Summary: Before Earth, before his change of heart and before his family, there had been a son he'd never wanted, made from Frieza's seed and born from his body. Then he was dead, and Vegeta made sure to forget he had ever been there at all. Only, he isn't dead. He is alive. Tormented and abused, but alive, and now Vegeta will do what he couldn't have done the first time. He will save him.
Warnings: Rated M for language, abuse, sexual violence, depictions of rape, mpreg, etc.
*This chapter includes child abuse and graphic depictions of violence.*
Every Eye Will See
Chapter Five: The Touch
The Past:
When a tray slammed down next to him, he jumped so hard that he felt a hard twinge somewhere in his spine. The bench he was sitting on creaked underneath the stranger's added weight. Chill kept his face down, and with shaky hands, brought his hard bread up to his mouth.
"Hi!" the person, a girl, practically shouted.
It took several moments before he realized that she was, in fact, talking to him. He curled his body away from hers and took another nibble of his bread.
"Hey! I'm talking to you."
He flinched. Then he swallowed his mouthful and turned just slightly to face her.
"Hiii," she said in a voice that seemed familiar, and he could not figure out why she dragged the word out that way.
"Do you remember me?" she asked, and suddenly he did. This was that odd girl who had insisted on speaking with him while they were chained together, hacking away at the stone trench before them with pickaxes nearly longer than they were tall. It had been his first day on his own, outside the grand building where he had lived prior, and of all the things he expected from that day, she was not one of them.
Neeila, she had said her name was.
Unease brews in the pit of his stomach. The girl, just a bit older than him he presumed, had confused him then. She was confusing him even more now, and he did not like to be confused. He inclined his head and turned away again. She was calling attention to him, he was sure, the same way she had done before. The dining yard was crowded and loud, but he was certain everyone's eyes were on him now, only just noticing the demon seed in their midst now that this girl had given his position of solitude away. He wanted her to go away. He wanted her and her bright voice gone and to never bother him again.
Despite his wishes, she showed no signs of moving on. There was silence for a moment, only the sounds of her slurping at her porridge passing between them, but the lack of words did not dim the stress of her presence.
He was taking another shaky bite of his bread when she spoke again, "You're a quiet one, aren't you?"
He said nothing to that.
"Can't say I relate. My brother says I could talk for days."
Before he could even think to stop it, Chill's first immediate thought was that her brother was right.
"You agree with him, don't you?" She replied as if she had read his mind, the displeasure in her tone quite clear.
His whole body tensed. He berated himself, wondering how he could dare to think something so awful about someone, as if he had any right to think ill of anyone—
She started to laugh, and when she spoke again, her words were just as bright as they had been before, "Well, looks like you and my brother have that in common. He won't be happy to hear that, the prick."
He blinked at that. Surely, she had just insulted the one she called her brother—both in comparing him to Chill and in the rude name—yet her voice sounded undeniably fond. He was not sure what to make of that. He wasn't sure what to make of a lot of things, the ways prisoners spoke to each other being one of them.
"Guess what my mother told me today?" she asked so suddenly that his head turned towards her.
"My teeth are special," she said and of all things that he imagined would come out of her mouth, that was not one of them. "It's been so long since I've been on my home planet that my mother has to remind me of a lot of things. She said that our teeth were our strongest asset. She said that we can pierce the toughest flesh, and on our planet, if we reflected them off the sun, we could blind our prey, and she says they can even heal things!"
She stopped, as if seeming to ponder for a moment. "Well, I've never actually seen these things done before, but my brother insists that they are true, and my mother told me not to tell people or they'll try and take my teeth right out my mouth."
He listened intently to every word that came from her mouth, certain that her words will enlighten him on just what exactly was the purpose of her telling him this. Try as he might, however, nothing she was saying made any sense. Teeth? Her family? He did not understand.
"Can you do anything special?" she asked. "I heard some guys in the mines a while back say that saiyans can turn into enormous beasts that are so strong they could destroy a whole planet. I thought the guys might have just been telling tales though. It seems pretty farfetched. But maybe it's true. Is it?"
He wondered why she would ever want to know that. His curiosity was peaked, however, no matter how he wished it weren't. Could he do that?
He did not know, and he probably never would. Still, he would concede that it was an interesting question, so he allowed her a minute shrug of his shoulders.
She was stunned, if her sudden silence was anything to go by. Before he could so much as take another bite of his bread, however, she seemed to have recovered, her voice coming back with twice the amount of enthusiasm as before. "You know we've got the rest of the day free because they are celebrating the Warden's Creation Day, right? That was a stupid question, of course you do. You've got to come see what Jinba built! Do you know Jinba? Probably not, since he lives in my barrack, but his parents used to be builders and he learned how to do so too. He made a swing from a loose board and two ropes and hung it up behind our barrack, and the guards haven't taken it down so we think it might be okay to stay! Do you know what a swing is? It'll probably be better for me to just show you. Come on, finish your food so we can go play!"
"No," the word came out so suddenly that he thought he was just as shocked as she was by it. Every muscle in his body was shaking, but he does not falter. He thought about following this girl—who must either be blind or just plain unhinged—back to her home, walking out in the open where anyone could see, only to be presented to other children who would not be as insane as her and know him—
"No," he said again, shaking his head. "No... no play."
She was quiet and he turned away. His stomach felt knotted beneath his skin, but he picked up his bowl to swallow the rest of his rice porridge—what was normally his most enjoyed meal—regardless. He licked around the inside and wet a finger to pick up the crumbs of his bread from the table.
She was still here. Why was she still here? Why wouldn't she go away?
There was the sudden scrapping sound of her snatching up her own bowl, then loud slurping, and finally a loud clang as she slammed it back down. She stood to her feet suddenly, and he could not see her, but he imagined that she was staring down at him like a giant would an ant.
"You don't want to play? Fine. Those other kids are lame anyway," she said, and again, they were words he had not expected to hear. "Come somewhere with just me, then! I know this place over by the cliff walls that I go to sometimes with my brother. It's a little pool of water, but it's all salt water so you can't drink it. We can swim in it, though! I bet you don't know how to do that! It'll be fun and educational for your survival. You can't argue with that, now can you? Let's go!"
For a second time he started to protest. Before he had the chance to speak again, however, she suddenly reached out and grabbed his hand.
Not his wrist. His hand.
"Come on!" she whispered, but so loudly that he could not understand why she even bothered. "We gotta hurry if we want any time to swim! And we gotta be low-key about it too, 'cause we may or may not actually be allowed to do this. Don't worry, though. I've never been caught, and once you're swimming, you'll be having too much fun to worry about getting in trouble!"
He gaped at her, but if she noticed she did not comment on it. He felt numb with astonishment, but at the same time had a million thoughts running in his head. Most of them had to do with her hand in his, the hold just as soft as her skin, but firm enough that he could feel the warmth of it.
He did not know what to do so he did nothing. When she tugged on his fingers, he followed after her, listening to every word that fell from the strange girl's mouth.
The Present:
It was barely half a second later when Vegeta, Kakarot, and the host of foreigners materialized in the front yard of the Capsule Corporations building.
The group was silent, staring at Kakarot with abject attention as he released the boy's hand. Almost as one, their gazes snapped to Kakarot's face, but all they were met with was the same dimwitted smile as before. The guards had seemingly lost interest first, and whatever thoughts they had on the ordeal that captured their attention in the first place remained unknown as they turned their neutral gazes towards the building in front of them.
The prisoners, though, seemingly held no such skills in schooling their features. Displayed on their ugly little faces was a myriad of disbelief and something that looked a lot like disgust. Vegeta furrowed his brows at the lot of them, not understanding why they were reacting so, and just as equally not understanding why it bothered him.
They scowled when Kakarot patted the boy's head with a grin, and in turn, Vegeta glowered at them. His expression was more frightening than anything the lot of them could ever manage, and their gazes dutifully cowered away.
"Welcome to Capsule Corp.!" Kakarot said loudly, snapping the group's attention to the sight before them. Their tiny eyes bulged in childlike awe as they took in the yard before them. Tall trees stood proudly above them and hanging precariously from their brittle branches were green leaves, their ends dipped with reds, browns, and yellows. Beneath the trees were sandy patches of dying grass, which led to the yellow dome of a building, large and extravagant as it loomed over their little faces.
Vegeta tried to see the landscape from their eyes. Vegeta did not remember much of Tene'mareen from his short visit so long ago, though he did remember thinking it was an incredibly ugly place. This building, his home, slowly falling victim to Earth's autumn season, was probably the most beautiful thing they had ever seen.
Vegeta had found the season oddly beautiful once, too. He had not been familiar with the name the humans had given it for a while, and in his head had simply thought of it as Earth's period of dying. He had been covertly fascinated by it, in perhaps a bit of a morbid fashion. He'd rarely ever stayed on a single planet long enough to see if it went through a seasonal cycle such as this (he could not even remember if Planet Vegeta had), so it had been admittedly interesting to witness it. The novelty of it had since worn off—it was his home now, after all—though he would not deny that he liked Earth just a bit more during its periods of change.
Vegeta turned to the boy then, not even bothering to berate himself for doing it once again. Sightless as he was, such a sight would hardly make any difference to him, he imagined. Even so, he could not help but to wonder.
He was met with a look of abject horror on the boy's blinded face.
He touched me.
Distantly he could hear the others around him, gasping and muffling other such astonished cries as they took in the grounds before them. The marvel that was this place was not entirely lost on Chill. He did not need sight to acknowledge that the air here was crisp and fresh, and just the slightest bit warmer than the forest clearing from before. He could smell a subtle, yet deeply pleasing, smoky aroma of searing meat coating around him. He could hear several things: the loud honks of Earthen vehicles; the endless bustling of humans walking across the pavement behind him; the small crunch of the leaves beneath his boots.
He would certainly love to properly experience these things under different circumstances. As it were, he could not spare more than the basic level of attention to them. How could he possibly think of such irrelevant things at a time like this?
He touched me. That man held my hand.
He held it out in front of him, imagining that he could see it. His hand was hard to picture, but the longer he focused, the better the image of it materialized behind his covered eyes: a scarred palm; slightly crooked fingers; nails the color of coals. He imagined an imprint on it now, a layer of red coloring everywhere that that man's skin had touched his.
He could picture the sight, but nothing beyond that.
He focused harder, assessing the nerves for any discomfort. He failed there as well. It was not bleeding. it was not burned. It was not flayed. He thought it might be tingling just a bit, but not unpleasantly, and that maybe it was a tad warmer than it had been before.
But that did not make sense. He could count the number of times that someone had willingly touched him without the intention of harming him, and just about all those times were done by Neeila.
And yet, there was no pain. Logic told him that there should be at least some bit of twinge or pang ailing him, but there was nothing.
Why?
Many things could be said about him, but Chill was not a complete fool. He was fully aware that a simple grasping of hands would not typically be painful, and that there were many other ways that you could touch someone without hurting them. Not all contact was meant to cause harm, of course, because that would defeat the purpose of even having such a feeling in the first place. Pain would have no meaning if there was no pleasure to negate it. He may not experience it often himself, but that did not mean there was no such thing. There was a reason—a very good reason, in fact, as to why he rarely experienced the purer side of physical acknowledgment. To touch him for any other reason than to punish was so unheard of he would not have been surprised if some secret law was made against it.
And yet this man disregarded all of this and touched him anyway. Neeila was different. He knew she was different. She always had been and always would be. This man—this stranger, had no such reason to give him such a gentle touch. And yet he had—even going so far as to pat his hair as if he were doting on him.
He felt himself start to tremble.
Hardly anyone touched his hands. His wrists knew touch well enough—on more times than he could count, the guards had grasped his arms with bruising grips, dragging him about as if he were incapable of directing himself. His hands were special though—only Neeila held his hands in this way, and only when he could bring himself to let her.
Her touch made him incredibly uncomfortable at the best of times. Even after all these years he still tensed when she did it, waiting for the moment when her gentleness would fade, and her grip would tighten until his fingers broke underneath hers. Despite this, he found that he did not completely hate it. Sometimes he even craved it, and she always delivered—gently grasping him as she led him to whatever wonder she wanted to show him that moment, or sometimes just holding him for no other reason than that she wanted too.
And yet this man had held his hand. Only for a moment but held it all the same.
Chill did not like it. He did not like these feelings, and these thoughts that he did not understand. He hated things he did not understand. He needed something he knew. He did not know how to survive with things he did not know.
It was only then when he noticed he was not breathing right. He bit his lip hard against a frustrated whimper. He tasted blood and he wanted to scream. He had to calm down. He had to calm down. He had to calm do—
Sharp pain erupted in the back of his neck. It came from the harsh fingers that were pressed deep into his pressure points, and if he had not already been biting through his lip he would have certainly cried out from the sudden pain. The stone grip forced him soundlessly to his knees, and only when his shoulders were brushing the fallen leaves did it release him.
He laid on the ground motionless for several seconds, focusing solely on the sharp, lingering stings in his neck. He then quickly stood to his feet, clenching his hands behind his back to restrain them from rubbing at his sore skin. He released a shuttering breath.
The tension from before was gone. He knew this—the Warden's touch just as well as he knew pain—and his mind was all the clearer for it.
The strange man must not have known who he was, he decided.
He was grimacing while he touched me, he reassured himself just in case.
Mollified and composed, he focused back on behaving.
Even from this distance, Vegeta could see the small, red circles of blossoming bruises on the pale skin of the child's neck.
Vegeta felt his eyes narrow, felt irritation bloom in his chest, felt his stomach clench just so. He did not like any part of what he had just witnessed.
He cursed his own curiosity. No matter how hard Vegeta focused ahead of him, no matter how hard he tried to dissuade the urge, the peripheral of his vision was constantly filled with the boy, until his sight was solely on the tiny, wretched thing. There was something odd about the boy, his intuition told him, and while Vegeta's instincts had more than once led him astray, he had not given up on them just yet.
The other prisoners' reactions to his home were intense and incredibly predictable. If anything, Vegeta was more surprised that they had the courage to display such a cringe-worthy amount of astonishment. He would have thought that convicts of the most austere prison planet in the North Galaxy would have had better emotional control. Then again—he acknowledged in admitted perturbation—the lot of them were all undoubtedly children. Uncomfortably young ones, at that. Perhaps unquestionable obedience was a bit too much to expect.
It was that line of thought that brought the boy he was so diligently trying to ignore to the forefront of his mind. His curiosity overwhelmed him, and his eyes betrayed him, openly glancing over to where he knew the child stood.
He was not quite sure what exactly he was expecting to see upon looking over. He anticipated some level of attentiveness (the boy had to rely on all his other senses after all), or he thought perhaps he would see some sort of posture that exuded impassiveness. Vegeta was not a man who was big on making baseless assumptions but given that he had not been deliberating too intensively on the matter, he could not imagine why his eyes would bear witness to anything other than those two scenarios.
He had not expected to see the undeniable panic that grew with each passing second on the boy's face.
The boy's face, partially covered as it was, went through notable changes. His tiny jaw was clenched, the bones of his cheeks jumped beneath his skin, and his nostrils flared against the air that was harshly forced through them. His body was tight, and outstretched before him was his little palm. His head was tilted down, and Vegeta was certain that hidden beneath the tied cloth was a scrutiny that would have had anything in its path withering away, thoroughly admonished.
The boy's rigidly stiff body still somehow managed to exude an aura of diffident obedience, but Vegeta knew it would not last. The boy's composure was dancing too far over the edge. His inner hysteria was held in check only by a small thread that pulled itself tighter and tighter as each second passed, until its final, inevitable snap.
The boy was panicking, and if Vegeta had to guess why, it was because Kakarot had touched him.
Vegeta supposed it was a good thing that the child was blindfolded. If his body could scarcely hide his inner turmoil, then his eyes—if he did indeed have them—must be like the pages of an opened diary. Perhaps the blindfold was there not to hide gruesome injuries, but rather so the rest of the world did not have to fall victim to the small portals that led too readily into crushing misery, and despair, and prayers of mercy.
All of this over only a second or so of physical contact…
He still did not know what drew him to notice him above all else, but even he could see that this boy was so very, and so undeniably damaged. Broken in a way no man should ever know. That a child, a boy the same size as Trunks, knew this kind of ruin...
Vegeta was no champion for the innocent, no matter their age. Yet, while he had always been a conqueror, he had never been a tormentor. Even at his worst, Vegeta did not think he ever would have brought someone this low. No one, save perhaps, his worst enemies, and even then, he knew he did not have the patience it would take to completely crush a man in both body and spirit. That someone had done this to a person so young—
The feelings blooming in Vegeta's chest were foreign, and it took him a moment to realize that it was pity. Pity and anger, though he knew the second one quite well.
The former feeling broke, however, as he watched Ziloh's hand reach out sharply. He watched stone fingers jab into the sensitive points of the boy's frail neck. He watched the boy fight to not fight against the grip as he was forced to his knees. He watched as, with a rough push, the boy's face acquainted itself near soundlessly with the grassy ground.
He watched as the boy laid motionless for several moments. Then he watched as he pushed himself back to his feet with a new, eerie calm emanating about him, seeming to not even notice the blood that dropped from his bitten lip. His face was unnaturally blank, like a window of a long-abandoned house. He looked as if he had left the lot of them behind entirely.
Just... gone.
Vegeta felt very disturbed. Then, he was outraged.
Vegeta pinned his gaze on Ziloh. The Warden turned his navy eyes toward him. Long seconds passed as their eyes lingered on one another, Vegeta's scrutiny turning more and more fiery as the contact persisted.
Touch him again, his eyes said. Touch him again, and I'll end you.
Ziloh looked away. His eyes betrayed nothing as he looked up at the building once more, but there was a wary edge in his stance that had not been there before. The sight of it filled Vegeta with vicious satisfaction.
That thought jolted Vegeta back into proper awareness, the change so drastic he was nearly sent reeling from the force of it.
Why?
Why was he acting like this?
TBC