I live!
...okay, I MOSTLY live. It's been rough for a while now – grief, health problems, work transitions, more health problems, Covid, more...health problems...well, you get the point. Anyway, I'm here now and there's FINALLY have a new chapter to read. I won't keep you.
Heads up for a few curse words, some crude language, some mild suggestiveness in a couple scenes, and Chi-Chi...because that woman needs a warning all of her own. Oh, and Tumblr couldn't handle this chapter because it has (unmentioned) nipples.
Enjoy!
Suggested Listening: Yes, "Owner of a Lonely Heart"
5: Is This Living, or Just Existence?
Somewhere between the anticipation of a blow and the following impact, there is a strange sort of high for martial artists. Piccolo spent his previous life in a near-ceaseless pursuit of this high - always striving for something just beyond his reach. He was a protector, after all – a warrior tasked with the defense of a whole world of innocent lives. He could not afford complacency when the world was always on the verge of destruction.
That, of course, was his previous life on the previous Earth. On New Earth, the mantle was long-since passed on to younger and more capable warriors. This world was no longer in his charge; still, he sought the skin-tingling feeling just out of reach. In a field near a split-log cottage reeking of burnt fish, the formerly nameless Namekian fought his own double in a bloody spar. Wind rustled the tall grass and spiny weeds as he pushed himself to his limits.
CRACK. Piccolo glowered at his clone, resenting the burning pain in his ribs; the clone sneered back at him without regard. There was, perhaps, something therapeutic about beating a living mirror image of yourself to bloody pieces, in a masochistic sort of way. Whether sane or insane or maybe somewhere between the two, Piccolo could not deny that it was an effective way to learn his weaknesses and overcome them. He always was, and perhaps always would be, his own worst enemy.
A sudden noise broke the silence–the sound of the cabin's front door swinging open with enough force to bang into the outside wall and then slamming closed even harder. The enraged half-breed owner burst into the yard and hurled a still-smoking cast-iron skillet into the midst of her chickens. Frozen in place, the two Piccolos watched as the hens gathered to investigate the contents of the pan, squawked in disgust, and went back to scratching in the dirt.
Aubergine stood fuming for a moment, skin flushed, her blind eye hidden behind her bangs, and her healthy eye near-buried under her furrowed eyebrow. Neither Piccolo nor his clone tracked how long she stood seething in rage; neither had any idea, either, why she was so upset over more burnt fish when she never cared before. It was a known fact that her cooking could kill lesser mortals, just as it was a fact that the sky was blue and the grass green.
"Fuck this!" Aubergine screeched without warning. "We're eating dirt!" Without a word of explanation, she stomped off toward the property line then, belatedly, launched into the air and took off. Bewildered by her behavior, Piccolo watched her departing form disappear in the haze surrounding Mt. Paozu. He might have watched even longer, perhaps until she vanished from his sight completely, had he not found himself with a gut full of familiar green knuckles.
"No distractions!" the bastard clone taunted as he bent double and retched. "That woman's going to get you killed if you can't tune her out!"
…and now he was insulting himself. Perhaps there was something to that insanity theory after all.
Life as a single mother was generally a never-ending struggle; as a single mother of two half-Saiyan boys, life was a never-ending catastrophe. Fortunately for Son Chi-Chi, both her boys were grown men capable of running their own lives. Unfortunately, that left her to manage her household alone. Oh, sure, Gohan and Videl had offered to move her into their home and take care of her, but she was not quite ready to accept that offer. She was quite capable of taking care of herself, thank you very much…that is, when she was not weighed down with groceries and being chased down by a saber-toothed wildcat.
Winded, she stumbled and landed hard on her knees, her bags falling and the contents scattering. One moment she could practically feel the beast's rancid breath on her neck; the next, a warning shout split the air followed by a pained yelp. Chi-Chi scrambled onto her backside and peered up at the familiar silhouette cast by the afternoon sun through the trees. Aubergine. Her black hair was as ragged as ever, and her clothes seemed even more worn than usual; eyes dark as pitch and teeth bared, she held the flailing wildcat by the throat, leaching away its strength. She drained it a little longer, snarled a wordless threat into its face, then tossed it aside. As it slunk away yowling in shame, she turned to her fallen sister-in-law. "You hurt?"
"No," Chi-Chi answered as she gathered the spilled goods, then belatedly added, "thank you." Aubrey shrugged and hoisted the bags onto her shoulder as the black faded from her eyes.
"Someone's got to shield the squishies," she replied instead, one long pointed canine poking out over her lower lip in a tight and uncomfortable frown. When it came to protecting others, that retort and expression were how the half-breed always responded to gratitude or praise. It used to irritate Chi-Chi to no end, but now she recognized it for what it was: You're welcome. I don't mind. Please change the subject, I'm an emotionally constipated ball of feelings, and I hate talking. While Aubergine's long silences and half-answers, and her tendency toward monosyllabic answers, grunts, and grumbles took adjusting to, they were like a second language to her in-laws. Okay, maybe it was more like a fourth or fifth language, one they understood a few words in but couldn't speak if their lives depended on it.
The walk to Chi-Chi's home passed in a silence midway between comfortable and awkward, and before they knew it, the matron was stowing her groceries in their places. Aubergine sat slumped in her chair, brooding and fiddling with a small shaker jar from the revolving rack in the middle of the table. Recognizing the speckled contents, she pried the lid open, sniffed at the contents, and sneezed; her eyes and sinuses burned in protest as she jammed it closed and shoved it back on the rack. Yes, she identified it correctly.
"So how's Piccolo settling in?" At the resulting silence, Chi-Chi turned to find Aubergine scowling like she just chewed five lemons in a row, rind and all, without even stopping to breathe. "That good, huh?" Chi-Chi teased.
Aubergine shot Chi-Chi a deadpan glower then exchanged the speckled powder for a jar full of tiny oblong seeds. As if it explained everything, she grunted, "he's not dead yet." These seeds didn't burn her nose like the sneeze-powder; instead, they had a rather unpleasant smell akin to rank body odor and sweaty cunt. Nose scrunching at the stink, Aubrey shoved the jar to the other side of the table and snatched up a tall shaker full of tiny white crystals with a much sweeter scent. Over by the table, Chi-Chi gave a knowing smile as the half-breed examined her spices like they were from an alien planet. ...then again, they probably were alien to Saiyans. "How one person can require so many of these...things?" Aubergine muttered as she surveyed the multitude of tiny jars and shakers on the Lazy-Susan. "What's the point?"
"Spices?" Chi-Chi asked, and upon receiving a blank stare, added, "they make food taste good. As for the number, different dishes require different spices—you can't cook everything with the same ingredients." Aubrey stilled, eyes wide and locked on the three jars she investigated before. That...was a concerning reaction. "What brought you here anyway?" If Chi-Chi didn't know any better, she would say the half-breed was embarrassed.
"He quit complaining," Aubrey mumbled. "He used to whine I was poisoning him...now he just…" She glared down at the jar of sweaty-cunt-seeds and poked it a little further away from her as if she could smell it through the glass. "I thought…" She fell silent, cleared her throat, then collected the other two bottles and shoved the lot toward the other jar. "Fish. Worse than usual."
Chi-Chi was used to getting only half the picture from her half-Saiyan sister-in-law, but this had to set a record. Those three spices were never used in the same dish; then again, this was Aubergine, and Aubergine was quite possibly the worst cook in all the realms. "Correct me if I'm wrong," Chi-Chi asked, "but are you saying you cooked fish…with black pepper, cumin, and sugar…?" The half-breed glanced at the jars, read the fading labels, and gave a wary nod; Chi-Chi felt her breakfast threaten reappearance. "No wonder, then," she tutted around bile. "Cumin and pepper can be used on fish but generally not together, and you never use sugar on seafood."
"This is stupid."…and so began Aubrey's usual response to statements regarding food as anything beyond life-preserving sustenance. After so many years of hearing the same thing over and over again, Chi-Chi easily tuned out the increasingly loud rant and gathered a few more appropriate seasonings for fish. "Food don't have to taste good!" Aubergine spat without regard as Chi-chi carefully measured out portions into a jar, capped it, then shook it to mix the contents. "Food's only here so we don't starve to death, anything more is—" Finally, she went silent. Of course, taking Chi-Chi's frying pan to the skull would shut anyone up.
"There's more to life than just existing," Chi-Chi scolded as Aubergine rubbed the already swelling lump on her skull and growled under her breath. "There's more to life than just survival. We were put on this Earth to thrive, not just not die."
"We were put on this Earth because dumbass wouldn't let me kill that rotten blue midget from the start." ...Aubrey tried to kill Pilaf when Goku was a child? That was new information. This time Aubrey ducked the frying pan.
"Missing the point as always," Chi-Chi huffed. "I swear, you're so much like my Goku. Aubergine, when your life is over, you'll have an eternity to look back on what you did. If all you have to look back on is not dying, then what was the point?" Aubergine went silent, glaring at the wall beside her as if she blamed it for everything that ever went wrong in her life. It didn't escape Chi-Chi that said wall stood between her kitchen and the clearing Goku where grew up on Old Earth. Not for the first time, Chi-Chi wondered what Aubergine's life was like in those early years to have molded the half-breed into the distant, bristly woman she was now.
"Life...was enough..." The admission was quiet—half-muffled in Aubrey's mostly flat chest and aimed into the polished tabletop—but to the human matron, it had the same impact as a battle cry. "Stay out of danger," the half-Saiyan muttered as though reciting some sort of task list. "Find and maintain shelter, locate reliable sustenance, protect Kakarot…"
...wait for me to come for you. I promise I will come for you!
Bardock may have been a visionary, but an honest Saiyan, he was not. He never came for them… Fulfilling her mission was enough…until said brother ran off with a blue-haired witch to seek adventure and left Aubergine behind. Sure, she caught up after a while and tagged along for a few misadventures—living alone in the wilds got boring, after all—but at the end of the day, she failed to accomplish the most important of these tasks. She could not protect Goku. One hand strayed up to brush her bangs out of her dead eye. She couldn't even protect herself. "What changed?"
"Perhaps...it never really was enough." Chi-Chi's smile held no judgment, and her voice, no censure. "Perhaps you're only just realizing it now." Perhaps…Aubergine turned again to the window, her eyes trained on the distant misty peak of Mt. Paozu. After so many years of feeling stuck in place, maybe it was time to change. "I've offered before and the offer stands: I'll help you if you'll let me." For the first time, the offer was answered with a long silence instead of a grunt, growl, bitter retort, or evasive remark; this alone was proof in Chi-Chi's mind that the other woman was finally considering accepting her help.
"A year ago, none of this…" Aubergine fell silent; again, she was driven to brush her fringe away from her blind eye though it wasn't impairing her sight. That nervous tic would be the death of her someday. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Nothing mattered. It still shouldn't."
Chi-Chi faltered. She recognized where this topic was leading, as clearly as she knew how Aubergine must have reacted to Piccolo's unanticipated resurrection. Chi-Chi smoothed the skirt of her long dress and seated herself at the table. The rest of the groceries could wait a bit longer.
"The first time I...lost Goku…" I lost Goku. Even after so many times of saying those words, her throat still caught around them; even after how many times Goku died before he called it quits, the very mention still triggered an emotional echo of the day Krillin brought her the news. Her son, taken – her husband, dead – her husband's savage sister, in league with the demon who kidnapped Gohan – and perhaps worst of all, more alien assailants were on their way. "Well, I was a mess," Chi-Chi finished mildly.
The past is in the past—let it lie there in peace.
"Every time I lost Goku, I felt sure it was my fault for not being strong enough to keep him. Every time he came back, I tried harder than before to make him stay…and every time, I lost him again anyway…the last time, for good. He refused to be revived." Even now, the words made her eyes burn and her throat clench, so it was a comfort when Aubergine broke the tense silence.
"He was an idiot like that." The dry remark earned a weak chuckle.
"But how does staying dead solve anything when there's no threat?" Aubergine cut in—an abnormally long sentence from a normally brief speaker. "People still needed him—they depend on him, and he turned his back on them!" Chi-Chi hazarded a glance at her company; Aubergine was off in another world, her pained eyes (or eye?) trained somewhere far beyond the grain of the wooden tabletop. "Didn't he know? Didn't it matter?" Chi-Chi's wrinkle-framed lips tilted into a sly smile.
"He knew there were such people, I'm sure," she answered. "I have a feeling he didn't understand what it would put you through." Aubergine gave a faint nod, eyes distant and distracted, then startled as she realized the subject change. Both women knew they were no longer talking about Goku; neither was ready to admit it, either. The half-Saiyan's cheeks darkened in embarrassment, but the effect was lessened by the venomous glare aimed out the window. "You never told him, did you?" Chi-Chi pressed.
"Why bother?" Aubergine muttered. "He knew what he was doing. He had to know I'd—" She fell short, vividly remembering the crippling pain in her chest from the day the Earth was destroyed—the fracturing of a heart timed to the shattering of a planet. From the first wince to the final shuddering heartbeat, she felt Piccolo die, and it was a feeling she would never forget…or forgive. Her instincts were wrong; she should never have marked him. She should never have let her homesickness and memories of her father's bite-scarred neck sway her without knowing what would happen.
A soft hand lit on Aubergine's work-roughened knuckles without warning. "People can be foolish when they are in love." Chi-Chi never acknowledged Aubergine's cringe or nervous shifting; it was funny how lack of childhood socialization gave Goku no respect for personal boundaries and his sister, need for excessive personal space. "Goku's choice came from a desire to protect us from those determined to harm him. When he made that decision I swore I would never forgive him for it." She released Aubergine's hand with a calming pat; all the while, she visualized the half-breed as an agitated cat whose shaggy fur slowly flattened when the threat retreated. "I swore I hated him and I'd be happier without having to worry about him."
It took a little longer than expected but Aubergine took the bait. "And…do you?"
Chi-Chi gave a cryptic smile. "What do you think?" Aubergine took a moment to study her – from the gray in her otherwise neat hair to the fine lines creasing her skin – then turned away with a snort.
"I think you need a hobby." ...and they were back to sarcasm. Strangers might believe they could experience the entirety of Aubergine's range of emotion in three turns – anger, discomfort, and brooding – but Chi-Chi was well-versed in the intricacies of Saiyan behavior by now. Aubergine was half-Saiyan; it was only natural for her to be uncomfortable when others saw her in vulnerable moments. Then again, there was another side to her that was in constant conflict with her Saiyan side.
"You're so much like my Goku," Chi-Chi said again, but this time, she spoke softly and wore a slightly pitying smile. "...and yet...you're so very different. One half of you struggles with emotion and believes that bonds make you weak...the other half cannot accept it and won't stand idly when others are in peril...even people who have been less than kind to you."
Aubergine didn't have to think about who Chi-Chi was referring to. She would never forget how Vegeta choked her to a blackout after she healed a nasty concussion or the terrified look on the bald monk's face anytime she came near him. Those people didn't really matter, though. The people who mattered...well, one of them never gave up trying to make amends, and even now, Aubergine heard the apology in her voice. "Don't matter." Even as she denied it, she remembered all the hateful accusations Chi-Chi repeatedly slung before the Cell Games claimed her husband. Chi-Chi went from treating Goku's sister like a plague and a villain to defeated and pleading, and so quickly, the half-Saiyan's head spun.
The past is in the past—let it lie there in peace.
"It does matter," Chi-Chi insisted, "it means you have a choice in how to live your life, and that's more than many of us get!" Aubergine's eyes—or was it eye, Chi-Chi wondered yet again?—snapped to Chi-Chi's in an open warning, and the tip of an over-long fang peeked out under a snarling lip. Chi-Chi wasn't intimidated anymore; if the hermit meant her harm, she would have let the wildcat eat Chi-Chi instead of fighting it off. "You can keep following your Saiyan side," Chi-Chi continued crossing her arms. "You can let your anger and hurt push Piccolo away and keep being miserable. Or—" She uncrossed her arms, and settled one hand on her hip and held the other up as if estimating the weight of a melon. "—you can give your other half a chance for once. You could protect him the way you always protected my Goku and rebuild the bridges you both burned! You have a choice!"
Aubergine spent so long glaring out the window in silence that Chi-Chi began to wonder if she pushed too hard. Then… "I…" Chi-Chi held her breath. Aubergine wilted in the old wooden chair like a fern in the desert sun. "I don't know jack about bridges…I just know how to take a beating." If the widow didn't know any better, she would say Aubergine was whining.
"You also know how to heal." Aubergine shot Chi-Chi a wary side-eye glance. "Healing a relationship isn't unlike healing a wound but it takes time…it has to be done gradually, carefully. You can't just wave your chi around and expect things to be right again." Chi-Chi paused, waiting for any sort of response from the other woman – a woman she now considered almost a sister – but none came. Then, Aubergine's volatile expression softened, her eyes turned back to the window, and her shoulders lowered. Chi-Chi thought it over for a moment then came to the decision the risk was worth it.
"I'll help you if you'll let me." Aubergine's eyes – yes, Chi-Chi was going to stick with the plural despite the hermit's half-blindness –darted back to hers from the window. They held no threat, just discomfort. "It's the least I could do," Chi-Chi added to encourage her, "after how many years I spent trying to keep you away from Goku, and him from you. You deserved to be a part of his family and his life," she added with a sigh. "It's not your fault I saw you as a threat."
Any other sister might have been waiting for years to get such an apology from her brother's wife. "It's…" Aubergine fell silent, then seemed to work herself up to another uncharacteristically long sentence. "If Kak—Son—wanted to see me, he knew where I was; if I wanted to see him, I knew where he was. You were never really a threat."
"Then why…?" Chi-Chi couldn't wrap her head around it.
Aubergine cringed and even harder than her usual cringes. "I…" She fell short, licked her dry lips, and gave a strange sort of shrug. "I don't like...people…" She spat the word like an obscenity. "...but I was supposed to enjoy Son's company because we're related?" The confused grimace on Aubergine's face was even better than her lemon-sucking scowl earlier. "He was loud...and annoying...and stupid." She shook her head, defeated. "Pretending I hated his guts kept him out of my hair. Was easier." It was far from the whole truth, but it was enough.
That was Chi-Chi's husband the hermit was badmouthing, but Chi-Chi knew Goku's flaws enough to chuckle about them; from the day they met to his final death Goku was loud and annoying, and Gohan definitely got his brains from Chi-Chi. Wrinkle-lined lips pulled into a smile, she shook her head. "Now it makes sense."
A look passed between the two women, unacknowledged but no less true...the look of a widow mourning her lost husband and a sister missing her lost brother, commiserating in silence.
Somewhere between sleeping and waking, there is a plane of existence inaccessible to the average mortal, and that plane is where Piccolo always accomplished the most in training. Accomplishment, however, was a scarcity since he chose to make his home at the foot of Mount Paozu.
Being pulled from deep meditation always left him disoriented, so he took a moment to ground himself. Cool dew on his clothing and skin—lack of warmth from above—the fragrance of night-blooming flowers and silence from Aubergine's livestock—it was night, then, though beginning or ending, he wasn't sure, and something around him was...different. How or why or what kind of different, he couldn't explain if he were to try. He was always better with actions than words, and in this case, action meant checking on the obnoxious woman he was supposed to protect.
The first surprise came at the cabin's back door…the unlocked door. Silently, Piccolo made his way past the old wood stove, through the pair of hides hung as curtains, and into the only bedroom. —empty, unless one counted the fat orange tabby dozing on the rumpled fur-covered bed. Piccolo sighed through his teeth. One would think with head-hunters out for her skin that Aubergine would know to stay home at night...then again, if she stayed back and allowed herself to be protected, she wouldn't be Aubergine.
He allowed himself a brief moment, taking in her scent and remembering when he thought he belonged in that room with her, then he took up the search again. Piccolo's feet followed his senses, and those led him through the nearby forest to a familiar clearing and the sound of rushing water. By the time he found her, he had forgotten everything he mentally cursed her for on the way, and he counted himself fortunate to evade her notice.
Aubergine was nothing like Earthling women...she was glorious. Bare-skinned and exposed to the night, she stood in the shallows of the river staring up at the sky, unafraid and unashamed like some wild demigoddess from a young and unspoiled world. Moonlight dripped, slid, and puddled on her tawny skin, catching on old scars and highlighting some new ones he was not yet familiar with. He itched to see if they tasted the same as the old ones and to feel the strength behind the mended skin; instead, he clenched his fists at his sides, closed his eyes, and rooted himself to the spot.
Piccolo remembered another time like this—another night when she could not sleep and sought the comfort and white noise of the river, and he found himself struck dumb by his response to the amount of skin she had on display. That day was the end of his dominance over Goku courtesy of loss in the Budokai and recovery at the hand of his sworn enemy; although none would know it for many years, that day was also the beginning of Piccolo's redemption.
The moon was full then just as it was now, but the air was hotter and the stream cool...and the water level was too low for modesty, not that Aubergine ever had any. Looking back, it was amusing that he thought she would miss his heavy breathing or not notice just which part of her body his bulging eyes were fixed on. "You fought Goku," she'd stated as she sent a bit of soggy vegetation flying with a casual flick of her tail. He always hated that tail... "Did you win?" When he refused to answer, she added just as casually, "and did that change anything?"
At the time, all Piccolo could manage was an unintelligible and hateful snarl, but it was not enough to frighten her. She never was impressed by his temper or his attempts at intimidation, and that never failed to make his blood boil and his skin burn. He didn't understand any of it until the day he lay in her field with blood in his eyes and teeth, felt the earth shift at his side, and opened his eyes to the watery blackness of wide-blown pupils and the pale glow of her healing hands.
It changed nothing; it changed everything.
Out in the river, Aubergine was unbothered by Piccolo's remembrance and ruminations, entranced by the light of the waxing moon. Her unbound hair lay stiff at her back, and her bangs hung heavy over her blinded eye. As if thinking that hair stood between her sight and the moonlight, she reached up to sweep it behind her ear again, then stopped halfway there. Useless, purposeless, that hand drifted down to clench before her, but Piccolo's eyes never left the hank of coarse black hair left covering her blinded eye. He remembered his thoughtless words to her as a child and how those words changed her opinion of scars. The cut on his forehead healed in a week, but her eye would never recover...she would never see through it again.
It changed everything...and it changed nothing.
"If scars, it'll prove I'm strong."
As a child, Aubergine was amused by Piccolo's insistence that scars indicated strength and told him – though not in as many words – that he was full of it. Now a grown, grieving woman, she stood staring down at her hand from her good eye and remembering when the world was clearer.
People rarely consider consequences while intoxicated, and Aubergine was no exception. The hunter found her lying out in the field, staring up at the sky in utmost loathing and a few decimal points short of a lethal limit; she was too focused on her grief and bitterness to spare any attention to her surroundings. She never heard the stalking footsteps until she hung from the Ankoku-seijin's grip by her neck; she did not comprehend the danger until she felt one set of claws leave her neck and approach her eyes. By then, it was too late to fight back. One moment the giant reptilian alien was trying to gouge her eye right from its socket with its bare claws, and the next, everything went black.
Nothing really sunk in until she woke up in that field—hours later, days, who knew—staring up at Dende's blood-stained robe and wondering why he looked blurry and two-dimensional. Behind him lay the hunter's withered corpse, and Dende looked ready to join it. He never explained to her what happened, or why he was unable to heal her eye beyond stopping the bleeding, or why he looked like someone tried to suck the life right out of him. Later that year, Aubergine got jumped again, this time while in possession of all her faculties, and she learned the truth. Her hands could heal...they could also kill. For what felt like the hundredth time, she looked to the sky in silent apology to the guardian she nearly killed for saving her worthless hide.
Aubergine never bothered trying to heal her eye. Even as the blurriness turned to fog, then fog faded into darkness, she never bothered trying to heal herself. Maybe Piccolo thought this was obstinacy or maybe some perverse attempt to punish him through her own suffering; childish as it was, she had tried it a time or two after the Cell Games in hopes it would change his mind about pushing her away. No such luck. In the case of her eye, strange as it might sound to anyone else, healing the eye simply never occurred to her. The injury simply did not bother her enough for her to want it healed, just as Goku's distance simply didn't bother her enough to seek him out. Now…
Now Aubergine was bothered. The world was flat, foggy, and dull, and for the first time in years, it was not enough. For the first time in a long time, she had some...thing...she wished to see in greater detail.
A familiar stinging, stabbing sensation arose in her eyes, starting behind them and searing forward—the swelling of pupils to encompass her irises and that unexplained blackness filling her sclera. Simultaneously, a blinding white glow emerged from somewhere between her veins and seeped outward through her skin, collecting around her hands. One hand clenched, and the other slowly lifted to her face, making both eyes ache every inch of the way.
She stopped. She scoffed. What was the point? Her hand was back where it belonged – away from her sodding face – before the healing glow dissipated.
Aubergine wrung the water from her hair as she waded to the shore. Piccolo's scent clung to the bark of a rugged cypress and the scrubby bushes behind it, but he was long gone. The musky quality of the remaining traces of his scent made her nostrils flare and her tail thrash. Good. Now she wasn't the only one at the foot of the mountain too frustrated for sleep. It served the rotten demon right for following her. Even as she cast blame and sneered at the irony, a smaller and more foolish part of her was pleased that looking at her still made him hunger.
Her feet led the way, and she followed without paying attention; before she knew it, she was back where she came from. Every step through her cabin, she recognized signs of Piccolo's presence...and with every step, she wondered why it felt so right. Tamarind slowly blinked in greeting from the windowsill. Aubergine nodded in return, though she felt a little silly for returning an animal's greeting, and shrugged on the clothing she left out. She tugged up the neckline of her shirt and sucked in a deep, dizzying breath; even on the old musty linen, she could smell him.
Through the window, a faint yellowish glow caught her eye; near enough to see his eyes, distant enough to go unheard, Piccolo levitated beneath the same old tree, meditating. Aubergine sat. Her hand drifted from her shirt to her neck, fingers clutching at a whisper of a memory of teeth as sharp as hers. You have a choice, Chi-Chi told her that morning. Pushing Piccolo away was clearly not working...but...if she stopped pushing…
She shuddered, and her fingers clenched on the tiny pattern of marks on her neck like she expected them to try and burst off her skin and take flight. ...if she rebuilt the bridge that they both burned… Her breath died in her lungs. Her stomach churned. ...what would keep him from tearing it down all over again? What would keep him from tearing her down all over again?
You have a choice! That choice was the problem, though, wasn't it? It was easy to endure through struggles and pain–no meat shield survived long if they couldn't take a beating–but risk was one of the few things she truly feared, and what was a choice if not willingly taking a risk?
Unbidden, Aubergine recalled that flying tackle the day he returned from the dead. The weight of him against her back, and the smell of his skin mingling with the bruised turf—the prick of a claw tracing the new scar on her eye, and his warm breath prickling the skin around the old scars on her neck—it was more than she was ready for, maybe more than she would ever be ready for, but there was something even worse. Her nails dug into her neck, but the pinch only reminded her of where the scars there came from. The worst part of that day was hearing her name on his lips—his foul, backstabbing, murderous, tantalizing lips—when he couldn't be bothered to tell her goodbye before his final bloody death.
Because that was what it boiled down to, wasn't it? It infuriated her, but it was true. Even when they avoided each other after their fallout over the Cell Games, they were still able to tolerate each other's presence without the risk of violence. She healed him without being asked, he came to her rescue when some dickhead enemy inevitably chose to shoot the medic, and they coexisted in the same general space without excessive fighting. Now just the sight of him made her want to wrap her hands around his throat and shake him. She didn't start hating him until he showed her she didn't matter to him...and she never stopped loving him.
A whisper on the wind pulled Piccolo's focus from within to without. His eyes opened a crack only to focus on the hunched figure at the open window of Aubergine's bedroom. The darkness obscured her expression from his view, but her posture told him she was in horrible pain. Her lips parted around a whisper, and the words made Piccolo wish he never heard them.
"Damn you, Namek...and damn me, with you."
UP NEXT: Even I don't know just yet, but I'll let you know when I figure it out. Until then, read and review, please?
* The Title of this chapter is a line from a song by Rush, The Enemy Within. The song's message regards not letting fears and (I believe) trauma control you and living your life to the fullest despite them.
"To you, is it movement or is it action?
Is it contact or just reaction?
And you - revolution or just resistance?
Is it living, or just existence?"
Aubergine spent the years between Piccolo's death and his newest life living a half-life governed by three distinct oppressors: fear, anger, and regret. Between the three, she was unable to make any progress whatsoever, but in this chapter, she finally realized the truth. Enough was never enough. Now we just have to wait and watch as she figures out all the other things she's been wrong about!
** Ankoku-seijin – This term probably threw some folks off. We've only seen one of these guys in any of the Dragon Ball anime series, and that was Majin Yakon back in the early episodes of the Majin Buu saga of Dragon Ball Z.