Disgruntled

A Dragonball oneshot

By

EvilFuzzy9

Rating: T

Genre: Angst

Characters/Pairings: Chichi, Goku; [N/A]

Summary: Chichi was a patient woman, but even a saint has their breaking point. (And Goku wasn't a great husband.)

Son Goku was not a good husband. Not in any conventional, modern sense of the phrase. As a father he was passable, not terrible despite what some might say, but hardly the exemplar of what a dutiful and devoted patriarch should be. He took no care or concern for his family's material needs, having himself grown up living off the land with zero notion of taxes or salary or formal education. Money meant little to Goku. As a child, if he'd been hungry he'd just hunt something down or gather edible plants.

Until he met Bulma, Goku had lived like a primitive woodsman from some bygone age, subsisting in the wild by his own craft and cunning, taking no thought of the world outside. He didn't really understand the concept of money in itself, or of economy, of the formalized and systematic exchange of goods and services, of coins or paper currency which acted as a barter substitute, a theoretical unit of capital that could be exchanged for something real at a later date.

In itself, this wasn't completely a flaw. Much the same could be said of many people. Few really understood the principles behind the economic systems on which their worldly lives were founded, but still most of those people generally played along. They got jobs, they earned paychecks, they paid for what they needed, feeding back into the cycle of endless consumption.

Goku was more intransigent, however. For the longest time he had resisted the idea of getting a job, of working for a living, of supporting his family the same way as virtually any other person in the modern world. And sure, Mount Paozu was in the middle of nowhere. For all intents and purposes, especially in the earlier days of their marriage, Chichi and Goku had been much isolated from the rest of the world, and they had been able to survive mostly on just game and forage, if they wanted to.

Goku favored a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. And at first, Chichi had also been enamored of the idea, in the early years of their life together viewing it as something fanciful and romantic. It was just the two of them making their way much the same as their most distant ancestors might have. It was a purer, simpler way of living than Chichi had thitherto known, and for a time it had satisfied her to live thus. With just the two of them and a broad mountain wilderness from which to draw their sustenance, it had been a very low-upkeep, low-impact lifestyle.

Even with his own rapacious appetite, Goku could feed the both of them with relatively little work. Nature's bounty was at their fingertips, and their home was newly-built, and she was happy just to be with her husband, with the man she had long dreamed of as her beloved. And if Goku seemed to show little particular affection, if he'd rarely seemed to treat her as a woman and his wife, then Chichi had once considered it part of his charm. That he never kissed her was a little offputting, maybe, but at first she'd supposed him to simply be shy of intimacy. This was a cute characteristic, in its own way, and her yet-lovestruck mind had romanticized it into something quite apart from the objective truth.

Honestly, the first year or two of their marriage, for Chichi, had been much sustained by fantasy. She was a sweet girl back then, asking little and giving much. Even if she demonstrated, from the first, a certain steel and fire in response to disappointment, she had nonetheless loved Goku dearly. But time wore all things down, and without reinforcement the honeymoon bliss soon faded. It was an inevitable thing for all couples, that the initial merest delight of one another's presence would diminish, that the stimulation of being near each other would fade with desensitization, until things cooled and they were forced to establish a more subdued but lasting kind of relationship: less outwardly passionate, but also more stable, more enduring.

For Chichi, the definite end of the honeymoon, so to speak, probably came when she got pregnant. Although she had always wanted to be a mother, and while she took better to pregnancy than some might, still she experienced the increasing discomfort, the bouts of seeming illness, the aches and soreness and mounting limitation of mobility. She'd been everything she believed a dutiful housewife to be, for Goku, and she'd gone to great lengths to draw the man into their requisite marital intimacies.

Maybe she should have first begun to tell that something was off around then, from how indifferent and bemused Goku had been in response to her first solicitations. Chichi was a very traditional sort of woman, a very conservative and family-oriented soul. Part of that character meant reserving the greatest of her carnal desires for marriage, saving herself for the man she would marry, even as she hoped him also to save it for her. On that end, at least, Goku seemed to meet her expectations. He'd obviously been a virgin, the first time. He'd had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do.

Chichi didn't hold that against him. She had likewise been fairly innocent of such things, knowing about sex mostly from a brief, vague, and hesitant instruction by her father. They'd worked it out together, she and Goku, and if not the most conventionally enjoyable experience, still it was long a fond memory for her. Their awkward and unskilled mating had seemed a very fine thing, in the moment, even if Goku had been clumsy and sometimes too rough. She was very sore afterwards, but she had also felt satisfied—if emotionally more than physically.

It wasn't the last time they had sex. They were married, a newlywed couple living alone together in a remote corner of the world, dozens of miles from the nearest meaningful settlement. Apart from the needs of survival, which could be handled in relatively small amounts of time, and of domestic upkeep, they had much time to spend as they saw fit. Even with the long hours that Goku spent training, Chichi was still able to get him to share a respectable number of encounters with her.

But she was always the one to initiate it. Goku never even seemed to think about sex unless she brought it up, and even then he never approached it with any clear, particular enthusiasm. He was in and out with little care, and Chichi had constantly to coach him on what to do. Their intercourse was never very exciting, as a worldlier person might deemed it. Frankly, they had sex with all the creativity and abandon of Puritans. Chichi was not a very liberal woman, and while she had her desires, she indulged them only when she felt it appropriate, and she did not much hold with dirty or outlandish sexual acts.

Almost one might say that the two of them viewed sex more as a duty or obligation than anything else. Goku rarely ever thought about it. He just wasn't interested in it the way he was interested in training. They weren't a very physically affectionate couple, at least not in a sexual sense. Goku was easygoing and quick to make friends, but he wasn't a very intimate person. He didn't confide in others. He didn't seek or desire bodily closeness. If it weren't for his merry ways and smiling demeanor, Chichi might have called her husband remote or aloof. In a way, he still was.

The process of disillusionment was slow, at first. As said prior, it was when pregnant with Gohan that Chichi first began to fear something wasn't right with their marriage. Goku seemed, initially, to have no concept of childbirth, or of what pregnancy was. When Chichi first told him the good news, he'd simply stared blankly. Not in the sense that he was frozen with inexpressible joy, or with sudden and overwhelming uncertainty. He'd quite plainly and simply been entirely uncomprehending. The news had meant nothing to him.

Having to explain to her own husband what pregnancy was, when she herself was a person fairly shy of such talk, had perhaps been her first moment of real, significant frustration with him since their wedding. In that discussion Chichi was, for the first time in a while, disabused of her fantasies about Goku, of the carefully constructed excuses for why he was the way he was. She could find reasons for why he didn't know what pregnancy was, sure, but it still just felt wrong in a way that hadn't before touched her.

This was a grown man, a man who had fought terrible enemies and saved the world from destruction. This was her husband, the man she had spent the years of her adolescence dreaming about, idealizing and romanticizing. Even the first resentment that had proceeded from her fruitless wait for Goku's return seemed small and childish next to her newfound dismay. It wasn't just that he didn't know where babies came from, although that was by itself hard to excuse, but also how flippantly he received the news, and how difficult it was for her to make him understand what it would mean for them.

Goku took care of her, when she was pregnant. He did all that was in his ability, all that he could conceive of as his duty, but there was something in the way he did it that left a bitter taste in Chichi's mouth. There was a vague immaturity, an unconcern or lack of investment, really just a complete disconnect between his mood and the situation. He acted no differently from usual. The idea of being a father seemed to mean nothing to him. He wondered aloud if their son would be strong. Chichi had corrected him by saying the child might well be a daughter. In response, Goku shrugged and wondered if their daughter would be strong.

This bothered Chichi. Very nearly the first thing Goku pondered, once she had hammered in the fact that he was going to be a father, was how good of a fighter their kid would be. After seeing his fight against Piccolo in the Tenkaichi Budokai, Chichi had been deeply disturbed. She was nearly made a widow before she'd even had a chance to get married. That fight had done much to sour her on martial arts. Already she had seen it only as a means to an end, at that time, a way to make her seemingly faithless fiance pay for his negligence, but witnessing the sort of fighting Goku did, the kind of opponents he dealt with... it scared her.

She loved him, in spite of everything. On some level she feared that, if he returned to fighting, his luck would fail, and he would die. She knew about the dragonballs, of course. Goku had told her once, laughing unconcernedly when she vented these fears upon him, that she could just wish him back to life if he died. She'd nearly shouted at him for saying such a thing. It had hurt her to hear him talk so lightly about the idea of his own death, as if he thought knowing she could bring him back would somehow nullify the hurt or the horror of such a thing. She didn't want him to die. She didn't want him to get hurt.

She didn't want him dragging their children into that dangerous, violent world of his.

This was probably the first seed of real resentment for her husband, for his lifestyle and attitude. It wouldn't be the last by a long shot. As the years passed and the rosy shine of the life she had so often dreamed about in youth was irretrievably tarnished before her very eyes, Chichi grew increasingly obstinate, steadily surlier and more bitter. She gave so much to Goku, doing for him all that she believed was due of her, and yet she received from him no more care or consideration than he might give to a particularly friendly stranger.

Ever more apparent it grew to her that he did not view her as wife, or else that he did not understand how a man was supposed to treat his wife. No matter how much she appealed to him, he always laughed and brushed off her concerns. No matter what happened, he always went right back to fighting. Even after he actually died, he never improved. He never learned.

She loved him. This was what really made it so hard to bear. She loved him, and yet she was forced time and again to accept that her husband was scarcely more than an overgrown child. Every time it seemed like things might finally be changing for the better, some new fucking threat would pop out of the woodwork and her family would be torn apart all over again, someone lost or killed or gone away to train on some distant world or plane of existence.

It seemed like an endless cycle. It seemed like this would continue until they were all dead beyond the recall of any dragonballs.

The one relief she had found, the one real shining ray of hope for her, was Gohan. He got married, he got a respectable job, he made money, and he had a child whom he cared for and doted on the way a parent ought. He became a decent, respectable man who looked out for his loved ones and actually cared about his family as more than just friends.

It was the joy of her life to see Gohan turn into a decent man despite everything, to grow up and live a happy, normal life in spite of all her husband's efforts. She had given up on Goku. She had given up on having a peaceful, contented existence with her husband, the two of them growing old together as they were gradually surrounded by an ever growing family.

It frustrated her to no end to realize that some of her happiest years as a mother had been the years when Goku was dead, when he was gone beyond all need of fear and worry. He was a good person in his own way, she knew this. He would fight to the death for those he cared about.

But that he had to fight at all, and that he seemed to care about his wife and children no more specially than he did about friends he scarcely visited, were the heart of her problem.

Chichi loved Goku—but damn it all if she didn't also hate him.

He just wasn't a good husband. He might be given a pass as a father, both his sons at least still seeming to love the man for their part, but to his wife he was a frustration and bitterness, a reminder of all these years wasted. She was glad to be a mother. She was proud to be a grandmother.

But marrying Son Goku might have been her biggest regret.

A/N: I'm in a weird limbo of opinions when it comes to Dragonball. While I grew up in a time when the series was popular, and am right around the prime age of people (in America) who would have first been into the series, I never really gave it the time of day until my adulthood or late teenage years. I like Dragonball, but it's not a fondness out of childhood. I'm sufficiently remove that I can be critical about the series. Yet at the same time, being thus less invested, I also have less foundation to be shaken or upset in regards to many things.

I like Gohan becoming a scholar and a family man. I don't mind Krillin or Goku getting hurt by bullets. I don't need my favorite characters to be the strongest in the universe.

But Goku isn't my favorite protagonist, in case you couldn't tell.

Updated: 2-8-17

TTFN and R&R!

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