#roz fic: lachrimae

[rozzingit]

WIP Wednesday

Trunks opened his eyes to violet leaves. They canopied above him as sunlight and a golden sky peeked through the forest foliage. He sat up, and the sound and smell of water nearby turned his head towards a stream.

A man sat on a rock overlooking the water. His hair was a wild mess of dark spikes, and his eyes were just as dark as he studied Trunks. Curiosity was plain on the man's face.

"Who are you?" the man wondered.

Trunks turned his gaze back out to the forest around him, his brow creasing; it felt unfamiliar. Something was itching in the back of his mind. "Trunks," he said.

The man huffed a quiet breath. "I've heard that much," he said. But he paused to consider his next question rather than press upon the first. Movement caught Trunks's eye, and he caught the twitch of a tail where it rested on the rock.

"Why are you here?" the Saiyan asked next.

Trunks hesitated. It was almost too big for him to grasp hold of. He felt like he should be worried, should be wary, and wondered why he wasn't.

"I think I can change something," he finally said.

The Saiyan made a thoughtful noise in reply. He leaned back, resting casually on his elbow. "That seems unlikely," he said, and there was a whisper of sadness in his smile. "But I won't tell you not to try."

Silence settled between them for a moment. After a hesitation, Trunks asked, "Who are you?"

"That's not important right now." For a moment, Trunks had a vision of an immense wellspring of grief, the sort that spanned galaxies. The sort that swallowed them. But still, the man smiled. "I'll talk to you soon, Trunks."

Trunks woke up.

[rozzingit]

WIP Wednesday

It was dim in the room, but his eyesight was good enough in the darkness to get a look around. It was a bit sparse, all told. The — building? house? structure? — seemed to be stone, and the formations he'd seen out in the desert sprang to mind as he studied the curved walls of the room. A mix of natural formation and external manipulation, then.

He kept his steps quiet as he moved to the doorway. He could see a small kitchen and living area in the darkness, well-stocked. He tracked a path along the perimeter, studying the tools and technology at hand. He found a device that his brief inspection discovered to be refrigeration of some sort.

Gives me an idea of their tech, at least. But how long ago could I be? His brow creased as he considered the possibilities. There was a time in his childhood when he wanted nothing more than to know every detail he could drag out of his father about the history of the Saiyans. He knew that Vegetasei wasn't their original planet, so they had to have some technology already to have made it here.

He stopped suddenly, mid-thought. Was he on Vegetasei? Did he even know? The weight of gravity seemed to fit: he hadn’t been ready for it when he arrived, and it knocked the wind out of him at first in his injured state. But he also didn’t know anything about the gravity on the original Saiyan homeworld, either.

A shiver of something unsettled ran down his spine as Trunks felt his mental balance waver. He took a breath and focused on his center until he felt steady again, and then he moved quietly into the next room.

Which is when he came face to face with the strangest nursery he'd ever seen.

Trunks stared at the glass and metal tank that stood before him. The room wasn't lit, but there was a soft glow from the tank itself, illuminating the shadowed form of a child within. Part of Trunks recalled memories and mentions of medical tanks, but all as footnotes to stories. In abstract. There was something fundamentally strange about being presented with the reality of it here in front of him: a child not even laying down in containment, but suspended. Floating.

Trunks's unease slowly evolved into curiosity, and he stepped forward to bring himself closer. He could see the gleam of his reflection in the glass as he started to reach to touch it, and his brow creased as the shifting light in the tank's fluid caught a different angle on the infant's face. Trunks leaned closer—

[rozzingit]

Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Categories: F/M, M/M Fandom: Dragon Ball Relationship: Bulma Briefs/Vegeta Characters: Trunks Briefs, Vegeta (Dragon Ball), Bulma Briefs Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Angst, Planet Vegeta, Time Travel, Alternate Universe: Planet Vegeta Exists, Adult Trunks Briefs, Other Additional Tags to Be Added

A man finds himself very far away from home. Or maybe very near.

---

Prelude: Trunks

His grip deformed the metal frame of the ship as he clawed open the canopy. Shards of glass cut through his skin, and his hand smeared blood across the fuselage as he reached outside the cockpit. He tried to pull himself out, but his muscles faltered, and he fell back into the seat with a cry of pain.

He took one breath. Then another. He focused his mind on the pain, reshaped it to a narrow pinprick. He accepted it. And then he dug deeper.

He hauled himself out of the ship and dropped like a stone to the ground below; the impact was brutally solid, knocking the wind out of him with a sharp cry echoed by the clatter of an object dropping beside him. For several minutes, he just lay there, breathing raggedly, the air oppressively thick around him. Part of his mind was sluggishly taking stock of his condition. He counted breaks and fractures, and listened to the wheeze of his breath. (Two ribs. Lung punctured, but not collapsed. Why was it so hard to breathe?) He tested the motion of each of his fingers, and then his toes. He tracked the sensation of pain up his limbs. Something was burning in his shoulder: dislocated, most likely.

Finally, he drew his attention to his back. He searched for something intangible along his spine, and his breath started to tremble and heave the longer he struggled to find it. Emptiness cracked open inside him. "No," he rasped, desperate and furious and grief-stricken all at once. "No–"

He opened his eyes to blood-red skies, and his breath stuck in his throat. He stared wordlessly at the open sky, crimson interrupted by white clouds, and felt his world shift unsteadily beneath him.

Where–?

[rozzingit]

WIP Wednesday // Lachrimae

Trunks felt her before she even knocked. Her hand was poised for it when he opened the door, knuckles ready, but she dropped it back to her hip with a thwarted huff of breath. She was seventeen and unrepentant trouble.

"What'd you get kicked out for this time?" Trunks asked his baby sister, who would always be his baby sister no matter how much she grew. He tried to contain the immediate instinct at the corners of his mouth; the game was better the longer he could pretend like it wasn't funny.

"Excuse you," Bulla scoffed at him as she swanned past him into his apartment. "I wasn't kicked out, I liberated myself." She made a beeline for the living room and flung herself onto the same oversized puff she always claimed. "Mostly because mom and dad are having the world's stupidest argument, so now I'm going to see how long it takes for dad to notice and freak out."

Trunks grew up living in dread of their father's temper, but Bulla seemed to revel in it. It was easier to play games with him when she had never seemed to have even a moment of doubting their father's regard.

"Isn't it a school night?" Trunks's gaze narrowed suspiciously on her.

"What are you, the police?" Bulla flipped onto her stomach next, coltish limbs all akimbo as she settled and scanned the room. Her focus honed in immediately on the empty beer bottle, then the half-full one, and then the open notebook beside them. "What are you doing?" she demanded. Like the police.

"Nosy little monkey." Trunks sat back down on the couch and flipped the notebook closed with excruciating casualness as he attempted not to reveal his soft, vulnerable underbelly.

Teenage girls could smell fear.

[rozzingit]

WIP Wednesday || Lachrimae

"I need to see the King."

For a moment, Bardock thought he was hearing things; the bar had gotten louder, after all, in the aftermath of the broadcast with all of the chatter that followed. But he focused on Trunks again, and the strange conviction in his voice left Bardock baffled.

"Good for you," he scoffed. "Good luck with that."

But Trunks was already looking away, his features fixed in thought. "They'll be sending someone stronger to deal with me, yeah?"

"Yes."

"So if I defeat that person, they'll have to send someone stronger than them."

Bardock felt very, very tired. "Yes."

"So if I beat everyone up the line of power levels, eventually I get to the King."

"That's not—" Bardock started to say, and then he stopped. He huffed out a breath and reached for his drink. "You know what? Knock yourself out."

Trunks smiled at him. There was still a bleariness to his focus, a slight flush to his face from the considerable amount of alcohol in his system, but the smile managed a certain sharpness.

"Thanks," he said. "I will."

[rozzingit]

"Who the hell are you?" the boy demanded.

Trunks didn’t have any patience left to thin out further. "Trunks," he said in a flat voice that did not invite further questions. "Who the hell are you?"

The boy startled, his brows springing up, and then they lowered again with renewed suspicion. "Why do you speak Saiyago like that?" he asked first. "Why are you in my house?!"

Trunks closed his eyes and inhaled a deep breath. "Listen," he said. "I usually like kids, but I’m not really in the mood for twenty questions right now. If you can’t tell, I’m still healing."

He caught the undersized fist aimed for his cheek before it could make contact. His gaze moved slowly and pointedly from the boy’s fist to his face, which was now awash with shock to be so easily thwarted.

"You don’t even have a power level!" the boy complained.

"Then I guess that’s really embarrassing for you."

[rozzingit]

WIP Wednesday

His fingers sunk into the metal frame and clawed open the canopy as glass shattered around him. The shards cut through skin as he reached outside the ship, and his hand smeared blood across the ship's exterior as he grasped desperately at it. He tried to pull himself out, but his muscles faltered, and he fell back into the seat with a cry of pain.

He took one breath. Then another. He focused his mind on the pain, reshaped it to a narrow pinprick. He accepted it. And then he dug deeper.

He hauled himself out of the ship and dropped like a stone to the ground below; the impact was brutally solid, knocking the wind out of him with a sharp cry that echoed the clatter of something else dropping with him. For several minutes, he just lay there, breathing raggedly. Part of his mind was sluggishly taking stock of his condition. He counted breaks and fractures, and listened to the wheeze of his breath. He tested the motion of each of his fingers, and then his toes. He tracked the sensation of pain up his limbs. Something was burning in his shoulder – dislocated, most likely. He could take care of that himself, at least. In a minute.

Finally, he drew his attention to the back of his head. He searched for something intangible, and his breath started to tremble and heave the longer he struggled to find it. "No," he rasped, desperate and furious and grief-stricken all at once. "No–"

He opened his eyes to blood-red skies, and his breath stopped. He stared wordlessly at the open sky, crimson dotted with white clouds, and felt his world shift unsteadily beneath him.

Where–

He slowly eased onto his good side. He had to pause to catch his breath as pain lanced through him. And then he carefully braced his hand on the ground beneath him and started to push himself upwards. Just enough to sit. Just enough to see.

Hard ground, hard rocks. Mountains in the distance. Scarce plant life. A desert. But the rock formations were strange, unlike anything he could recall from back home: something about them seemed carved and stacked together, manmade – or at least man-manipulated – rather than naturally occurring.

He reached to probe carefully at his injured shoulder and grew lightheaded with pain in an instant. He closed his eyes, breathing carefully as he tried to calm his racing heartbeat, and then for a full minute afterwards to prepare himself. He grasped his wrist and held out the dislocated arm in front of him, and then he pulled.

His scream echoed across the rocks in mocking reverberation.

[rozzingit]

WIP Wednesday || Lachrimae

Raditz awoke to the incessant beeping of his terminal.

He groaned, rolled over, and dragged a pillow over his head to try and muffle the noise. It helped, but soon a foot was kicking his shin under the blankets.

"Take it outside," a sleepy, grouchy voice mumbled.

Raditz cursed under his breath as he gave up on the pillow and rolled out of bed. He dragged himself into the next room, closed the door behind him, and jabbed the button on the terminal with an amount of force entirely inadequate to his annoyance.

He didn't want to deal with the expense of breaking it.

"What," he growled before he even saw who was on the other side.

The scarred face of his father was particularly bland. "Am I interrupting?" Bardock glanced down at Raditz's state of undress, and then up at Raditz's state of hair, and he smirked. "Clearly I am."

"Only my sleep," Raditz grouched at him. He dragged a hand over his face, scrubbing it into some semblance of wakefulness. "What do you want?"

"You're still on leave, right?"

Raditz felt a deep well of suspicion ripple in his core. His gaze narrowed on the vidscreen. "Yes."

Bardock nodded. "Good. The prince's trainer is going off-world. You need to go with him."

[rozzingit]

He had seen a few mornings since arriving on Vegetasei, but the view from the palace was a dramatic departure from the ground floor of a small village home. The palace was hundreds of feet in the air, built upon a rising cliff, overlooking the capital with a presence and authority that Trunks suddenly felt certain was designed to be an echo of the monarch’s. He could see the city below that the palace loomed over: it was mostly quiet at this hour, but pinpricks of light throughout the buildings marked the start of its slow awakening.

The sky was still dark, but it was beginning to lighten in an early herald of the coming dawn. Trunks leaned over to brace his arms on the balcony rail and watched the early morning dab color across the sky as if it were a painter crafting a new masterpiece. The deep purple of night grew warmer with every minute. He watched as purple mingled with blue and green and brilliant pink, a fantastical mix of colors that made no sense to his mind, but gripped something in his heart until it hurt.

Trunks felt the moment sear into his memory, and he suddenly wondered if his father had remembered the Vegetasei sunrise.

[rozzingit]

"Aren’t you mad?" Trunks finally blurted out, looking at his uncle with a flash of frustration he didn’t even understand. "Your parents — my grandparents — they sent you away. Right? Because you weren’t strong enough. That’s..."

His words failed him as he found them inadequate for the situation. Too small to encompass the enormity of it. The betrayal he somehow felt on his uncle’s behalf.

Tarble’s smile gentled. It grew sad. "I won’t say that I’ve never been angry," he admitted after a moment. "Although I think I was always more...hurt. I’ve felt inadequate. A failure. But at the same time, I wish I could remember more of them. Of my home." He paused. "Of your father. I was...very young when I was sent away."

"But that’s not fair!"

Trunks could not tell if it was the sentiment or just the vehemence of it that surprised Tarble. His uncle’s features settled once more, though, and he smiled again.

"No," he agreed. "It wasn’t fair."

---

Also including a bonus coda/epilogue to close up Part 1 of the fic!

[rozzingit]

Somewhere very far away, there’s a little girl.

She’s not in love with the stars.

They’re pretty, yes, and she does like that about them. She’s curious about what might be found so far from home, and what it might be like to travel there, but it’s a passing fancy.

She doesn’t dream up stories of spaceships and aliens like her sister. This little girl is in love with reality.

Reality is the screwdriver in her hand. It’s the feel of metal beneath her fingertips. It’s the living current of electricity that she carves a path for from circuit to circuit.

But sometimes she looks up at the stars, not to imagine stories, but to sketch the blueprints of her own adventures.

[rozzingit]

WIP Wednesday || Lachrimae

Vegeta's ki blast exploded the door.

The guards who had led him to this trainer's room hung back, grimly on edge as their Prince quite literally blew his way inside.

Vegeta stormed inside. There was a stale, sour scent in the air, faint but still distracting beneath the sharper scent of metallic scrap dust. His gaze barely had to search to find Trunks sitting there waiting for him. He was in loose pants and without a shirt, his hair damp and a towel slung across his shoulders, and he watched Vegeta with an unsurprised resignation.

Somehow, the lack of response to Vegeta's show of force just served to make him angrier.

"You dared to lay your hands on me!" Vegeta screamed at him.

Trunks didn't move. His elbows were resting on his knees, his hands hanging loosely between them. "I did," he said simply.

"The punishment for laying hands on the royal family is death," Vegeta continued.

"So I've heard," said Trunks. He tipped his head. "At least I'll go to my grave freshly showered. I can beat any of you one on one, but you might be able to take me down with enough numbers." His smile was devoid of humor. It was more like a grimace.

Vegeta lifted his hand, and the balcony exploded. Trunks didn't move.

[rozzingit]

He felt the approach a moment before Vegeta did; his gaze flicked towards the brush, sensing the flicker of a vaguely familiar ki behind it, and then he saw Vegeta raise his arm out of the corner of his eye.

He didn’t have time to do anything but react. In a split second, he was between Vegeta and the brush, his arm slapping aside the ki blast that would have been more than enough to incinerate whatever was behind him.

"Careful, your highness," Trunks said in a low, taut voice. "You start incinerating all your subjects and you won’t have any left to rule by the time it’s your turn."

[rozzingit]

He had been here before.

Trunks’s childhood was built on a framework of admiration. His father was his idol, and the center of his whole world. He was the sun, and Trunks was his satellite. Always in his orbit.

Somedays the orbit was more distant than he needed. Somedays the sun was too far to warm him.

"Do not be ridiculous. You know I do not care about these things. I do not show up for the ridiculous parties your mother throws for herself, either."

They had both been here before.

It didn’t matter what Trunks said. He knew it didn’t matter. His father was a wall: implacable, impossible, immovable. There was saying nothing, and there was having a fight; there was nothing in between.

He couldn’t choose saying nothing.

[rozzingit]

WIP Wednesday | Lachrimae

He barely ate. Nerves were twisting and gnawing at his guts. He had made this haphazard, roughshod plan, getting from Point A to Point B, but now that he was here, the prospect of walking into a room with his father — as a child — was…

…daunting.

He could feel him. Vegeta's ki had never left his awareness ever since that first moment in the shuttle. Not when he'd finally managed sleep, and not now that he was awake in the earliest hours of the morning. A small star now, so much dimmer than the one he'd known, and yet unmistakable.

Trunks finally shoved out of bed with restless energy. The tile was cool beneath his feet, and he found himself focusing on the details of the sensation. He noted the press of each individual toe against the floor, then the ball of his foot, then back to the heel. Each recorded observation eased some of that waking anxiety, until he felt himself even once more.

[rozzingit]

Trunks was surprised to discover that he’d be taking a shuttle to the capital. For a brief moment, he thought about arguing the superior speed of flying, but set the impulse aside soon enough. It would give him time to think, at least.

Frieza’s visit had clearly been a brief one; he felt his power begin to recede from the planet the morning after the bar. But even then, the planet still buzzed with countless lower level ki. It was a strange sensation: he grew up with so many unbelievably powerful fighters, but Earth by and large was populated with people without any fighting ki at all. Vegetasei was like a constant hum of feedback in comparison. Feeling so many palpable ki made everything a mess in his head, as each individual became a single pixel in a screen of television static.

Trunks was half-asleep when he felt a slow creeping in the edges of his awareness, like smelling something from his childhood that he couldn’t quite place.

He opened his eyes, blinking into the dim light of the shuttle, and then at Nappa across the way from him; he was dead asleep and snoring audibly. Trunks closed his eyes again and eased into the inner sense he’d been cultivating since childhood. He reached out carefully, like grasping smoke between his fingers. Like he was chasing a ghost.