Rock Your World

Part 4 – Silence in a World of Sound

I didn't see him again for days. Maybe it was weeks. It didn't matter; either way, to me it was a lifetime. Goten was visiting Trunks at Bulma's house at the time, Gohan was busy working, and my friends had left me to myself long ago. I think I scared them. Regardless, I was alone, and for some reason that was almost bliss; no one to judge me, no one to stare, no one to hate me. Like Vegeta hated me. I knew he did even if he didn't say it; just the look on his face was enough.

Ironically, the one person I wanted to see right then, the one person who could understand where I stood, was the one person I never wanted to see again: Vegeta. It was a contradiction that tormented me in those days of solitude; I simply lay in my room, staring at the ceiling, warring within myself. I did not play any of the raging music pounding in my brain; I didn't so much as utter a sound for many nameless days. I was silent, in a world of sound that crushed me from the outside.

I hated myself more in the scant hours of each night than I had in my entire long life. I beat myself up over one simple fact: I hated Vegeta, but I loved him. I hated myself for the fact that I no longer grieved for my late wife; instead I grieved for a future that could never be, with a man whose sole purpose in life was to destroy me. That hadn't changed, even with the simmering rivalry that used to stand between us little more than a memory now. I knew I should feel ashamed, that literally on the same day that my wife passed away, I could realize that all along the true meaning of a love I may never have was right in front of me; in the body of my old rival. Was my heart really so fickle? That I could throw away decades of marriage and loyalty over someone I had sworn to defeat years ago, an enemy?

The worst of it wasn't the nights that I stayed up until dawn brooding and seething about what was and what shouldn't be. The worst of it was the nights that I did get a few hours of restless sleep. My dreams on those nights were vivid, recurring visions that lingered in my mind throughout the following day. Dreams that had me jerking awake, sweating and panting with the tangibility, the realness of them.

The dreams themselves disturbed me to no end. Not nightmares, mind you. These were no visions of terror and pain; if they were I could have dealt with them. No, these dreams were much worse.

I dreamt of him. Of his scent, his eyes, the hard, corded steel of muscle that so defined Vegeta. Lost, discordant lines from my many songs wound their way into the dream; sometimes the slurred lyrics even contradicted each other, one side singing of pleasure and love, the other screaming in rage and pain. I remember dreams of sweat-soaked bronzed skin and throaty moans of desire; some of them wrought from my own throat, some of them forged by my own, twisted imaginings. I could always feel, in these dreams, an intense heat, a burning humidity and crushing pressure, as though I were in the center of a supernova. When my eyes would snap open, away from these visions that so consumed me, I would lay awake for hours, oblivious to the coming dawn, attempting to slow my racing heart and savor the lingering sensations from the dreams at the same time. It was madness.

As I said, I don't remember how long I stayed in solitude. How long did I quarantine myself from my friends and family? I couldn't guess then, and I'm just as clueless now. Oh, Vegeta would laugh at that, of my ever admitting I was as clueless as he constantly suggests. But I was. I was the idiot he portrayed me to be; and in my days alone I would welcome that fact, that he'd ever been so right about me, even in his attempts to demoralize me, he knew what I was, who I was. And I wanted him no less because of his insults.

Bulma found me. She did her best to appear calm and polite as she knocked on my bedroom door; I should have felt violated that she didn't knock before entering my house, but I wasn't, not at the time, sickened as I was by my obsession. Her eyes held more shock than her audible gasp could carry. I knew I had deteriorated those past few…days? Weeks? Hardly leaving my room more than was necessary, hardly eating; I had mostly just lay there, not doing, not being, anything.

I snapped out of my drunken haze a few days later when I awoke with a clear mind for the first time in weeks. I remember that I was surprised to find myself at Capsule Corp., but looking back I can laugh at my ignorance; obviously Bulma had moved me when she saw my dire condition.

I remember the headache; the never ending pulse of agony that minced my skull every second that I lay awake. I even tried to hold my breath to quell the pain, but it throbbed there nonetheless, perhaps even worsening. But I didn't care. At least the dreams, and the nattering disquiet of my mind, had finally silenced.

I sat up and stretched, muscles popping along my shoulders in the pleasant pull of my own flesh against itself. I was thin, I could feel every one of my ribs and even the harsh bones of my vertebrae and hips were visible. I had all but starved myself, and I felt like I could pass out from hunger.

Stumbling down the stairs, I remember nearly staggering due to my killer headache, but I just paused, leaning on the banister, and caught my breath, sweating.

The smell of cooking food reached my hyper-sensitive nostrils before long and my stomach gave an insistent growl. Striding into the kitchen, wincing as the drop in temperature chilled my bare chest and feet, I scanned the room slowly. Bulma stood in front of the stove, flipping bacon and stirring something that smelled nothing short of heavenly. I remember thinking that the kitchen wasn't as spotless as Bulma usually kept it, and reasoning that she'd probably been worried about me in my subconscious dream-state, or whatever idiotic mess I'd gotten into after…. after my stunt in the thunderstorm with Vegeta, a seeming eternity ago. Speak of the Devil, I remember an electric shiver as my eyes found the prince leaning his royal elbows the table, raising his chilling eyes to meet mine and lifting one royal eyebrow skeptically. I hadn't even known he was here.

I suffered a sudden inability to speak, or even to breathe. As if my throat and lungs had just abandoned their posts or stopped dead for no reason.

Ah, but there was a reason, a very obvious, shirtless, bronze-muscled, princely reason that brought a heavy swamp of sensations from my haunting dreams crashing back over me, sending heat straight to my groin.

The reason was sitting right in front of me, after all.

TBC