Dragon Ball Z: Dynasty – Prince Vegeta's Struggles with "Friendship"
Written by: Feraligreater328
Overseen by: StevenBodner and SparkerLightning
A/N: Okay. I genuinely wanted to wait a bit longer to start posting this, but I felt super guilty about how long it's been taking me to get chapters out recently. This story is written in a "Drabble" format, meaning that I have a word-count limit of 500 words (not counting credits, titles, and author's notes), so I should be able to get out a few of these a week.
The reason for this format is that I want to tell some of these stories, but I can't find a place where they'd make narrative sense in the actual flow of Dynasty. So, this is a compromise. I hope you enjoy these, because they are things I've been really excited to delve into.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Friendship. A state of mutual trust and support between two separate living beings. For some, it is a concept as easy to grasp as the wind, the sea, or the color of the sky. For others, it is the sort of thing that keeps them up at night. And yet still, for some it is a concept so foreign it defies belief. How does one acquire these friends? How does one maintain these friends? What behaviors are acceptable? What behaviors need to be modified? Why should one change a single thing about themselves for another? What gain is there in that?!
Thus, we arrive on our two subjects in this little story. Let us review them in brief.
Prince Vegeta Briefs IV (he took his wife's name in the marriage) is a man in his mid-thirties. Most would politely describe him as an asshole. He is the type of person that holds himself and his own interest's paramount. He is also the type that would not describe anybody in his life as a friend. He has family. He has rivals. He has cohorts. He even has a wealth of enemies. But he would never describe a single person in his life with the dreaded f-word. From Nappa and Raditz, the people who had known him the longest, to the most recent additions to his life, they all fall short of that standard for him through some loophole or the other. He wears this friendless status seemingly as a badge of pride. He has managed to make it this far without having to rely on anyone. But, the surface view of a complex object like Vegeta is often deceiving.
Lazuli Lazarus (for the love of God do not call her that!) is a woman in her early thirties. Since a certain point in her life, she had come to be known as Android 18. This has slowed her aging process to such a degree that she still appears to be in her twenties. It has been a hard life for her. From being abandoned by both parents at an early age, to starving and struggling on the streets to survive, to being offered a shred of kindness by an old man at a diner only to wake up a prisoner and lab rat. Life has been nothing but betrayal after betrayal for Android 18, so extending trust in the form of friendship is not high on her agenda. Having only recently become close enough to her own husband to sleep peacefully in their house, this sort of thing was still quite hard for her. Unlike the previous subject, Android 18 does have people she would consider friends. But those friends were forged in flame. Making a connection with someone without the presence of peril was an action she could not comprehend. Android 18 is a powerful woman with a deeply-rooted anxiety for the entire world around her.
The question is thus: can these two strange creatures truly develop a meaningful friendship?