight. And not because I'm a delusional idiot, either. Not exactly, anyway.

He's between girls right now.

It's happened quite a few times before. They all seem to be really cool girls – you know, the kind I might actually want to hang out with if they weren't fucking my soul mate – but none of them have lasted very long so far. The first one lasted a month. It's been a year since he left me, and there have been at least a dozen of them, week or two on, week or two off.

So yeah, me and Goten are still 'friends', right? Or at least, Goten doesn't seem to want to let me go entirely. We hang out every now and then, and it's not the same, not even close to the same, but I do it because it's the only thing I know. I meet the girls, and it's always just beyond uncomfortable, because, thanks to the mags, they all know our sordid history, or some semi-accurate version of it, possibly straightened out a bit by Goten. I have no idea what he tells them, and don't want to know. But I meet them, and I'm nice to them, and I do everything I can to help assure them that I'm not going to infringe without being rude enough to actually say so.

But when the latest girl is gone, and he comes to me, wanting sex with no strings attached . . . how the fuck am I supposed to say no?

It's the only thing I know . . . or at least, the only thing I know that I am still allowed to have.

Trust me, I want to say no – every time he comes to me, I pray to Dende for the strength to resist, and I hope that fucking pansy-ass Namek doesn't wonder why I never come to visit his sorry green ass any more – I want to be strong and tell Goten to just go away and leave me the fuck alone because his heart just isn't in it. I mean, that's a fucking understatement. And there doesn't seem to be a kami-damned thing I can do about that.

But I always cave, because that no-strings-attached sex is the only fucking passion he will give me, and it's so fucking sad, but it's also the only way I can lose myself enough to really pretend that he's still mine. That he still loves me. It's only a temporary, pathetically insufficient fix, and the inevitable coming down is a fucking bitch . . . but I still cave every time.

And he doesn't love me. I wish that I could pretend, outside those occasional moments of passion before my brains rush back into my head. He's been so fucking detached this past year, as if he doesn't give a shit about anything, and all I can do is wonder what I did to make him that way. I know I did something, because my Goten wouldn't turn against me if I hadn't done something horrible. But we don't talk about it. The subject of why is forbidden completely. He won't even give me a hint, as if really does expect me to already know whatever it was that I did to make him hate me.

Kami, I must be such a fucking idiot . . . What the fuck did I do? I have no fucking clue. None.

Some people say that everyone has a soul mate, and that if you miss your opportunity to be with that person, then you're just shit out of fucking luck. Maybe other people can pretend. Goten seems to be able to do it, after all. Sort of. I just can't. I don't know if there is really a soul mate out there for everyone. But I know mine.

Sometimes I wish I didn't.

***

Maybe 'inferiority complex' is a little too simplistic for what my problem actually is. I guess it just came to mind because I see myself as being superior to the rest of the world in so many ways. My mind can't quite wrap around this irony that I've set myself: that I have so many things that all those people outside the bubble wish they had, but at the same time . . . nothing.

So . . . I don't really wish that I never knew Goten. The only times I do wish that are the times when I've gotten so emotional that I've started ignoring reality altogether, because the reality is that I can't even imagine life without him . . .

I always wanted to meet this version of me from the 'future' that did grow up without Goten, so that I could thank him for going back in time and inadvertently causing Goten to be born by helping Goku to stay alive long enough to knock Chichi up again.

Now I just want to meet him so I can cry on his shoulder and curse him for what he did to me, and listen to his reassuring speeches about how it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. I actually do that, in my twisted little fantasies. Cry on his imaginary shoulder, listen to him reminisce about his soul mate Gohan, who died in his arms. And this is all concocted from my imagination, of course – I find the idea of those two as lovers to be both incredibly romantic and a little bit scandalous – but it gives me a weird outlet for those inconvenient Gohan fantasies . . .

***

I'm jerked out of my thoughts as I realize that Goten's energy is headed this way.

Well, well, well . . .

I'm sitting in the middle of nowhere, at least so far as the rest of the world is concerned. For us, it's somewhere. But I didn't come here so he would know where to find me. I can always feel him, just like he can always feel me. That's part of what makes it so hard to forget about him. But only a small part.

I came here to let him know that I was thinking about him. That I wanted to see him. I was sitting here, thinking about him, the first time he came 'back' to me, and it's not something we've ever discussed, but I know he won't come to me unless I'm here.

I stayed away a couple of times he was in between girls. Not away from him, but away from here. I'd go to his house, hang out, listen to him tell me why she didn't work out, what he was looking for in the next one . . . but when I left his place, I went other places. Sometimes home. Sometimes other places in the middle of nowhere.

He never comes unless I'm here.

I was just over at his place a little while ago. He's already got his eye on the next girl, and he was telling me about her various denizens, how he was planning on hitting all of them up tonight until he found her. She gave him her number, of course – Goten never has trouble getting those – but he likes doing it that way. Probably because calling a girl lets her know that you give a shit. 'Randomly' meeting her in a dark club is a different thing altogether, and if you're Goten, it's likely to have the same result.

Usually when he tells me about those kinds of plans, I just go home and hit the spare gravity room, preferably on a setting that I can't handle without transforming, until I'm exhausted enough to put myself out of my misery for the evening.

I'm not sure why I didn't tonight. Because I'm a delusional idiot? Maybe . . .

So, it takes a little more effort than it should to stand up and dust the grass and dirt off my pants. It's another ones of those odd inner conflicts, that I've been sitting here, hoping against the odds that he would come, and at the same time, dreading it.

It's like every one of these misbegotten encounters takes away another little piece of who I am, and if I keep doing it, I'll end up . . . empty. Just a shadow of what I was before.

Why do I still cave? Why do I still come here, hoping he'll show?

I realize that he's always come, every time I have been here. I guess I've just never really thought about it before because I only come when I know he doesn't have anything better to do. Except for that first time, when I came here just to think about him. I didn't expect him to show up then, offering a small taste of what I thought was lost forever.

So, I guess I came here tonight to test him. To see if he would ditch his plans to come here. I wonder if that's what he's actually doing, or if he's just coming out here to taunt me. I can't see him doing it – he hates me, but he's not cruel – but why would he ditch his plans for someone he can't stand? I know he's coming here; he's got a place in West City, and the girl is in West City. There's no other reason for him to head this way.

That's part of the problem with psychoanalyzing yourself. Specifically, I have a hard time facing my motivations until after the deed is done. Sometimes well after. My brain tells me that the horrible whatever that I did to Goten is one of these things, but any attempt to comb my memories of the days before I lost him for clues inevitably draws a blank, leaving me as wide-eyed and clueless as my dad's favorite idiot.

***

Me and Goten trained in this place as long as I can remember. You can definitely tell; the land is pretty much blasted clean in every direction, almost as far as the eye can see, from the center of the field. There are boundaries to the blasted land that have a tendency to change fairly often, but we've managed not to destroy the forest on the northern edge of the destruction zone.

The trees cover the foothills leading up to a range of old mountains, capped with snow even now, in early summer. There's a particularly gigantic mountain that cuts to the edge of the foothills in one spot, with a fair-sized river flowing from below the snow-capped peak, twisting around the mountain to end in a two-thousand-foot drop to a large lake deep inside the forest, in a huge bowl-shaped valley near the base of the mountain, hidden by the surrounding hills and dense trees.

I know where I am going, though. A quick flight over the low hills, and I'm dropping down to a place near the bottom of the waterfall, still hundreds of feet above the lake.

The pressure of the falling water at that spot could seriously injure or kill most people, but it only feels like a massage to me as I fly through the water as quickly as possible, coming out on the other side in a cave, completely hidden from outside view. A bit of energy to light the lamps, illuminating the cave. He's getting close, and I want to be ready when he comes.

Another small bit of energy to dry my hair and my clothes, and a little more to dry out the bedding at the back of the cave, behind the fire pit we made for the cold winter nights. We set up the bedding back there when we were kids, often using it to camp out after long days of fighting in the destruction zone. We figured out pretty fast that it's impossible to keep bedding from getting all mildewed in this cave. So Goten got the bright idea to ask Piccolo if he could make bedclothes that won't mildew. Would you believe that he can?

Our innocent sexual escapades began here, and continued here almost exclusively; we can't go all out in the cave, but the fact that it's on the edge of our training field masks what we're doing to anyone on the planet that can sense us. That is, if they don't happen to wonder why we're sparring in the middle of the night (a recent development – we favored daytime sex before the split), or why we never power up enough to really destroy anything. You'd think it would make more sense just to hang it all and have wild monkey sex out in the destruction zone, but we have only had the nerve to do that once.

Countless hours wasted away in this cave, sometimes with sex, but sometimes just talking, about our dreams, and our plans for our life. We could do that anywhere, just talking, but this was our cave, and we liked it here. We would sit for hours and watch the waterfall, sitting where the mist barely touches your skin, listening to the water as it patiently waged its war on the rock, above and below.

***

I can feel him, right outside now, and I realize that the tears are already streaming down my face. Every time he's come to me here, I've been crying. It's like his presence, just here in this place, brings all of those lost dreams to the forefront of my mind, overwhelming me. I can keep it under control, when I see him somewhere else. Usually. But in this place, I'm a slave to the past.

Maybe that's why I can't say no when he comes. Or maybe it's just because I'm a delusional idiot, hoping he'll snap out of it, and willing to take whatever drabbles come my way in the meantime, and to be thankful for them. And isn't that just pitiful?

[[This chapter was cut in half. To read the rest, go to aff or mediaminer.]]