I remember the first time I ever saw my father's face. I was eleven or so, restless from a long day of rain. I knew of my father, of course. The proud Saiyan prince. When I was younger I would whine and beg my mother for stories about him, imagining him as some great hero, mysterious and noble. My mother would always look away when I asked, her tone taking on a quiet somberness. I always thought it was just because she missed him. Later, when I traveled through time, I realized that maybe the sadness that I has always attributed to sorrow maybe wasn't sadness after all. It was shame, because the answers I so desperately needed, she didn't have to tell. Either way, I eventually stopped asking.
I don't recall ever being sick as a child. I suppose I should thank my father for that one. He was a resilient bastard, God rest his soul, and the blood coursing through my veins is a testament to that. Still, my mother, for all her good intent, never allowed me to play outside during the cold or the rain, lest I catch a fever.
So it was the boredness of such a cold, rainy day which led me to the northern wing of the house, to the room that had once belonged to my grandparents. I remember little of them. They died in the first few years after my birth. I was four maybe, certainly not five, but I remember clearly the night that they died. Everybody remembers the first time they ever see their mother cry. After their deaths my mother had taken it upon herself to move all of their belongings into that one, spacious room. I don't know if it had more to do with the healing process rather than the ever growing damage being done to our home, courtesy of the Androids, but I never once asked. My grandparents were off limits in my mind, something that had belonged to my mother alone; never me.
The room was full of things. Vases, old laboratory equipment, dead flowers, still in their pots, the ancient dirt dry and dull. But the thing that interested me the most were the boxes. Hundreds of boxes, puled haphazardly atop of one another. I loved to sneak into this room and open these boxes, never knowing just what I'd find.
This day in particular I found a box in the further most corner of the room. It was old and dirty, the same basic condition of the others. But the flaps on this box were well worn, creases lining the opening, silently telling the world the countless times the box had been opened.
The box was filled with pictures. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I took them out by the handful, peering curiously at the people in them. Some I recognized from others in our home. Goku, my mother's best friend. Krillin, the bald-headed monk. Others, Gohan and Aunt Chi-Chi, I knew personally. Master Roshi, whom I'd met a few times, posed on the beach with the Z Gang, everyone smiling and flashing their cheesy grins.
Most of the pictures were of my family though. My mother as a young girl, smiling brightly from my grandfather's lap. My grandmother in the kitchen, hands filled with a tray of cookies, the glass door behind her letting in the beauty of what our home once was.
I flipped through picture after picture, smiling at some, uninterested in others, when I came across one I'd never even hoped to see. In the picture he is standing outside, next to the tree that had once faithfully served as my playground. His body is facing away from the camera, but his head is turned back, as if somebody snapped the picture just as they called his name. He is scowling, arms crossed, his eyes black and hard. I felt my stomach drop as I stared at the photograph of this man, this stranger, that I somehow knew was my father. I felt as if time should stop, or that something monumental should happen now that I had discovered his face. But instead I felt this overwhelming sense of aloneness, as if suddenly this room, filled to the top with things, was as empty as the eyes staring back at me. And suddenly it was too dark, too empty, the air too thick and I felt out of place, like I shouldn't be in here, snooping through my grandparents' things. But I couldn't move, I didn't want to. Instead I sat and stared at my father's face, memorizing the way his brows came together, the downward slant of his mouth, the shape of his face; branding the details into my mind. I must have sat there for half an hour before I heard my mother's voice calling my name from somewhere in the house. I didn't want her to find me here. I didn't want her to know that I had found this picture. I placed me father's photograph into the very bottom of the box and quickly covered it with the rest. I knew as I shut the door to my grandparents' room that I wouldn't be going back in there for a long time. And it would be years before I did, driven to that door only after my mother's death and the overwhelming need to see her face once again, and maybe, somewhere inside me, my father's as well.
But that night, as I washed my face before bed, I looked up and searched into the mirror. And for the first time in my life, it wasn't my face that I saw staring back at me in the glass, but his.