Dr. Briefs had not yet finished recalibrating and refurbishing ship and its gravity chamber. A little over forty-eight hours had passed since Vegeta's return to Earth. He had rested from his long journey, and he had eaten his fill, and he eagerly wished to return to training. But after training under intensified gravity simulations in space for so long, he found that virtually nothing could challenge him at Earth's normal gravity. If he pushed himself to his limits, he would surely destroy more than he would have intended. Vegeta grew stifled and bored sooner than he would have liked. Only he could feel less free in a world open for roaming than in a compact space vehicle. He found himself pacing in his room like an animal.
As he rhythmically put one foot in front of the other, his mind kept wandering back to the field of space debris that had once been Planet Vegeta. He couldn't stand it. Two decades had passed, and every few weeks, he would think of something that reminded him of Frieza and what he had done; this would send Vegeta spiraling down into the oblivion of his own memory. In the earlier years, he had thought the bouts of acute anxiety signaled his undeniable insanity. However, he soon realized that the anxiety came and went with the months, and only certain things would set it off. He retained control of his mind. He no longer feared the silly things his mind and body seemed to want to do to him. He dissociated such "irrationalities" from his person.
When he had awoken from his nightmare a few nights ago, his body felt on edge, his heart racing and his skin beading with sweat. Yet his mind did not register the same anxiety that his body had; it angered him when his body rebelled. He remembered having hurled a pillow against the wall, his interior dialogue along the lines of, "Fuck you, you miserable piece-of-shit body." He hated so many aspects of what others would normally include in their summations of what they considered "themselves." He compartmentalized his personality—such as his body's natural reactions to stimuli—categorizing it and locking the parts he had no time for deep into his subconscious.
His father, and to a greater extent, Frieza, had taught him how to take life with as much detachment as Fate herself, and he figured that the same technique would help silence his fears and emotions, his hindrances. When he saw death on the battlefield, he could not be bothered with that one nerve in him that would snap and make him fear for his own life. When he wheezed and found his hands covered in dark, purple blood, he had no time to stare and panic over his injury. A single flinch, and you could find yourself in Hell.
Vegeta despised every mental or physical sensation that he had not self-initiated in some way. More than anything in the universe, he wished to have everything around him in his complete control, aware of absolutely everything that he might optimize his strategies to get what he wanted. Mysteries annoyed him; he needed to know everything. The surest way to infuriate him was to deny him.
He derived little pleasure from others' touch, for it felt strange for his body to respond to something he had not totally pre-cognized and predicted. For every ten thousand violent physical confrontations, he had but a single friendly or affectionate one, and even when he did receive that one friendly touch, it unsettled him. Touch was something you did to people to kill them. The sense of touch in general signified little more to him than otherness—touching made the body and mind aware of things that were not identical to itself. In a universe limited to a single tautological individual, a sense of touch would mean nothing. Sometimes, Vegeta wished he and his mind were the entire universe, something totally subject to his authority.
He did not want anything to touch him; he wanted to be unmoved, and he hated the duality between the self and the non-self. He was afraid. Anything that did not belong to him had the potential to move him, touch him, frighten him. And what then? Death meant a perishing of the individual and his universe, an absorption of that individual into Otherness. When the body became dust, Vegeta would become dust, and dust was not identical to that which had been Vegeta, but other than Vegeta. He wanted to be Vegeta.
He stopped pacing. Dizzily, he flopped onto his bed. He felt slightly nauseous.
This was why he hated not following his daily routine, training in particular. Inevitably, he would find himself bored, and he would scare the shit of himself. A scared little boy lived inside his head, and that little boy needed a distraction from his ruinous purpose—the usurping of Vegeta's consciousness. That little boy needed to shut the fuck up, then grow the fuck up. The universe was a shit-hole, and millions of people died in it every day; there was no need to curl up and cry as if it were some terrible thing that could never happen to poor, innocent you.
When ennui overtook him, Vegeta pleasured himself with increased frequency—a distraction. He found the act self-affirming, a reinforcement and physical expression of a tautology. Neither fancies nor fetishes participated; instead, Vegeta thought only of the delectable sensation, losing himself in it. He never understood why Nappa or Raditz felt the need for partnered dalliances—why disgrace yourself by fucking non-Saiyans when you could feel so contented alone? Had they no shame, no respect for their noble blood? Vegeta had never considered them noble anyhow. It didn't matter.
A pleased sigh ascended from deep in his throat.
Vegeta couldn't remember the last time he had eyed a live female lustfully. Perhaps he had done so in his adolescence. He had stopped even acknowledging the gender of other beings at least by his twenties. At that point, they were all just Others. Except for that Saiyan noblewoman—she had aroused him long after he had stopped looking at women.
Damn it! Now he was thinking of that dreadful experience all over again. Vegeta needed the gravity chamber back immediately.