"I don't think you're in a place to understand my people's needs, Mr. Briefs," Cleary says in the most authoritative tone he can muster. His unblinking glare is at least somewhat convincing, if not his reedy voice.
"With all due respect, Mr. President—" I stop myself and roll my eyes. "Swore I wouldn't use that line. Broke a rule, didn't I?"
"I don't think you're in a place to understand my people's needs, Mr. Briefs," Cleary prompts in that same rehearsed tone, still staring me down through his hipster glasses. Never misses a beat, this guy.
"I understand enough, Mr. President, about the needs of many people beyond your citizens. The resettlement issue isn't going to be resolved by forcing even more people out of their homes."
"If you're implying that—"
"I'm not implying. I'm stating outright that you're not going to start another war out of your own greed." If this were a movie, I'd imagine the stare off intensifying. The camera focusing on my disfigured knuckles. The faint burn marks on my throat. Battle scars that the Dragonballs didn't bother healing all those years back.
"How dare you threaten me," Cleary puffs himself up, a skinny, pasty imitation of the blustering machete-waving dictator, and I can't hold it in anymore.
Laughter's almost a foreign sensation to me these days, like an infant surprising himself with the noises his own mouth makes. Soon I'm laughing so hard I can't breathe. I know it's not that funny, but with my mental state I seem to take all emotions to extremes.
Cleary tries to look dignified as he patiently waits out my outburst.
"Trunks. Any day now," he says when I don't show any signs of stopping. A few seconds later, he starts to sound concerned. "We only have a few hours left before you meet President Kambar. You have to have this down."
"I know." It comes out as a wheeze. I wipe a tear from my eye and finally get it together. I say it again more seriously, as if I'm in the room with that blowhard and really do have to threaten him with personal harm. "I know."
"You okay?" Cleary says uncertainly. "Did you fly yourself here last night? I was worried when you missed the official transport."
"Yeah." It's a half-lie. I can always count on this kid to feed me a cover story, even against his own questioning. "I hate closed spaces, you know that. Wanted some time to clear my head too."
"Well, I suggest you spend the rest of the morning clearing the rest of it. I know you're under a lot of stress, but we're counting on you."
This isn't the first time he's chastised me. He used to be shy about contradicting me in any way, just like most people are when they first meet me and only see the exalted savior of the world. Then they get to know me, or the persona I let them think is me, and either treat me like a high maintenance pop star or an inexperienced politician with an impulsive streak.
I learned how to separate the pawns from the system a long time ago. It's the government Cleary and his staff represent that I can't stand. He's just doing his job. So I just smile and joke around with him a bit more before he leaves me alone to rehearse on my own. And then I drop the façade and kick back with a whiskey out of the hotel room fridge.
Cleary's the most bearable of the government lot I've had to work with the last couple years. He's one of those whiz kids who graduated from college in three years, got his PhD in political science while writing speeches for President Matsuzawa, has ambitions to be Chief of Staff one day. Patient, smart, idealistic to a fault. Able to bear with my flaws behind the scenes as he makes me shine in public. Polishes that image of me as the silver bullet that keeps this country at the forefront of reconstruction, and the rest of the world in begrudging admiration.
He's starting to see underneath my flaws, I'm afraid. Only Dr. Hayden ever sees the broken parts of me nowadays, but Cleary's sharp. He suspects there's something wrong beneath the flippant cynicism and the chronic lateness. But he'll let it be, just like everyone else, as long as I perform in my role. Enforcer of peace, deliverer of inspiring speeches, defender of justice, "Goodwill Ambassador." All on my free time when I'm not up to my neck running Capsule Corporation.
I saw this coming years ago, and I didn't do anything to avoid it. I was as idealistic as Cleary back then, with the cyborgs' shattered circuits freshly strewn around my feet, eager to keep saving the world in any way it needed. I thought I could handle it, that it was what I was born to do, that it was the least I could do for a world that had been careening toward extinction. I thought it'd be worth it. Lay my life down just like all my heroes had – thirty years ago when the cyborgs first showed up, and in the other timeline when I lined up with the rest of them in a united front against Cell.
Should have known better, though. I'd spent enough time with the two full-blooded Saiyans in the other timeline to know that it wasn't a united front at all. It was each man thirsting for glory, consciously or unconsciously using the Cell Games as a cover for his own bloodlust. Vegeta at least was never subtle about it. Goku, on the other hand, only revealed his hand when he tossed Cell that fateful senzu bean and shoved his son into the ring.
I know I was the last person Goku cared about at that moment, but I had never felt so betrayed. Not even when Vegeta had let Cell ascend the first time. Or anything else my pseudo-father had done in his impressive capacity for cruelty and self-absorption. As I said, Vegeta was never subtle about anything, including his disdain for me and everything else in existence other than his drive to win. But Goku was supposed to be the hero, the one who cared for the greater good of the world, the one my mom nearly lost her eyesight for, peering into microscopes and nearly taking her eyes out in lab accidents late into the night, all so she could find him a cure. The word we etched onto the time machine was a synonym for his name. As long as he stayed alive, there was hope.
He almost threw that hope away because he wanted his son to know what it was like to be a full-blooded Saiyan. No, not just that. He wanted Gohan to embrace his Saiyan identity and enjoy it, not to bury that skeleton and unearth it only when necessary. He wanted him to crave battle for the sake of battle, practical odds and the Earth's fate be damned. In the end, he was no different from Vegeta, who pounded my face in for the better part of a year in the time chamber, telling me I was a pathetic excuse for a Saiyan, that he couldn't believe I had a drop of his blood in my veins. Different test, same sadistic purpose behind it.
The worst part is, beneath the betrayal, I understood. No matter what Vegeta said, I was and still am part Saiyan. I know what it's like to thirst for a challenge, to feel in my bones that it only counts as a real challenge if I spill blood and nearly die.
Giving my life in service to a broken world would have been the ultimate challenge, I thought back then. Billions of people loved me for it. Most still do, though some have gotten tired of me by now.
Saiyans aren't meant to give their lives in service to anyone, though. They fight and kill and die on their own terms, to satisfy their own bloodthirstiness and instinctual need to grow stronger. My fight these past ten years has been bizarrely counter to Saiyan nature as an altruistic crusade for the greater good. Though I've won plenty of political and humanitarian victories, none of it has been for me. In this sense, I can say I've been a much better savior than Goku. What did he ever really sacrifice? Beneath all the lives he saved, every battle was a chance for him to slake his bloodlust, ride that incomparable high of getting beaten within an inch of his life and then come back victorious from it. It was what he wanted, and what I've subconsciously wanted with the insane half of my soul.
I didn't need Dr. Hayden to puzzle all this out for me. I've had enough introspection time since Kestrel moved out, between staring at my hands over how close I'd come to killing someone, and how my blood quickened every time I thought about it. Being Saiyan is a sickness.
As the whiskey fades out of my system faster than I'd like and Cleary comes back to tell me the jolly old dictator's almost here, I wrap that sickness around me like armor. If I can't fight with fists, I'll tear into him with the tools I've been given. Every pompous political figure they set me against thinks I care about what I'm defending more than I actually do. If only they knew how much I've stopped.